I saw the best minds of my generation played by the unlikeliest of actors

In the category of “Unlikely Casting That Looks Like It Just Might Work”:  James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in Howl.

This is an interesting choice and I wonder who came up with it.  Franco would be a natural to play Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassady.

But Allen Ginsberg?

Well…

Now that you mention it…

It’s what’s going to get me in the theater to see it.  I might have gone anyway.  But I’m not sure.  I know that people who knew him and admired his work thought of him as a hero and even a kind of saint and I understand why.  But I’ve always found Ginsberg a somewhat repellant character.

I realize my impression of him is influenced by the way Kerouac portrayed him and that Kerouac treated him meanly.  But I didn’t read On the Road or any of the Beats until I was in college and by that time I “knew” Ginsberg as a minor celebrity from the media’s coverage of the anti-war movement and the burgeoning sexual revolution and in that coverage he came across to me as a funny-looking old guy trying to get young people to pay attention to him by pretending to be a hippie.

He struck me as a showboat who wanted it all to be about him, who, in fact, seemed to think he had inspired the whole thing.  (Of course I didn’t know then to what degree he actually had.)  I even suspected of him of wanting to form a cult of personality around himself.  In that, I may have been confusing him with the various “gurus” he looked like.

It never occurred to me that what I saw on the news could be as much a fiction as anything I read in a novel.

So my opinion of Ginsberg has always been based on two fictions, and when I started reading the Beats in earnest my reading of his poetry was informed by those fictions.   I’ve written before how I didn’t get poetry until I was in grad school.  Before that, reading a poem was like picking up something written in a foreign language and staring at it fixedly in the hope that the letters on the page would magically rearrange themselves into English.  Oddly, though, Ginsberg’s poetry I could understand or thought I could.

Didn’t care for it.

Until…

I heard another poet, Gerald Stern, read from Kaddish.

Ginsberg was one of Stern’s literary heroes and major influences.

I wound up liking Stern’s obviously Ginsberg-influenced work much better than I liked Ginsberg’s.

And that, more than my continued antipathy to Ginsberg the character, has been my general feeling about Ginsberg’s poetry.  I don’t read it because there are too many other poets whose poetry I like much better, and that includes two of Ginsberg’s fellow Beats, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder.

Especially Gary Snyder.

To the point that I think one of the things I’ve held against Ginsberg is that he wasn’t Gary Snyder.

Also, I think it was something Snyder said or wrote---or words that Kerouac put in his mouth in the person of Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums ---that convinced me that there really was no Beat movement, it was a self-aggrandizing invention of Ginsberg’s and he made it up in order to declare himself the “founder” of it and put himself and his work at the center of it, elbowing aside Kerouac whom he loved but of whom he was also extremely jealous.

Howl was published in 1956.  On the Road was written---typed, according to Mr Capote---in 1951, but it wasn’t published until 1957.   So there’s something for the professors and disciples to argue about.

At any rate, I’m hoping that since my opinion of Ginsberg is based on two fictions, a third fiction might change it or at least give it more nuance and balance.  Franco, and the movie, might do for me what Philip Seymour Hoffman and Capote did for my opinion of Truman Capote.

Capote’s another writer I “knew” as a television personality long before I read any of his work.  But I also always knew that Capote’s TV personality was a fiction and a fiction Capote himself created and which he expected people to see and enjoy as an act.  The “real” Capote was kept hidden behind the tinted glasses and under the broad-brimmed fedora.  So I never mistook the character I knew who called himself Truman Capote for the writer who signed his books and stories with the name Truman Capote.  I just simply couldn’t imagine in what ways that writer was different from the television character and so I had no idea how the books and stories got written.

The movie Capote’s Capote is as much a fiction as the writer Capote’s Capote but I believe it’s the kind of good fiction that is captures the truth better than journalism or even history often does.

Maybe that will happen with Howl.

_________________

Steve Kuusisto, who teaches a course on the San Francisco Literary Renaissance, says that the poet who should be known as the “Father of the Beats” isn’t Ginsburg, it’s Kenneth Rexroth.

Here’s a good website devoted to Allen Ginsberg.  Video, audio, photos, poems and more.

An article about the movie and its troubles getting a distributor in The Guardian.

Related Mannion re-runs:

Dirty sexy naked poets.

Reading Capote.

That's not writing, or typing, it's driving---and in circles.

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Technorati Tags: Allen Ginsberg,Howl,James Franco,Jack Kerouac,On the Road,Truman Capote

Comments

[Victoria]

Of men and jealousy: I'm coming to believe jealousy runs much deeper in men than women. Marc Maron's confessional podcasts frequently (I'm talking weekly!) deal with his festering resentment of other comics based on professional jealousy. As he confronts this in interviews with comedians he has resented (and been "mean" to), the two men usually discuss it in a way that tells me this is the sea they swim in, more norm than exception. Curious.

[sfmike]

If you're feeling ambitious, I'd recommend a very long life-and-times tome from the early 1990s by Michael Schumacher called Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. I wasn't much of a Ginsberg fan either, but after finishing the book, my respect for him was raised a hundred fold.

[Jackie Ogburn]

Yes, do look at Dharma Lion. Ginsberg worked hard to promote the work of Kerouac and other Beats, harder than he worked to promote his own. He had a horrific childhood, but had a generous spirit just the same and encouraged many writers and artists during his long life. He also lived openly as a gay man when that took tremendous courage. Yes, he had a huge ego too, but I think he needed it just to get up in the morning.

[Lance]

Jackie, SFMike, thanks for the recommendation. I've put it on reserve at the library.

Victoria, I think there's an idea for a blog post in what you say.

[Cleveland Bob]

Thanks, Lance. I've been on a James Franco binge lately and this is fist clip of Howl that I've seen. I think he's aces as an actor and here's his first big shot in a major movie to test his mettle. Supporting doesn't appear at all lacking either.

Secondly, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of Ginsburg. Fits my opinion precisely. Here's hoping for that "third fiction" of which you speak.

Let the cross posting begin. Thanks.

[Leo Leahy]

Poets that don't have a huge ego are mainly those poets that you have never heard of. Thanks for the post. I'm looking forward to seeing the film.