Scrolling Down the Road

Abstract

Page 13 November–December 2007 Raskin continued from previous page picture and doesn’t sufficiently appreciate how and why Ginsberg’s self-promotion went hand in hand with his poetic originality, and that neither cancelled the other out, as the former poet laureate Robert Pinsky noted when he observed, “Allen Ginsberg’s genius for public life should not obscure his genius as an artist or his study of his art.” Should not, indeed, but in Morgan’s biography, it does. In I Celebrate Myself : The Somewhat Personal Life of Allen Ginsberg, he tells a story without cultural context and social background—except for big brush strokes—and both are, of course, essential for a meaningful biography of the author of poems like “America,” in which he addresses the nation as a whole; Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), his moral invective against the war in Vietnam; and “Come on Pigs of Western Civilization Eat More Grease,” his diatribe about the unhealthy eating habits of Americans and Europeans. Sadly, Morgan misses a major point of Ginsberg’s poetry— that in celebrating himself, he also celebrated the Beat Generation, and the American nation, too, with all its outcasts and outsiders, in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Reading Morgan’s biography feels a lot like watching a movie that’s filmed largely in close-up, without the necessary establishing shots, and without sufficient group portraits. Moreover, Morgan says very little about Ginsberg’s genesis, evolution, and craft as a poet, or about his use of language, including the memorable phrase he coined, like “hydrogen jukebox” or “drunken taxi cabs of absolute Reality.” I Celebrate Myself presents the portrait of a poet without exploring his poetry in depth, and it might be taken as a model of how not to write the biography of a literary genius who altered the shape of American poetry. Morgan’s observations often sound obtuse, and even perverse. At times, he seems negligent as a scholar of Ginsberg’s work. Kaddish was started in Paris, he insists, though Ginsberg’s diaries make it clear that he began the poem in Berkeley in 1956 and continued to work on it while he worked as an able-bodied seaman in the Merchant Marine in the Pacific Ocean that same year. Because he covers so much ground so quickly, Morgan doesn’t have time for nuances, and so, for example, he leaves readers with the distinct impression that Ginsberg—and the Movement against the war in Vietnam—were to blame for prolonging the war, precisely by protesting against it. Nowhere does he examine, or explain, why Ginsberg continued to march, protest, and sit-in: supporting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and expressing his virulent opposition to the Reagan administration’s politics. And nowhere does he discuss the poems Ginsberg wrote in the 1980s that were inspired by the politics that emanated from both the White House and Kremlin. From beginning to end, Morgan makes sweeping statements that seem more appropriate for a public relations campaign than a reliable biography. “When Allen Ginsberg died, the country lost not only one of her most renowned poets, but also one of her greatest citizens,” he proclaims in the Foreword, though nowhere does he explicitly show why and how Ginsberg fits that description. In the very last line of the Epilogue, he insists that Ginsberg was “one of the century’s greatest poets,” though he neglects to say who the other great poets of the twentieth century might have been or what makes for a great poet. Granted, Morgan mentions Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Pablo Neruda, but merely in passing. Wallace Stevens doesn’t merit a single reference, and there’s not a word about Carl Sandburg, Ginsberg’s favorite poet until he began college at the age of 17. Perhaps it’s to be expected that a major biography , from a major publishing house, about a popular, and an iconic, poet would say more about the subject’s personal history with drugs and sex than about his poetry. Ever since Thomas Moore published his candid biography of his friend and fellow poet, Lord Byron, in 1830—and perhaps before then—biographers have been drawn...