“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”
Allen Ginsberg, course.
In a renovated auto-repair garage in San Francisco on Oct. 7, 1955, 22-year-old poet Michael McClure read from his own work, after which another poet, Ginsberg, took the stage. He read Howl and made history.
McClure died at age 87 on May 4, 2020 from complications of a stroke.
McClure’s poem on that day in 1955 had been For the Death of 100 Whales. It related to the wanton killing of whales, and like Ginsberg’s, to the cruelty and craziness at the heart of American culture, perhaps all culture more than some of the time. The cruelty does not fill the heart, not all hearts, perhaps no hearts, but it is there in some degree in all.
Both men threw down the gauntlet early. Neil Genzlinger quotes McClure in a The New York Times article on May 6:
“In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before,” he [McClure] wrote. “We had gone beyond a point of no return — and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void — to the land without poetry — to the spiritual drabness.”
McClure’s career encompassed poetry, novels, lyrics, plays, he certainly challenged existing moral codes, and he experienced the censorship of the day. The AR recalls an American author of an earlier period. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and other works were banned in the USA for 27 years. Many, many other authors have been punished for writing their truth. The list is vast: Salman Rushdie, J. K. Rowling, Nadine Gordimer, D. H. Lawrence, Goethe, Einstein, nearly everyone in the Nazi era, in the Soviet Union, in China, under the Taliban, under ISIS, under the Catholic church. It could, of course, mean being murdered, being burned at the stake, being eviscerated.
Howl was the subject of an obscenity trial in the USA. On 1957, a judge ruled it was not obscene. At least on that occasion, the rule of law in its best sense prevailed. Long may it live.
On a lighter note, for a bit of fun McClure would join with others in improvising lyrics, in one case with Janis Joplin for one of her most famous songs (again from Genslinger): “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.” Her best friends all drove Porsches and she had to make amends.
A sweet part of the NYT article is a video excerpt from Martin Scorcese’s 1978 The Last Waltz, featuring the The Band and friends, including McClure. He’s 45 at that time. He appears briefly on stage and to a receptive crowd recites in Middle English lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:
And, yes, Chaucer had been censored in the USA. Too much sex.
What would they all be thinking now, these Ginsbergs, McClures, Kerouacs? 1955 is a long time ago. Kerouac finished On the Road in 1951.
I dare not ask my friend, M. A. Titmarsh. His views on the vanity of the human species are well known. He sees people for the most part as “abominably foolish and selfish.”
There came that brief intake of breath after WWII at least in the West. As Noam Chomsky and others remind us, war did not end in 1945. But in the Western world, one could drift into a happy sleep during the fifties, the economy was less inequitable, evils were not gone, just well hidden, many of us in a sleep Ginsberg, Kerouac and McClure and other authors hoped to wake us from.
By 1969, Kerouac was dead of alcoholism. There had been the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. Murder at Altamont. The summer of love had passed.
They won’t give peace a chance/That was just a dream some of us had. (Joni Mitchell)
The Authorial Rabbit also noted the passing recently of American television network communications executive Gil Schwartz, age 67. He died of a heart attack.
He had had another identity, as Stanley Bing, under which wrote business satire for Forbes and Esquire. He also wrote novels. That presence in one person of the corporate mindset and the individual author’s truth is heartening.
The AR would ask, how are the best minds of our generation doing today?
J. B. Thompson 