Pubdate: June 15-21, 2000
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Page: 30
Copyright: 2000 Guardian Newspapers Limited
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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.
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