Ginsberg occasionally offered creative and financial support to young writers and his fellow Beats. He even provides a stern yet polite response to an overzealous young writer who repeatedly asks for his help. Ginsberg corrected the authors of the Monarch Notes for lazy fact-checking and other missteps in a long, detailed letter that documented his humor. “I was kicked out of Columbia for being found sleeping in bed with Kerouac, not the reason cited on page 61,” he writes.
And of course, his work continued to be banned even after vindication in the City Lights/Howl trial. In a letter to the Wichita Beacon after local police confiscate copies of his books, he duly reminds the offenders: “Almost a decade ago there was a similar attempt to ban a book of mine in San Francisco and my book was found to be NOT obscene by the courts. That settled that.” Allen later recounts Czech police holding his notebook hostage because of alleged illegal writings.
One passage in particular reveals Ginsberg’s strong humanitarian bent on a personal level. While traveling through India, Ginsberg and longtime partner Peter Orlovsky helped a particularly emaciated beggar, washing and feeding him and then securing medical care for him.
Once Ginsberg became a full-time professor, his letters became shorter, less engaging, with administrative and academic concerns taking up a huge chunk of his time. His health declined, and he succumbed to liver cancer on April 5, 1997.
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg is a must-have for any avid reader of Ginsberg or other Beat Generation writers, as is Morgan's biography of Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself:The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.
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