December 8, 1999, Review of “Screaming for Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg” by Caveney Graham

Published in the Uncategorized

Review of Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg

Author: Caveney Graham

Broadway Books

Special Markets Department

Random House, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, NY 10036

216 pages; bibliography, index

hardcover

7 1/2 x 8 1/2

Price: unknown

ISBN: 0-7679-0278-5

Reportedly, one of Allen’s final instructions to Bob Rosenthal, his literary executor and long-time assistant, was “not to let them turn me into a museum.” It is ironic that the entire concept has for many years been merely academic, and the process nurtured by no one more than Ginsberg himself. He taped everything, he saved everything, and he was always attentive in the presence of a camera.

Since we already have Barry Miles’s extensive biography of Allen Ginsberg (even Ginsberg himself was surprised to discover things he had forgotten or never known by reading the book), do we really need another “Life of Alle Ginsberg”? Well, this one picks up the story and takes it to its conclusion, for one thing. In addition, some of the photographs, although rather snapshotish near the end, are pleasant and interesting.

The title, Screaming with Joy, comes from perhaps historically the most controversial of Allen’s lines in “Howl,” and refers to the somewhat surprising-by-1950s-standards reaction of some of the best minds of his generation to receiving the . . . um, sexual attentions of sailors (Ginsberg’s frank and precise term is still unprintable in a family newspaper, 45 years hence). But there is very little joy expressed in this cursory survey of Ginsberg’s life and career.

Would Ginsberg have learned anything new about himself in this book? I don’t know. I didn’t. Will it serve as an adequate introduction to the average reader? I guess it depends on what they know already, and if they want a breezy litany of dates and events, this could do the trick. In its favor, the book is largely accurate, fair and level-headed, no small compliment for a book on a subject as controversial and complicated as this one. But misspelling the names of Malcolm X and Herbert Huncke in the author’s introduction doesn’t help, nor does understating the date of a photograph of Ginsberg and Neal Cassady by at least a decade, or referring to Alex B. Toklas, Theolonious Monk, Ann Waldman, Galek Rinpoche, Che Geuvara, “narcicissim,” a trip to Shangai, China, and, in one for the ages, Allen’s visit to “Bombay and Deli” (doesn’t anyone proofread or fact-check at Random House anymore?). And the clumsy self-consciousness of his sophomoric style (“his Jewishness, as indelible a part of his identity as circumcision,” and “[in his homoerotic poems] Ginsberg brings a whole new meaning to the concept of the oral tradition”) will certainly take some getting used to. In addition, I am certain that Ginsberg did not first become acquainted with the works of William Blake via William Burroughs, as he often spoke of hearing several of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience recited by his father, the poet-teacher Louis Ginsberg, when he was a child.

As someone who moved to Boulder to apprentice with the poet in 1979, and worked for him in various capacities until his death in 1997, I have avoided reading anything about the poet for almost 20 years. It was always the human who lived passionately and honestly that attracted me, and I was always slightly irritated with Allen as media figure. Screaming with Joy skates quickly along the surface of that public persona and relates the series of events of his life like cultural markers. But it’s essentially a slightly racy primary school picture book. Or, as a friend of mine put it, “it’s a coffeetable book, but for people with extremely small coffeetables.”