All the Time in the World

by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  The genie was out of its bottle. Reviewing the San Francisco poetry scene, The New York Times dubbed Howl the “most remarkable poem of the young group,” a work that received a “furor of praise or abuse whenever read or heard.” It sparked enough controversy to draw the attention of federal authorities. In 1956, the San Francisco police seized printed copies of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, and publisher-poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–) was brought to trial for obscenity.

  A professor of English at the University of California defended the poem during the proceedings, arguing it “uses necessarily the language of vulgarity.” The prosecutor demanded, “Do you understand what ‘angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night’ means?” “Sir, you can’t translate poetry into prose,” the professor quipped. “That’s why it’s poetry.” The courtroom crowd—full of fellow writers and angelheaded hipsters—burst into laughter. Next, the prosecutor brought in a woman who taught at a church school for girls. Her take: “You feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff,” she said. “I didn’t linger on it too long, I assure you.” After two weeks’ deliberation, the judge found Howl not obscene. Ferlinghetti was acquitted.

  Kerouac claimed to be the founder of the Beat movement, which emerged around 1953, the year Ginsberg and friends followed him from New York to San Francisco. He explained that “beat” meant living low, down on your luck, but he later realized that it also meant “beatific.” By 1959, weekend beatniks thronged city streets everywhere from New York to Atlanta to Prague to Paris, wearing goatees and sunglasses and, invariably, carrying poetry books, while the women wore heavy bangs and heavier eye makeup. Even the comic strip Popeye introduced a beatnik character. “A Beat-inspired fad for public recitation of verse has not only caught on in big cities and college towns but has given the very word, poetry, a new and abrasive connotation,” Life magazine reported. “A calculated vulgarity is part of the Beat act, and a good many of these performances are conducted in an atmosphere not unlike that which attended the bare-knuckle prizefights of the last century.” Ginsberg, of course, was dubbed the magazine’s “Shelley of the Beat poets.”

  As he later said, he was simply in the right place at the right time when Howl came raging through his typewriter, creating a whirlwind of emotion in everyone that it touched. “You have to be inspired to write something like that,” Ginsberg explained. “It’s not something you can very easily do just by pressing a button. You have to have the right historical situation, the right physical combination, the right mental formation, the right courage, the right sense of prophecy, and the right information.”

  Though the waltz evolved from quaint spinning German folk dances, when the two princesses of Mecklenburg dared to waltz at a court ball in Berlin in 1794, the Prussian queen, appalled, averted her gaze and prohibited her own daughters from joining them. The waltz, the biggest sensation dancing Europe had ever seen, ignited passions and scandals in ballrooms across the continent, from Vienna to Paris and London. Unlike, say, the ultra-refined minuet, the waltz was wild, unfettered, and—for the first time—it brought partners face-to-face in a prolonged snug embrace. Woozy dancers clung to one another, making tight clockwise turns while traveling counterclockwise around the perimeter of the dance floor. “Never have I moved so lightly,” remembered Goethe, who danced the waltz in Strasbourg when he was young. “I was no longer a human being,” he sighed. “To hold the most adorable creature in one’s arms and fly around with her like the wind, so that everything around us fades away …” His diary entry for one night in 1777 notes: “Evening with the ladies, danced from 6 until 3 in the morning.”

  Not everyone was so convinced. In the waltz, “there is something in the close approximation of persons, in the attitudes, and in the motion, which ill agrees with the delicacy of women,” the English author of The Mirror of the Graces wrote in 1811. Married women were warned that they should waltz only with their husbands, and unmarried women were advised against dancing the waltz altogether. “A woman especially ought to be very sure that the man she waltzes with is one worthy of so close an intimacy,” cautioned an early-nineteenth-century etiquette manual. A gentleman wore gloves on the dance floor, to avoid accidentally grazing any part of his partner’s body with bare hands. Doctors fretted over the vertigo brought on by all that twirling, as one critic explained, because the “rapid turnings, the clasping of the dancers, their exciting contact, and the too quick and too long continued succession of lively and agreeable emotions, produce sometimes, in women of a very irritable constitution, syncopes, spasms and other accidents which should induce them to renounce it.” The motion could be “injurious to the brain and spinal marrow,” another detractor cried, and the overexertion could shorten a woman’s lifespan. Someone cautioned that the distance covered by each turn, added to every length of the ballroom traversed during ten waltzes, meant that the couple traveled fourteen miles over the course of one night. To avoid tripping, waltzing women lifted the hems of their dresses with tongs, which hung from a cord at their waists, occasionally flashing a forbidden glimpse of petticoat.

  It was all so thrilling. In Vienna, birthplace of the waltz, super-sized lavish ballrooms competed for dancers. At the Apollo, couples danced under a chandelier blazing with five thousand candles. At the Monschein, it was all about speed. “Each couple tried to outdo the others,” wrote playwright Adolf Bäuerle (1786–1859), “and it was no rare thing for an apoplexy of the lungs to end the madness.” Austrian composer Johann Strauss and his sons Johann II, Josef, and Eduard composed hundreds of waltzes to keep them all turning, including the younger Johann’s classic “Blue Danube” (1867).

  Though the waltz hit London in 1790, more than twenty-five years later it was still wonderfully shocking. “So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice,” read an article in the London Times after the dance was introduced at a royal ball in 1816, “but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.

  “National morals depend on national habits,” the article went on, “and it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressure of the bodies, in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females.”

  Before coffee was a morning drink, medieval Sufi mystics in Yemen drank a brew made from Coffea arabica beans to stay awake for their midnight prayer sessions, coming together to sing poetry and to seek dhawq, or a “taste of the divine.” “They drank it every Monday and Friday eve, putting it in a large vessel made of red clay,” one witness reported. “Their leader ladled it out with a small dipper and gave it to them to drink, passing it to the right, while they recited one of their usual formulas, ‘There is no God but God, the Master, the Clear Reality.’ ”

  Soon, drinking intoxicating, heady coffee, which provided its own kind of clear reality, was no longer reserved for religious rituals. Coffeehouses where one could sip for the pleasure of it sprang up across the Middle East. With the Red Sea port of Mocha, in Yemen, supplying beans to Medina, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, coffee soon took its place alongside wine, hashish, and other forbidden delights. Coffee was first banned in Mecca in 1511, and banned again in 1526. The cafés of Cairo were destroyed in 1535. It didn’t stem the tide. “The Turks have a brew, the colour of which is black,” wrote an Italian traveling in Egypt in 1580. “It is drunk in long draughts, and not during the meal, but afterwards … as a delicacy and in mouthfuls, while taking one’s ease in the company of friends, and there is hardly any gathering among them where it is not drunk.”

  Though the authorities in Constantinople once warned that those caught drinking coffee would be drowned in a
sack in the Bosporus, there were already six hundred coffee shops there in the mid-sixteenth century. The finest were outfitted with terraces where patrons could lounge on divans covered with rich carpets to watch a fountain or to stare out at the sea while sipping coffee scented with saffron, cardamom, opium, or ambergris. Such places were “thronged night and day,” a visitor noted, with “the poorer classes actually begging money in the streets for the sole object of purchasing coffee.”

  Slowly, during the mid-seventeenth century, Europeans got hooked on the exotic drink. In 1669, Suleiman Aga, the Turkish sultan’s glamorous ambassador in Paris, dressed in a turban and diamond jewels, his eyes rimmed with kohl, plied his guests with the dark brew, offering male visitors voluminous dressing gowns to wear as they luxuriated in his Ottoman-style salon. French doctors warned that coffee induced exhaustion and paralysis, but it was so fashionable that no one cared.

  Before long, a sturdy Greek coffee-seller could be heard going door-to-door through the streets of Paris selling coffee made on his miniature cookstove and singing:

  O drink that I adore,

  You rule the universe!

  O drink that I adore,

  You rule the universe!

  You wean the faithful from the vine.

  You’re more delectable than wine.

  As the Sufis first discovered, coffee delivered a taste of the divine.

  At midnight, Britain’s moody mid-eighteenth-century poets brought the graveyard to life. One of the earliest to plumb its depths was Irish poet Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), who wrote “A Night-Piece on Death,” describing tombs where the “nameless heave the crumpled ground,” which was appropriately published after his death. English poet Edward Young (1683–1765) picked up the thread with his wistful Night Thoughts (1742), a series of nine poems written after the death of his wife and of two friends, and praised across Europe. During his college days at Oxford, Young had composed poetry after midnight by the light of a candle stuck in a skull. He preferred dark to day, he explained in verse, because it evoked a comforting melancholia:

  How like a widow in her weeds, the night,

  Amid her glimmering tapers, silent sits!

  How sorrowful, how desolate, she weeps

  Perpetual dews, and saddens nature’s scenes!

  In the deepest dark, the supernatural was never far from the artistic imagination. Another poet followed, describing his nocturnal encounters in the churchyard, from the scared schoolboy sprinting past to the newly made widow: “Listless, she crawls along in doleful black, / Whilst bursts of sorrow gush from either eye.” A seventeen-year-old prodigy contributed to the genre with “On the Pleasures of Melancholy,” calling “raven-colour’d” midnight the “solemn noon of night,” and detailing his creepy visions of graveyard gloom, which included a ghostly figure inviting eternal rest “with beckoning hand.” Thomas Gray (1716–1771) penned “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.” And on it went.

  So why all the gloom and doom? Philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) attributed the fascination to the irresistible allure of the Sublime, which conveyed a certain heart-quickening terror without posing any real threat. But writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) noted that the pursuit of terror was also an antidote to monotony. “The more wild, fanciful and extraordinary are the circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it,” she explained. Fear was a kick. “Passion and fancy co-operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.”

  Whatever his reasons, Horace Walpole (1717–1797), author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), went further than any of his peers, living and breathing Gothic gloom, or “gloomth”—a word he coined to describe both the cozy warmth and the dark gloom of his beloved mock-medieval castle. Though his home was filled with antique suits of armor, and topped by a plethora of arches and plaster battlements, Walpole would travel any distance to see a prettily ruined cathedral or dilapidated crypt. And if his carriage couldn’t make it down some wayward country road, he’d climb onto one of the horses and blunder on through the mud to get there.

  Spine-tingling gloom wasn’t just a thrill. For Walpole it offered a sense of freedom from a too-predictable world. “The great resources of fancy,” Walpole wrote, “have been dammed up by strict adherence to the common life.”

  ARTIST FRANCIS PICABIA (1879–1953) in the fall of 1924 touted the concept of instantanéisme, French for “instantaneity,” renaming his Parisian art magazine the Journal de l’Instantanéisme for the October issue. His post-Dadaist crusade promoted the exhilaration of living in the moment, granting “liberty for all,” not believing in “anything except today,” or “anything except life.”

  The of-the-moment movement lasted just long enough for Picabia and composer Erik Satie (1866–1925) to create the instantanéiste ballet Relâche, commissioned by the ultraexperimental Ballets Suédois and performed in Paris several months later. The piece was an assault upon the artificiality of the theater—and on the audience—crafted by two sly old artists who loved to shake up the bourgeoisie.

  Picabia was a pillar of Dadaism. Satie was a born provocateur who ironically named his first published score “Opus 62.” Dressed in black, wearing his signature pince-nez and toting an umbrella under his arm, no matter what the weather, every Sunday he went to Picabia’s suburban villa so the two could collaborate on what Satie saw as the most important theatrical project of his career.

  On opening night, the chic audience didn’t know what to expect, though Picabia’s Journal had advised all to bring earplugs and to wear sunglasses. Inside the theater, whistles were distributed, and a wall of large reflector discs, each with a lightbulb at its center, gave off a brilliance that “only the sun could then look at directly,” according to a witness. During their choreographed show, performers and dancers emerged from the audience and made their way to the stage, acting like curious spectators who had suddenly decided to get a closer look. Once in the spotlight, they carted one another around in a wheelbarrow. A chain-smoking fireman ambled about. The climax came when, vamping vaudeville, a pack of men in evening dress circled around a woman in an evening gown as she undressed, finally stepping away to reveal her glorious form, sheathed in a snug pink bathing suit. Then the men stripped down to their spangled long johns and hunched over so the woman could walk across their backs as if over a bridge. A poster hanging above the fray suggested: “If you’re not satisfied, go to Hell!” But what did it all mean?

  “Relâche goes strolling through life with a grand burst of laughter,” Picabia wrote in the program notes. “Relâche is aimless movement. Why think?” Underpinning the irreverent mood, Satie’s score was built from snatches of the music hall songs of his younger days—dance music, waltzes, and once-familiar tunes, which he spliced, twisted, and warped—and if the “reactionary mutton-heads” didn’t like it, he wrote, too bad. “I shall tolerate only one judge: the public.”

  Fueling the fire, director René Clair’s short film Entr’acte was screened between the two acts. In the first scene, Picabia, hair mussed and looking wild, and Satie, distinguished in his bowler, loaded a cannon and fired it at the camera. In another scene, a ballerina twirled on a pane of glass while filmed from below, offering the audience more than a glimpse under her tutu. As the film played, “boos and whistles mingled with Satie’s comical tunes,” Clair (1898–1981) remembered. “He, no doubt, took a connoisseur’s pleasure in the sonic reinforcement which the protesters brought to his music.” Amid the mayhem at the end of the night, Satie and Picabia drove onstage in a tiny Citroën to take a bow.

  Reviews of Relâche were merciless. “Its essence is nothingness,” one wrote, “it boasts of it, and I am very embarrassed.” Another called it “nothingness, a laborious nothingness in two acts.” And a third complained, “ ‘Relâche’ cannot be discussed, cannot be recounted, cannot be analyzed. It’s nothing.” Even Satie’s former protégé weighed in, claiming the product
ion was “the most boring and stupidly depressing thing in the world.” Artist Fernand Léger (1881–1955) was one of the few to defend the duo, applauding their anti-art stance and recognizing that with Relâche “the water-tight division between ballet and music-hall has burst.” Satie fell ill a few days later. His premiere-night cruise was his last public appearance. He would die within several months.

  Many called the instantanéiste ballet a failure, too obscure, and too random to be worth the time. On the contrary, Satie based his definition of success on the beauty of artistic vision, rather than on its artful execution. His was the ultimate avant-gardist stance, one that allowed for a cacophony of show tunes, floodlights, and chain-smoking firemen to triumph as art. “Great Masters are brilliant through their ideas, their craft is a simple means to an end, nothing more,” he once said. “Let us mistrust Art: it is often nothing but virtuosity.”

  Medieval rulers of Islamic Spain gathered their closest friends in lush, high-walled gardens for secret parties called majlis, where pretty servants sang and danced, and kept the choice wines flowing right through the night. The vibe was one of refinement, and of deep sensuality. Within the privacy of such intimate company, the caliph could relax and unwind, unrestrained by strict courtly protocols. Stretched out on rare carpets or brocade cushions, he and his guests took in the stars, philosophized about love, and spun couplets to memorialize those good times, when a dancing girl might finally slip out of her dress, “like a bud unfolding from a cluster of blossoms.”

  The epic soirées are thought to have begun earlier in Iraq and in Persia, but they reached their height in eleventh-century Andalusia, when the era’s poetic power couple, Ibn Zaydu¯n (1003–1071) and his love, Wallada bint al’Mustakfi (1001–1091), the rebellious daughter of the Caliph al’Mustakfi, made attending such events, and crafting heart-aching verses about each other, their priority.