The Last Page
Wilentz, Sean
". . . great poet of the murderous century, who persisting in folly attained wisdom." -CZESLAW MILOSZ, "To Allen Ginsberg" (1995) "All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor," Walt...
...But he still had the power to hush a huge packed hall with the final stanza of "Kaddish...
...128 • DISSENT...
...Ginsberg made a point now and then of accosting his spiritual foes in person, with an air of ingenuous reasonableness...
...Hart and Brookhiser fondly recall his attending a publishing party at the National Review offices in the 1980s—hoping, in vain, to broker a fellowship deal for Peter Orlovsky from Hart, who had ties to the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...The triumph of Ginsberg's may be that so many Americans, including adversaries, listened and came away impressed by, if nothing else, his sweetness and his candor...
...To be sure, there are those who neither loved nor forgave him and never will...
...For these critics (by no means all of them conservatives), Ginsberg was one of the worst cultural vandals of the sixties...
...We were deep in February, but Allen Ginsberg, wearing a necktie and Irish tweed jacket, was as ever the King of May...
...At that last Princeton reading, Allen looked frail and rheumy, his palsied right eye slipping in and out of focus, one wrist swaddled in an Ace bandage due to a recent sprain...
...Across the room, two beautiful women, perfect strangers, bought a round of drinks and sent it over to our now crowded table...
...After the reading, a bunch of us repaired, at his insistence, to a local bar, where, upon his appearance, from odd corners, adoring men rose as if God incarnate had just walked in—some of them men I'd seen in the place before, but none of them men (this being Princeton) I'd ever imagined were gay...
...He wanted to be understood as a writer of clear-seeing poems, a blend (as he told an audience at Princeton last year) of Buddhism and an American empirical aesthetic that he associated with Whitman and William Carlos Williams...
...As a craftsman, Ginsberg expanded modern American poetry's breath, punctuating his long lines with the satori-like juxtapositions ("hydrogen jukebox," "your arms of fat Paterson porches") that he said had been inspired by C6zanne's paintings...
...Looking back, Hart and Brookhiser make it clear that they hated Ginsberg's politics, and apart from "Kaddish" and "White Shroud" (and maybe bits of "Howl"), they find little to commend in his poetry...
...But it was interesting to read some unlikely tributes to Ginsberg, not least appreciations in National Review, written by Jeffrey Hart and Richard Brookhiser...
...He also had a marvelous lightness of touch and of spirit ("America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel") that leavened his more portentous verses...
...CZESLAW MILOSZ, "To Allen Ginsberg" (1995) "All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor," Walt Whitman wrote in 1855...
...Yet the tone of both essays is oddly serious and gentle when they get to Ginsberg the man and cultural icon—and Brookhiser's piece even attempts a sincere if somewhat cockeyed reckoning with Beat writing...
...Allen Ginsberg, who was candid about his faults and about much else, died a beloved and forgiven poet...
...The irony of Whitman's life is that his democratic chants failed to gain, in his own time, either the respect of the literary establishment or a popular American readership...
...A drug-taking leftist homosexual and self-described nearsighted psychopath, he hoped, as he confessed some years ago, "to set surpassing example of sanity as measure for late generations...
...His good eye gleamed as he cleared his throat, adjusted the mike, and solemnly announced the title of a new poem: "Sphincter...
...He still had the scholastic earnestness of his Columbia days, as he explained to his listeners (average age nineteen) the mid-sixties allusions in "Wichita Vortex Sutra...
Vol. 44 • July 1997 • No. 3
