u/beatdom_journal

Poet Lew Welch was born 100 years ago today (August 16, 1926).

This photo shows him with Allen Ginsberg, whose centennial is also this year. The photo is of them outside City Lights in 1963, taken by John Doss.

Welch was close friends with Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. He later got to know other Beat poets, including Jack Kerouac. He struggled with alcoholism and depression and disappeared in 1971.

For more on Welch's life and work, we recommend the excellent book, He, Leo, by Ewan Clark, published in 2023.

Edit: Title should say "69 years ago..."

The obscenity trial fought for the right to publish Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems began 69 years ago today. It was originally scheduled to start on August 9, 1957, but the defence lawyers requested a one-week delay for “tactical reasons.”

Ginsberg’s book had been published in late 1956 but in March 1957 US Customs seized copies that had been sent from a printing company in England. A thousand copies slipped through but 520 were impounded. They were deemed to contain “matter not proper for admission” to the United States.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti capitalised on the publicity generated by the seizure by printing 2,500 copies in the US, thereby undermining the authority of US Customs, and on May 29 the impounded editions were released.

A few days later, however, on June 3, undercover officers purchased copies of Howl and a magazine called The Miscellaneous Man from City Lights, then arrested the store manager, Shig Murao. On June 6, Ferlinghetti—who owned the store—turned himself in to the police. He had foreseen this and had already enlisted the help of the ACLU, who would later fight the case in court.

The trial started (after the one-week delay mentioned above) on August 16, 1957. On October 3, Ferlinghetti was found not guilty in a landmark decision that had profound implications on what could be legally published in the US. Two days later, he printed another 5,000 copies and the book became a massive success in part due to the free publicity the trial had generated.

To date, Howl and Other Poems has sold well over a million copies.

Further Reading

As one of the most important literary trials of the century, and the most important of the Beat Generation, the Howl trial is quite well documented. For more details, see the following books:

• Howl on Trial by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters
• The People vs Lawrence Ferlinghetti by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover
• I Celebrate Myself by Bill Morgan
• Dharma Lion by Michael Schumacher

This quote is from a 1952 letter to John Clellon Holmes. He had just related some stories about his peyote-fuelled adventures in Mexico with William Burroughs. He goes on:

>If I could only stick to novels long enough to tell a few good big stories, what I am beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story into the realms of revealed Picture . . . revealed whatever . . . revelated prose .. . wild form, man, wild form. Wild form’s the only form holds what I have to say—my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory in—I have now an irrational lust to set down everything I know—in narrowing circles around the core of my last writing, very last writing, when I am an old man or ready to die, will be calm like the center of whirlpools and Beethoven’s quartets—I love the world, and especially do I love the external eye and the shining heart of pure heart-to-heart mornings in a sane eternity, with love and security, but at this time in my life I’m making myself sick to find the wild form that can grow with my wild heart.

From Selected Letters Vol 1, p.371

Peter Orlovsky was born 93 years ago, on July 8, 1933.

He met Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco in late 1954 and they became lovers, taking vows about 50 years before gay marriage was legalised in the United States. Ginsberg recalled:

>The key thing was when we decided on the terms of our marriage—I think it was in Foster’s cafeteria downtown about three in the morning. We were sitting and talking about each other, with each other, trying to figure out what we were going to do, who we were to each other, and what we wanted out of each other, how much I loved him, and how much did he love me. We arrived at what we both really desired. […] So we held hands, took a vow: I do, I do, you promise? yes, I do. At that instant we looked in each other’s eyes and there was a kind of celestial fire that crept over us and blazed up and illuminated the entire cafeteria and made it an eternal place.

Ginsberg encouraged Orlovsky as a poet and together they were published in Donald Allen’s landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960. They travelled the world together and read together on stage countless times. Kerouac said of him, “I now pronounce Peter Orlovsky a great American Surrealistic Poet of the First Magnitude.”

Photo by Harold Chapman.

For more about Orlovsky, see the book Straight Hearts' Delight, published by Gay Sunshine Press.

>God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life—and to think that negative little paper-shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that!
--Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, p.347

Kerouac admired Ernest Hemingway as a young man but then grew to dislike his macho persona and sparse prose. However, later in life—and particularly after Hemingway's death—Kerouac regained his respect for the older writer.

Read all about Hemingway and the Beats in this essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/hemingway-and-the-beat-generation

Ernest Hemingway died 65 years ago today (July 2, 1961). Although one does not typically think of him as having influenced the Beat writers, there were certainly some connections.

>Hemingway was a very, very great technician, and a good head and a real sharp mind, and basically a very sympathetic person.
--Allen Ginsberg

>The Snows of Kilimanjaro [...] is one of the best stories in the language about death. [...] The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s The Dead and the end of The Great Gatsby.
--William S. Burroughs

>God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life.
--Jack Kerouac

>I wish them all good luck.
--Hemingway on the Beat writers

Although the quotes above are mostly positive, their opinions varied and they could be extremely critical, particularly of Hemingway's macho attitude and the dialogue in his novels. You can read all about the links between Hemingway and the Beats in this new essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/hemingway-and-the-beat-generation

>How about a real broadside attack on the Beat—to be published by City Lights? Wd you be interested? A short book—or pamphlet?
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Kenneth Rexroth, March 14, 1959

By 1959, both Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were sick of the Beat Generation and, in particular, they were tired of being associated with the media’s “beatnik” obsession.

Rexroth did not take Ferlinghetti up on his offer but continued to write vicious (and often quite unfair) attacks that were published elsewhere, and he occasionally gave nasty quotes to tabloid journalists. He loathed Kerouac in particular and sometimes wrote brutal reviews of his books for major newspapers.

Ferlinghetti was eager to distance himself, too, and offered Rexroth the chance to write a full-on “attack on the Beat” that would no doubt have confused visitors to City Lights Bookshop, which was already very much associated with the movement (most notably as the publisher of Howl and Other Poems). In the same letter, he congratulated Ferlinghetti on an earlier “put-down of the mushroom beats.”

Both men spent much of the rest of their lives angrily denying paternity of the Beat Generation but their complaints were mostly ignored and numerous headlines called them each “the father of the Beat Generation.”

For a full account of Rexroth’s difficult relationship with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, see this essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/honest-advice-wanted-allen-ginsberg

>I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however (being letters).
--Jack Kerouac

This is from Kerouac's Paris Review interview. He goes on to talk about the Joan Anderson letter that Cassady had sent him, calling it "the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves." This letter, which was lost for many decades, was finally published in 2020.

Photo by Carolyn Cassady

Houellebecq mentions Burroughs a few times in his books but only superficially. I suspect there is probably some overlap in fanbase though. Both are brutally critical social commentators and darkly comedic.

Image source: https://howlfarm.substack.com/p/houellebecq-and-burroughs

Ferlinghetti said this in an interview soon after the 1965 reading at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Some reviewers had complained about a poem in which he used the word "fuck" many times. He denied that it was explicit and said he was trying to use the word in a "holy" sense.

>The whole point of the poem was defeated, but a lot of people got it despite the stupid reviewer; many people in the audience got the message.

This quote and photo come from Penthouse magazine.

More info on the Royal Albert Hall reading in this recent essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/poets-of-our-time-the-beats-at-the

>I’ve never had a beard in my life. I wear sober, unspectacular suits. I’ve never slept on anyone’s floor and no one has ever slept on mine. My only association with the beat crowd is that I know poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. So why call me a beatnik?
--William S. Burroughs

This comes from a short article in The Daily Mirror (August 31, 1965). Burroughs was reported as being “in London to arrange publication of his new book, Subject: Science fiction.”

Asked about his plans for future books, he told the reporter: “I’ve explored the field of drugs and sex as much as I want to. All I want now is to write something which can be enjoyed by 12-year-old children.”

Burroughs was in the news constantly throughout 1965, on both sides of the Atlantic. A Canadian newspaper announced in August that “Reading Burroughs is like eating raw oysters: either you do and you’re crazy about them, or you don’t and the thought of it makes you sick.”

The photo is from a different article, this one from earlier that same year but in his hometown of St. Louis.  

The poetry reading widely known as "The International Poetry Incarnation" took place on June 11, 1965. It featured Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many other poets in a three-hour event at London's Royal Albert Hall.

In fact, the event was called "Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time." There is much uncertainty about it. There is debate over whose idea it was and who did most of the organising, and it is even unclear how many people were in the audience or on the stage. That is in spite of it being partially filmed for Wholly Communion (1965) and widely reported in the press.

Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti were all extremely unhappy with the reading and went to the media in the days following it to complain publicly about the other poets on the line-up. However, in spite of their disappointment with the local poets, the Albert Hall event was a pivotal moment in the British counterculture.

All of this is discussed in this new essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/poets-of-our-time-the-beats-at-the

Photo by John "Hoppy" Hopkins.

>When the question is therefore asked, "Are writers made or born?" one should first ask, "Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?" Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing.
—Jack Kerouac

This is from a short essay called “Are Writers Made or Born?” and collected in Ann Charters’ Portable Kerouac. He goes on to explain:

>Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents." Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar (Wilson's famous "shock of recognition"). I got that feeling from Swann's Way, as well as from Sons and Lovers. I do not get it from Colette, but I do get it from Dickinson. I get it from Celine, but I do not get it from Camus. I get it from Hemingway, but not from Raymond Chandler, except when he's dead serious. I get it from the Balzac of Cousin Bette, but not from Pierre Loti. And so on.

He then makes this fascinating statement:

>The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius because there's nothing else to imitate. Since talent can't originate it has to imitate, or interpret.

Photograph by Fred DeWitt.

For more on Kerouac’s views on writing (as well as those of other Beat writers), see this short Substack article: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/writing-advice-from-the-beats

>When you notice yourself thinking, take a friendly attitude toward it. Don’t invite it in for tea, don’t invite the thought in for tea, don’t push it away either, just let it be there and notice it or acknowledge it.
--Allen Ginsberg

This advice on meditation comes from a 1990 interview that Ginsberg did with Christian Loidl. It was unpublished until a few days ago, when it appeared in Beatdom 26.

From the mid-sixties onwards, Ginsberg frequently used his interviews and poetry readings to educate people about meditation techniques.

Photo by Michael Tighe.