In New York: Howl Becomes a Hoot

Night, the hour of poets, on a windy street in the part of New York City where academe meets Harlem. Outside a nondescript building, a man calls to an acquaintance. The second replies, “Allen Ginsberg reading Howl? It’s tempting, but . . .” He walks on.

Inside McMillin Theater at Columbia University, an audience of about 900 assembles. Most appear to be younger than the poem they are to hear. A few are bearded hippies loyal to the Movement. A few are enervated, gentle, Buddhistic Wasps. A handful are black. All around are flannel shirts, funny hats, sleeping children, the emblems of safe bourgeois funk. Not many in the crowd notice, let alone cheer, the arrival of one honored guest, Radical and Felon Abbie Hoffman.

Most wait quietly, unsure of what to expect. Ginsberg is reading his epic poem of outrage and lament to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its publication. Media announcements have recalled the public theatrics of the poet, an ostentatious non-comformist, a self-described “Hebraic Melvillean bardic breath.” He drew together the strident Beat Generation of the 1950s, led the flower children of the 1960s into Eastern religions, hymned the antinuclear movement of the 1970s. Throughout, he sustained his vernacular yet visionary voice—marked, said one admiring fellow poet, by a “note of hysteria that hit the taste of the young.”

There is nothing obviously theatrical about the Allen Ginsberg who scutters among friends and fumbling technicians. One thirtyish woman in the audience, a “fan,” fails to recognize him. Says she: “He looks like any college professor.” Gone are the flowing beard, the Zapata mustache, the ragbag tatters. He wears a gray-blue business suit, a blue shirt, muted red-and-blue striped tie, dark socks, black shoes. Offstage he talks with the measured deliberation of a statesman-celebrity.

Half an hour late, Poet Anne Waldman rises to introduce the aging enfant terrible, now 55. She arouses the crowd to nostalgia for dissent with the code language of the antiEstablishment. She describes Ginsberg as a product of “postwar materialist paranoid doldrums.” She proclaims, to the audience’s laughter, that Howl was “written while Allen was living on unemployment compensation.”

At last Ginsberg is ready to stand and perform, as he has at coffeehouses and on campuses since the late 1950s. Howl begins with one of the bitterest and best-known lines in American poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

But something has changed. This puckish little figure, this professorial imp with the loony grin, does not sound angry. He is not wailing about the wickedness of his time. He is mocking the past—mocking the angry radicals, mocking the dreamers, mocking the quest for visions. The audience is laughing with him. They are howling, but in pleasure rather than anger, as he thrusts an arm up for each of the jokes. They hear satire, not nobly expended pain, in these lines: “. . . who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall”; “who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish”; “who drove cross country seventy-two hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity”; “who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism and were left with their insanity and their hands and a hung jury.”

Some, perhaps, do not understand the poem. After a long litany using the name Moloch, a biblical god demanding human sacrifice, to invoke nearly every American banality and evil, two girls turn to ask a man behind them, “What is a Moloch?” Others, perhaps, are reflecting on their own older-but-wiser bemusement about antiwar and anti-Establishment excesses of the 1960s, a decade later than the poem. But Ginsberg’s humor is intentional. His contemplative, rounded voice has tightened into singsong waggery.

Mockery is his theme through much of the night. He speaks of a poem by William Blake, whose work once plunged Ginsberg into perception of “a totally deeper real universe than I’d been existing in,” as “a country-western S-M song.” He then sings several of Blake’s visionary eruptions, to cheerful nursery-like ditties of his own composition. Near the end of the evening he reads from recent verses describing himself as a failure. In one he confesses: “My tirades destroyed no intellectual unions of the KGB and CIA . . . I have not yet stopped the armies of entire mankind on the way to World War III . . . I never got to heaven, nirvana, x, whatchamacallit. I never learned to die.”

After the reading he is surrounded by youths asking the usual hesitant questions of the starstruck. Does he remember a mutual friend? (Yes.) Does he still have a following in Europe? (He seems to remember, and cite, his every public reading scheduled within the past two years.) What younger poets does he like? (He mentions Punk Novelist Jim Carroll, Rock Singer Patti Smith and “a guy named David Pope in Grand Rapids, who doesn’t get published.”)

In Europe, where 100,000 Prague youths once elected Ginsberg King of the May, the young are once again marching against war. On campuses there are teach-ins about the threat of nuclear holocaust. But this night, at this Columbia campus, sartorially and spiritually the most volatile and un-Ivy of the Ivy League, Allen Ginsberg is chatting, singing, wearing a necktie and making his howl a thigh-slapping hoot. His last words are prophetic, but not in the stirring way of the years gone by. He plays a worn squeeze-box and sings: “Meditate on emptiness, ’cause that’s where you’re going, and how. ”

—By William A. Henry III