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204 Western American Literature As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Edited by Barry Gifford. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co., 1977. 300 pages, $5.95.) Allen Ginsberg’s Howl — “a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamblike youths,” said the poet later—was dedicated among others to his first great love, Neal Cassady, “Adonis of Denver”; As Ever, their newly published collected correspondence, is consequently not only the paper and ink detritus of a failed romance but one practical beginning point for the study of post-modern American literature, the work of “lambs” like Ginsberg and Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. The poems like Howl or Kaddish that make Ginsberg one of our greatest living poets came generally from his mind, conscious and otherwise; these letters come from his heart as well: “I have genius,” he wrote Cassady in 1947, “and I have had to pay for it with torment and horror; my every act is a trial of the soul . . .” This volume details those trials from 1947, when the two men met and became lovers, through Cassady’s death in 1968 (with an Afterword that includes Jack Kerouac’sdeath in 1969). Ginsberg’s letters record his youthful sorrow at losing his lover, his mystic Blake experi­ ence in 1948, the fruits of his exhaustive technical studies of poetry (includ­ ing many unpublished poems), and — after his 1953 liberation from Manhattan — his exotic adventures in Mexico, Africa, and India. They add much to our knowledge of him. As to Cassady: Ken Kesey, a close friend of both Cassady and Ginsberg in the 1960s, said of Neal that he was “a man driven to the cliff edge by the grassfire of an entire nation’s burning material madness. Rather than be consumed by this he jumped,” considering things in the brief but clear “moments of a life with no retreat.” As Ever documents that leap with the strobe photograph stop-action of letter piling upon letter, coalescing into a profoundly disturbing new portrait of the counterculture’s mythological hero, “Dean Moriarty” of Kerouac’s On the Road. “Look, my boy,” Cassady wrote Ginsberg, “see how I write on several confused levels at once, so do I think, so do I live, so what . . .” The perceptive confusion that was Cassady’s trademark is everywhere evident in this volume, from the first bleeding love notes which neglected to mention his new girl-friend to lengthy wailings about his inability to write succeeded by marvelously funny tales like the deflation of the boring “Clinical Dope Scientist.” There is serious and intelligent philosophizing, and madness; the last letter is a crazed mysterioso demand that Ginsberg rendezvous with him at John Kennedy’s assassination site. As Ever is not merely another set of literary letters to be filed on a library shelf; it is a partial record of the modem struggle for poetic and metaphysical vision in this land, a unique social history of post-war avant garde culture. Ginsberg wrote, “The only thing for me to do is to stick to facts until I see the facts which are beyond reason”; here are some of the facts. DENNIS McNALLY, San Francisco, California Reviews 205 The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef. By Charles Reich. (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1976. $8.95.) Here the young-in-heart author of The Greening of America tells his personal story. It is a story of seeking-success-disillusion-alienation-rebellionself -discovery-and-enlarged-consciousness. (Whether the reader buys it is something else again.) It is also a rather uncomfortably frank confessional by a repressed homosexual who did not find sex and self and love until age forty-three when he broke away from success as a Yale law professor to join the homosexual seekers of San Francisco. Yet because of his skill as a writer and thinker, and his honesty as a story teller, Reich makes his personal story also one which reveals much about America and the times and the problems of living in a largely secular society. And he really makes you feel the agony of repression and alienation and lovelessness that can occur in any...

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