Our friend David S Wills over at Beatdom continues his run of in-depth essays, the most recent, “The 6 Gallery – Unravelling the Myths”, an early reveal of his research for an upcoming book on the fabled 6 Gallery and the 6 Gallery reading.
Wills writes:”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…”
“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.)”
Wills cites Ferlinghetti’s post-Gallery 6 publication telegram invitation as just one of many examples of debatable claims:
“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.”
Understandable misremembering, conflation and confusion, most especially as the event itself fades further into the past. Bill Morgan has written before about “Faulty Memory Syndrome”
Not to mention, willing and wholly conscious myth-making”:
“I wondered for a while whether Ginsberg had created the myth”, Wills writes, “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.”
He doesn’t entirely reject that suggestion. (“Perhaps there is some credence to that but I don’t think it’s necessarily true”).
He cites the frustration of the ongoing absence of a number of primary texts (a detailed letter from Kerouac to Burroughs that the latter subsequently destroyed, ditto, a first-hand account “shortly after the event” from Allen to John Allen Ryan (similarly lost))
Wills’ article goes on to examine ten “falsehoods”, four “uncertainties” and “other related issues” surrounding this pivotal occasion. (Did Allen really begin his reading sitting a toilet? – no – What exactly did he read, and what did others read, that night?)
His 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.”
A propos to the legendary October 7 reading – see also our post on a March 18 follow-up – here
These are troubling times. PEN America reports, featuring a gathering that took place last month at City Lights Bookstore, on book banning in America – “From Howl to Now – Tracing the History of Censorship” – see here
Allen Ginsberg and Carolyn Cassady – an (understandably) fractious relationship. Peter Harrington, noted rare book dealers and manuscript dealers in London, have recently put up for sale a cache of correspondence (three autograph letters and three postcards) dating from the ’80’s.
“The letters show Ginsberg and Carolyn, both in their late middle-age, expressing anxiety over misrepresentations of their lives. In the first letter, dated 30 November 1982, Ginsberg remarks on their differing experiences of the Kerouac conference held at Naropa to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of On the Road. Ginsberg defends a speech given by his spiritual teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, on the unlikeliness of nuclear disaster. While Ginsberg found it “psychologically brilliant and very moving”, he remarks “I realize you thought he was just drunk & incoherent”. In her (carbon) reply, Carolyn reprimands Ginsberg for listening to gossip and sets him straight: “How curious it seems to me that those who are themselves frequently victims of heresay or media errors, when it concerns others, they consistently assume all reports are gospel truth and rarely seek confirmation from the party involved. Per se, Henry Allen’s account of my behaviour during Trungpa’s speech”.
Contrite, Ginsberg apologizes in a densely written postcard sent from Amsterdam during his 1982 tour of Europe (“I’m sorry I mis-took Henry Allen’s projections for your own expression”), notes that Peter Orlovsky is coming to meet him and the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, and states his plan to travel through Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Berlin.
The next letter, dated 2 June 1983, shows Ginsberg disgusted by the “errors of fact and grotesqueries of interpretation” in Gerald Nicosia’s biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe (1983). He complains to Carolyn that he and Lucien Carr had spent time and energy correcting Nicosia’s book, but that the author “fibbed to grove press & said he’d satisfied my corrections” to get the book published. A note in a different hand at the head of the page – “Hi, Gregory here – were still here – love, [illegible]”, is possibly by Gregory Corso.
The next two postcards (25 January 1988; 15 June 1989) are fractious. The first is partially made out in Carolyn’s hand as a multiple-choice question: “Please tick one: Yes you may include my name. No I’d prefer to be left out.” Ginsberg has cautiously ticked “Yes” but added a caveat, “if you’re not putting down my poetry again… I read you thought my body of work (poetry) was ‘dirty boys behind the barn'”, though he admits her quote may have been taken out of context. He had refused the use of his name in the 1980 film Heart Beat, based on Carolyn’s book about her relationships with Cassady and Kerouac; here Carolyn is evidently in the midst of a similar project. The final postcard is a response to a letter from Carolyn in which she objects to “foul” language as “world pollutants”, a perspective Ginsberg dismisses: “if you think that candid poetics & idiomatic straight-forwardness is more pollutant than TV disinformation or state [obfuscation?], than I think you got it upside down”.
In his final letter, dated 8 December 1992, Ginsberg remarks on his poor health (“went thru heart failure Xmas last”), remarks on his studies with the Tibetan llama Gelek Rimpoche since the death of Trungpa, and his nostalgic attempts to catch up on reading and with old friends. He has bought Kerouac’s posthumously published Pomes all Sizes from City Lights and acquired a copy of Grace Beats Karma, the collection of letters written by Neal Cassady to Carolyn while he was imprisoned. He says it “was a pleasure” to see the Cassady children, “entertaining them in the local hotel ‘Presidential Suite'”, a “mahogany postmodern Castle” he acquired “by fluke”, and writes sincerely that he would like to see her if she happened to be in New York. The letter is written on the back of Ginsberg’s comic-strip on being pressured by publishers to meet deadlines, repurposed here as a Christmas greeting.”