Howl offers a veritable inventory of autobiographical references and a laundry list of

iconic gay tropes: anal sex, motorcycle trade boys, sailors (the ubiquitous seafood),
promiscuity, public sex.

In San Francisco in 1954, Ginsbergs seminal experiences didnt take place on the town
and in the midst of crowds. The pivotal moments were intensely personal and remarkably
solitary. They often happened while he was on drugsDexedrine, marijuana, and
peyoteand the drugs opened an interior world that led to Howl. Peyote provided the
seeds for Part I and Part II of the poemthe most depressing sections, though even here
there are glimpses of ecstasy and joy. In his essay Notes Written on Finally Recording
Howl, Ginsberg explained that he got high on peyote in his Nob Hill apartment in the
city and saw an im- age of the robot skullface of Moloch in the upper stories of a big
hotel. The big hotel was the Sir Francis Drake, a San Francisco landmark, but as his
journals and letters indicate, he didnt see Moloch immediately, as he would later claim.
Moloch came to him slowly, not in a sudden revelation; he shaped and selected his
images gradually, not in a flash.
The first time he looked at San Francisco under the influence of peyote, he saw New
York City as though it was right outside his windowso close and so real that he could
almost touch it.
Ginsberg also drew increasingly on his own life, especially his memories of childhood,
which sprang up as he wrote Howl. In Part I, he describes his vul- nerability as a boy at
school who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before / the
machinery of other skeletons. He also added passages that describe his selfabandonment and the ways that the culture of repression was embedded in his own
consciousness from an early age. Moloch who entered my soul early! he wrote with a
sense of sadness. Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ec- / stasy!
He was in exile from himself, and his burden was to come home to himselfto his
homosexuality, his Jewish identity, and his own idiosyncratic version of communism.

-------------------------------------

At the end of Part I, Ginsberg describes his literary journey the process of writing
Howl; thus Howl is also a poem about itself, a poem that refers to itself and
communicates with itself: an autotelic poem. Ginsberg depicts himself as he runs
through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash / of the alchemy of the use of the
ellipse the catalogue the meter. At the end of Part I, he sees himself confessing out the
soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his / naked and endless head. Now, he isnt
only a poet of New York, Denver, or Texas, but of the entire country, and he identifies

himself as an inspired jazz musiciana saxo- phonistwho blows the suffering of

Americas naked mind. Part I ends with a sense of triumph and personal satisfaction.
It made sense to end his poem with an account of the act of writing the poem. But Howl
wasnt done with Ginsberg; the poem wasnt completed yet. The peyote-induced image
of the Sir Francis Drake Hotelthe Drake Monster, as he called it came back to
haunt him. In August of 1955, nine months after his first hallucination in San Francisco,
he took peyote againthis time with Peter Orlovsky, the new love of his life. We
wandered on peyote all downtown, he wrote Kerouac. Saw Moloch Moloch smoking
building in red glare downtown . . . with robot upstairs eyes and skullface, in smoke,
again. Now for the first time he gave the monster a specific name, a name from the Old
Testament, which he had read as a boy and on his voyage to Dakar and was now
rereading. He began to write about Molochnot on his typewriter, but by hand at the
bottom of the page of the who section that hed already written. His first description of
Moloch was shortit added up to less than a full page. Here again Ginsberg borrowed
from his memories of gloomy New York, and once again he wrote about subways,
garbage cans, and ugliness. He also offered two powerful images of children children
screaming under the stairs, and children breaking their / backs under the subway.
Breaking their backs trying to lift the / Whole City on their backs. The Whole City is
icy, heavy New York City; Ginsbergs children carry the weight of Rocke- feller Center
ons. They also carry the immense political weight of the twentieth century on their own
backs, and that seems to be how Ginsberg felt as a child growing up in the 1930s in a leftwing household. Hitler! Stalin! he wrote in the first manuscript draft of Part II, echoing
the names hed heard so often at home in Paterson. The Moloch section of Howl was as
dark and de- pressing as anything he had written, but a new note of joy could also be
heard. The children raise the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us.
Even in the inferno, paradise might be found.
Soon after he wrote the initial draft of the Moloch section of Howl, Ginsberg moved
from San Francisco to Berkeley, and in Berkeleythe campustown, as he called ithe
became even more optimistic. Howl became more hopeful, too. The last image in the
poemits almost picture-postcard perfectis of a cot- tage in the Western / night, an
idyllic sanctuary from the inferno of the American megalopolis. The image of the cottage
was in- spired by the real cottage at 1624 Milvia Street in Berkeley, where Ginsberg lived
from the summer of 1955 to the summer of 1956.
In 1975, twenty years after he wrote Howl, he insisted that the key phrase of the whole
poem was Moloch whose name is the / mind!a phrase that derives from Blakes
image of mind- forgd manacles. What Ginsberg seemed to be saying was that the
human mind was its own worst enemya notion that was re- inforced by his readings in
Buddhism in 1955. Howl sounds a note of ambivalence about the causes of human
suffering. Gins- berg offers two contrary, though not necessarily irreconcilable, ideas
one Marxist and political, the other Buddhist and spiri- tual. In Howl, human beings are
the victims of war, injustice, and povertycapitalist society inflicts suffering. But human
beings are also the authors of their own suffering. While the author rages against Moloch
and identifies with the Blakean lamb-like youths, he also suggests that the lamb-like
youths arent simply innocent victims. They have led themselves to slaughter, much as

they have chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy /
Bronx. Howl derives its power from Gins- bergs ability to entertain what Keats called
negative capabil- itythe strength of mind to hold opposite, contradictory thoughts . .
. without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. Ambivalence, irony, and paradox
are at the heart of Howl, and in that sense its a poem of the 1940s and the era of Eliot
and the New Criticism. But its also a poem of the 1950s and the era when Buddhism
began to influence poets and writers from Salinger to Kerouac. Ginsberg would say he
wanted a world without war and without the Bomb, and yet he would also say that he
loved the Bomb. Hating it and wanting to ban it would only add to its power over
humanity, he felt. The point was to negate it through acceptance. By the end of Howl,
hed come to that realization. The Bomb was holy too.

--------------Three years later, in 1951, when the United States was fighting communism in Koreaa
war Ginsberg did not supporthe took the images and phrases he had recorded in his
journal in 1949 and turned them into A Poem on America. Not surprisingly, it begins
America is like Russia . . . / We have the proletariat too. Still laterin San Francisco in
1955he returned to the idea that the two nations mirrored one another, but this time the
mir- ror images were more menacing. In an early draft of Part II of Howl he wrote,
Moloch whose name is America / Moloch whose name is Russia . . . Moloch whose
name is / Chicago and Mos- cow. Later, he removed those lines, making the Moloch
section less overtly political, but his idea that the monster of war and tyranny could be
found in both America and Russia came up again and again over the yearsin interviews
and in poems. It seems to me that dogmatic cold-war types in the U.S. and the So- cialist
countries are mirror images of each other and are bent on world destruction, he
exclaimed in 1965, the year he finally had a real taste of communist bureaucracy and was
expelled from both Cuba and Czechoslovakia.
------Every detaileven the exclamation marks in the Moloch sec- tion (all eighty-three of
them)contributed to the intensity of the whole. Though he boasted of his spontaneity,
he in fact searched for what Flaubert called le mot justethe precise word to fit the
specific context.
Acc to Ginsberg All conceptions of the self which limit the self to a fixed identity are
obviously arbitrary. When he wrote those lines to Louis he was living in Europe, an
experience that intensified his awareness of his identity. So finally it even begins

dawning on me to stop thinking of myself as an American. And often in the dead of night
I wonder who this fiction named Allen Ginsberg isit certainly isnt me.
Surely, fame would have taken a far greater toll had he not un- derstood that Allen
Ginsberg was a fiction. His ability to re- main detached from any one fixed identity had
helped to make Howl an extraordinary poem. In Howl, he was the paragon of the protean
poet. In the moment of creation, he was everyone and he was everywhere, from Alcatraz
to Madison Avenue. He was him- self, and he was also almost everyone else in the poem.
He could become one with the angelheaded hipsters and with the Adonis of Denver. He
was Moloch and he was Carl Solomon, too.