New York in the '50s (30 page)

After meeting with Allen and Norman again, I had a fantasy of bringing those two good men together, of sitting them down at my kitchen table to share in a common understanding of the powerful
contributions of their intertwined past. But I suspect that scene will remain in the realm of fantasy; in the real world, each man keeps setting off sparks in the other.

When the Jack Kerouac Commemorative (a monument in the form of a mandala, with passages from his work cut into granite columns) was dedicated in the author's hometown of Lowell in June 1988, Podhoretz wrote in the
New York Post
that “Kerouac and Ginsberg once played a part in ruining a great many young people who were influenced by their ‘distaste for normal life and common decency.'”

In an interview in
New Letters
, Ginsberg was asked to respond to the charge. Instead of attacking his old rival, Allen said he had come to think of Podhoretz as “a sort of sacred personage in my life, in a way; someone whose vision is so opposite from mine that it's provocative and interesting … so I should really respect him as one of the sacred personae in the drama of my own transitory existence.”

When we talk in his kitchen, I ask Allen if that meant he's grown more mellow.

He smiles and asks, “Didn't it mention that I was on Ecstasy when I said that?”

I tell him the excerpt that I saw failed to mention it.

“Anyway, after I had made that statement, Norman said, ‘You still don't understand me.'”

Ginsberg lays out on the table a book of his photographs published in Czechoslovakia called
Allen Ginsberg: Fotografier, 1947–87
. The main subject is Allen's favorite topic, his friends. Seeing the now famous shots of his Beat Generation buddies prompts him to talk of them again with pride as he points to their photographs in the book: “Burroughs just had his seventy-seventh birthday this year, and he's writing up a storm. He finished a trilogy, and now he's writing a new book whose protaganist is Jesus. He's breaking the God monopoly of the fundamentalists. He acted in the movie
Drugstore Cowboy
, you know. His great love is denouncing the government's war on drugs, which he says is just an excuse for having the police apparatus.”

Ginsberg defends Burroughs's view, saying, “There's a spiritual war going on now for liberation of consciousness and expansion of
consciousness, as opposed to another close-down. It's a different view of reality. We want liberation from the reign of alcohol and cigarettes and heroin.

“Do you know the statistics? Between 20,000 and 35,000 people a year die of hard drugs, 100,000 of alcohol, and 400,000 die of nicotine or related causes, like heart failure, high blood pressure, and so on. So our eccentric use of recreational drugs was healthier than the average insurance salesman's casualty list.”

Allen smiles and takes another sip of his tea. “My own peers have led healthy lives,” he says. “They seem to get stronger as they get older. Nobody I know died of an OD on junk, or committed suicide on acid, though some people did get freaked out on amphetamines. The big killer drug was booze, certainly in Kerouac's case. And the casualty list of academic poets on booze is enormous—John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and on and on.”

Unlike the boozers, Ginsberg has lasted to enjoy the acceptance of his work by most of his peers, with the exception of his “sacred” adversary, Podhoretz. Some who didn't appreciate “Howl” and the attendant publicity of the beats came to appreciate Ginsberg's later work. The poet and editor Harvey Shapiro says, “I wasn't really interested in the beats. I wasn't convinced of Ginsberg's genius until ‘Kaddish.'” “Kaddish,” a long work dedicated to Allen's mother, Naomi, is described by the poet as “proem, narrative, lament, litany and fugue.”

Now, Allen and Harvey Shapiro are on the board of PEN, the international writers' organization. “I see him around,” Harvey says. “Once I gave a reading with him, M. L. Rosenthal, who was poetry editor of
The Nation
, and LeRoi Jones [before the black poet took the Muslim name Imamu Amiri Baraka] after the Eighth Street Bookstore burned down. You know, the Eighth Street Bookstore was
the
place for poets—I met other poets there, some poets even got their mail there, it was a real center for us. So we gave this reading to honor the store and the owner, to give him the desire to go on after the fire. What I mainly remember about the evening was that Allen improvised a poem, ‘The Burning of the Eighth Street Bookstore.' It was really pretty good. Allen has a kind of ready-made rhetoric, like Milton, that enables him to do such things. He thought it was good too, and after the reading he ran
around the audience to see if anyone had a tape recorder so he could save it, get a copy of it.”

Ginsberg still plays to full houses on college campuses, and some of his poems—like “To Aunt Rose,” a sympathetic lament for an aging woman—are now taught to high school students. He needs a secretary to keep track of his crowded schedule of teaching, writing, speaking, campaigning for political causes, and raising money for Buddhist centers and needy poets.

We finish our tea and coffee, and walk through the snow to lunch at Allen's favorite neighborhood restaurant, Christine's, an old-fashioned luncheonette on First Avenue between 13th and 14th streets. “It's an institution around here for hungry rock 'n' roll musicians,” he says as we sit down at a table by a window. There are paintings by Larry Rivers on the walls, and a photograph of Ginsberg, and he says, “They want me to give them some manuscript pages to frame and put on the wall too.”

I order what Allen has—barley soup and pirogi, Polish ravioli—and a man and woman from another table come over to introduce themselves, and say how much they like his work. When they leave, I tell Allen that all the literary people I talked with who knew him at Columbia—even Norman Podhoretz—have spoken with admiration of his mastery of poetic form when he was still a student. In typical fashion, he brushes off the praise.

“I never took it as a big thing, being an accomplished poet. After all, my father was a poet. It's like the family business.” Louis Ginsberg was a high school English teacher and lyric poet whose verse was included in collections such as Louis Untermeyer's
Modern American and British Poetry
. He was known to recite Milton while the rest of the family read the Sunday paper.

Ginsberg saves his pride for the work of his friends. I think of a comment Murray Kempton made a few weeks before: “I never understood what Kerouac was about, but I loved Allen Ginsberg because he was Allen Ginsberg.”

His early work that caused such controversy now seems part of the vitality of our common language as well as our social, cultural, and political history. If in “Howl” he foreshadowed the anger and anguish of the sixties, in some of the other poems of his first book, like “A Supermarket in California” (“What peaches and what
penumbras!”) and “Sunflower Sutra,” he articulated the innocent joy and beauty that became the flower-child ethos: “We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.” In “America” he also gave us a way of seeing our postwar macho-victorious image as a nation with humor and irony, ending with his marvelously mocking pledge: “America, I put my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

After lunch, Allen hails a cab and I ride with him to Union Square, where he keeps an office. We talk of the mystery of time, and growing older, and Allen says he recently took his aunt to dinner for her eighty-fifth birthday. “I asked her what she had learned by now, what life was all about, and she said, ‘Life is a dream—it's all a dream.'” He looks out at the snow and smiles. “I believe it.”

William Carlos Williams's tribute to Ginsberg, in the introduction to
Howl and Other Poems
, sounds more prophetic with the passing years: “Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist.”

The snow that silently slants past the windows of the cab I ride in with Allen Ginsberg in 1991 reminds me of another snowy scene I picture him in, from 1956, a scene described to me by Helen Weaver, the friend who introduced me to Allen. Helen graduated from Oberlin College and moved to New York, where she got an apartment in the Village and a job at Farrar, Straus. A striking young woman, she was tall and slim, with dark brown hair worn in bangs and cut straight across just above her shoulders. She could quote Henry James, read novels in French, and besides all that was a great cook. What literary man could resist her? (Not Jack Kerouac. Not me.)

It was a Sunday morning in late November 1956 when the buzzer rang in Helen's apartment on West 11th Street, across from the White Horse. Helen's roommate, also named Helen, went to the window and looked down into the courtyard to see who was there. The buzzer that released the lock on the door of the building was broken, and to let someone in you had to throw down a key inside a sock.

“Oh, it's Jack and Allen,” Helen's roommate announced.

Kerouac and Ginsberg. With them were Peter Orlovsky and his brother, Lafcadio. Now Helen Weaver looked out to the courtyard and saw that all four guys carried sleeping bags and backpacks.

“In my memory it's snowing,” Helen says, “and they are looking up at us through the snow. They were penniless and exhausted, hungry and cold, and, well”—Helen paused and laughed—“they were
beat
. There would be articles about the beats that year in
Mademoiselle
and the
Village Voice
. Jack and Allen were on the threshold of being discovered.

“Allen was setting this up for Jack,” Helen explains of their arrival in the courtyard. “Allen had another place to stay himself, but Jack didn't, and Allen knew either Helen or I would take Jack in. He was right. Jack stayed with me from the word go. It was like a movie, the way everything proceeded as planned. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. From the very first night he was with me—it wasn't even discussed, it was understood. As soon as Jack came in the door we locked eyeballs—and immediately started arguing. He took off his backpack and started showing me his books. He had manuscripts and a copy of his first novel,
The Town and the City
, and he handed it to me and said, ‘This is like Thomas Wolfe.' He was very proud of that. I liked Thomas Wolfe, he was one of my favorites, but I was into Henry James at the time. Telling that to Jack was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, but the arguing wasn't acrimonious.

“It was almost impossible not to fall for Jack. Aside from looking like a movie star, he had this combination of innocence and humility—unfortunately he lost both—and wildness. All that was irresistible to me. So the others lined up their sleeping bags on the floor, and Jack stayed with me. He stayed until he went to Florida for Christmas to see his mother. While he was gone I read
The Town and the City
. That was his sweet side, and it renewed my love for him.

“He came back after New Year's. He was doing some editing and polishing—” Helen laughs. “I know it was supposed to be all spontaneous, but that's what he was doing then.

“I knew very early on that our relationship wasn't going to last. I was from Scarsdale, the sheltered life. Jack opened lots of doors for
me. I loved him and was charmed by him. But I knew I couldn't handle the drinking, the crazy schedule, the inconsistency—he'd fall off a fire escape and not show up, and then arrive two days later.

“I was just going into analysis. I had a terrible analyst, one of those strict Freudians who said almost nothing. So he didn't say anything about Jack, but he exuded hostility toward him. When I finally told Jack to leave, I think my shrink was the only person who was pleased, though of course he said nothing. I suspected he was afraid I'd give my money to Jack instead of to him.

“I was a mass of ambivalence and anxiety at the time. I was the only one in the household who had to show up at a job every day in some kind of reasonable shape. It was a stressful situation for a little girl from Scarsdale with her own set of problems. One night Jack and his friend Lucien Carr came in late and were rampaging around, playing records at top volume, and I lost it completely and started beating on Jack and tore out a hunk of his hair—after that he said that was where his hair started falling out. Jack never hit me back. I can't imagine Jack ever hitting a woman. But after that, something just gave. I banished myself to my room and Jack left with Lucien and my roommate's dog.

“Shortly after that night, I sat down with Jack and said, ‘This is not working.' But it was the fifties, you know, so I felt guilty and wrung my handkerchief. I thought I was a terrible person for throwing him out. I could see from the beginning Jack was going to be famous, he and Allen. I could also see he was going to drink himself to death. It was not a turn-on, ultimately.”

Helen sighs and sits back in her chair. A waitress brings our cappuccinos. Helen has come to New York from her home in Connecticut to share her memories of Jack, and of the time she and I spent together in the Village. It's been thirty-four years since Jack and Allen, Peter and Lafcadio materialized in her courtyard on their way back from the Coast. It feels as if it might have been the day before.

We're sitting in the Peacock, a coffeehouse on Greenwich Avenue, not far from Helen's old apartment. It's the perfect place to evoke such memories, for its atmosphere is coffeehouse-timeless. It could just as well be the fifties, or for all I know the twenties. People are talking or musing or writing in notebooks as some smoke cigarettes
or eat pastry or sip espresso at the heavy wooden tables with wire-back chairs, like the ones in old-fashioned drugstores, and no one hustles you out. It's warm and the Saturday autumn sunlight falls in the front windows in long beams where dust motes stir lazily. The place smells comfortably of coffee, chocolate, and dust.