The New Criterion

Why did many writers—mainstream as well as countercultural—take a shine to “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem, which famously begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”? This new collection of appreciations strives to uphold the importance of the poem that romanticized “angelheaded hipsters,” battled Moloch, “whose blood is running money!,” and otherwise deprecated the Establishment. For the undergraduate Rick Moody, at least, “Howl” offered an alternative to his main bugaboo:

Fuck Robert Frost. Fuck stopping in woods on a snowy evening. I hated Robert Frost. I hated bucolic imagery. I hated the reverence for nature, because what was nature anyhow but subdivisions in the suburbs and malls and nuclear power plants and petrochemical everything.

Moody’s colossal misreading of Frost is overshadowed only by the shallowness of his aesthetic standards, eschewing anything ostensibly bourgeois or even scientific. I emphasize “ostensible”: his is a mere attitudinal stance. While the virulence of Moody’s contribution is not representative of this collection’s essays, there is a self-conscious hipness throughout. When the relatively level-headed Billy Collins writes that “Howl” allowed him “to try to sound in his poems like a downtown homosexual Jewish beatnik intimate in the ways of pot and Benzedrine,” he is slightly aware that his vicarious rebellion was ridiculous, yet he operates in the same style-worshipping genre as Moody.

Most stunning is the essayists’ seeming indifference to the text itself. Those few who comb Ginsberg’s verse retrieve insights strangely similar and few: there is much doting fascination with the phrase “boxcars boxcars boxcars,” for example. “Howl”—far from being good in its own right (and this from its admirers!)—seems to serve two more advanced ends. First, its progressive spirit was supposed to saturate the culture, thereby altering politics and America itself. Many contributors are loath to forsake the poem’s supposed high idealism. (In truth, the more lasting effects were literary, if indirect: renewed interest in Whitman and inspiration for Robert Lowell.) Second, young people “trapped” in the middle class considered it a spiritual elixir. As Sven Birkerts describes its effect, “the Benjamin Braddock consciousness of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate—all this practiced disaffection fell away before the blade of this new upped-ante assault.”

“‘Howl’ is a theodicy,” wrote Lewis Hyde, and this collection bears out this characterization well. The god it justifies is the destructive, exhibitionist behavior that the “best minds” engage in (they “threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism,” “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge,” etc.), yet remain vexed about the source of their own “madness.” How can suffering persist in the face of their own hip goodness? The solution is to invent Moloch—the military-industrial complex reified, the hipster Satan—who justifies the mind-reeling gap between their madness and their perceived worth. One can easily see how such a metaphysic might appeal to young narcissists and their equals.