(Very, Very) Rough Draft 2

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?

“The origins of the word “beat” are obscure,” (Charters, 223) wrote John Clellon Holmes in his 1952 article, This is the Beat Generation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Ann Charters she spends the entire introduction of Beat Down On Your Soul discussing the meaning of the word ‘beat’, and who embodied it, who was a part of this so-called generation. She doesn’t pin down a sufficient definition of ‘beat’, since, it seems, even the core members of the Beat Generation didn’t know how to explain it completely. Kerouac tried several times, coming up with: a““swinging group of new Amercan men” in the late 1940s who were “intent on joy” because they had survived World War II and possessed “wild selfbelieving individuality.” (Charters, xv) Or “a revolution of manners in America” (Charters, xxi) And “a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful way.” (Charters, xxix) The Beat Generation, Kerouac said, was “a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America – beat meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.…” (Charters, xxix) Kerouac came up with the name “Beat Generation” with John Clellon Holmes one night in 1948. Holmes himself defined the generation in This is the Beat Generation “as a particularly American brand of Existentialism, involving “a sort of nakedness, of mind, and, ultimately, of soul… a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.” (Charters, xxvii)

Holmes’ and Kerouac’s attempts at definition are perhaps some of the best examples we have of what the Beats believed. In ‘Origins of the Beat Generation,’ Kerouac said, “I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood . . . and suddenly with tears in my eyes had a vision of what I must have really meant with ‘Beat’ . . . the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific.” (Merrill) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘beatific’ is “Making blessed; imparting supreme happiness or blessedness” and a ‘beatific vision’ is “a sight of the glories of heaven; esp. that first granted to a disembodied spirit.” In this definition of ‘beat’, we can certainly see the Beat philosophy evolve, and how their poetry could be seen as their own beatific visions. The Beats followed their impulses, living as many of them believed Zen Buddhism taught them. “According to Zen, evil is not considered the natural enemy of good but its inevitable companion.” (Merrill) Merrill says that the Beats viewed the “basic corruption” of the Western culture as “its compulsion to be right”, “natural humanity” versus an “artificial ideal” – good and evil, right and wrong are equal parts of “natural humanity”, and to strive to remove one from the other is to create an “artificial ideal.” Therefore, “To be right was to follow one's natural bent; to be wrong was to resist instinct and to allow an artificial standard from outside the personality to govern one's life.” (Merrill) With this view in mind, it can be seen why spontaneity was such a highly valued ideal to the Beats.

To be completely spontaneous is to completely follow your “natural bent”. Merrill quotes Ginsberg: “The whole point of spontaneous improvisation in song is that you have to accept whatever thought presents itself to your rhyme – on the wing, so to speak. . . . You let your tongue go loose! . . . You can't change your mind – your mind is its own. And there's nothing heroic about that acceptance. . . . That's the whole point – it's ordinary mind!” This adheres to the ideas of Zen Buddhism, following T'ang master Lin-chi’s statement that “In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.” (Merrill)

However, “Beat Zen exaggerates two aspects of “pure” Zen: the holiness of the personal impulses and the idea of the Zen-lunatic or holy maniac.” (Merrill) This comes back to Kerouac’s ‘beatific’ view, that as the Beats, in their “wild selfbelieving individuality”, were made blessed at the following of their impulses. Merrill also argues this saying, “the idea of the holy lunatic, is closely allied with the holiness of personal impulse. Such persons are revered because they deliberately confound the rational (artificial) tendencies of their disposition and therefore come closer to pure natural existence. Lunacy, in other words, is cultivated as a part of a long discipline of disaffiliation from rational and material thought patterns. One deliberately deranges the senses that organize those patterns.” It then follows that “The sanctity of the spontaneous impulse justifies the principle of “spontaneous writing” as well as the characteristic confessional quality of beat literature. Art does not discriminate; every thought and feeling is sacred and thus appropriate for aesthetic registration.” (Merrill)

In ‘Howl’, Ginsberg references Kerouac’s belief in ““First though, best thought” clarity and sincerity” (Howl, 136). In the original version, the line (80) read, “who recreated syntax & structure of prose to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head” (Howl, 25) and which in the final version (line 75) reads, “to recreate syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected et confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head” (Howl, 6). The annotation of this line includes “Kerouac’s slogans for composition” as “outlined in “Belief and Technique of Modern Prose.” (Howl, 136) This list, “tacked on the wall above [Ginsberg’s] bed” before he wrote ‘Howl’, includes many ideas that conform to the Beat Zen spontaneity:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You’re a Genius all the time

(Howl, 137)

When Kerouac read Ginsberg’s edited-while-typed first draft of ‘Howl’ and told Ginsberg he wanted “spontaneous pure poetry,” Ginsberg replied with:

…that was the 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.
(Howl, 149)

This sentiment shows quite clearly how influenced Ginsberg was by he, Kerouac and the Beat’s shared belief in spontaneity. “No time,” as Kerouac wrote, “for poetry but exactly what is.” It has been said that the Beat Generation really only consisted of three or four people. In Beat Down On Your Soul, Ann Charters quotes Hettie Jones, who said in 1959, “the Beat Generation was “really a misnomer because at one point everyone identified with it could fit into my living room, and I didn’t think a whole generation could fit into my livingroom.”” (Charters, xvi) Charters says, however, that “by the end of the 1950s, many thousands of us throughout the United States felt that we belonged to the Beat Generation, even if we all didn’t go on the road with Kerouac or take off our clothes with Ginsberg or get stoned with Huncke.” (Charters, xvi) She says she “first became aware in May 1956 that [she] was part of a community of disaffected Americans who would later be identified as members of the Beat Generation.” (Charters, xvi) This realisation occurred at Ginsberg’s first legendary reading of ‘Howl for Carl Solomon’.

Holmes said that to be ‘beat’ was “More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw.” (Charters, 223) The disillusioned youth of the United States at the time of the Beat Generation latched on to this, identified with it. The Beat writers saw the pain in reality, the necessity of bad to come with good and the beauty in the “ordinary mind.” (Merrill) Spontaneity, it seems, was seen as the best way to capture this, and it was therefore held in extremely high esteem. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ pretends spontaneity, when it was actually revised quite thoroughly in hopes of further capturing the ideas that spawned the desire for spontaneity in the first place. And it does so successfully. One Beat writer, George Barker, said in one of his ‘IX Beatitudes to Denver’ that “To Ginsberg reality has, for a longwinded moment,/Broken down, howled, and shown her disconsolate heart./It is much to his honor that he has not attempted/To edit her real hysteria. Or his own.” (Charters, 3) Ginsberg edited the words, but only in attempt to further the reality they conveyed.

Notes:
This is highly disoraganised, but it includes most of the information I wanted to discuss in this essay. I plan to rearrange it to make it a lot more coherent and improve on the flow and how things tie together, and also elaborate on some of the lesser discussed points and quotes. This is about 7seven and a half pages right now, but I think it will reach ten once I’ve fixed it up properly. I also want to go into some of the other important lines of the poem and how they changed over Ginsberg’s edits to help achieve the poem’s purpose of portraying reality as Ginsberg saw it. I also would like to include the following quotation if a place opens up for it in the editing process:

In Gary Snyder’s ‘Note on Religious Tendencies,’ he comments that on the religious inclination of the Beat Generation: “[I find- three things going on: 1. Vision and illumination-seeking. This is most easily done by systematic experimentation with narcotics. . . . 2. Love, respect for life, abandon, Whitman, pacifism, anarchism, etc. . . . partly responsible for the mystique of 'angels,' the glorification of skid-row and hitchhiking, and a kind of mindless enthusiasm. . . . 3. Discipline, aesthetics, and tradition . . . its practitioners settle on one traditional religion, try to absorb the feel of its art and history, and carry out whatever ascesis is required.” (Merrill)

Also, how do you cite a video interview from the internet? Right now I have it as the following, but I doubt it's correct:

BBC2 interview, Face to Face with Allen Ginsberg, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1011318964326139723#/videoplay?docid=1011318964326139723#/videoplay?docid=1011318964326139723#