Allen Ginsberg on Norman Podhoretz's 'ridiculous fat-bellied mind'

 "Why have you come back, Allen," I said. "To save America," he answered. "I don't know what from."

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
October 15, 1958, Vol. III, No. 51

 

Between the question-smile, answer-laugh, the first beer in the time and space between table and saw-dust-covered floor, the order of an interview was lost; order that demands a stiffness one cannot long maintain when talking with Allen Ginsberg, reading Allen Ginsberg, digging Allen Ginsberg.

Data: Allen Ginsberg, 32, Paterson, NJ, Columbia College, Merchant Marine, Texas, Denver, Times Square, Mexico City, Harlem, Yucatan, Chiapas, San Francisco, "HOWL," Rue Dit le Coeur, Lower East Side.

Ginsberg sat at the table in a Village bar wearing a colored T-shirt and faded wash pants. Also remember the breaks into time when I got the beer, or he borrowed matches from three girls nearby. Sometimes I took notes and sometimes I didn't, and this is no New Yorker profile but a series of responses, thoughts, and phrases. If I were to write of Ginsberg instead of Ginsberg's sayings, this would not be an interview;it would be a litany.

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Norman Podhoretz: (in the Spring 1958 issue of Partisan Review, Norman Podhoretz attacked beat-generation writers, primarily Kerouac and Ginsberg, as "Know-Nothing Bohemians." Podhoretz charged that K. & G. were violent anti-intellectuals and that their cultivation of spontaneity destroyed "the distinction between life and literature.") "The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths—it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction…The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'INTELLECTUALS' and there are intellectuals. Pohdhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce. The trouble is that Podhoretz has a great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often."

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