Allen Ginsberg in New York

by Philip Gambone

During his undergraduate years at Columbia University, the future Beat-generation poet Allen Ginsberg spent a "two-sided student career," dividing his time between intense literary studies and a life of drinking in homosexual bars, hanging out in Pokerino parlors, listening to jazz, writing poems, and searching for a way to pay for psychoanalysis. Twice expelled, he graduated in 1948 with a BA in English.

Over the next few years, Ginsberg took various menial jobs and hung out with a bohemian set, some of whom were involved in criminal activity. In April 1949, he was arrested as an accomplice to a ten-thousand-dollar theft. He was released into the custody of his father on the condition that he receive psychiatric treatment. He spent the next eight months at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, from which he was finally released in February 1950.

Ginsberg's time in the psychiatric facility gave him an opportunity to reassess his commitments, especially as a writer. He began to aim for a poetry that would be "gone, wild, weird, romantic," full of "bounce and beat," as one of his biographers, Bill Morgan, notes.

In late August, 1951, the twenty-five-year-old Ginsberg decided a change of scene might do him some good. Accompanying his hard-drinking friend Lucien Carr, he embarked on a road trip to Mexico. In Mexico City, they hitched up with Joan Volmer Burroughs, the wife of Beat writer William Burroughs. The three of them took off on a drunken jaunt across the Sierra Madre mountains to Guadalajara, where Joan was intent on scoring some marijuana. Ginsberg remembered the ride as both "great kicks and torment of continual threat of death."

Paricutín Volcano
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In Mazatlán, they went to see the active volcano Parícutin, which was spouting molten lava and rocks. Lucien's Chevrolet kept getting stuck, while Joan urged them on: "Let's get to the volcano!" In early September, Ginsberg and Carr headed for home. When the car broke down in Texas, Carr flew to New York, leaving Ginsberg with the job of getting the vehicle repaired. On September 7, he read in the newspaper that Burroughs had killed his wife in a freak accident.

Joan Vollmer Burroughs' Death
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During the next few years, Ginsberg tried to get his poems published, but without success. "I waste time," he wrote in his journal, "whole days, weeks, years have passed by. I walk around aimlessly not noticing things, not experiencing anything new, emotionally or spiritually, just dreaming or analyzing without result and with an aimless aim." He continued to struggle with his sexuality—queer or straight? A lot of his energy went into helping his friends get their own work published, especially Jack Kerouac, who had written an autobiographical book called On the Road. (See "A Kind of Shangri-la: Jack Kerouac's Mexico," Lokkal, July 23, 2023.) He also started studying Zen Buddhism, reading Chinese poetry, and looking at Asian art.

Ginsberg became tired of his life in New York and his string of short-lived jobs. When his friends Neal and Carolyn Cassady invited him to come out to California for a visit, he grabbed the opportunity. He looked forward to another, longer road trip that he hoped would be good for "my art and soul's sake."

Carolyn and Neal Cassady
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He left in December 1953, taking a very roundabout route to San Francisco by first hitchhiking to Florida and then on to Cuba. From "horrid Havana" he flew to Mexico, enjoying the green Yucatán Coast, "maplike below with sinkholes in earth of limestone crust and narrow road and trails like antpath down below and little cities like mushrooms on pockets," he wrote in one of his journals. Ginsberg planned to stay two months, visiting Mayan ruins, then crossing over to Chiapas and Oaxaca, and on to Mexico City.

In Mérida, he stayed at a casa de huéspedes for five pesos a night. On New Year's Eve, he was invited to a formal party attended by wealthy people who were dressed in formal wear and sipping champagne. Later he wandered into a poor section of town, where he listened to music coming from the peasant dancehalls. The contrast between the rich and poor disturbed him. Other things troubled him, too: the mosquitoes were awful; speaking in his limited Spanish was exhausting and frustrating.

Temple of Kukulcan (Chichén Itzá)
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During his years at Columbia, Ginsberg had developed an interest in Mayan mythology and art, and so he headed to Chichén Itzá. He wrangled free housing next to the great pyramid of "El Castillo" (Temple of Kukulkan) and spent several days wandering around the ruins and climbing to the top of the eleventh-century temple. One night, he took some codeine, set up his hammock outside one of the temple chambers, and spent a few hours "looking up at the nylon of stars."

Ginsberg was impressed by the pyramid. He wrote in his journal of the "great stone portals, entablatures of language gone, poetry gone, spirit gone, bas reliefs of unknown perceptions." He saw a death's head and "cocks a thousand years old grown over with moss and batshit in a dripping vaulted room of stone." Clapping his hands, he heard the eerie "reechoes from half a dozen temples laid out at acoustical angles made for jazz and poetry and religion: the projection of a voice of stone, the echo of eternity."

Tizimín altar
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He moved on to the ruins at Valladolid with its Mayan observatory and then, via a ten-hour crowded train ride, to Tizimín, where the colonial-era cathedral hosted the oldest fiesta in Mexico, Three Kings Day. In a long letter to Kerouac, he described "the air of the cathedral so smoky and so full of candles the wax on the floor was inches deep and slippery." The ride back was just as uncomfortable as the journey to get there. He had to sit for ten hours in a boxcar "with benches on sides and down center." There were over a hundred people in the car, "old women and babies falling asleep on my shoulder and lap, everybody suffering meaningless hour-long stops in the nite to change tracks or engines."

By the middle of January, he was at Uxmal, where he found the ruins "a splendid spectacle of white courtyards, complicated latticework and crude sculptures." The pyramids were covered with trees, and the "awesome intricate vistas" of jungle and mountain brilliant in the sunlight. As in Chichén Itzá, here, too, he clapped his hands, which brought about "many strangely pitched echoes like twanged ukulele."

Jack Kerouac
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Mounds "big as battleships" sat next to white courtyards and pyramids. The great pyramid was then "a mass of rubble, very loose &c dangerous &c high." He found it "curious to see those great stones hanging together by their own weight ready to fall without much of a push." Bits of pottery were scattered all over ground. Marveling at the balance and proportion of The House of the Magician, Ginsberg found the structure "unthinkable for this continent—I'd never realized the vast sophistication of Pre-Columbian America."

In his journal, he jotted down notes on all the structures he saw. The fact that the entire site, including the great main streets and mounds, was manmade impressed him greatly. Still, at night, alone in his hut, he found himself wishing he had "someone in the room I loved with me—no ghosts—a man of flesh to talk to and hug."

Ginsberg at Palenque (1954)
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Ginsberg moved on to the lost city of Palenque, which struck him as "more sylvan than imperial, consisting of main pyramid halfway up mount, main palace with labyrinths &c fragments of stucco ornament and a 3-story tower, and a set of 3 small arcadian temples grown over with moss perched together on a set of green terraces at the foot of a gigantic hump of green mountain, &c resembling the mountain in contour, much like a Chinese drawing in its lines." Later he wrote to his friend Jack Kerouac to say that the area's forest was "perfect for Bhikku solitude."

Toward the end of January 1954, in another letter to Kerouac, Ginsberg confessed that he was "beginning to really hate Mexico and almost wish I were out of it." He was short on funds, and realized that he would not be able to visit several other cities he had hoped to see. Nevertheless, he planned on "dawdling" in Mexico a few more weeks before finally moving on to California and the Cassadys. His plan to dawdle was made easier by a stroke of good luck that allowed him to stay in Mexico much longer than he could have hoped. That surprising turn of events will be the subject of the next installment of my column, "The Writer in Mexico."

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. For over a decade, his book reviews appeared regularly in The New York Times. Phil is the author of seven books. His memoir, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, was published last year by Rattling Good Yarns Press. His books are available through Amazon, Aurora Bookstore, and at "Tesoros," the bookshop at the Biblioteca.

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