“Self portrait on my 70th birthday, in Borsolino hat and cashmere silk-scarf from Milan, and Dublin Thornproof-tweed suit, Oleg Cassini tie from Goodwill shirt from same source, kitchen window mid-day, I stayed home and worked on Selected Poems 1947-’95 after returning from Walker Arts Center reading – Beat exhibition weekend. Monday, June 3, 1996. N.Y – Allen Ginsberg (photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)]” (Image from Allen Ginsberg Project)
In 1993, the celebrated poet Allen Ginsberg arrived in Ireland for the first time. Always counter-cultural and sometimes controversial, Ginsberg was his own man throughout his entire life. The Irish Press noted before his visit that “Ginsberg is now in favour with a new generation who find the music their parents listened to more exciting that their contemporary soulless techno-pop”.
Ginsberg’s political activism often made headlines. An active opponent of the Vietnam War and American aggression in South America, he was deported from Cuba in 1965 for publicly condemning the treatment of homosexuals there. In terms of his own literary output, he is undoubtedly best remembered for Howl, a masterpiece which was dragged through the courts in a 1957 obscenity trial. Widely considered one of the great works of contemporary literature, it captured the madness and spirit of the Beat Generation to which Ginsberg was so central, alongside people like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. In my youth, I stumbled on it after becoming obsessed with Kerouac’s On The Road (a teenage rite of passage for the angsty), which began a journey into the output of related writers.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.
– From Howl.
Ginsberg performed in Dublin’s Liberty Hall before a packed crowd in October 1993. In interviews leading up to his visit, he noted what lured him to Ireland wasn’t money, but the promise that Theo Dorgan of Poetry Ireland would procure him a new tweed suit. One contemporary report noted that “after a little shopping around, Dorgan found that Kevin and Howlin tailors on Nassau Street did a variety of the ‘thornproof’ tweed and it was there that Ginsberg was outfitted. The irony of the company’s name wasn’t lost on him either.”
Ginsberg’s Liberty Hall appearance was the stuff of legend, leading one journalist to write that “there hasn’t been such a rare gathering of the tribes, the true heads of our time, since Dylan played Slane Castle.” The great, the good and Bono were among the attendees. The Irish Press noted:
He considered the choice of Liberty Hall as an ideal venue for his reading last night. He liked the labour connection. He still believes in all his original causes. When I left the show, he was still singing. Maybe he’d still there in Liberty Hall this morning, playing to the ghosts of Larkin, Connolly, O’Casey and God knows who else. An unforgettable fire.
Irish Press report on Ginsberg visit.
In a postcard, Ginsberg noted with delight that “Part of my Dublin fee was great grey tweed suit so now I look like an elder Irish gentleman crossing customs borders.”
The suit meant a lot to Ginsberg. Three years after his Dublin visit, he donned it for a self portrait,along with his “Borsolino hat and cashmere silk-scarf from Milan”. Some accounts suggest he was buried in it. Kevin and Howlin remain open for business today on Nassau Street, almost twenty-five years after dressing one of the greatest poets of his generation (or any other).