[In the following essay, Ferlinghetti gives an account of the charges that were levied against him for publishing and selling obscene writings and his subsequent San Francisco trial, after he published the first U.S. edition of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.]

Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which books burn, has finally been determined not to be the prevailing temperature at San Francisco, though the police still would be all too happy to make it hot for you. On October 3 last, Judge Clayton Horn of Municipal Court brought in a 39-page opinion finding Shigeyoshi Murao and myself not guilty of publishing or selling obscene writings, to wit Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and issue 11 & 12 of The Miscellaneous Man.

Thus ended one of the most irresponsible and callous police actions to be perpetrated west of the Rockies, not counting the treatment accorded Indians and Japanese.

When William Carlos Williams, in his Introduction to Howl, said that Ginsberg had come up with “an arresting poem” he hardly knew what he was saying. The first edition of Howl, Number Four in the Pocket Poets Series, was printed in England by Villiers, passed thru Customs without incident, and was published at the City Lights bookstore here in the fall of 1956. Part of a second printing was stopped by Customs on March 25, 1957, not long after an earlier issue of The Miscellaneous Man (published in Berkeley by William Margolis) had been seized coming from the same printer. Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930 was cited. The San Francisco Chronicle (which alone among the local press put up a real howl about censorship) reported, in part:

Collector of Customs Chester MacPhee continued his campaign yesterday to keep what he considers obscene literature away from the children of the Bay Area. He confiscated 520 copies of a paperbound volume of poetry entitled Howl and Other Poems. … “The words and the sense of the writing is obscene,” MacPhee declared. “You wouldn't want your children to come across it.”

On April 3 the American Civil Liberties Union (to which I had submitted the manuscript of Howl before it went to the printer) informed Mr. MacPhee that it would contest the legality of the seizure, since it did not consider the book obscene. We announced in the meantime that an entirely new edition of Howl was being printed within the United States, thereby removing it from Customs jurisdiction. No changes were made in the original text, and a photo-offset edition was placed on sale at City Lights bookstore and distributed nationally while the Customs continued to sit on the copies from Britain.

On May 19, book editor William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle gave his Sunday column to an article by myself, defending Howl (I recommended a medal be made for Collector MacPhee, since his action was already rendering the book famous. But the police were soon to take over this advertising account and do a much better job—10,000 copies of Howl were in print by the time they finished with it.) In defense of Howl I said I thought it to be “the most significant single long poem to be published in this country since World War II, perhaps since T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.” To which many added “Alas.” Fair enough, considering the barren, polished poetry and well-mannered verse which had dominated many of the major poetry publications during the past decade or so, not to mention some of the “fashionable incoherence” which has passed for poetry in many of the smaller, avant-garde magazines and little presses. Howl commits many poetic sins; but it was time. And it would be very interesting to hear from critics who can name another single long poem published in this country since the War which is as significant of its time and place and generation. (A reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly recently wrote that Howl may well turn out to be The Waste Land of the younger generation.) The central part of my article said: … It is not the poet but what he observes which is revealed as obscene. The great obscene wastes of Howl are the sad wastes of the mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms. … Ginsberg chooses to walk on the wild side of this world, along with Nelson Algren, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, not to mention some great American dead, mostly in the tradition of philosophical anarchism. … Ginsberg wrote his own best defense of Howl in another poem called “America.” Here he asks:

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!”

A world, in short, you wouldn't want your children to come across. … Thus was Goya obscene in depicting the Disasters of War, thus Whitman an exhibitionist, exhibiting man in his own strange skin.

On May 29 Customs released the books it had been holding, since the United States Attorney at San Francisco refused to institute condemnation proceedings against Howl.

Then the police took over and arrested us, Captain William Hanrahan of the juvenile department (well named, in this case) reporting that the books were not fit for children to read. Thus during the first week in June I found myself being booked and fingerprinted in San Francisco's Hall of Justice. The city jail occupies the upper floors of it, and a charming sight it is, a picturesque return to the early Middle Ages. And my enforced tour of it was a dandy way for the city officially to recognize the flowering of poetry in San Francisco. As one paper reported, “The Cops Don't Allow No Renaissance Here.”

The ACLU posted bail. Our trial went on all summer, with a couple of weeks between each day in court. The prosecution soon admitted it had no case against either Shig Murao or myself as far as the Miscellaneous Man was concerned, since we were not the publisher of it, in which case there was no proof we knew what was inside the magazine when it was sold at our store. And, under the California Penal Code, the willful and lewd intent of the accused had to be established. Thus the trial was narrowed down to Howl.

The so-called People's Case (I say so-called, since the People seemed mostly on our side) was presented by Deputy District Attorney Ralph McIntosh whose heart seemed not in it nor his mind on it. He was opposed by some of the most formidable legal talent to be found, in the persons of Mr. Jake (“Never Plead Guilty”) Ehrlich, Lawrence Speiser (former counsel for the ACLU), and Albert Bendich (present counsel for the ACLU)—all of whom defended us without expense to us.

The critical support for Howl (or the protest against censorship on principle) was enormous. Here is some of what some said:

Henry Rago, editor of Poetry (Chicago)—

… I wish only to say that the book, is a thoroughly serious work of literary art. … There is absolutely no question in my mind or in that of any poet or critic with whom I have discussed the book that it is a work of the legitimacy and validity contemplated by existing American law, as we know it in the statement of Justice Woolsey in the classic Ulysses case, and as we have seen it reaffirmed just recently by the Supreme Court in the Butler case. … I would be unworthy of the tradition of this magazine or simply of my place as a poet in the republic of letters … if I did not speak for the right of this book to free circulation, and against this affront not only to Allen Ginsberg and his publishers, but to the possibilities of the art of poetry in America. …

William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle:

… Howl and Other Poems, according to accepted, serious contemporary American literary standards, is a dignified, sincere and admirable work of art. …

Robert Duncan and Director Ruth Witt-Diamant of the San Francisco (State College) Poetry Center:

… Howl is a significant work in American poetry, deriving both a spirit and form from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, from Jewish religious writings. … It is rhapsodic, highly idealistic and inspired in cause and purpose. Like other inspired poets, Ginsberg strives to include all of life, especially the elements of suffering and dismay from which the voice of desire rises. Only by misunderstanding might these tortured outcryings for sexual and spiritual understanding be taken as salacious. The poet gives us the most painful details; he moves us toward a statement of experience that is challenging and finally noble.

Thomas Parkinson (University of California):

… Howl is one of the most important books of poetry published in the last ten years. Its power and eloquence are obvious, and the talent of Mr. Ginsberg is of the highest order. Even people who do not like the book are compelled to testify to its force and brilliance. …

James Laughlin (New Directions):

I have read the book carefully and do not myself consider it offensive to good taste, likely to lead youth astray, or be injurious to public morals. I feel, furthermore, that the book has considerable distinction as literature, being a powerful and artistic expression of a meaningful philosophical attitude. …

Kenneth Patchen:

The issue here—as in every like case—is not the merit or lack of it of a book but of a Society which traditionally holds the human being to be by its very functional nature a creature of shameful, outrageous, and obscene habits. …

Eugene Burdick (novelist and critic):

The poem Howl strikes me as an impressionistic, broadly gauged, almost surrealistic attempt to catch the movement, color, drama, and inevitable disappointments of life in a complex, modern society. Howl is a pessimistic, and indeed, almost a tragic view of life. … It is my impression that the total impact of the poem is far from lascivious or obscene. It is depressing, but not licentious or extravagant in its use of harsh words. …

Northern California Booksellers Association:

It may or may not be literature but it does have literary merit. … The proposition that adult literature must meet the standards of suitability for children is manifestly absurd. … To quote Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter in a similar case—“… the effect of this is to reduce the adult population to reading only what is fit for children … surely this is to burn the house down to roast the pig.”

Barney Rosset and Donald Allen, editors of the Evergreen Review (in which Howl was reprinted during the trial):

The second issue of Evergreen Review, which was devoted to the work of writers in the San Francisco Bay Area, attempted in large part to show the kinds of serious writing being done by the postwar generation. We published Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in that issue because we believe that it is a significant modern poem, and that Allen Ginsberg's intention was to sincerely and honestly present a portion of his own experience of the life of his generation. … Our final considered opinion was that Allen Ginsberg's Howl is an achieved poem and that it deserves to be considered as such. …

At the trial itself, nine expert witnesses testified in behalf of Howl. They were eloquent witnesses, together furnishing as good a one-sided critical survey of Howl as could possibly be got up in any literary magazine. These witnesses were: Mark Schorer and Leo Lowenthal (of the University of California faculty), Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Herbert Blau, Arthur Foff, and Mark Linenthal (all of the San Francisco State College faculty), Kenneth Rexroth, Vincent McHugh (poet and novelist), and Luther Nichols (book editor of the San Francisco Examiner). A few excerpts from the trial transcript—

DR. Mark Schorer:
The theme of the poem is announced very clearly in the opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Then the following lines that make up the first part attempt to create the impression of a kind of nightmare world in which people representing “the best minds of my generation,” in the author's view, are wandering like damned souls in hell. That is done through a kind of series of what one might call surrealistic images, a kind of state of hallucinations. Then in the second section the mood of the poem changes and it becomes an indictment, of those elements in modern society that, in the author's view, are destructive of the best qualities in human nature and of the best minds. Those elements are, I would say, predominantly materialism, conformity and mechanization leading toward war. And then the third part is a personal address to a friend, real or fictional, of the poet or of the person who is speaking in the poet's voice—those are not always the same thing—who is mad and in a madhouse, and is the specific representative of what the author regards as a general condition, and with that final statement the poem ends. …
MR. McIntosh:
(later in cross-examination) I didn't quite follow your explanation to page 21, “Footnote to Howl.” Do you call that the second phase?
MARK Schorer:
I didn't speak about “Footnote to Howl.” I regard that as a separate poem.
MR. McIntosh:
Oh, I'm—
MARK Schorer:
It is not one of the three parts that make up the first poem. It's a comment on, I take it, the attitude expressed in Howl proper, and I think what it says—if you would like my understanding of it—is that in spite of all of the depravity that Howl has shown, all of the despair, all of the defeat, life is essentially holy and should be so lived. In other words, the footnote gives us this state in contradistinction to the state that the poem proper has tried to present.
MR. McIntosh:
(later): Did you read the one in the back called “America”? … What's the essence of that piece of poetry?
MARK Schorer:
I think that what the poem says is that the “I,” the speaker, feels that he has given a piece of himself to America and has been given nothing in return, and the poem laments certain people who have suffered at the hands of—well, specifically, the United States Government, men like Tom Mooney, the Spanish Loyalists, Sacco & Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys and so on.
MR. McIntosh:
Is that in there?
MARK Schorer:
That's on page 33. In other words, that is the speaker associating himself with those figures in American history whom he regards as having been martyred. He feels that way about himself.
MR. McIntosh:
Well, “America” is a little bit easier to understand than Howl, isn't it? … Now [referring to shorter poems in the back of the book]—you read those two? You think they are similar, in a similar vein?
MARK Schorer:
They are very different. Those are what one would call lyric poems and the earlier ones are hortatory poems.
MR. McIntosh:
What?
MARK Schorer:
Poems of diatribe and indictment, the mood is very different, hortatory.
MR. McIntosh:
That's all.
DR. Leo Lowenthal:
In my opinion this is a genuine work of literature, which is very characteristic for a period of unrest and tension such as the one we have been living through the last decade. I was reminded by reading Howl of many other literary works as they have been written after times of great upheavals, particularly after World War One, and I found this work very much in line with similar literary works. With regard to the specific merits of the poem Howl, I would say that it is structured very well. As I see it, it consists of three parts, the first of which is the craving of the poet for self-identification, where he roams all over the field and tries to find allies in similar search for self-identification. He then indicts, in the second part, the villain, so to say, which does not permit him to find it, the Moloch of society, of the world as it is today. And in the third part he indicates the potentiality of fulfillment by friendship and love, although it ends on a sad and melancholic note actually indicating that he is in search for fulfillment he cannot find.
KENNETH Rexroth:
… The simplest term for such writing is prophetic, it is easier to call it that than anything else because we have a large body of prophetic writing to refer to. There are the prophets of the Bible, which it greatly resembles in purpose and in language and in subject matter. … The theme is the denunciation of evil and a pointing out of the way out, so to speak. That is prophetic literature. “Woe! Woe! Woe! The City of Jerusalem! The Syrian is about to come down or has already and you are to do such and such a thing and you must repent and do thus and so.” And Howl, the four parts of the poem—that is including the “Footnote to Howl” as one additional part—do this very specifically. They take up these various specifics seriatim, one after the other. … And “Footnote to Howl,” of course, again, is Biblical in reference. The reference is to the Benedicite, which says over and over again, “Blessed is the fire, Blessed is the light, Blessed are the trees, and Blessed is this and Blessed is that,” and he is saying, “Everything that is human is Holy to me,” and that the possibility of salvation in this terrible situation which he reveals is through love and through the love of everything Holy in man. So that, I would say, that this just about covers the field of typically prophetic poetry. …
HERBERT Blau:
The thing that strikes me most forcefully about Howl is that it is worded in what appears to be a contemporary tradition, one that did not cause me any particular consternation in reading, a tradition most evident in the modern period following the First World War, a tradition that resembles European literary tradition and is defined as “Dada,” a kind of art of furious negation. By the intensity of its negation it seems to be both resurrective in quality and ultimately a sort of paean of possible hope. I wouldn't say that the chances for redemption or chances for salvation in a work of this kind are deemed to be very extensively possible but, nonetheless, the vision is not a total vision of despair. It is a vision that by the salvation of despair, by the salvation of what would appear to be perversity, by the salvation of what would appear to be obscene, by the salvation of what would appear to be illicit, is ultimately a kind of redemption of the illicit, the obscene, the disillusioned and the despairing. …
VINCENT McHugh:
In this case … we have a vision of a modern hell. Now, we have certain precedents for that, for example, the book that it makes me think of, or the work of literature that it makes me think of offhand, the work of literature which is ferociously sincere in the same way, is Mr. Pound's—some of Mr. Pound's Cantos, especially Canto XIV and Canto XV. These, for example, in turn derive certainly from Dante and from the famous so-called cantos in Dante, and Dante, in turn, derives from the Odyssey, and so on into all the mythologies of the world. …

The prosecution put only two “expert witnesses” on the stand—both very lame samples of academia—one from the Catholic University of San Francisco and one a private elocution teacher, a beautiful woman, who said, “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 University of San Francisco instructor said: “The literary value of this poem is negligible. … 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 critically devastating things the prosecution's witnesses could have said, but didn't, remain one of the great Catholic silences of the day.

So much for the literary criticism inspired by the trial. Cross-examination by the Prosecutor was generally brilliant, as in the following bit:

MR. McIntosh:
Does Mr. Ferlinghetti attend your poetry writing workshop?
DR. Mark Linenthal:
He does not.
MR. McIntosh:
Do you attend his?
DR. Linenthal:
I do not.
MR. McIntosh:
You haven't been over there hearing him read poetry?
DR. Linenthal:
No, I haven't.
(etc.)

Legally, a layman could see that an important principle was certainly in the line drawn between “hard core pornography” and writing judged to be “social speech.” But more important still was the court's acceptance of the principle that if a work is determined to be “social speech” the question of obscenity may not even be raised. Or, in the words of Counsel Bendich's argument:

“The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States protecting the fundamental freedoms of speech and press prohibits the suppression of literature by the application of obscenity formulae unless the trial court first determines that the literature in question is utterly without social importance.”

(Roth v. U.S.)

… What is being urged here is that the majority opinion in Roth requires a trial court to make the constitutional determination; to decide in the first instance whether a work is utterly without redeeming social importance, before it permits the test of obscenity to be applied. …

… The record is clear that all of the experts for the defense identified the main theme of Howl as social criticism. And the prosecution concedes that it does not understand the work, much less what its dominant theme is.

Judge Horn agreed, in his opinion: “I do not believe that Howl is without even ‘the slightest redeeming social importance.’ The first part of Howl presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. … ‘Footnote to Howl’ seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name. It ends in a plea for holy living. …”

And the judge went on to set forth certain rules for the guidance of authorities in the future:

1. If the material has the slightest redeeming social importance it is not obscene because it is protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and the California Constitution.
2. If it does not have the slightest redeeming social importance it may be obscene.
3. The test of obscenity in California is that the material must have a tendency to deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire to the point that it presents a clear and present danger of inciting to anti-social or immoral action.
4. The book or material must be judged as a whole by its effect on the average adult in the community.
5. If the material is objectionable only because of coarse and vulgar language which is not erotic or aphrodisiac in character it is not obscene.
6. Scienter must be proved.
7. Book reviews may be received in evidence if properly authenticated.
8. Evidence of expert witnesses in the literary field is proper.
9. Comparison of the material with other similar material previously adjudicated is proper.
10. The people owe a duty to themselves and to each other to preserve and protect their constitutional freedoms from any encroachment by government unless it appears that the allowable limits of such protection have been breached, and then to take only such action as will heal the breach.
11. Quoting Justice Douglas: ‘I have the same 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.’
12. In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: Honī soit qui mal y pense (Evil to him who thinks evil).

At which the Prosecution was reliably reported to have blushed.

Under banner headlines, the Chronicle reported that “the Judge's decision was hailed with applause and cheers from a packed audience that offered the most fantastic collection of beards, turtle-necked shirts and Italian hair-dos ever to grace the grimy precincts of the Hall of Justice.” The decision was hailed editorially as a “landmark of law.” Judge Horn has since been re-elected to office, which I like to think means that the People agree it was the police who here committed an obscene action.