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Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son. Allen and Louis Ginsberg. Ed. Michael Schumacher. £25 UK HB.
In an essay entitled 'My Son the Poet', quoted in Barry Miles's biography of the more famous Ginsberg, Louis Ginsberg recalled an incident between the young Allen and a schoolyard bully stopped in his tracks by his intended victim's verbal defences. The bully, wrote Louis Ginsberg, 'forgot his punitive intent and asked Allen what he had said. They began to talk and the threat was over. I believe that my son then felt the power of words.' Given that his father and, to a lesser extent, his elder brother Eugene both wrote poetry, it is hardly surprising that the young Allen might feel this power so early on. As a child, Louis had been taken by his own father to socialist meetings in the Workman's Circle in Newark, and he instilled into his own children the same interest in socialist politics and debate that made the Ginsberg household a place of often heated discussion. (Even the well-known madness which took Allen's mother Naomi brought her more often to rage and argument than to brooding silences.) But if the politics was to help to inform the writing of poems, which Allen later dubbed 'the family business', his father's praise of him as the one 'normal' Ginsberg -- ie the one non-poet in the family -- seemed reason enough for concealing his own interest in verse, at least until he went to Columbia University in 1943. It was there he was to meet an ex-Columbia football player and a 29 year old Harvard graduate who significantly broadened his horizons. Friendships with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs (for Louis 'a brimstone, bigoted preacher'), along with Neal Cassady and others, changed everything. Just over a year later Louis was warning his son that the 'homosexual and the insane person is a menace to himself and to society', little expecting the admission of sexual preference that was to come from his son four years later. Though neither Kerouac nor Burroughs was particularly interested in politics, the sheer force of their counter-culturalism, egoism and ambition help to break the seal into the family vault and set Allen loose as a writing force. If anyone was ever poetry in motion, it was Allen Ginsberg. For him more than for any other poet of the last century, poetry was motion. It was the living thing that moved through the mind and past the range of the senses, never the still life object. It was perhaps this difference, emerging from this period onwards, that best points up the healthy opposition between father and son. The father dismissing two of three of the son's early formal pieces and then asking, off the cuff, 'What about a psychiatrist?' is both shocking and hilarious, but equally is his critique ten years later of the free verse poem 'Death to Van Gog's Ear': 'Candidly, it is not my cup of tea.' Allen's claim that 'nobody publishes a word that is not cowardly robot ravings of a depraved mentality' not surprisingly came in for a fatherly rebuke. 'Really, nobody publishes anything worthwhile? Only you?' Louis asks in a response. But in the next paragraph he praises the 'imaginative images flashing out' of that poem as a sign of 'True poetic genius!' and signs his letter, 'Pride and love from Your father, Louis.' Most of these letters, by the way, are signed 'Love' by both men, a love that comes through both the reserve of one and the flamboyance and more than occasional posturing of the other. Even the few variations are not withdrawals of love, conscious or unconscious, but attempts to get the last word in edgewise, as in Louis's sign-off, 'Yours for Israel with an honourable, safe, peace!' after a correspondence in which both men passionately argue their visions of the state of Israel, American foreign policy, and all aspects of civil rights. The simple fact that Louis has to grow so much if he is to match the pace and dynamism of his son is one of the many attractions of these engging and constantly entertaining letters. The reader can almost feel Allen feel himself expand from something the world moves around to something it moves through (the visions of Blake and the east coming together), but Louis's own journey is equally challenging and makes for no less fascinating reading. The published poet who gives his son harsh but supportive critiques of early work becomes, over the thirty odd years of this correspondence, a poet who is drawn to his now famous son for help in finding a publisher and later for access (through almost a decade of joint reading appearances) to virtually a second poetic career. 'I went down to Stanford Univ. the other day to be subjected to a research experiment with a new drug -- LSD-25 (Lysergic Acid)', Allen writes in May 1959, to which letter Louis responds 'That was an interesting experiment you had ' before going on to discuss the thoughts of Jung and others to such unusual phenomena, and ending up, 'Meanwhile, why not enjoy the sensation and extract some poetry from the illusion?' Both men are engaged in similar pursuits and, to an extent, sympathise with each other, though their paths could hardly be further apart. By this half-way point in the correspondence, both Allen and Louis had been through a lot together, and the changes are clearly visible in the letters. The publication of Howl and other poems in 1956 brought the kind of fame to Allen that Louis had never dreamed of as the self-proclaimed 'poet of Paterson'. But the heart-wrenched 'biography-in-poetry' that is Kaddish, published after the death of Naomi Ginsberg in 1961, must have been one of the reasons why Louis began to see his errant son in a new light, though his first mention of it in these letters is no more than a passing reference. In November of that same year, he writes to Allen on his travels in Tel Aviv: 'I gather you had a favourable review of your Kaddish in The Nation. If you have not already received it, I'll try to procure a copy for you.' That Louis has yet to discover how his son has managed to incorporate his mother's power as witness, and visionary, together with his father's commitment to politics and desire to persuade is one of this book's many cliff-hangers. The family's Jewishness -- a matter of history and politics more than religious practice -- and the horrors of Naomi's condition were twin currents from which Kaddish burst up like an exploded fire hydrant on a city street. For a son who had an erotically-charged relationship with his father, the energy was not surprisingly sexual and political, sexual-political. The vast majority of these letters have that same energy. The son is challenging everything, all values; the father is trying to save what exists for him, has existed for him, what he knows. He is from a world where things endure -- history, poetry, truth; his son is from a world where things must be made, tested, proved. All things to the son are potential bridges, including those the father has come to see as barriers. While the correspondence is gathering pace, Louis glimpses the future. In 1958, he adds a PS to a letter concerning the Russian invasion of North Korea and the notion of 'Beauty, poetry, freedom' so beloved of his son, asking Allen to 'Save this letter and also some of my better ones. I'm saving some of yours. Maybe -- who knows -- parts of our correspondence might be published when we both are dead and gone.' Allen, the champion and brightest light of the Beat generation, saved almost everything, letters, notes, shopping lists, paper cuttings. As time passed, Louis let things slip; letters made their way around the extended family and disappeared, and the surviving correspondence becomes increasingly one-way. But despite all their differences, or maybe because of them, Family Business is not only a unique portrait of the formation of at least one poet, but also a compelling portrait of the opposing forces of tradition and change that re-shaped America and American life over the past half century.
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