“Utopia and Dissent”
Two things struck me this week. The first was a quote from the poet Robert Duncan in the book “Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California,” by Richard Candida Smith. The book is a social history of the artistic and literary scene in California from the late 40s into the early 70s, though it begins earlier along to set the terms. In a discussion of writers and artist of the 1950s who objected to the term “Beat” Smith quotes Duncan describing a term he preferred to Best:
“In a Bohemian household you have immediacy to all the arts so that you are going to have some aspect of music, poetry, painting, and also the decoration of things at the same level. The minute they’re picked up, it is part of the thing that you do. Much of what you have around is either painted, composed, etc., either by you or your friends/ That's part of the flow. The first thing you have regarding the Bohemian thing is that you don’t have someone else do your decor… The Bohemian way is also a constant flow of people in and out, lots of entertainment. You are not surprised that so-and-so is married, or not married to so-and-so. That’s part of what we see – this network of people, this constant interchange.”
The other thing that struck me came during our Wednesday mediation session with Cantor Kerith Spencer-Shapiro; I was thinking about times when I had thought that I understood what my wife thought, but, for one of a variety of reasons, I didn’t ask. I realized that I really didn’t know what she was thinking, that it might have made a difference in my life if I had known. That book is closed now. She passed away.
Reading “Utopia and Dissent” brought me to a similar, if less intimate place. David Meltzer and Jack Hirschman come up in the book. David more so, particularly in the chapter discussing Wallace Berman and the circle around him. I knew both of them for twenty-five years or so and talked to them many times. I even arranged a poetry reading featuring the two of them together at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco. (Rabbi Alan Lew was very excited to have a poetry series at the shul, having been a part of the poetry scene in the 70s centered at the Grand Piano cafe on Haight street.) For a long time, I felt that I knew them. Reading about their experiences in the 60s and 70s showed me otherwise.
David Meltzer was a precocious figure in the poetry scene. He began writing poetry at 11. He moved to San Francisco in 1957 and recorded an album of poetry backed by a Jazz group the year after, only 18 at the time. When the artist Wallace Berman moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Meltzer became part of his circle. Their relationship lasted until Berman’s death in 1976, though they were closest during Berman’s San Francisco years. Berman returned to Los Angeles in 1965. They were both considered part of the Beat Movement, but they were less part of the Beat Scene.
In “Utopia and Dissent,” Smith describes a fissure within the Beats that is largely out of sight for most people. Smith’s analysis is really helpful to me. Having known some of these figures it was hard for me to figure out the specific gravity that attracted them into the Beat orbit. David Meltzer represented a more domestic figure. He was close friends with Jack Hirschman. I saw them together any number of times. Hirschman lived in self-imposed poverty and was always close to the life of the street. Jack Micheline, patron saint of out-sider poetry, lived a rougher life than Hirschman, but resembled much more the Kerouac side of the beat experience. Smith uses Berman and his Bohemianism as the example of Beat domesticity, a counterweight to the Kerouac version, which was the version of the Beats that was useful in popular culture.
Kerouac represented the male Beat desire for self-fulfillment that viewed domesticity, and thus women, as a part of the confining social structure that stood in the way of that fulfillment. Berman, who valued family very highly, found self-fulfillment within the family structure. One might view that as inherently conservative, but for Berman familial domesticity, due to its inherent intimacy, could be seen as a form of seeker experience that paralleled the searching found in those who used drugs like peyote or heroin, or those on the Kerouac extreme who used sexuality and danger as their means.
Jewish Beats tended more towards the domestic side. Berman depicted himself with his son Tosh in promotion that he did for his exhibits and in the magazine that he published, Semina. This projection of domesticity as a value was influential. The cover of David Meltzer showing him with his daughter on the 1962 poetry collection, “We All Have Something to Say to Each Other,” mirrored Berman’s imagery. All of the figures that I have mentioned were Jewish with the exception of Kerouac.
Berman, Meltzer and Hirschman were all interested in Kabbalah. Berman probably led the others in that direction. He was a few years older and had already begun to use Hebrew letters, that he invested with mystical significance, in his artwork. He used the letter Aleph as his mark, with an understanding that it carries the Kabbalistic meaning of the ineffability of the Divine. It is a letter without a sound, which appealed to Berman as a marker of presence without dominance. Berman used Hebrew letters in his art and both in his graphics and in his sculptures. However, the way he uses Hebrew feels odd to a knowledgeable Jew because the letters are not organized into Hebrew words. They are not even transliterations of English into Hebrew. Instead, they represent expressions of Berman’s sensory experience of the letters. He did not even know that the letters had numerical values until Meltzer showed him the early 1970s.
Interest in Jewish mysticism fit into the interest of this group as they matured out of the Beat era (well, as some of them did). A high-point of the that Jewish expression came through the four issues of “Tree” a thick poetry journal edited by Meltzer in the early 70s (along with the doorstop of a collection edited by Jerome Rothenberg, “A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present.”) Tree’s first issue ends with the Aleph in the typography that Berman preferred and closes with a photo of one of the stone sculptures that Berman did with Hebrew letters on them. The writers and artists featured come out of Berman’s orbit. It includes a section on Abraham Abulafia that begins with a preface by Gershom Scholem.
While I see the role that Berman may have had in encouraging interest in Kabbalah with Meltzer and Hirschman (who provides the translations of Abulafia) they went further into the actual tradition. I am frustrated with myself for not asking them about this when I had the chance. Neither of them seemed particularly eager, when I knew them, to identify themselves as “Jewish” poets. I have always wondered how much access they had to the Hebrew texts. Hirschman was known for his large body of translations from an array of languages. I got him a copy of Hirsh Glik’s short collection of poems when he wanted to translate that from Yiddish and he didn’t give me any reason to think that he would be challenged by that, but it was never clear to me how much of these languages that he was translating from he actually knew.
It seems like they did read Scholem, but they also read the idiosyncratic work of the French poet, artist and Kabbalist, Carlo Suares. While Abulafia is best known for his emphasis on the Hebrew letters in Jewish meditation, Suares came up with his own ideas about codes in the Hebrew Bible, an idea taken further by soberer seeming folks who are actually crazier. Suares was an Egyptian-born Jew who did actually have access to the original texts. Of the mostly American authors who appear in Tree all seem to be outside of the world of traditional Judaism and seem instead to, like Rothenberg, be treating Jewish ideas as part of what Rothenberg would call, “Ethnopoetics.”
What is a mystery for me about these poet’s lives is something that I can pick away by reading more and picking out clues. With my wife, what I am struggling to understand I can only search for in memories. But there are so many others whose lives I would like to understand better. There are questions that I can ask now. I am hoping that I have become a better listener and a more fearless inquirer.
