A HOWL FOR LITERARY FREEDOM
By Dick Meister
It was 50 years ago this summer that Americans finally won the unfettered
right to read whatever they wanted to read, 50 years since the trial of poet
Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” -- a trial I covered as a young reporter for The
Associated Press.
Like many works before it, “Howl” had been declared “obscene” by law
enforcement authorities who banned its sale. But this time it led to the
summer-long trial that cleared “Howl” and virtually ended government
book-banning.
Poet William Carlos Williams concluded his introduction to “Howl” with a
warning: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through
hell.” Most critics agreed it was an extremely rewarding trip, a journey
through one of the masterworks of modern literature.
But the San Francisco police, poking a blue nose into the poem in 1957,
declared the journey obscene and ordered “Howl” removed from the city’s
bookstores.
They arrested bookdealer-poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and sales clerk
Shigeyoshi Murao for defying their order and selling “Howl” at
Ferlinghetti’s small, financially struggling City Lights bookstore in the
city’s Bohemian community. It had published and distributed the poem
despite Ferlinghetti’s strong suspicion that “we would be busted, not only
for four-letter words but also for its frank sexual, especially homosexual,
content.“
Ferlinghetti and Murao went on trial facing $500 fines and six months in
jail under California’s severe obscenity law, then one of the country’s
toughest.
Ten weeks earlier, Collector of Customs Chester MacPhee, aptly described by
the San Francisco Chronicle as “overzealous and notably prissy,”
consfiscated the second shipment of “Howl” sent to the city by its English
printer. MacPhee, who said he acted because the poem was “unfit for
children,” eventually was overruled by the U.S. attorney in San Francisco.
But six days later, two police inspectors entered the City Lights store to
arrest Ferlinghetti and Murao. The inspectors admitted that the police
acted as a result of publicity generated by MacPhee’s attempt to keep “Howl”
out of the country. They agreed wholeheartedly with MacPhee. The officers
were outraged, one of them complained, that Ginsberg’s work “comes right out
and uses vulgar words. I mean filthy words that are very vulgar.”
Police officials promised that if action against “Howl” proved successful,
they’d pick up other books containing “dirty words.” Captain William
Hanrahan of the Juvenile Bureau insisted that “anything not suitable for
publication in newspapers shouldn’t be published at all.”
After the arrests, Ferlinghetti put a “Big Brother” image in his store
window. It glared down on stacks of once-banned books, an excellent
cross-section of the world’s greatest literature, including the Bible. A
banner over the display, proclaiming “banned books for sale” and the
publicity given to “Howl” and City Lights, brought hundreds of new customers
to the store.
“Big Brother” sought larger targets, too. A pleased Captain Hanrahan
reported, after a personal check of downtown shops, that “the big stores did
sell those books but they took ‘em off the shelves the day we raided City
Lights.”
Three attorneys defended Ferlinghetti and Murao pro bono – leading civil
rights lawyers Lawrence Spiser and Albert Bendich of the ACLU, and famed
criminal lawyer Jake Erlich.
The most dramatic trial session came when a group of renowned authors,
critics and teachers took the stand to defend “Howl” and make the
prosecution look ridiculous as it faced the experts with feeble arguments
about “dirty words.”
A chief prosecution witness, Gail Porter – “a recognized authority in voice
production” – said of the poem that “you feel like you’re going through the
gutter when you read that stuff.” Which of course was Ginsberg’s precise
intent.
Novelist and critic Mark Schorer, an English professor of at the University
of California, led the defense witnesses. He praised “Howl” for using “the
rhythms and language of ordinary speech -- necessarily the language of
vulgarity, the language of the man in the street, which is absolutely
essential to the poetic theme.”
Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth called it “a prophetic work which greatly
resembles the Bible in purpose and language … the most remarkable poem
published by a young man since World War II.”
Others praising "Howl" ranged all across the academic and literary spectrum
to Anthony Boucher of the Mystery Writers of America, a group far removed
from the avant garde
school of Ginsberg.
Two weeks later Municipal Judge Clayton Horn lifted the police order. He
ruled, in effect, that only readers had the right to censor publications –
by simply refusing to buy or read any that offended them.
Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister