The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Ten years, a religious revival, a cold war, a hot war, and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, separated the Beat scene from the first hippie season. The Beats had been, originally, a literary event—a scattered pack of writers who had broken through, in print and in person, what Ginsberg once called “the syndrome of shutdown.” Almost all of them were born into the Depression, and they grew up during the Second World War to take up their pens under the long shadow of McCarthyism and the grim prosperity that supported it. Somebody once described them as Hugh Selwyn Mauberleys in sweatshirts. Their holy men were all the pariahs of American life, and they practiced, in print, a metre and a diction drawn from their own extravagant and often desperate experiences. In person, they practiced a sort of sociological hit-and-run, rattling people who were too close to the shutdown and too new to the riches to listen to them. As it turned out, the best thing about the Beat credo was the writers who invented it. Its disciples were conspicuous mainly for the thoroughness of their rejections, and they were left behind when the Beat literati eventually moved on to explore new ground. Ginsberg spent most of the early sixties travelling around the world, and came home to a generation of postwar babies who were ready to shed the stigma of real or imagined complicity in the spiritual lag. The coincidence of Ginsberg’s homecoming, the Beatles’ inauguration of a new sound-sensibility, and Timothy Leary’s LSD crusade marked the beginnings of a mystique for them. Somebody has described these little hippies as champions of the pretty. Their style was somewhat limited by an aesthetic based largely upon the forms of the East as interpreted by novelties manufacturers and appraised, through crystal beads, under the influence of hallucinogens, but they worshipped good intentions, and this in itself was something of a religious leap. (It is difficult to imagine Jack Kerouac or Norman Mailer arriving at the Stock Exchange with flowers in his hair.) Their holy men were holy men, and they invited everybody to join them in a loving universe of family sacraments, group trips, and total rapport.

  Ginsberg himself was too political to settle down with the hippies for very long. Given the priorities as he saw them, he was content to leave the details of a loving universe to his friends while he went back to work trying to preserve the universe at hand. Last summer, he flew to London for a long symposium called the Dialectics of Liberation, with Ronald Laing, Paul Goodman, Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael, and Herbert Marcuse, and then, in the fall, he took a room in a pensione in Venice, next door to Ezra Pound, to start putting together three new books of journals and poems. From Europe, he plotted what was very likely the first American rite of exorcism since the Navajo Enemy Way, whipped up a fine Pentagon mantra as an accompaniment, and by these and other appropriate means directed in absentia the mass circumambulation of the Defense Department by several thousand demonstrators on October 21st. The anniversary of the San Francisco Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In found him in court in New York, accused of having blocked the entrance to the Whitehall Street induction center during End the Draft Week. (He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was given an unconditional discharge. It was his first conviction, and his East Village neighbors, who wanted him to run for President, were very unhappy about it.) A week or so later, he turned up at a rally at Town Hall protesting the indictment of Dr. Benjamin Spock for encouraging resistance to the draft. He spent the rest of January digging up information on the sins of the American military-industrial complex, and in February, armed with statistics, he left for a tour of thirty or forty colleges. In March, he was in Washington, talking with Robert Kennedy about the war. When the Democrats meet in Chicago, he will be there with his bells on, for “a mass manifestation of gaiety” by a few hundred thousand of his friends.

  Out in the world, Ginsberg has proved to be so irreproachably immune to the rewards held out to tractable, commercially exploitable, or socially decorative bohemians that over the past year he has become something of a symbol of the profound and often comic incompatibility between the values of the Establishment and the values of the amalgamated hippie-pacifist-activist-visionary-orgiastic-anarchist-Orientalist-psychedelic underground whose various causes and commitments he has managed to espouse. He has been the subject of more argument between the generations than any other American poet since Whitman, whom he admires, and his impact has perhaps been stronger than Whitman’s, for, whether enthusiastic about Ginsberg or enraged by him (possibly, Ginsberg says, because of “the unjust equation of my long hair with their nightmare visions of some monster beatnik”), people who know him, or know about him, seem to put a great deal of energy into reacting to him. Much of Ginsberg’s mail, which is voluminous, comes from strangers: “Dear Allen, This letter was written due to a line where you stated ‘Communicate with me.’ Do you realize that you would not be you if not for me? Please acknowledge my presence,” and “Dear Mr. Ginsberg, Occasional escape from reality is good, but it seems to me that you are too real…and your ‘ultra’ reality in which you blot out the unreal shows you’re not really where it’s at and probably just an exhibitionist.” Some of the writers need advice: “Dear Allen, How do I become a poet? Could you just tell me something about it?” and “Dear Allen, I am very sad and want to ask you whether or not you believe that an innate capacity for opening the mind and loosening the heart exists in all, however angry, afraid, submerged they may be?” and “Dear Allen, Being a student and, at the same time, being a person, I am searching for reconciliation through art and the self….I am 20 years old and do not expect magical solutions. Merely insight, and a new view. Would you correspond with me?” Others want information: “Dear Allen Ginsberg, I plan on heading toward northern India and Nepal and on to Japan, if necessary, in search of a guru….I was wondering what my chances would be of finding one that spoke English. If you happen to know of certain individuals who might instruct me on my search for the realization of the truth, I would appreciate it very much if you would let me know,” and “Dear Mr. Ginsberg, In my English course we are required to write ten short papers on various topics. You are my first topic….” In one day’s batch of mail a few months ago, Ginsberg received requests for a character reference and a guarantee of financial support from a Japanese poet who wanted a permanent visa with which to enter the country; for a piece of his beard (which he immediately clipped and mailed) as a contribution to the annual fund-raising sale of a high-school literary club in Bakersfield, California; for a manuscript (which he sent) to be auctioned off at a benefit in London for the relief of South African political prisoners; for a manuscript (which he also sent) to be auctioned off at a benefit in France for a new committee to end the Vietnam war; and for a love potion of his own choosing, from a petitioner who wrote, “If you are whimsical or have time, send something to the boy I love. He has had acid already. I wish it worked” (which he did nothing about). In addition, there was a note from an Albuquerque jail, which went, “Mr. Ginsberg: I am also a poet….I was arrested in Albuquerque, New Mexico, late last year for the possession of the herb; three dollars’ worth. I am now awaiting trial….May I, Mr. Ginsberg, with your permission, read your statement on marijuana from the Atlantic Monthly at my trial?…I saw you once from afar and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Soul.’ ”

  Ginsberg also gets a great many letters from friends. They write to let him know where they are: “Dear Allen, Another day in the bug house!” and “I am on my way to India and the India beyond India but I will see you before and there, of course. You were right. Siva really dances!” And they keep him up to date on what is happening there: “Dear Allen, Things really seem to be in a state of chaos here in London. The news. First, 12 policemen visited the bookstore on Thursday last week….They seized all back issues of the International Times (about 10,000 copies), including all the reference copies, they didn’t leave us one…and from the shop they seized all the copies we had of: Naked Lunch, I, Jan Cremer, Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, by Patchen, The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan…” and “Hello Allen, The students at the London School of Economics are ‘doing a
Berkeley.’ They have been holding sit-downs, fasts, marches with flowers, etc., and recently declared the formation of an ‘open university’ within the school….But everyone—poets, pop stars, students, intellectuals, kids—is moving together into a united force in reaction to the official heavy hand.”

  Ginsberg answers all his letters. He puts them first into a big, worn manila envelope with “Unanswered” scribbled over an old address. Then they go into a second worn manila envelope—this one marked “Answered”—which, when it is full, is stuffed into one of many bulging cartons, labelled “Letters,” that are stacked in vaguely chronological order on the floor of a five-room apartment he lives in on East Tenth Street, in New York. Important mail, such as communiqués about drug laws and obscenity trials, is clipped, underlined, and stowed away in the appropriate folder in a cross-referenced file cabinet in his dining room.

  One of Ginsberg’s friends has called him the central casting office of the underground. He enters in the address book that he always carries in his purple bag the name, address, and phone number of anyone he meets who plays, or is apt to play, a part in what he thinks of as the new order, or has information that might be useful to it, and he goes to considerable trouble to put people he likes in touch with each other and with sympathetic and influential Establishment characters who might be helpful to them. In this way, he has managed to create a network of the like-minded around the world. Any one of his friends who goes to a city that Ginsberg has ever visited knows in advance where to stay, whom to see, and what local statutes to avoid breaking, not to mention who the local shamans are, what politicians are friendly, who has bail money, who sells pot, the temperament of the chief of police, the sympathies of the editors of all the newspapers, the phone numbers of the local activists, and where the best sex and the best conversation can be found.

  Ginsberg’s passion for an entirely communicado underground has made him the most practically effective dropout around. He has contacts in Washington and most of the big city halls, and also in law firms, Civil Liberties Union offices, and universities scattered across the country. Since most of the information that he needs is at his fingertips, Ginsberg can accomplish with a phone call what many of his friends would take months to plow through. He will direct a friend with a problem to a United States senator’s office—“Call. They owe me a favor”—or, with the aplomb of a bank president, ring up the Mayor of San Francisco for a hippie in distress, and he can recommend a lawyer by offering a complete rundown of pertinent cases undertaken and a conclusive “Use him. He’s good. He turns on.” Ginsberg’s friend Gregory Corso, the poet, once complained that Ginsberg was operating like a businessman, but all of Ginsberg’s friends—including Corso—agree that as an operator he is invaluable. Few of them have either his talent for coping with the tangly protocol and bewildering façades of the square world or his tolerance and affection for its unregenerate inhabitants. He likes most people, and, consequently, he does not share the compulsion of many of his companions to dismiss them, avoid them, or put them down. He tries his best to be soothing rather than startling. He will scold a friend for frightening a fellow-being on the other side of the Establishment fence by “coming on like some spooky super-exclusive angry beatnik egomaniac madman,” and he works hard to assure everybody that nothing human—not even Ginsberg—is really terribly alarming.

  “I hope that whatever prejudgment you may have of me or my bearded image you can suspend so that we can talk together as fellow-beings in the same room of Now, trying to come to some harmony and peacefulness between us” was the way he introduced himself to Senators Quentin Burdick and Jacob Javits at a special Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on narcotics legislation in the spring of 1966. “I am a little frightened to present myself—the fear of your rejection of me, the fear of not being tranquil enough to reassure you that we can talk together, make sense, and perhaps even like each other, enough to want not to offend, or speak in a way which is abrupt or hard to understand.” Senator Javits, who was a little jittery at being in a room of Now with Ginsberg, interrupted the poet to tell him not to worry so much about his bearded image, but Ginsberg went along calmly, talking to the senators about his peyote visions, about learning to love better under the good influence of ayahuasco, and about praying for Lyndon Johnson’s “tranquil health” after taking LSD on a cliff cove at Big Sur on the day of the President’s gall-bladder operation. He told the senators to try to think of LSD as “a useful educational tool” and (this was long before any records that could be considered reliable had been compiled on the psychological and genetic dangers of LSD) to consider the possibility that the terror preceding most of the acid breakdowns that had been reported was an effect less of the drug itself than of threatening laws and unfriendly social circumstances. Then he said that to really discourage the use of LSD the senators should supply the kind of society in which “nobody will need it to break through to common sympathy.” The senators were no more unnerved by this piece of advice than Timothy Leary was when Ginsberg told him, one night last winter, that in a “groovy” society drugs like LSD would be irrelevant. Leary had just invited Ginsberg to join him on “an LSD march around the world.” Ginsberg replied that in his opinion it would be far more sensible for everybody to stay home and help the government figure out how to stop the war. “All I’m trying to do, really,” Ginsberg said later, “is get the people who smoke pot and take acid talking to the people who don’t, and clear up some of the paranoia around.”

  The people who don’t are apt to have learned about Ginsberg’s mission—Senator Burdick introduced Ginsberg to his colleagues as the Pied Piper of the drug movement—from newspaper pictures of the poet chanting “Hare Krishna” at one of Leary’s sell-out psychedelic celebrations or marching across Sheridan Square with a big grin on his face and with a homemade sign saying “POT IS FUN!” pinned to his overcoat. Actually, Ginsberg has spent years doing research on the ins and outs of the marijuana laws and compiling historical, scientific, and religious arguments against them. Marijuana, known in its various incarnations as hemp, hashish, ganga, kef, and Cannabis sativa, is smoked, chewed, baked into cakes, or brewed into tea and enjoyed as a daily pick-me-up in a good part of the world, by Africans, Latin Americans, Hindus, and Moslems, many of whom regard the ingestion of alcohol as a sin; the official panic about the herb in the United States has therefore always been something of a mystery to travellers like Ginsberg, who has shared it by the pipeful with Arab Sufis and sipped it in milk with professors in Indian faculty clubs. In fact, it was legal in this country until a onetime Prohibition officer by the name of Harry Anslinger became commissioner of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics, around the time of Repeal. Anslinger steered through Congress the country’s first marijuana-control bill, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, and within a few years he had managed to convert the Bureau from a tiny Treasury Department offshoot concerned with the collection of taxes on opiates into a massive watchdog operation, with a staff of agents, that enjoyed near autonomy within the government. Under Anslinger and, more recently, under Henry Giordano, the Bureau, which is empowered to prefer federal “possession” charges carrying high mandatory minimum sentences, has been embroiled in a running war of wits with Ginsberg and his friends. The war involves match-point propaganda—once, in 1961, Ginsberg attacked the Bureau on a Saturday-night television panel show, and the Bureau demanded, and received, equal time—and a good deal of tactical one-upmanship. The Bureau, which used to train agents as beatniks, now has a crack corps of hippies and “students” circulating in the universities and through the underground. Ginsberg, for his part, keeps a volunteer “marijuana secretary” busy cataloguing the clippings, documents, and correspondence that accumulate in his apartment, and his marijuana file is one of the most complete and accurate private records of its kind anywhere. (His favorite among the articles about marijuana he has turned out, a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly called “The Great Marijuana Hoax,” was sprinkled wi
th footnotes and citations from such ponderous and unlikely authorities as the 1925 Panama Canal Zone Governor’s Committee’s report on marijuana and the Report of the British India Hemp Commission, 1893–1894.) Reporters use the file, and so do the students and scholars of the marijuana movement who live around New York. Lawyers preparing marijuana cases refer to Ginsberg’s papers, and the papers are the basis of the poet’s own latest marijuana project—the sponsorship and support of a brief to the effect that the existing marijuana statutes violate the legal right of artists to the necessary materials of their trade. Ginsberg would like to use the brief in Washington, eventually, in a test case in the Supreme Court. He estimates that the costs will come to some fifty thousand dollars.