Research Essay Draft 1

Alora Young

Much of the art from the Beat Generation is about spontaneity, about individuality, about ‘first thought best thought’ – being true to yourself. “Let it be raw, there is beauty,” Allen Ginsberg said in ‘Notes for Howl and Other Poems’. This statement seems to apply not only to Ginsberg’s own poetry, but the Beat movement in general. When you find a book like Howl: original draft facsimile, transcript, and variant versions, fully annotated by author, with contemporaneous correspondence, account of first public reading, legal skirmishes, precursor texts, and bibliography, however, you’re forced to wonder how true the Beat artists were to this belief in practice. There’s a common misconception that Allen Ginsberg did not edit. The original and additional drafts of ‘Howl’ show us otherwise.

Ginsberg sent the original draft the Kerouac in August of 1955, and in his reply, “Kerouac wrote that” “Howl For Carl Solomon was a very powerful poem, but he didn’t want it arbitrarily negated by secondary emendations made in time’s reconsidering backstep – He wanted [Ginsberg’s] lingual spontaneity or nothing.” He said Ginsberg “should send some spontaneous pure poetry, original Ms. of “Howl”.” (Ginsberg, Howl, pg 149) Ginsberg returned with, “The pages I sent you of Howl (right title) and the first pages put down, as is.” (Ginsberg, Howl, pg 149) In another letter, though, Kerouac made it seem he was “aware that it was the original draft he had; his objection was to the fact that A.G. x-ed out words and phrases, revising during the process of composition.” (Ginsberg, Howl, pg 149) From even a glance at this original draft, (Ginsberg, Howl, pgs 13-25) we can see that Ginsberg did not adhere to the ‘first thought best thought’ ideal – x-ing out quite a lot as he typed. Also, this hardly accounts for the edits made in pencil all over the pages, revising and rearranging.

Throughout all Ginsberg’s edits, through all the rearranging of lines and changes to wording in attempt to better capture, ironically, the spontaneity and associative aspects of thought process, and to completely embody the poetic tone, The opening line stayed essentially the same. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” opened every one of Ginsberg’s drafts, and this certainly sets us up with a distinct tone from the offset. Originally, though, the iconic “starving hysterical naked” that follows “destroyed by madness” was “starving, mystical, naked.” In the BBC2 interview, Face To Face with Allen Ginsberg, he said that he “thought that [the use of “mystical”] was too sentimental.” In the annotated Howl, Ginsberg comments that the change is a “Crucial revision: “Mystical” is replaced by “hysterical,” a key to the tone of the poem.” There is no doubt that this revision does develop the tone. He doesn’t, however, comment on the loss of commas from the drafts to the final. It seems that this, also, plays a large part in creating the desired tone. Because they are not separated by commas, “starving,” “hysterical,” and “naked” come with one another, are one thing. The three words create imagery of humans living in a madhouse or animals on the street, mentally disturbed and suffering. Ginsberg shows us the “best minds of [his] generation” in their struggle, a literal depiction as well as a statement that covers and conveys the whole range of connotations that come with these three words.

“Starving” could have any number of implications other than the obvious, ‘starving for food.’ An individual could be starving for a fix of his or her chosen drugs, starving for inspiration for their art, starving for love. The group as a whole (the “best minds”, the Beat artists) could be starving for acceptance into society. “Hysterical” seems to most obviously pertain to madness, but hysteria is also the inability to be controlled, or an unreasonable reaction to a situation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a, “Morbidly excited condition; unhealthy emotion or excitement.” You can laugh or cry hysterically – and, when in hysterics, you often do both – so the word suggests not only the mental condition, but with both wild joy and overwhelming depression. “Hysterical” therefore takes on the tone of the Beat Generation as a whole. “Naked” obviously has the association of unclothed bodies, which then leads not only to the inability to clothe oneself for lack of money, for example, but also to sex. “Naked”, however, also connotes vulnerable, unshielded. This could be physically or emotionally, and an individual could be baring themselves to another (in Ginsberg’s case, baring himself to himself?), or the group could be baring themselves to society. Then there is, however, the idea of being ‘stripped naked’, which leads to the idea of violence, perhaps a vulnerability that this group of “best minds” had forced upon them by society?

A revision like this is, therefore, obviously “crucial”, as Ginsberg says. It defines the “who” that Ginsberg opens most lines of the poem with, that he “return[s] to and take[s] off from again” (Ginsberg, ‘Notes for Howl and Other Poems’), that he “depend[s] on” “to keep the beat.” It is a revision that became essential to how we readers perceive the poem. Other revisions throughout the series of drafts were equally as important, so why is it that Ginsberg claimed and implied that he hardly edited at all?

Notes:
The above is the (very) rough draft I have so far. From there, I’m going to talk about the Beat Generation and its ideals, as well as Kerouac’s influence on the writing of ‘Howl’. I want to include a quote from one of Ginsberg’s letters to Kerouac after Kerouac told Ginsberg that he wanted “spontaneous pure poetry”: “…that was he first time I sat down to blow, it came out in your method, sounding like you, an imitation practically. How advanced you are on this. I don’t know what I’m doing with poetry. I need years of isolation and constant everyday writing to attain your volume of freedom and knowledge of the form.” I still need to investigate more sources in order to close with a proposed reason for why Ginsberg claimed not to edit when he in fact did. I suspect it will have something to do with the expectations and ideals of the Beat Movement, but I hope to find a source that will back me up on that view.