Worthless Drivel

It all started with one line in one poem in one book that I found on my parents’ bookshelf. That book was Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, the 28th printing of the battered City Lights edition with the black-and-white cover that once was known all across America for its involvement in a 1957 obscenity trial. My mother had found this 28th printing at a used bookstore when she was in graduate school—remarkably enough, Ginsberg’s fountain-pen autograph adorns the title page. She lent the book to me, suggesting that it was something that I, who was fascinated by controversial literature, might be interested in. I read the first line and never gave it back.

“Howl,” as you might know, begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…” I was captivated by this line most of all, which begins Ginsberg’s description of his friends and colleagues of the Beat Generation, and by all the lines that follow, describing the gritty picture of drugged-out brilliance that seems so much more real to me than the Woodstock love culture that would follow from the Beats. All the poems in the Howl volume combine a sense of wonder and whimsy (such as in the “Footnote to Howl” that expounds the notion that all humans are holy, or in “A Supermarket in California,” which pays tribute to Walt Whitman and Frederico Garcia Lorca) with a sense of gritty cynicism (such as in the second and third sections of “Howl” or in my second-favorite Ginsberg poem, “America”). I read them aloud, I wrote essays on them, I copied them out by hand or on a typewriter over and over again. But just as much as I loved the language—if not more so—I loved the sense of having a physical copy of those famous and important words in my hands. A City Lights paperback fits neatly in a jacket pocket, and for several months I carried Howl and Other Poems with me everywhere, always able to take it out, admire the old-fashioned typesetting and of course the signature on the title page, and feel a connection to those decades gone by when there were obscenity trials, and when Allen Ginsberg was alive. It was always a joy to open a history book and see a black-and-white City Lights book just like mine adorning a page that talked about the Beat Generation and how it inspired everything that was to come in 20th-century counterculture.

And were there ever history books! Reading Howl and Other Poems and then branching out to appropriating Kaddish and Other Poems, another City Lights volume of my mother’s, led me in time to acquire and read everything I could by and about Ginsberg and his contemporaries. Happily, it at least meant that my extended family knew what to get me for Christmas, which caused me to add a number of books to my now-burgeoning collection. A book called The Poem That Changed America taught me how ground-breaking “Howl” had been in undermining the old obscenity laws; I devoured Bill Morgan’s biography of Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself, and learned both the great and not-so-great about a man who, for his writing, was essentially now my hero.

One relative gave me a book called The Beats: A Literary Reference, a compilation of letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and every conceivable primary source about not only Ginsberg, but Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, and everyone else who lived with them, influenced them, and joined in their at times hedonistic, at times ascetic lifestyle. This led me to realize that there was more Beat literature out there than just Ginsberg. I found a 1957 copy of Kerouac’s On the Road in a used bookstore, and had the wanderlusting epiphany every teenager who reads On the Road does, I think—it’s exciting to realize that the oh-so-American sense of exploring this vast country can be applicable to a set of values that is young and liberated and not so tied to the burdens of American history.

Then, embarrassed by what I knew was the scandal hiding in William Burroughs’ heroin-fueled Naked Lunch (the title, as my history books told me, provided by Kerouac), I rather furtively purchased a copy from Barnes & Noble and hid it from all my friends and family for the next several days while I oscillated between open-mouthed shock and squirmy delight at the utter bizarreness of everything that goes on in that ostensible novel. And when, on a whim, I bought Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from the same Barnes & Noble (it may, after “Howl,” be my next-favorite piece of writing), I was giggly with excitement to discover its connections to my world of fantastical poets and wanderers and drug-addled dreamers. I spent one very delightful school holiday with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters whizzing about madly in my mind: the Beats’ muse, Neal Cassady, at the wheel, with Ginsberg popping up every so often to offer a Buddhist incantation. The web of connections grew and grew. I was given a biography of Kerouac that filled in the gaps of my very Ginsberg-centered historical picture, while a teacher who was retiring from my high school gave me a big box of books, including Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and I could see how even this later spin-off of the Beat Generation knew what it was like to grapple with a tenuous grip on sanity, as Ginsberg does in all his poems.

I continued to fill in the scholarly holes in my understanding of the Beats, but I began to discover so many missing pieces. A friend from England whom I met on the Internet sent me a book called Women of the Beat Generation, and I couldn’t believe how much the canon history left out in its representation of what is, unfortunately, a very male-dominated literary circle. The wives and girlfriends, and even some female Beat writers, such as Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman, had their own impact on not just the Burroughs-Ginsberg-Kerouac triumvirate, but in the tendrils they spread out into the full-fledged Beat literary movement. So, too, when I visited San Francisco—home of City Lights itself and so much Beat lore—finding and spending money on something about the Beats was unavoidable. I found a book in a used bookstore in the Castro called Queer Beats, a series of selections from Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and many other writers about their understandings of their own sexualities, an aspect so very important to all of their writing. (The most entertaining part of this book, though, is how it ends an excerpt from the most infamous chapter of Naked Lunch, “AJ’s Annual Party,” before it gets really weird. It’s amusing to me that even a book about sex would expurgate that section.)

I kept reading, I kept learning, and I kept collecting—whether happening upon a used New Directions edition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (he owned City Lights and thus was Ginsberg’s first publisher, in addition to being a poet in his own right), or spending too much money on a vast volume of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1997—all of which I then had to sit down and read in succession. I downloaded a recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl” from an Internet archive of famous poets reading their work, and listened to it on my iPod whenever I was on a plane or a train and too restless to work or to fall asleep. I wrote one of my college application essays on “Howl,” and my faithful City Lights black-and-white paperback came with me everywhere, from summer vacation in Canada to when wildfires in southern California forced my family to evacuate our house.

Now I am in college, and while I transplanted all of my Beat books to my little bookshelf in my dorm, my budget finds it difficult to sustain the obsessive accumulation of every book by or about Allen Ginsberg and his contemporaries that I run into in a bookstore. I am forced, for the most part, to make do with the transient pleasures of the library, and endure the desolation that accompanies the fact that the beautiful illustrated edition of assorted Ginsberg poems that I checked out must be returned in January. I can’t enjoy the satisfaction of placing it on my shelf between my precious City Lights volumes and the Collected Poems. And yet, no matter what limitations I place on my spending, it still doesn’t stop. Just a couple of weeks ago, while walking by the sale tables at Labyrinth Books, I spotted a thick hardback, its cover adorned with a picture I knew to be college-age Allen Ginsberg. Called The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, it’s Ginsberg’s high-school and college journals, from the period when he was growing up in Paterson, NJ, and then going to school at Columbia. I bought it—it was only $10, after all—because now I’ve seen enough of the Columbia campus to know the buildings he describes, and now that I go to school in New Jersey, I dream of making a pilgrimage to Paterson. My connection to Ginsberg and the beautiful poems I don’t have the words to describe is stronger than ever, simply because now I know what it is to be a young adult in the throes of growing up, wanting to take my own writing seriously, enjoying spending time with my friends, and discovering, in the self-awareness I imagine I share with him, truths about myself.

But despite that greater connection, anyone who spends time around me will see Howl and Other Poems spread out before me in the dining hall, as I delicately try not to spill salad dressing on it, or notice it emerge from my coat pocket when I’m waiting in the doctor’s office. Maybe, when I’m in my room sitting at my desk and working, and my City Lights treasure rests unobtrusively on my overflowing bookshelf, one of my roommates will see me turn my gaze upwards to a page of fixed-width Courier font affixed to my wall: it’s my IBM Selectric-typed copy of the first page of “Howl,” which never, ever fails to comfort and inspire me.