John Suiter on Walter Lehrman and Allen Ginsberg continued from here
“The Town Hall Theater at 2797 Shattuck Avenue was the home stage the Berkeley Drama Guild, a Bay Area little theater group. On March 18, 1956, the theater was the venue for a poetry reading featuring Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Michael McClure. with Kenneth Rexroth as emcee, as he had been at the 6 Gallery (Rexroth can be heard on an audio tape of the event complaining at the start of the reading, “Why do I have to make a speech. Why do I have to em-cee?”. In fact at Town Hall, Rexroth did get to deliver some of his recent poems)
The Town Hall reading in Berkeley has sometimes been referred to as a “recreation” or an “encore” of the 6 Gallery, but it was more than that. Too much had happened – poetically- for theTown Hall to be merely a recreation or carbon-copy reprise of the 6 Gallery. For one thing at Town Hall Ginsberg first read all three parts of “Howl” (but not the“Footnote”). At the Gallery he only read Part 1 of “Howl”, as is well-known. At Town Hall he also read “Sunflower Sutra”, “A Supermarket in California” and “America”‘, none of which had been written at the time of the 6 Gallery. The other poets, too, had been working prodigiously and with almost constant inspiration on poems old and new since the Gallery reading the previous October.
The Town Hall reading was the first actual media event of the Beat Generation, on a small scale perhaps, but significant for literary scholars. The event was documented by at least two photographers – Lehrman and Harry Redl – and on three tape recorders, as historic in its own way as the 6 Gallery reading.
In those five intervening months, Allen Ginsberg had become – in the Bay Area, at least – “one who needs no introduction”, as Rexroth put it when he called Ginsberg to the podium at the Town Hall Theater, and Walter Lehrman had become a competent and unobtrusive photographer of his friends’ events… and the creator of the best photographs of this historic night.
“This photograph is the closest we have to a “team picture” of there poets that had read at the 6 Gallery five months earlier. Of the original Gallery readers, only Philip Lamantia is missing from the scene. This image had never been printed until the negative was digitally scanned for an exhibition at Utah State University in 2014. The poet Michael McClure, seeing this photo for the first time at age 82 wrote to me, “No one ever took a photograph of any of us that is more sensitive and true to life.”
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“These photographs, from a party in Berkeley in 1956, were the last that Walter made of Allen. Within a few weeks of this picture (Jack) Kerouac, seen here, would leave the Bay Area for Washington state, heading to his fire lookout on Desolation Peak. At the same time, Allen got a job as a seaman aboard the US Navy cargo ship bound for the Arctic Circle with supplies for the United States Ballistic Missile Early Warning network, then under construction. He would not return until September. By then Walter Lehrman had moved to Ohio, where he had been hired to the faculty of the University of Akron. Walter would not see Ginsberg again.
As Peter Orlovsky, pictured here between Ginsberg and Kerouac, wrote at the time: “Allen is going to work on a ship headed for Alaska – $400 per month, by winter he plans to be in Europe. His poetry is doing good, the New York Times will give him a big write-up. He’s blossoming and on his way to the library shelves and from there into the souls of young searching minds”
