“... the surfeit of prosperity
… the
decay of faith...
Walt
Whitman Democratic Vistas (1871)
Lament for the lost possibilities of the United
States and reprehension for what is perceived as
the current fallen state of the nation are recurrent
motifs in American literature. Among the writers
of the Beat Generation -- reacting to the drift in
post war America toward consumerism, conformity,
and complacency -- the theme of the decline of American
ideals is particularly prevalent.
Writing in A Coney Island of the Mind (1958),
Lawrence Ferlinghetti deplores an America of "freeways
fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent / spaced
with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions
of happiness"; an America "of the immigrant's dream
come too true and mislaid / among the sunbathers." l
Similarly, Bob Kaufman, in his poem "Benediction" (1958),
rebukes the American nation for its shortcomings
and failures, bringing his indictment of American
society to an end with the bitter comment: "Every
day your people get more and more / Cars, televisions,
sickness, death dreams. / You must have been great
/ Alive." 2 And in a spirit akin to that of Kaufman
and Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, writing in Myths
and Texts (1960), expresses his anger and sorrow
at the despoilation of the American continent by
the impious, impercipient greed of its immigrant
settlers: "All America hung on a hook / & burned
by men, in their own praise.” 3
In the prose records of his journeys from ocean
to ocean and from border to border across the United
States, Jack Kerouac, too, often registers his sense
of disillusionment at the displacement of traditional
American ideals and aspirations by the forces of
commercialism and conformity. In On the Road (1957)
Kerouac deprecates the absurdity and futility of “millions
and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves,
the mad dream grabbing, taking, giving, sighing,
dying, just so they could be buried in those awful
cemetery cities…” 4 In The Dharma
Bums, (1958), the author notes with sadness
and a sense of foreboding the growing domination
in American life of "the middleclass non-identity
... rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television
sets in each living room with everybody looking at
the same thing and thinking the same thing at the
same time.” 5
And in a like manner, writing in The Naked Lunch in
(1959), William Burrough describes the interior of
America as “a vast subdivision, antennae of
television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses
they hover over the young, sop up a little of what
they shut out. Only the young bring anything in,
and they are not young very long.” 6
The interrelated issues of the deterioration of
American ideals, and of the potential redemption
and renewal of those ideals, are central concerns
in the writing of Allen Ginsberg.
In his first published collection of poetry, Howl
and Other Poems (1956), these concerns inform
the title poem, "America", and “A Supermarket
in California”. 7
In “Howl” the United States -- together
with other nations of the world -- is depicted as
being under the sway of a demonic deity, Moloch,
whose evil dominion imposes upon both individual
and national consciousness a state of spiritual,
mental and moral degradation. Elsewhere in "Howl”,
the United States is personified as a beloved but
sickly figure who “coughs all night and won’t
let us sleep."
In "America”, the poet apostrophizes the American
nation; by turns reproaching and cajoling it, remonstrating
with and confiding in it, insulting it and mocking
it, admonishing and exhorting it, and, at last, pledging
to extend to it -- according to the poet's own principles
-- his support and aid. The traits of the American
nation that are condemned and ridiculed in the poem
are those perceived as deriving from what the poet
views as the country's essential condition of atrophied
idealism and stultified spirituality. The poet's
concluding vow to come to the aid of his nation is
to be understood as his promise to dedicate himself
to the redemption of America from its fallen state.
The state of the American nation is also the subject
of "A Supermarket in California”, in which
-- in contrast to the more polemical strategies of "Howl" and "America" --
the theme is treated in elegiac fashion, though not
without certain lighter touches.
The central oppositional images of the poem are
those of Walt Whitman and the supermarket, each with
its own resonances and associations. It is the poet-narrator
who in his imagination brings the two into juxtapositions
the apparition of the neglected, rejected American
visionary wandering the brightly lit, well-stocked
aisles of a suburban self-service grocery store.
Employing again -- as in “America” --
the device of apostrophe, the poem is addressed to
Walt Whitman.
Essentially, the poem concerns three phases or levels
of experience which in the course of an evening succeed
each other in the mind of the narrator: a mood of
dejection, a sudden moment of vision and exhilaration,
and, finally, a meditative, reflective state of mind.
At the outset of the evening, the narrator feels
somewhat dispirited, walking the streets alone "with
a headache / self-conscious", and weakened by a sensation
of "hungry fatigue". He feels also a sort of depletion
of the imagination that prompts him to go in quest
of images, seeking them even in so unlikely a place
as a supermarket, which with its cellophane-wrapped,
artificially colored, flavor-enhanced, mass-produced
food represents the triumph of standardization and
impersonality.
Inspired by a recollection of the characteristic
enumerative style of Walt Whitman’s poetry
with its celebratory lyrical inventories of the physical
world, the narrator enters the supermarket where
he is confronted with a spectacle of profusion and
consumption -- crowded aisles busily astir with shopping
families. From remembrance of Whitman's rhapsodic
catalogs, the narrator is then moved to vision, seeing
amid the bustle of the brightly-lit supermarket the
figure of Walt Whitman and hearing him speak.
At first reading, the questions posed by Whitman
to the shoppers and the supermarket employees may
seem frivolous or absurd, but upon closer consideration
his inquiries reveal themselves to be pointed and
pertinent. They are the very type of question of
which in the poem "As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s
Shore" Whitman wrote, warning his readers: “I
am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue,
questioning everyone I meet." 8
"Who killed the porkchops?" asks Whitman of one
shopper. Indeed, who undertakes to perform for us
the more disagreeable tasks of our society and our
economy? What are such persons paid? What are their
working conditions? What do they think and feel?
What kind of lives do they lead? Remote from the
sordid realities of labor in a slaughterhouse, shoppers
do not often pause to consider human questions of
this kind when purchasing their packaged meats at
the supermarket.
Similarly, Whitman asks "What price bananas?" The
syntax of the question suggests that he is not merely
seeking to learn the sales price of bananas but rather
that he is asking for a consideration of the cost
of bananas in terms of human misery and oppression
on the American-owned fruit plantations and in the “banana
republics" of Latin America. At what price in the
toil and tears of others and at what cost to our
own ideals of human liberty do we enjoy the convenience
of buying bananas inexpensively at the supermarket?
Whitman's third and final question -- "Are you my
Angel?” --is the most unsettling and subversive
of his inquiries, for it represents the fundamental,
ultimate question that we are desperately determined
neither to put to each other nor to ask ourselves.
The condition upon which our collective illusion
of being is contingent is the suppression of our
awareness of ourselves as angels. 9 To reassure ourselves
that we are real, to protect our precious fictitious
selves, our cherished personalities, we are obliged
to deny our identity as spirit, to renounce our natural
innocence and nobility.
Now completely occupied and absorbed by his vision
of Whitman, the narrator follows the apparition among
the aisles of the supermarket. Soon he achieves a
comradely communion with the spectre of the dead
poet, and together in fancy they partake of the various
wares of the store, and -- since their consumption
of them is purely imaginary -- they do so without
obligation to pay for the foods they enjoy in this
manner: “tasting artichokes, possessing every
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier."
I wonder if here Ginsberg can have been recalling
or may have been alluding indirectly to certain passages
in the poetry of Walt Whitman which propose similar
imaginary feasts? In "Song of Myself", for example,
Whitman asserts that "I or you, pocketless of a
dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.”10
And in "Song of the Open Road." he celebrates the
capacity of the human imagination "To see no possession
but you may possess it -- enjoying all without labor
or purchase -- abstracting the feast, yet not abstracting
one particle of it.” 11
The narrator's moment of excitement and elation
-- the imaginary feast shared with Whitman in the
supermarket -- is of brief duration, whereafter his
mood quickly descends and he grows more subdued and
meditative. Now in the last stanza of the poem, he
addresses a series of questions to the restless apparition
of Whitman, questions that begin in uncertainty,
then increasingly convey a sense of melancholy and
loss.
The narrator's questions call forth resonances that
make his personal sadness and loneliness germane
to the state of the American nation, a connection
that is then made explicit in the phrase "the lost
America of love". The tone of this last stanza is
gently elegiac; the implications of the apparition
of Walt Whitman in the supermarket -- which earlier
possessed a half-comic incongruity -- are in these
lines more fully and more solemnly apprehended, more
keenly felt.
The note of sadness that pervades the last stanza
of the poem proceeds from the narrator's disappointment
in mid-twentieth century America. The nation's notable
success in achieving material abundance -- as evidenced
in the poem by the busy, well-stocked supermarket
and by the automobiles in the driveways of suburban
houses -- has been accomplished, he feels, at the
cost of its neglect of the ideals that once were
its motivating energy and the visions that were once
its ultimate aim. These forgotten visions and ideals
are embodied in the poem by the unquiet spirit of
Walt Whitman. Modern America is -- very tellingly
in the view of the narrator -- a nation unheeding
of the vital voice of Walt Whitman, unmindful of
its boldest prophet and most impassioned bard; and
through its disregard for and indifference to Whitman
has relegated him to a wraith-like existence in the
netherworld of the national consciousness. And so
in sorrow Whitman's shade visits the supermarkets
at night and walks the dark and empty streets of
the suburbs, troubled by the unfulfilled historic
promise of the American nation, grieving for the
lost dream of new world community and spirituality.
Imagery of shadow and darkness is recurrent in the
poem, growing progressively more marked and more
intense in the course of the three stanzas. The events
of the poem begin in early evening, move forward
through the hour when the stores close, and end in
the full darkness of night after the lights in the
houses have been extinguished. The coming of dark
in the poem is both gradual and cumulative. Even
inside the brightly lit "neon fruit supermarket" there
are portentous “penumbras" among the produce.
Later, in the deserted streets among the darkened
houses, "the trees add shade to shade”. The
final image of the poem is of profoundest darkness:
the dense underworld gloom of smoky Hades and "the
black waters of Lethe”. 12
These images serve to effect in the poem a mood
of malaise and melancholy, suggesting some fateful
omission on the part of the American nation, implying
behind all the bright abundance of contemporary American
life the presence of a kind of dark blight.
Although the last stanza of the poem strikes a somber
note and seems in the end to fade into gloom and
obscurity, depicting the figure of Whitman as being
confined in darkness and dispossessed of his beloved
America, the apparent pessimism suggested in these
final lines should be considered in relation to the
implicit interaction between this portion of the
poem and the preceding middle stanza in which Whitman
is seen to appear in the supermarket. Whitman's bereft
condition at the conclusion of the poem -- his arrival
in the abode of the dead -- necessarily takes place
prior in time (sixty-three years previous) to his
return to earth as a spirit haunting a supermarket
in California. My purpose in giving emphasis to so
obvious a point is that considered in this manner
the sequence of events in the text serves to affirm
the irrepressible power of the idealism and vision
that in the poem are embodied in the figure of Walt
Whitman.
Viewed in their chronological and causal relations
to each other, the events of the poem suggest that
the qualities of idealism and vision cannot long
be denied or restrained; ultimately these redemptive
energies must under one or another guise manifest
themselves. Read in this way, the note of sorrow
and the sense of loss imparted by the last stanza
are mitigated, and the poem may be seen to propose
grounds for hope and belief.
Accordingly, the apparition of Walt Whitman at the
supermarket and abroad in the land may be read as
a sign that even in affluent, complacent postwar
America a spirit of resistance and renewal is latent.
Though Whitman's shade seems at first forlorn, a
pitiable and ludicrous "lonely old grubber”,
it proves to be a resolute and a purposive ghost,
slyly subversive, a figure of eccentric dignity,
representing a vivid reproof to petty contentment
and a portent of revenant vision.
A concomitant theme of the poem is that of the communion-through-imagination
of two isolated, lonely persons whose temporal existences
take place in separate centuries. The narrator of
the poem -- solitary, estranged from the life of
his time -- achieves through the medium of imagination
an affectionate bond with the dead poet Whitman,
who becomes for him a companion and spiritual father.
The narrator, who in his loneliness yearns backward
in time in search of a kindred spirit, comes into
conjunction with Whitman who so often in quest of
communion and comradeship yearned into the centuries
to come, by means of his poems projecting himself
forward through time and death to embrace his future
readers. The communion of the narrator and Walt Whitman
constitutes a victory of the imagination and the
heart's affections over the physical and temporal
restraints of the material world, and represents
a confirmation of Whitman' s assertion in his poem “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry" that "the count of the scores or
hundreds of years between us ... avails not -- distance
avails not, and place avails not." 13
The spirit of Walt Whitman is not the only ghost
to be encountered by the narrator in the supermarket.
Just prior to sighting the shade of Whitman, the
narrator glimpses in the produce department the ghost
of Federico Garcia Lorca. The apparition of Lorca
functions in the poem as a point of transition between
the realistic description that has hitherto characterized
the text and the imaginary-visionary passages that
begin immediately hereafter in the second stanza
with the manifestation of Whitman's spirit.
Additionally, though, the abrupt, brief appearance
of Garcia Lorca in the poem represents, I believe,
an acknowledgement on the part of Allen Ginsberg
of Lorca's prior employment of the figure of Whitman's
spirit as a central trope in a poem titled "Ode to
Walt Whitman". 14 In Lorca's poem -- part of a sequence
written by the poet during his sojourn in New York
City in 1930 -- the spirit of Walt Whitman is invoked
as exemplar of the American ideal. The poet-speaker
of the ode praises the power and purity of Whitman’s
poetic imagination, his erotic energy, and his spirituality,
contrasting the nobility of Whitman's inspired vision
of America with what Lorca perceives to be the debased
condition of modern mechanized America.
Also in respect of particular images and devices,
Ginsberg’s "A Supermarket in California" resonates
with Lorca’s "Ode to Walt Whitman". In his
ode Lorca employs a series of three rhetorical questions
-- addressed to the city of New York -- which in
their surreal but potently suggestive imagery, as
well as their overall tonality, would seem to have
served as inspiration for the three questions asked
by the spirit of Whitman in Ginsberg’s poem.
Lorca’s poet-speaker inquires:
"What angel do you carry hidden in your cheek?
What perfect voice will tell the truths of the wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?”
Furthermore, the first of these questions is in
terms of its central figure of thought noticeably
akin to the question posed by Whitman in Ginsberg’s
poem: "Are you my angel?" Similarly, the frequent
occurrence in Lorca's ode of imagery pertaining to
Walt Whitman's beard is echoed in Ginsberg’s “Supermarket".
Finally, throughout his ode Lorca makes use of the
technique of direct address, apostrophizing the spirit
of Walt Whitman, a device of which Ginsberg also
avails himself in his poem.
Another literary prototype for "A Supermarket in
California”, and another source from which
during the composition of his poem Allen Ginsberg
may have drawn inspiration -- though probably inspiration
of an unconscious character -- is Vachel Lindsay's "Abraham
Lincoln Walks at Midnight", written in 1914. 15
In Lindsay's poem the ghost of Abraham Lincoln roams
restlessly through the night streets of a modern
American town and ranges among the sleeping houses
there. Lincoln’s spirit is seen by the poet
to have returned in grief at the great suffering
and oppression of humankind occasioned by the world
war, and as a remembrance to “the sick world" that
the ideal of a free and just society must not be
forgotten and may yet be achieved.
The mournful figure of Lincoln’s spirit in
Lindsay's poem may be seen to correspond in significant
ways to the forlorn spirit of Whitman in Ginsberg’s "A
Supermarket in California", in that both ghosts serve
in their respective poems as embodiments of the American
ideal as it was manifest in the historical past,
and both appear again among their countrymen in order
to disturb and to warn them, and to inspire and incite
them.
Yet these echoes of and resonances with poems of
Lorca and Lindsay notwithstanding, "A Supermarket
in California" is neither derivative nor imitative.
Rather, the poem is the product of a creative assimilation
of literary influences in the imagination of the
poet operating in combination with Ginsberg’s
own distinctive poetic sensibility. 16
In a similar manner, while stylistically the poem
is indebted to Whitman for its long loose lines and
extended rhythms and for a syntax and a diction based
on spoken language, Ginsberg creates of these elements
-- augmented by an absorption of the free verse measures
and imagistic concision of William Carlos Williams
and Ezra Pound -- a synthesis that is all his own,
an unmistakably individual poetic idiom.
Consistent with the anti-formalist aesthetic of
the poem and its casual conversational tone, Ginsberg
employs no figurative language, but particular realistic
details of the text are potently suggestive, serving
implicitly as metaphors. Thus, the narrator's observation
that the doors of the supermarket will "close in
an hour" conveys an ominous urgency, while the descriptive
detail of “lights out in the houses" communicates
a melancholy sense of the unawareness and apathy
of the inhabitants of the houses and also of the
narrator’s sad isolation from them.
But as well as being a structure of resonant images, "A
Supermarket in California" is equally a poem of voice,
that is of accents and inflections read on the page
as words but heard in the mind of the reader as if
uttered by a human voice. In a sense the narrative
voice may be seen to represent a kind of aural metaphor.
Already from the opening lines of the poem the voice
of the narrator arrests and engages us. It is an
honest, earnest voice, confiding and self-mocking,
by turns eager and gleeful, anxious and uncertain,
whimsical and wistful, sedate and meditative. And
always intrinsic in the intimate narrative voice
of the poem there is an affirmation of personal identity
in a depersonalized age, and in an era of collective
self-gratification a cry for human communion.
"A Supermarket in California" is a haunted, haunting
poem, fraught with nostalgia for the America that
might have been and sorrow for the dream gone wrong.
Poignantly evoking the contradiction between the
American promise and the American reality, the disparity
between the possibility and the actuality, there
is yet in the poem an element of hope as the poet
strives to invoke from the American past a tradition
and a guiding myth, and to summon a vision that can
redeem and revitalize his nation.
With its colloquial immediacy and its elegiac stateliness,
its playfulness and its wistful lyricism, the poem
has stood up remarkably well to time and changing
circumstances. Nearly half a century later, in our
own era of affluence and indifference, consumerism
and depersonalization, Ginsberg’s critique
of material prosperity achieved at the price of spiritual
impoverishment re-mains penetrating and pertinent.
NOTES
1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the
Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958)
p. 9, p. 13.
2. Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New
York: New Directions, 1965)
p. 9.
3. Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts (New York:
Totem Press, 1960) p. 4.
4. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York:
Signet, 1958) pp. 89 - 90.
5. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York:
Signet, 1959) pp. 32 - 33.
6. William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (Paris:
Olympia Press, 1959) pp. 16 - 17.
7. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1956) "Howl" pp. 9 - 20; "A
Supermarket in California” pp. 23 - 24; “America" pp.
31 - 34.
8. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (London:
Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 265.
9. The theme of the opposition between personal consciousness
and spiritual consciousness is central to much of
the poetry of Howl and Other Poems. In the
title poem this theme is expressed in the second
section where the poet denounces "Mental Moloch
... Moloch whose name is the Mind." In this passage
the ignorance and error that comprise ego-consciousness
are seen as supplanting our original state of “natural
ecstasy", thereby severing us from our inherent awareness
of "heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!" Yet as Ginsberg observes in "Transcription
of Organ Music", somewhere within our spirit there
persists a knowledge of our truest, deepest being: "The
world knows the love that's in its breast ... the
suffering lonely world." The same theme informs "Sunflower
Sutra”, “Song”,
and "In back of the real", and is also to be found
in “America” where the poet demands to
know "America when will you be angelic?" and in "Footnote
to Howl" where the poem proclaims that “Everyman's
an angel!"
10. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (London:
Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 69.
11. Ibid. p. 127.
12. In this instance the poet mis-remembers the geography
of the classical netherworld. It is the subterranean
river Acheron, not the Lethe, across which Charon
(in return for an obolus) ferries the souls of the
departed. Perhaps Ginsberg thought here of the Lethe
-whose water causes forgetfulness of the past in
those who drink of it -- because he felt that Walt
Whitman's work had been relegated to oblivion.
13. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (London:
Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 130.
14. This poem is included in The Selected Poems
of Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Stephen
Spender and J.L. Gili (New York: New Directions,
1955). In Allen Ginsberg’s journal for 1955,
he notes having read this volume of Lorca translations
in August of that year, the same year in which “A
Supermarket in California" was written. See Allen
Ginsberg, Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954 - 1958,
edited by Gordon Ball, (New York: Harper Collins,
1995) p. 215.
15. Vachel Lindsay, The Collected Poems (New
York: Macmillan, 1934) p. 165.
16. A thematic counterpart or companion piece to “A
Supermarket in California” is Jack Kerouac’s
poem, “Berkeley Song in F Major”. Written
in the autumn of 1955 while Kerouac was a guest at
Ginsberg’s rented cottage in Berkeley, California,
Kerouac’s “Berkeley Song” also
employs as its central image the figure of a revenant,
redemptive Walt Whitman. As the precise dates of
composition for “A Supermarket” and “Berkeley
Song” are not ascertainable, it is unclear
whether Kerouac’s poem preceded and thus influenced,
or followed and was influenced by Ginsberg’s
poem. “Berkeley Song in F Major” first
appeared in Journal for the Protection of All
Beings, co-published with The Co-Evolution
Quarterly, No, 19, Fall 1978, pp. 11 - 12; and
was subsequently collected in Pomes All Sizes by
Jack Kerouac, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1992)
pp. 81 - 86.
|