746
G. S.
FRASER
PLUG, PROJECT, REPEAT
THE HAPPY BIRTHDAY OF DEATH . By
Gregory Corso. New
Directions. $1.20.
I listened about a year ago, on the British Broadcasting
Corporation's Third Programme, to a dialogue between either Gins–
berg or Corso, I forget which, and an old acquaintance of mine,
now in the United States, Donald Came-Ross. Carne-Ross looks
rather like Sherlock Holmes, and has a gimlet-like intelligence; on
this occasion, he was using it to bore holes
in
the sea. Came-Ross
is not what I would call a kindly man, but in England the tender
side of his nature used to come out in keeping, in his rather shabby
rooms in Earl's Court, a pet rat. His crisp, brisk, biscuity English
voice offered, however, no crumbs of comfort to Ginsberg or Corso.
The Beatnik soliloquy just went on and on, throbbing with a grow–
ing admiration and pity and love of itself, and when Carne-Ross
did, once in five minutes, manage to break the flow with, "It does,
rather,
seem to me
that .
.."
the terrible flux would drown the de–
pendent-noun clause, the relentless voice of Ginsberg or Corso
would cry: "Don't break into what I'm saying."
It was not an interview, in other words, it was abreaction:
Came-Ross ought not to have been the critic, "the questioner who
sits so sly," but the psychiatrist lying as exhausted on his companion
couch (the flow of abreactive words was very exhausting) as his
patient. The effect of exposing yourself full, bang on, to Ginsberg
or Corso is in fact like the effect (which I have suffered) of letting
a manic-depressive friend slowly exhaust all your constructive and
helpful responses in the depressive phase. You reach a point where
you scream, "All right, why
don't
you go and kill yourself?" and
the friend, having secured a temporary breakdown of your
bour–
geois
smugness, feels a little better. Corso's verse seems to me to
show more talent than Ginsberg's, and he conducts his war against
adjustment, moderation, the objective view, and what have you,
with a passionate single-mindedness that is in some ways admirable.
He is very cruelly whipping the same set of obsessions round and
round the same ring, but the words do prance sometimes, and he
cracks the whip stylishly. It is difficult, however, to criticize the
