Jubilee Hitchhiker (26 page)

Ginsberg's relationship with Orlovsky, which was to span more than four decades, began in its first weeks as a romantic tug-of-war with LaVigne. By February of '55, Peter had moved into an apartment with Allen on the corner of Montgomery and Broadway in North Beach. They pledged eternal marriage vows together one chrome-and-Formica 3:00 AM at Foster's: “a kind of celestial cold fire that crept over us and blazed up and illuminated the entire cafeteria and made it an eternal place.” An Oklahoma sunset had illuminated Ginsberg and Neal Cassady seven years earlier when they knelt together in the dust alongside a two-lane crossroad and exchanged similar eternal vows.

In May, Ginsberg was living on unemployment, replaced at the ad agency by a computer, and able to concentrate all his energy on poetry for the first time in months. Heeding some criticism from Rexroth and with Peter off on the East Coast in August, Allen loosened up, not to write a poem, “but just write what I wanted to without fear.” He typed out the lines:

The next day, he shipped a copy of the first six pages of “Howl” to Jack Kerouac in Mexico City. In this draft, Allen titled the poem “Howl (for Carl Solomon).” Seeking to complete an MA in English, Ginsberg had enrolled in the graduate program at the University of California, moving across the Bay at the start of the semester to a one-room “rose-covered cottage” in Berkeley. Peter Orlovsky and his teenage brother, Lafcadio, inherited the apartment at 1010 Montgomery.

A peyote trip celebrating Orlovsky's return to Frisco provided the hallucinatory image of Moloch perched atop the St. Francis Hotel and gave Ginsberg the opening stanzas for “Howl” Part II. By the time he ran into McClure in late September, Ginsberg had already read the poem twice in public. The first time was to a small gathering at The Place, a hip bohemian bar on Grant Avenue, opened two years before by two alumni of Black Mountain College, the legendary avant-garde school in North Carolina.

The second reading (September 16, 1955), part of the Arts Festival held at the Nourse Auditorium on Franklin and Hayes Streets, attracted a much larger audience. The other poets on the bill that night were Jack Nugent, Jack Gilbert, and Guy Wernham, a skinny fifty-year-old Englishman whose mother had once been the mistress of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Jack Goodwin, a San
Francisco composer whose opera
The Pizza Pusher
was to be performed at the festival on the next evening, remembered the event: “The balloon really went up when the ‘Howl' thing happened.”

Zekial Marko, a flamboyant actor (later, a Hollywood screenwriter) from Salinas, stage-managed Goodwin's opera. According to Goodwin, Marko “horned in and coached the poets while they rehearsed.” It was a hot night, and everyone sweated backstage waiting for the curtain to go up. “In Ginsberg we had a genuine Old Testament prophet straight out of DeMille, and Marko made suggestions about tone, volume, tempo, and gesture. The result was electrifying. Ginsberg shouted, wept, chanted, and mopped his brow with a telling little Marko gesture across his forehead on the word ‘lobotomy.' The message was drearily familiar, but the presentation was hair-raising.” Rumor had it that Marko switched off the microphone when Ginsberg stepped up to read, forcing him to shout out his lines dramatically.

McClure's offer to let him take charge of the Six Gallery reading presented Allen Ginsberg with a perfect showcase for “Howl.” He would be the headliner this time and surround himself with poets he admired. Originally guided to Kenneth Rexroth (then a reader for New Directions) through a letter from William Carlos Williams (who had written an introduction to Allen's unpublished poetry collection
Empty Mirror
), Ginsberg sought the older poet's advice in planning the Six Gallery reading. Knowing Ginsberg lived over in Berkeley, Rexroth suggested Gary Snyder, another young poet, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in Japanese and Chinese, raised among lumberjacks, who had labored on a forest service trail crew and was a regular blue-collar guy, a working-stiff Buddhist, much as Rexroth viewed himself.

Ginsberg found Snyder on Hillegass Avenue, repairing his bicycle in a “Zen garden” backyard. A small, wiry man, browned and hard from the mountains, with slanted cat-green eyes (Robert Creeley called them “wise old-young eyes”), Snyder lived a scholar's life of monastic simplicity in a twelve-by-twelve-foot cottage with straw tatami mats on the floor. Orange crates served as bookcases and writing tables, the only furnishings aside from scattered paisley cushions. Ice axes and coiled climbing ropes hung on the walls; a rucksack neatly packed with nested cookware stood in one corner. Bohemians had flirted with Buddhism since the days of Madame Blavatsky (“In the summer, I'm a nudist, / In the winter, I'm a Buddhist,” rhymed Maxwell Bodenheim decades before), but Gary Snyder practiced what he preached, meditating at the Berkeley Young Buddhist Association and publishing his work in their magazine,
Berkeley Bussei
.

The two poets hit it off immediately. William Carlos Williams provided a common meeting ground. Three years before, Ginsberg sent his poetry to the Bard of Paterson, finding at last a sage teacher whose encouragement and advice shaped his voice. In November of 1950, Gary Snyder, then an undergraduate at Reed College in Oregon, had also been profoundly impressed by Dr. Williams during a weeklong campus visit. At the time, Snyder shared a basement flat in a Portland rooming house with two other young poets, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen. They dubbed themselves the Adelaide Crapsey–Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration Poetasters Society after a reading by Williams rocked them with the power of a hard-blowing jam session.

Snyder agreed to be part of the upcoming “charming event” at the Six Gallery, suggesting that Phil Whalen, due to arrive in Berkeley the next day from a fire-watching job on Sourdough Mountain in the High Cascades of Washington, would happily participate. Ginsberg said Jack Kerouac, his “great poet” friend from Columbia University, was heading into town from south of the border any day now. In fact, Jack had already arrived, jumping freights and hitchhiking, and
was high on bennies in Allen's Milvia Street “Shakespearean” cottage, playing Bach's
St. Matthew Passion
full-blast on the Webcore three-speed.

Malcolm Cowley anointed Jack Kerouac “the greatest unpublished writer in America.” At thirty-three, Kerouac had just finished
Mexico City Blues
, a long jazz-inspired poem with 242 stanzas, and in the five years since
The Town and the City
(his first novel) failed to earn out its advance, added
On the Road
and ten other books in manuscript to the unfinished epic Wolfeian vision he called
The Duluoz Legend
. He disagreed with Ginsberg on “Howl,” urging him not to revise a word, “spontaneity or nothing.” He admired the long wailing saxophonelike choruses, so like his own improvisational experiments. Kerouac declined to be part of the proceedings at the Six Gallery, citing shyness, but enthusiastically supported the project.

Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia became the last of the six poets invited to read. Carl Solomon introduced Ginsberg to Lamantia in 1948 at the San Remo bar, a hipster hangout on the northwest corner of McDougal and Bleecker in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. When Gary Snyder suggested they include Rexroth as master of ceremonies, Allen passed the word along, delighting the elder statesman of the Frisco scene, who promptly bought a secondhand pinstripe cutaway for the occasion. Ginsberg mimeographed over a hundred postcard copies of a “goofy” invitation (“6 Poets at the 6 Gallery [. . .] wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori”). He mailed out some, posting the others around North Beach in the usual locations: City Lights, Miss Smith's Tea Room, The Place, Vesuvio, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop.

On the afternoon of Friday, October 7, Kerouac and Ginsberg took a bus across the Bay. By coincidence, they bumped into Phil Whalen and Gary Snyder (who also came over from Berkeley together) on the corner of First and Mission outside the Key System Terminal. The group joined Philip Lamantia for dinner at the New Pisa restaurant on Grant Avenue across the Broadway intersection from City Lights. Afterward, they all found separate transportation to the Six.

Ferlinghetti owned a tiny “beat-up” old Austin. He and his wife, Kirby, already had a passenger, and there was only room enough to give Kerouac and Ginsberg a lift. Allen and Jack crammed into the backseat with Gregory Corso (“Wild mad eastside funny Gregory”), their back-alley poet buddy from New York, a gutter sparrow born across the street from the San Remo and drawn to literature at sixteen while serving a three-year bit for armed robbery upstate in Dannemora. At twenty-five, Corso was younger than the other poets packed into the little car.

When they arrived at the Six shortly before eight, the five-hundred-square-foot former garage was already crowded. From varying reports, between a hundred and a hundred and fifty
cogno-centi
eventually showed up, a first-time gathering of all the diverse Frisco art and poetry circles. College professors, longshoremen, bohemian poets, journalists, the social set, all crammed together on folding chairs crowding the dirt floor of the two adjoining rooms. Mink coats mingled with blue denim, suits-and-ties rubbed elbows with turtleneck sweaters.

Neal Cassady leaned against the wall in his blue serge brakeman's uniform, bobbing and nodding maniacally to those all around, although most were strangers. Shy Peter Orlovsky stood at his side. Jazz trombonist Charles Richards came in with his wife. Ruth Witt-Diamant, grand doyenne of the Poetry Center, sat primly among the throng. Latecomers lined the back wall or perched on the low platform stage. A festive street fair gaiety prevailed.

Some were present only in spirit. Poet and pianist Weldon Kees was reported to have been in attendance, although he had disappeared on June 20, his empty car discovered on the Golden
Gate Bridge. Most conspicuous in their absence were Jack Spicer (looking for a day job on the East Coast) and Robert Duncan (off in Europe with Jess), the spiritual progenitors of the event.

Jack Kerouac mythologized the proceedings in
The Dharma Bums
, describing the audience as “rather stiff” before he “got things jumping” by taking up a collection of dimes and quarters and rushing out to buy three gallons of cheap California burgundy. The jugs circulated from hand to mouth. Kerouac sprawled on the floor close to the stage. Fred Martin's sculpture (fragments of orange crate draped in plaster-of-paris-soaked muslin) stood behind the podium, “like pieces of surrealistic furniture,” according to Michael McClure. Of the six poets gathered on the platform in a semicircle of folding chairs only Lamantia and Ginsberg had read in public before.

Kerouac called Rexroth “Reinhold Cacoethes” (“bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fud . . .”) in
The Dharma Bums
. He dismissed Rexroth's thrift shop tails as his “shabby old coat,” yet the emcee's wacky costume perfectly captured the carnival spirit of the evening. In “his snide funny voice,” Rexroth introduced Philip Lamantia (“Delicate Francis DaPavia”), the first poet of the night. Lamantia read a group of prose poems by John Hoffman (a friend of his, as well as Ginsberg's and Carl Solomon's), who had died recently of a heroin overdose in Mexico City.

Michael McClure was next in line. (Kerouac called him “Ike O'Shay.”) At twenty-three, the youngest of the six, McClure wore a suit for the occasion and read a letter from Jack Spicer, who had departed Frisco in July after being fired from the CSFA. Spicer moved to Boston, where his friend Robin Blaser got him “a low-level job” in the rare book room of the public library. Jack longed to return to the Bay Area. Spicer's letter “got applause from his friends and fans,” McClure recalled thirty-seven years later. “It was a practical matter. ‘Could anyone help Jack?'”

Michael McClure went on to his own ecologically concerned poetry, reading “Point Lobos: Animism” and “For the Death of 100 Whales.” He met both Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder for the first time on the stage at the Six, little realizing how soon they all would be lumped together as reluctant standard-bearers for the “Beat Generation.” Spicer and Duncan, founders of the Six (King Ubu) Gallery, would shortly be replaced as the dominant icons in the local cultural pantheon by these unknown young upstarts.

The third reader was Philip Whalen (“booboo big old goodhearted Warren Coughlin a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat”), whose humorous poem “Plus ca Change” concerned “confronting metamorphic change.” Whalen's reading ended around ten thirty, and a short intermission was called. Half an hour later, wearing jeans and a navy sweater, Allen Ginsberg (“hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbook”) made his way through the crowd to the stage, nodding amiably to his many friends. Fortified by cheap red wine, the poet began reading what would become his best-known work, its title now truncated to “Howl.” The burgundy overcame his nervousness, adding timbre to “a small intense voice.” Ginsberg spread his arms wide, swaying from side to side at the lectern as he intoned each long line “like a Jewish cantor.”

Jack Kerouac beat out time on his wine jug, singing along “(like a jam session)” and cheering his friend with shouts of “Go! Go! Go!” at the end of every line. The novelist was almost completely unknown at the time. Jack Goodwin referred to him as “This Carrowac person” in a letter detailing the event to John Allen Ryan, one of the founders of the Six Gallery, who was away in Mexico. Goodwin described Kerouac “singing snatches of scat in between the lines; he kept a kind of chanted, revival-meeting rhythm going.” Soon, most of the audience joined in, enthusiastically shouting, stomping their feet, and snapping their fingers in time with the poem's insistent beat. As
Goodwin reported in his letter, “the people gasped and laughed and swayed, they were psychologically had, it was an orgiastic occasion.”