Madness was much on Ginsberg's mind in 1948—the year of his
graduation from college, his hallucinations in Harlem, and his
obsession with Paul Cézanne. At the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan, he looked, with the aid of marijuana, at Cézanne's
paintings—the The Card Players and the Rocks at Garonne—and
saw “sinister symbols. ” He looked at Cézanne's life and saw a
“big secret mystic” who “didn't know if he was crazy or not. ”
Everywhere he looked he seemed to see himself, and everywhere
he looked he saw madness. So did his Beat brothers. Madness was
the Beat badge of honor in a world gone insane with bombs and
dictators, terror and tyranny. In the midst of the madness of
1948, Ginsberg was still recommending writers antithetical to
liberalism and liberals, and now his favorite writer was Louis-
Ferdinand Céline—the French novelist, veteran of World War I,
doctor, anti-Semite, and anti-communist. Céline was a “mad
author” who had taken on a “weird mask, ” Ginsberg wrote in a

-81-