“...
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. |