Biographical Details #2: Allen Ginsberg by Jonah Raskin

Portraying a poet and a poem

OUR NEW series continues as biographers, who have told the life stories of Beat authors or portrayed musicians who have become associated with that literary world, talk about the process involved in bringing their work from the drawing board to the bookstore, the computer keyboard to our own personal libraries.

The second instalment engages with the US cultural historian, academic and critic JONAH RASKIN as he discusses his much-praised work American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation which first appeared in 2004…

What is biography for?

I think a biography ought to connect an individual’s life to the times in which he or she lives or lived. Biography can offer a more insightful portrait of an era than an historical study because it combines the personal with the social. Biography also ought to entertain.

What did you hope to achieve with your account here?

I started off wanting to cover Ginsberg’s entire life and researched up to the mid-1960s and then decided I want to write about ‘Howl’. I latched on to the notion of writing a biography of a poem. That was a very useful concept.

Were you invited or did you pitch?

I don’t remember if I approached the University of California Press or if they approached me but the press published my bio of Abbie Hoffman and I had a solid working relationship with my editor Naomi and I was confident that I could say things about Ginsberg that had not been already said or not emphasized. I was sure the book would be published and reviewed. It is the best-selling of all the books I have written, used in college classes on the Beats and poetry.

Did you have contact with your subject. Obviously, Ginsberg was dead by 1997 though you knew him. Is that useful, even vital? Or can it be unhelpful?

After the book American Scream was published I was often asked ‘Did you know Allen Ginsberg?’ and, while I did know him, I learned more about him from rummaging around his archives at Stanford than from interviewing him.

It did help that I interviewed Allen for my bio of Abbie Hoffman and that I heard Ginsberg read his poetry and that I spent three days with him when he came Sonoma State University where I was teaching and where he taught a workshop and read one evening. We ate together and traveled around. He was great in the classroom, gave writing assignments that challenged the students and drew on their imaginations and creativity.

What problems did you face in writing this particular life story?

I had some issues with the Allen Ginsberg Trust. I knew that Ginsberg had been a patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and I wanted the Ginsberg folks to obtain the records for me. They did get them. Then I had to persuade them to send them to me. They eventually did.

No other biographer had seen them so they were a revelation and provided valuable information about the poet and his poem Howl. The Trust people tended to idealize Ginsberg. I didn’t want to idealize him but I wanted to celebrate ‘Howl’ as a great poem.

If you're portraying or critiquing a living individual, does that give you a particular obligation to the ‘truth’?

I don’t think there is any one single truth about anyone. There are truths. There are also stories that people, including Ginsberg, tell about themselves and the stories can be as significant as the ‘facts’. It seems that Ginsberg wrote an early draft of ‘Howl’ before he typed it. That’s what his therapist told me. Ginsberg created a whole mythology of how, where and when he wrote ‘Howl’. He was in good company. I believe Samuel Taylor Coleridge did something very similar, and Ginsberg knew that.

Your subject had an interest in music of various kinds. How do you perceive that association – important or peripheral to Ginsberg?

Ginsberg and music? Not as significant perhaps as Kerouac and music though he was raised with Black music and he also performed with the harmonium which he played. He would said that poetry was first performed with music and dance as part of tribal ritual and he wanted to recreate it.

There is Ginsberg’s relationship with Dylan. I believe Ginsberg had more of an influence on Dylan than Dylan had on him. Ginsberg hung with the Stones and the Beatles but I see that as one superstar connecting to other superstars and feeding his ego and maybe their egos too.

Any other thoughts?

I should add that the subtitle of the book was the publisher’s idea and it was a good one so the biography was about the birth of the Beat Generation as well as the birth of ‘Howl’. The phrase ‘the Beat Generation’ had been used in print before the publication of ‘Howl’ and there were writers who would be called ‘Beat’, but Ginsberg crafted it and promoted it and made a myth into a reality. He had a gift for publicity and promotion.

See also: ‘Biographical Details #1: Jack Kerouac and Steve Turner’, September 30th, 2023