1.

I first encountered Bruce Gardiner in the last year of my undergraduate degree in 1982 as one of the teachers of the year-long Twentieth Century Literature Honours Seminar. A new appointment to the English department at the University of Sydney, fresh from his PhD at Princeton, he was young, full of personality and clearly delighted to be teaching. I was so struck by Bruce himself that I do not remember the subject of that first seminar. Rather, what has stayed with me is an elegant, allegorical anecdote involving the Empire State Building, and the surprise it engendered. More than forty years since my first exposure to his unexpected way of approaching the singular mystery of texts and persons alike, that sense of surprise and interest has never left me. I did not know then that we would be friends and colleagues for the rest of our lives. After I returned from doctoral and postdoctoral study in the UK to teach in the department in 1990, Bruce and I shared a course on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s writing. I also sat in on Bruce’s American literature courses for the sheer enjoyment of it, learning a lot about how to read inexhaustibly, and how to combine scholarship and teaching in a way that was energised but not overwhelmed by its personal stakes. For the first twenty years or so of my working life as an academic, there was plenty of passionate argument and disagreement (to put it politely) about what and how to teach, but for the most part live-and-let-live pluralism reigned. A large, traditional literary-historical department with many and varied electives reflecting the wide-ranging interests of staff, each one a world unto itself, both teachers and students were involved in continuously assembling their own bespoke, mosaic curriculum. That live process of choice and negotiation, from semester to semester, year to year, first as a student and later as a teacher, was at the core of my ongoing sense of discipline, vocation and agency.

Over the thirty-five years in which Bruce and I worked as allies and collaborators, the rise of neoliberal, commercial imperatives and bureaucratised management have decimated most humanities departments and changed academic culture almost beyond recognition. In the highly surveilled, notionally “efficient” contemporary university, academic personality and independence – not so long ago de rigueur – is often reframed as a mini-cult of personality. As a specialist in the intricacies and coteries of queer decadence, Bruce’s training helped him to double down and regroup in defence of the chiastic relation between queer scholarly personality and personal scholarship. His legacy exemplifies what Michael Snediker has called “queer optimism”.2 Of course, no one in their queer right mind would resile from the generative, negative side of this formulation. Indeed, the reparative emphasis of “queer optimism” and “its particular élan” requires the counterweight of Edelman’s “queer pessimism”, Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and Sedgwick’s “paranoid and reparative reading”.3 Snediker argues that:

Walking around the University of Sydney, official posters exhort its denizens to “Unlearn”. Another cutesy administrative adage in circulation counsels us to “fail faster” and cut our losses. These cruelly optimistic, counterintuitive commands implicitly promise a pay-off – time saved, quick breakthroughs, change-management for the greater good – but as all the worker bees know, good cheer is hard to find on campus these days. It is now a commonplace, taken as read, that the university is no longer a place conducive to what Snediker suggestively calls “lyric personhood”.4 This is where queer optimism comes in. As Snediker argues, it is not that “if one were more queerly optimistic, one would feel happier. Rather, queer optimism can be considered as a form of meta-optimism: it wants to think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable.”5 English department life has not always been happy or even optimistic in the ordinary sense: at times, far from it. It has, however, never been less than “interesting” in a “meta-optimistic” way. In fact, its very existence is predicated on the “immanent value” of literary studies as a disciplinary field and the pleasure of “rigorous thinking” about its methods and objects in the present. Over many years, Bruce’s contribution to this project has been indefatigable, inimitable, personal, lyrical. From my first encounter with him in that Honours seminar in 1982 I had an inkling that this was a lucky chance.

2.

In what follows I turn my attention to Allen Ginsberg. His life and oeuvre, often thought to exemplify “the utopic energy that motivates counterpublics”, can helpfully be understood as “queerly optimistic” in Snediker’s terms: that is, “immanently rather than futurally oriented”.7 The immediate and exponential notoriety of “Howl” from the time of its first public reading and publication in San Francisco in 1955–1956 established the formerly obscure, thirty-year-old Ginsberg as an activist-celebrity poet on the world stage, but it was his queer “lyric personhood” and the voluminously consistent writing and teaching performed under its aegis over many decades that established his enduring presence as a literary lion.8 My focus here is on Ginsberg as elegist and the copresence of praise and blame, joy and melancholy, optimism and pessimism (elegy’s signature) in Ginsberg’s most famous poems, “Howl” (“for Carl Solomon”, 1956) and “Kaddish” (“for Naomi Ginsberg”, 1961). I first worked on “Kaddish” as a PhD student in the 1980s and have since enjoyed teaching both “Howl” and “Kaddish” many times. This volume seems an appropriate occasion to think again about Ginsberg in relation to affect, genre and taxonomy, personality and coteries, families and institutions, returning to these galvanising companion poems, particularly in light of the psychiatrist Stevan M. Weine’s significant recent book, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness.9 Through Weine’s research in hospital records, the Ginsberg papers at Columbia and Stanford, and his account of his interactions with Ginsberg himself along the way, we have a newly detailed, multi-layered, psychiatrically informed sense of the inextricably entwined experiences of Allen and his mother, Naomi Levi Ginsberg (1894–1956), in and out of the American mental health system. Weine provides a substantively different understanding of the chronology and meaning of key events and texts, which, in turn, have implications for the reading of Ginsberg’s poetry.

As Weine shows, Ginsberg received a letter from Pilgrim State Hospital, where Naomi had most recently been incarcerated since April 1947, recommending her as an appropriate candidate for a prefrontal lobotomy, at that time regarded as an extremely promising new treatment for intractably psychotic patients. Allen’s early life had been dominated by Naomi’s increasingly frequent psychotic episodes (she was first hospitalised at eighteen). Naomi had been hospitalised for two years prior to Allen’s commencement at Columbia in September 1943, following the harrowing Lakewood incident memorably narrated in “Kaddish II”. Over the next few years Ginsberg established the core of his “angelic” literary friendship circle, including William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassady, the dedicatees of Howl And Other Poems. Allen tried to distance himself somewhat from his family and establish an independent life as a queer poet at large in New York but, after his parents separated, he was directly responsible for Naomi’s treatment. On 16 November 1947, aged twenty-one, Allen provided written consent for the lobotomy, performed on 13 January 1948 (Naomi was then aged fifty-three). Despite several “attacks of disturbance” in the following months, Naomi’s lobotomy was deemed to have been a success and she was released into the care of her sister, Elinor, on 1 May 1949.10 Thirteen months later, in February 1951, after assaulting Elinor, she was involuntarily readmitted to Pilgrim State  (again, Allen signed the papers) where she remained until her death on 9 June 1956.

In a telling criss-cross, Allen, then a student at Columbia University, had been arrested one month before Naomi’s post-lobotomy discharge, on 1 April 1949, and charged in connection with possession of goods stolen by his drug-addicted friends. In June 1949, a year after having authorised Naomi’s lobotomy, Ginsberg was admitted to the Psychiatric Institute of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (PI), in accordance with the terms of a plea deal brokered with the help of Ginsberg’s eminent literature professors at Columbia, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. He spent the next eight months at PI in psychoanalytic psychotherapy designed to diagnose his mental state and correct antisocial, homosexual tendencies. Working in succession with three young residents in psychiatry, the last of whom he continued to see in private practice for two years after being released from hospital, this enforced stay at PI was highly significant for Ginsberg. He was relieved to have been spared any more dire criminal consequences and regarded this period of sequestration as an opportunity to reset his life and writing, still broadly under the umbrella of Columbia. Allen had wanted to be in therapy for years, especially since being experimentally “analysed” in 1945–1946, according to Reichian principles, by his friend and mentor, William Burroughs.11 While at PI, Allen became close friends with fellow patient Carl Solomon, later the dedicatee of “Howl”. In his second resident doctor at PI, a woman whom Weine does not identify, Allen also found an important ally in negotiating his homosexuality and standing up to his father’s homophobia. Allen had come out to his father Louis in November 1947, in the same month that he had given permission for his mother’s lobotomy. It had not gone well. Now, in a meeting with both father and son, the doctor advised Louis to accept Allen’s sexuality if he wanted to have a relationship with his son. Louis responded by successfully demanding that the woman be removed from Allen’s case, but it did force an uneasy truce.12

After finding the relevant original documents in the Ginsberg archive and studying the hospital files, Weine was able to show Allen conclusive proof that he had authorised his mother’s lobotomy in 1947 and not, as he had long thought, in the early 1950s: that is, before the events that led to his own arrest and psychiatric admission.13 Weine also reveals that, although Allen’s extensive clinical case file at PI noted Naomi’s lobotomy and recent discharge from hospital, the undoubtedly traumatic fact of Allen’s authorisation of the operation is nowhere mentioned in the record of his psychotherapy.14 This startling omission, along with the absence of any explicit narrative in Allen’s contemporaneous journals and his conscious or unconscious revision of the timeline, suggests Allen’s drive to conceal its significance not only from his psychiatrists but also from himself/his writing. The timeline established by Weine does not so much clear up confusion or correct error as confirm its personal and poetic generativity. When Ginsberg gave Weine permission to access the hospital files he himself had never seen, he opened the queerly optimistic possibility of increase and poesis: more knowledge, complexity, interest, more thought and writing, more misprision, in the spirit of Edelman’s “jouissance that at once defines us and negates us”.15

It had been Allen’s practice, from age eleven, to keep a journal. At first the entries are brief, intermittent, and almost exclusively concerned with Naomi’s illness, newspaper headlines and movies. Over time they become more expansive, literary and erotic, including transcriptions of dreams, sexual fantasies and experiences; dialogues and letters; lists of books and vocabulary; and drafts and excerpts from his own and others’ literary and philosophical writings.16 With the encouragement of William Carlos Williams, who did not approve of the rhyming lyrics Ginsberg first sent him in 1950, these prose journals provided the basis for the new compositional method and aleatory poetic which led to the poems of Empty Mirror and, especially, Howl And Other Poems.17 “Kaddish” continues what Ginsberg described in his liner essay for the LP “Notes for Howl And Other Poems” (1959) as “experiments with the formal organization of the long line … to build up large organic structures”.18 These “rhapsodic” (320), procedural experiments in “romantic inspiration – Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath” (318), involved reactivating and redisposing an archive of texts and memories in conjunction with prolonged, drug-enhanced spontaneous composition designed to “open secrecy” (318) and produce “strange writing which passes from prose to poetry & back, like the mind” (320). The ways in which both journal entries and the poems developed from them combine transcription and alteration, disclosure and omission are central to the question of their presence and imminence. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued in relation to “Howl”: “The work is post-apocalyptic act, assuming that we are living beyond end time – a moral, political, sexual afterwards that is not simply aftermath, but defines a totally ‘new time’”.19 Framed as a three-year anniversary memorial, belated but nonetheless timely, “Kaddish” engages the familiar problematic of masculine elegy as genealogical (political, sexual, ethical, poetic) crisis and revelation, in a highly unusual way, as maternal agon. With its epigraph from “Adonais”, Shelley’s elegy for Keats, “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!”, “Kaddish” seals Naomi in the monumental body of Allen’s “great formal elegy for [his] mother”.20

William Carlos Williams, in his surprising “Introduction” to “Howl for Carl Solomon” (published as a foreword to Howl And Other Poems), had praised Ginsberg and his title poem “to the hilt” as a radical, heroically manly and “well made” love poem in both homoerotic and homosocial senses:

Williams’ final line, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell”, strategically imputes fastidious, homophobic distaste to “Ladies”, aligning enjoyment and approval of this queerly “contained” explosion of a “well-made poem” with real, right-thinking men who do not “look aside”. The subsequent obscenity trial, The People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in which the powerhouse team of J.W.K. (Jake) Ehrlich, Lawrence Speiser and Albert Bendich, funded by the American Civil Liberties Union, successfully defended the owner of City Lights Books and publisher of The Pocket Poets Series, conferred on both Ginsberg and his book enduring significance and celebrity. Ferlinghetti described the outsize significance of Pocket Poets #4 as “the catalyst in a paradigm shift in American poetry and consciousness”.22 In his “not guilty” ruling (3 October 1957), the presiding judge, W.J. Clayton Horn, affirmed Howl’s “redeeming social importance” as individual, literary expression and thus its protected commercial status, according to the First Amendment obscenity test.23 The book could be freely sold; and sell it did. The original print run was one thousand copies. By the time Allen returned to New York in 1959 and finished “Kaddish”, twenty thousand copies of Howl were in circulation, and he was one of the most famous queers in America, if not the world.24

The forty-three page, ten-poem manuscript of Howl And Other Poems was in press when Naomi died but Allen had sent a mimeographed preprint to her and other family and friends in May 1956. Louis, who had been privy to the book’s genesis, responded promptly with his characteristically ambivalent combination of criticism and support, calling it “a weird, volcanic, troubled, extravagant, turbulent, boisterous, unbridled outpouring, intermingling genius and flashes of picturesque insight with slag and debris of scoraic matter”. Presciently, he added: “The poem should attract attention and perhaps be a sensation; one will hear defenders and detractors. But it should give you a name.”25 Naomi’s reply bore no date but was, eerily, postmarked 11 June 1956, two days after her death, the day of her funeral. Allen learned of his mother’s death on 9 June. He was due to ship out for three months on the USNS Pendleton on 15 June and did not make the trip from San Francisco to the cemetery in Long Island, New York.26 Following her last involuntary admission on 2 February 1951, he had visited her in Pilgrim State every few months up until July 1953.27 These visits, later represented in “Kaddish”, were harrowing and he had not seen her for the last three years. A few weeks before her death, he had written to his brother Eugene that “nobody wants or can help her, really” but he still hoped that she might “be well enough to get along one way or other on the outside”.28 Instead, Naomi died and her last words found him posthumously in mid-July when the ship made a stop in Tacoma.29 Naomi’s letter repeatedly enjoins Allen to “get a good job so you can get a girl to get married” and “behave well”, closing: “Don’t go in for too much drink and other things that are not good for you. … I hope you are not taking any drugs as suggested by your poetry. That would hurt me. Don’t go in for ridiculous things. / With love & good news, / (mother) Naomi.”30 The “good news” adverted to here seems to be Naomi’s queerly optimistic desire to be “out of here and home at the time you were young; then I would be young. I’m in the prime of life now – / Did you read about the two men who died at 139 & 149 yrs. of age? I wonder how they lived. / I’m looking for a good time.”31 The poetic properties of this letter are both internal and external: received after its author’s death, at a poste restante, its contents produce “good news” by containing past and future in the textual present: “I’m in the prime of life now … I’m looking for a good time”. As Weine shows, the letter incorporated into “Kaddish II” as Naomi’s last is, in fact, a mash-up of this one and another letter sent to Eugene, and sent on by him to Allen: “God’s informers came to my bed, and God, himself, he saw it in the sky – it was after Jan 1, 1956. The sunshine showed it too, a key on the side of the window for me to get out. The yellow of the sunshine, also showed me the key on the side of the window. I’m begging you to take me out of here.”32

Naomi’s radiant vision of the key in the window in the sunshine, sent to Eugene and then to him, becomes the central figure of Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”, stretching across all time and space: “Sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges – what shines on old hospitals – as on my yard” (“Kaddish II”). In “Kaddish I”, Ginsberg traces his own returning path to the present of the poem, “thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again”, as he inscribes their meeting in the space of the immemorial memorial poem – Manhattan, “a single vast beam”, “beginningless, endless”. The poem contrives the crossing of Naomi’s immigrant life and death, the “little girl – from Russia” on the Lower East Side – “Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream” – and her son’s nomadic itinerary, both moving “Toward the Key in the window”, “mortal changed” (“Kaddish I”). In “Kaddish II”, the detailed narration of their life together ends with news of Naomi’s death reaching Allen in Berkeley and the poetic incorporation of the reprocessed and altered mash-up of the two letters into a single, phantom text that exists only in this form:

Determined by maternal, Jewish, communist history and origin in the time of the Holocaust and of Stalin, “Kaddish” continued the project of “Howl”, staging a homecoming from a distance, the angelic, queer poet-son’s reverse-annunciation.33 The poem’s dateline is “Paris, December 1957–New York, 1959”. Taking its place at the centre of Ginsberg’s oeuvre, “Kaddish” is chief among the formal elegies and elegiac poems through which he asserted his place in the homographic “fold of the universe where Whitman was / and Blake and Shelley saw Milton dwelling as in a starry temple”, “fellow travellers” and “beloved brothers of an unknown moon”: “My immortality”.34 The son-elegist of “Kaddish” is a flâneur in the ruins, post-“Howl” and motherless:

In the opening lines of “Kaddish”, Ginsberg exchanges the cascading “I saw” of “Howl” for the continuous epic present in which apocalypse as event and atmosphere encompassing all human and cosmic time coincides with processual poesis:

Ginsberg summons the poetics of maternal orientation and disorientation as hauntology: “I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder […]”. The visionary, orphic child assumes his mother’s paranoid orientation, imagining Naomi in his poetic power – here and gone – fort/da. After the anarchic trip of “Howl”, “waving genitals and manuscripts”, Ginsberg returns from Europe a figure of Benjaminian “melancholic progress”, as Ben Lee memorably puts it, with Naomi and her son, in succession, enrolled as angels of history, “moving forward while gazing backward”.37

Written over three years in the aftermath of Naomi’s death and completed in 1959, Ginsberg’s anniversary poem is framed, in part, as a fantasmatic, postponed, graveside “Kaddish”-elegy: a minionless kaddish, the work of Allen alone. As transcultural and transcontinental communion/excommunication, “Kaddish” sublimes the literal absence of the kaddish, and Allen himself, from Naomi’s funeral, in the process becoming the most celebrated maternal elegy in the English language and one of the most noted elegies of the twentieth century. “Kaddish” staged a return to New York as a scene of diasporic mourning, at once apocalyptic and everyday. In the aftermath of his mother’s death and the succès de scandale of Howl And Other Poems (1956), Ginsberg retraced his own and Naomi’s inextricable histories with Shelley’s “Adonais”, the Hebrew kaddish, his own lifelong journals and the body of his errant, incarcerated mother as guides. What emerged is a transnational visio: a prophetic dreaming of the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Bomb, and what Ginsberg later called the “Fall of America”, through the eyes of Naomi and, at second distance, her scribe, true heir, and youngest son.

Howl And Other Poems had staged what proved to be a spectacular coming out in which the radical potential of queer dissidence is broadly conceived. As DuPlessis argues, Ginsberg aligned himself with the community of “deviant Others – people in minority cultures, internal exiles for political reasons (communists, anarchists, anti-Bomb radicals), exiles for psychological reasons (the dissident/odd, psychotic, crazy or driven mad) as well as the sexual exiles and outcasts (mainly male homosexuals, also the sexually promiscuous, and others who do not enter the family economy)”.38 “Kaddish”, “Howl”’s sequel and companion text, revisits this territory precisely as Gothic family romance and schizo-analysis, to tell the story of his own queer invention. If “Howl” was Ginsberg’s spectacular poetic coming out, “Kaddish” narrates a crisis of coming after and trying not to go under: the etiology of the queer poet-heir. Ginsberg sources his own inalienable queer dissidence in what he called Naomi’s “unnamed wildness”, foregrounding and preserving Naomi’s incurable, unbearable alterity as his true inheritance.39 Ginsberg’s iconoclastic free translation and appropriation of the structure and text of the mourner’s kaddish, in memory of his bible-reading, Yiddish-speaking, non-conforming, incarcerated, Russian-American communist mother, angered some of the poem’s early Jewish critics. Mortimer J. Cohen, in the Jewish Exponent for 10 November 1961, for instance, complained: “There is a kind of illegitimate use of Jewish Tradition that is exceedingly exasperating … a total absence of any spiritual quality that in the slightest way warrants the use of the word Kaddish”.40 The transvaluation of the proper meaning and use of words and cultural practices is, of course, a vital tactic of queer signification. Ginsberg’s syncretic, reprocessed, durational kaddish-elegy is part of a left modern reckoning in which, as Amelia Glaser argues, “the distinctly Jewish password was passing, in a non-Jewish language, to a secular, multicultural audience”.41

In “How Kaddish Happened” (1972), Ginsberg described his intention to tell “the whole secret family-self tale … in all its eccentric detail. I realised that it would seem odd to others, but family odd, that is to say, familiar.”42 Ginsberg naturalises what would seem “odd to others” as an eccentricity nonetheless proper to the family and to poetry. To himself he assigns the virtue of telling what should (not) be told, and what we now know he did not tell in his psychotherapy at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. Naomi had died on 9 June 1956, a few days after Allen’s thirtieth birthday, and just a couple of months before Ginsberg’s scandalous, wildly successful career as a published poet was fully launched by Ferlinghetti’s publication of Howl And Other Poems as number four in The Pocket Poets Series. The sensational obscenity trial which followed in 1957, and Judge Horn’s favourable ruling, made Ginsberg an instant celebrity and iconic counter-cultural figure. Donald Allen’s canon-making 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry, included both “Howl” Parts 1 and 2 and “Kaddish” I, III, IV, V. Allen’s anthology notably excluded “Kaddish II”, the detailed central narration of Allen’s life in the vortex of Naomi’s psychosis and hospitalisations, with its brief embedded tale of his first big crush on another schoolboy and, “Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole – weight on my melancholy head –.” At twelve dense pages, Part 2 is twice as long as the other five sections of the poem put together. Only nominally contained by the ritual structure of the kaddish, the copia of Part 2 forms the traumatised body of the elegy. In it the attempt to access homosexual desire and compulsion as a positive source of sublimity always returns to the inescapable phallic mother. At the level of narrative, “Kaddish II” unsparingly recalls how Allen as a child (the poem twice records his age as twelve but he was in fact fifteen, as Weine shows) tries and fails to save Naomi, by doing her (psychotic) bidding, and then himself.43 The poem’s “release of particulars” is evidentiary and apotropaic, an epideictic catalogue of praise and blame. A pastoral tableau of the young Naomi as “holy mother”, “crowned with flowers” – “O glorious muse that bore me”, “O beautiful Garbo of my Karma” – finds its apotheosis in a monstrous counter-image of Naomi cursed, denatured, lobotomised: “Back! You! Naomi! Skull on you!” As “Kaddish II” draws to a close, the poem moves from “All the Horror!” of the poet’s last sight of Naomi, in which both son and mother are annihilated – “‘You’re not Allen –’ I watched her face – but she passed by me, not looking – / Opened the door to the ward, – she went thru without a glance back” – to news of her death and the arrival of her last letter: a poetically orchestrated benediction clearing the way for “Svul Avrum – Israel Abraham – myself – to sing in the wilderness toward God”.44

In his “Note” on composition, first published as the liner notes for a 1959 Fantasy album of Ginsberg reading from “Howl” and “Kaddish”, Ginsberg described his desire to

We hear the echo of Whitman’s homoerotic enargia and his claim in Leaves of Grass – “What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition”. But Ginsberg’s grammatically ambiguous phrase, “open secrecy”, and his intimation of the mirroring pleasures of coterie manuscript circulation – “my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears” – cannot ward off the “loose ghosts” seeking “to invade the bodies of living men”. (The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers was released in 1956, the year of Naomi’s death and of the publication of “Howl”.) Ginsberg immediately associates the colonisation threatened by these ungendered, inhuman bodysnatchers with “academics in limbo” – disapproving authority figures like Ginsberg’s Columbia professor, Lionel Trilling and, to some extent, Ginsberg’s own father, Louis, a modestly successful lyric poet, Columbia graduate and homophobe. Ginsberg’s fantasy of revenge on these predatory paternal ghosts – “creeps [who] wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight” – is offered as the corollary of his “scared love” of feminised “forms in [his] own image” pointing back to the engulfing creator-mother, “a poem in the dark – escaped back to Oblivion”.46

As the ambivalent inheritor of his schizophrenic mother (“you knew, and I know” [Kaddish I]), Ginsberg swerves away from the rhymed lyrics of his father towards more anarchic and expansive versions of experimental masculine/queer textuality – Whitman, Blake, Shelley. But even so, Louis had instilled in both his sons a love of poetry and a desire to write it. Louis’ own poetry, though cast in conventional rhyming quatrains, clearly left its mark on Allen. Take these apostrophic lines from “Special Delivery Letter to Shelley”, from Louis’ first book The Everlasting Minute and Other Lyrics:

Like the poetically altered, special-delivery, posthumous letter from Naomi to Allen which ends “Kaddish II”, Louis’ 1937 poem seems to prophesy his queer son’s mainlining of Shelley’s “Adonais” a generation later.48

3.

Like the cascading “who” of “Howl I”, the six sections of “Kaddish” (“Proem”, “Narrative”, “Hymmnn & Lament”, “Litany & Fugue”) stage an allegory of the fraught, intimate mother–son relation through the grammar and rhetoric of anaphora and deixis; orientation and relation: “toward”, “done with”, “no more” (“Kaddish I”), “by” (“Kaddish II”), “in the [x] blessed be” (“Hymmnn”), “only to have” (“Kaddish III”), “O mother / farewell / with your …”, (“Kaddish IV”) and “Caw caw”, “Lord Lord” (“Kaddish V”). The poem’s maternal tropism – “I walk toward the Lower East Side / – where you walked fifty years ago, little girl – from Russia, eating the / first poisonous tomatoes of America” – is concentrated in Allen’s repurposing of Naomi’s figuration of the key in the window. In the coda of “Kaddish II”, with news of Naomi’s death and the arrival of her posthumous letter of maternal advice, Ginsberg lays Naomi’s ghost, figuratively reburying his mother in the belated, immemorial present tense of “Kaddish”. The poetically altered posthumous maternal intertext reaches its destination as twice-mediated, co-authored inclusion at the centre of the son’s crypt-elegy, “my own as hers” (“Kaddish V”):

Replacing her, the embedded, rescripted letter, foreshadowed in “Kaddish I” (“Toward the Key in the window”) and appearing in both “Kaddish II” and “Kaddish III”, offers an affective and aesthetic condensation of the work of mourning and the work of poetry, secreted within the son’s elegy as radiant open secret.

Ginsberg’s incantation of Naomi’s life as communist activist and incarcerated, lobotomised madwoman, forms the ground of “Kaddish” as cyclical, melancholic perseveration. Naomi is before and after “the flash of existence”, “beginningless and endless”: “Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever – like Emily Dickinson’s horses – headed to the End”.52 The erotic, cosmopolitan camaraderie of angel-headed hipsters that suffused “Howl” may seem all but extinguished in “Kaddish” by the spectre of “the Naomi” as another zombified, child-eating Moloch, at once dead and alive: “Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own as hers caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand”.53 In the final graveside section of the poem, however, the return to Whitman and Leaves of Grass, although buried, is unmistakeable. Ginsberg consigns his own backward glance – the panoptic, maternised eye of “Kaddish” – to the grave, along with Naomi’s remains, conjuring in its place an unstable queer echo on the border of the inhuman: “Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord”.54 Naomi laid, inlaid: half-life, half-rhyme; Mother as poisoned and life-giving pharmakon; the poem as part-object, half-mad; the poet-son as “fag attendant”.55 Ginsberg brings his queerly optimistic kaddish-elegy – singular work-product, magnificent workaround – “home”, graveside, on Long Island: Whitman’s birthplace.

Bibliography