For all the greatness of some individual pieces (take a read, or a re-read, of the under-appreciated “In the Baggage Room at the Greyhound”), Ginsberg was an uneven talent, a major minor poet — as one snarky critic put it with too much accuracy for fans like me. But the truth need not wound; it can illuminate. Like Oscar Wilde, Ginsberg put his effort into his work and his genius into his life. And what a life it was.
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, by Bill Morgan, the editor of Ginsberg’s selected essays and the poet’s long-time archivist, is a magnificent celebration of his life. It is not the last book that will be written about Ginsberg, but — for now — it is the best.
Morgan takes as his organizing principle Ginsberg’s most-intimate relationships. And the range of those relationships, from acquaintances to friends, from colleagues to lovers, is staggering. But central to Ginsberg — occasionally for the better and too often for the worse — was his long-time involvement with Peter Orlovsky. It was a bond that too often teetered on the brink of mutually assured destruction, although the truly self-destructive Orlovsky would outlive Ginsberg.
Ginsberg played many roles in his life: poet, musician, photographer, pharmaceutical philosopher, erotic practitioner, political activist, spiritual agitator, and godfather to the Beat Movement which, Morgan maintains, should be dated from that October night in ’55 when Ginsberg took part in the Six Gallery reading.
Despite the multitude of masks he assumed with varying degrees of success, Ginsberg had — essentially — a single persona: he was a pilgrim. Allen Ginsberg died as good a man as he knew how to be. That’s a rare enough accomplishment.
