OBITUARY OF ALLEN GINSBERG BEAT POET AND GURU TO THE HIPPIES, CHIEF
SUPPORTER OF KEROUAC AND BURROUGHS, AND PROPONENT OF NAKEDNESS AND DRUGS
Copyright (c) 1997, Telegraph Group Limited

ALLEN GINSBERG, who has died aged 70, was the original
beat poet and the chief guru of the hippie drug and protest
movement in America during the 1960s. His best and first
published poem, Howl (1956), begins: "I saw the best minds
of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked, / Dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix." Best appreciated when read
aloud particularly by Ginsberg himself it became the
most widely known American poem of the postwar years. Like
T S Eliot, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost, Ginsberg was first
published in England, where Dame Edith Sitwell was an early
champion. In 1958 she took him and his fellow beatnik poet
Gregory Corso to luncheon at her London club, the Sesame.
Dame Edith, garbed in a long satin dress, adorned with one
of her tall conical hats, and leaning on an ebony stick,
led the bearded, sandalled and turtlenecksweatered
beatniks past the stunned members. When Ginsberg offered
Dame Edith heroin she declined, saying, "It brings me out
in spots." Dame Edith ordered Ginsberg and Corso bombe a
l'americaine, in reference to the sensation they had caused
earlier in the week with their poetry readings at Oxford.
At New College Corso's poem, Bomb, with the lines "O Bomb,
I love you, I want to kiss your clank, eat your boom. . ."
had provoked members of the College poetry society into
hurling their shoes at the poets. At University College
Ginsberg, while being shown around by the Indian poet Dom
Moraes, demanded to see Shelley's rooms. Moraes, who had
not the slightest idea which these were, vaguely indicated
a door. Ginsberg burst through it, fell on his knees and
started kissing the carpet, while the occupant of the room,
who had been making himself a pot of tea, stood in
horrified silence. W H Auden, who was then Professor of
Poetry at Oxford, told Moraes he did not wish to meet any
beatniks. But Ginsberg and Corso went to see him anyway.
"Are birds spies?" Corso demanded. "I don't think so. Who
would they report to?" a puzzled Auden returned. "To the
trees of course," concluded Ginsberg. Auden later defended
Ginsberg, observing that Howl had much to say and that
Ginsberg "may well grow to even larger achievements". The
judgment proved overoptimistic. For some time Howl was
freely available in Britain, while barred from America by
US Customs. When Howl and Other Poems was finally published
in San Francisco in 1957 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a court
case ensued. Ginsberg won and became a celebrity, with his
photograph in Life magazine. The book was soon a
bestseller in America but Ginsberg took off, becoming an
able seaman in the Arctic Circle. For all his undoubted
talent for publicity, he used it to promote his friends
rather than himself. He acted as an unpaid agent for both
Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. In 1953 he had
persuaded a friend's uncle to publish Burrough's first
novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict;
strangely, the uncle was under the impression that it was a
detective story. Later Ginsberg edited The Naked Lunch down
to manageable size and found it a publisher in Paris. He
was also responsible for Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road,
being published in New York in 1959. In the 1960s the
lifestyle which Ginsberg had been advocating suddenly
became popular. His Americanised Eastern mysticism was
taken over by the young, particularly in California, where
he was the father of Flower Power and the Hippies. He
figured prominently in the first rallies against the
Vietnam War. During the riots in Chicago in 1968 Ginsberg
halted police and national guardsmen in Lincoln Park by
reciting the mantra "Om" over and over again for seven
hours. The police and guardsmen who had arrived to arrest
or to move on the protestors assumed a reverential stance
in the face of the Oms though a Hindu in the crowd passed
him a note complaining that he was not pronouncing his "m"s
properly. Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3 1926 in
New Jersey, of Russian Jews who were both firstgeneration
Americans. His father, Louis, was a friend of e e cummings
and himself a poet. Louis Ginsberg taught English in the
high school at Paterson, New Jersey, where he knew William
Carlos Williams; at the time he was the more highly
regarded poet of the two. Allen Ginsberg was a bright
schoolboy but his father was more impressed by the poetic
talent of the elder brother Eugene, whose work was
published in the New York Times. It was William Carlos
Williams who encouraged Allen. The mother was mad. This did
not seem to bother Louis Ginsberg, who left Allen in charge
of her while he and Eugene concentrated on poetry. There
were nightmarish goingson, with Mrs Ginsberg attempting to
do herself injury and frequently making loud, crazy scenes
in the street. Ginsberg's poem Kaddish is a tribute to his
mad mother. If it appears an unseemly composition, that is
because one of the symptoms of Mrs Ginsberg's disorder was
a compulsion to remove her clothing. Mrs Ginsberg was an
active Communist, and Allen remembered going to a summer
camp where the dining room walls were painted with murals
of bloodyhanded capitalists. Ginsberg pere was a vague
socialist. Allen never had any politics, other than
protest. He won a scholarship to Columbia, the Ivy League
university in upper Manhattan, where he met Jack Kerouac
and was taught by Lionel and Diana Trilling and by Mark Van
Doren. William Burroughs, 17 years older than Ginsberg, had
graduated from Harvard in 1935 and was living in a
luxurious flat near Columbia which had been lent to him by
a rich friend. Secure in the possession of a private
income, he indulged a love of low life, and introduced
Ginsberg to petty criminals. Where Burroughs was cool and
detached about these crooks, Ginsberg attempted to make
friends with them, losing money and belongings in the
process. In 1948 he was arrested after some acquaintances
had used his flat as a base for a robbery. He only escaped
prison because his family committed him to a mental
hospital. The insanity which Ginsberg encountered in the
asylum found its way into Howl. On his release there was a
scandal when Kerouac, who had been expelled from Columbia,
was found one morning in Ginsberg's bedroom at the
university. Ginsberg assured the authorities that the two
of them were innocent of any vice, but did not convince. He
was obliged to continue his studies on his own to which
end he took "mindexpanding" drugs. The theory which he,
Burroughs and Kerouac adopted, was that it did not matter
how much drink and drugs they took at night so long as they
were at their desks in the morning. This way of life had
the advantage of conferring upon Ginsberg a vision of
William Blake. Ginsberg worked in an advertising agency in
New York and as a marketresearcher in San Francisco. He
held no hopes that his poems would ever be published
partly because he did not want his father to discover that
he was homosexual. For a time he lived with a woman and
even thought of marrying. Though Burroughs was in love with
him, Ginsberg preferred Neal Cassady, a colourful character
who featured in Kerouac's On the Road and later in Tom
Wolfe's The KoolAid Acid Test. When Cassady's wife found
Ginsberg in bed with her husband it broke up the marriage.
Yet Ginsberg's generosity was unfailing. For years he
supported Gregory Corso (who was never a lover), and made
over to him the royalties of some of his books. And when
his lifelong companion Peter Orlovsky decided he wanted a
child, Ginsberg let him and his girlfriend live in his
flat. He was as faithful to his friends as he was free with
his money. Though he could have made a fortune in the 1960s
by going to a large New York publisher, he remained loyal
to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books. For a long
time he refused to take money for his readings, believing
that poetry should be free. He did, though, manifest an
inherited tendency to remove his clothes while reading. At
a party in London in the mid1960s, John Lennon arrived
with his first wife to find Ginsberg wearing nothing but a
Do Not Disturb sign, hung on his person as over a hotel
door knob. "You don't do that in front of birds," declared
the affronted Beatle, and left the room. Ginsberg was an
intrepid traveller, journeying into the jungles of Central
and South America in search of drugs. Well before it became
fashionable he lived for some time in India among the very
poor, studying Eastern mysticism. The Indian government
thought he was an American spy and expelled him. He was
well ahead of the Washington Post in discovering that the
CIA was running drugs out of Cambodia. In 1965 Ginsberg was
thrown out of Cuba for preaching and practising
homosexuality. He went on to Prague, where he was a great
hit with the university students who elected him King of
the May. A crowd of 100,000 saw him chaired throught the
streets. But plain clothes police attacked him with clubs,
and he was expelled as an undesirable. Though he was
arrested several times in America on account of his pro
drugs and anti war campaigns he was never held for long.
He appeared several times as a witness for other
protestors, but was never a success with judges, who were
unable to understand his rambling speech pattern. In the
1970s Ginsberg fell out with some of his friends when they
objected to the military discipline of his guru, the
Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who held court
at Boulder, Colorado. Though Trungpa died in 1987, Ginsberg
continued to devote much of his energy to the Buddhist
college in Colorado, setting up the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics there. He also taught at Brooklyn
College in New York. Whereas in the 1970s his jokey style
seemed to be wearing thin, the ReaganBush era brought him
new disciples among the rebellious young. Though his poem
Don't Smoke was recorded by U2, he continued to take a
liberal stand on drugs, disapproving only of crack and
cocaine: "they cause psychosis," he said. He also supported
the North American Man Boy Love Association. "At last," he
declared with glee, "I've found an organisation which is
totally indefensible." Ginsberg published some 40 books,
mostly verse but some of a political or sociological
nature. Though vigorous, they were largely incoherent. He
lived in a slum in New York's East Village and spent almost
nothing on himself; on the other hand his office in Union
Square, from which he directed help to struggling poets and
rebels, was well equipped. Latterly Ginsberg belittled his
own poetry, claiming that he had copied it from Kerouac,
particularly from Visions of Cody, a novel full of "prose
poetry" which he had read in manuscript in 1951 but which
had not been published until after Kerouac's death in 1969.
Ginsberg began to insist that he was not a poet at all, but
a photographer. Yet he went on writing, and aimed to become
a "rock lyricist". He made records with Bob Dylan (whom he
deeply admired) and The Clash, but without much success.
Most critics were quick to agree with Ginsberg's dismissal
of his work. Nevertheless he introduced a large public to
poetry that was written to be read aloud. A
quintessentially American figure, like his model Walt
Whitman, he did much to cheer up the 1950s. And if he
encouraged the talentless to imagine that poetry was merely
a question of spewing out "feelings", he also inspired
established poets. Robert Lowell declared that he changed
his own verse after hearing Ginsberg read. Ginsberg also
exercised considerable influence over John Berryman, while
Stephen Spender began to write poetry again after
encountering his work. For years Ginsberg had been in poor
health. He suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, and from
Bell's Palsy; the cancer which finally killed him was only
recently diagnosed. He was still writing poetry last week
in the hospice; one of the last was entitled Of Fame and
Death. His Selected Poems 19471995 was published in 1996.