Review of Howl (2010) by Pj P — 02 Apr 2011

You have to be about my age or older to have been called a 'beatnik'. The word was invented in 1958 by Herbert Caen as a description of the followers of the more superficial trends of what Jack Kerouac described (originated) as 'The Beat Generation' in 1948. I doubt if we would have called ourselves anything, but certainly in 1965 (after I was expelled from school for having my hair too long but before I was expelled from the local tech college for being a bad influence) through 1966 and into early 1967 (it ended then because that was the Summer of Love) some of my strongest influences were these guys - 'The Beats' - Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and of course Allen Ginsberg. My generation (or its best minds) wanted to go to San Francisco, not to wear flowers in our hair (they had yet to be picked) but to browse in City Lights Bookstore. In the mid 60s everyone I knew had read Kerouac's 'On the Road' and everybody had read 'Howl'.

Not everybody read it aloud to the local Girls' High School though, like Phil and I did in '70 or '71. It would not be to true to say that the entire audience was entranced, but hey, you can't please everybody. The whole audience seemed more or less OK with "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" but a couple of the mistresses seemed a tad unhappy with "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy". It wasn't my fault ladies; but I suppose back then some of you might not have known that Americans say 'ass' when they mean 'arse', but honestly we needed to learn to accept the Americanisms and not be so purist. Anyway, shortly after I left town for twenty years.

Nor indeed did Howl please everybody when it was first published, as this film reminds us. Oddly, Ginsberg didn't much want to publish it because he thought that he'd be embarrassed if his dad read it. But Ferlinghetti was in the audience at the Six Gallery reading in Fillmore Street in San Francisco on October 7, 1955 when Ginsberg gave his debut reading of How,, and offered to publish it. (So was a drunken Jack Kerouac.) The forces of reaction rapidly moved to suppress it, but to the eternal credit of the American legal system and constitution the judge rejected the attempt.

The movie juxtaposes the Six Gallery reading (black and white) with the trial (colour) with added animation and is hauntingly effective. James Franco is just so totally plausible as a young, often uncertain Ginsberg, just beginning to show a flicker of confidence in his sexuality. For most of us an unimaginably remote Ginsberg from the bearded avuncular guru with which we became familiar (and unbelievably, walking and writing in the very Welsh border valley from which my own ancestors hail).

But somehow those San Franciscan readings, and that group of people, had an enormous influence. And most of us are touched by this in some way. This movie is just heart-stopping at evoking this remote seminal age. It has not been without its detractors, but really the best judgement on it is by David Edelstein of New York Magazine who said "Since the Sundance opening of James Franco's take on Allen Ginsberg in Howl, I'd heard the movie was howlingly bad - which makes me think that some of the best critical minds of my generation have been destroyed by cynicism".