June 6, 1957: Book dealer charged for publishing 'Howl'
Artists of the Beat Generation were rebels with a cause.
They created a post-World War II libertarian literary style that was distinctive and disruptive and undermined the conventions of structure and language that dominated the orthodoxy of literature and art. It also was a cultural phenomenon characterized by a handful of charismatic artists—Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes—whose observations of each other formed the core of what became the Beat genre. Very often, and to the chagrin of the literary mainstream, they wrote about drugs, sex and bebop jazz as part of an existentialist search, in the words of Holmes, “driven by a desperate craving for belief.”
It was Holmes who popularized the term “Beat Generation” in a 1952 essay in the New York Times. He credited the term to Kerouac, who several years before had declared: “You know, this is really a beat generation.”
Holmes wrote Go, the earliest successful Beat novel. But Beat writing became literature with the publication of the poem “Howl”—a stunning, unsettling, raw and rhythmic epic of anguish written by Allen Ginsberg.
Composed in spurts from 1954 through 1956, the poem opens with one of the most famous opening lines in 20th-century American letters:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …
Inspired by a friend in a mental institution, it began with Ginsberg’s notes after a hallucinatory experiment with peyote. The notes, reprocessed during later sober moments, provided the raw and ranting descriptions of drug and alcohol-fueled sex—gay and heterosexual—that became a signature of rebellion for the Beat Generation.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights bookstore in San Francisco was a Beat gathering spot, published the poem in November 1956 in Howl and Other Poems. Ginsberg’s book almost immediately became a target for the instinctive censorship that had befallen works by Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.
In March 1957, the San Francisco Collector of Customs seized 520 copies of the book that arrived from a second printing in England on grounds that Howl was obscene. But the embargoed copies of Howl were released after U.S. Attorney Lloyd Burke refused to institute condemnation proceedings.
Local authorities were not dissuaded. On June 3, City Lights manager Shigeyoshi Murao was arrested after selling copies of Howl to two undercover investigators from the juvenile division. A warrant was issued for Ferlinghetti, and on June 6, he surrendered to face charges for having published the poem.
Meanwhile, about two weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court determined in Roth v. U.S. that obscenity was not constitutionally protected, upholding the criminal convictions of two porn merchants in New York and California.
Howl redeemed
In a bench trial lasting several days, California State Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn—over the objections of prosecutors—heard expert testimony on the literary merits of the composition. One of the two prosecution experts rendered it derivative of Walt Whitman. The other admitted that she “didn’t linger on it too long.”
Before the trial’s end, the charge against Murao was dismissed. But on Oct. 3, 1957, Horn delivered the final verdicts—literary and criminal.
He rejected prosecution arguments that the poem was indecent or that the California statute in question had anything to do with the protection of youths. “Unless the words used take the form of dirt for dirt’s sake and can be traced to criminal behavior, either actual or demonstrably imminent, they are not in violation of the statute.”
In Roth, Horn wrote, the materials were by their nature prurient and pornographic. The sole question was whether they were constitutionally protected. They were not.
“I do not believe that Howl is without redeeming social importance,” Horn wrote. The language was, indeed, coarse and even violent, but it fit the “nightmare world” that Ginsberg was describing and that, Horn reasoned, should be his right. “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?”
Both Ferlinghetti and Howl were acquitted.
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