It was pounded out, narrow margins, pockmarked by angry edits, entire lines of black X-outs — the copy paper a pale ecru, sprawling side notes in blue.
The letter was addressed to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Its author was Allen Ginsberg, a defining voice of the Beat Generation, of counterculture, of gay freedom, the poet who conjured “Howl,” which the government tried to squelch but couldn’t.
In 1959, Ginsberg took his fight to the Chronicle.
And this time, too, he won. Mostly.
On May 24, the Chronicle ran a front-page story on a North Beach poetry reading at Garibaldi Hall. The headline: “Beat Poets Appear En Masse — A Mess.” The story was not a literary review.
Reporter Donovan McClure described a “monstrous” gathering of 500 “longhairs (mostly uncombed)” who paid a dollar to hear poets Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and others.
The poets mesmerized “the believers,” the story said, delivering “wild and uninhibited” performances before an audience “that could be shocked only by the sight of a hair oil bottle.”
McClure did not delve into the content of the poems. He focused on side remarks and moments that produced a “smattering of heckling and cheering.”
“Beatniks,” the story concluded, hold in low regard “tailors, manicurists, barbers.”
Ginsberg objected. His letter, sent the next day, said the article was not just inaccurate but “in bad taste.” The reporter was “sullen,” using “dull humor” to mock an audience that was “socially quite varied.”
Ginsberg was the only “Beat poet” there, he corrected, adding that the “En mass — A Mess” headline “brainwashed the public and destroyed something of value.”
Wrote the poet: “The newspaper cult of sadistic contempt for the egg head is not appropriate on the Chronicle Front Page.”
Throughout his missive, Ginsberg typed over initial insults with X’s, replacing them in blue ink with sharper invective. At the end of his last line, for example, he replaced the last words “local newspapers” with a more stinging finale:
“You have a poetry scene of great beauty going on now, it has brought international honor to this city, it should not be sneered at by juvenile delinquent reporters.”
To the Chronicle’s credit, the newspaper printed the letter word for word on May 27, 1959. Even the parts calling reporting on the poems “garbled,” “hashed up” and “inept shorthand,” and the treatment of the poets “vulgar.”
Ginsberg had asked: “… has the Chronicle no better sense, no better reporters?”
The answer came a few months later.
On July 26, 1959, a much bigger display in the Chronicle — a half-page, in fact — featured an essay reframing “the Beats” not as clowns but as courageous people exposing a nation in crisis, a troubled, spiritually repressed America.
It argued that mass culture, including “respectable” institutions such as the police and newspapers, persecuted nonconformists. This suppressed individual consciousness, spiritual insight, sexuality and artistic freedom.
And who was the author in this mainstream newspaper of this strident defense of nonconformists, this celebration of poetry as a record of the soul’s private truth?
Allen Ginsberg.
“America,” the poet wrote, “is having a nervous breakdown.” His critique brought to mind the first line of “Howl” — “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked … .” Two years earlier, U.S. Customs had seized copies of the book “Howl and Other Poems” as obscene but dropped the case. Later, authorities tried to stop its sale by arresting City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, only to lose in court.
The ruling left “Howl” free to circulate — a poem that treated gay men, as well as sex, drugs and profanity, as bona fide elements of the human experience.
“Recent history,” Ginsberg wrote in his Chronicle essay, “is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind… .”
The essay evoked the rebellious Beat Generation style of the 1950s, rejecting conventional middle-class values and promoting personal freedom.
The Chronicle gave it considerable space. But not without caveats.
Under the headline “Ginsberg ‘Howls’ Again — On the S.F. Poetry Controversy,” an italic note called the essay “unnerving.” The editor’s note declared the article worthy as a “curiosity piece” rather than “profound social or literary criticism.”
Ginsberg was described as “the most publicized, and perhaps most talented” of the “younger poets” writing under the Beat banner.
Within two months of firing off his protest letter, Ginsberg had won a rare opportunity to be heard by the mainstream. And this Friday, the Ginsberg letter becomes a permanent part of the Bancroft Library as one of 215 letters donated by the family of the late Chronicle book editor William Hogan.
See Bill Hogan’s collection
The saga of the Ginsberg letter evokes the iconic sign-off used years later by San Francisco journalist Wes “Scoop” Nisker:
“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” All it took was a manual typewriter, pale ecru copy paper, a blue pen and gumption.
Journalist Eric Newton edited three Bay Area newspapers and was the founding managing editor of the nation’s only major museum about journalism, the Newseum. His late wife, Mary Ann Hogan, was the daughter of William Hogan and grew up in the family home in Mill Valley. After Bill’s death in 1996, Newton and Hogan preserved the letters.
This article first appeared in Local News Matters here.