| Review of: | American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation by Jonah Raskin |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Bryan Wuthrich |
| Reviewed in: | Peace & Change |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 32, Issue 03, Pages 435-462 |
Book Reviews
Given the intensity of the debate generated by the culture wars in recent years, there is no greater indicator of where people stand amid all this rancor than their disposition toward the Beats. This strategic position has afforded the Beats a privileged place in the national cultural dialogue that keeps them relevant years after their greatest works were published (indeed, years after their three leaders-Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs-have died). Consequently, this also assures them of a steady stream of attention by intellectuals and scholars, the most recent of which is Jonah Raskin's
The passage of time, however, has done nothing to clarify who the Beats were and what they did. Instead, they have been covered over with an accumulating residue of mythology: they have become "prophets of [spiritual] awakening," or radical "personalists," frequently viewed from within the limited constraints of a larger ideological perspective not entirely akin to their own. What has been lost in the shuffle is the Beats themselves, a group who took great pride in their own lack of polish and deliberately unpresentable manner. As Raskin correctly points out at the end of this study on the early years of Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac once described the Beat aesthetic as "beautiful in an ugly graceful way." To make the Beats pretty and presentable is, in fact, to misrepresent them.
Even though Raskin admits to being a fan of Ginsberg since the age of twelve, when he first read
Raskin is also keenly aware that that very legend imprisoned Ginsberg in what the poet himself once referred to as "this fiction named Allen Ginsberg," a fiction/legend that eventually threatened to become his master shrouding him, and by extension all the Beats, beneath the stifling veil of myth. To what degree Allen Ginsberg the man was actually undone by his own creation is, thankfully, not an avenue of poetic and dramatic irony that Raskin indulges in. What he does offer is a fine historical analysis of the man and his unique form of aesthetic resistance to larger social forces that is his poem,
First of all, Raskin shows us a young Ginsberg who is unsure of himself, struggling with his sexuality as well as with his own aesthetic vision. Far from being this rock of personal assuredness, Ginsberg repeatedly struggles against and denies his own homosexuality. Far from being this cocksure poet of absolute aesthetic conviction, Ginsberg vacillates, at various times embracing T. S. Eliot and rejecting Walt Whitman and vice versa. Far from rejecting conformity and mainstream society, Ginsberg works numerous times as a market researcher and attempts to live the "straight life." Far from being the resolute defender of personal madness in the face of alienating conformity, Ginsberg signed off on his own mother's electroshock therapy.
Raskin dutifully and accurately chronicles Ginsberg's personal voyage to aesthetic self-discovery and self-realization from his days as a college student at Columbia, through numerous personal and artistic explorations, leading up to that moment at the Drake hotel in San Francisco in 1955 when he began typing out the words for what was initially an untitled poem. The poem was then tentatively called
Raskin wisely confines his speculation to those aspects that relate directly to the production of the historical document in question and avoids unnecessary attention to Ginsberg's personal history and speculation about his personal life beyond that frame of reference. The various lurid details that are included in
Indeed, Raskin could have gone farther, since there is ample evidence that this particular aesthetic sensibility on the part of Ginsberg is also part of a general and deliberate structure of aesthetic values shared by the other Beat writers, most notably Burroughs and Kerouac. These new aesthetic values stood in stark contrast to the many social and artistic movements that came before the Beats and played a significant role in defining the Beat generation as well as opposition to it. In all the writings that can be properly defined as "Beat," there is a recurrent focus on the abject and various forms of degeneration, which speak to the unique, and often glossed over, philosophical outlook of the Beats. Raskin rightly points out Ginsberg's ambivalent feelings about traditional notions of identity as a stable and static entity. This is a key and important observation, but he fails to dig deeper and see a deliberate aesthetic strategy at work within his writing and ideas, a strategy of ego subversion by way of self-derangement (via drugs, sexuality, or aesthetic experimentation), all in the interests of a radically innovative conceptualization of individual freedom.
This conceptual reformulation of traditional notions of identity and human freedom would go on to have a broader impact on the future of American radicalism and, I would argue, defined the Beats historically. Raskin is a little less detailed, consequently, in his account of how Ginsberg fits into the broader sociopolitical forces taking shape during the early stages of the Cold War, leaving the promise of the second part of his subtitle, an examination into "the making of the Beat Generation," somewhat unfulfilled. But given the tremendous contribution to our understanding of Allen Ginsberg, and to some degree, the Beats as well, that this book has managed to achieve, it is an omission that can be easily overlooked.