by Sanders, Ed
I ran a series of readings that summer at Café Le Metro. I hand-drew stencils and printed flyers for the readings series on the Speed-o-Print on the bathtub cover at the Secret Location.
I had long forgiven Huncke for luring me into cashing those bad checks on his girlfriend’s closed account the previous August. In fact, I taped his reading at Le Metro, the reel of which resides in my archive..
The author mc’d the summer reading series at Café Le Metro and also hand-drew the flyers on the Secret Location stencils
Lenny on Trial
On June 16 thirty-seven-year-old Lenny Bruce went on trial for obscenity at the courthouse at 100 Centre Street. His attorney was the well-known Ephraim London, assisted by Martin Garbus. Two days before the trial around one hundred demonstrators gathered to show Bruce support, but New York’s mean, freedom-squelching side paid little attention.
Testifying for the prosecution were Herbert Ruhe from the Department of Licenses; John Fischer, editor of Harper’s; Robert Sylvester of the Daily News; columnist Marya Mannes; right-wing professor Ernest Van den Haag; and several arresting officers. Testifying for the defense were Richard Gilman, drama critic for Newsweek; Dorothy Kilgallen, columnist and television panelist; Nat Hentoff, Village Voice columnist; Alan Morrison, editor of Ebony; Daniel Dodson, professor of comparative literature at Columbia; cartoonist Jules Feiffer; sociologist Herbert Gans; Forrest Johnson, a Presbyterian minister; and Jason Epstein, vice president of Random House.
On November 4 a three-judge panel, with Judge Creel dissenting, found Bruce and Howie Solomon (owner of the Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, where Bruce had performed) guilty. On December 21 repressionist ADA Richard Kuh got his way, and disgraced the Constitution in the process, when Judge Arthur Murtagh sentenced Lenny to four months in the workhouse.
Allen Ginsberg helped put together a big petition of intellectuals to help screen Bruce from the hounds, but to no avail.
Graduating from NYU
I had become friends with fellow Greek student Duncan McNaughton, who was soon to marry the secretary of the classics department, Eugenia Edelman, herself a graduate student in philosophy. McNaughton, the class whiz, was from Boston. After getting his degree in classics, McNaughton headed for graduate work in Oriental studies at Princeton and later received a PhD in English literature and poetics at SUNY Buffalo. In subsequent years McNaughton set up the Poetics Program at the New College of San Francisco and directed the program from its opening in 1965 until 1990. Eugenia became an environmental scientist working for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Around the final day of classes I turned McNaughton on to Olson’s Maximus Poems and a few months later, not long after I had opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, gave him Pound’s Cantos, even though I was harboring serious second thoughts about Pound. Nevertheless, Pound was a writer of an actual epic, and my studies in Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus at NYU had fine-tuned my appreciation of epic—a passion that would blossom forth decades later in my own book-length verse projects, such as the nine-volume America: A History in Verse.
Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to make a living. My weekend gig at the cigar store on Times Square was not enough. Miriam was almost six months pregnant. We were still living in the Bronx apartment.
My Catalogs
In June I began putting out “rare book” catalogs. One day I went over to Allen Ginsberg’s pad to scrounge some literary relics for my first catalog. (I’d heard of a signed Dylan Thomas dress shirt that’d shown up in someone’s catalog.)
A. G. graciously donated his well-scooped cold cream jar by the bed and inscribed it as follows: “This is the jar of bona fide ass-wine or cock lubricant, into which I regularly plunged my hardened phallus to ease penetration of P. Orlovsky. . . . winter 1964,” and signed it!
It became a famous literary relic, by word of literary mouth, but it was not the fastest-selling item in my catalog, most of whose items were snapped up by collectors and rare book libraries. I gave the jar later to photographer Richard Avedon during a Fugs photo shoot.
Allen also collected pubic hair from the famous and well placed, which I advertised in my catalog. Item numbers 42 and 43 sold briskly, helping thereby to relieve my summer of ’64 impecuniosity. I put out a total of six catalogs during 1964 and 1965.
Freedom Summer
Meanwhile, the newspapers were lit up with articles about Freedom Summer, which occurred from early June to late August. Love, persuasion, fortitude, and a thirst for justice came together when more than one thousand college students, most of them white and most from the North, went to Mississippi to work in forty-four local projects sponsored by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They lived in what were known as Freedom Houses or with local black families. Their main task was to register black voters and to work in what were known as Freedom Schools. It was exhilarating, thrilling, dangerous work that helped change a nation.
Friends from the Lower East Side went down during Freedom Summer. I was tempted but was graduating, working weekends at the Times Square cigar store, doing my films, and putting out numerous Mimeo Rev publications. Plus Miriam was six months pregnant.
Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner
On June 21 in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where klanmind ruled, a Freedom Summer volunteer named Andrew Goodman, twenty-one, went forth in a station wagon with James Chaney, twenty-one, and Michael Schwerner, twenty-four, to investigate the burning down of Mt. Zion Baptist Church near a town named Philadelphia. (The church had been arsoned by the Klan because it was to be a Freedom School.) They were arrested that afternoon on a traffic charge and held until nightfall and then released into the coils of klanmind. Their station wagon was found burned and charred near Bogue Chitto swamp the next day. Their bodies were found on August 4, buried in a fresh earthen dam six miles outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Decades later I’m still overwhelmed by the image of the slender, nervous, newly wedded Rita Schwerner (shown in Freedom Summer by Doug McAdam) urging everyone to continue Freedom Summer even though the fate of her husband and his companions wouldn’t be known for weeks.
Freedom Summer screamed in our minds in the Lower East Side. Crackers were arrested later in the year after the FBI offered a $30,000 reward, so two guys came forward to point out where the three had been buried. We followed the horror as best we could in the New York Times or the New York Post (then a liberal publication), but there were a lot of lacuna and dotted lines in our knowledge.
Confronting overt racist violence was difficult. Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t get a federal antilynching law passed because of threats by Dixiecrats to kill New Deal legislation. I recalled how the Klan threatened to burn our church in Carthage, Tennessee, on the Nashville-DC peace march of ’62. We were saved only by being hauled off to the safety of the local National Guard armory.
Despair, an Anthology
I was feeling down down down after the murders of the Freedom Summer workers, so I decided to publish an anthology called Despair, which came out in July 1964.
With despair as a theme, I had very little trouble attracting quality poems, especially from Ted Berrigan. Despair was in the air.
Table of Contents, Despair.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
Johnson signed the act on television on July 2, confiding to his aide Bill Moyers that the law had “delivered the South to the Republican Party during your life and mine.” Racistcrats and conservatives had tried to begrunge the bill with over five hundred amendments and had filibustered, too, but with no success. The act set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to help prevent discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, or sex. Many, if not most, restaurants and hotels complied right away. It was a moment for Johnson and a moment for America.
The War Starting to Impinge
On July 11 Johnson lifted one of his pet beagles by the ears during a session with guests on the White House lawn. His action offended some of us at the time, and we
started calling him Ear Grab. I satirized Mr. Ear Grab a few months later in an editorial in F.Y. In a well-known television commercial during those months a child called out to his mother, “More Park sausages, Ma!”
The Republican Convention
To the historic Cow Palace in San Francisco—built as a public works project by the New Deal—came the Party of Lincoln, now seized by right-wing railers like something concocted by Jonathan Swift. On Tuesday July 14, Dwight Eisenhower spoke to big applause, after which there was a ninety-minute reading of the platform. Then Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York came to the mike (it was already pretty late) to propose some amendments to the platform. He was given five minutes to argue for a resolution against extremism (he had in mind the vicious nuttery of the John Birch Society) and another five for civil rights.
The convention had been almost totally seized by nuts, who shrieked their hatred at the centrist Republican. As if he’d read the futurist manifesto The Pleasure of Being Booed, the governor bucked the boos and threw them back. He seemed to be enjoying the rudeness. “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, but the wailing wing nuts wouldn’t let him speak, forcing the governor’s allotted five minutes to stretch to fifteen minutes of televised hiss.
Anti–Vietnam War ad showing Mr. Grab.
Goldwater’s Famous Speech
Barry Goldwater no doubt believed he was tying the casket of history with the threads of right-wing raillery in his July 16 acceptance speech, which he ended with words far-famed in their era: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” This was true enough in certain limited circumstances, but not from the nuke-friendly lips of someone who’d voted against the Test Ban Treaty and the civil rights law and who wanted to resume cancer-spreading open-air nuclear bomb testing. Blinded by folly, the hissing right was sure the nation would vote a quick passage from New Frontier to Old Fortress. The hissers were wrong, for the moment.
Riots in Harlem
On July 16 a police lieutenant named Tom Gilligan shot a fifteen-year-old black kid named James Powell. The lieutenant later said that Powell had drawn a knife. Then on July 18 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held a protest rally at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Afterward a group went to the local precinct and soon began hurling bottles and trash. When the Tactical Patrol Force was called in, a riot ensued, complete with what store owners hated very much: widespread looting.
We were thankful the riots didn’t reach the Lower East Side.
Trouble in the Gulf of Tonkin
By the summer of 1964 Lyndon Johnson and his generals were looking for an excuse to spill more blood and drop more bombs. They had a resolution, already written months in advance, giving the president the power to expand the war at whim.
As The Pentagon Papers later revealed, the South Vietnamese that summer badly wanted to attack cross-border into North Vietnam and also bomb the North. The new U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Maxwell Taylor, had been authorized to tell the Vietnamese that the United States was considering attacking North Vietnam. Such as attack “might begin, for example, if the pressure from dissident South Vietnamese factions became too great.”
The chance to begin a full-scale war came in early August. The Defense Department reported on August 2 that North Vietnamese PT boats had fired torpedoes and shells at the destroyer Maddox while it was out “on a routine patrol” in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But the Maddox patrol was not routine. Rather, it was on an electronic spying caper and was in Vietnamese territorial waters—and no torpedoes were fired at it. It was not until Daniel Ellsberg released The Pentagon Papers in 1971 that the public learned the Gulf of Tonkin attack had been a fabrication of the military-industrial surrealists. Conferring with Allen Ginsberg, I had the presence of mind to write a letter on August 6, 1964, to President Johnson, mailing it to him at the White House: Dear President Johnson,
Allen Ginsberg and I, poets and residents of the lower east side of New York City, were ardently pursuing a policy of persuading our fellow poets, artists, novelists, and musicians to register to vote in the coming election in order to enhance your chances of serving the country (and the world) for the next four years as president.
However, the rather insensitive methods with which you dealt with the problem of small boat attacks from North Vietnam cause us to ponder whether it is still morally demonstrable that you maintain a superior position over that of Barry Goldwater.
For instance, formal diplomatic protests were not made to the North Vietnam government as a warning against further harassment, before you decided to destroy those coastal marine positions. Perhaps the worst aspect of the entire situation is the tacit assumption that the American citizenry could not be supplied with more information before you ordered countermeasures. To inform your constituency that you are engaging in an act of war just as you are explaining to those to whom you are ultimately responsible, why you are doing it, is right in the line with the methods of an extremist.
No official reasons were given by the United States as to why the North Vietnamese were hitting against U.S. ships. Was it in reprisal against South Vietnamese naval intelligence raids into the North? Was it a paranoiac response on the part of the North Vietnamese against the presence of the Seventh Fleet?
Certainly we cannot ourselves mount a campaign to place you into office without some clarification of this entire situation. We can, perhaps, persuade some 1500–2000 voters of the necessity of voting for the Democratic candidate in 1964. These are new voters, those who have for one reason or another not voted in past elections. However, these voters are highly sensitive and articulate, those from whom you could expect an audible support in their dealings with the mass media.
We, as citizens and voters, must be informed in greater detail as to the complexities of our foreign policy. We hope that you may find time to issue statements in depth that spell out point by point the intricacies of the American positions with regard to Vietnam.
Please may we have some of your time in these regards? We, the artists, poets, writers of New York’s lower east side await your reply.
Respectfully yours, Ed Sanders, Box 193, Stuyvesant Station, New York 9, New York.
I never received any kind of reply, and the day after I mailed the letter to Mr. Ear Grab, the Vietnam War, in effect, began.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
On August 7 the U.S. Congress in joint session voted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson full powers to stomp down North Vietnam on behalf of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (a rubber-stamp umbrella group). Thus the war in Vietnam expanded to North Vietnam based on a lie. Only Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruen-ing of Alaska voted against it.
Letter to Olson
On the very day the joint session of Congress foisted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on an unsuspecting America, I wrote Charles Olson in Gloucester, Massachusetts, enclosing the manuscript for what would become my first “big” book of poetry, Peace Eye. I was still very insecure about it. “I’d like thee to take a look at these poems,” I wrote to my mentor, “and give your thunder a roar or two to see if you still think there’s a book there. . . . If it is possible to use glyphs, I enclose a full set of drawings corresponding to the ones in the poems. You are kind beyond shrieks to consider a book of poems.”
At that time I had no idea that Olson himself would wind up writing an introduction to Peace Eye, which I was dedicating to my wife, Miriam. One idea was to have poet John Wieners write an introduction.
In the same letter I also offered to have the team of volunteer typists who typed for my projects help Olson type up, from handwritten versions, a new book of his Maximus poems. I noted that I’d heard from Harvey Brown that “there seems to be some problems in regard to the latest Maximus manuscript. We have here in the Lower East Side a team of typists more than willing to get to help
prepare a Maximus manu! Let us know if there is ANYTHING we can do for you. Send the manu with instructions and we’ll prepare sparkling copies for thee.”
The Democratic Convention
I rode with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky down to Atlantic City on August 24 to demonstrate on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the Democratic National Convention. The demonstration was a hint of the turbulence that would engulf the Democratic Party, trapped in the throes of the American military’s thirst for war, four years later in Chicago.
Allen had one of his famous hand-painted posters, 24” x 36,” with this message:DOWN WITH DEATH
WAR IS BLACK MAGIC
BELLY FLOWERS
TO
NORTH AND SOUTH VIETNAM
Adorning the poster were two flowers with faces and a hand-drawn sun and a moon.
The outside world was starting to impinge on our little Lower East Side Zone of Revolution.
