prevails to this very day. But it was… ex-radicals, or even Marxists, who, disillusioned
by the show trials of 1937 and the anti-Semitism of Stalin, went all the way over to the
to the extreme right and began suppressing their understanding of the trouble with the
American capitalism and imperialism, and didn’t strike a good balance, as did a few
intellectuals, like Irving Howe, an American who had explored the World of Our Fathers,
Ian McGuint… the first-generation of Slavic, Russian and Jewish geniuses that rose out
of the American soil after the great immigrations of 1895, which is part of my family too,
because my mother came over from Russia in 1895.
So, to summarize: in the Fifties you had invasion of the intellectual world, subtly and
secretly, by the CIA. You had invasion of political worlds in the Middle East, in Central
America and Africa, I presume, and in Asia, again with secret police. I believe it was
Wesley Fischel, the professor at East Lansing, Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin, who
trained President Diem’s secret police and brought them over intact to Saigon, under the
auspices of the CIA, back in the early Fifties, when Diem was installed, ‘56 or so. You
had a subversion of student activity and a blanketing of student protest. That’s why you
had the extreme rise of SDS, and later (Prairie Fire?) in the early Sixties, because
normal student investigation and rebellion against the status quo had been suppressed by
CIA funding of the National Student Association, with the presidents of the Student
Association quite witting.
You had a literary atmosphere where there was censorship, where there was very little
vigor, where an Eliotic conservative attitude was dominant in the academies, which
excluded then Whitman as canon or Williams as canon or Minna Loy, or Louis Nightecker, or
Cobracussi or Charles (unclear), or the whole imagist/objectivists’ lineage which came
into prominence in America in the Fifties and transformed American poetry to open form. So
you had a closed form in poetry, and a closed form of mind, is what it boils down to.
INT: So how did it feel for you as an individual, with
writing in a very different way about very different subject matters, to be coming through
that period?
AG: Well, it was fun. (Laughs) First of all, I was gay,
and once I came out of the closet in 1948, all during the Fifties I was astounded at the
cowardice or silliness or fear of the rest of the gay literary contingent, although I
think one or two writers had been up front, like Andr? Gide or Jean Genet, of course, and
Gore Vidal in America, who broke some ice.
But between Burroughs and myself, we were (Laughs) completely out of the closet, and
thought it was all funny or, you know, absurd, the repression and the persecution of gays
in those days. I remember I got kicked out of Columbia for… I had hosted Kerouac
overnight – he slept in my bed, and I was a virgin at the time, and this is back in the
Forties, ‘46 or so… and quite chaste; we slept together because it was too late to go
home to his mother on the subway – and somebody found out about that he was staying over,
and when I came downstairs there was a note: "The Dean will want to see you."
And I went to see Dean Nicholas McKnight of Columbia College, and he looked at me and
said, "Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you’ve done."
(Laughs) And I took a look and I realized I was surrounded by madmen (Laughs) – they were
completely nuts, you know, and, you know, thinking something horrible was happening.
So that was the atmosphere late Forties, early Fifties, actually. And then I think
probably by ‘55-’56 in the… I’d sort of given up on New York ’cause it was too
restricted and too much in the closet, and too academic; there was no way of getting
anything as wild as Kerouac’s writing or Burrough’s routines or Burroughs’s novel Queer,
which we put together in ‘53, or In Search of Yahe, 1953, though we had managed to
publish his book Junkie, which is a realistic account of the stupidity of the war
on drugs, and the troubles of drug(s) too.
But the literature we were producing just for ourselves, without any intention of
publishing, just for the pleasure of writing and amusing ourselves and extending our
imaginations, and each others’ imaginations, you know, I think in the dedication of (.?.)
in 1956, I mentioned Kerouac’s 13 novels and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Neal
Cassady’s First Third, and saying "All these books are published in
heaven." I didn’t think they’d be published in our lifetime; things seemed so closed.
And it’s that closed mind, I think, that was responsible for the ineptness of the Cold
War. Certainly, a cold war of some kind was necessary, but I think probably rock’n’ roll,
blues, blue jeans, the counter-culture, did as much, if not more, to undermine the
authority of the Marxist bureaucracy, certainly in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland -
probably in Russia, too, and the internal corruption within Russia did as much to
undermine it as all the trillions of dollars that we went into debt for military hardware
which was never used, or rarely used.
INT: What was your assessment of the Russians during
this period?
AG: Well, very mixed, you know. My mother was a communist
and my father was socialist, so I grew up with knowing the fight. And I never was a
communist – I was more apolitical in a sense, until I went to Saigon in ‘63, and saw
the… But that wasn’t it, because I did make mockery of some of the McCarthyite Cold War
straightness. I think my poem America says: "Them Russians, them Russians and
them Russians, and them Chinese and them Russians, they’re after us, they want to take our
cars from out of our garages." And I said, "OK, America, I’ll fight them – I’ll
put my queer shoulder to the wheel." They still don’t let gays in the military in
America, so…
I was sort of neutral in the Cold War, since it seemed to me a balance of aggression on
both sides; a preponderance of heavy, heavy police state in Russia, and not so heavy in
America at all, though a police state for junkies, certainly, and it has grown and grown
and grown, where we do have a generic police state for people who are committing the
political crime of smoking grass, or the illness … or involving the illness of
addiction. We have more people in jail now than anywhere else. But in those days, the
Government was also spreading all sorts of mythological nonsense about marijuana, despite
the Guardi report giving it a clean bill of health.
So there was a little element of police state here, and certainly in areas that I was
familiar with. There was an enormous element of the American police state in Latin America
and in Iran and so forth. So, Americans did not take that in account. It’s almost as W.E.
Dubois, the great black philosopher, said, that the problem was not merely race, but that
people who were prosperous were willing to enjoy their prosperity at the expense of the
pain, suffering and labor of other people. Like, I understand that we withdraw, from
Africa hundreds of billion of dollars of raw materials every year, and then complain when
they want some foreign aid. (Laughs) Or that, as of those days to these very days, we’ll
lend them money to expand their coffee plantations, but not to make their own coffee
factories and sell it abroad. So we’ve been sucking the blood out of our client and
undeveloped nations like vampires, and that’s why America has this prosperity; and people
are not willing to recognize that – not only America, but Western Europe. I mean, I was
quite aware of that and thinking in… thinking in those terms in the late Forties, early
Fifties.
But by ‘65, I’d had several very interesting incidents. I went down to Cuba and,
complaining about Castro’s treatment of homosexuals, found myself after a month under
arrest and expelled from the country, to Prague. In Prague, I found I had quite a bit of
money from royalties, and so took a tour of Russia and saw what was going on there in
terms of police state and bureaucracy; came back to Prague, was elected the King of May by
the students, and immediately expelled by the Minister of Education and the Minister of
Culture, as an American homosexual narcotic hippie – a poor role model for Czechoslovakian
youth. At that time, I think it was May nineteen-ninety… And in ‘65 I ran into Havel as
a student, an acquaintance which we renewed when he became President, and he reminded me
that we’d met. If you ask Havel, or see his interviews with various jazz figures who
influenced him, you’ll find that the inspiration for the rebellion in Eastern Europe was
very much the American counter culture, and the English counter-culture: the Beatles,
Dylan, Kerouac, Burroughs, Soft Machine, the Fugs: a very important rock group singing
‘Police State Blues’ and ‘River of Shit’ (Laughs) in the early Sixties in America.
So I found I was kicked out by the Prague police and the Havana police. Then, when I
got back, I took part in various anti-war manifestations. But I found that the day I’d
arrived in Prague, I had been put on the dangerous security list of J. Edgar Hoover, as a
crazed, violent, or … I don’t know what he thought I was. And that he should talk, I
must say… (Laughs) Maybe he thought my homosexuality was a threat to America or
something.
But anyway, on April 26, 1965, the day I arrived in Prague, to be kicked out two weeks
later, I was put on the dangerous security list here. Then I found that… in ‘65-’66,
that the Narcotics Bureau was trying to set me up for a bust, partly for my anti-war
activity, partly anti-war on drugs, anti-police corruption activity, and so they tried to
set me up for a bust, several different people busting people and threatening to throw the
book at them unless they went to my apartment and planted marijuana. So I complained to
Robert Kennedy and to my various Patterson, New Jersey representatives in Congress, and
New York. And years later, when I got my papers from the FBI under the Freedom of
Information Act – because you can get your papers after 15-20 years – I found that the FBI
had translated a denunciation of me by the Prague youth newspaper (Lada Fronta?),
saying that I was a corrupter of youth and alcoholic – which I’m not – and not to be
trusted, and had sent it over the Narcotics Bureau to send to my representative,
Congressman Jolson, wanting him not to answer my questions and request for protection and
complaints about the set-ups, the entrapment procedures of the Narcotics Bureau, because I
was irresponsible, as is proved by this communist newspaper (Laughs), and that anything I
said might be turned to embarrass him. So I realized that the Western police and in
certain areas, the Western police and the communist police, by 1965, were one
international mucous membrane network (Laughs) – there was hardly any difference between
them.
INT: Very good answer. Can we go back to the emergence
of the counter-culture? Some of your writings hit a very popular vein and you became very,
very popular…
AG; Yeah.
INT: Could you describe to me a little bit about why
you think that happened, what they were and why that happened, and what the elements of
this… what your philosophy was, if you like, that emerged from this period?
AG: Well, the main themes, actually, of a whole group of poets – that would be Gary
Snyder, myself, Philip Wayland, Jack Kerouak, William Burroughs, Michael McLure, Philip
Lamonti of the surrealists, the San Francisco group, and the New York group, the beat
group, as well as to some extent the Black Mountain group – one: spontaneous mind and
candor, telling the truth in the public forum, completely difficult during the time of
censorship and party-line mass media, moderation and… well, deceptiveness, deceptiveness
in terms of the American violence abroad. And…
(Interruption – change tape)
INT: So, we were talking about…
AG: Yes, the counter-culture.
INT: … the counter-culture and new revolutionary
(Overlap) (.?.).
AG: (Overlap) What were the tenets or themes of the counter-culture, as I know them
from the Forties and Fifties, meaning the beat group and some allied friends.
INT: Uhum.