Column: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s life contains a lesson for cancel culture

He had a great look, a group of avant-garde friends and a boot-strapped start-up in North Beach. It was 1957. He was also facing a lawsuit: the People of the State of California vs. Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The state hoped to enjoin the publication of “Howl,” the whirling epic poem by Allen Ginsberg that had appeared under Ferlinghetti’s imprint, City Lights Bookstore & Publishing.

Ferlinghetti, who died Monday at 101, was having none of it. “Howl” was an artistic breakthrough. “Once I heard it aloud, I realized this was going to cause a revolution in American poetry,” he told the New York Times in 2007. “Howl” also sold well. To shut it down would be to cripple City Lights and its mission. To cancel it.

These dynamics, of course, are alive and well in 2021, in the fury over what is broadly derided as “cancel culture.”

On one side in some of these debates are talkers and writers who like to use antagonistic language and call it swashbuckling free speech. On the other are those who maintain that certain utterances are themselves acts of hostility and should be subject to discipline.

Of course, to liken the plight of those facing contemporary cancellation to Ferlinghetti’s plight in 1957 is to load the dice. Ferlinghetti, and “Howl,” have long since moved from transgressive to canonical.

Will the use of a racial slur in this decade, even in a meticulously polemical context, ever be remembered as poetry? Is being fired for using offensive language anything like having books confiscated by federal agents and facing jail?

Maybe not, but the “Howl” court docs apply to the new order nonetheless.

The state’s complaint alleged that Ferlinghetti “did willfully and lewdly print, publish and sell obscene and indecent writings, papers and books, to wit: ‘Howl and Other Poems.’ ”

According to the judge who decided the case, to prove that “Howl” was obscene, the prosecution had to show that it took “the form of dirt for dirt’s sake.”

And admittedly, “Howl” is about hipsters “who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may.”

Ginsberg’s subjects “bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication.”

The defense was a celebrity affair. Sitting with Ferlinghetti and making the case for “Howl” as literature were the critic Mark Schorer and Ginsberg himself. For the prosecution, other literary scholars argued that the poem was entirely without merit.

Ultimately, Ferlinghetti was found not guilty of lewdly publishing. (What does it look like to “lewdly” typeset, print and bind a book?) The social significance of “Howl” made up for its indefatigable interest in drugs and sex.

But Judge Clayton W. Horn’s full opinion says much more as well.

First, Horn argued that the notion of obscenity is ever-changing, and its determination depends on “the locale, the time, the mind of the community and the prevailing mores.”

He cited case law arguing that the test for obscenity is not whether it would emotionally arouse “a particular segment of the community, the young, the immature or the highly prudish.” Nor, he wrote, is it based on whether “the scientific or highly educated or the so-called worldly-wise and sophisticated” would be “indifferent and unmoved” by it.

Instead, Ginsberg’s words must be judged by the effect they have on those they are likely to reach: “Does it offend the common conscience of the community by present-day standards.”

Finally, the words may not be unconscionable if the work has “the slightest redeeming social importance.”

Horn’s carefully laid out points are as good a guide as any in thinking about cancel culture, at least in in the court of public opinion. (Unlike People vs. Ferlinghetti, the choice of private-sector publishers or media organizations to fire people for certain utterances does not raise constitutional issues, and rarely legal ones.)

Following Horn, neither those “worldly-wise” types who take in offensive language without a blink nor the “highly prudish” (wokes or snowflakes, maybe?) get to dictate a word’s valence by themselves. Relevant communities — from workforces to classrooms to readerships — must establish the standards. A racial slur used antagonistically may once have been commonplace; then it was tolerable when used dispassionately and in quotation marks; now it’s considered antagonistic when white people use it.

Horn misattributed (to Justice Benjamin Cardozo) a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a poet on this point: “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”

And what about “redeeming social importance”?

Surely, people vulnerable to “cancellation” believe their offending arguments or quips have literary, political or social merit. This too is something to be hashed out by the community. In the Ferlinghetti case, scholars and poets spoke for and against the merits of “Howl.” Where racial slurs are used, equivalent experts on race and social theory might speak to the significance of an argument or speech act that might otherwise be seen as purely hostile.

Ferlinghetti wanted a revolution, and he wanted more poetry. He was, as indicated by one of his book’s subtitles, a proponent of “poetry as insurgent art.” In other words, he liked dirt just fine — but dirt for the sake of change and literature.

Can something similar be said for the slurs that are often at issue in cancel culture? To claim that using certain words in certain contexts is not only allowable by white people but has “redeeming social importance” is a tall order. You’d have to show that the slur is in the service of a broader ideological or artistic project — one that’s at least as original, interesting, principled and true as other projects kicking around. It doesn’t have to be “Howl,” but anyone hellbent on giving offense should also be making a compelling point.

And that point can’t be look at the bad word I can say.

That’s dirt for dirt’s sake. And no one needs that.

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