It was two thousand years since the last Poetry Olympics flop at the Albert Hall … people would have forgotten. Time for another bout of logorrhoea. The Beatniks’ revenge.
John Cooper Clarke had been slipped on the bill as a young(ish) contender so Demetrius finally got the chance to get to Allen Ginsberg, the headline act. Nico knew Ginsberg from the good old days back at the Dom – in fact she’d borrowed the harmonium idea from him. Demetrius and Ginsberg had a shared enthusiasm … Enthusiasm. Demetrius championed Ginsberg because he was never really ‘hip’, being too much of a celebrant … the nebbish at the centre of every groovy scene, holding a candle, chanting his homoerotic mantras. He’d get excited and take off his clothes in the presence of people who were too cool to remove their RayBans. He was Dr Demetrius’s kind of guy.
Demetrius quickly elected himself as Ginsberg’s road manager and fixed him up with a rentagig reading in Liverpool. Nico and I tagged along.
Ginsberg was dressed in a check jacket, white shirt and tie, his beard neatly trimmed. He looked like an elderly Emeritus professor of American literature, rather than the guru of mutual masturbation. Demetrius seemed a bit disappointed. As the exhausted Citroën panted up the M6, the conversation limped along behind.
‘How smaaart you look now, Allen,’ remarked Nico.
‘Weell you know, times have changed. I’m told the Buddah would wear a jacket and tie now, and host his own talk show, on cable of course.’
‘Well, I’m not so sure about that, Allen,’ said Demetrius, offended by the image.
‘Neither am I,’ he chuckled.
Rather than the hoped-for instant bridge of sensibilities between the two men of letters, Demetrius encountered an immediate chasm of understanding, constantly widened by their attempts at conversation. Demetrius had believed that Ginsberg was the true inheritor of the Whitman flame, the Ecstatic Priapic, an unrepentant self-pleasurer.
But … the Master Beat, it turned out, was not a true man of the people. He didn’t endorse the simple and honest virtues of the people’s music (Country & Western). Nor did he honour the memory of the people’s sovereign. The King:
We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much, Baby.
‘I really can’t,’ said Ginsberg, the words muffled by a mouthful of cheese and onion crisps, ‘see any redeeming qualities in the music of Elvis Presley. I’m sorry …’ He really did seem sorry.
Demetrius turned up the cassette. ‘Just listen to this, Allen.’ He sang along in that bluff, hunker-down baritone:
We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds.
‘There you go, Allen,’ Demetrius paused the cassette. ‘We can’t build our dreams on suspicious minds. What a line!’
Ginsberg shook his head. ‘Once again, I’m sorry, I just don’t see it.’ To him it was just honky music, whiter than a Klansman’s hood. ‘Compared with an artist of Dylan’s depth and originality, Presley is pure Vegas Schlock.’
‘Bloody’ell, Allen, you’re talking about the King there.’ Demetrius was wounded. He canvassed Nico’s opinion.
Nico was smoking a thin, single joint like a rollup, of opiated hash. She mulled over the message of the dead King, then smiled at everyone. ‘You know, there’s this new birth pill, that when you take it, it’s like you were never boorn … funny, huh?’ She laughed.
Ginsberg popped open another bag of crisps and offered them round. It kept our mouths wordlessly occupied.
Demetrius had hoped he might be in for some On the Road epiphanies. Ginsberg, perhaps, hoped he might be in for some Front-Line Brixton Faggotry. (I’d expressed interest in his small Indian pump-organ. I think he got the wrong idea.)
Nico just seemed happy to be with someone older than herself, who endorsed some of the same Dionysiac myths. For Artist Guru, read Favourite Uncle.
Ginsberg seemed genuinely to go for the good in people, straight away. Demetrius’s competitiveness and cock-size comparisons were of little interest to him. There was a seriousness behind the hedonism and an austerity beneath the hyperbole. He was a kindly man who held strong beliefs, the belief in happiness being paramount. He just didn’t like Elvis Presley.
We weren’t accustomed to such positivism and the dank European fog of pessimism took a little time to lift … though, strangely, not from Nico’s shoulders. She seemed almost childlike with him, less tortured. Enriched by his spiritual largesse.
Demetrius’s father, Big Lionel, was a gruff, bluff, Manchester patriarch. The Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Rotary Club. He detested all lesser reptiles like his son’s associates and thought Demetrius Jr an unworthy recipient of the family chemist fortune. He’d had three heart attacks already – one for each of his sons.
Demetrius Jr had witnessed Ginsberg’s dignified professorial manner at the Albert Hall. Perhaps a poetry recital would reassure his father that his son was at last engaged in serious cultural pursuits.
The dressing-room was unlike any I’d ever seen. People talking quietly, holding glasses of white wine at shoulder level. Women in frocks, men in suits, cheese on sticks, a couple of bearded Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor lookalikes discussing ballad form by the beer tray. There was no one puking, fighting, shooting up, or sulking.
Nico wandered around the chattering forest of literary wind, a lost child smoking an opium joint.
I remained, the corner paranoiac, aware only of a slight whiff of body odour, of nervous provincialism, of defeat. Allen was the most famous poet in the world. Not as famous as a medium-level pop-star would be, but it was an extraordinary achievement, nonetheless. You could detect little bite-size morsels of envy, they popped in and out of mouths, like the skewered cubes of sweating cheddar: ‘This psychedelic Rabbi, this media-manipulator, this Half-Holy Fool of the Beautiful People gets everywhere, all the time. How does the bastard find time to write? Huh, no wife, no kids of course … Gay, you know … the first to come out, they say … Quite courageous really, in the middle of McCarthyism … H’mmmm, he has been around rather a long time, though …’
The cheese-and-winos left the dressing-room and took their seats in the hall. Big Lionel was escorted to the ‘Reserved’ row.
Nico offered Ginsberg some of her joint (a rare act) before he went on stage. He paused, then as if resolving against false resolutions, accepted it, sipping little by little the tarry euphoria. He passed it to Demetrius, who shook his head.
‘No, no, Allen, never, not for me … the mirror is already distorted.’
‘Are you going to take your clothes off, Allen?’ Nico asked.
In front of the ‘mild, withdrawn English’, we’d have to see.
Nico and I took our places at the back, directly behind Big Lionel and Demetrius.
Ginsberg began by chanting the Padma Sambhava mantra: ‘Om Ah Hum …’ seated on a chair, squeeze-box on his knees, sustaining a single-note drone. The embarrassment prickled, but it was bearable. People half expected the chanting. What made the audience crave invisibility, though, was Ginsberg’s increasingly homosexual subject matter.
He lubricated our sensibilities with ‘Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet-mouthed/Under Boulder coverlets winter springtime …’ Gently he slipped in the ‘happy hard-ons’.
Then he yelled a climactic sonnet to the stretched sphincter: ‘Fuck me in the ass! Suck me! Come in my ears!/I want those pink Abdominal Bellybuttons!’
The veins in Big Lionel’s neck bulged. His skin turned red to purple with barely suppressed outrage.
After the reading Big Lionel refused to shake the hand of the sodomite, the fellator of blond boys, the man who washed his own arse like a street Arab. Instead he exploded at Demetrius: ‘My Godfathers! Call that poetry? That I should desert my hearth and home to be subjected to the foul-mouthed ravings of a bearded nancy.’
In the dressing-room the serious Liverpool literati gathered as Ginsberg carefully packed his squeeze-box. Mersey Beat Poets. Beards and BeBop glasses. Thelonius Monk and the Man in the Moon.
Nico poured herself a glass of warm Liebfraumilch and shook her head; she seemed disappointed.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘I thought Allen always took his clothes off,’ she sighed.