Please Don't Play It Again, Sam
Please Don't Play It Again, Sam There is a time in life when civilized tact checks out and dangerous candor checks in. Usually the time is late in one's seventies or in one's eighties. The...
...The grave yawns, further suppression of long repressed views no longer seems to have much point...
...General embarrassment felt by everyone except my friend's father, who looked as if he had just committed a splendid public service...
...When Ginsberg finally spoke, he thanked Geldz-haler, but said that, after this introduction, he wasn't clear whether he was being given this award for poetry or fellatio, though he used the much rougher word...
...By way of introduction, Geldzhaler thanked his good friend Allen for his courage in coming out of the closet so early and so fearlessly, and went on about this at great, sentimental length...
...The other day, standing near one of the cash registers in a large book store, a young man, maybe 23 or 24, with a mustache and goatee, asked the clerk if she knew where he might find a copy of Naked Lunch by William Burroughs...
...Excuse me," I said, "but I don't think you need to read that book...
...Quite right, too...
...It's full of ugliness, stupid violence, odious philosophy, and other dreary stuff...
...The condition seems to afflict men more than women...
...I asked my friend what he did...
...Should I happen upon you in a bookstore inquiring about a Hermann Hesse novel or in the street carrying an old Kurt Vonnegut book, please don't take it personally if I start telling you off...
...The audience was clearly carriage trade, men in black tie, women in blue-rinse hairdo...
...Ever the helpful guide, I stepped forth...
...Seeing signs of this everywhere causes my blood to boil, my bile to bubble, my brain to burn...
...I wished I had a badge showing him that I had published four books of literary criticism, but I'm fairly certain it wouldn't have helped...
...If you had any courage at all, you wouldn't have wasted your life working for a bank...
...Why, some 40 years later, is this still not clear to all...
...The recent obituary press for Allen Ginsberg was just the beginning...
...He looked at me as if to say, "Who is this guy...
...The Beats' literary legacy is just below negligible, their politics chiefly about druggery and buggery...
...As I recollect this emotion in tranquility, I recognize that what triggered my outburst is my sense that there is, looming even as I write, a revived appreciation of the Beat generation as precursors of the 1960s in all its (presumably) glorious tumult...
...A close friend of mine, who is in the mortgage business, reports this happening one day to his 80-year-old father in the office of an important vice president of a bank with whom they had long done business...
...Ginsberg, whose verse today remains largely unreadable and whose every political utterance was wrong, died with the kind of praise that might have seemed heavy-handed had it been applied to Walt Whitman (to whom, inevitably, he was compared...
...More...
...Worship of the Beats, I sense, is a way of getting back to the '60s (even if the Beats' own beginning was the '50s...
...So much for vigilante literary criticism in our day...
...Tried, without success," he said, "to find a place to hide my eyes...
...Who was I to offer such opiniona-tion...
...Cold silence...
...Sitting there, exchanging the standard pleasantries, my friend's father suddenly said: "You know, Grossman, you are a pompous ass, and always have been...
...The threatened reappearance of the '60s is what has put me in my current mood of dangerous candor...
...Precocious in a number of ways, I worry about whether I myself may be hitting the stage of dangerous candor well ahead of schedule...
...Only the greatest exertion of self-control allowed me not to ask them why they thought so well of such dreck...
...Take my advice: Save your money and take a pass on this loathsome tome...
...Joseph Epstein...
...A new wave of '60s envy looks to be upon us—an emotion that entails the strong feeling among the young that they missed something momentous, that great days have passed them by...
...He asked in a tentative way, as if he had only learned about the book himself in the past few days...
...what the hell, one says, let 'er rip, and, swoosh, the dam bursts with the opinion held back for so many years...
...In any case, he turned away, pretending I wasn't there, obvious kook that I was, and waited for the clerk, now consulting her computer, to tell him in which section of the store he might find Naked Lunch...
...In a course in prose style I teach at Northwestern University, three students in a class of 25 brought in sentences from Jack Kerouac as examples of prose they much admire...
...The only good story I've ever heard about Allen Ginsberg had to do with his one night receiving an award from some cultural organization presented to him by a man named Henry Geldzhaler...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 6
