The Censorship Trials of the Beat Generation

I am not sure if it was the red cover or the disgust that dripped from the professor's introduction that attracted me to the book. "We are only reading this because the headmaster has instructed me this is required reading. It was trash when Salinger wrote it and, it still remains to be trash." Dr. Esther Wiles said. If one can picture gray flannel skirt, smart, thick-soled black shoes, and a white, stiff collared shirt pined tight with a black and white Camellia cameo, the picture of Dr. Wiles begins to materialize from the mist of east coast preparatory school nightmares. Dr. Wile's husband, the Reverend, was head of the English Department and for decades, they controlled the reading material of America's best and brightest. We fed on a steady diet of Mary Wollencraft, Georg Eliot, and to the bane of our male existence, the Jane Austen's of the literary world. The Catcher in the Rye was salacious, tantalizing, and contrary to the dry-tack existence of our previous reading, delicious. Through her back east, puritanical vehemence, she awoke a literary interest I have not quenched yet.

The dreary spring semester with Dr. Wiles juggled between great nights of reading Salinger to listening to her venomous denunciations of my first literary hero, Holden Caulfield. May came and school released for summer break. As my classmates migrated to the Vinyard or Oswego, I opted to take a bus from Boston to south Texas. I wanted to see Gettysburg, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Graceland, walk Beale Street, and swim the Mississippi. The Greyhound Bus system is an interesting place for a wide-eyed sixteen year old with the first taste of freedom on their tongue. As the bus wound south along US81 and the Blueridge Parkway, I struck up a conversation with a recent parolee of the Winchester Correctional Facility in Virginia. We talked about life from two diverging prisms and found common ground somewhere near Roanoke. The next little town, Blacksburg, he stood up and handed me a blue bound book with pink letters. "Read it; it will change your life." He said. On the Road. Enter the Beats and exit the stodgy prose of old Europe and early America. I had the taste.

That summer, back in Texas, I read everything I could by Kerouac. I returned to the east coast with a weathered and worn edition of the Subterraneans. I was hip. I made sure the title stuck out of my blazer pocket during chapel so every one could see how 'turned on' I had become over the summer. "You like the Beats?" A voice asked. The voice came from a professor I had never seen in my previous three years. He had a ponytail, horn-rimmed glasses, and carried a faint sweet, smoky smell I could not quite place. "What's that?" I ask.

"Kerouac, he is a writer called a Beat writer. I am Dr. Anderson. Why don't you find me during your English period and I will loan you a few books by some other Beats; see what you think."

"Sure!"

I went to the registrars after chapel to get my first semester schedule. English IV Shelley, Keats, and the Romantics, Dr. John Anderson; this was going to be an interesting semester.

"Sir, I have you for English IV. You were going to loan me a few books about the...Beats." I said.

"Read the poem Howl first, then read this book."

He handed me a greasy and dog-eared yellow-red-orange book-the Naked Lunch. I feasted and the dinner almost launched me on a path to law school. Flash forward twenty years and the next longhaired bad influence enters my life and awakens further education goals through the guise of the Beats. If Dr. Wiles and I could sit down for a conversation now, I hope she would be proud of the thirst for the 'obscene' she instilled.

Dr. Wiles began closing the minds of the east coast elite in the fall of 1955. On the west coast, Allen Ginsberg and the cadre of writers that would define a generation were opening the minds of American youth. On a rainy October night in San Francisco at 3119 Fillmore Street, City Lights' owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti introduced five poets at a 6 Gallery reading. A young Jewish poet with a full head of dark curly hair and thick black rimmed glasses took the stage and blew a breath that turned into the gale that defined the hippy movement of the sixties. To the tune of a drunken Kerouac fresh off the road and chanting 'go, go, go,' Ginsberg launched the Beat Generation with the infamous words, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked" (Ginsberg, 134) The next morning Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram congratulating him on the eve of a great career and offered to publish a collection of his poems in a City Lights Pocket Poet Series book. The North Beach Renaissance and Beats had arrived; trouble was around the corner.

City Lights Press in the fifties was a small printing house on an even smaller budget. Howl and other Poems, the fourth book in the Pocket Poets Series, was set to print a first edition of 1000 copies in London. The process of printing presses was cheaper than printing in the US. The savings Ferlinghetti was trying to obtain by printing outside of the US would soon prove to not only be a saving in monetary value but a boon for free press and exposure back home. In March 1956, under 18 US Code 1461, San Francisco Customs Collector, Chester McPhee, seized 520 copies on the grounds the writing was obscene. (Morgan, 2) In court testimony, McPhee stated the material was something "You would not want your children to come across." (148)

The US Post Office entered the censorship game in 1873. Anthony Comstock, a proxy beat character in Lucien Carr's son Caleb's book the Alienist, created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to thwart delivery or transportation of lewd, salacious, or obscene material or any means or information pertaining to birth control. Comstock, a US Postal Inspector, urged Congress to pass the Comstock Law, the genesis behind 18 US Code 1461. When Comstock turned his attention to George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession, Mrs. Warren is a lovable prostitute, Shaw returned fire by saying, "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all." (Schlosser, 120)

With Howl and other Poems banned, Ginsberg found himself in the land of literary giants. He was in the venerable company of Henry Miller, Walt Whitman, and Aristophanes. McPhee, in the quest to protect the children of San Francisco from prurient interest, created a media storm of press that provided more visibility for Howl than City Lights could have afforded to promote the book. Unwittingly McPhee elevated the book from a small press publication to a national success. Howl is now one of the most reprinted and anthologized poems in American Twentieth century literature.

The American Civil Liberties Union informs McPhee they will defend Howl against obscenity charges in April. In May, from the interest generated by the press surrounding Howl, Ferlinghetti prints 2500 more copies this time under the higher printing costs of US printers to circumvent US Customs scrutiny. (Morgan, 3) On May 29th, the US Attorney Lloyd Burke forces US Customs to release Howl and other Poems. He refuses to pursue condemnation hearings against the book. Five days later, June 3, undercover San Francisco Juvenile Division cops arrest City Lights bookseller Shigeyoshi Murao. An arrest warrant is issued for Ferlinghetti and he subsequently turns himself in and is released on five hundred dollars bond. (6) The trial is to be presided over by Judge Clayton Horn. ACLU attorneys and the San Francisco public are concerned Howl will be ruled obscene by the conservative Honorable Horn.

For Howl to pass prosecution, the book had to pass the Roth Test. Public sentiment was mixed with Honorable Horn presiding. Judge Horn had recently gained notoriety when he sentenced four female shoplifters to view The Ten Commandments and write essays extolling the virtues of lessons learned from the screening. (DeGrazia) Insiders doubted the bible-school teaching magistrate could rule in favor of a book depicting gay sex and filled with 87 counts of the words cock, balls, shit, and fuck.

Through the 1930's, for a book to face the condemnation of censorship, the publication had to fail the Hicklin Rule. The Hicklin Rule derived from the old English Common Law Case of Regina v. Hicklin (1868), LR 3 QB 360. The Hicklin test states if a work "depraves and corrupts those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall" then the work is obscene. (WestLaw) Unfortunately, the test applies to a work line by line rather than regarding the work in its entirety. The chosen text is tested even if the text was taken out of context to its desired meaning. The last literary case challenged under the Hicklin Test in the US was James Joyce's, Ulysses. The Ulysses trial, banned under the Hicklin premise of line-by-line scrutiny, prompted US courts to take works as a whole rather than by selective scrutiny. In 1957, the US Supreme Court opened the door to end censorship and place the onus on lower courts to determine whether a work was obscene or acceptable.

Samuel Roth, publisher of American Aphrodite that depicted literary erotica and nude photographs of women, faced arrest and conviction by a New York Federal Court for sending lewd, obscene, and lascivious material through the US Postal system. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and ruled to hear the case. Justice William Brennan, Jr authored the 6-3 majority decision and defined the three basic tenets of the Roth Test.

1. The dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex.

2. The material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters.

3. The material is utterly without redeeming social value. (Morgan, 351)

Brennan, defining his decision stated the "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" of the "average person, applying contemporary community standards." (WestLaw) These phrases repudiated the Hicklin Rule and and proved the Constitution a living document. The decision did not protect obscenity under the First Amendment but it did allow future cases to apply contemporary standards to material prosecutors deemed obscene.

In August 1957, the Howl trial proceeded. Mauro's charges are acquitted on the first day of hearings when the prosecution could not prove he had read the book or sold Howl under lewd intent. Nine defendants testify in defense of Howl. (3) Ferlinghetti is not guilty of selling or publishing lewd or obscene material. Handing down his decision Judge Horn writes, "No two persons think alike ... would there be any freedom of press and speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to innocuous euphemism? An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words ... I have confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, politics, or any other field." Borrowing words straight from Justice Brennan's Roth decision Judge Horn opens his with "I do not believe that Howl is without redeeming social importance." To fail the Roth Test, a work must comply with any of the three standards put forth by the Supreme Court. Howl passed the Roth test as material that had redeeming social importance.

The day after Horn handed down the decision from his bench Ferlinghetti and City Lights printed another additional 5000 copies of Howl and other Poems to keep up with the demand created by the media sensationalism of the trial. Ginsberg, away in Paris creating the next censorship row through his friend and sometimes lover, William S. Burroughs, followed the trial through correspondence with Ferlinghetti. He did not hear the outcome of the decision until three weeks later.

William Seward Burroughs was a man on the run. He left Texas for Mexico City at the behest of his attorney; his lam stemmed from a pending drug charge in the Big Easy. While expatriated in Districo Federal, Burroughs once again found himself in trouble with the law after accidently killing his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, in a drunken game of William Tell. He spent thirteen days in a Mexico penitentiary before posting bail. His attorney, the Mexican precursor to America's Johnny Cochran, Bernabe Jurado, bragged it was the fastest he had gotten anyone acquitted on murder charges. Burroughs once again found himself on the lam through Columbia with young lover Lewis Marker in search of the conscious expanding drug Yage. After frolicking through the Columbian rainforest, Burroughs jumped the pond and landed in the International Zone of Tangiers, Morocco.

Lonely and addicted to Eukadol Burroughs spent his days whiling his time between starring at his big toe and writing letters to his friends. Burroughs, through the fifties, had an immense infatuation with Ginsberg. Burroughs, acting upon the routines he developed in Junky and Queer, sought in Ginsberg a receiver to his sender's routines. Ginsberg, a consummate pack rat of his correspondences, kept the Burroughs routine filled letters. The letters soon developed into a manuscript that would soon rock the censorship boat; the Naked Lunch.

While Burroughs junked around Tangiers writing the NakedLunch, Ginsberg went on his personal Yage quest following Burroughs lead. Postal Service to South America was sketchy at best and Burroughs routines were not reaching their intended receiver. Bill became distraught that he was not receiving return correspondence from Allen and he started to plead with Kerouac and Ferlinghetti to help him contact Allen even if Allen's response was to sever the relationship. Allen soon learned of Bill's desperate pining and became concerned with the condition of Bill's loneliness. Together with his young lover Peter Orvolosky, the separately traveling Kerouac, and Alan Ansen from Naples, Allen planned a trip to relieve Bill of the stress of his self imposed exile. The plan was to help Bill type and organize the Naked Lunch manuscript. To expedite Bill from his loneliness, Allen and Peter planned to coax Bill out of his depression with a good old fashioned man on man on man three way.

The trip to Tangiers did not go as planned. Bill was mired in an intense Eukadol addiction. The living conditions in the Arab district were deplorable. Bill's obsession for Allen was bordering on the psychotic and Allen was afraid Bill wanted to possess him rather than love him. In a separate room, Kerouac, missing the US and his beloved Memere, banged away at a manuscript that left him dreaming "öf sausages coming out of his mouth." (Morgan) Bill's drug sick longing and jealousy of Orvolosky, Kerouac's America pining, and Ginsberg growing fear of Bill's obsession with him came to head and all went their separate ways. Peter and Allen to Paris and the Beat Hotel at 9 rue Git le Coeur, Kerouac back to America via Paris and London, and Bill back to the recesses of his addiction and the young Spanish boys of the Interzone. The short summer in Tangiers represented the last time the three seminal authors of the Beat Hotel would occupy the same space. Fame and celebrity awaited them.

Once in Paris, Allen relieved himself of the mental torment he blamed on Bill's obsession. Allen, acting as the always faithful and loyal friend and literary agent, began to 'shop' Bill's NakedLunch to magazines and publishers. Allen sent sections of the NakedLunch to friend Irving Rosenthal, editor of the University of Chicago's literary magazine, the ChicagoReview. Rosenthal loved it and agreed to publish a five page section in the fall issue. The words fuck and depictions of homosexual sex sparked ire in ChicagoDailyNews columnist Jack Mabley. In his October 25^th column entitled FilthyWritingontheMidway, Mabley called the fall issue "one of the foulest collections of printed filth I've seen publically circulated" the university "should take a long hard look at what is being circulated under its sponsorship." (Morgan, 296) NakedLunch entered its first row with censorship. University Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton vowed that something had to be done to stop the spring issue of the ChicagoReview. The entire issue was dedicated to the writing of Burroughs and Kerouac. In protest, Rosenthal and six members of the editorial staff of the review resigned.

Rosenthal and his six colleges started a magazine to publish the suppressed material. The editors, in search of a title, paid homage to Kerouac when he telegrammed them the suggestion BigTable. The name was inspired when he saw a note to himself saying "get a bigger table." Big Table #1 rolled of the presses the spring of 1959 with the dubious title "The Complete Contents of the Suppressed Winter 1959 ChicagoReview." The Beat writers found themselves owing a great debt of gratitude to customs officials and the US Post Office. The USPS seized the first few hundred copies of the magazine and created a sensation nationwide. Readers had to see what was so bad it would be force seizure by the post office. The next 10,000 issues of the magazine sold out.

The ACLU once again came to the defense of Beat literature and on June 30, 1960, Judge Julius Hoffman ruled the magazine was not obscene. Judge Hoffman, who Burroughs would later cover during the Chicago Democratic National Convention riots for EsquireMagazine, ruled the Burroughs sections although "contained a galaxy of four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words or other expressions usually consigned to the category of obscene parlance, it need not appeal to a salacious interest in sex. The use of obscenities in a work is insufficient to classify it as obscene. In this instance the use of shit and fuck violates a cultural and social taboo, to be sure, but not the law." Judge Hoffman wrote in his decision "the dominant theme or effect is that of shocking contemporary society, in order perhaps to better point out its flaws and weaknesses, but that clinical appeal is not akin to lustful thoughts." Clearly, Judge Hoffman applied the Roth Test to the case of Big Table #1. The Chicago Post Office was forced to release the cordoned issues to the public. (Morgan) Beats - 2; Censorship - 0.

Irving Rosenthal and Ginsberg introduced the microcosmic literary world to the prose of William S. Burroughs. He had published Junky and Queer through the ACE Publishing House earlier in his career; however, to protect the tender sensibilities of his well to-do family, Burroughs wrote under the pseudonym of William Lee. Lee was his mother's maiden name. Allen Ginsberg had larger designs. He wanted the WORLD to read Naked Lunch. He could not acclaim Bill's writing more. While Allen was enjoying the sites and attractions of Paris, he was also working overtime on Maurice Girodias to publish NakedLunch under his Olympia Press. Girodias refused on the grounds the book did not have enough sex. He conceded it did have a few blow jobs and one dramatic sex scene in the Swiftian-inspired anti-capital punishment routine, AJ's Annual Party, but as a purveyor of the dirty books series, or affectionately the d.b.s. Girodias was a patron of the arts in a round about way. He published Nabakov's Lolita and Donleavy's The Ginger Man and keep a lot of American and burgeoning writers alive by publishing their porn output in the d.b.s under pen-names. However, when Girodias caught wind of the censorship charges arising from the Big Table case and the subsequent exposure, his interest was renewed.

Girodias invited Burroughs to dinner and on June 6, 1959 he made his offer in a letter. "Dear Mr. Burroughs, what about letting me have another look at NakedLunch?" (Morgan, 313) Bill accepted and received an $800 dollar advance. With the ink barely dry on the contract, Olympia Press ran the first 10000 copies. Barney Rosset of Grove Press quickly purchased the American rights from Girodias for $3000 and Girodias, representing Bill as both publisher and agent, maintained 17.5 percent royalties on the rights.

Barney Rosset and Grove Press did more to challenge literary censorship than any two entities in the United States. Grove and Rosset, when NakedLunch was purchased, were mired in a censorship battle with Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. While the courts battle over the obscenity charges against Cancer, the first 10000 American issues of NakedLunch sat stored away in a warehouse. Rosset reasoned "if they (Grove Press) lost on Tropic they would sure as hell lose on Lunch." (Morgan 329) TheTropicofCancer raised more censorship trials than any other book in history. The financial stress further delayed the release of NakedLunch. Rosset feared another protracted court case could finish Grove. Rosset grew even warier in October of 61 when Diane Di Prima and Leroi Jones were arrested by postal inspectors for disseminating their magazine the FloatingBear that contained Bill's "Roosevelt after Inauguration." A grand jury refused to prosecute FloatingBear but encouraged Rosset to postpone publication. In 1962, a Florida censorship case of The Tropic of Cancer made it to the Supreme Court. The court ruled the work was not obscene. Lunch was ready to be served.

While the US's highest court was arguing the minutiae of what is and, what is not obscene, Bill was in Edinburgh, Scotland attacking censorship in a best of the best writer's conference. Bill likened censorship as "the presumed right of governmental agencies to decide what words and images the citizen is permitted to see." NakedLunch is a diatribe against the horrors of control and addiction. "That is precisely thought control." The thought of any governmental control or censorship inflamed Bill's sense of artist and citizen's freedom. Bill had faced personal censorship in his own country through a 1940's arrest for writing a bad prescription and getting caught in possession of heroin in the lazy city of the Big Easy and then facing further censorship in Mexico when he accidently shot Joan and finally in Paris when a letter was intercepted by customs officials addressed to friend Paul Bowles. His writing was now the object of censorship.

Naked Lunch's first 8000 copies hit the stands on November 20, 1962. In January of 1963, Boston bookseller Theodore Mavirokos was arrested for selling obscene material-NakedLunch. Financially Grove Press was still reeling from the costs of the Cancer trials and had intended not to pay booksellers court costs. However, the Boston case was the only arrest that was made for selling NakedLunch and, with the liberal nature of the Massachusetts's Supreme Court, Rosset thought the book had a great opportunity to pass through a speedy trial. Rosset tapped Edward De Grazia, an attorney Grove kept on retainer, to defend NakedLunch.

The trial opened on January 12, 1965, with Honorable Eugene A. Hudson presiding, to the less than committed opening statements of the prosecuting attorney. "I'm prosecuting this case because various old ladies are getting on the attorney general's back and insist that he do something about this book or that book. I wish I was devoting my time to something more important and so does the A.G., but we have to bow to public opinion." (Morgan) Judge Hudson did not see it that way and did not deem Naked Lunch to maintain any significant social importance and ruled the book obscene on March 23, 1965. De Grazia appealed and argued the case before the entire Massachusetts's Supreme Court on October 8. The Tropic of Cancer case had set the standard as to what was, and was not obscene. On January 7, 1966, the Massachesett's Supreme Court handed down their decision. NakedLunch was not obscene. Bill, a vehemently outspoken agent against control, holds the honorable distinction as the last author to face literary censorship. The NakedLunch trial effectively ended literary censorship in America. Beats - 4; Censorship - 0.

As I reflect back on my life with the Beats, I have to wonder. Was the Winchester parolee my Kerouac urging me to explore the unexpected as Kerouac urged Burroughs to write? Was Dr. Anderson my Irving Rosenthal exposing me to a world of wild expectations and a hint of the full taste of the literary palate? Was Dr. Johnson my Barney Rosset exposing me to the full flavor of the Naked Lunch and willing to take the chance on a young protégé? I think they are.

Works Cited

Brinkley, Douglas, ed. Jack Kerouac, Windblown World. New York: Viking P, 2004.

Burroughs, William S. Junky. 50th Anniversary ed. New York: Grove P, 2003.

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. Restored Text ed. New York: Grove P, 2001.

Burroughs, William S. Queer. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984.

Charters, Ann, ed. Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956. New York: Viking P, 1995.

Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. 8-59.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1997 Allen Ginsberg. 1st ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel. 1st ed. New York: Grove P, 2000.

Miles, Barry. William Burroughs. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1993.

Morgan, Bill, and Nancy Peters. Howl on Trial. 1st ed. San Francisco: City Lights, 2006.
Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1988.

Wakefield, Dan. New York in the 50's. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999