“Howl” (1956)

DOC 3: Imagination

Wednesday, April 7, 2009

Jack Kerouac—the greatest of the “Beats” reads from his 1957 novel On the Road

(on the Steve Allen Show)

NB “Beat” ThemesLandscape—Music—Spirituality—

Authenticity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzCF6hgEfto&NR=1

The Famous “Scroll”

The 1950sBackground

• War Dep’t Film—Red Nightmare (1957) Leave It to Beaver meets The Twilight Zone. Our enforced conformity is better than their enforced conformity?

• Elaine Tyler May Homeward Bound (1988)Terror of nuclear annihilation. Refuge in suburban, marital bliss?

The “Beat” Generation

• Term coined by John Clellon Holmes in “This Is The Beat Generation” The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952

• “In the pale, attentive face [in the photograph], with its soft eyes and intelligent mouth, there was no hint of corruption. It was a face which could only be deemed criminal through an enormous effort of righteousness. Its only complaint seemed to be: "Why don't people leave us alone?" It was the face of a beat generation.”

• cf. 1920s “Lost” Generation

“Beat” (cont’d)

Over time, Kerouac and the other Beats expanded the original meaning of the term.

• Underworld—“tired” or “beaten down.”

• Not exclusively negative—“upbeat”

• Even religious—“beatific”

• Or musical—being "on the beat:"

The “Beats”

“The Beats were characters with an awareness of each other as personages in the sacred drama of each other’s lives.”

Jack Kerouac 1922-1969

• On the Road (1957)

• “100% personal honesty”

William S. Burroughs 1914-1997• Naked Lunch (1959)

Gary Snyder (1930-)

“My karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom”

Peter Orlovsky 1933-

Allen Ginsberg 1927-1997

Major Works• Howl (1956)• Kaddish (1961)• Plutonian Ode (1981)

San Francisco Poetry Renaissance• Movement born in the famous Gallery Six reading at

3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco (Oct.7,1955).• Kerouac remembered “It was a wild night. And I

was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven when [Allen Ginsberg] was reading his—[howling] his poem [“Howl”]—drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling “Go! Go!” (like a jam session).

Howl (Part I)

• One sentence mad ride across America and many lives…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfBzCG4H8uo

Humorwho demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of

hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia…

New York Times Magazine article

“The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.”

Realismwho talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to

Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes…

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish…

Onomatopoeia

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night…

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio…

Howl (Part II)

• Moloch— “or Molech, the Canaanite fire god, whose worship was marked by parents burning their children as propitiatory sacrifice. “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21)” (Ginsberg’s note)

• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1925)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfBzCG4H8uo

Incantation/Invocation/Climax• (Me)What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their

skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? • (all the males in Peterson 110)Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and

unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

• (Me)Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the

loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

The Omnipresent Moloch

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

The Omnipresent Moloch (cont’d)

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

The Literal Moloch

Howl (Part III)

• Original title of poem was “Howl for Carl Solomon”

• Litany

• Resolution

Litany/Resolution• (Women in Peterson 110)

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland • (me)

where you must feel very strange • (Women in Peterson 110)

I'm with you in Rockland • (me)

• where you're madder than I am

Litany (cont’d)• (Women in Peterson 110) I'm with you in Rockland • (me)

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

• (Women in Peterson 110) I'm with you in Rockland • (me)• where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our

own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

The End

• (Women in Peterson 110) I'm with you in Rockland

• (me)

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

Common Questions re: “Howl”

• Why are we reading this?

• Who was this weird guy?

• Isn’t he just crazy?

• Is this a good poem?

• Is this a poem?

• Etc.

Instant Acclaim

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

• Paterson 1946-1963

• “Introduction” to Howl and Other Poems

Robert Lowell 1917-1977

• The “raw” and the “cooked.”

William Blake (1757-1827)

• Songs of Experience (1794)

O rose, thou art sick! Has found out thy bedThe invisible worm Of crimson joy,That flies in the night And his dark secret love In the howling storm Does thy life destroy.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

• Leaves of Grass (1855)

First lines of HowlI

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…

First Lines of HowlI

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…

Bebop/Improvisational Jazz

• “Spontaneous bop poetics” (Ginsberg)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z10gZTxdHhQ&NR=1

1957

• 520 copies seized at the Embarcadero by S.F. Customs

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao arrested by undercover agents at City Lights bookstore.

Ruling by Judge Clayton Horn

• “…a work is not to be judged on a few “unpalatable” words lifted from context, but as a whole—and then, from its effect not upon childish minds but upon the “average adult in the community.””

• There is no obscenity in a work that has “redeeming social importance.”

• (Judge Horn “regularly teaches Bible class at a Sunday at a Sunday school”)

“Howl” on trial…

• “threat to the fabric of American society”• Berkeley professor Marc Schorer: “an indictment

of those elements in modern society that, in the author’s view, are destructive of the best qualities in human nature and of the best minds. Those elements are predominantly materialism, conformity,and mechanization leading toward war…or modern life as a state of hell.”

Ginsberg on “Howl”

• “[The poem is part of a plan] to crash over America in a great wave of beauty.”

• “Howl” is an affirmation… it’s about mercy and compassion”

Robert Lowell’s Assessment

• Re Beat vs. Establishment poetry—he saw himself “Hanging like a question mark” between the two camps, “I don’t know if it is a death-rope or a life-line.”

• Consider Howl as a quintessential expression of the creative and cultural tensions of the 50s. “Us vs. them” climate—optimism vs. skepticism — complacency vs. complaint — sweetness vs. dissention.”

Elaine Tyler May

• Family and Suburbs

• Look at the sacrifices, the dreams relinquished by the couples in the Kelly Long Term Longitudinal Study

• Note the many other similarities—e.g. religious crisis (in the marriage of Joseph and Emily Burns)

New York Times Magazine article• Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing

a car.• In a graduating class of ex-GI's, intending to become a comfortable cog in

the largest corporation to be found.• A little younger, a little more bewildered, caught in Illinois when the first

non-virgin club was uncovered. • A young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly

drinking himself into relaxation.• The energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, playing Russian Roulette with

a jalopy.• The secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or

wait.• The mechanic beering up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a

whim.• But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging.

Betty Friedan

• Do “the best minds” of Ginsberg’s America also have “the problem that has no name”?

• What is the place of women in Ginsberg’s vision of artistic revolt?

• “