On October 7, 1955, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem “Howl” at the Six Gallery, in San Francisco. Poems don’t usually change the world, but “Howl” did ruffle some feathers.
More than 100 people attended that night, more than expected. The Six was both venue and metaphor: as a converted auto-repair shop, it was perfectly suited to a movement dedicated to dissonance. Ginsberg took the stage, clutching his typewritten pages. Dressed in a jacket and tie, his hair neatly trimmed, he looked more like a high-school teacher than he did an anarchic poet.
But then he started reading and the disguise slipped. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” he read. Jack Kerouac shouted “Go,” as if there were a risk that Ginsberg might stop. But Ginsberg couldn’t stop; he could hardly take a breath.
The audience sat stunned, words battering them like hailstones. Words were weapons to attack a corporatist leviathan—“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!… Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!” Ginsberg’s vision of America was utterly bleak, focusing as it did on the victims: “Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!” The end came in an orgiastic explosion, leaving listeners bruised. “O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here,” Ginsberg shouted. And then he wept.
“Howl” quickly became the defining poem of the Beat Generation. It still possesses immense power, still shocks, still offends. But the energy it emits today is nothing compared with the raw force produced on that night 70 years ago. In 1955, the poem was an overt challenge to the First Amendment: Would freedom of speech accommodate a challenge of this order? Nowadays, Americans are perhaps more accustomed to obscenity but also more inclined to censure and ban. Jimmy Kimmel’s recent controversial remarks seem tame in comparison to what’s contained in “Howl.”
One poem and 100 listeners do not a revolution make. To pretend that “Howl” was a watershed is to assign far too much power to a single work, especially one that few would ever read, and even fewer understand. But that night was a harbinger; premonitions of so much of what would follow can be discerned from those pages. Between the lines lurk Dylan and Malcolm X, Stonewall and Saigon. The unspeakable was aired.
We need to remind ourselves of the context. America in the 1950s was a place of Wonder Bread conformity, a country of immense self-confidence. Middle-aged Americans considered themselves the Greatest Generation, their assumed righteousness encouraging a suspicion of difference. It was a society that worshipped the principle of free speech but abhorred its practice. Jim Crow still thrived; gays hid in the closet; women obeyed. Nowadays, those who yearn to make America great again look longingly toward the 1950s.
“We had gone beyond a point of no return and we were ready for it,” Ginsberg’s friend Michael McClure later wrote of the Beats. “None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness.… We wanted voice and we wanted vision.” The arbiters of Americanness, however, found both voice and vision suspicious.
The term “Beats” was an allusion to the feeling of being roughed up by life—aching souls struggling to find meaning in a wasteland of materialism and conformity. Escape came through aimless wandering “on the road,” through mind-expanding drugs, through formless music and art, or through stream-of-consciousness literature. They befriended those on the perilous margins of society—prostitutes, addicts, gays, the homeless. The renegade world offered escape from the sheltered middle-class life from which they came.
“The only people for me are the mad ones,” wrote Kerouac. “The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Theirs was a reckless, risky, and rather naïve quest, but they had little concern for their own safety, since safety seemed conformist. The highways of their exploration are littered with corpses, the casualties of bohemian excess or of friends gone nasty. Ginsberg was one of the few to survive to old age.
That first reading of “Howl” was packed with premonitions. It was about freedom, the enemy of conformity, but also, more specifically, about drugs, homosexuality, alienation, and madness. As such, it was a statement of what was to come but also an act of defiance against those inclined to censor thought, those who sought a homogenized America.
In time, the Beats would morph into Beatniks, hip cats dressed in black who were actually as normal as 98.6. Politically, Beatniks were an irrelevance. We should instead remember Ginsberg and his friends, brave souls who deserve admiration for shouting questions during an era of nodding compliance. We do not need to love their literature, or indeed their ethos, to admire their revolt.
Where have all the poets gone? They’ve gone to graveyards every one. Ginsberg howled about iniquity and reminded Americans about what freedom really means. His howl has nowadays gone quiet as cowardly corporations willingly offer sacrifices to the new Moloch.
Gerard DeGroot is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews and the author of several books, including The Sixties Unplugged
