Key texts
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth
"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg
Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Paintings by JMW Turner
Ginsberg's opening line - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked" - is one of the best-known in modern poetry. It gave a celebratory start to what became the counter-culture. But the poem's ecstatic exploration of gay sex, art and spirituality inevitably drew the ire of the establishment. Before publication Ferlinghetti had given a manuscript to the American Civil Liberties Union asking them for support if he was prosecuted. The ACLU agreed. When a batch of books was seized by US Customs he was arrested for importing obscene literature. "They had been printed in England because it was much cheaper and much better quality. But when they grabbed them, we were ready."
The subsequent trial attracted attention from all over the world. It ended when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that a work could not be deemed obscene if it had "the slightest redeeming social significance". The decision enabled the publication in America of works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropics books, and while Ferlinghetti says there were several more trials about other books, "our judgement, even though it had been made in a local municipal court, stood up. And we never took the book out of the [City Lights] window throughout the trial."
Half a century on, Ferlinghetti, now 87, remains a formidable and influential figure on the literary and artistic scene in San Francisco and nationally in the US. His office at City Lights is marked with a blue Parisian street sign saying Place St-Germain-des-Prés and he can be seen there most days, wheezily rearranging the chairs or making sure the books are properly displayed on the shelves.
His own career as a poet began with publication of Pictures of the Gone World in 1955. His 1958 collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, has sold over a million copies, with the poem "Constantly Risking Absurdity" a defining explanation of the role of the poet in that era: "Constantly risking absurdity / and death / whenever he performs / above the heads / of his audience / the poet like an acrobat / climbs on rime / to a high wire of his own making". In 1994 Price Row, a San Francisco alley, was renamed Via Ferlinghetti (it was "a former haunt of undertakers and bootleggers" he noted at the dedication ceremony) and in 1998 he was named as the city's first poet laureate. Late last year he was given a lifetime achievement award by the American National Book Foundation. Alongside his literary life Ferlinghetti has remained politically engaged - particularly around anti-war and freedom of speech issues - as well as maintaining a career as a respected painter. His MA was on Turner and he has exhibited work he describes as "wavering between the pure figurative and emotive expressionism" all over the world.
He was born in Yonkers, New York in 1919. His father was from northern Italy and his mother was a French-Portuguese Sephardic Jew. "They met in a boarding house on Coney Island. It is such a typically American story." His father died of a heart attack a few months before Lawrence was born and he says his four elder brothers described his father's early years in America as "something out of The Godfather II; he went from being a small-time shopkeeper in Little Italy to owning a real estate office on 42nd St. I'm told he wore a white suit and was always given good tables in restaurants."
After his father's death his mother, then aged 42, had a breakdown. Ferlinghetti was informally adopted by a French aunt who took him to France until he was five, where he learned French before English. When they returned to America his aunt "disappeared" and another relative brought him up in New York before he was sent to a boarding school in New England founded by missionary evangelists for their children. "We worked the school farm," he recalls. "Got up at five in the morning and milked cows. It was very strict, academically very good and in my last couple of years I got interested in writing and literature. I had a room- mate who carried round the Sun Also Rises in one pocket and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel in the other. They were sort of his Bibles and they, especially the Wolfe, became mine."
Ferlinghetti went to Chapel Hill University in North Carolina - where Wolfe had set Look Homeward, Angel - until in 1941, four months before Pearl Harbour, he joined the navy. "I was totally politically unconscious. On the east coast no one had even heard of a conscientious objector. The only socially acceptable thing to do in 1941 was to join up." He took part in the first morning of the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and ended up commanding a 110-foot wooden sub-chaser. "Any smaller than us you weren't a ship, you were a boat. But we could order anything a battleship could order so we got an entire set of the Modern Library. We had all the classics stacked everywhere all over the ship, including the john. We also got a lot of medicinal brandy the same way."
After the war he undertook post-graduate work at Columbia and the Sorbonne before moving to San Francisco in 1951, having met Kenneth Rexroth in Paris. "It was only then I began to get a political education, mostly through Rexroth who was the most important literary critic and political commentator out there. He called himself a 'philosophical anarchist' and wrote a weekly column in the old Saturday Review of Literature." Rexroth held weekly "soirées" where Ferlinghetti met the local anarchist and poetic community. "North Beach in those days, the area around City Lights bookshop, was about 90 per cent Italian with half pro-Mussolini and the other half anarchists. We used to sell two Italian anarchist newspapers here at the store. Rexroth was at the centre of all this."
By this time, he says, he very much wanted to be a writer, "although not necessarily a poet". At the Sorbonne he had attempted to write a novel - "imitation Thomas Wolfe that happily was never published" - but by the time he got to San Francisco he had spent a summer living on Majorca writing poetry. "Between 1948 and 1950 I was so influenced by TS Eliot and Ezra Pound that I had to put their books out of the house to stop myself imitating them."
His own poetry is self-consciously anti-elitist and uses everyday subject matter and language while also relying on solid technique and an appreciation of tradition. "My poetics are totally different to something like the Ginsberg school, which is based on the idea of 'first thought, best thought'. It is a solid concept to get the most direct transcription of your consciousness, especially if the person doing it has an original mind. Allen Ginsberg had a fascinating and genius mind and so the poetry is fascinating and genius. But when this method is laid on to thousands of students, many of whom don't have original minds, you get acres of boring poetry." He also notes, as Ginsberg's editor from 1955-85, that "Howl", and much else of Ginsberg's work, was painstakingly revised before publication.
When Ferlinghetti arrived on the West Coast there was already a literary ferment that became known as the San Francisco renaissance. "After the war it felt as if the nation had tilted west. But it wasn't until the early 1950s that there was any cultural evidence of this shift. But when all the new elements of the post-war culture came together, that's when the first Beat poets showed up in San Francisco." Peter Martin and he "were lucky to be on the spot when it happened" when they opened City Lights in 1953. "And as we weren't sound asleep we also recognised it as something important."
In the decades since then City Lights has become a national institution and Ferlinghetti has gone on to produce criticism, fiction and drama as well as paintings and 15 volumes of poetry including A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), his companion collection 40 years after A Coney Island of the Mind. In recent years, he says, he has been most occupied with Italian literature and has been translating Pasolini - "a poet before he was a filmmaker and now increasingly recognised as perhaps the most important Italian writer since the second world war".
He says San Francisco in the early 50s seemed to consider itself almost an island. "It felt cut off even though it is a peninsula. But now it's just like everywhere else, in that it has become immersed in the corporate monoculture. And the political situation now seems worse than ever. Looking back, people like Nixon and even Eisenhower look almost like angels. Bush and his gang are destroying American democracy".
But Ferlinghetti still has some faith in the artist's role to both reflect and change the world, although, despite being so closely associated with Ginsberg and then Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs and the other Beat writers, he says he never considered himself a Beat. "The movement became public very quickly. Life magazine ran a headline saying 'The Only Revolution Around' and it's never stopped. There is even someone in San Francisco trying to start a Beat museum, but I'm keeping well away because I think there's been more than enough commercialisation.
"In some ways what I really did was mind the store. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats."
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