Few literary figures transcend their fame with the written word and become political and/or pop culture icons. Allen Ginsberg achieved this feat. Even non-readers recognize the name and/or his photo from his appearances with Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video or even the truncated attempt to make him a counterculture pop icon for a new generation shortly before his death.
Ginsberg archivist Bill Morgan has culled the best of over 3,700 letters Ginsberg penned down to the 165 included in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. The chronological arrangement of letters, along with Morgan’s notes, binds this collection into a fully rounded picture of the poet as a son, brother, friend, intellectual and political activist.
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg starts with Ginsberg’s first letter to the New York Times at age 15 debating World War II isolationists. The correspondence that follows takes the reader on a firsthand trip through Ginsberg’s extraordinary and sometimes exhausting, life. Allen attempts to secure a psychoanalyst to deal with his homosexuality, even to the point of being temporarily “cured” by dating a young woman named Helen Parker shortly after college. He joins the Navy, is confined to a psychiatric institution for a time, endures the hospitalization and subsequent lobotomy of his mother Naomi, a paranoid-schizophrenic
The letters provide a travelogue of Beatnik/hippie poets and prose writers in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They trace the Beat Generation’s global wanderings, drinking, drug use, sexual escapades, and yes, even their writing. The correspondents read like a who’s who of late 20th-century literary culture, with letters addressed to Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, etc., and the list goes on.
The intersection of intellectual and pop culture was at its zenith in the 1960s, and Ginsberg was part of that scene, too. He blithely recounts hanging out with the Stones and the Beatles, and, of course, Bob Dylan. He later wrote a letter to Dylan asking for help for the money-strapped Naropa Institute.
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