The Beat Century — post 25 of 100. Lenore Kandel, The Love Book (1966).
Six pages of erotic verse that San Francisco police seized from two bookstores in 1966, producing the city’s longest obscenity trial over a literary work and the only one to put a woman writer in the dock.
The Love Book is roughly eight hundred and twenty-five words long. It sold for a dollar. Almost nobody had read it — fewer than a hundred copies had moved — until the San Francisco Police Department decided in November 1966 that it was a crime, at which point it sold more than twenty thousand. This is the standard arithmetic of censorship, and Lenore Kandel’s small book is one of its purest demonstrations.
It is also the last of its kind. The trial that followed was the longest San Francisco ever ran over a literary work, and the only one in that city’s long history of them in which the writer on the wrong end of the state was a woman. The city had prosecuted a book before, most famously Howl at City Lights in 1957, and after Kandel it stopped. These six pages are the closing item in that sequence.
The Raid
On 15 November 1966, five officers walked into the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street and bought a copy for a dollar. The moment the money changed hands they arrested the clerk for selling obscene material, confiscated the remaining stock, detained and frisked the customers on the floor, and issued a warrant for the owner, who was jailed the next day. They then drove across town to City Lights — the shop that had already survived the Howl prosecution a decade earlier — seized Kandel’s book there as well, and took that clerk into custody too.
The timing was not accidental. The week before the seizure, Ronald Reagan had been elected governor of California on a platform that promised to break the counterculture. The raid was the promise arriving early, and the target was chosen with care: a woman writing frankly about her own pleasure was a softer defendant than a famous male publisher.
What Was Actually on the Pages
The book is a short sequence of poems celebrating sexual love from inside a woman’s experience of it, one cycle bearing the title “To Fuck with Love.” The four-letter words were the pretext. San Francisco in 1966 was not short of coarser material, most of it sold without incident by people the police never troubled, and the difference was that the coarser material did not claim to be sacred.
Kandel’s claim was exactly that. Her stated intent was theological: that when two people become close enough to be one flesh or one spirit, they cross from the human into the divine. The poems treat the body as a route to God rather than a distraction from Him, which is an old idea in most religious traditions and an intolerable one in a municipal courtroom.
The second aggravating factor was the point of view. Erotic writing was widely available in 1966 and almost all of it was written by men about what was done to women. Kandel wrote from inside a woman’s own desire, as its subject rather than its object, and she wrote about it as something to be celebrated rather than confessed. A book that assumes a woman’s pleasure requires no apology was, in that courtroom, the genuinely unprecedented item on the table.
The Defendant in Orange Stockings
The trial opened in April 1967 and became the longest municipal court proceeding the city had seen. Kandel arrived in a brilliant orange turtleneck, a burgundy jacket, and vivid orange stockings, and she read her own work aloud to the jury rather than let a lawyer paraphrase it — a decision that turned the proceeding into a reading and the jury into an audience that had not consented to be one.
Her testimony supplied the trial its permanent lines. Asked about the language, she answered that love is a four-letter word, and that the genuinely obscene words were hate, bomb, and war. Asked whether the poems were religious, she said yes — and that everyone who makes love is religious. The defence was not that the book was harmless. It was that the prosecution had the sacred and the profane the wrong way round.
Guilty, Then Not
The jury deliberated for ten hours and convicted, finding The Love Book obscene and possessed of no redeeming social value. In 1971 the verdict was overturned. By then the point had been made in both directions: the state had established that it could still drag a poet through a courtroom, and the courtroom had established that it could no longer make the charge stick.
Kandel’s response to the conviction was the finest gesture of the affair. Since the prosecution had turned an unsellable pamphlet into a bestseller, she thanked the department by assigning one percent of the book’s profits to the Police Retirement Association. It is difficult to imagine a more precise piece of criticism.
The Poet Behind the Case
Kandel was the only woman to speak from the stage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, where she read from the seized book on her thirty-fifth birthday while the case against it was still pending. That is the image the period ought to have kept of her and largely did not. She died in San Francisco on 18 October 2009, aged seventy-seven, of complications from lung cancer diagnosed two weeks earlier.
The trial did her a disservice that outlasted the acquittal. It made her a case rather than a poet, and the eight hundred words that caused it are now read almost entirely as evidence. That is the durable damage a prosecution does even when it loses: it does not suppress the book, it replaces it.
The comparison that clarifies this is Howl, prosecuted at the same counter nine years earlier. Ginsberg emerged from his trial with his reputation made and a long career in front of him, and the case became a chapter in a much larger story. Kandel emerged with a conviction, a bestseller she had not sought, and a body of work that never escaped the shadow of the six pages the police had chosen for her. The difference in outcome is not a difference in the quality of the poems. Her Collected Poems exists, and reading it is the only real remedy available.
Love is a four-letter word.
Lenore Kandel, testifying at the 1967 obscenity trial, where she named hate, bomb and war as the obscene words
Where to go next
Follow it with the Howl obscenity trial of 1957 at the same City Lights counter, and with Kandel’s Collected Poems for the writer the case obscured.
Previous: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind. Next: Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- The Forgotten Poet at the Center of San Francisco’s Longest Obscenity Trial — Bunk History
- Lenore Kandel — FoundSF
- Lenore Kandel — Wikipedia
- 50 Years Ago This Week: The Love Book Arrests — Terrie Schweitzer
- Lenore Kandel, ‘The Love Book’ author, dies — SFGate
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
