1955 ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked’, he intoned,
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 and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz …
These are just the first four verse paragraphs in a total of 88 in Part I alone. Most reiterate that parallel construction beginning with ‘who …’, so are about those ‘best minds’ ‘who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa’ and ‘let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy’.
Howl took over from where Ginsberg’s fellow New Jerseyian Walt Whitman left off – not just in that conversational rhythm and versification based on breath, but also in those frank vignettes of urban lowlife, and of the gay scene generally.
Howl came out in 1956 in a now legendary ‘Pocket Poets’ edition published by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti under the imprint of the City Lights Bookshop, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. The book’s format was nearly square – 6½ inches high by just under 5 wide – and it cost 75¢.
As a result of its sexual explicitness, the San Francisco police prosecuted Ferlinghetti for publishing obscene material after the local district attorney declined to act. In the trial that followed in 1957, the book was defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, calling on artists and academics as expert witnesses. Ferlinghetti won when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the work was of ‘redeeming social importance’. The trial was as widely publicised in the US as was the Lady Chatterley case in Britain (see 10 November).
But for all the book’s notoriety, who were the Beats, after all? Was their ‘generation’ anything more than one of those convenient clichés of literary classification, like the so-called ‘lost generation’ between the wars, an epithet actually based on a disparaging remark made by Gertrude Stein to her French garage mechanic? Were they a literary movement, or just a public relations gesture, a bunch of guys, their women seldom mentioned, famous for making themselves famous?
Take Neal Cassady. Did anyone ever read anything by him, or just about him in Jack Kerouac’s defining narrative of the Beat moment, On the Road (1957)? The (rather more conventional) poet Gary Snyder, who also read that night at the Six, denies that the movement had much coherence, other than as a ‘circle of friends’.
Yet the reading at the Six Gallery remains a monument in American poetry. By its 50th anniversary, Howl had reached its 53rd printing, and nearly a million copies remained in print.