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  • Allen Ginsberg's Biographical Gestures
  • Jason Arthur

As Beat archivist turned biographer Bill Morgan makes clear in the title of his recent biography of Allen Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006), Ginsberg's life and works are subject to a Whitmanian commerce of publicity and privacy. Having authorized and aided in the production of his letter and journal collections, Ginsberg reveals an intense awareness of the literary-historical importance of his own development as a poet. As I will demonstrate below, a close look at the archival record of his early (pre-Howl) career reveals that Ginsberg has always exercised an editor's control of the public face of his private life. In fact, Ginsberg's development of this editorial control of biography and the development of his craft as a poet take place concurrently. Indeed, in reference to Ginsberg's role in the publication of his journals, Mark Schechner explains that Ginsberg "understands … that he matters less as a poet than as a figure, an exemplary life" (334). I will continue this argument, examining Ginsberg's real-time modification of the historical record about the production of his "breakthrough" poem, "The Green Automobile." Alleging to have written the poem in concert with a three-way letter exchange with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Ginsberg crafts a biographical gesture that formalizes "public privacy" as the essential condition of Beat literary production. In other words, he highlights the importance of intimate, collaborative exchange as a precondition to the kind of revolutionary texts that have emerged from the Beat movement.

Ginsberg's careful manipulation and publication of written materials not originally intended to be public (i.e., letters and journals) marks Ginsberg as a curator of his private life. His goal in part, as Schechner claims, is to "clarif[y] the example" of his extraordinarily singular life (334). But Ginsberg's biographical gestures are also poetic gestures; they expand the palette of the poet from the published poem into the gritty realms of private life. Making authorial use of things other than poetic lines, Ginsberg indicates that his poems extend, like the declamatory lines of Howl, beyond the orthodoxy of published print. In a sense, then, I continue a conversation, [End Page 227] started by Oliver Harris, about how the "reciprocal economy" of Beat letters and Beat literature counteract the "embalming insecurities" of Cold War America (177).

It is important to note, however, that Harris is in the minority of recent Beat scholarship, which has become increasingly biocentric, especially when compared to such first-wave Beat studies as John Tytell's Naked Angels (1976). Where Tytell examines the corresponding stylistic innovations of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs, recent Beat scholarship tends instead to mine letters and journals for biographical information. Though he admits he relied heavily on "twenty boxes of letters," Tytell's examination is of Beat style (261). Biography is always secondary. Harris similarly peruses letters for a formal, rather than contentual, value. Less rigorous, more biocentric Beat scholars such as Steven Watson examine letters alongside interview transcripts, novels, and poems. In the process of producing impressively exhaustive biographical narratives, such scholars view all sites of writing as equal storehouses of biographical fact.1

To some extent, the conflation of letters (as fodder for biographical narratives) and "Letters" (as crafted literary products) has a kind of official Beat mandate. Like Ginsberg, Kerouac kept meticulous biographical records, including an archive-ready catalogue of his correspondence, conveniently labeled with date and month and correspondent's name. He did indeed, as Ann Douglas asserts, mean for "his work to be in some sense verifiable" (12). But verifiability alone does not justify the treatment of literary texts as the notes and props of autobiography. This insistence that Beat literature is at root autobiographical overdetermines the contemporary reception of Beat literature, especially by a twenty-first-century generation of readers who could give a fig about the trivia or degrees of separation that seem to be so important to first-generation Beat scholars. On the one hand, the sheer madness of their lives and writings about their lives ensures that the Beats will always to some extent have a...

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