I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, and: American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (review)

Re-reading his journals in 1952, four years before Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg was surprised to find that the impressionistic prose fragments contained in them could be recast into a poetry of concrete particulars. Up to this point, his poetry had consisted of highly abstracted, though metrically sharp, imitations of seventeenth-century verse. This moment would be the catalyst for a new aesthetic that eventually led to the one speech-breath-thought poetics of “Howl.” William Carlos Williams was the least surprised by Ginsberg‘s discovery; Williams had been pushing him in this direction since their first meeting in 1950. By the time Ginsberg had composed his breakthrough poem in this style, “The Bricklayer‘s Lunch Hour”—to which Williams replied “You‘ve got it!”— Williams had taken over for the young Ginsberg‘s father, the poet Louis Ginsberg, as a major influence. Louis, known as “Paterson‘s principal poet,” endowed his son with a poetic ear and a gift for image-making. But it was Williams’s influence that led to the successful experimentation of “Howl.” Moreover, it was the psychological thrill of the young Ginsberg‘s regular correspondence with Williams, and the eventual inclusion of his letters in Book IV of Paterson, that gave Ginsberg the confidence required to reach beyond the localized poetic acclaim of Louis. Williams was by no means Ginsberg‘s only influence, but the effect of Williams‘s personal mentorship on Ginsberg was crucial.

To the casual reader of Ginsberg‘s expansive, vatic line trajectories, Blake and Whitman are the more obvious sources for the image of the shaggy poet-prophet that has come to define Ginsberg‘s literary reputation. Yet, as in the brief story, above, of the effect of Williams‘s mentorship on the young Ginsberg, literary biography can cause us to modify our understanding of the artist‘s body of work, and in some cases can reveal fissures in our prior assumptions about the artist‘s literary reputation. Two recently published books suggest two markedly different directions for biographical study of Ginsberg. Bill Morgan‘s comprehensive book, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, supplants previously definitive biographies of the poet by Barry Miles (in 1989) and Michael Schumacher (in 1992). In contrast, Jonah Raskin‘s biographical study of the origins of “Howl,” American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, works too hard to canonize Ginsberg at the expense of the kind of detail that would produce new insight on the poet’s life and work.

Biography has been the bane of Beat Studies. The romanticized particulars of Beat writers’ admittedly fascinating lives too easily obscure the writing they produced. Biography of course is important; it is through biography that we see the person behind the poetics, the life that gave birth to the text. Yet too often in the study of Beat literature, biographical criticism has been accepted as a substitute for literary-historical study of the primary texts. As Beat Studies scholar Ronna C. Johnson has noted, the production of 21 Kerouac biographies in 31 years from 1973–2004 suggests that Beat biography suffers from an overproduction that, at its worst, repackages hipster anecdotes at the expense of telling the story of how Beat writers’ lives affected the art they made. Ginsberg for the most part has escaped the Kerouac biography glut. Miles’s and Schumacher’s earlier biographies, published while the poet was still alive and writing, were important examinations of Ginsberg’s life and writing process. Ed Sanders’s book-length verse biography of the poet, published in 2000, also contributes a useful insider’s perspective to our knowledge of Ginsberg’s life.

Still, the...