American Scream at 20

Author discusses his key Ginsberg biography

TWO DECADES have passed since the counterculture historian Jonah Raskin released his widely-acclaimed book, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation, charting the emergence of Ginsberg and particularly his groundbreaking poem, the title work of his first collection of verse Howl and Other Poems, published by legendary City Lights in 1956, the year after its initial live unveiling in a legendary reading in the city of San Francisco.

Raskin, who moved to that very city three years ago, is an academic and essayist, novelist and poet, who has penned titles on other important figures in the shaping of America’s cultural politics, Jack London and Abbie Hoffman among them. But he has had a lifelong personal interest in the power of the Beat writers and also in the potent soundtrack – from jazz to rock – that has accompanied much of this literary explosion.

We invited Raskin to take a candid retrospective tour of American Scream, its undoubted strengths but also the issues he might have approached differently if he were commissioned to write this account today. We welcome the thoughts of this regular contributor to Rock and the Beat Generation and hope you enjoy his background notes to a history originally issued by the University of California Press in 2004…

SW: Twenty years on from the publication of American Scream, a significant Ginsberg biography, a substantial history of a great twentieth-century poem and an important portrayal of the birth of Beat as historical and social phenomenon, is this still the book you would write today?

JR: Yes and no. I don’t like to do the same thing twice, didn’t do the same lesson repeatedly when I taught. So, while I like American Scream as it is, I can see myself approaching the poem and the poet from other directions and carrying out the project in a different key and with a different rhythm. I was criticized for using a very scholarly vocabulary and not using a hipster lexicon. So I can envision myself borrowing from a more streetwise language and looking at ‘Howl’ from several different directions: as my beatnik self from the 1950s, my Yippie self from the 1960s and my punk personae from the 1980s. I like that idea.   

SW: Has your view of Ginsberg changed, has your striking endorsement of 'Howl' survived?

JR: I still love 'Howl'. Of all his poems, it is still my favorite. I have recently been reading and rereading another Ginsberg collection, The Fall of America, which feels much less fun and much less playful than Howl. I mean, one can’t better the opening line of 'Howl', the phrases ‘hydrogen jukebox’ and ‘drunken taxicabs of absolute reality’. In my view, Part I is a masterpiece and so is Part II; Part III is disappointing. I think that Ginsberg did a disservice to Carl Solomon.

If I rewrote, I might say more about the problems inherent in writing about one’s friends and fictionalizing their lives. Using T. S. Eliot’s ideas about what makes a classic and applying it to 'Howl'might have been off-base. Maybe today I would borrow from LeRoi Jones (Amari Baraka). But that could be too cheeky: using a Black writer to plumb Ginsberg. But for a time Baraka was a fellow Beat as well as a Black nationalist, a revolutionary and a lover of jazz, so it does make sense to me.

SW: You taught Literature as a Sonoma professor for many years. How are the Beats regarded on the academic campus now, do you think?

JR: Not sure how the Beats are regarded on college campuses today. I live in San Francisco which might accurately be described as ground zero for the Beats and Ginsberg. City Lights Bookstore and Publishing Company are alive and well; I have recently attended events at the store and have rubbed poetic shoulders with folks such as Neeli Cherkovski, who very recently died, and who carried on the Beats and Ginsberg.

Pat Thomas’ launch at City Lights for his Ginsberg book, Material Wealth, was a hoot. All the people who wanted to attend couldn’t fit into the poetry room upstairs. 'Howl' still sells and is still read. I was recently on a bus going home from City Lights and saw a young woman, maybe in her twenties, who was traveling with her mother and reading 'Howl'. That was exciting to see. She might have been atypical, but still young people today gravitate to 'Howl'and find that it speaks to them.

SW: That group of writers lost momentum by the early 1990s but seemed to regain purchase after the big touring Whitney show of 1995-6. Where do they sit in the public consciousness a quarter century on?

JR: Rock‘n’roll will never die and neither will the Beats. For better or worse they’re an institution. The Beats  and the Beat go on. I know that Ginsberg traveled to China and read there. He was well received. I’d be curious to know how he’s viewed today given the current crop of rather repressive Chinese leaders. By the way, parts of my Ginsberg book were translated into Chinese and published in China.

On the fiftieth anniversary, in 2005, of the first reading of 'Howl' at the Six Gallery I launched an event at the San Francisco Public Library that attracted hundreds of people. And on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road I launched a commemorative event with Gerry Nicosia at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center that was well attended, though the woman who ran the event wasn’t initially behind it. 

And last year I did a Kerouac event at Bird and Beckett Bookstore in San Francisco with Garrett Capples, the City Lights poetry editor, who was exceedingly generous, and also with the publisher at Heyday Books who said that On the Road is a terrible book and that Kerouac was a terrible person. But when I asked him, if he been an editor in the 1950s, whether or not he would have published On The Road, he said ‘Yes’ emphatically. At that event I read from Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler and called it inspired writing. The Heyday publisher disagreed, emphatically.

I have recently gotten to know Joanna McClure, Michael’s first wife, a Buddhist and a poet now in her 90s. She was a child psychologist and played psychologist to the Beats in the 1950s. When I first arrived in San Francisco three years ago and was feeling lost and lonely she encouraged me to see the city as an opportunity, a challenge and to be grateful. That was the best advice I received from anyone. I think that Joanna is one of the last of the original San Francisco Beats. She has published a book of poems for and about Michael and has more poems, but unlike her fellow Beats she’s not driven to publish.

SW: You researched and penned American Scream not long after Ginsberg's death in 1997. Did his passing further stimulate your attention or give the book a particular historical focus?

JR: If I remember correctly I started the Ginsberg book about the same time that he died. It’s challenging to write a biography of a poet or writer who is still alive. Death provides a sense of closure. One can look back and see the whole of someone’s life, or at least as much of a life as possible. No one’s life is entirely visible. I didn’t realize how controversial Ginsberg still was in 1997, even in San Francisco. The synagogue where his memorial was held didn’t like the idea initially; the rabbi had to be talked into it and pressured because of Ginsberg’s sexual personae.

SW: You interviewed many people for your landmark text. Some individuals felt the portrait of the poet was negative in some aspects, e.g. suggestions of his isolation in his later years. How do you feel about these matters now?

JR: I did have some challenges with some people. I agreed with Lawrence Ferlinghetti that there was a decline in the quality of Ginsberg’s poetry in the last decade or so of his life, but that as a performer he was spot on. One Kerouac biographer told me that he thought that my Ginsberg book was the best book about Ginsberg, but when I asked him to say that in public he refused.  Scholars and critics were cagey, interested in protecting their reputations and leery of saying things they might later regret. I’m being cagey here. No point in stepping on anyone’s toes.

SW: What stories might you share about the creation of this particular Beat history? What were the challenges? The breakthroughs? The frustrations? The satisfactions?

JR: I liked working in the Green Library on the Stanford campus. The librarians were all helpful. When I took a break from the archives and went for lunch I’d see Chelsea Clinton, Bill and Hilary’s daughter, surrounded by three or four men in suits who I assumed belonged to the Secret Service. When I received Ginsberg’s files from the New York State Psychiatric Institute that was a breakthrough. I should have used them to better advantage and built an entire chapter around them. They are vital for an understanding of Ginsberg. I came to think that I 'owned’ Ginsberg. Not true. No one did or does. I have learned to be more appreciative of fellow writers and scholars.

My book about Ginsberg was my second biography; my Abbie Hoffman book was my first and my Jack London book was my third. If I could redo my life I’d obey chronology and do London first, Ginsberg second and Hoffman third. A friend recently pointed out that I have often written about iconoclasts; taking them in chronological order would have been, and could have been enlightening. 

Thanks, Simon for the opportunity to go down Memory Lane.

See also: ‘Biographical Details #2: Allen Ginsberg by Jonah Raskin’, October 29th 2023; ‘Book review #2: Beat Blues’, September 27th, 2021