Interview #45: David S. Wills

New 'Howl' history further unpacked

IT’S BEEN SOME considerable time since I enjoyed a Beat Generation history as much as DAVID S. WILLS’ A Remarkable Gathering Of Angels. I remember the thrill of discovering Ann Charters’ biography of Jack Kerouac perhaps a year after its 1973 publication and being drawn into this life story, both mythically grand and impossibly tragic, and swept along on a cavalcade of tangled tales of literary aspiration and surprising friendships. This new book brings that groundbreaking portrayal to mind.

Wills’ impressively-researched charting of the 6 Gallery reading of 1955, while more contained in its focus, is still rich in background, anecdote and analysis, with a close examination of the cultural pre-history, the central event itself and the legacy of that hothouse moment, when poetry became a true social force, a radical rage for change rather than a polite impulse in the academic drawing-room.

As the 70th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s original live presentation of his epic verse ‘Howl’ arrives on October 7th, we are commemorating this occasion in various manners. Jonah Raskin, one of the great specialists on Ginsberg and the poem – his acclaimed American Scream is a landmark account of the work, the poet and the Beats – has already reviewed the Wills text for these digital pages. Associated tributes by David Meltzer and Steven Taylor, Antonio Pineda and CJ Thorpe-Tracey, are appearing in connection with this notable anniversary.

Here, R&BG Founding Editor SIMON WARNER provides some extra detours as he follows a number of off-ramp routes in conversation with a the author of this outstandingly ambitious survey of the whys and wherefores of ‘Howl’’s inception, supporting those other linked articles mentioned above.

Just published by Beatdom, Wills’ book might be described, in fact, as a remarkable collection of angles as he explores key details, from the very basics – the 6 Gallery not the Six Gallery! – to the complexities of tricky interpersonal relationships in the City by the Bay during that mid-century period of social and artistic, political and sexual, shifts with talk of a latter-day Renaissance in the air…

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Simon Warner: An opening question about your more than admirable research on the 6 Gallery event and its extraordinary poetic premiere in 1955. There is almost a paradox here: how did you find out so much when there seems to be so little known? You say you took years to complete this project and it certainly shows in the text and the marvellous range of sources you have tracked down.

David S. Wills: I don’t think most general readers realise that if you just take a biography or history of the Beat Generation and skip to that part about the 6 Gallery event, what you read is usually speculation masquerading as fact. The people writing these books have included it as part of their story because it’s a huge moment in Beat history, but it’s just one moment in a longer tale, and so they’ve given over a few sentences or paragraphs and then moved on.

That’s fine except, because there is so little information available, they’ve had to make assumptions by drawing upon the available sources, which are limited, and instead of saying, ‘It’s impossible to know for sure, but here’s what I think happened…’, they speak with false certainty. They say, ‘The building was a stable and then an auto mechanic’s garage… and then Michael McClure asked Allen Ginsberg to organise it… and there were 250 people there… and Ginsberg starting reading his poem when he was sitting on the toilet… and they had an orgy afterwards…’, etc.

The problem is that they’re pulling quotes from interviews conducted many decades later and oftentimes citing a letter that I know for a fact they didn’t read. There really is a very small amount of reliable information, so to make these interesting narratives in order for their book to be published by a major press, they pad it out with other details, and what happens is that, over time, one well-known biographer will say something that they’ve made up, and then another will refer to that detail and add their own… and another will do the same, so that over time we know less and less and less…

We’re just adding layers of fiction to this event and what I wanted to do was to strip all that away and ask, ‘Well, what do we really know? What can we say – if not with 100% certainty then at least 90% – happened before, during, and after the reading?’

I started by research by digging up all the books and essays and articles and videos that mentioned the 6 Gallery reading, and I went through them and simply compared them. This allowed me to see who had made up what details and remove them from the record. A surprising number didn’t give any sources even in books that were otherwise well cited, but I was able to figure out eventually what claims had some degree of authenticity.

Then, I would look up the original sources and see if they had been taken out of context or misunderstood (and often they had!) and I asked that key question: ‘When did this person give their account of the 6 Gallery reading?’ This is important because none of us have perfect memories. I struggle to recall the specific details of events from 20 years ago, yet we trust famous poets to accurately recall events from 50 years earlier. It’s silly. I compared these statements and saw the problems.

McClure would disagree with Snyder who would disagree with McClure who would disagree with Whalen, and so on. But then Snyder would say one thing in the 1970s and a different thing in the 1980s and yet other things in the 1990s and 2000s… and over time you can see memories being warped and becoming far less reliable.

This is natural and I don’t mean in any way to blame those people giving their memories. But what happens is that scholars, journalists, biographers and historians have this smorgasbord of available quotes to pick from and so they can just pick one that suits their narrative and ignore all others, and sadly that means oftentimes just picking a convenient but incorrect version of the story.

Let’s say you’re writing about Snyder. Well, he always put himself at the centre of the tale but his accounts never fit with any of the contemporary documents. That makes this sound like an impossible task but I think, once you know these limitations, you actually are in a good position to look for new information. I’m pretty obsessive about little details and solving puzzles and I’ve found ways of digging up information, so from there I sort of began trying to fill gaps and double-check the claims that hadn’t been proven wrong by my earlier work.

Of course, there wasn’t a huge amount to go on. That’s largely why all these writers before me had made assumptions and relied on interviews from years later. The fact is that all the best contemporary sources (letters, journals, audio recordings, etc.) had been lost or destroyed or perhaps never even existed. I mean, who would’ve thought this reading would be such a success? And what people forget is that you had this group of friends – a bunch of young men – who were so smitten with each other they were more like lovers than buddies and, for weeks and months, mostly, they just spent all their time talking and goofing and drinking and collaborating on poems.

You look at their correspondence and journals and there’s this conspicuous and frustrating gap and that exists because they were just too busy having fun with each other. We want to know what they were doing, but this key moment in their lives is sort of hidden because they didn’t have time to document it.

The major find was a famous letter that dozens of people had quoted without ever actually reading! It took me two whole years to find it and it was a big help. (When I asked people, they always hummed and hawed and said, ‘I think maybe I saw it here or there…’, but they’d all quoted the same few lines with the same transcription errors. Anyway, there were other little bits and pieces, none of which was an amazing source in and of itself but which combined helped put together the bigger picture.

Of course, this book isn’t just one long description of one poetry reading. It’s the story of how it came to be and so I had to research what happened in the lead-up to the event, and there’s more to go on there. I spent a long, long time researching the history of the building in which it took place and the area around it and the people who were involved in the gallery and the galleries (yes, plural!) that were there before the 6.

Altogether, it was one of those stories that just got bigger and bigger the more you researched it. I hope that people find all that stuff interesting. I suppose,, if they expect the book just to say what happened that night, they might be confused or disappointed that they end up reading about the building in 1905 and about Rexroth and Duncan in the 1940s and Douglas MacAgy’s efforts to bring together the arts… but in my mind all of this was absolutely essential to answer the question of ‘Why the hell did that reading on October 7th, 1955, have such an impact?’ To me, you have to understand the whole history or else it doesn’t make sense.

SW: There is a tantalising reference to a possible alternative, and significantly earlier, derivation of the term ‘beatnik’. Gallery owner Ethel Gechtoff, you hint, might have come up with the term several years before journalist Herb Caen. Obviously the Russian diminutive ‘-nik’ was long-standing, but how well would the term Beat have been known in San Francisco around 1954?

DSW: That was something I only mentioned in order to dismiss it. A few people have made this claim but I don’t agree with it at all. I mentioned Gechtoff because she and her daughter were involved in the story and because there are a few books readers might know that make this claim, but I find it a bit ridiculous. I don’t know exactly when she’s supposed to have come up with the term, but even if she used ‘-nik’ before Sputnik it’s unlikely she would’ve known ‘Beat’ before the Beat mania surrounding ‘Howl’ and On the Road.

The idea that she came up with it and coincidentally so did Herb Caen is a bit far-fetched. Maybe he came to her gallery in late 1957 or early 1958 and heard her say it, then borrowed it without giving her credit…But for claims like this you really need some evidence and I’ve never seen any.

On that note, your readers may be interested to learn that, prior to Herb Caen coining ‘beatnik’ by mixing ‘Beat’ and ‘Sputnik’, another reporter combined ‘Beat’ with the noise Sputnik made to come up with the term ‘Beep Generation’. I wrote about that here.

SW: You refer to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘surprisingly good salary’ while working in marketing in the city in the year or so before the 6 Gallery reading. What sort of money might he have been making? I principally ask because general poverty seemed to haunt the poets and the artists in this circle.

DSW: His salary was $450 per month towards the end of his time there, which is something like $5,000 in today’s money. San Francisco is incredibly expensive today, so maybe $5,000 doesn’t seem like a lot to people living there, but it was a really cheap place in the mid-Fifties. It was home to a lot of poor artists and they got by without too much difficulty. You could rent apartments for $25 or a whole house for $60, and you could get a restaurant meal for $1. There was cheap wine, too.

In most regards, it was the very opposite of San Francisco in 2025. So for Ginsberg to earn $450 per month, it was really quite a lot of money. In fact, when he became unemployed – and this was something he really pushed to happen, with his employers trying hard to keep him – he got an unemployment payment of $30 per month for about six months, and he was able to live on that. Later in the year, when he began working as a busboy and marking exam papers he brought in $20 to $30 per week, so that would be $80 to $120 per month, and he had enough to spare for friends who were struggling. He had a cottage and seems to have not struggled too much for money on that income.

It speaks for his absolute dedication to poetry that he gave up such a lucrative job simply in the hope that unemployment would afford him the chance to write something great. And it did, of course. Within four months of being laid off, he had a draft of ‘Howl’. He was never hugely interested in money, though, and often gave it away when he had it.

SW: Kenneth Rexroth clearly enjoyed, or endured, an extraordinarily disputed reputation. His behaviour seems to have been driven by an egotistical nature and an almost paranoid fear of the new poets. Were you surprised how antagonistic he was eventually to some of the newcomers and they were to him? His actions seemed to verge on the schizophrenic: initially keen to promote and then desperate to sabotage. And there was also a sense that he was either remarkably well-educated or something of a charlatan!

DSW: I think his name probably appears in my book more than Ginsberg’s does, and I used Ginsberg as a sort of narrative thread to tie the middle part together. But that’s because Rexroth was incredibly important and was busy forming a scene well before Ginsberg and co arrived in the Bay Area. The funny thing when I was researching this book was just how much people would praise him on one hand and then say something – usually while laughing – terrible about him on the other. This traces back even to contemporary documents.

People were endlessly amused by this man who was both a genius and a bullshitter, both kind and monstrous, both intellectual and hilariously irrational. He knew lots but always pretended he knew much more. He would tell stories about knowing Oscar Wilde, who had died before Rexroth was born, and if you mentioned a famous female writer he would claim to have slept with her – even if you’d made up a totally fictional person. He could be downright nasty to friends and lovers and people often avoided him for long periods, and I don’t think there’s anyone he knew well whom he didn’t attack and fall out with at some point…

Gary Snyder perhaps tolerated him more than anyone else and took a very Buddhist approach to dealing with the nastiness, but one gets the feeling he is excusing just inexcusable behaviour. Yet when he found a talented young writer he would go out of his way to support them. He really pushed for the success of the 6 Gallery and the reading there, and then he seems to have arranged for them to have subsequent readings, and he largely wrote the famous New York Times article that brought the Beats to a national level of interest.

Around the key era of this book, 1955 to 56, Rexroth clearly had a severe breakdown caused by domestic problems. This was exacerbated in various ways by these young Beat poets, one of whom, Robert Creeley, screwed Rexroth’s wife. Between bad behaviour, misunderstandings, and Rexroth’s general tendency towards insecurity and paranoia, he just blew up and was a bit of an embarrassment for a period of months or even years. I think it’s only because he was so respected as a poet and community organiser that people sort of ignored or tolerated him wandering around screaming accusations at them. Later, of course, he calmed down a bit but he never forgave Kerouac and his various reviews of Kerouac’s books are just awful.

In fact, the best Allen Ginsberg letter I ever read is sadly unpublished. He wrote to Rexroth and went on for several pages calling out his faults, begging him to show some decency. He was spurred to do this by one of Rexroth’s public tirades against Kerouac. It absolutely should have been in his collected letters. It shows Ginsberg at his emotional best, furious and passionate yet at the same time somehow tolerant and, above all, desperate to put poetry and community above personal bitching. I hope it is published one day.

SW: There is an intriguing connection made between Ginsberg’s strophes in ‘Howl’ and Kerouac’s phrases/lines in Visions of Cody. Is this a new connection you make?

DSW: John Tytell originally made the connection in Naked Angels, one of the earliest books about the Beats. I had read so many comments by Ginsberg about how ‘Howl’ was derivative of Kerouac and honestly I just didn’t see it. Eventually I found an audio recording of Ginsberg doing both ‘Howl’ and some parts of Mexico City Blues and I was stunned by how similar they sounded, and so it finally clicked for me. OK, Ginsberg really did take something from Kerouac for the rhythm of ‘Howl’.

But still, he only read the Mexico City poems after starting Part I of ‘Howl’, so I wanted more proof. It was a little later that I found Tytell’s comparison with Visions of Cody and I quoted that in the book because Ginsberg had of course read the manuscript (‘Visions of Neal’ as it was called in early 1955) and I agree with Tytell about this being a likely source of inspiration. Tytell had broken a certain passage into ‘Howl’-length lines based on a starting point of ‘I…’ and so I included that as further explanation of why Ginsberg kept citing Kerouac as a poetic inspiration.

SW: You mention that Allen Ginsberg disliked Michael McClure’s poetry. Please tell us more. And it wasn’t long after the 6 reading that McClure was distancing himself from his Beat brothers. Also, you reveal that Ferlinghetti thought Ginsberg had little respect for his poetry.

DSW: I don’t know what Ginsberg thought about McClure’s poetry much later but at the time he wasn’t a fan, calling it ‘tightassed’ and later even his compliments were backhanded and tended to categorise him so poorly that one gets the feeling Ginsberg had never really paid him all that much attention.

He could be very, very bitchy about other poets though. When he first met Rexroth and Duncan, he flattered them to their faces and spoke ill of them behind their backs. His letters at this point quite often disparage other poets and he even claimed not long before the 6 Gallery reading that there were simply no good poets in the city.

At this point, he had known McClure for about six or more months, so he was including him in that apparent poetic void. It’s interesting that McClure’s poems didn’t seem very well received at the Berkeley reading in March 1956. He didn’t seem all that interested in participating and, as you mention, he sort of turned his back on the group a little later, although that was more about reluctance at being labelled and forced into any sort of group and less about any sort of dislike of the other Beat poets. McClure was not alone in that attitude.

Various San Francisco poets felt uncomfortable or even angry about the scene that developed in the late Fifties. As for Ferlinghetti… Well, you read or hear these statements he made later and I just don’t entirely believe him. He was quite inaccurate in his recollections of that era and tended to be a bit self-pitying. It’s quite possible that Ginsberg wouldn’t have liked his poetry… but even if Ginsberg had enjoyed it, Ferlinghetti probably would’ve said later that he hadn’t.

Ferlinghetti got along very well with Rexroth and their personal letters are quite interesting for a number of reasons. Both men were very negative about the early Beat movement and Ferlinghetti applauded Rexroth for attacking them in public and even offered to print a full-on anti-Beat screed, but that never came about. They tended to feel that poetry should be more politically engaged and I think they both viewed the Beats and certainly Ginsberg as being more personal and emotional.

Ferlinghetti believed that Ginsberg thought of him as an old-fashioned, overly political poet (and even a ‘square’), but he seemed to be basing this on his assumptions of what Ginsberg might of thought but never said, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in them. Like I said, Ginsberg was very bitchy and didn’t hold back in criticisms of other poems in his private writings, so if he disliked Ferlinghetti or his work, then he would’ve said that in letters or journals, but I can’t recall having come across such criticisms.

From all I’ve read and heard, it seems Ginsberg really liked and respected him (although in the role of editor and publisher Ferlinghetti managed to annoy Ginsberg a bit, but I think Ginsberg realised that Ferlinghetti’s choices were ultimately beneficial even if at the time he disagreed).

SW: It seems most surprising that this group of obsessive notetakers, journal scribes and letter writers should have so many holes in their personal records, particularly in relation to October 7th.

DSW: Yes, absolutely. That was what shocked and confused me most in the beginning. It is quite possible that they did write something but certainly those notes have been lost. We have fragments of letter responses that show the story was told, but the story itself was in letters that were not saved. The journals are all more or less devoid of information and Snyder’s holds the key to that. He wrote that he was simply too busy having fun with his new friends to bother.

Indeed, when you look at these documents, there is a gap, and it makes sense that there would be. Ginsberg and Snyder met on September 8th. Whalen got into town two weeks later, almost at the same time as Kerouac. The four met on September 23rd and, by all accounts, they had this wild immediate friendship – a sort of bromance of intense poetic philosophical joy and frenetic activity. They were constantly together – talking, drinking, screwing, writing. They helped each other with their poetry.

When you think about it, it’s little surprise that they didn’t write much about it. This period extended approximately through to May of the next year although notably Kerouac was away for most of that time and Ginsberg began work again. They were just busy, busy, busy. What little was saved got destroyed later and that partially explains why this incredible event is so poorly documented.

SW: You refer to the ‘rejection of militarism and materialism’. How did a third ‘M’, McCarthyism, impact on this particular artistic movement? Was San Francisco relatively immune from those HUAC investigations?

DSW: Well, by 1955, when the 6 Gallery readings happened, it was sort of old news. McCarthy had been disgraced a year earlier and that was the tail-end of his waning influence. Even in more conservative circles that was seen as a sort of embarrassing period.

By the time Ginsberg arrived in the city, I don’t think it was much of a factor. Besides, San Francisco had been politically very different from the rest of the country almost from its beginnings. The first chapter in my book, in fact, stresses the political diversity within the city and its tolerance for anarchists and even communists. (Again, I felt that this sort of thing was necessary for explaining the success of the reading, like the history of the building and the art movements and people of interest that are covered before we get to October 7th.)

That said, nowhere was entirely free from the paranoia and the government was watching to an extent. It was just less of a factor. I really never came across much related to McCarthy or HUAC during the research for this book. What I did see, and what will probably be of interest to your readers, was that Gary Snyder had been investigated by the FBI due to communist connections.

I think it was in 1948 that they began watching him and he was refused a passport when he first wanted to go to Japan because of his supposed political affiliations. He was also blacklisted from various government jobs, which was devastating given his preferred summer employment at that time (fire-watching, logging, etc.), but, in late 1955, he successfully appealed and got a passport. He left the US in May 1956.

Another interesting digression is that this was the last time he ever saw Jack Kerouac. How strange and sad that such good friends, tied together in literary immortality, enjoyed each other’s company for such a brief moment in time…

Anyway, going back to the FBI/communist thing, I wonder if Snyder ever requested his FBI file. That would be an interesting Beat document. Ginsberg’s can be found online and makes for quite a good read. I included some amusing notes from it in my book World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller.

SW: It’s a little hard to work out how well the jazz and poetry events, including Ferlinghetti and Rexroth. went down. They seem to have attracted capacity crowds but then did they fail to take off? Your insights are welcomed. It’s also very interesting to the contemporary reader to hear about the later addition of the stripper.

DSW: The whole jazz-and-poetry thing is a long story and I didn’t get into it much in this book because, while it was related, it was not really central. The book already covered a huge amount of ground with many interesting sort of digressions and ties together so many places and people that I couldn’t cover everything in huge detail even when it was interesting. The Cellar readings were mentioned in the ‘Aftermath’ section as something of note that came along later, arguably growing out of the vibrant poetry scene created by the 6 Gallery reading.

However, it should be noted that ruth weiss was doing this before Rexroth and Ferlinghetti and I think a few others were doing it before her, albeit not in San Francisco. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Leon Horton discusses the Cellar readings in the next issue of Beatdom, issue 25, for those who want to know more, and Thomas Antonic writes about weiss and mentions her jazz poetry experiments as well.

The Cellar readings were a huge hit at first. Rexroth talked about there being hundreds of people turned away at the door and I assumed he was exaggerating but other sources confirm this. People loved them. However, in terms of the poetry, they were supposedly not very successful and perhaps a failed experiment. It was too hard, I think, for the poets to read over the musicians and the musicians to play to the poets’ work.

There are some successful examples but it was not something that really caught on and was more of a short-lived fad. I think one could also argue that it was co-opted by the talentless beatniks and perhaps became a cliché and almost a parody of what it had briefly been.

As for the stripper, that was a related thing called ‘Poets’ Follies’. This was started by Weldon Kees and Michael Grieg, whose name might be familiar to your readers as he wrote an early celebration of the Beats around the time of Richard Eberhart’s famous NYT article, and together those helped push the SF Renaissance and Beat movements into the public consciousness.

This began a few days after Robert Duncan stripped during Faust Foutu at the 6 Gallery and it seems to have been very successful. It resumed after Kees’ death later that year. They had some kind of primitive computer generating sort of cut-up poems and all sorts of poetic-artistic activities that were very much ahead of their time.

Ferlinghetti read translations of French poems under the name of ‘Mr Lawrence Ferling’, which is interesting because he’d switched from Ferling to Ferlinghetti a year or two before this. We discussed earlier the idea that Ferlinghetti thought Ginsberg did not respect him as a poet… Well, no one really knew he was a poet, even his business partner at City Lights.

He was a painter and art critic and bookshop owner. Of course, later that year he’d publish his own first book and it was tremendously well received, so perhaps by then he had let it be known he was a poet, too, but note these were translations rather than original works.

To go back to the stripper, she bared her soul rather than her body as she was reading poems, and there were dancers and a play that may have been the acting debut of Phyllis Diller… It was a big mix of different art forms, which was something that really marked the arts scene of San Francisco at the time, including King Ubu and the 6

I didn’t mention it in the book, but Ginsberg made a comment during the planning of the 6 Gallery reading, saying ‘the tradition continues with a gala evening…’ I couldn’t find any evidence of his having attended the ‘Poets’ Follies’ and of course, in the end, the 6 Gallery reading was just five poets reading poems but I think it’s likely that he had been to at least one of those events and might temporarily have been thinking of his own event as featuring multiple artforms.

That’s just speculation though and there’s no further evidence which is why I did not explore it further in the book. He had been at the Faust Foutu thing, though, and had much more appreciation for the arts and music scene than the poetry one in the city.

SW: Can you say any more about the disagreement about jazz between Kerouac and McClure?

DSW: Not really, I’m afraid. There wasn’t much else. In that part of the book I was talking about the poets becoming friends and how they all got along well, but I felt it was worth mentioning something McClure said about 50 years later when asked about it. He couldn’t actually remember the details but that he and Kerouac had disagreed about jazz, possibly about Miles Davis.

He said that meeting, which I think may have been their first sort of social interaction, did not go terribly well but it was also not very unpleasant. They disagreed in some way about music and then later got along better during another meeting.

Editor’s note: David S. Wills has written and released a number of Beat-related titles through his own imprint Beatdom. In 2013, he published Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’, under his own name. World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller followed in 2019. Two years later, the title High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism emerged.

See also: ‘“Howl” at 70: Taylor-made tribute’, October 4th, 2025; ‘Book review #55: A Remarkable Collection of Angels‘, September 30th, 2025; ‘“Howl” at 70: Meltzer’s half-century memory’, September 23rd, 2025