(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#

Rough Draft 2:

The San Francisco Beats

People usually imagine the 50s as an era of innocence, when really it was filled of ignorance, lies, and dead American Dreams. But art was created in the mist of the depression of the post war world, and was hidden in the land of the Bohemia. It was a land filled of drugs, sex, and the rebels of the 50s. A land most innocents ignored and denied. But it was also home to the poets of the Beat Generation. New York and San Francisco were and are still where this land of Bohemia flourishes. The thing is that many people (like me) seem to forget that the Beats were apart of San Francisco. This was the reason I chose to write about this, because I have lived my whole life in San Francisco, but because I was confined to a crappy suburb I was ignorant. Thanks to the media (tv and movies) I always believed that New York was where all the poets chilled out. And that San Francisco was filled of random artists, homosexuals, and hippies. Yes, the Beat generation may have started in New York, but it found its way to the heart of San Francisco. It gave reason to the poets and found its way into the poetry of the Beats.

The Beats were revolutionary, a counterculture of sorts. They were known for exploring new areas of consciousness by using drugs, and also they rumored about never editing. Allen Ginsberg was a big protagonist of these ideas. “He was a genius. Another thing about Allen was, you can say that the ‘graph of consciousness school’ of poetry was great when he did it or when another of the originators did it. Allen had a genius mind. He had a pack-rat mind” (Meltzer 103). And he did have a “pack-rat mind”, because one the main attributes of this “consciousness” idea was to just let it all out and allow your stream of consciousness to take control. Let your mind be unconfined. This is one reason why many people believe that a lot of the Beat writings had no meaning at all, because the point of it was to just write whatever came to mind. To be liberated of meaning. William Blake, one of Allen’s biggest influences, had something similar: “Illuminated voice” (Portuges 3). Allen was also a devoted Buddhist who used chants to calm people down in time of violence. Buddhism also inhabits the idea of losing connection and allowing everything to be one. And because of this obsession he spent 15 years (1948-63) wanting to find the breakthroughs in average consciousness. Kerouac believed in this idea as well and “initially typed ‘On the Road’ on a 150-foot-long paper roll, not wanting to stop and change paper while he was on fire with idea” (Pekar 23). These ideas were some of the things that tied these poets together, but none of this would have ever happened if not for New York.

The beginnings of the Beats begin to fall to place in the late 40s, once Allen Ginsberg stumbled upon Lucien Carr one winter day at Columbia University (Morgan 2). Allen was a nerd and a “brilliant but shy social fuckup” (Pekar 51). His family “was Jewish in name only, and both of Allen’s Parents were fully agnostic” (Morgan 3). His father was a socialist, and his mother a communist. She would even bring Allen to party cell meeting, but then he was too naive to understand a thing. Carr was a handsome rebel who barely cared. He moved to New York after he spent some time for attempting suicide in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital (Morgan 1). Instead of studying he spent his time with any interesting person he could find, and this is why he met Allen and later introduced him to William S. Burroughs and David Kammer. Bill was the son of the man who invented the modern adding machine so he was from a fortunate family. When he met Ginsberg, Burroughs had already done most of the things Allen had dreamed of, and this was why Bill became a sort of mentor and idol for Allen. Kammerer only was in New York because he had followed Carr there. He was infatuated with him and stalked him in hopes that the straight Carr would fall for him as well. Sadly this lead to a drunken argument which that continued until Carr stabbed Kammerer dead and dropped him into the Hudson River (Pekcar 12). Kerouac and Burroughs ended up collaborating on a novel based off the murder Carr called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. But the meeting of these four marked the beginning of a wonderful friendship that would change literature as we know it.

Now that was the beginning of the Beat Generation, but it did not boom into something big until after the October 7, 1955 reading of Howl. Where was this reading? Yes, in San Francisco where Howl was also written while Allen lived with Peter Orlosvski on Nob Hill. Though the poem mostly alludes to New York it also has allusions about San Francisco like in one of my favorite stanzas:

“who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for

impossible criminals with golden heads and the

charm of reality in the in their hearts who sang sweet

blues to Alcatraz” (Ginsberg 18).

At the time of the spillage of words that became Howl Allen had been under the influence of peyote (Portuges 123). Peyote is a type a cactus that is a psychoactive drug (a drug that alters consciousness). Seems like the perfect drug for Allen. He actually mentions it in the poem: Peyote solidities of halls” (Ginsberg 10). This plant brought about a poem that forever changed the lives of the Beats and the San Francisco poets. “Mcclaire said the day after the reading that Ginsberg had turned from a nebbish to an ‘epic vocal bird.’ His reading of Howl had to have created more interest in poetry and the Beats than anything in memory” (Peckcar 37). This poem was so strong because “he tied the composition together with strong words that condemned the dehumanizing nature of America’s corporate culture. Many in the audience were aware that Ginsberg was making poetry out of his innermost thoughts in a way that had never been done before. Nothing was hidden behind a veil of poetic rhetoric. All his feelings were laid bare, undiluted and direct, exposing society’s raw nerve to a group attentive listener ((Morgan 2010, 103). That first reading of Howl became the glue that kept Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs forever united with the poets of San Francisco.

It also is what helped give Lawerence Ferlinghetti the enthusiasm to finally ask Ginsberg for a manuscript: “I greet you at the beginning of your career. When do I get the manuscript?” (Morgan 2010, 104). And with this came Howl and Other Poems which was published by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Publishing in San Francisco. City Lights is not just a publishing company though, it is what some have called the best bookstore in the world (google it someone really has called it that). Not only was it the first all paperback cover bookstore in the country, but it also was one of the first that encouraged customers to roam around, sit, and read. It even became one of Allen’s favorite bookstores to hang around (Morgan 2003, 1). All of this and the generation of untamed writers who were published by them made City Lights a Beat monument. And Lawerence was a Beat poet as well, writing what Allen described as an “adaption of ‘French loose verse--- that you get out of Prevert and Cendrars and a few other poets--- to the American style” (Hoover 42). Ferlinghetti came to San Francisco in 1950 and thought he had discovered Alantis. He fell for North Beach: “I certainly saw North Beach especially as a poetic place, as poetic as some quartiers in Paris, as any place in old Europa, as poetic as any place great poets and painters had found inspiration” (Ferlinghetti). And in this he found inspiration immediately and wrote a poem about a North Beach scene:

“Away above a harborful

of caulkless houses

among the charley noble chimneypots

of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines

a woman pastes up sails

upon the wind

hanging out her morning sheets

with wooden pins

O lovely mammal

her nearly naked breasts

throw taut shadows

as she stretches up

to hang at last the last of her

so white washed sins

but it is wetly amorous

and winds itself about her

clinging to her skin

So caught with arms upraised

she tosses back her head

in voiceless laughter

and in choiceless gesture then

shakes out gold hair

while in the reachless seascape spaces

between the blown white shrouds

stand out the bright steamers

to kingdom come” (Ferlinghetti).

San Francisco had inspired him, just like it had inspired the Renaissance writers and would the Beats.

But there was a crazy poetic renaissance going on in San Francisco before the Beats even came about. Though sometimes it is considered part of the Beat Generation, because of that 1955 reading that united these poets together (Pekar 97). The most important person in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance was the dubbed godfather: Kenneth Rexroth. Kenneth was a “walking encyclopedia” who did not even finish high school. He had always had a love of poetry, but like many writers took many jobs. In the 40s he had become a major poet in the San Francisco art scene: “He was publishing his poetry and wrote regularly for ‘The Saturday Review’ as well as local publications. His influence is dealth with in William Everson’s ‘Rexroth: Shaker and Maker’” (Pekar 100). He created a group called the “Anarchists’ Circle” with who he held meetings and readings. These “Anarchist Circle” events were attended by as many as 200 people. During this time and the 50s San Francisco started to become a big center for poetry. And I can’t help but blame his literary talent and dedication. Some of the other Renaissance poets and artists (since DeFeo happens to be a painter) were: Micheal and Joanna McClure, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Bob Kaufman, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, Larry Jordan, and David Meltzer (Pekar 142). That 1955 reading blended this renaissance with the Beats, and made them defined as one.

The reading was in The Six Gallery. All organized by Kenneth Rexthroth, “who acted as the event’s master of ceremony since he was the only person who actually knew all the poets slated to read” (Morgan 2010, 101). The Beat Artist, Jay DeFeo’s, artwork was on exhibit during the reading. She was also in the audience as was Kerouac, Cassady and Ferlinghetti. The first poet up was Lamantia, who was not really declared a Beat poet, but he did have associations with the Beat Generation, but he had more in comment with the Surrealists. “Philip Lamantia was a visionary poet, open to sudden revelation, and bent on exploring ‘the supreme disalienation of humanity and it’s language” (Pekar 140). At the reading, instead of reading his own work, he read the poetry of his recently dead friend John Hoffman. These poems were “laconic and surreal, unlike anything the listeners had heard at a poetry reading before” (Morgan 2010, 102). Next was Michael McClure the youngest poet of the bunch, and he read a poem by another San Franciscan, Robert Duncan who was more associated with Black Mountain poetics (Hoover 29). Though it seems that all different poetic groups of this generation all kind of blurred in to the Beats, even if they did not want to be.

[there will be more here. I just keep adding bit by bit. And when I think I can’t do no more, I read it all again and add more. Yeah, so help me. I need help. I used to never ask for help, but now it seems like that is the wise and mature thing to do. Also, about the poem by Ferlinghetti because I am questioning it myself. But I put it there because I alluded it, and had the poem at hand so I thought "Why not??!" But now all I can think is "My goodness it is taking up most of a page!" So tell me if you like it like that, if I should add more information about "how it inspired him" or if it should just go, completely. I should also add that the poem is untitled.]

In conclusion, the New York Beats united with the Renaissance poets and then on San Francisco was and forever will be a main center for poetry and art. From the Renaissance to the Beats to the hippies and especially the now. “The Beats were like the Stone Age hippies, in that they anticipated and articulated many of the themes that became the main tenants of the 1960s counterculture : pacifism and Buddhism, the first voicings of an ecological consciousness, the expansion of consciousness by psychedelics, hedonistic sex and homosexuality, all of which in reality comprised a ‘youth revolt’ against what was seen as a repressive conformist culture,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Morgan XIV). In today’s culture you will still find these anti-comformist bohemians. Actually, in San Francisco the streets are filled of them. These folks are people are inspired by the Beats, and the Hippies who were inspired by the Beats. These are kids who inspire to keep the beliefs of these major countercultures alive. Sure, with time some things must die, like the idea of free love. But yet there are aspects of it that still live on, because people are still influenced by these generations. You could even call me one of these people.

At this moment it is exactly 8 pages.