Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poet and publisher who founded the City Lights bookshop, epicentre of the Beat movement
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI who has died aged 101, was a poet who, as founder of the City Lights bookstore and publishing house in San Francisco, was a key player in the Beat movement. He was immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur.
City Lights, the first all-paperback bookshop in the US, was established in 1953 as a forum for political dissidence and poetic debate. It exploded into the national consciousness when Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged under the Obscenity Act for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s poem of gay sex, artistic consciousness and spirituality, “Howl”.
Vociferously supported by artists and writers arguing the First Amendment, City Lights was bankrolled through the case by the American Civil Liberties Union. In a landmark ruling, which paved the way for the publication of Henry Miller and DH Lawrence, Judge Clayton Horn observed that a work could not be deemed obscene if it had “the slightest redeeming social significance”.
The judgment opened the way to the counterculture, with San Francisco and City Lights at its epicentre. Over the next few years Ferlinghetti published all the major Beat writers and lent Kerouac the remote log cabin in – and about – which he wrote Big Sur.
But Ferlinghetti was more than a facilitator. He was a distinguished poet in his own right, his work eschewing the stream of consciousness and Buddhist karma that marked the Beat movement. Rather he focused upon everyday subjects in plain language and relied on solid technique and an awareness of literary tradition.
Although an anarchist for much of his life, he avoided polemic, and although he lacked the exuberant genius of a Ginsberg or Kerouac, his poetry maintained a consistently high quality and included the millionselling A Coney Island of the Mind (1958).
Ferlinghetti remained unaffected by his place in history: “What I really did was mind the store,” he said. “When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats.”
Lawrence Monsanto Ferling was born in Yonkers, New York, on March 24 1919; his Italian father had anglicised the name, and Lawrence later reverted to it. His father died a few months before Lawrence was born, having risen from being “a small-time shopkeeper in Little Italy to owning a real estate office on 42nd Street”.
Ferlinghetti’s mother suffered a breakdown and the boy was brought up by relatives, in France and then in New York. He attended Mount Hermon School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he became infused with a love of literature through the work of Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
In 1941 he joined the navy and took part in the Normandy landings. Under the GI Bill he took a Masters at Columbia and wrote a doctoral thesis, “The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition”, at the Sorbonne. In Paris he supported himself as a painter and met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who persuaded him, after a summer writing in Majorca, to move to San Francisco.
He settled there and immersed himself in the North Beach bohemian scene. He also tuned in to the nascent Beat movement, regularly jumping freight-trains bound for Mexico, armed with nothing but a slim volume of poetry and a clear view of the stars.
Describing himself as a “philosophical anarchist”, Ferlinghetti attended poetic and political soirées where he encountered Peter Martin. Together they founded a film magazine City Lights, working from the second floor of a building on Columbus and Broadway. Having established the Pocket Poets Series to publish the poems of Ferlinghetti and friends in affordable paperbacks, they opened City Lights bookstore beneath their office as a side venture.
In October 1955 Ferlinghetti was in the audience at the Six Gallery when Ginsberg gave the first reading of “Howl”. At its conclusion he sent the poet a note echoing Emerson’s salutation to Walt Whitman after he had received a copy of Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” adding the rider: “When do I get the manuscript?”
Its publication directly led to the obscenity trial that established City Lights’ reputation and catapulted the Beats into the international consciousness. Ferlinghetti said that he and Peter Martin were “lucky to be on the spot when it happened”.
Ferlinghetti’s own poetic debut, Pictures of a Gone World (1955), and its successor, A Coney Island Mind, which was translated into several languages, avoided linguistic pyrotechnics in favour of an evocation of a familiar world. “Constantly Risking Absurdity” was a description of his sense of the poet’s role 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.”
Even if his subject matter could be fanciful – “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning” imagined America drowned beneath a tidal wave – the focus remained upon the physical: “In Utah / Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles / … Manhattan Island swept clean in sixteen seconds …”
Over the next few decades Ferlinghetti published Beat (and other) poetry and fiction, painted, held one-man exhibitions, wrote essays and political polemic – his views softening from anarchy, for which he decided humanity was not quite yet ready, to Scandinavian-style social democracy – as well as art criticism and film reviews.
He published several novels, of which Love in the Days Of Rage (1998), concerning the Paris événements of 1968 was perhaps the best-known, several short experimental plays, collected in Routines (1964), and translated Poemi Romani, the poetry of the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom he considered “perhaps the most important Italian writer since the Second World War”.
All the while he minded the store, emerging from an office indicated by a Boulevard St Germain road sign to check that the books were in order or to deal with the ever-increasing numbers of tourists wishing to pay homage at the court of the Beats.
Ferlinghetti’s fame was assured not only through his own work and as City Lights proprietor, but by his appearance in Kerouac’s Big Sur as Lorenzo Monsanto, the confidant who urges the drunken celebrity author to retreat into nature to confront his demons – with disastrous results.
In the late 1990s he began to reprise the motifs of his earlier work. A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997) recalled A Coney Island of the Mind, while Americus: Part I (2004) was “part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic”.
In recent years he published Greet You At The Beginning Of A Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955–1997 (2015), and in 2019 a well-received autobiographical novel, Little Boy.
Ferlinghetti won numerous awards for his poetry, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was elected to the American Academy for Arts and Letters. He was recognised by his adopted city, appointed the first Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 1998 and having Price Row – an alleyway frequented by “undertakers and bootleggers” – renamed Via Ferlinghetti.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti married, in 1951, Selden Kirby-smith. They had a daughter and a son but divorced in 1976.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born March 24 1919, died February 22 2021