On October 7, 1955, Allen Ginsberg read the first part of his most famous poem, “Howl,” in a strange building on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. Soon after, and very likely because of this reading, his career suddenly took off, propelling him from a barely published poet who had little faith in his own work to the world’s most famous living poet, the spokesman for a literary movement and perhaps a whole generation.
Without the 6 Gallery reading, it’s quite possible that there would not have been a Beat Generation or San Francisco Renaissance, and that the names associated with these movements would be obscure at best. That begs the question of whether we would’ve had the hippies and the punks and all the other cultural movements of late 20th century America had this event not taken place or had it gone differently. Then of course there are the fashions and artworks associated with or made possible by these movements. In short, I don’t think it’s as hyperbolic as it sounds to say that the 6 Gallery reading was one of the most important moments in American literature and certainly one of the most significant cultural events of the mid-twentieth century, setting in motion a chain of events that led to greater freedoms and great outpourings of creativity.
What is interesting is that in spite of its tremendous importance we know very little about it and what we do know is mostly untrue, exaggerated, or impossible to verify. No one recorded the event, so no video, audio, or even photographs exist. There is scant documentation concerning the building itself and the art gallery that occupied it in 1955, with the fabled 6 Gallery postcard only surfacing in the mid-1980s. Thus, most of what we know comes from the memories of those who were there, and these changed wildly from one year to the next, and none of them really match with any other. Ginsberg would tell one story but then give another a few months later and these would contradict Snyder’s versions, which changed significantly with the passing of time. McClure told a dozen or more different versions, all of which were colourful but none of which seem hugely plausible. Ferlinghetti swore that Gregory Corso was there, despite his arriving in San Francisco about nine months later. The list of mis-remembered details goes on and on and on…
I don’t mean to criticise too harshly because these men were describing an event that occurred several decades before they were asked about it. I certainly could not recall with accuracy a poetry reading or any other event I attended twenty or thirty years ago (although of course none of those came close to the importance of the 6 Gallery one). Yet these interviews are where most of our information about the 6 Gallery reading comes from, and the more one looks into these accounts, comparing them with one another and digging up verifiable data, the more one realises that these versions of events are quite unreliable.
This is compounded by the fact that Jack Kerouac wrote about the reading in The Dharma Bums, so no doubt these people’s memories were partly shaped by his version, which had become the accepted one by the time they were asked about the 6 Gallery reading in the 1970s and ‘80s. Allen Ginsberg had written about it a month before Kerouac, and it’s not impossible Kerouac was partly influenced by Ginsberg’s memories… and Ginsberg wasn’t merely remembering the event; he was actively promoting it for a European audience, pitching the idea of an exciting new bohemian literary movement. He was in full spokesman mode at this point, writing about himself in the third person, proclaiming himself the new Whitman and his peers the greatest literary movement of the century.
In researching a forthcoming book on the 6 Gallery reading, I consulted roughly two hundred publications that mention the event and noted that almost all of them drew upon only a handful of sources, with the aforementioned versions making up the majority of the detail. In the face of massive contradictions between accounts given by McClure, Ginsberg, and Snyder, authors have merely picked whatever sounded best, and these accounts have been cited by later authors. Too many people have cited works that were mistaken, and the proliferation of these mistakes has made them accepted knowledge. (These “facts” have also been padded out with a great deal of speculation, with the more colourful details repeated later on the assumption that they were not merely figments of the authors’ imaginations.)
Are there no better sources to go on? That’s something I wondered when I began researching my book. Secretly, I hoped I would stumble upon a recording that had somehow slipped between the cracks. I hoped to find someone who had been there and written about it in a diary and then forgotten it for 70 years. Or maybe it had been mentioned in the culture section of a newspaper and no one had found that yet.
The sad and strange truth is, however, that the 6 Gallery reading—in spite of being within living memory—is largely lost to time now. It was an unexpected hit and whilst there were plenty of audio recordings made of later Ginsberg readings, the earliest of which took place in February 1956, no one recorded this one. It was not advertised in any newspapers and no records were kept by the 6 Gallery organisers. The event became legendary in spite of—and perhaps partly because of—the lack of available evidence.
I wondered for a while whether Ginsberg had created the myth. Certainly, he was good at promoting himself and his friends and he often did so by repeatedly telling stories that created or reinforced narratives that helped portray the Beat writers as not just gifted artists but fascinating individuals. I don’t mean to say that he necessarily invented anything, or even that he exaggerated unduly, but rather that he knew how to market his Beat friends effectively by pointing people to certain moments in Beat history that spoke to their bohemian-artistic credentials. In the case of the 6 Gallery reading, I wondered if perhaps it had been a successful reading that led to a few more, and that he later put emphasis on the 6 Gallery in order to make an appealing sort of “origin story” for the Beat Generation.
What pushed me to this suspicion was the fact that there is almost nothing written about (or mentioned in audio recordings) the 6 Gallery prior to the 1970s, when a handful of hip professors began to give it some academic attention. (The two exceptions being the aforementioned Ginsberg essay and Kerouac novel.) By then, memories were already fuzzy and embellishments were unavoidable. Just look at Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. The whole section devoted to the 6 Gallery reading was a mess of inaccurate and contradictory accounts. That’s probably why Wally Hedrick, one of the founders of the 6 Gallery, said “Now, it’s all gotten kind of myth-like. Everybody remembers what they remember.”
So, could it be that this had been a minor event and one that only gained importance in retrospect, after being forced into the spotlight? Perhaps there is some credence to that but I don’t think it is necessarily true. It seems more likely that the event was hugely significant and that we merely lack primary sources that give much detail. There are a handful of contemporary accounts that attest to its impact but these lack the detail would expect from an event of such importance. Those are namely a smattering of letters written by people who attended and conveyed their excitement particularly at Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl.”
Sadly, though, there are no sprawling letters or journal entries by the participants or indeed by the audience members. Thus, not only do we lack audio recordings and photos, we lack extensive written accounts other than those Ginsberg and Kerouac produced in 1957 (two years after the fact). However, we came agonisingly close to having them! This is the most frustrating part. Much of the evidence one would want to rely upon was destroyed long ago. This includes the following:
- A letter from Allen Ginsberg to John Allen Ryan shortly after the event. It was lost.
- An extremely detailed letter from Jack Kerouac to William S. Burroughs, which the latter burned in a paranoid fit.
- The journals of Philip Whalen, which he burned in the early 1960s.
Lacking these sources, it does seem hopeless that we could ever really know what happened that night. However, I do feel we can put some degree of faith in Kerouac’s account, for several people who attended have called it accurate and none of them has disputed it. His account, of course, did not heap undue praise on the reading, so unlike Ginsberg’s account it cannot be seen as Beat propaganda. He was mostly in awe of Snyder that night, downplaying the other poets’ accomplishments. But still, his version is the one we best know, and it seems to be a quite faithful account. We can also cross-reference the versions provided by Snyder, Ginsberg, Whalen, and McClure in order to use probability to say what most likely happened, and compare these with other less detailed or more cryptic statements made by those in the audience.
The biggest problem for me, though, is that for decades Beat historians have looked at these interviews and at Kerouac’s book, picking and choosing whatever makes for a nice, convenient, colourful narrative. Many of them have padded these sections out with little details and these often have no origin in reality. They are merely there to make a more engaging text and to avoid uncertainty. How many times have we heard that the 6 Gallery used to be a garage and that it had a dirt floor? Well, what evidence is there that it was ever a garage? And why do all photos of the 6 Gallery and the King Ubu (which was in the same building before the 6 was founded) show a concrete floor? Instead of repeating that there were 30 people there… or 100… or 150… or 250… or 400… why not just look into the floor space and the likely figure for a capacity venue of that size? Why accept that it used to be a garage just because lots of poets repeated that claim? After all, the building had been one art gallery or another since 1951. Before that, it had been a pest-control company for years, so how would these poets have known?
These are trivial details but they show how people merely repeated things they heard, passing them off as fact. Worse still is the tendency to present an engaging narrative at the expense of fact. A very popular book from about fifty years ago, written by a person who actually attended the second reading, has a wildly inaccurate account, yet it has been—understandably—quoted over and over. This account simply does not hold up when compared with the audio recordings of that particular reading, or photographs taken that night. Again, I don’t mean to criticise unduly but rather to show the frailty of human memory and the problems inherent in simply trusting the accounts given by earlier generations of scholars.
Well, that’s enough for my preambulatory rant. Now, I would like to take the opportunity afforded by this anniversary to present some misunderstandings and myths related to the 6 Gallery. These will be more thoroughly discussed in a book that will hopefully be released at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Falsehood #1 – The 6 Gallery reading happened on October 13.
Reality – It happened on October 7. About half of books that discuss the reading give the wrong date and many, unsure of the real one, just say “early October.” The event was definitely scheduled for October 7 and some have tried to justify the very random claim about October 13 as being due to a delay, but several letters written between October 7 and 13 affirm that it happened on the former date. Many who spoke of it, including McClure and Rexroth, failed to get the month or even year correct, so you can see why establishing the exact date was a challenge. After various highly regarded books got it wrong, the incorrect date tended to be repeated with confidence.
Falsehood #2 – The gallery opening included a toilet in the window beside a draft notice.
Reality – This actually happened at a popular San Francisco bar called The Place. It was the sort of controversial statement/artwork that the 6 Gallery artists appreciated, but it did not take place at the 6 Gallery. It’s not clear how this became associated with the 6 Gallery, but it is often repeated because it makes for a cool story.
Falsehood #3 – The gallery closing party featured a smashed piano.
Reality – This did happen but it was not at the closing party. It was a poetry reading about a month prior to the gallery’s closing (when few would have known that closure was imminent). Many accounts say that Kerouac and other Beat poets were reading, but in fact it was three local poets who gave a reading and a musician then smashed a piano. This turned into a minor riot when teenage boys passing by came to help rip art from the walls. This was documented in local newspapers, so it’s hard to believe so many people have simply repeated the false version without checking it.
Falsehood(s) #4 – The 6 Gallery reading was attended by Gregory Corso, Lew Welch, and Weldon Kees.
Reality – Just no, no, no… Ferlinghetti misremembered Corso being there but he didn’t come to San Francisco until the following year. Welch similarly was not in the city at that time, and Kees had a better excuse: he was dead.
Falsehood #5 – A letter from Jack Spicer was read aloud.
Reality – This happened at the March 1956 “repeated performance” in Berkeley. Michael McClure seems to have started this by conflating the two events. It has been repeated many, many times probably because Spicer had been an important poet in the area but had gotten stuck on the East Coast and missed it. The absence of various San Francisco poets led to the event changing the local poetry scene to put the out-of-town Beat writers at the centre.
Falsehood #6 – There was an orgy after the event.
Reality – Ginsberg mentioned this once as a joke and various people have taken it to be the truth. He meant it in the sense of a group of poets gathering and having fun rather than actual group sex.
Falsehood #7 – It was the first public reading for all of the poets.
Reality – Only McClure was making his reading debut that night. The others were inexperienced for sure but had some practice. Ginsberg had read at the San Francisco Art Festival in September and Snyder and Whalen had given a few readings in Oregon. Lamantia was the most experienced of the five poets, having read in public many times.
Falsehood #8 – There was a makeshift dais and a dirt floor.
Reality – The dais/stage can be seen from photos about a year earlier and was likely built by the theatre group that had the building before it became the King Ubu. Photos also show a concrete floor rather than a dirt one. By some accounts, the raised area that functioned as a stage still existed in the 1990s, so it was not a temporary structure built for that reading.
Falsehood #9 – The postcard mentioned “dancing girls” and “free satori.”
Reality – For years, the text of a famous postcard circulated. This was the postcard sent out to advertise the reading, proclaiming “6 Poets at the 6 Gallery.” This seems to originate with Ann Charters’ early Kerouac biography. The text was not cited in the notes section and I believe that she put it together based on interviews with Ginsberg and Snyder, who likely pulled the text from their memories. Oddly, the real postcard surfaced in the mid-eighties thanks to Ann Charters, who sent a copy to Ginsberg for his annotated “Howl” book. However, the real and fake versions, and several hybrids, all circulate now in about equal measure. Sometimes they include parts of another postcard used to promote the “repeat performance” of 1956.
Falsehood #10 – Ginsberg began his reading on the toilet.
Reality – This story comes from Wally Hedrick, who was recalling the event more than forty years later and at a very advanced age. He said that when it was time for Ginsberg to read, he was sitting on the toilet, then pulled his trousers up after the spotlight hit him. The audience watched him proceed to the stage as he read. This version not only contradicts every other account but it is just absurdly unlikely. Hedrick also claims that Kerouac was outside directing traffic whilst wearing a gas mask… Hedrick was a wonderful character but he was a storyteller and his tales sometimes moved beyond the exaggerated and into the ridiculous. There are numerous accounts of Ginsberg starting his reading in a much more conventional way and these are far more plausible. In fact, they are probably the most agreed-upon part of the whole event. They also depict a slow-building reading very similar to those he gave in February and March of the following year, which are publicly available. These show a very serious and intense young man quietly starting and then building to a passionate and emotional state. Many who watched him called it a “transformation” and that is an apt term.
Falsehood #11 – John Hoffman Died of Peyote Overdose
Reality – It is sometimes claimed that John Hoffman (whose work Lamantia read at the 6 Gallery that night) had recently died of a peyote overdose in Mexico. In fact, he died on January 20, 1952, so it was not a recent death, and he probably did not die of a peyote overdose as such a thing is likely impossible. Hoffman was cremated, which is impossible in Mexico except for cases of infectious disease, and it is likely he died of polio. Lamantia reported that he had been paralysed, which supports this theory. For more information, see Garrett Caples’ book Retrievals. In it, he expands upon an essay originally published in a joint City Lights edition of poems by Lamantia and Hoffman.
Uncertainties
Okay, so we’ve seen some claims that are just flat-out wrong, but it’s worth looking at some parts of the tale that are uncertain or unlikely.
Uncertainty #1 – Ferlinghetti’s telegram
Famously, Ferlinghetti watched Ginsberg read “Howl” and then went home to send him a telegram that paraphrased Ralph Waldo Emerson’s letter to Walt Whitman. Emerson had written his in 1855 and Ferlinghetti wrote his in 1955. With Ginsberg claiming to be the new Whitman, and with Ferlinghetti possessing certain Emersonian qualities, it makes for a nice story. But where is the telegram? No one has ever seen it and Bill Morgan, who knew both men well and had access to their archives, failed to find evidence of it. In the 1960s, Ginsberg admitted it had probably never been sent but Ferlinghetti was adamant it had. This all raises the question of why he would have bothered sending it at all. The two men had already reached an agreement about publishing “Howl” and telegrams were expensive. They didn’t live all that far from each other and saw each other regularly. They had never even communicated by letter at this point… so it does seem rather unlikely the telegram ever existed.
Uncertainty #2 – Almost everything you know about 3119 Fillmore…
Every book that talks about the 6 Gallery mentions the same repeated facts about the building and occasionally someone throws in a random new one. Yet none of these seem to be true. Most commonly, we hear that the 6 Gallery had been a garage, but I’ve spent several years digging through the building’s history and see no evidence of that. Certainly, the owner of the building put an advert in a tradesman’s journal several decades before the reading looking for bids on a project to convert the downstairs area into a private garage… and it was subsequently inhabited by a chauffeur, so it may have been—for a while—suitable for a vehicle. However, the building housed many other businesses that certainly were not auto mechanics. Immediately prior to the 6 Gallery it was another art gallery called King Ubu… and before that it was a gallery space for a theatre group… and before that it was a pest control company’s office… and before that there were restaurants and wine merchants and a huge assortment of businesses. Various other claims seem dubious as well, including it having been a stagecoach stop (despite stagecoaches being redundant for 50 years prior to its construction) and the stables for a mansion. Most of these “facts” seem to stem from a none-too-detailed look at the area around the time of the building’s construction. There had been a mansion nearby and there were stables too. However, this building—which admittedly has a frustratingly elusive history—was built in 1905 and its various tenants and their businesses can be tracked through directories and news reports.
Uncertainty #3 – Whose idea was the reading?
There is a ridiculous number of versions of this story. None of the participants was ever able to convincingly explain who came up with the idea for the reading or why they did it. McClure, as usual, gave the most detailed accounts, so his are often cited. After all, he made up conversations and these give colour to the story. Ginsberg was the worst here, giving multiple versions in single interviews! However, we can go back to his letters from that period to see that Wally Hedrick asked him. Back then, prior to the event, there was no need to distort the truth in any way, so it seems by far the likeliest version. Whether it was Hedrick’s idea originally is unclear and we don’t know exactly how Ginsberg went about organising it. Certainly, Rexroth was involved because he pointed Ginsberg in the direction of Snyder, but it’s unclear if Rexroth had consulted with Hedrick, though that does seem unlikely. I have picked this apart to a good degree and have a very probable order of events that I will explain in my book.
Uncertainty # 4 – What did the poets actually read that night?
Given that we don’t have any recordings of the reading, it is hard to know what the poets actually read. Undoubtedly, Ginsberg read Part I of “Howl,” but which of the various drafts did he read? I have written about the process of writing Part I here but there seems to be no way of knowing which typescript was used. He’d certainly moved beyond Draft I and likely Draft II, but he probably was not reading the same version he read in March, which was close to Draft V. No account has ever suggested he read more than just Part I, yet the most detailed primary source comes from October 8 and says Ginsberg read for more than 30 minutes and that “Howl” had been his “main number.” Had he read something else before it? He certainly had a number of poems he might well have read, but which were overshadowed by the raw power of “Howl.” And what of the other poets? McClure has given detailed accounts but these were written years later. Ann Charters attempted to establish the content and order, presumably based on interviews with the participants, but how accurate is her version? I would say that we can be fairly sure of a number of poems included but beyond that it is guesswork—and when it comes to figuring out which of John Hoffman’s poems Philip Lamantia read, that would be little more than blind guesswork.
Other related issues
If we take “the 6 Gallery reading” and expand it to include the people and events surrounding that night, we end up with yet more confusion. The March 1956 event at Berkeley Town Hall is one. One biographer who was there made many strange errors in writing about it years later. These can easily be seen by comparing their version to the audio recordings and photos from the event. They talked about Ginsberg wearing a ragged sweater and finishing Part I of “Howl” to rapturous applause, with all his friends rushing the stage to congratulate him… except he was smartly dressed and read all of “Howl.” In fact, oddly enough “Howl” was not much of a success. The audience wanted something funny and silly, so they responded much more enthusiastically to “America.”
Kenneth Rexroth was a huge part of the San Francisco scene and he helped the Beat writers a lot. However, he famously fell out with them after Robert Creeley (a friend of Kerouac’s) ran off with his wife. It seems there had been several incidents prior to that, and so Rexroth was already quite unhappy with Kerouac. But what exactly happened between them? Again, we have many, many accounts ranging from Rexroth finding Kerouac a bit too boisterous and disrespectful to his grabbing Rexroth’s moustache to the very far-fetched story (provided by Rexroth himself) of Kerouac shooting up hard drugs in front of his children! Once again, we find ourselves having to read numerous sources, trace their origins, and pick apart the exaggerations and lies and mistakes. I’m not sure what the politically correct term for it is, but this seems a sort of “Chinese whispers” game that marks Beat studies, and which has been drastically worsened with the ease of online publishing.
There are many other stories from the months either side of the 6 Gallery reading and working out what really did and did not happen can be exhausting because—and I will repeat myself once more—we keep having to rely upon the flawed memories of people talking about these days much later. For all the Beats liked to chronicle their lives, this seems to have been a period of such frenetic activity that they were too busy to do so. Ginsberg’s journals from this time, for example, are a nightmare of random notes in random order and skip over everything that would later seem of importance because at the time he was more interested in working out his poetic frustrations and noting his dreams. Ah, but perhaps therein lies some of the appeal… The 6 Gallery reading has always been a tantalising tale shrouded in myth.
Conclusion
The 6 Gallery reading was an immensely important moment in Beat literature, San Franciscan culture, and—at least in my view—American history. Yet more than most events of that nature, it has become mired in myth and it will likely remain that way unless someone dusts off an old audio recording or finds an absurdly detailed journal entry written on October 8. I think it’s unlikely that either of those will ever happen, though. Wading through all the accounts of the 6 Gallery reading has taken me several years. I’ve taken those accounts and dug up as many other sources as possible in order to rule out the least likely claims and establish a version of events based on probability. This book is nearing completion and I hope that when it is finished it will provide a good overview of that event by looking at how it came about, what (probably) happened, and what happened next. With this article today, I hope I have provided a little insight but you’ll have to wait for the book to go into more detail.
Note: Just a few days ago, Simon Warner of Rock and the Beat Generation (an excellent Substack that every Beat fan should follow) posted an interview by the late Steve Silberman who spoke with Philip Whalen about the 6 Gallery reading.
This is awesome, thank you for posting! I have also been working on a project about the Six Gallery, and yeah, finding reliable & consistent sources has been a challenge. Maybe my project turns into another fiction? Who knows.
All we can do is our best.
I am well aware that with my own book, I will get things wrong. It is impossible not to. However, I have consulted more sources than anyone before me and I will state them clearly so that people can check to correct any erroneous assumptions I’ve made. I will also avoid stating things with certainty where in fact the truth is unknown. It does make the text perhaps less exciting but I think accuracy is of the utmost importance.
Good luck with your 6 Gallery project. Feel free to reach out with questions or if you have published something I’ll be happy to share it with Beatdom’s readers.