To the Editor:
As Norman Podhoretz’s “My War With Allen Ginsberg” [August] proves, there is no war like an old war. I wish Mr. Podhoretz would take the time to look back and decide that his conflict with Ginsberg was not an essential moment in American literary history. In fact, according to his own lights, I believe Mr. Podhoretz might find several reasons to praise Ginsberg.
First of all, as the poet Louis Simpson demonstrated in A Revolution in Taste, Ginsberg essentially was a poet, not a propagandist or a libertine. He always thought in terms of literary creation and its relation to spirituality. Contrary to Mr. Podhoretz’s assertion that Ginsberg was a spent literary force by 1959, the poet was able to conjure up lyrical writing at all stages of his career. You may not always have liked what Ginsberg was doing, but you had to grant him the craft to know how to do it.
Second, I feel Mr. Podhoretz stumbles badly on the issue of pornography in Ginsberg’s poems. Pornography is obscene by virtue of its ability to wound through senseless violence. Allen Ginsberg is not a pornographic poet. Even his valedictory poem in the New Yorker is touchingly egocentric and loving in its réminiscences d’amour. If Mr. Podhoretz’s implicit case for obscenity lies in rampant homoeroticism, why doesn’t he just say so?
Third, Mr. Podhoretz badly mangles the important role Ginsberg’s writings play in the American discussion and treatment of the mad. As a manic-depressive with an uncle who had undergone a lobotomy—and who was a state-hospital contemporary of Ginsberg’s mother—I have learned firsthand that Ginsberg grew up in a time when mental illness was a shameful attribute. When Ginsberg chose to “beatify” the mad, he called attention to a whole social substructure that oppressed and tortured some of the most helpless among us. Mr. Podhoretz wants all literature somehow to convey a fulfilling vision within a normative life. Ginsberg had the courage to say, “it ain’t necessarily so.”
As a poet myself, I still have to face the intransigence of all but a few editors when I write, in the most clinical way, about hospital wards and the terrors of psychosis. That I, and other writers like me, can be published at all and embraced by public audiences is a tribute to Allen Ginsberg’s humanity and daring. He was right about self-promotion: even if he was wrong about Kerouac, drugs, the Gulf war, and anything else one might express an opinion on over seven decades, he forced Mr. Podhoretz, John Hollander, Donald Hall, and others to take his world seriously by the very fact of who he was. The first obligation of a master poet is not always to be likable.
David Saemann
Wayne, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
Is Norman Podhoretz implying that not only Allen Ginsberg’s life but his poetry constituted a “revolt” against “normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence”? Is poetry to be judged on the basis of what it tells us about the poet’s life as well as on its artistic vision? Is significant art—or, for that matter, second-or third-drawer art—to be read, seen, or heard as polemical or political fodder, to the detriment of the imaginative and stylistic integrity of each piece?
Mr. Podhoretz’s aversion to the Beat ethos and to the ways of life that followed it up until the present day appears to be influencing an appreciation of Ginsberg’s poetry. Whether or not the poetry will achieve classic status (time alone will see to that), it is, I believe, a disservice to the poet to encumber the art with the particulars of the artist’s life.
If an artist’s work were to be associated with the unpleasant detritus of his personal life, how many of us would wish to know the plays of Tennessee Williams, the operas of Richard Wagner, or the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh?
Robert Lagerstrom
New York City
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To the Editor:
The picture Norman Podhoretz paints of Allen Ginsberg effectively illustrates Ginsberg’s anti-Americanism and libertinism, but when he expands the portrait to include the entire counterculture, Mr. Podhoretz puts down his fine brush and picks up a crude spray-paint gun:
[Ginsberg’s] disciples and friends now extended way beyond the relatively narrow circle of the Beats to encompass the entire world of the counterculture, from rock musicians like Bob Dylan to hippies and “yippies” like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to a variety of “gurus” peddling one form or another of Oriental mysticism. What they all had in common was a fierce hatred of America, which they saw as “Amerika,” a country morally and spiritually equivalent to Nazi Germany. Its political system was based on oppression, to which the only answer was resistance and revolution, and its culture was based on repression, to which the only answer was to opt out of middle-class life and liberate the squelched and smothered self through drugs and sexual (preferably homosexual) promiscuity.
I would be interested to have Mr. Podhoretz cite the songs in which Bob Dylan advocates homosexuality as the preferred form of promiscuity to liberate American culture. As for the Oriental mystics, I can attest that for at least one of Ginsberg’s guru friends, Mr. Podhoretz’s indictment is false.
In the fall of 1966, posters appeared around Manhattan showing the head of an Indian man with sparkling eyes, long hair, and a beard of Santa Claus proportions. The poster bore the caption: “On December 2,1,000 people will be able to hear Swami Satchidananda. Allen Ginsberg will introduce him, chant mantras, and recite poetry.” At the time I was a college dropout living in New York and newly interested in yoga as a spiritual path. I had read some of Ginsberg’s poetry and admired it. So, with several hundred others, I attended the event, held at a midtown church.
The occasion unfolded as advertised. Ginsberg chanted for a considerable time, read poetry, some of it anti-American, and introduced Swami Satchidananda as one who could serve as a guide to American youth searching for spiritual truth.
Attracted by Satchidananda’s message and personality, I became a student at the Swami’s Integral Yoga Institute in New York, where Ginsberg was an occasional visitor. Before long, I was a full-time disciple of the Swami’s and planned to become a Swami myself. For two years I attended many of his public talks and was present during innumerable private conversations. In all my association with Satchidananda, I never observed him to express anti-American sentiments. He was apolitical and his message, whatever its inadequacies (they were such that I broke with him after two years), was a spiritual one. And far from promoting drugs and promiscuity, Satchidananda preached against drugs (and persuaded many young people to give them up) and in favor of celibacy.
In his article, Mr. Podhoretz quotes from one of his early critiques: “Being against what the Beat generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision.” I submit that his animus against Allen Ginsberg and the counterculture has led Mr. Podhoretz to fail his own standard of precision.
Daniel Love Glazer
Chicago, Illinois
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To the Editor:
I am in total agreement with what Norman Podhoretz has to say about Allen Ginsberg and his friends. I believe that Ginsberg is one of the spiritual ancestors of reactionary anti-Americans like Timothy McVeigh.
Ginsberg’s death reminds us how anti-reason and anti-science the 1960’s and early 1970’s were. The growth of Buddhism in a country with no Buddhist tradition, the interest in astrology, the spirituality of that era—all emerged in precisely the place where one would least expect it: the colleges. The secular tradition of American constitutional government was confronted with a new enthusiasm for mysticism and irrationality. The counterculture was relatively weak, but it was working from within; it challenged the idea of evidence based on the senses and on scientific testing.
The counterculture would have fizzled out, but it was joined by religious zealots who had never been content with the conservatism of American religion. They created a new anti-democratic force that put the Left to shame.
George Jochnowitz
CUNY-Staten Island
Staten Island, New York
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To the Editor:
I would like to thank Norman Podhoretz for his article on Allen Ginsberg. Recently the leading Russian daily in New York, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, published a poem by the well-known Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky on the death of Ginsberg. The last two lines of this poem (in my prosaic translation) read: “A Holy Angel looks down from the sky/ This angel is Ginsberg.” What an interesting angel indeed.
I immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1989 and am currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, but I am also a poet and political analyst. I replied to Voznesensky in an article and poem (also in the Russian press) and am amazed to see how close my points were to those of Mr. Podhoretz, although I was driven mostly by intuition while he, of course, has firsthand knowledge. In my view, we are dealing here with a major pollutant of the intellectual and moral environment.
I would also like to comment on the footnote in which Mr. Podhoretz says he had always thought that
Communist governments were stupid in failing to understand that cultural radicals like Ginsberg who did everything in their power to undermine American resistance to Communism were their de-facto allies in the cold war.
I think he underestimates the KGB. It is true that Communist governments would never tolerate Ginsberg-type activities in their own territories, but they were pleased to see such pseudo-prophets at work destroying the West. And the KGB not only observed such people, it used them for its own ends. It was, in fact, people like Ginsberg and other so-called Western “intellectuals” whom Lenin had in mind when he used the phrase “useful idiots,” that is, useful allies in promoting the Communist cause.
Boris A. Kushner
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
Allen Ginsberg’s 60’s performances in London have stuck in my memory. Coming away from one of them, I found myself agreeing with the critic who remarked that “Howl” should be retitled “Bleat.”
Two aspects of Ginsberg and his “movement” impressed me at the time. One was that his appeal to gross animal instinct and emotions had a lot in common with certain aspects of Nazism. The other was how much he (unwittingly) evoked Hannah Arendt’s description (in The Origins of Totalitarianism) of that good old nostalgie de la boue in chic European haut-bourgeois circles. It seemed to me that there was always something pathetically, quintessentially middle-class, even suburban, in Ginsberg’s revolt, and among his followers: the famous Marxian phenomenon of history being repeated (or played out by high-school kids who never grew up) as farce.
Of course, I did not have Norman Podhoretz’s advantage of personal acquaintance with the man. Still, I never understood why so many Americans—not all of them young—took him so seriously. He had talent, but it was not a big talent, and certainly not great—except maybe for public relations.
Even so, it was fascinating to read Norman Podhoretz’s account.
Herb Greer
Manchester, England
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To the Editor:
I read Norman Podhoretz’s “My War With Allen Ginsberg” with great care. Then I reread it, put it down, and read it yet again a week later.
I come out of that time of the late 1950’s (born in 1943), and I had, I must say, a benign view of much of what was going on then. Norman Podhoretz made me think, and think hard. For this, I thank him.
Roger Soder
Seattle, Washington
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s piece on Allen Ginsberg was of a high order of truth-telling and intellectual vigor. In saner times, I would expect it to be the first choice of the 1997 edition of Best American Essays, but I am sure Mr. Podhoretz can live with the certainty that his work is among the best of our time.
Mark Schore
Los Angeles, California
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s elaborate soliloquy about his acrimonious lifelong relationship with America’s anarchist bard, the late Allen Ginsberg, reminded me of two related incidents. The first was a long conversation a colleague, Avraham Shemtov, and I had with Ginsberg in the early spring of 1994. Steering from subject to subject, we began discussing contemporary literary figures and their political tendencies. In a test of Ginsberg’s Buddhist equability, Avraham began speaking about Mr. Podhoretz in a laudatory manner. (“I just wanted to see how he would react,” Avraham later confessed to me.)
Ginsberg’s nonchalance suddenly evaporated as he went off on a tirade for several minutes, calling Mr. Podhoretz everything from “a wannabe without any [literary] talent—and he knows it,” to “a McCarthyite who wants to control everything” by “putting his own family, his own son-in-law, into the government to run our lives and suppress all of America into a totalitarian state.” (He was to repeat this last allegation with great flair a few days later during his class on Beat literature at Brooklyn College.) As far as I can remember, words such as “megalomaniac,” “hateful,” “bitter,” and “frustrated” were liberally scattered throughout. Only Cynthia Ozick was held in more contempt for her “neofascist” attitude toward the Palestinians.
The second incident took place two months later. During a late-night gathering of young Lubavitchers, students, and aspiring poets at Ginsberg’s former apartment on East 12th Street, someone pulled a copy of Mr. Podhoretz’s Making It from a shelf, opened it where the jacket flap had it bookmarked, and began reading. Seeing this, Ginsberg snuck up behind the reader and glanced at the open page. Raising his eyes, he smiled ruefully at me, and in an I-told-you-so manner, gestured toward the book and gleefully walked away.
Taking the signal, I went over to see what the passage was. The book was opened to page 39 and there I read:
[My] hunger for success as a student . . . became absolutely uncontrollable when I began to realize that I would never make the grade as a poet. I had a small talent for verse, yet try as I did for more than two years, there was no concealing the fact from myself that, as compared with Allen Ginsberg, John Hollander, and a dozen other Columbia poets of the time, I rated at the most generous estimate a grudging honorable mention. . . . The truth was I could not bear the idea of not being great.
Baruch B. Thaler
Columbia University
Jewish Theological Seminary
New York City
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
David Saemann thinks that Allen Ginsberg wrote good poetry “at all stages of his career.” I disagree, and I believe that careful critical analysis would bear out my contention that after 1959 the poet in him surrendered to the propagandist (who, to be sure, had been there before but in a less prominent role). I also disagree with Mr. Saemann’s definition of pornography, but definitions aside, if the highly explicit descriptions of sexual activity in some of Ginsberg’s later poems are not pornographic, then nothing is. On the question of madness, I have no quarrel whatever with writing “in the most clinical way” about psychosis; what I object to is representing it à la Ginsberg (and such theorists as R.D. Laing) as the true sanity and as a superior state of human consciousness.
On a related point raised by Robert Lagerstrom, when I spoke of the Beat ethos as a revolt against normal feeling and intelligence, I was talking about the poems and novels of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and their acolytes, not about their personal lives. The problem is that in the case of these writers, it is very difficult to distinguish between the life and the art: not for them the distinction T.S. Eliot drew between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates” or his conception of poetry as “an escape from personality” rather than “an expression of personality.”
I will give Bob Dylan to Daniel Love Glazer if he will give me the acknowledgment that, whether or not one Oriental guru or another preached anti-Americanism in the 60’s, it was a hatred of their own country and its culture that drew their young American followers to so alien a form of spirituality.
George Jochnowitz sees this clearly, and goes on to suggest a spiritual connection between Ginsberg and “reactionary anti-Americans like Timothy McVeigh.” This seems a bit of a stretch to me, but on the other hand I have no doubt that a line can be drawn from the counterculture of the 60’s to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
I thank Boris A. Kushner, Herb Greer, Roger Soder, and Mark Schore for their kind words and interesting comments. I am also grateful to Baruch B. Thaler for the story he tells. I was, frankly, a little surprised to learn that as late as 1994 the mention of my name could still break down Ginsberg’s “Buddhist equability,” sending him first into a rage and then back yet again to my adolescent dreams of greatness in his never-ending and comically desperate effort to explain my relatively low opinion of his work. After all, as I wrote in my article, by 1994 Ginsberg had by his own account long since changed his mind about me, and he would reaffirm his newfound fondness in 1996, two years after the incidents described by Mr. Thaler and only six months before his death. But perhaps, like his beloved Whitman, he would have said, “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Then again—considering that it was, as he himself put it, while “dropping some Ecstasy” that he first decided to stop hating me—maybe his attitude varied with whatever drug he happened to be on at any given moment.
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