Pubdate: June 15-21, 2000 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Page: 30 Copyright: 2000 Guardian Newspapers Limited Contact: 75 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER, England Fax: +44-171-837 4530 Website: http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/guardian/ Forum: http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/BBS/News/0,2161,Latest|Topics|3,00.html Author: Bruce Cook BEAT BOHEMIANS Deliberate prose Selected Essays: 1952-1995 by Allen Ginsberg edited by Bill Morgan HarperCollins 536pp $30 Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs edited by James Grauerholz Grove 273pp $25 Reviewed by Bruce Cook Jack Kerouac announced the Beat Generation to the world in 1957 with the publication of his novel On The Road. Not much more than 10 years later, he was virtually forgotten, crowded out of the national spotlight by the hippies and the political protest against the Vietnam War. Goofy, good-looking Kerouac slipped slowly into alcoholism, denounced the radicals of the'60s as commies and worse, and died in 1969 at the age of 47. Yet two others who, along with Kerouac, were considered Beats in good standing nut only continued to enjoy literary celebrity status for decades but even gained in respectability (each became a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters). Allen Ginsberg died at the age of 71, and William S. Burroughs at 83, both of them in 1997 - two grand old men of bohemia. They were more than survivors. Ginsberg was the Beat with an agenda: He wanted nothing less than to alter the attitudes of his generation and those that followed. Whatever his worth as a poet - and it was certainly not negligible - he seemed to value more his role as prophet and propagandist. Nowhere is this more evident than in this posthumous collection of essays, Deliberate Prose. So many of the pieces in the book are written in a style of rushed urgency as be deals with one problem, then rushes off to the next: "Albeit political and social projections change year by year, I still form Public theories." Occasionally he omits the articles from a sentence in a telegraphic or baby-talk mode: "Poem book Fall of America is time capsule of personal national consciousness during war-decay recorded 1965 to 1971." Some are written as manifestos in the first-person plural with key words shouted out at the reader in capital letters. Some are written as press releases and were actually used as such. Others, however, should be set apart from all the above. They are contained in two separate sections devoted more or less to literary matters: "Literary Technique and the Beat Generation" and "Writers," In the first Ginsberg extols the sort of automatic writing in a semi-trance state which Kerouac practiced as "spontaneous bop prosody." Spontaneity is stressed in essay after essay as the only way to authenticity, and authenticity Ginsberg held to be the hallmark of divinely inspired poetry and prose. "Writers," the longest section in the collection, contains the best and worst to be found in it. There are essays on William Blake, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, the three greatest influences on Ginsberg's poetic writing; these are generous and respectful without being in the least cloying or bombastic. In them, he reveals what a good teacher he might have been, had his interest lain in that direction. Yet this same section is padded out with book-jacket blurbs and recommendations for writer-pals. For the most part he engages in the most shameful sort of puffery here. He calls Gregory Corso a poet's poet, his verse pure velvet, close to John Keats for our time . . ." Corso, of course, is not at all a bad poet, but "Keats of our time"? Really? Ginsberg spills more ink for William S. Burroughs than for any other of the old Beats except Kerouac. Among the items in Ginsberg's file on Burroughs are a blurb for an unspecified work; an introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of the older writer's first novel, Junky; and two nominations - one for the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, which was successful, and the other for the Nobel Prize, which was not. Burroughs was curiously reluctant to be identified as one of the Beat Generation, at least in the beginning. It was not just that he was years senior to the rest; but be was also better educated, better traveled and more worldly than the others when they met in 1945. He never practiced spontaneous writing; on the contrary, he labored rather long and hard over his novels, particularly Naked Lunch, the book that made him famous. It was written, as were most of his early works, while he was a heroin addict. He claimed that he never had a sick day as long as be was on drugs. And in his final journals, he boasts of his longevity in spite of his addiction; from that, he draws the conclusion that the federal government's campaign against habituating drugs is simply an exercise in mind control la Big Brother, with no real basis in hard facts. In Last Words he is consistent in this as in much else: ". . . I became a morphine addict. Best thing I ever did for myself. Without God's Own Medicine I could well have ended up one of those Write the Great American novel [types] that never get off the ground, or an alcoholic academic." There are, however, a few surprises in this book of entries drawn from the last nine months of Burroughs's life. For instance, he complains as many a cranky old man before him that things are not as they used to be in the old days: "And what has become of the New Yorker cartoons? They are not funny or even comprehensible any more." And elsewhere he inveighs against the encroachments of age: "I feel chilly and grown old." I find this sort of thing rather comforting. Burroughs was in his literary lifetime a connoisseur of horrors, one whose fictional fantasies seem to merge into the inhumanly absurd and surrealistic. And so I find it mildly surprising but oddly reassuring to learn that for the last 16 years of his life he lived in a house in Lawrence, Kansas, with six cats for company; that he came to believe in God and an afterlife; that he was terribly saddened by the death of Allen Ginsberg, If any doubted Burroughs's humanity, there is ample proof of it in Last Words. There never was any doubt that Ginsberg was a mensch, either as the earnest young nerd on the front of the dust jacket of Deliberate Prose or as the rabbinical older man on the back cover. Together, believe it or not, they did a good deal to shape American culture during the last quarter of the 20th century. - ---