ALLEN GINSBERG IN AMERICA by Jane Kramer. 202 pages. Random House. $4.95.
In 1956, his anguished protest poem Howl ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .") set the stage for the Beat scene. Since then, often unwashed yet somehow steeped in cleansing waves of culture, sometimes naked but never far removed from the whole cloth of bohemian and Brahman tradition, Allen Ginsberg has gained celebrity not only as a poet but as a practicing pansexualist and pioneer in psychedelia. He has also preached all manner of revolutionary activities that could lead to the overthrow of what he considers society's "hallucination" regarding money and power.
Thus he has been canonized by the underground press and posterized by high-camp followers. Ginsberg has also come to be legitimized by a wide public (LIFE, Playboy, TV talk shows) and all but officially designated as a peculiar national treasure of sorts.
Off the Rails. Earnest, articulate and somehow despairingly sanguine, Ginsberg at 43 is busy providing a kind of air-ferry service across the contemporary great divides: the generation gap and the moral abyss that seem to separate absolutist youth from pragmatic age. Behind Ginsberg's freaky fagade there has always been a core of pure humanism and of religion—in an almost planetary sense. In an era in which most people accept violence as the way life is, Ginsberg has managed to remain fervently gentle. If he still calls for nothing less than a complete revolution, he also insists that his role within it will be a compassionate and bloodless one. "I'm willing to die for freedom," he told an interviewer recently, "but I'm not willing to kill for it." Such a distinction, and the commitment to it, seems to make sense to a considerable number of Americans—especially the young, who would have to do the killing.
In the beginning this somewhat preposterous hobo rode the middle class rails. But as a student at Columbia in the middle '40s, he found that he could no longer groove along those rails. After precocious turns at turning on, dropping out, shipping out and even bugging out (into a mental asylum for eight months), Ginsberg drifted to San Francisco's North Beach in 1953. There he abandoned all vestigial attempts to play it straight. Instead, he decided to "cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. And to keep living with someone—maybe even a man —and explore relationships that way." At Christmastime in 1954, he began to explore the relationship of love with Fellow Poet Peter Orlovskv. "It was very beautiful, totally unlike a New York faggot situation. It was like some sort of very idealized happy Dostoevskian confrontation of souls." The confrontation has apparently endured.
Embarking on a "pious investigation" into drugs and theology (which he seems to think are somehow related), he and