East Versus West

McGrath’s circle, which continued to meet regularly and host events throughout the 1950s, was hardly the only active group in town. The faction known as “Venice West” gained prominence as the third beatnik enclave (after North Beach and Greenwich Village) largely due to the tireless promotion of its leader, the writer – and former advertising man – Lawrence Lipton. McGrath was originally skeptical of Lipton’s poetry when he read it as an editor for California Quarterly, recalling later that he had recommended publishing some of the poems but that he “didn’t think that much of the work.” The Venice group’s lack of genuine interest in politics and increasingly debauched lifestyle also put them at odds with McGrath’s allies.

Lipton went out of his way to cultivate connections with the San Francisco beats, and officiated a 1956 reading at the headquarters of Coastlines that famously devolved into a fracas. While reciting his recently-written poem “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg was confronted by a heckler; the two argued furiously, with Ginsberg eventually stripping off his clothes to make a final point. Lipton gleefully declared in a letter to Kenneth Rexroth that “L.A. will never be the same again.”

A snapshot of this fractured Los Angeles poetry scene may be glimpsed in the Table of Contents of the summer 1957 issue of Coastlines, which leads off with the first published pieces of McGrath’s "Letter" and features poems by both Ginsberg and Corso – and also includes a scathing Mel Weisburd editorial deriding Lipton as “The Merchant of Venice.” These fissures worsened when Lipton published his 1959 book The Holy Barbarians, which introduced California’s beatniks to the mainstream, while further proving to McGrath’s group that Lipton was interested less in literature and truth than in self-promotion and sensationalism.