I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "ONE EVENING, while out buying the New York Times, Allen Ginsberg stopped to talk to a friend on the street while Peter Orlovsky went into..." (more)
Key Phrases: poetry conference, kidney stone attack, new loft, New York, San Francisco, City Lights (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It has become almost a cliché for biographers to speculate about their subjects' psychosexual oddities. But speculation is not necessary when the subject is Allen Ginsberg, because the legendary beat poet and countercultural figure proudly proclaimed his psychosexual oddities, from his youthful incestuous impulses toward his father and brother to his little-requited infatuations with beat golden boys like Neal Cassady and his later eye for young male acolytes. Indeed, Ginsberg meticulously documented all his doings and feelings, and Morgan, his archivist and bibliographer, relies on that trove. Morgan does little to shape the material; each chapter, bluntly titled with the calendar year, simply recounts 365 days' worth of parties, debauches, quarrels and breakups, drug experimentation, all-night debates about literature and philosophy, dead-end jobs, knock-about travels, psychoanalysis, ecstatic Blakean visions, depressed funks, homicides committed by friends, jazz, poetry readings and Ginsberg's contemporary ruminations on all the above. The disorganized, onrushing flow of experience is occasionally eye-glazing, and Morgan offers disappointingly little interpretation of Ginsberg's poems. But Ginsberg and his gang—Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady et al.—are such vibrant, compelling characters that this mere straightforward chronicle of their lives approaches, as they intended, a fair imitation of art. Photos. (Oct. 9)
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From The Washington Post

Just after his 21st birthday, Allen Ginsberg decided to kill himself. Again. This time, however, to allow for the necessary preparations, he settled on a schedule. Two years should be "just enough time," he wrote in his journal, "for me to have accomplished the first great prose work, a small body of perfect poems . . . and to have attempted some happy labor in the world, and failed." Not all of his "Dear Diary" suicide notes -- and there were many -- were graced with such panache. Of the numerous love affairs worthy of diary entries, none was so crucial to Ginsberg's imagination as his courtship with death, except perhaps his enduring commitment to the sensual and spiritual joys of living.

Bill Morgan's provocative and thoroughly researched new biography of the poet, I Celebrate Myself, is a testament to the creative fruits and the personal anguish of this struggle, which spanned Ginsberg's long career as poet, literary impresario, political activist and cultural icon.

As a boy, Ginsberg witnessed his mother's painful descent into schizophrenia with the same mixture of compassion and revulsion that he later felt for his own life. The Modernist poet Marianne Moore shrewdly diagnosed his predicament in an early letter: "Your disgust worries me," she wrote, reminding him of the "old hackneyed truism; affirm or die." Of course, with all of Ginsberg's best work yet to be written, Moore could not know the other self-delighting and vigorously affirmative side of his personality. This bolstering self-assurance led him to proclaim, when he was only 14: "If some future historian or biographer wants to know what the genius thought and did in his tender years, here it is."

In retrospect, the real "here" of this announcement, however, was neither his journal nor his parents' home in Paterson, N.J., but the grounds of Columbia University in the 1940s. During his first few months as a student there, he met the future luminaries of the Beat generation, including the princely football star Jack Kerouac; the flirtatious and unpredictable playboy Neal Cassady; and the patron saint of awful advice, failed schemes and moral depravity William Burroughs.

In "therapy" sessions to which he regularly submitted with desperate credulity, Ginsberg turned to Burroughs (who knew nothing about psychoanalysis) for help overcoming his sorrow and dread. He fled despair for months at a time with the U.S. Maritime Service. When he gravitated toward Cassady's sexual charm, though, Ginsberg slid back into a dark night of the lover's soul. Morgan recounts this affair with regrettable cliché -- "The moment Ginsberg saw Cassady, he fell in love" -- but the melodrama of romantic thralldom and heartbreak, he rightly suggests, was the young poet's favorite emotional posture. Melodrama is never far from sentimentality, and Ginsberg's conflicted affections for life and death often tumbled into the less glamorous territory of self-pity and egotism.

Later, he hitchhiked to Mexico to hunt his melancholy spirit through Mayan ruins and burial grounds. It never took Ginsberg long to run out of money, but luckily this time an American woman (whom he called "the White Goddess") gave him a place to stay on her plantation, where he spent an idle summer training his imagination in the work of the medieval Catholic mystics and the path to nothingness.

In less than a year, however, the cocoon he had begun to spin around himself unraveled, and Ginsberg's creative energy emerged again with newfound force and direction. On Oct. 7, 1955, he bellowed the first public rendition of "Howl" to a crowd of about a hundred at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, soon to become the Mecca of Beat civilization. In "Howl," Ginsberg performs his swings between life and death at fever pitch, in both their epic and banal aspects. It is a savagely beautiful poem, by turns obscene and intimate, barbarous and noble.

The Six Gallery reading galvanized the Beat writers as a distinct literary avant-garde, and the event was so successful that Ginsberg was invited to read "Howl" again five months later to a crowd double the size, now abuzz with anticipation. Less than a year after the famous City Lights edition was published, a U.S. customs official seized a shipment on charges of obscenity. And thus began the famous trial that put Ginsberg's name into all of the newspapers and made "Howl" the poem that some say changed America.

Morgan includes marginal notes that helpfully point out correspondences between the life and the poems, though he rarely lifts the curtain to show us the writer at work. For this, readers can turn to three other Ginsberg gems, also timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of "Howl": Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters (City Lights, $14.95); The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, First Journals and Poems: 1937-1952, edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan (Da Capo, $27.50), and Howl: Original Draft Facsimile (HarperPerennial, $18.95). In contrast to the barbaric yawp of his masterpiece, Ginsberg's journals reveal a sensitive, vulnerable imagination. The scrawled and minute revisions of "Howl" in the facsimile edition demonstrate that -- popular legend notwithstanding -- the poem did not spring fully formed from Ginsberg's head but was the product of much creative deliberation and revision.

Morgan is a seasoned archivist and a nonacademic scholar, which means that his biography happily avoids slapdash research and academic jargon. But it also means that we are doubly disappointed with the uselessness of the endnotes, which demand that we consult his own separately published two-volume bibliography of Ginsberg to confirm his findings. His prose is enviably concise, if sometimes uninspired. But his least forgivable writerly offenses, both of which seem suspiciously chummy, are the drug lingo and the tactless four-letter-word descriptions of Ginsberg's sexual encounters.

On March 30, 1997, Ginsberg was diagnosed with liver cancer and told that it was too advanced for treatment. He spent the following days contacting old friends and lovers to say good-bye, often inviting them to visit him in his Manhattan loft on East 13th Street. He died early in the morning on April 5 surrounded by a small group of friends; Bill Morgan was among them.

Alongside the flood of popular attention that his work is now enjoying, the mammoth new Collected Poems, 1947-1997 (HarperCollins, $39.39) places Ginsberg firmly among the most prolific poets of the age. But as he knew, none of this guarantees him a plot on Parnassus. Cultural heroes or not, poets live or die on the strength of a handful of poems that vibrate with a strange frequency all their own. If this biography brings us closer, as I believe it does, to the magnificent resonance of "Howl," the tender intimacy of "A Supermarket in California" and the stringent beauty of "Kaddish," then it merits a place on every Ginsberg shelf.

Reviewed by Anthony Cuda
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (October 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670037966
• ISBN-13: 978-0670037964
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #72,459 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Life to Celebrate, December 18, 2006

By	David S. Nichols "davemult" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are now many biographies of Allen Ginsberg. Shumacher's Dharma Lion stands out as a particular favorite, and the book-length poem by Ed Sanders is not to be overlooked. Most take a bird's-eye view of this poet and his life. Because of his long personal relationship with Ginsberg as his archivist and bibliographer, Morgan stood closer to his subject, both personally and through his access to the prolific journals Ginsberg diligently kept from the age of eleven to the end of his life, than any previous biographer has, or any future biographer is likely to.

The result is a biography whose intimacy and authority are unparalleled. For or some at least, this will be a decidedly mixed blessing. Those with a strong aversion to sexual revelation and description will be distracted if not put off, for Ginsberg was possessed of a ruthless, at times self-defeating, candor in all matters sexual, as readers familiar with his poetry will know. But, as Morgan shows, he was equally candid in all other areas of his life and feeling.

He was also deeply flawed, persistently naive and hopeful about the numerous lifelong friends he made in his days at Columbia and shortly thereafter: Kerouac, a drunk Republican mama's-boy and anti-semite, whose friendship Ginsberg treasured and whose work he championed to long after Kerouac's death; Huncke, who mooched and stole from him repeatedly; Burroughs, who, for a time lusted after him, but at others was inaccessible and gratuitously mean to Ginsberg's life partner, Peter Orlovsky; Cassady, an insatiable womanizer and artful dodger, or worse; Corso, who embarrassed and abused him often; and Orlovsky himself, heterosexual, chronically unstable and addicted to alcohol and amphetamines, and not infrequently interpersonally and physically destructive. To all of these, and to scores if not hundreds of others, Ginsberg's loyalty, generosity, and his efforts to support them financially and promote their work and enhance their lives never wavered. In his close personal relationships, Ginsberg could be, and often was, a fool, but he was not a fair-weather friend. Among the flaws that Morgan addresses and clarifies was Ginsberg's peculiar and persistent blind spot for women, their strengths, virtues, and talents. Even those close to him, not rarely in love with him, could in important ways escape his notice.

In fairly documenting his flaws, however, Morgan's treatment does not throw Ginsberg's virtues into shadow. His intense interest in all things human, his passionate commitment to free speech and unfettered thought and social justice and, some will be surprised, his patriotism, all come through. But what comes through most powerfully is the loving pains he took to care for others, more often than not one-at-a-time. Undivided attention, a meal, a place to stay, the reading of a poet's work brought to him for comment, his personal responses to virtually all the letters sent to him, from friend and stranger alike; Ginsberg cared and gave.

Until the last very few years of his life, and despite the popularity of his books, readings, and recordings, Ginsberg was chronically close to poverty, on many occasions simply broke, and sometimes temporarily stranded. Even when his income was nominally adequate, he bought his clothing in second-hand stores, rescued his friends again and again and again, and made up the difference. As he supported his friends, sometimes over many years, he supported numerous younger poets and writers, as well as working tirelessly to benefit the many causes, programs, and institutions he cared about; he gave and gave and gave.

In the end, Morgan's biography, its chapters proceeding year by year, covers the life of a great poet who was not less a man of truly heroic love and candor, a flawed human being who can stand as a model and a beacon for that which is most tender and dear in each of us.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Biography, November 21, 2006

By	mary helen wiesel (wilmington, DE United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I highly recommend Bill Morgan's "I Celebrate Myself", a biography of the late poet, Allen Ginsberg, a "Beat Generation" writer. Bill Morgan allows the reader to understand and appreciate, in such an interesting narrative, Ginsberg's unique style of poetry. I was truly captivated by this poet's life and work that the book seemed to be much shorter than it actually was. In addition to the title "I Celebrate Myself" from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," I especially enjoyed Bill Morgan's innovative approach of describing occurrences in Ginsberg's personal life that influenced his writing by placing in the margins of the book, the titles of the poems that Ginsberg was writing at the time. This creates for the reader an immediate interest and desire to read Ginsberg's poetry. "I Celebrate Myself" was a joy and adventure to read, and I learned so much about this sensitive, brilliant, and compassionate poet of the twentieth century. Fascinating Book!!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Top of My Favorites List, December 2, 2006

By	Lita M. Gamgort "Lita Aprile" (Hockessin, DE) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Bill Morgan's new book about the poet Allen Ginsberg, "I Celebrate Myself", rates at the top of my favorites list. I was immediately captivated when I read in the Introduction about an incident where Ginsberg saw a poor woman who was about to be attacked by an angry dog.Ginsberg went to her and asked,"Would you like a fig newton?" From then on I couldn't stop reading.
The book is full of many interesting facts about Ginsberg's life and poetry.His writings represent the turbulence of the cultural revolution of the time and this book is a wonderful testament to this eccentric and unique writer's talent. I applaud and congratulate Bill Morgan for his superb book.