White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985.

White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985

ALLEN GINSBERG is an interesting poet, in spite of himself, and with at least one great poem, Kaddish, he has earned himself a permanent place in American letters. I say "in spite of himself," for he has absorbed without redeeming irony the idea of the poet as "other"--anti-bourgeois, criminal, sexually deviant, traitorous. But these "outrageous" guises become so predictable that they turn into cliches. If only Ginsberg would understand that what would be really outraeous would be to wear a Brooks Brothers suit.

In person, Ginsberg is almost humorless. He is also surprisingly nice and very well-informed about poetry. His "long line," as he calls it, comes not from Walt Whitman, as it routinely assumed, but from the eighteenth-century mad poet Kit Smart. There are few people alive today more interesting to talk with than Ginsberg about metrics and the English language.

Ginsberg has made so sustained an attempt to be outrageous that it is remarkable that he is still alive--or, peraps not so remarkable. In the main, he has practiced a safe, "legitimate" outrageousness, nothing so venturesome as the outrageousness of James Gould Cozzens. Still, Ginsberg has pushed along, trying to epater the bourgeois. At Columbia during World War II, Ginsberg had Jack Kerouac, against the rules, living in his dorm room. The window panes were so filthy Ginsberg could write on them. Writing backwards, so that his words could be read from down in the quadrangle, he inscribed in the dust "F--the Jews." Wheeeeee. The then dean, Nicholas MacKnight, a decorous late-Victorian liberal gentleman, called in Lionel Trilling. Ginsberg had really "done it" this time. MacKnight couldn't bring himself to utter the ghastly, impious words; and passed them scribbled on a slip of paper to Trilling. Trilling had to choke back a laugh at the situation. The crafty Ginsberg had figured out a way to really offend a "tolerant" culture.

Then there were other matters, like burglaries, the narcotics crowd around William Burroughs, and a murder, under murky circumstances, in Riverside Park. Kerouac, a conservative and a patriot, had quit the Columbia football team and enlisted in the Navy, the Marines, and the Merchant Marine, too drunk to keep track of the papers he was signing.

As a poet, Allen Ginsberg did an immensely liberating thing during the later 1950s. He stepped aside from high modernism, and went ahead and wrote.

Now you have to realize the situation. Everyone was in awe of Eliot, Joyce, Proust, Mann, Yeats, Gide. These giants were so intellectually imposing that, well, if that was writing, forget it: no one could be that learned, that accomplished. Ginsberg proved that a literature was possible that did not require a handbook or a skeleton key. He also reached for a different range of material and emotion: madness, drugs, homosexuality, Communism, violence, love.

It mut be frustrating to him to have become, now, relatively respectable. His early, and probably best, work was published by City Lights Books in San Francisco, an underground press. Now he's become virtually a Man of Letters, published in collected edition by harper & Row, than which no publishing house is more respectable. His early poem Howl has even been brought out in an expensive, heavily annotated edition. All that remains is to elect Ginsberg to the British Academy and give him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Which brings us to the present volume, White Shroud. I surmise that the tite refers to AIDS, though it may well have broader application, for the poems often deal with what is now politely called high-risk behavior. If we take this material as autobiographica, it is remarkable that Mr. Ginsberg remains apparently healthy, except for a bit of high blood pressure. Perhpas he should leave his body to science for study.

It should be added that Ginsberg is one of the great platform entertainers of our day, right up tere with Mark Twain. He recites his poetry, he plays a weird musical instrument and sings, and he can mesmerize an audience by just going "Ommmm . . . Ommmm . . . . Ommmm." Think what you like of him, he's a work of art.

The principal defect of his sensibility remains his fundamental humorlessness. He does not realize that homosexuality is, among other things, funny. The great homosexuals, like alcibiades and Oscar Wilde, realized that they were really clowns. "It would be more interesting," said Wilde of Niagara Falls, "if it flowed upward." "You would have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing." A lobster on a leash. Stable boys. A green carnation. Hilarious. Allen Ginsberg has the technical skill and, especially, the material to be a great comic poet, but he doesn't realize it.