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IV

When Allen Ginsberg, bespectacled and brazen, took the stage at the Six Gallery, the bohemians in attendance whooped like warriors. His underground reputation for poetic drama had preceded him. While Ginsberg wasn’t a nature poet, his long signature poem “Howl”—exploding with shamanistic prophecy45—was a bardic condemnation of modern city life, a fiery indictment of society’s destructive forces. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold had written that when a wolf howled, it was “an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.”46 This was the insurgent Ginsberg at the Six Gallery, chanting with conviction, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”47 With this apocalyptic poem, a new American consciousness—a paradigm shift—was happening.

Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” was the highlight at Six Gallery. His sizzling words would ricochet from San Francisco to Singapore and beyond for the next decade. Some critics believe the beat generation was born that evening, with Ginsberg boldly putting the modern condition on trial. But Kerouac didn’t see it that way. Long before Ginsberg chanted “Moloch,” other poets—such as William Blake (in “London”) and T. S. Eliot (in “The Wasteland”)—had expressed the same ideas. The real breakthrough, Kerouac’s keen poetic ear told him, came from the last reader: Gary Snyder.

Rocking back and forth, mesmerized by every line, Kerouac thought Snyder’s “A Berry Feast” (later published in The Back Country) an important statement of human love toward animals. McClure’s “For the Death of 100 Whales” seemed fueled by anger, which never solved much, whereas Snyder exuded a love of bears and coyotes. When Kerouac wrote about the event at Six Gallery in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, he described Snyder (the character Japhy Ryder) as a “great new hero of American culture.” Kerouac intuited that Snyder represented an avant-garde new way—actually a revivification of an ancient way—of looking at nature holistically. “And he had tender lines, lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries, showing his love of animals and great mystery lines about oxen on the Mongolian road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature,” Kerouac wrote of Snyder. “And his anarchistic ideas about how Americans don’t know how to live, with lines about commuters being trapped in living rooms that come from poor trees felled by chainsaws (showing here, also, his background as a logger up north).”48

Snyder shared with Ginsberg the belief that atomic bombs would destroy the world—that this genie had to be put back into the bottle. The most controversial line in Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems came from “America”: “America go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” It was unclear whether the obscenity laws of the time allowed such language to be put in print. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agreed to defend City Lights Books, which had published Howl and Other Poems (with an introduction by William Carlos Williams). It was the U.S. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, always for freedom of speech, who insisted that books like Howl had to be protected by the First Amendment against would-be censors. “None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militarists’ silence, to the intellectual void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness,” McClure wrote in Scratching the Beat Surface. “We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”49 At its core, Ginsberg’s “America” was a burlesque of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

On November 1, 1956, when “America” was published in Howl, Ginsberg didn’t know that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was establishing the “Plowshare Program” to “investigate and develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.” An Inupiat from Point Hope Village, Alaska, would watch anxiously