Free spirit
Forty years ago, already well into his 50s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti jotted a few lines into one of his travel notebooks. The writer and bookseller who would later become San Francisco’s first poet laureate was about to embark on a trip from Mexico City to the Gulf of Mexico and back, with no belongings in tow.
“Only what I can carry in my pockets,” he wrote. “The need for baggage is a form of insecurity.”
Ferlinghetti, co-founder of San Francisco’s beloved City Lights bookstore and longtime publisher of its widely influential Pocket Poets series, is a quintessential face of the city. Truly, though, he’s a citizen of the world — the Gone World, as he termed it in his first collection of poems, in 1955. At 96, he’s always been a man with an admirable lack of baggage.
In a long career that has included the publication of dozens of poetry collections and the odd novel or two, “Writing Across the Landscape” may be the closest the city’s literary trustee has come to writing an autobiography. Yet there’s scant mention of San Francisco, or even New York, where Ferlinghetti was born and raised, inspiring his best-known book, “A Coney
Island of the Mind.”
Instead, “Writing Across the Landscape” offers some highly impressionistic reportage from his life and times, from his travels in Paris, Rome and Latin America, from Seattle to New Mexico to Jacksonville, Fla. By turns, it’s a chronicle of political tourism, poetic diplomacy and the free-flowing observations of the Zen consciousness.
“I hope I at least have an open mind, but a mind not so open that the brains fall out,” as he wrote on a 1984 excursion to Nicaragua, during the Sandinista revolution.
Though he’s been a keen eyewitness to dissent on a global scale, crossing Siberia by train and noting the “soft handshake” of a much younger Fidel Castro, Ferlinghetti is at heart an advocate for the abolition of all borders and boundaries. While in Mexico in 1970, he called for “a very simple little revolution ... all national flags made into snotrags or bandages to be used in maternal hospitals,” where the mothers would be giving birth to “a new generation of babies of nothing but mixed colors and race.”
In Paris during the demonstrations of 1968, Ferlinghetti noted some of the graffiti he saw: “Be Realistic, Ask for the Impossible,” read one slogan. “I Declare the State of Permanent Happiness.” “Boredom Is Counterrevolutionary.” It would appear he has subscribed to each of those sentiments for life.
Though he has long downplayed his own association with the Beat literature that City Lights helped legitimize, Ferlinghetti was, of course, close in his own way with many of its leading figures. In his journals, he writes of his “older brother empathy” for the ill-fated Jack Kerouac, who was “just a ‘home boy’ from little ol’ Lowell and certainly no rebel.”
At a ceremonial dinner in Fiji, Ferlinghetti points out that Allen Ginsberg, a vegetarian, partook of the pig roast “so as not to offend the elders.”
“Omnivorous Allen!” he writes. “Omnivorous mind must devour everything.” And in London in 1963, visiting William Burroughs to collect the manuscript for Burroughs’ “Yage Letters” with Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti remarks on his colleague’s “subbasement” living quarters. What does he do spending all his time there? he wonders. “Just work,” Burroughs replies.
Recalling the meeting, Ferlinghetti was impressed by Burroughs’ commitment to his craft: “When he replied, ‘Just work,’ I forgot to say, ‘Why?’ ”
Some of the greatest pleasures of reading these funky, sometimes experimental travel journals come when Ferlinghetti makes no attempt to register anything more than the contents of his own mind — its lusts and longings, the sights and sounds of his “flickering little halfass projector.” In Mexico, for instance, after a bad trip in 1970, not long after the death there of Neal Cassady:
“The night had no dawn attached to it. Or dawn had a lot of night still stuck to it, still hung on it, and couldn’t get off the ground. The blackness, dark tar, pitch of night, black mescal, still stuck to everything.”
The book, edited by Giada Diano and Matt Gleeson from Ferlinghetti’s notebooks, now collected at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, features about 50 reprints of Ferlinghetti’s childlike sketches, mostly crude self-portraits and nudes. The illustrations, such as they are, might seem unnecessary, until the reader arrives at an entry from a trip to “the Roman Carnival” in the ’80s.
“I have to get a sketchbook and start doing heads,” he enthused, “nothing but heads and faces. ... Faces and hands, what a universe. No need to draw anything more.”
More than once Ferlinghetti mentions as a model Henry Miller’s “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.” (Visiting the Salton Sea, he brings along a copy of Miller’s book “in the pocket Avon edition, published by the Hearst Corporation, which is the most ludicrous irony of all.”
But his own travels — the occasional bad trip notwithstanding — tend to err on the side of optimism. “Forty-one yrs old and in my right wrong mind,” as he wrote on a train to Vermont in 1960.
More than half a century later, San Francisco can congratulate herself for sending Ferlinghetti’s “right wrong mind” out into the world.