What follows is a chapter from Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers (2012). (Paperback edition available from University of Massachusetts Press.) You can read other chapters from the late Jules Chametzky’s memoir here and here.
When I saw Jules for the last time in August, he agreed this piece belonged in First too. Jules was a close reader of this magazine from the beginning, but his attentions never devolved into mindless fanship. A few months back when I went with a slim batch of posts, he let me know (through his son Robbie, who’s been my friend since childhood) that I needed to get on the stick. His straight talk gave more snap to his praise (which could be unstinting).
Jules was no macho but he wasn’t meechy. I’m reminded of a story he told a couple years ago about a party at my parents’ house in the late 50s. Jules bumped into a lordly Amherst English professor there named G. Armour Craig (who was a headache for my own dad until he got tenure at Amherst). Craig asked Jules what he’d be teaching in the upcoming semester. After Jules replied, Craig tried for a high anti-Semitic irony: “Shakespeare taught by Chametzky.” Jules told my dad to keep that bastard away from him or he’d knock him into the Anglosphere. B.D.
One of the smartest co-editors of the Norton Anthology, John Felstiner, ends his astute introduction to Ginsberg and his place in Jewish American letters with quotes from Harold Bloom (negative: reading “Kaddish” is like being forced to “watch the hysteria of strangers”), and Saul Bellow (positive: “Under all the self-revealing candor is purity of heart”). John concedes that Ginsberg changed “the face of American poetry,” but adds that the word for him is chutzpah. I go along with Bellow: candor, and heart. “Howl” was the great breakthrough work of our generation, and “Kaddish,” for his mother who died in an insane asylum, his Jewish declaration of love for her, warts and all, and his heartbreak. When Ginsberg published “Howl” in 1953, I couldn’t agree with his opening lines— I didn’t see “the best minds of my [our] generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” though undoubtedly there were some of those among Ginsberg’s friends, but they were a fairly small, marginal and self-destructive bunch—I had seen some. There were many other “best minds” of different persuasions around, let’s not exaggerate, but undoubtedly Ginsberg’s raw and raunchy poem shattered the last vestiges of Eliot-esque, academic gentility and literary anemia. That was and has been of inestimable importance. Harold Bloom, as critic and teacher, did some of that important work, too, with his Freudianism, Romantic or Emersonian oracular style, interest in Kabbalah, so I cannot fathom his hostility to Ginsberg. In some crazy way, they are brothers under the skin, if Harold but let himself admit it.
For a long time I associated Ginsberg with the George McGovern (a good man who deserved better) disaster at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami Beach which I attended with my three sons, given tickets by an old friend from Minnesota who had been Hubert Humphrey’s Press Secretary. Ginsberg didn’t do much there, except sit in the mud in Flamingo Park with hundreds of other alternative lifestyle types, in trees, in tents, in a ripped T-shirt, rubbing his belly and intoning “Ummmm-ummmm.” It was emblematic of all that went wrong with the organization and PR of that event, culminating in the nominee’s acceptance speech at 2 a.m. Imamu Baraka was running around as well, that year wearing a Mao jacket, surrounded by thuggish Mau Mau-type bodyguards, and there were some women in combat jackets and boots, all caught on television. Not good.
Over time, my impression of Ginsberg changed completely. We did get him up to Amherst on March 22, 1986 (he inscribed the date for me in his Collected Poems), when he was wearing a three-piece flannel suit and was by then a professor at Brooklyn College. It was an historic occasion, for one thing because it was the only time he and James Baldwin met—a photograph of them together is the cover of an MR issue that deals with Ginsberg’s 1965 Prague experience. That experience was the real reason for Ginsberg’s appearance among us.
Andrew Lass, an anthropology professor at Mount Holyoke College, and in another part of his life a well-known Czech poet, had grown up in Prague with his American journalist parents and had been Ginsberg’s cicerone and translator that year of 1965. On May 1, Ginsberg was crowned King of the May by the university students, an act of deviance that presaged the uprising of 1968 and the later Velvet Revolution. Andy had told me he thought he had a short film of the occasion. My excitement was predictable, and ultimately that was what brought the poet up—for he had never seen the footage either. We showed it to a full house in a local bookstore. Lass’s film took less than 20 minutes, but it was gorgeous and fascinating— nd the student rebellion in naming Ginsberg led to his expulsion by the regime. The secret police had also confiscated his journal, which was rather risqué, to say the least (and which we published in part in MR), and that became the ostensible cause of his ejection. He did eventually get the journal back, heavily censored. Ginsberg wrote all about it in the airplane taking him out of the country, in a poem called “Kral Majales,” which ends as follows:
“And tho’ I am the King of May, the Marxists have beat
me upon the street, kept me up all night in the Police
Station, followed me thru Springtime Prague, detained
me in secret and deported me from our
kingdom by airplane.
Thus I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid
….Heaven.”
Candor, and courage. Never mind chutzpah. Finally, the part of Ginsberg I most respect. Not just his brave stands against war, nuclear weapons, environmental degradation and all that, but his extending friendship and support to all who needed it. One of my son Robert’s best friends at Columbia was writing a dissertation for a graduate degree on Lionel Trilling and Ginsberg — a connection between the two begun when Ginsberg was an undergraduate at Columbia and that others have commented on, including Ginsberg himself, and was hinted at in a Trilling story, “Of This Time, Of This Place” — which promised to be immensely illuminating about that relationship. This boy, Nat, a slight, good-looking Jewish kid from New Jersey, took a job teaching in New Orleans, and there he came out — a turn that surprised all his college friends, none of whom had realized earlier that he might be gay. Not too long afterwards, he was diagnosed with AIDS, which he endured bravely for some time. In his final sickness, his family refused to see him and so Robert left Chicago, where he was a graduate student, to spend a week with Nat at his bedside. During that bad period, Allen Ginsberg, in Colorado then, I believe, called Nat several times. He knew Nat only as someone who had corresponded with him about his own time at Columbia for the dissertation. Ginsberg’s calls offered warm affection and regard — and were extraordinarily meaningful to Nat, as he told us when we visited him. Ginsberg, I’ve read, kept an elaborate, extensive file on all those in similar and other needy circumstances, frequently making helpful connections with and for them. Candor yes, courage yes, and most assuredly heart.