[Landline] You must liberate!

A lost interview with visionary '60s poet Lenore Kandel has surfaced

“Come on, get used to it. Loosen up. You must liberate!”: Lenore Kandel (as quoted by Peter Berg in 2006), holding a copy of her four-poem Love Book, probably 1966 or 1967. Two San Francisco bookstore owners selling The Love Book were busted on pornography charges by the SFPD’s obscenity squad in 1966. They were convicted in 1967 after a five-week trial amidst a media frenzy; the conviction was overthrown on appeal in 1971.

Good news!

Diggers.org archivist Eric Noble has posted the text of a previously unpublished 1998 interview with Lenore Kandel.

A very small portion of this hour-plus interview, conducted by French filmmakers Alice Gaillard and Céline Deransart, was used in their documentary Les Diggers de San Francisco. The remainder of the conversation has now been transcribed and edited for clarity and is now online. (I helped with some editing.) Go here to read it: diggers.org/lenore_kandel.htm

Lenore Kandel was a visionary poet, famed author of the controversial ‘holy erotica’ ‘The Love Book,’¹ an accomplished belly dancer and folk musician, Zen practitioner, the only female speaker at the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In (which occurred on her 35th birthday), and by many accounts, a major, imaginative, persistent force within the anonymous street/park/life activists who called themselves the Diggers—and in the Haight-Ashbury scene in general—especially during the crucial 1966-1968 period.²

Kandel’s life and work were extraordinary: she was a living, vital link between the Beats and the flower children, between poets and Hells Angels, between the old world and the new, between men and women, between the mundane and the divine. She was involved in a relationship in the early ’60s with Beat poet Lew Welch (they both appear, thinly fictionalized, in Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical 1962 novel, Big Sur); published countless poems in small press magazines and chapbooks across the decade, culminating (perhaps) in the 1967 Grove Press collection, Word Alchemy (a posthumous 2012 collection of her complete poetic output, including all of The Love Book and Word Alchemy, is in print); appeared with husband/Digger/Hells Angel Bill ‘Sweet William’ Fritsch and friend Bobby Beausoleil in Kenneth Anger’s ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother‘; and, along with many other Diggers, was a featured poet at The Band’s ‘The Last Waltz’ concert.

Untreated injuries resulting from a 1970 motorcycle accident caused Lenore severe pain for the rest of her life; by the ’90s, at the tail end of which this interview was conducted, she was essentially homebound—but, as you will read, she remained intellectually alive, articulate and learned, playful and joyful.

Lenore Kandel, 1998. Screengrabs by Eric Noble from the Les Diggers interview footage.

On a personal note, I had hoped to interview Lenore regarding the Diggers in 2006 with my documentary filmmaking partners; however, when I contacted her, she was in one of her periods when she was feeling unwell. She asked me to call back. In 2009, as my partners and I began to prepare a second trip to northern California to conduct further interviews, Lenore was at the top of our list. Before I called her to schedule, I did a quick Google search, and was saddened to learn that she had passed away the previous week.

Everyone that I subsequently interviewed about the Diggers (see diggersdocs.org for a collection of my work on the subject) talked about Lenore with great fondness, especially Phyllis Wilner and Vicki Pollack. (Peter Berg and Kent Minault also shared some especially vivid memories of her brilliance.) Unfortunately, there is almost no record—in print or otherwise, that I am aware of—of Lenore herself talking at much length about the Diggers, so this precious conversation will have to do. I am very happy that Alice and Celine shared the unexpurgated footage of their interview with Lenore with Eric—and that he has now made it available to everyone.

There are so many lovely passages in this interview. Yes, I wish Lenore had talked about her own family background, Fritsch, Hells Angels, all the incredible Diggers women, Diane di Prima, Emmett Grogan, Lew Welch, and on and on—but I am so grateful for what is here. 

Lenore with her husband, Bill “Sweet William” Fritsch. Source unknown, probably 1967.

Love wins, eventually.

Fondly,

Jay Babcock

Southern Arizona

Lenore Kandel, 1967. Photograph by Don Snyder

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1. “How San Francisco tried, and failed, to ban a 6-page book about love and sex”—a 2023 retrospective SFGATE.com article by Amanda Bartlett on the whole sordid episode surrounding the San Francisco Police Department’s attempt to ban Kandel’s four-poem, 825-word Love Book via obscenity charges against two local booksellers—is thoroughly researched, masterfully composed and run through with telling, humorous detail. To wit:

Kandel sticking the “F-word” in close proximity to mentions of angels and deities was a step too far, a sacrilegious decision, in the eyes of officers Peter Maloney and Sol Weiner, who confiscated copies of the book from the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street and City Lights bookstore. They subsequently arrested the booksellers on charges of peddling obscene content; the cops also derided the book as “hard-core pornography” and sought to get it banned, believing, perhaps on a deeply personal level, that it “excited lewd thoughts.”  

And:

Kandel herself told reporters she was “really amazed” by the busts, and when they asked whether she thought any four-letter words were dirty, her response was succinct.

“Yes,” she told the Chronicle. “Bomb and hate are two of the worst. The war in Vietnam is an obscenity, my poetry isn’t.” 

And:

[A] five-week case went to trial in April 1967, just before the Summer of Love. Kandel read her book aloud to the 10-person jury and reiterated her assertion in the book that sex was a religious act. She made references to other examples of sexuality in religious texts, noting, “I do not feel the nature of man could be anything but religious,” she said. “The body is the temple and a man and woman joining together in love transcends beyond what is the body to the divinity of the holy spirit.”

And:

Kandel was asked by Assistant District Attorney Frank Shaw to break down each poem line by line and explain what they meant. The Examiner reported that Shaw became “visibly irritated” by some of Kandel’s answers, particularly when he asked if her use of the word “fuck” was a noun or a verb. 

Her response was that it could be both. He asked if that violated rules of grammar. “Poets,” she responded, “are not restricted to grammar.” 

And:

Not everyone saw eye to eye with Kandel. … Gail Potter, a freelance writer and former teacher at Dominican and Golden Gate colleges, who also served as a prosecution witness, said of the book: “I would enjoy seeing it burned. Even if it were burned I believe the fumes would pollute the air.” 

Bartlett links to the Bay Area Television Archive, which features gorgeously restored contemporary TV news footage from the episode, some of it astonishing. My favorite moment is when a defense lawyer for the defendants is asked by a journalist how far he is willing to go to appeal the obscenity verdict returned by the jury after a five-week trial. After a short pause, he replies, “To the cosmic court, you might say, if that’s beyond the state or federal supreme court. All the way.”

2. Eric Noble argues that it is Lenore’s repeated, public, fervent use of “Love” that gave the “Love Generation” its name… I don’t know if I’m persuaded on that count (yet), but it seems possible.