Book review #55: A Remarkable Collection of Angels

Legend reprised, myths busted in 'Howl' history

A Remarkable Collection of Angels: A History of the 6 Gallery Reading by David S. Wills (Beatdom Books, 2025)

By Jonah Raskin, Chief Book Reviewer

THE WORDS ‘ANGEL' and ‘angels’ were very much on Allen Ginsberg’s mind in 1955, the year he wrote the first part of ‘Howl’ and the same year he performed his epic at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. In the poem he describes the characters who populate the poem as ‘angelheaded hipsters’. In the postcard he used to promote the event, he wrote ‘6 Poets at Six Gallery’ and described Philip Lamantia, Mike McClure, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen and himself as a ‘remarkable collection of angels’.

Ever since then, Beat writers and Beat biographers have made free use of the words. John Tytell called his 1976 group portrait Naked Angels and Kerouac titled his 1965 novel Desolation Angels, which covers the years just after the reading which he famously fictionalized in The Dharma Bums. Dennis McNally’s 1979 Kerouac biography carried the name Desolate Angel and Steve Turner’s own 1996 life story of the same novelist was subtitled Angelheaded Hipster.

Cultural historian and Beat scholar David S. Wills, the founder and editor of journal Beatdom, calls his new book about the 6 Gallery reading A Remarkable Collection of Angels. The poets were indeed remarkable, to say the least, though they weren’t angelic, at least not by the standards of Eisenhower’s America, where sex, drugs, rock‘n’roll and radical politics were mostly ignored in the mainstream media.

One might say that, in his new book, Wills rushes in ‘where angels fear to tread’, though he is scrupulously honest and amazingly diligent when it comes to the reading at the ‘6’ which has been misrepresented and even falsified ever since it took place. Wills has his hands full separating fact from fiction, and myth from history, as the 70th anniversary of the reading rapidly approaches.

Near the end of his book, which moves chronologically and includes an admirable history of San Francisco, he writes, ‘There is no way to know for certain – at least to the extent we would like for such a monumental event – what exactly happened on October 7th, 1955, at the 6 Gallery.’ Wills takes on the role of a literary detective and assembles a vast body of information, misinformation and disinformation, and separates what most likely happened from what probably didn’t happen.

Kerouac’s initial biographer Ann Charters is partially to blame for the problem. Her Kerouac: A Biography (1973), published four years after the author’s death, ‘was the first real acknowledgement of the event,’ Wills writes, but it also ‘began a long series of inaccurate accounts’. Why this happened was due to no one single factor and wasn't malicious.

‘What we really know of the 6 Gallery reading is drawn from fiction, self-promotion, and poor memory,’ Wills states. Painter and Korean War veteran Wally Hedrick, who helped kick start the gathering of the angelheaded hipsters, noted, ‘Everybody remembers what they remember.’

A Remarkable Collection of Angels isn’t about the hippies in San Francisco. On that subject, see McNally’s The Last Great Dream which was reviewed recently in Rock and the Beat Generation. Still, Wills can’t help but offer some comments about the hippies. It wouldn’t be right to talk about the Beats and not say something about them.

In the chapter titled ‘Infamy, Infamy!’, in which he touches on the 1967 Human Be-In to which the Beats contributed mightily, he writes that ‘the hippie movement…would be co-opted and commodified’. How true, though McNally would disagree. On the co-optation and the commodification of the hippie movement in San Francisco, Wills writes, ‘Such is human nature.’

Wills takes all the assertions and allegations seriously and examines them in the clear light of day and with a clear head. He gives a lot of space to composer Jack Goodwin, whom he describes as ‘an educated gay man’ and the author of the 1968 essay ‘Dress Rehearsal’, which curiously doesn’t show up in Wills’ otherwise thorough 15-page bibliography.

Goodwin claimed that Ginsberg mentioned the word ‘lobotomy’ then drew attention to his own forehead with a ‘telling little Marko gesture’ (According to AI, a Marko gesture is ‘a non-verbal communication signal used to convey specific meanings’.)

No one who attended the 6 event and no one who has written about it has ever mentioned the word ‘lobotomy’ or included a description of Ginsberg’s gesture. Ginsberg gave the okay for doctors to perform a lobotomy on his mother Naomi, but that wasn't public knowledge.

Wills doesn't slam the door closed in Goodwin’s face, but he does say that he finds Goodwin’s ‘memories’ ‘quite unlikely’ and ‘misleading’. Since Goodwin doesn’t appear elsewhere as a source of information about the 6, one wonders how Wills found him and where one might find his piece ‘Dress Rehearsal’, which doesn’t show up in a Google search. Solve one mystery and others pop up.

What I found surprising but entirely believable is Wills’ assertion that the effusive telegram that Ferlinghetti claimed to have sent to Ginsberg immediately after the reading never existed. ‘Many have searched for evidence of it but to no avail.’ Wills adds, ‘Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s archivist and biographer, and a good friend of Ferlinghetti, spent decades looking for it and concluded that it seemed “unlikely” that Ferlinghetti ever wrote it and sent it.’ So, apparently the publisher of ‘Howl’ and the Beats was as capable of mythologizing as Ginsberg, Kerouac and Company.

Much of the information in A Remarkable Collection of Angels can be found in previously published books. Wills kindly mentions me and my book American Scream and quotes me as saying that the more Ginsberg ‘performed the poem, the more it turned into a performance piece’ and that San Francisco ‘encouraged poets and novelists to draw creative work from their innermost depths’. I still think those words are accurate.

Wills writes that ‘even if Ginsberg was not a San Francisco poet, “Howl” was undeniably a San Francisco poem.’ I would say that it’s a New York poem that could not have been written anywhere but in San Francisco where Ginsberg was liberated from friends, family and his Columbia mentors. I would also suggest that San Francisco wasn’t as free a city as Wills argues. Philip Lamantia, a native, wrote it had ‘islands of freedom’.

At the San Francisco trial of ‘Howl’ in 1957 a year after it was published, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem wasn’t obscene, but it was in ‘liberal’ San Francisco that Ferlinghetti was arrested and professors from San Francisco State University testified against him and ‘Howl’ in court.

A Remarkable Collection of Angels is subtitled ‘A History of the 6 Gallery Reading’, but it is much more than that. It’s about Ginsberg and ‘Howl’ and Ferlinghetti and City Lights and the Beat Generation which, as Wills observes, is so difficult to define. ‘Most of the writers group under this label had unique styles of writing and subject matter,’ he points out. ‘They didn’t even comprise a generation in the truest sense of the word.’ Touché!

Wills aims for balance and he achieves it, too. He honors the achievements of the Beats but doesn’t engage in hagiography. He writes insightfully about the language of ‘Howl’, including its four-letter words, and about the real life individuals and their adventures which lie behind the poetic, mythological descriptions.

We might also remind ourselves that great performances – the 6 Gallery event was surely a great performance – often provoke strong reactions. They have throughout the ages.

When Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse (The King Amuses Himself) was first staged in France in 1832 it was shut down by the government after just one performance. Hugo sued the French government and lost. His play wasn't performed again for another 60 years. Meanwhile, Giuseppe Verdi used Hugo’s provocative play as the framework for his opera Rigoletto, which was first performed in 1851 in Venice and was an instant hit.

Perhaps the next big hubbub over a performance took place on May 29th, 1913 in Paris when Igor Stravinsky’s experimental ballet The Rite of Spring was first performed and rowdy members of the audience hissed and booed and drowned out the applause. Still, the performance of Rite went on.

A decade later, Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ insisted that modernism as a literary and cultural movement begun with the Post-Impressionist exhibit in London in 1910. The exhibit, which highlighted the work of Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh, certainly influenced Woolf’s style. The Post-Impressionists’ experiments with geometric shapes, depth, perception and the naked human body made them targets of outraged criticism.

In retrospect, perhaps we might not be surprised by the strong reactions – both positive and negative – that the 6 Gallery performance generated, though we can also lament the attempt to censor ‘Howl’ and stifle City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

This new account, at over 450 pages and with a vast array of facts, is a most welcome addition to the library of books about the Beats. It synthesizes and it moves the story forward. I think it will forever end the dispute that ‘Howl’ was not revised. Wills argues convincingly that it was reworked and improved with revision. Is A Remarkable Collection of Angels the definitive book on the subject? For now it is!

See also: ‘“Howl” at 70: Meltzer’s half-century memory’, September 23rd, 2025