prurient interest.
1960. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. With this book, Barney Rosset at Grove Press began a long, costly campaign to clear outlawed works of significant literature. The importance of the case Grove Press v. Christenberry [the Postmaster General] is that it served as a platform for judges in the District Court and the Court of Appeals to emphasize the importance of artistic merit and the desirability of expressing controversial ideas in a free society.
1961. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Argued by First Amendment lawyers Edward de Grazia and Charles Rembar, the Miller case was finally won, and the book published by Grove Press. The decision was the high benchmark of First Amendment protection of literature: No book should be banned unless it was utterly without social importance. (This led to subsequent arguments that even hard-core pornography could be construed as important.)
1966. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Maurice Girodias published the first edition in Paris in 1959; the book was proscribed in the U.S. In 1962, after Tropic of Cancer was cleared, Grove Press published Naked Lunch. It was challenged and found obscene in Boston in 1965, but the Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed the finding the following year.
1973. Miller v. California. This is the present standard, reflecting the more prohibitive direction the Supreme Court took in the Nixon years. Under the Miller Test, to be obscene, a work’s main theme must be prurient, it must offend contemporary community standards, and it must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. This last point has been called the “SLAPS test.” Community standards here replaced national standards, and the court attempted to remove hard-core pornography from First Amendment protections.
1978. F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation. The Court held that the F.C.C. could create time, place, and matter restrictions on literary and other material to be broadcast. For example, Ginsberg’s “Howl” was among the works restricted to the early morning hours when children would presumably be asleep.
1997. Reno v.ACLU. The Supreme Court struck down the 1996 Communications Decency Act, ruling that it was an unconstitutional attempt to control communications on the Internet. The decision found that the law was too vague in defining obscenity.
1998. National Endowment for the Arts et al. v. Finley et al. The Supreme Court upheld a “decency” standard for NEA grants.
1999–. ACLU v. Ashcroft. Since the 2002 COPA [Child Online Pornography Act] victory of the ACLU in the Supreme Court, cases that concern the government’s attempt to restrict access to “obscene” material on the Internet are still being contested. The ACLU is representing plaintiffs who publish literary and educational materials online, including Salon.com magazine, Powell’s Bookstore, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti/City Lights Books. The language of some of the laws’ propositions could prevent access by everyone (not just children) to educational material on AIDS, for example, or to works of literature. The plaintiffs further assert that reliance on “community standards” improperly allows the most conservative communities to dictate what should be considered indecent. Under present law, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” could be subject to censorship once again if offered on City Lights’ web site.
References:
American Civil Liberties Union. www.aclu.org
American Library Association. www.ala.org
Clark, Allan. Instances of Censorship throughout History. Humanist Association of San Diego. www.godless.org
Ehrlich, J.W., ed. Howl of the Censor. San Carlos, CA: Nourse Publishing Co., 1961
Ernst, Morris L. and Alan U. Schwartz. Censorship: The Search for the Obscene [Milestones of Law Series]. NY: Macmillan, 1964
Haffercamp, Jack. “Studies in Erotology,” Libido. www.libidomag.com
Kovarik, Bill. Interactive Media Law. Radford University, Radford, VA. www.radford.edu
Noble, William. Bookbanning in America: Who Bans Books? and Why. Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Eriksson, 1990
“The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”
—Walt Whitman
DEDICATION To—
Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years (1951–1956)—On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr. Sax, Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Some of the Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, and Visions of Gerard—creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are taken from him.
William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad.
Neal Cassady, author of The First Third, an autobiography (1949) which enlightened the Buddha.
All these books are published in Heaven.
Lucien Carr, recently promoted to Night Bureau Manager of New York United Press.
Howl for Carl Solomon
Introduction by William Carlos Williams
When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the First World War as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of “going away,” where it didn’t seem to matter; he disturbed me, I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.
Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that cannot be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived
