Allen Ginsberg and His Brush With Madness
Allen Ginsberg was afraid of his father reading his poem “Howl”. In an interview with the Paris Review published in 1966 he says: “The beginning of the fear with me was, you know, what would my father say to something that I would write. At the time, writing “Howl” — for instance like I assumed when writing it that it was something that could not be published because I wouldn’t want my daddy to see what was in there. About my sex life, being fucked in the ass, imagine your father reading a thing like that, was what I thought.” Ginsberg’s Howl has been one of the most influential poems of our times. Reflecting on the poem he had once said that he didn’t think of writing a poem but just writing something without fear. “Let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind … writ for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears.”
Ginsberg’s homosexuality obviously conflicted with the religious beliefs of the time he was living in. His open acceptance of his sexual desires and preference of ‘young boys’ were again reasons to be frowned upon by the religious and the orthodox sect. Ginsberg also came from a family with a history of mental illness and he himself had spent a good eight months in a mental facility after a hallucination which happened to him while he was mastrubating. A visionary experience in which he heard William Blake’s voice reading a poem called “The Sick Rose.” It went: “O rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night / In the howling storm, / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy, / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.” After the incident, which he described as a rich experience, he admitted himself in a facility where the doctors told him he was not mad just borderline neurotic. But then, who isn’t?
In the year 1990 Harper’s magazine published an interview of Ginsberg with the Washington Times columnist John Lofton. Lofton proved himself to be a rather rude, orthodox and therefore a difficult interviewer who made his dislike for Ginsberg’s “kind of sex” quite obvious from the very beginning. In the irksome interview where Ginsberg managed to keep his humour intact answered the hostile questions in a way only he could have. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.
JOHN LOFTON: In the first section of your poem “Howl” you wrote: “I saw the best young minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Did this also apply to you?
ALLEN GINSBERG: That’s not an accurate quotation. I said the “best minds,” not “the best young minds.” This is what is called hyperbole, an exaggerated statement, sort of a romantic statement. I suppose it could apply to me too, or anybody. People who survived and became prosperous in a basically aggressive, warlike society are in a sense destroyed by madness. Those who freaked out and couldn’t make it, or were traumatized, or artists who starved, or whatnot, they couldn’t make it either. It kinda cuts both ways. There’s an element of humor there.
LOFTON: When you say you suppose this could have applied to you, does this mean you don’t know if you are mad?
GINSBERG: Well, who does? I mean everybody is a little mad.
LOFTON: But I’m asking you.
GINSBERG: You are perhaps taking this a little too literally. There are several kinds of madness: divine madness —
LOFTON: But I’m talking about this in the sense you spoke of in your 1949 poem “Bop Lyrics,” when you wrote: “I’m so lucky to be nutty.”
GINSBERG: You’re misinterpreting the way I’m using the word.
LOFTON: No. I’m asking you a question. I’m not interpreting anything.
GINSBERG: I’m afraid that your linguistic presupposition is that “nutty” as you define it means insanity rather than inspiration. You are interpreting, though you say you aren’t, by choosing one definition and excluding another. So I think you’ll have to admit you are interpreting.
LOFTON: Actually, I don’t admit that.
GINSBERG: You don’t want to admit nuttin’! But you want me to admit something. Come on. Come off it. Don’t be a prig.
LOFTON: I’m just trying to understand what you meant by what you wrote. But this question of madness.
GINSBERG: There’s also another background. In Zen Buddhism there is wild wisdom, or crazy wisdom, crazy in the sense of wild, unlimited, unbounded. Or as in jazz, when someone plays a beautiful riff or extemporizes, they say, “Crazy, man,”
LOFTON: But I am interested in this question of your possible madness. It’s not a gratuitous question. There is a history of madness in your family.
GINSBERG: Very much so.
LOFTON: Your mom died in 1956 in a mental institution. Before that. in 1949, when you were twenty-three. you spent eight months in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. What was this psychiatric disability and why did you spend just eight months in this institute?
GINSBERG: Well, I had a sort of visionary experience in which I heard William Blake’s voice. It was probably an auditory hallucination, but it was a very rich experience.
LOFTON: This happened while you were masturbating, right?
GINSBERG: Yes, but after.
LOFTON: I want to ask you about this psychiatric disability.
GINSBERG: No, no, no. no, no, no, no, no. Sir, first of all your tone is too aggressive. You have to soften your tone, because there’s an element of aggression here. There’s an element almost like a police interrogation here.
PS: An audio link of the Big Table Chicago Reading, 1959 where Ginsberg read his poem for the first time.