http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/07/holy-barbarians-continued-.html
by Larry Harnisch
July 8, 2009
Reading "Holy Barbarians" has turned into a curious case of role
reversal. I was a youngster when the book was published and the beats
and squares who populate Lawrence Lipton's study of the Venice scene
would have been my parents' contemporaries -- although my folks were
a bit older.
Today, however, although the Beats and squares have remained in their
20s and early 30s, I'm old enough to be one of their parents -- and
this shift in ages provides an odd perspective. I'm apt to be a
little tougher on them than if I'd read the book when I was younger,
and I'm also a bit more charitable toward these earnest, naive angry
young artists telling the truth.
Even so, I bogged down in Lipton's lengthy defense of smoking
marijuana, which may have been dangerously revolutionary in the 1950s
but is trite and passe these days. For the record, Lipton didn't even
smoke marijuana, which the Beats preferred to call "pod" rather than
"pot." But he was "given a pass," which tells you something about the
minimum requirements to be a beatnik. And I'll have more to say about
that later.
In fact, "Holy Barbarians" had just about gotten a one-way ticket to
the discard pile when I came across an incident that's absolutely
hilarious. I can't guess why Lipton buried it in the middle of the
book, but he did.
He's describing a reading in Los Angeles by Allen Ginsberg and
Gregory Corso that's interrupted by a heckler. It's some square, of
course, who wants to fight. Instead, Ginsberg starts undressing and
dares the heckler to take off his clothes.
"Holy Barbarians," Pages 195-198
The reading was to be held in a big old-fashioned house that was
occupied by two or three of the Coastline editors, living in a kind
of Left Wing bohemian collective household, furnished what there was
of furniture, which wasn't much in atrociously bad taste, nothing
like the imaginative and original decor of the Beat Generation pad,
even the most poverty-stricken.
I consented at their request to conduct the reading, "chair the
meeting," as these people are in the habit of saying. To them
everything is a meeting. In this case they got more than they
bargained for. Allen showed up high mostly on wine, to judge by the
olfactory evidence and, after an introduction by me, in which I tried
to spell out something of the background of this "renaissance," he
launched into a vigorous rendition of "Howl." "Launched" is the word
for it. It was stormy, wild and liquid. In his excitement he tipped
over an open bottle of wine he had brought with him, spilling it over
himself, over me and over his friend Gregory Corso who was with him
and was also scheduled to read.
Allen and Gregory had refused to start till Anais Nin arrived, and
now that she was seated in the audience Allen addressed himself
exclusively to her. He had never met Anais before and knew her only
from Henry Miller's books. She had written the preface to Miller's
"Tropic of Cancer" in the Paris edition of the book. He was sure that
Anais was one person who would be able to dig what he was putting
down. For him there was no one else in the audience but "beautiful
Anais Nin ." That she had long ago come to the parting of the ways
with Henry Miller and was making her own scene now, a very different
scene from the one they had once made together on the Left Bank of
Paris, made no difference to Allen. She was still, to him, the Anais
Nin of the Henry Miller saga, a fabulous figure out of a still
brightly shimmering past. Artistically, he felt, she was his nearest
of kin, and Anais very graciously acted out the role he had cast her
in that night.
The audience, except for Anais and the people we had brought with us
from Venice West, was a square audience, the sort of an audience you
would find at any liberal or "progressive" how that word lingers on
even though the song is over fund-raising affair of the faithful who
are still waiting for the Second Coming. Few of them had come knowing
what to expect. They never read anything but the party and
cryptoparty press. The avant-garde quarterlies are so much Greek to
them. Most of them don't even know such magazines exist any more.
They associate that sort of thing with the little magazines of the
twenties which were swallowed up with the advent of the Movement, the
real Movement (capital M), in the thirties and transformed into
weapons in the class struggle. The few who had heard rumors of what
was going on in San Francisco and Venice West were there as slummers
might go to a Negro whorehouse in New Orleans, to be with, briefly,
but not of. But even they were not prepared for Howl, or for the
drunken, ecstatic, tortured, enraptured reading Allen was giving it
that night. A very moving performance, for all his tangle-tongue
bobbles and rambling digressions. He was reading from the book, which
had just came out, but he changed words, improvised freely, and
supplied verbally the obscenities that the printer had in a few cases deleted.
As it happened, Allen and Gregory were not the only ones in the place
who had been drinking. There was one other in the audience. He was
someone who had drifted in, having somewhere picked up one of the
pluggers advertising the reading. At first he applauded Allen's
reading at all the wrong places and too loudly. Then he took to
cheering, the kind of cheers that are more like the jeers they are in
tended to be. I watched him and it struck me that he looked and
sounded like a brother Elk on the loose, or an American Legion
patriot on a convention binge. When Allen got to the poem America,
the drunken square was visibly aroused. He began to heckle. Allen
ignored him and, at one point, interrupted the reading to ask the
heckler, very gently, to hear him out and he would be glad to talk to
him about it later and listen to any comments or criticism he cared
to make. That, and disapproving scowls from some members of the
audience who, being squares themselves and sober dislike anyone
"making a scene," stopped him for a few minutes.
Gregory Corso now got up to read or, rather, sat down to read
Gregory, unlike Allen, is the gentle, relaxed persuader rather than
the shouter. At least he was that night. When the drunk started
heckling him, too, he turned the face of an injured angel to him.
When that failed he reversed himself and tried shock therapy.
"Listen, creep, I'm trying to get through to you with words, with
magic, see? I'm trying to make you see, and understand "
The square had an answer for that. "Then why don't you write so a
person can understand you, instead of all that highfalutin crap?"
"You will understand," Gregory replied patiently, "if you open your
self up to the images. Try to get with it, man."
You think you're smart, don't you?"
Gregory ignored the remark and went on with his reading. Nothing
could have angered the drunk more. It brought out the righteous
citizen in him.
"Think you know it all, don't you? I know your kind. It's punks like
you that are to blame for all this -all this " he sputtered, unable
to make up his mind which of the crimes punks like this were to blame
for were equal to the enormity of the occasion. He tried again, gave
up, turned a beet red and, to cover his chagrin, launched into a
tirade of uninspired, stereotyped, barroom profanity, ending with,
inevitably, an invitation to "step outside and settle this thing like a man!"
Gregory grinned. "Yeh, I know, you want to fight. Okay, let's fight.
Right here. Not with fists, you cornbalL That's baby stuff. Let's
fight with a mans weapon with words. Images, metaphors, magic. Open
your mouth, man, and spit out a locomotive, a red locomotive,
belching obscene smoke and black magic. Then I'll say:Anafogasta.
Rattle-boom. Gnu's milk. And you'll say: Fourth of July, Hydrogen
bomb! Gasoline! See? Real obscenities. . . ."
The drunk was indignant. He was outraged. When he heard snickering in
the audience he started toward the front of the room, menacingly,
repeating his challenge to step outside and settle this thing.
"You're yella, that's what. Like all you wise guys. You're yella "
Ginsberg got up and went forward to meet the drunk.
"All right," he said, "all right. You want to do something big, don't
you? Something brave. Well, go on, do something really brave. Take
off your clothes!"
That stopped the drunk dead in his tracks.
Ginsberg moved a step toward him. "Go on, let everybody see how brave
you are. Take your clothes off!"
The drunk was stunned speechless. He fell back a step and Allen moved
toward him, tearing off his own shirt and undershirt and flinging
them at the heckler's feet. "You're scared, aren't you?" he taunted
him. "You're afraid." He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and
started kicking off his trousers. "Look," he cried. "I'm not afraid.
Go on, take your clothes off. Let's see how brave you are," he
challenged him. He flung his pants down at the champ's feet and then
his shorts, shoes and socks, with a curious little hopping dance as
he did so. He was stark naked now. The drunk had retired to the back
of the room. Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. The audience just
sat mute, staring, fascinated, petrified, till Allen danced back to
his seat, looking I couldn't help thinking at the moment with inward
amusement like Marcel Marceau, the great French mime, doing his
hopping little David and Goliath dance. Then the room was suddenly
filled with an explosion of nervous applause, cheers, jeers, noisy
argument. Our hosts, the editors of Coastlines, had been having a
huddle on the sidelines. Now one of them, Mel Weisburd, dashed up
front and stood over Allen menacingly.
"All right," he shouted, "put your clothes on and get out! You're not
up in San Francisco now. This is a private house . . . you're in
someone else's living room. . . . You've violated our hospitality. . . .
"If this is what you call . . ."
He looked over at me as if to say, "You re chairman here, do some thing."
I rapped for order like a proper chairman and announced the next
order of business. Gregory Corso would read another group of poems
and then we would hear from Allen Ginsberg once more with his poems
Sunflower Sutra and A Supermarket in California. Corso was all for
leaving at once. "We'll go somewhere where we can get good and drunk
and take Anais Nin with us." But Allen shook his head and quietly
put his clothes on, one piece at a time, in slow motion, smiling to
himself with half-closed eyes. A sly, mysterious, inner-directed Buddha smile.
The reading went on amid general approval and with closer, more
respectful attention than before. The incident had sobered up the
drunk. When the reading was over he approached Allen and said, loud
enough for everybody to hear, that he was sorry he had made such an
ass of himself and where could he buy a copy of Howl?
Through it all Anais Nin, faithful to the role in which the poets had
cast her, sat imperiously still, only slightly disdainful of the
hubbub, like a queen on a throne.
.
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