To the Editor:

In his article “Allen Ginsberg Then and Now” [July], Robert Richman mistakenly—and repeatedly—refers to James Breslin, the author of a book called From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965 (University of Chicago Press, 1984), as Paul Breslin. Now there is another critic of contemporary poetry named Paul Breslin, who teaches at Northwestern, but he has nothing but the name “Breslin” in common with James E. B. Breslin, who is professor of English at Berkeley.

It is not surprising that Mr. Richman makes this error since he distorts facts and resorts to innuendo throughout his article. Having myself written a long review-essay on Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems for American Poetry Review (“A Lion in Our Living Room,” March/April 1985), I do not wish here to go over the same ground. But I do want to protest some of Mr. Richman’s statements and raise some larger questions about poetry (and art) reviewing in COMMENTARY.

Like a number of other magazine reviewers, Mr. Richman is indignant that Allen Ginsberg should actually have received “a six-figure contract” for his book, and that the book itself is an elegant “two-inch-thick extravaganza.” “Never,” writes Mr. Richman, “has an aesthetic of obsolescence been so fastidiously preserved.” Why is it so upsetting that a poet of Ginsberg’s reputation should actually earn some money or that his Collected Poems should be handsomely produced? Even if Mr. Richman considers Ginsberg a negligible poet, surely even he must concede that Ginsberg’s work has enormous historical interest. Geraldine Ferraro, whose autobiography strikes me as having virtually no interest, received a “six-figure contract” for her book. So have any number of film stars. Why not Allen Ginsberg, a man hardly noted for his wealth or his lavish “life style”?

Ginsberg, Mr. Richman tells us,

is . . . part of the immensely talented generation that burst on the poetry scene in the years following World War II. But while most of that generation’s better poets—among them Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Howard Nemerov—were of a decidedly formalist persuasion, Ginsberg was the freewheeling experimental rebel.

This sounds straightforward enough, but the fact is, as anyone who has studied the subject knows, that the chief difference between the postwar generation of American poets and their predecessors was precisely the abandonment of formalism. James a.k.a. Paul Breslin, whom Mr. Richman cites as his authority on Ginsberg’s literary subterfuges, provides one of the best accounts we have of this “opening of the field.” Indeed, Breslin discusses Richard Wilbur’s poetry as a prime example of the narrow and academic formalism that was to be eroded by the innovations of the 50’s and 60’s. Mr. Richman need not, of course, agree with this assessment, but in informing COMMENTARY readers what “most of that generation’s better poets” were doing, he might at least make clear that Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jerome Rothenberg, James Wright, W.S. Merwin—the list goes on and on—were doing no such thing.

But then literary history is not Mr. Richman’s strong suit. He reports, with seeming objectivity, that between 1944 and 1946, Ginsberg formed “attachments” to the likes of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke—“drug addicts and criminals all.” A curiously philistine statement, given that Burroughs is considered by most scholars in the field as one of the major writers of the period whereas Neal Cassady was not a writer at all, only the object of Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s love. Never mind, the aim is to show that Ginsberg’s friends were all “drug addicts and criminals.” So much for Ginsberg’s friendship with Creeley and Duncan, Ashbery and O’Hara, so much for his remarkably learned essays on poetry and poetics collected in Composed on the Tongue and Allen Verbatim. To read Ginsberg on metrics or on Pound’s syntax is to marvel that a man who took all those drugs and had all those adventures, survived to write with such clarity and vigor. Ginsberg would understand, for instance, that the 1952 poem called “A Crazy Spiritual,” which Mr. Richman dismisses as “derivative—this time, of Williams,” is quite unlike Williams’s free verse in its adoption of folk-ballad rhythms and argot.

But then Mr. Richman isn’t really interested in Ginsberg’s poetry. He is interested in the Ginsberg legend, the dreadful story about what happened at the Naropa Institute in 1974 (a story that suffers from the worst sort of journalistic overkill), and the stories about Ginsberg’s testimony on LSD at the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in June 1966. It is rather like writing about Rimbaud and recording only his use of obscenities at public gatherings, his smoking of hashish, and his duel with Verlaine. Having, in any case, discussed none of the poet’s major works with any degree of seriousness, having said nothing of Ginsberg’s humor, which may well be the most lasting quality of his poetry, or of his powers, quite unlike those of Kerouac and Cassady, to survive and to change, and having never asked himself for a moment why Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is admired in Japan as in Sweden, in Yugoslavia as in Israel, Mr. Richman returns to the dreaded recognition that this poet is “the proud holder of a six-figure book deal,” once again refers to James Breslin as Paul Breslin, and ends on this note: “One need not read between the lines of Allen Ginsberg’s life and work to find sleaziness abounding.”

It is all sadly dispiriting, especially for someone like me who is a faithful COMMENTARY subscriber and reader. For years I have been pondering this question: why is it that the people who have the most clear-headed sense of political realities, who understand, as do most COMMENTARY contributors, what is at stake in our world, are willing to tolerate the philistine banalities of a Robert Richman? Conversely, why are avant-garde artists and critics—and contrary to Mr. Richman and your other reviewers, I believe the avant-garde is alive and well—so blind when it comes to politics? The current gulf between political and social realities on the one hand and the art scene on the other seems to be so great that perhaps the only way to avoid the Ezra Pound trap (or, for that matter, the Allen Ginsberg trap) would be to practice some humility regarding fields we seem not to understand. It has long struck me that COMMENTARY . . . just doesn’t understand what is happening in new music, performance, photography, poetry. Indeed, COMMENTARY seems to have no more understanding of Ginsberg’s poetic mode than Ginsberg evidently had of the events in Prague in 1965.

But just as left-wing poets shout obscenities at Caspar Weinberger, even as they don’t have the foggiest notion of how he, or anyone else, might actually run the Pentagon, so the right-wing “critics” and reviewers in your pages regularly expose themselves as simply lacking the ability to describe and analyze what happens in a literary text. No one who has read Howl! with even minimal attention could describe it, as does Mr. Richman, as “an ode to sexual, social, and poetic freedom.”

Marjorie Perloff
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California

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To the Editor:

In his “Allen Ginsberg Then and Now” Robert Richman refers to an essay of mine—“Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’”—and to my book, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965. Never mind that Mr. Richman appropriates my own basically sympathetic account of Ginsberg to his attack on the poet. That’s a common enough form of dishonesty. But Mr. Richman also identifies a “Paul Breslin” as the author of the essay and the book. Yes, Robert, there is a Paul Breslin, but he didn’t write either of these two pieces. Why don’t you read instead of seeing what you expect to find?

Mr. Richman finds “sleaziness abounding” in Ginsberg’s work. What’s Mr. Richman’s word for someone who can’t correctly transcribe the name of an author twice in one essay? Mine is dope.

James E. B. Breslin
University of California
Berkeley, California

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Robert Richman writes:

I apologize to James E.B. Breslin for confusing him with Paul Breslin. He has every right to feel indignant. Marjorie Perloff’s indignation is another matter.

First of all, nowhere in the course of my article do I suggest that I am against six-figure book contracts. I like nothing better than to see authors prosper, especially down-and-out authors. But Allen Ginsberg has routinely derided capitalism—indeed, the very concept of money—for the last thirty years. Is it really that unfair of me to criticize such brazen hypocrisy? I agree with Mrs. Perloff that Geraldine Ferraro’s biography is of less interest than Ginsberg’s Collected Poems. What this has to do with my argument that Ginsberg is a hypocrite is beyond me. If anything, it supports my case.

Mrs. Perloff is correct to assume that she and I will disagree about who the best postwar poets are. Evidently we also disagree about the status of William Burroughs as a writer. She contends that “most scholars in the field” regard Burroughs as one of the “major writers of the period.” Coming to “the field” not as a scholar but as a reader, I must confess I find Burroughs to be of some interest but hardly a preeminent figure. But then I am quite mystified by what “scholars in the field” admire in contemporary poetry and fiction. So many of these “scholars”—and, clearly, Mrs. Perloff is straining to be counted among them—have the taste and sensibility of a telephone pole, at least when it comes to recent poetry. No doubt it takes the special insight of a “scholar in the field” to find Ginsberg’s essays “remarkably learned.”

Mrs. Perloff accuses me of focusing on the Ginsberg legend at the expense of the poetry. This is blatantly false, as any reader of my article can testify. But as the legend is exactly what Ginsberg has tirelessly promoted through the years, it would have been no disservice if I had concentrated solely on the legend. If anyone can be held responsible for the tendency of critics to discuss Ginsberg’s endless series of attention-getting actions, it is the Professor of Publicity himself.

Mrs. Perloff castigates me for not liking Ginsberg’s poetry, while it “is admired in Japan as in Sweden, in Yugoslavia as in Israel.” What a novel idea! The next time we want to know who our best and most important poets are, we’ll ask the Yugoslavs. Is this another of the preposterous notions rife among “scholars in the field”? If so, the university is in an even sorrier state than one had thought.

But most preposterous of all is Mrs. Perloff’s automatic equation of my dislike of Ginsberg’s work with a dislike of the “avant-garde.” Mrs. Perloff accuses me of being philistine, yet it is the worst kind of philistinism to find in my criticism of Ginsberg a criticism of the “avant-garde.” I happen to admire a great deal of the avant-garde, in poetry as in other art forms, but clearly Mrs. Perloff’s mind is incapable of tolerating such a notion.

Mrs. Perloff ends her letter by saying that COMMENTARY critics “regularly expose themselves as simply lacking the ability to describe and analyze what happens in a literary text.” Since she makes no effort in her letter to contend with my description and analysis of Ginsberg’s poetry—not to mention my argument—I have to assume she agrees with most of what I have to say about it. For this I thank her.

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