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HOWL OBSCENITY TRIAL

A Dirty Book in San Francisco

Howl and Other Poems (1956), the first book by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, had been for sale at the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco for eight months when, on 21 May 1957, local city and county police officers Russell Woods and Thomas Pagee were sent by their boss, Capt. William Hanrahan, chief of the Juvenile Bureau, to purchase a copy of the book and swear out a warrant for the arrest of the sales-clerk and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the shop owner. Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books had also published the volume. The book was variously described as "a howl of pain" caused by "Mr. Ginsberg's personal view of a segment of life he has experienced … colored by exposure to jazz, to Columbia, a university, to a liberal and Bohemian education, to a great deal of traveling on the road, to a certain amount of what we call bumming around" (by Luther Nichols, a San Francisco reviewer) or as "a lot of sensitive bullshit," in the words of the prosecutor. The defendants pleaded not guilty to charges of selling lewd and indecent writings, and a highly publicized trial followed in San Francisco Municipal Court, the lowest ranking California court. The circuslike court proceedings were reported nationwide, though from a legal perspective the ultimate outcome was a foregone conclusion of dubious significance.

To Trial

Ferlinghetti (charges against his clerk were dismissed) was defended free of charge by Jake Ehrlich, who had achieved legal celebrity by defending murderer Caryl Chessman and exotic dancer Sally Rand, among others. He faced Ralph McIntosh, an aging assistant district attorney who specialized in prosecuting pornographers. The issue was whether a work could be judged obscene because it contained individual words that might be considered offensive without regard to context. The court found Ferlinghetti not guilty and, presumably, staved off a wave of indictments in San Francisco against publishers and sellers of books with obscene words in them.

The Issue

The Howl trial was less about law than about exposure. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free publicity that made Ginsberg a celebrity and his book publishing legend. As of 1993 it was in its forty-first printing, and some 850,000 copies had sold. The author and publisher were portrayed as libertarian spokesmen, symbols of First Amendment rights, and crusaders against ignorance and censorship. A spotlight was cast on professional literary criticism as well when Ehrlich called a parade of writers and critics as witnesses to elucidate the literary qualities of the book. They prompted less enthusiasm than the other principles, though.

Witnesses for the Defense

Among the critics, Mark Schorer led off, followed by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Kenneth Rexroth, and six others. Professor Schorer, a highly respected author and scholar, stated that poetic expression could not be reduced to the level of common language, and thus he could not say what lines in the poem mean; poet, teacher, and critic Rexroth proclaimed Howl "probably the most remarkable single poem, published by a young man since the second war"; and Clark, critic and author of The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), was warned to avoid lecturing the court and the prosecutor when he described the difficulty of defining literary merit and questioned its relevance to the case at hand.

Witnesses for the Prosecution

The prosecution's witnesses were an assistant professor teaching freshman English and engineering English at the University of San Francisco who was working on his Ph.D. and a college instructor and writer who had rewritten Faust (incorporating forty versions of the story, she said) and Everyman, among other works. The first witness attempted to define the literary shortcomings of Howl: "It is really just a weak imitation of a form that was used 80 or 90 years ago by Walt Whitman"; "The statement of the idea of the poem was relatively clear, but it has little validity, and, therefore, the theme has a negative value, no value at all"; and "this poem is apparently dedicated to a long-dead movement—'Dadaism' and some late followers of Dadaism. And therefore the opportunity is long past for any significant literary contribution of this poem." The second witness complained that "you feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff. I didn't linger on it too long, I assure you."

The Verdict

After due consideration, the Honorable Clayton W. Horn found the defendant not guilty, because isolated words cannot be considered obscene, the effect of the work was not "erotic or aphrodisiac," and he found the poem to have redeeming value. He concluded his decision with the motto of the highest order of English knighthood: "In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' (Evil to him who evil thinks)."

As of 1993, Howl sells some twenty thousand copies each year.