Daddy cool

One of the more objectionable of Allen Ginsberg’s traits was a tendency to speak in iron bound absolutes. More than rejecting their parents’ post-war moralities, the Beats replaced them with a diametrically opposed set of values, espousing homosexuality, jazz, drugs, poetry, booze. Which was a blast, sure, but the reader often got the feeling he or she was merely being sold more dogma; a different breed perhaps, but dogma nonetheless.

So then, who better to challenge Allen’s cant than his old man?

Family Business – Selected Letters Between A Father And Son (Bloomsbury), edited by Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher, is a collection of correspondence between the Howl legend and his father Louis, himself a reasonably respected lyric poet and thinker.

There were no flies on the elder gentleman. In one extract dated March 10 1958, he writes: “Everything, according to your views, is all wrong, all in ruins, all warmongering, all immoral – except you (plural). All husbands and wifes (sic) fornicate selfishly; all is false; all civilisation messed up, all progress in the wrong, false track; all doomed. Everything wrong except your Beat Generation. Well, all I can say is ‘Save me from that mixed up, confused view of the Beat Generation which maintains it has a blueprint of Truth, obviously handed down to them in a mystic, blinding revelation from Heaven.’”

Such missives juxtaposed with supportive and shrewd reviews of the younger man’s poetry make Family Business a crackling read. The subjects discussed cover everything from Allen’s LSD experiments to his love affairs and travel expeditions, plus Kaddish, his fiery elegy for his gifted, disturbed and committed Communist mother Naomi (Louis unsurprisingly had objections about the “beard about the vagina” line), making these letters as indispensable to Beat lore completists as the Pull My Daisy short film, Kerouac’s spoken word recordings or Burroughs’ own collected correspondence.