GLR July-August 2023

Ginsberg Knew Madness Firsthand

A S A THIRD-YEAR medical student at Columbia in the mid 1980s, Stevan M. Weine wrote to his hero, Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), wanting to pursue research on Ginsberg’s experiences with mental ill ness. The poet welcomed Weine’s interest and gave him access to his medical records from his eight-month stay at a psychiatric hospital (1949–1950). Weine, now a pro fessor of psychiatry at the University of Illi

other ambitious young writers, and fretting over his sexuality—he granted doctors at New York’s Pilgrim State Hospital permis sion to perform a prefrontal lobotomy on Naomi. Two months later, she had the ghoulish procedure. In time, based on ap parent improvement, she was allowed to leave the asylum, a massive complex hous ing more than 13,000 patients. However, she continued to suffer and caused distress for everyone around her, which led her to

H ILARY H OLLADAY

BESTMINDS How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness by Stevan M.Weine Fordham U. Press. 304 pages, $34.95

be institutionalized again. In May 1948, six months after he gave the doctors permis sion to lobotomize his mother, Ginsberg began having what he called visions. While reading William Blake’s poetry in bed in his East Harlem apartment, he heard a disembodied, “ancient” voice reciting the poems. The apprentice poet felt he was in God’s presence and experienced a profound contentment and acceptance of the universe. Most accounts of this formative in cident report that Ginsberg heard Blake himself reading the poems. According to Weine’s research, it was actually ten years after his visionary experience that Ginsberg began identifying the voice as Blake’s. Exciting as his visions (including one in the university book store) were at the time, Ginsberg still had to function in the quo tidian world. Distracted and worried that he was going mad just like his mother, he struggled. In the spring of 1949, he allowed several thieves, including his impoverished junkie pal and po etic muse Herbert Huncke, to store their loot in his apartment. When they were caught, Ginsberg’s father, a respected poet and teacher, along with several of Allen’s Columbia professors, in tervened on behalf of the troubled young man who clearly was n’t in the same category as the crooks he’d befriended. As a result, Ginsberg was sent not to prison but to the New York State Psychiatric Institute for treatment and rehabilitation. It was there that Ginsberg met fellow patient Carl Solomon, an erudite gay man with whom he quickly bonded and later immortalized in “Howl,” the long title poem of his debut collection, Howl and Other Poems (1956). The most intriguing parts of BestMinds appear in the pro logue and the chapter describing Ginsberg’s eight months in the asylum. Near the end of his stay, during the hospital’s weekly case conference, he appeared on stage with his therapist for an interview in front of an audience of hospital staff. Weine sum marizes the notes in Ginsberg’s medical file: “The patient acted as if he had something to prove—that he wasn’t mad like his mother, who had recently been released from Pilgrim State Hos pital following a several-year stay and a prefrontal lobotomy. He was talkative and brash but cooperative and aware of the au dience around him. ... He was grandiose, like many people in the throes of psychosis, but also demonstrated literary talents and ambitions not commonly seen among the patients presented at the clinical case conference.” After Ginsberg left the auditorium, the doctors conferred,

nois College of Medicine, thought the author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” could help him understand “the relationships, if any, between madness and poetry, between art and life.” Published more than three decades after their first meeting, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness reveals what Weine learned from and about the Beat poet and counterculture spokesman who became his friend and mentor. The book combines biography, medical history, literary analy sis, and memoir. It feels jumbled in places, with the narrative

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Photo by Herbert Rusche.

moving back and forth in time, but Ginsberg’s long reckoning with mental illness deserves the sustained and sympathetic at tention that Weine provides. Born in Newark, Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jer sey, the younger son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg. His mother, a Russian immigrant who graduated from college and worked as a schoolteacher, was periodically institutionalized for schiz ophrenia throughout his childhood, and his parents eventually divorced. In November 1947, when Ginsberg was a 21-year-old English major at Columbia—reading widely, getting to know Hilary Holladay is the author of The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Bi ography and Herbert Huncke: The Times Square Hustler Who Inspired Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation . 36

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