Holy Barbarians Revisited

'Holy Barbarians' Revisited

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/09/holy-barbarians-revisited.html

September 2, 2009

Note: In late June and early July, I wrote about Lawrence Lipton's
1959 book on the beatniks of Venice West, "Holy Barbarians." I was
particularly interested in the account of a reading by Allen Ginsberg
in which he responded to a heckler by taking off his clothes.

I recently heard from Mel Weisburd, one of the sponsors of that
reading, who figures in Lipton's account. He stated that Lipton's
account of the reading was inaccurate and highly slanted to his point
of view. For example, Weisburd never said or demanded that Ginsberg
"get out," nor was he in any way hostile toward him and others in the
reading. He respectfully asked him to get dressed because there was a
child in the house.

He has kindly shared his experiences with the Daily Mirror.
--

If you are able to get John Maynard's book on Venice West, which I
urge you to do, at least from the library, which documents the career
and life of Lawrence Lipton, you will see that in many ways he was a
remarkable though complex man. He succeeded in many of his
"commercial" works and writing, particularly in the detective mystery
novel field (with his first wife Craig Rice) and in TV, radio script
writing, books and promotion and publicity. He was on a treadmill all
of his life and had to compromise with the commercial world.

Then he discovered the tiny world of poetry and the little magazine
which he saw as an underground, anti-academic, anti-elitist,
anti-social movement which in Los Angeles he attempted to dominate --
and in our case -- to take over our magazine, Coastlines Literary
Magazine, which ran during the '50s. At the same time, living in
Venice he met a group of poets --such as Stuart and Suzanne Perkoff,
Tony Scibella, John Thomas and others. From their deprived life style
he codified the concept of "disaffiliation" in an extreme form --
from job, consumption, conventional life styles etc. I was editor of
Coastlines at the time at night, newly married with child, and worked
as an air pollution control inspector with the Los Angeles County Air
Pollution Control District (forerunner of the AQMD) and felt that I
had a constructive, useful job in the fight against smog. Of course,
I refused. That began a culture war between him and us, the
Coastliners. We were the "squares"; he took it upon himself to
represent the Barbarians.

Lipton wanted to use me as an example as one who drops out from his
job, maybe even marriage and join him in Venice. He began touting
poets of Venice West as great poets who had dropped out. I wrote an
article entitled "The Merchant of Venice" which attacked him and his
third rate poets in contrast to substantial poets and writers
throughout Los Angeles like Ann Stanford, Thomas McGrath, Lawrence
Spingarn, Gene Frumkin and many others. As a young man, I took what
Lipton said about me personally. Later, he quoted from my report on
my LSD experience, as an example of a pure experience, but then
attacked me viciously as a "Sunday slummer in Paradise" in his book,
even though I ventured to be the first in the literary life of Los
Angeles to have had that experience. (1956.)

According to John Maynard, Lipton succeeded in persuading or finding
(I don't know which) a high-paid executive by the name of Charles
Foster to drop out in the way he wanted me to do. You have to read
Maynard's book to appreciate the full extent of this tragic case.
Others in his entourage suffered similar fates. There was
considerable anti-Lipton sentiment among his young poets. Perkoff,
who was actually a good poet, referred to Lipton's book as "Holy Horseshit."

Three versions of my account of the Ginsberg were published in
Grasslimb, a San Diego journal, in the long article "Gene and I" in
Blue Mesa Review, published by the University of New Mexico (where
Gene Frumkin taught) after he died in 2006.
--

THE COASTLINERS

the Other Generation of the 50's

By Mel Weisburd
melweisburd@yahoo.com

One evening in October 1956, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso entered
a three-story, Tudor brick and stone house on Virginia Road in an old
middle-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. Just as he had done in
Gallery 6 in San Francisco earlier that year, Ginsberg read Howl,
Sunflower Sutra and other poems to a gathering of the local literati.
Some were enthusiastic, some ambivalent, some shocked. The reaction
of a young man who was probably drunk was clear. His ears heard the
whining, shrill voice of an unkempt poet. He interrupted the reading
to lambaste Ginsberg for his negativity. The verbal exchange that
ensued began to verge on a fist fight, when Ginsberg suddenly
challenged the man to take off his clothes instead and then stripped
until he was completely naked.

In this manner the Beat Generation was introduced to Los Angeles.
Present at this reading were the diarist Anais Nin and Lawrence
Lipton, a former pulp fiction writer and founder to be of
"Venice-West," each with their own entourage. The reading was
sponsored by Coastlines literary magazine which was founded by Gene
Frumkin and myself and published from this house which was owned by
Barding Dahl, the fiction editor.

Ginsberg was barely known to us at the time, and while his reading
was heartfelt, his poetry on first impression did not seem to differ
much from the material we were receiving in the mail and publishing.
Much of that writing was anti-academic and non-traditional. It
protested social conditions, the conservative values of the
mainstream, the industrial military complex, the nuclear threat and
McCarthyism. While we agreed with the intent, the manner of complaint
was becoming repetitious. We were looking for new ways to express
these same ideas and feelings, hopefully to a more mainstream
audience. In those days we were anxious about the presence of
government agents who were in the habit of attending events like
ours. If a local undercover cop had been in the crowd, we could
easily be cited for indecent exposure or gathering illegally. It also
occurred to Frumkin and myself that we had never before seen the
stranger who attacked Ginsberg and that he might have been an agent
provocateur.

This was, without our being aware, a defining event of the 50's and
this reading has since become legend. In fact, the entire year of
1956 was loaded with defining events. Earlier, we accepted an article
by Lipton entitled "American's Literary Underground." It called for
"disaffiliation" from job, political loyalty and middle class mores,
the assumption of 'voluntary poverty' and denial of the "Social Lie"
(the lie of the assumed social contract in which the government gives
more to the people than the people to the government). Then we met
Lipton at the New School of Art in Los Angeles where we sponsored a
poetry reading of the works of Bert Meyers, Tom McGrath and Lipton.
Afterwards, Lipton proposed that Coastlines become a vehicle for the
'new writing,' under his tutelage. According to him, writers can be
true only if they shun 'the thickening centers of corruption.'

Because we didn't want to emphasize one group of writers over
another, we turned him
down. We argued that his notions were unrealistic and inappropriate
for Los Angeles. In addition to the damage done by McCarthyism to the
educational and cultural assets of Southern California --the film and
entertainment industries and education -- Los Angeles was a socially
desolate, repressed city, a city where single people of the 50's were
often isolated. They were seeking attachment, not disaffiliation.
Besides, art was an existential affair and all experience was valid.
Right under our noses, a number of the world's greatest writers were
working for the movie industry. 'Thickening corruption' was the theme
of the novels written as a byproduct of the experiences of such
writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West,
Budd Schulberg, Howard Fast, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Lowry. Many of
the movies they wrote reflected this complex mood of complicity and
involvement, particularly in the film noir of the time. In fact, the
novelists working as screen writers within the studio system called
themselves insiders, meaning their novels could not have been written
in such a socially relevant manner had they been disaffiliated to the
side lines.

Also some of us had concerns more germane to Southern California than
to San Francisco, such as the local, but immense military-industrial
complex with its 'think tanks' which created a C.P. Snow type of
two-culture conflict in many intellectuals (as represented by the
writings of Curtis Zahn in the magazine), the nuclear threat, the
alienation and dispersal of "The Non-Existent City," and, of course,
the unique symbol of this all, smog.

Coastlines was the name Frumkin and I gave the magazine in 1955.
Ocean waves rebounding from the coasts of California suggested to us
lines of poetry, while the long coastline symbolized the continuing
tradition of literature with its many variations in the forms of
jagged indentations, coves and peninsulas. We also saw it as a
boundary between the awareness of the land and of the unconscious in
terms of the immense ocean. Since the earth's surface is mostly
comprised of water, the planet itself is mostly subsurface and
unconscious, to be mined and farmed by poetry.

As the first editor of Coastlines, my opening editorial sought simply
to "discover the source of writing in Los Angeles." That was meant to
be more than rhetoric; it initiated the search for writers in a vast,
urban wilderness. The second intent was to "fully exercise the right
of free speech" which was more than cliche, since many social themes
and avenues of literary exploration were shut down by McCarthyism. We
saw ourselves as partisans daring to publish any material of merit,
regardless of content. To make that point, we dedicated the first
issue to the passionate and socially aware poet Edwin Rolfe, who
happened to have been a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and
who had died then.

In retrospect, a Coastliner was one associated with the writers and
editors of the magazine and who were originally brought together by
the poet and teacher Thomas McGrath. Like the beats and Lipton's
barbarians, Coastliners were in the process of transition from the
literary traditions of the 30's and 40's to something different.
Ginsberg, for example, transformed his political orientation to a
point ever as agitated as the 30's, but essentially without
direction; Lipton renounced his world of the radical left of the
Chicago 30's. The Coastliners hoped to presage a freer and more
creative left to come. They sought to re-assert a poetry relevant to
the larger society and pursued socially conscious themes, but treated
in an individual and personal manner. They often used the devices of
surrealism and were receptive to Zen and other influences. They only
differed from the writers at Venice West in that their creativity was
not contingent on a life style.

Through McGrath, the Coastliners consciously assimilated the
influences of Hart Crane,
Berthold Brecht, William Butler Yeats, Andre Breton and Rainer Maria
Rilke ­ and something called a poetry wheel which through its
randomness taught the element of surprise in language and surrealism.
Thus, our central concern was above all the craft of poetry geared to
the socio-political concerns of the 50's.

Another important defining element was the introduction of mescaline
and LSD (acid) in the mid-fifties. Contrary to accepted history,
first exposures were by non-beats for whom Aldous Huxley remained the
archetype, not the Timothy Leary to come. In Los Angeles, the
psychiatrist Dr. Oscar Janiger administered some 3,000 doses of LSD
to 1,000 volunteers from 1954 to 1962. I was the first in our group
to be given LSD, followed by Gene Frumkin and Alvaro Cardona-Hine.

Most importantly, the effects extended beyond the immediate; they
tended to persist in some form, if only in re-activatable memories,
across the life span of the individual. Frumkin grew in the direction
of a poetry that is a hybrid of realistic narrative and 'language
poetry' (language in itself as an entity). He regards
"poetry-thought" as occurring beyond ordinary cognition, which can be
construed to be something like an expression of linguistic substrate
in the sense of Chomsky's 'deep structures.' Alvaro Cardona-Hine in
his acid trip1 reported that the "five senses have taken off in
different directions and are bringing back reports of their wonderful
discoveries." 1 Thereafter he grew as a multi-media artist: poet,
composer, novelist, painter.

The ingestion of acid altered consciousness in many creative artists
in highly individual ways. When positive (many were bad), "the
experience" had the tendency to nullify categories, reconcile
contradictions and unify disparate concepts, rendering Beat v. Square
meaningless.2

After LSD was banned in 1962 it was impossible to study the long-term
effects, but I believe the total recall I've had of the minute
details of this experience 44 years later is a major sign of it--like
a single, powerful religious or other peak experience can permanently
alter certain aspects of consciousness and perception.3 For me, it
appeared to facilitate (1) non-linear, multi-dimensional perception
and (2) reflexive perceptions of one's own brain states. One of the
immediate effects of my experience was a feeling of omnipotence --
that I could cross professional and occupational lines with the
surprising result that I emerged as an inter-multi-disciplinarian.
Paradoxically, I believe the experience empowered me in my life-long
career in the field of environmental protection to the extent that I
founded and ran an environmental engineering company for some 15
years, perhaps the only English Major to have ever have done so. On
retirement I began writing a novel based on ecphory, the retrieval of
systematically stimulated memories.

The experience not only inspired poems, novels and paintings but also
impacted popular culture.4 These changes produced profound and
widespread effects both directly and indirectly in succeeding
decades, not only on artists, but professions and vocations and
society as a whole, often in extremely subtle ways, amounting to a
silent revolution. The effects span the spectrum from the most
extreme affecting, personal states of consciousness in poetry and art
on one end to the most detached, objective point of view in science
and technology on the other. Objectivity alone perceives forms at
different scales of realities which evoke aesthetic pleasure in
themselves. Scientific detachment sometimes can became analogous to
the notion of the sound of one hand clapping.

In my view, the 50's was the most ideal period in history for such
drug experiences because they were taken by relatively few, mostly
for the purpose to experience higher levels of creativity. By the end
of the 60's and up until the present day hard drugs began to be used
on an epidemic scale for escape, sensation and ultimately out of
addiction, with dire results.

While the beat movement in Lipton's Venice West was very short lived,
often with tragic results, looking back, it is clear that the
contribution of the beats to the culture and lifestyles of the U.S.
and much of the world continues to reverberate through the
generations of the hippies, flower children, street people, punk,
yuppies, in the rock and roll/ rap/ slam/ performance/ spoken word
performances we see today and in the continuing interest in the poets
and writers of that time, especially Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti,
Di Prima and Burroughs.

The greatest contribution of the beats was in liberating many human
latencies in life-style, language and sexual mores that had been
repressed by social and political taboos. They broke the pervasive
hold of the new criticism and ended the idolatry of T.S. Eliot. But
at the same time they also contributed, although inadvertently, to
the loss of an organized, effective political left in this country
implicit in the creed of disaffiliation codified by Lipton in 1959.

The Coastliners on the other hand never lost their left orientation,
but also never comprised a distinctive school of poetry with a set
program. They worked as individuals refining their art down the
decades. Many of them are still alive and writing on their own
resources. Others like the poetry of Bert Meyers and Naomi Replansky
are being rediscovered today. Perhaps the pendulum has swung, and
given the times, similar perspectives that radiate to social concerns
can be seen and new voices heard.
--

This article was originally published in The Lummox Journal, May/June 2003
--

Footnotes:
1. Alvaro Cardona-Hine, "The Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Experience,"
(date and publication unknown.)

2. David Ebin (ed.), The Drug Experience, "2. A Symposium", Ronald A.
Sandison, p. 378, The Orion Press, N.Y., 1961. -- "The introduction
of LSD ... has transformed the entire hospital, because the whole
atmosphere engendered by LSD has spread throughout the hospital and,
in fact, forms an essential part of the hospital culture. If LSD is
given in a large institutional setting, treatment will be ineffective
unless this transformation has occurred."

3. Mel Weisburd, "Lysergic Acid and the Creative Experience," in
"Poets of the Non-Existent City, Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era,"
Estelle Gershgoren Novak (ed.), University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque, 2002.

4. Ebin, ibid.

Mr. Weisburd is completing a book-length memoir on the Coastliners
and other major events that took place in the 50's. He is currently
seeking a publisher for this and other works. He is the author of "A
Life of Windows and Mirrors, Selected Poems," 2005, and "The Gloria
Poems," 2009, both published by Conflux Press.

.