Lawrence Ferlinghetti Moved To His Own Beat
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was not, he said, a “Beat poet.”
But he hung around with Beats, also known as Beatniks, and he sold their books in his famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and he shared their skepticism toward contemporary culture and politics.
That was plenty for us young kids back in the late ’50s and early ’60s who were intrigued by the Beat mystique without really knowing a darn thing about it.
Ferlinghetti, who died Monday at the highly respectable age of 101, probably found that syndrome amusing. As Gertrude Stein is said to have once remarked about Ernest Hemingway, “It so flattering to have a pupil who does it without understanding it.”
We dumb kids did know what was not a Beatnik: Maynard G. Krebs, the Beatnik character on the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
We also got that Beatniks were irresistible targets for mainstream media caricature and ridicule. Dress a couple of people in black turtlenecks with a black beret, wearing shades indoors. Goatees for the guys. Put them in a dimly lit club where the entertainment is either someone reading incomprehensible poetry or a combo playing soft impenetrable jazz. Punctuate their speech with words like “Daddy-O.” Assume this was how they spent their lives, disdaining things like jobs or sunlight..
We envisioned Beats as people who looked at contemporary American culture, saw its absurdities and rejected them by creating a breakaway culture of their own. While we may not have understood it, it seemed cool.
In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like much of a blueprint for reorganizing society. But since we had no responsibility to do that, it was fun to flirt with the fantasy.
We read books like Catcher In the Rye and On the Road and ignored the fact we were dilettantes in the Beat game. Not one of my friends gave up rock ’n’ roll for bongo drums.
Anyhow, all this childhood posturing connects to Lawrence Ferlinghetti not because we knew anything about him, his artwork or his poetry, but because he was part of an actual important counterculture, years before Boomers appropriated the term.
Just read “Loud Prayer,” a reworking of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which might be Ferlinghetti’s best-known poem because his reading is included in the brilliant movie The Last Waltz.
Its last lines go like this:
And lead us not into temptation
too often on weekdays
but deliver us from evil
whose presence remains unexplained
in thy kingdom of power and glory
oh man
Ferlinghetti described himself as a wishful anarchist who recognized that anarchy would require human beings to be more uniformly generous and considerate than we are. Therefore, he downsized his wish to something potentially achievable, like democratic socialism. City Lights started an imprint that published many books on the left edge of progressive politics.
His most impressive and enduring blow against the empire was his publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” the one in which Ginsberg declared he had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness — a madness Ginsberg blamed on a culture that had abandoned its humanity. The protagonists in Catcher in the Rye and On the Road were frustrated and angry over a misguided society. Ginsberg howled with rage.
As soon as Ferlinghetti heard Ginsberg read “Howl,” at the Six Beach gallery in North Beach, Calif., in October 1955, he wanted to publish it. Once he published it, he was arrested and tried for obscenity.
He was acquitted, a landmark decision widely regarded as a precursor to a series of decisions that would unchain books like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and generally point to a much broader interpretation of the First Amendment vis-a-vis what was considered obscene or indecent.
Not everyone thought or thinks that was a good thing, but it was a victory for those who, like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, felt part of the socio-culture cancer in America was authorities telling other people what they could and could not read, hear or say.
Ferlinghetti’s own poems, paintings and other writings, which would number in the thousands over a long, active life, often touched on those matters. His most impassioned crusade was bringing all forms of artistic expression to the masses, bridging what he lamented was a great and false divide by which the likes of jazz, opera or classical music were widely perceived as speaking only to a cultural elite. When he opened City Lights he sold only paperback books, as a way of making literature more affordable to everyone.
The Beat “movement” and colleagues like Ferlinghetti eventually moved forward with the times, often becoming an element in the next wave of movements.
Kerouac became an outspoken political conservative. Ginsberg kept writing poetry and influenced his pal Bob Dylan. Ferlinghetti ran City Lights and traveled the world.
He also readily admitted he was a big fan of the San Francisco 49ers.
That came as no surprise, perhaps, because his first journalism job was writing sports for the University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel in 1941. It did illustrate that, contrary to the abstract image we young grasshoppers may have envisioned 60 years ago, folks like Lawrence Ferlinghetti didn’t spend their lives sitting in a coffeehouse sipping Espresso. As a Naval officer in World War II, Ferlinghetti was part of the Normandy Invasion. Later he witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, which led him to spend the rest of his life campaigning against war.
That campaign is a work in progress. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti saw a lot of changes over his century here — and he helped make some of them happen.
