Echoes of Howl.

Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression EDITED BY BILL MORGAN AND NANCY J. PETERS (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006); 224 pp.; $14.95 paper; ISBN: 0-87286-479-0.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ...

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull ...

(Allen Ginsberg, Howl)

It's hard to believe this coming April marks ten years since Allen Ginsberg's death, and maybe even harder to believe that November 2006 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Howl, the poem that changed American poetry and, in some ways, American life forever. No poem before or since has had such a profound impact on the culture that produced it. And Ginsberg himself remains such a formidable force in contemporary poetry and seems so present in his work that many of us just can't get our heads around the fact that he is gone.

To commemorate the half-century anniversary of Howl, the poems original publisher, City Lights, gives us Howl on Trial, a truly evocative book (in the sense that it fully evokes an era) which reminds us there was a time in the not too distant past when people actually cared what poets had to say--when people cared enough to censor and prohibit some of those poems. The late 1950s and early '60s was indeed a time during which American standards concerning what was publishable and what wasn't underwent major changes.

Three important court cases contributed to those changes. The Howl trial in 1957 was the first of these, the second was the Lady Chatterley's Lover case in 1960, and the third was the Tropic of Cancer decision in 1961. The Howl trial marked one of the first applications of the so-called "Roth standard" (established a few months earlier in Roth v. United States), which created a test to determine whether or not a work was "obscene" That test had to do with "whether the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest." The American Civil Liberties Union argued that, taken as a whole, Howl had literary merit and thus had "socially redeeming value." The Lady Chatterley's Lover case (Grove Press v. Christenberry) broadened this principle, stressing the importance of "artistic merit" and the need to allow controversial ideas to be expressed in a free society. In the Tropic of Cancer decision (Grove Press v. Gerstein) the U.S. Supreme Court underscored both results by insisting that no book should be banned unless it was utterly without social value. Taken together, these legal precedents liberated serious writers to deal with issues, especially human sexuality, that had previously been suppressed.

Although Ginsberg was surprised when Howl was seized by the Customs Inspector in San Francisco in March 1957, he became well aware of the relationship between these various trials and the power of literature to threaten and disrupt comfortable social beliefs. In a letter to his father he wrote,

   I was reading Henry Miller's banned book, Tropic
   of Cancer, which actually is a great classic--I never
   heard of it at Columbia with anything but depreciatory
   dismissal comments--he and Genet are
   such frank hip writers that the open expression
   of their perceptions and real beliefs are a threat
   to society. The wonder is that literature does have
   such power.

Howl on Trial is largely a collection of documents, photographs, letters, articles, and trial transcripts related to Howl's publication, its seizure, its trial, and the events that followed. The final two brief essays, "Fifty Years of City Lights" by Albert Bendich and "The Censorship Battle Continues" by Bill Morgan bring us right up to the present and remind us--if we need any reminding, given the vast constriction of civil liberties enacted in the Patriot Act and other legislation--not to be too smug about how far we have come in the battle against censorship since the publication of Howl. Morgan points out that radio and television broadcasts of Howl continue to be censored by the more subtle means of Federal Communications Commission regulations and describes the ongoing curtailment of National Endowment for the Arts funds in support of "controversial" works of art.

But the most engaging aspects of Howl on Trial are not the editors' attempts to show contemporary relevance. In fact, they miss much of that relevance by focusing nearly exclusively on the censorship issue and not on the subject matter of the poem. But their compilation of materials brings us palpably into the controversy that this revolutionary poem aroused against the quiet, bland background of Eisenhower America. Ginsberg's intelligent and impassioned defense of the poem in letters to formalist and conservative poets like Richard Eberhart, John Hollander, and his own father, Louis Ginsberg (who wrote quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter for much of his life) shows how seriously he thought about both the issues the poem raised (the most intelligent, visionary, and spiritual sensibilities of the time destroyed and overwhelmed by a stifling conformist, war-mongering, and money-grubbing society) and about the radical nature of its form. Ginsberg's letters to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the book's publisher and defendant in the censorship trial, reflect his practical, public relations side: who gets how many copies, how much certain page changes might cost, when he will get a check, and so on. He was traveling through Europe all during the trial and learned about ongoing events through correspondence with Ferlinghetti, so we have an unusually detailed record of the work's genesis.

While there is a two-and-a-half page introduction to the book by Ferlinghetti called "Editing and Defending Howl," and many of Ferlinghetti's letters and other documents are included, I would like to have read a more detailed contemporary assessment of his experience from this nearly last survivor of the Beats who contributed so much to the advance of free literary expression in our time. It's interesting, for example, to hear both the pride and the slight tinge of annoyance in his voice when he describes his first impressions of the poem; after hearing Ginsberg read Howl (at the famous Six Gallery reading), Ferlinghetti recalls he sent him a telegram "mimicking what Emerson had purportedly written Whitman upon first reading Leaves of Grass: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.'" Ferlinghetti then adds: "(Despite Allen's saving every scrap of writing, this telegram is not to be found in his archive.)" The book could also have greatly benefited from an index, or at least a list of contributors' notes more clearly identifying the various participants.

The impression one comes away with after reading Howl on Trial is just how prophetic and visionary Ginsberg was. So many of his words seem like they might have come from yesterday's newspaper. Here are a few sentences he wrote in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1959:

   Deviants from the mass sexual stereotype.... those
   who will not ... fib and make arms for hire, join
   Armies in murder and threat ... those who wish
   to ... think ... act beautifully on their own, speak
   truthfully in public, inspired by Democracy--what
   is their psychic fate now in America? An America,
   the greater portion of whose economy is yoked to
   mental and mechanical preparations for War?

Ginsberg longed for a Whitmanic America where we could all experience a spiritual connection to one another; an America that could respond to language like "And what I assume, you shall assume, and every atom belonging to me as well belongs to you" Instead we have our Ann Coulters and James Carvilles shouting hateful phrases at one another as if they came from different planets. Instead we have what Ginsberg saw as Moloch's America, "whose love is endless oil and stone," still demanding more and more endless oil, still putting up with the human sacrifice of our young, still teaching them to kill and hate and now even torture. We move from one atrocity to the next, hardly flinching, "staying the course" as the president has it, despite the irreversible damage it has done to our collective soul.

Fred Moramarco is the editor of Poetry International, published at San Diego State University where he teaches literature and creative writing.