Text messages: The Beatles, the Beats & the books

In an almost 50-year-old letter from Ginsberg to Beat historian Barry Miles the poet seems to suggest Lennon was virtually unaware of 'Howl' as late as the mid-1970s. How could that be?

READERS of these pages will know that I’m a happy convert to the legend that the Beatles only took that name because a young British poet persuaded the largely unknown group of that time to add the cachet of Beat to their title because it imbued a street hipness, an American kudos, to an act who had adopted various descriptions up until that point, including the Beetles.

In 2020, I wrote about the 60th anniversary of this re-christening as Lennon, de facto bandleader, was thought amenable to the backstage proposal by wordsmith Royston Ellis and the rest, as they say all too often, is history, but history on a scale that few cultural figures have ever managed to attain.

Yet, when my US contact and friend, the Beat specialist, counterculture historian and music devotee Pat Thomas, posted an attention-grabbing quotation from one Allen Ginsberg on social media this week, it made me question some of the pillars of my, quite possibly fallible, knowledge, raising a serious query about what Lennon knew of the Beats in 1960 – when the name of his group was changed – and indeed how aware he was of them as late as the mid-1970s.

And here is the reason for that scepticism: a letter from Ginsberg to his London-based friend and leading Beat Generation historian Barry Miles, from c.1976, in which the poet writes: ‘I was passing by (the) Dakota Apartments last month, phoned upstairs and visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono for an hour. Lennon said he was retired temporarily from the LA music scene, staying home with baby and extreme clean diet…

‘Said he was lying sleepless one night listening to WBAI (radio on) earphones and heard someone reciting a long poem, he thought it was Dylan till he heard the announcer say it was Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl"...said he'd never read it or understood it before (he'd eye'd the page but, "I can't read anything, I can't get anything from print"), but once hearing it aloud, he suddenly understood, he said, why Dylan had often mentioned me to him, and suddenly realised what (it was) I was doing, and dug it...said he didn't understand (hadn't understood) at the time.

‘He'd seen me as some strange interesting American supposed-to-be-a poet hanging around but didn't understand exactly what my role was. Now he said he understood how close my style was to Dylan's, and how it influenced Dylan and also dug my voice reciting, the energy...It sure was nice hearing Lennon close the gap, complete that circle and treat me as a fellow artist as he walked me to the door goodbye.’

Pictured above: Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon, One to One Concert, Madison Square Garden, August 30th 1972

Now, I would argue there are a few intriguing fragments from the past which might challenge Lennon’s claimed ignorance. If we immediately set aside the schoolboy scribbles of his juvenilia comic The Daily Howl, which definitely predates the public arrival of Ginsberg’s epic poem in 1956, there are other inklings that the Beatles star had dabbled in some versions of Beat not long after that.

Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s Art into Pop, a fine history of British rock’s close connection to art college activity in two post-war decades, draws attention to the enthusiasm that Lennon and his friend Bill Harry, soon to become founding editor of the pop newspaper Mersey Beat, had for the Beat writers at the end of the 1950s.

We might enquire when exactly the far-from-engaged teenage Lennon walked away from his calligraphy course and the campus of Liverpool College of Art – just as Dylan jumped ship from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis quite soon after – and just what Beat books were available on Merseyside by then anyway.

As we have stated, ‘Howl’, first read on stage in San Francisco in 1955, published by City Lights the following year and then embroiled in obscenity charges, eventually rejected, in court in 1957, became something of a West Coast cause célèbre (though the New York Times took relatively little interest in the legal proceedings).

But it is quite hard to say what impact the famous slim pocket edition, which gave Ginsberg’s sensational statement– part autobiography, part political manifesto, part ecstatic vision – to the world, had on a British readership. The Atlantic was, in. theory at least, a serious barrier to full and frank cultural exchange at that time.

However, perhaps Lennon and Harry were digesting the excitements of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, published in Britain in early 1958, some months after its US appearance, so that his tale of travel, jazz and kicks might just have been available to rebellious young men with their fingers on the pulse. Further, William Burroughs’ debut novel, Junkie, had been around since 1953 and Kerouac himself had previously issued his first attempt at full-length fiction, 1950’s The Town and the City.

Yet I truly doubt that the Burroughs book would have been easily available in the UK as that era of monochrome austerity played out and I also suspect that Kerouac’s premiere outing, a book that enjoyed both lukewarm reviews and restricted sales, would have been Lennon’s entry point to Beat literature while at college.

That said, the booming port status of Liverpool made it a unique portal for portable artefacts to travel from New York to England. Certainly US pop records, a rage in the ascendant, were being brought onto the shores by the so-called ‘Cunard Yanks’ – the crews of ships who worked for that famous seagoing line and traversed the mighty ocean back-and-forth.

We can surely then assume that if rock‘n’roll, with its subversive manners, pungent sexual flavour and swirling undercurrent of racial miscegenation, was being imported in this way, then why shouldn’t hipster novels and underground poetry also be finding their way into that great dock city?

So, in simple terms, Lennon – and McCartney, too – could have been experiencing early views of Beat writing in a way that students, musicians and artists, with a taste for new and exciting cultural expressions, in Manchester or Birmingham or even London, were not.

Yet this all remains conjecture. What appears to be less speculative is Ginsberg’s report of his conversation with John Lennon in his own Central Park flat, some time down the line. The poet was a brilliant self-mythologist but why would he have made this memory up? Yet there had been many opportunities, surely, for the Beatle and the writer to have touched base on these matters – art and politics, poetry and ‘Howl’ itself – in the decade before this Dakota chat.

Ginsberg had been present in May 1965 when the Beatles met up with Dylan at the Savoy Hotel after one of the American’s Albert Hall concerts. When the poet asked Lennon if he knew of Blake and he said no, his wife Cynthia was irritated that her musician husband was playing the ingénu and told her husband so.

That was not the only incident of close engagement: Ginsberg’s 39th birthday party, a little while afterwards, was attended, if briefly, by Lennon and Harrison; the poet joined the Beatles and the Stones for the ‘We Love You’ recording session in 1968; and, once Lennon was precariously ensconced in Manhattan from the early 1970s, there was potential for further such interaction.

Recruited to a cross-racial, pro-drugs, anti-war coalition and facing a tangle of red tape over his Green Card application, Lennon had quite frequent friendly consultations with the poet, himself no stranger to the surveillance of governmental agencies. Did the topic of ‘Howl’, or even what Ginsberg stood for as artist and activist, never arise? Hard to believe.

But let us go finally to one of the surviving sages, personal friend of Beatles and Beats, and frequent participant himself in these complicated histories – the recipient of Ginsberg’s revelatory letter, Miles himself – for some definitive takes and retrospective updates framed by the benefit of time. Firstly, he is sure he remembers the letter and responds helpfully to my queries.

He tells me: ‘I never got the sense that Lennon was much of a reader, though Yoko might have encouraged him a bit later on. In the Sixties, Paul was much more interested in books – encouraged, probably, by [his girlfriend] Jane Asher who was well read and knew a lot of writers, playwrights, theatre people, etc., who Paul also met through her. And through Peter Asher, who later became something of a book collector. And me and [the bookshop] Indica.’

Miles adds: ‘I used to lend him [McCartney] books, such as Evergreen Review, Big Table and other Beat Generation volumes. In 1967, I took Ginsberg to meet him at [Paul'‘s home] Cavendish Avenue – as recounted in my book In The Sixties – and it was Paul who was massively interested in Alfred Jarry and “pataphysics” from about 1966 after hearing Ubu Cocu on the BBC Third programme.

Pictured above: Barry Miles

‘Zapple [Apple’s spoken word project] was more or less Paul's idea,’ he explains, ’and he was the one to approve my list of poets to record: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, McClure, Olson, Bukowski, though I think he had only read the first two. Later, while I was already in the States recording, John and Yoko asked for Diane di Prima to be added. In fact she was already on the list for the second wave of recordings, had they looked.

‘So the answer is, yes, I'd say that Paul probably read “Howl” before the others, though they may have heard the title from people like [poet and writer] Johnny Byrne back in Liverpool days. It wasn't actually published in Britain until The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men from 1959. Now I remember, Byrne hated Lennon so he probably didn't introduce him to “Howl”.’

So, it is quite possible that Lennon did not encounter ‘Howl’ in any engaged sense until he heard that radio recording to which Ginsberg refers to in the Miles letter. It certainly appears extremely likely that McCartney – all too often characterised as the conservative Beatle to Lennon’s radical – was well ahead of his songwriting partner in terms of his association with Ginsberg and his seminal work. And maybe, yes, it was Fluxus ally and conceptual artist Ono who was able to open Lennon’s reading eyes in the sunset years of his short life.

But there is no clear evidence to challenge Ginsberg’s assessment that his musical hero was far from conversant with ‘Howl’, its power, its meanings and impact, prior to that chance hearing of an after hours broadcast on the airwaves of the American night, more than 20 years after the poem made its sensational public debut.

See also: Simon Warner, ‘From Beetles to Beatles: It was 60 years ago today’, The Beat Museum, June 1st, 2020, https://www.kerouac.com/beetles-to-beatles-simon-warner/ and ‘John Lennon’, The Allen Ginsberg Project, October 9th, 2011, https://allenginsberg.org/2011/10/sunday-9th-john-lennon/

Plus other R&BG links – ‘What tomorrow now knows: The Beatles, the avant-garde and Beat’, September 29th, 2022; ‘Beat poetry, beat groups’, August 6th, 2022; ‘Still angry after all these years’, June 13th, 2022; ‘Book review #5: Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God’, March 3rd, 2022; and ‘Macca, Ginsberg and Glass: Taylor’s take’, November 26th, 2021