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NY Times, March 22, 2019
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Celebrates His 100th Birthday With a Novel
By Robert Pinsky
LITTLE BOY
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
179 pp. Doubleday. $24.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday on March 24 with the
publication of “Little Boy,” his life story told in flashes and arias.
No one’s biography has more completely or ardently embodied the visions
and contradictions, the achievements and calamities, the social mobility
and social animosities, of that life span.
Poet, retail entrepreneur, social critic, publisher, combat veteran,
pacifist, poor boy, privileged boy, outspoken socialist and successful
capitalist, with roots in the East Coast and the West Coast (as well as
Paris), Ferlinghetti has not just survived for a century: He epitomizes
the American culture of that century.
Specifically, he has been a unique protagonist in a national drama: the
American struggle to imagine a democratic culture. How does the ideal of
social mobility affect notions of high and low, Europe and the New
World, tradition and progress? That struggle of imagination underlies
the art of Walt Whitman and Duke Ellington, Emily Dickinson and Buster
Keaton. It also underlies a range of American issues, from the
segregation of public schools to the reality of human-caused climate
change. Those political issues involve our interbreeding of the highbrow
and the vulgarian in a supercharged process whose complexities defy
simplifying terms like “culture wars.”
As to social mobility, the opening pages of “Little Boy” range from a
Chappaqua orphanage to prep school at Mount Hermon; from malnutrition to
luxury. He lived with his Tante Emilie on the Upper West Side and in
Strasbourg (French was the little boy’s first language) and then in a
Bronxville mansion where Emilie for a spell became the governess. After
his graduation from the University of North Carolina, Ferlinghetti
commanded a submarine chaser in the Normandy landings, then “went to the
Pacific as a navigator … and saw Nagasaki seven weeks after the second
bomb was dropped and saw the landscape of hell and became an instant
pacifist.”
Is Ferlinghetti’s career as an influential, best-selling poet a story of
high culture or of popular culture? Is his City Lights, as bookstore and
publisher, a San Francisco tourist trap? Or is City Lights a literary,
moral and legal shrine that not only published Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch
Poems” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems” but in a 1957 court
case established First Amendment principles that transformed American
life? The store’s North Beach location has been designated an “official”
San Francisco landmark. Is that a funny contradiction in terms? Or a
triumph? The answer to all these questions is, emphatically, yes — all
of the above.
The cover of “Little Boy” bears the label “A Novel” — not a matter of
literary form so much as an assertion of the autobiographer’s right to
invent, embellish and creatively misremember. The book begins with a few
dozen pages of engaging narrative of a conventional kind: ancestry
(including a strand of Sephardic immigrants to the Virgin Islands and
other lines that are Danish and French, thus Tante Emilie) and childhood
anecdote. That linear setup gradually sublimates into long, lyrical
sentences of freewheeling associations: the verbal riffs of a good
talker. Readers hoping for reminiscences of Beat figures like Ginsberg
(“Ginzy”) and Jack Kerouac (“Ti-Jean”) may be disappointed. Ferlinghetti
approaches writers and writing in a more sweeping, lofty way, as in his
vision of Ginsberg “arm in arm” with “the other great writers and poets
and great articulators of consciousness,” a procession that includes
Shakespeare, Tolstoy, “sexy tragi-romantic Vincent Millay and Dylan
Thomas sweet singer.”
Above all, Ferlinghetti is literary in the American way of his
generation, with the appealing old-fashioned enthusiasm of an autodidact
(despite his M.A. from Columbia). As a child, he thrilled to “Horatius
at the Bridge” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He even calls
Shakespeare “the bard of Avon” and notes that the Cantos of “Old Ez”
Pound “couldn’t possibly be sung.” He also admires and mocks “old Tea
Ass Eliot.” The mingled derision and awe, doubt and aspiration come from
that underlying cultural duality of high and low.
Ferlinghetti’s vastly influential first book of poems, “A Coney Island
of the Mind,” echoes that doubleness in its very title: In this corner,
the Mind with a capital M; and in the other corner, Brooklyn’s
thrilling, low-class amusement park. The book’s first poem, which so
many of us read as enthralled teenagers, begins with a great European
artist whose name is the second word: “In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem
to see / the people of the world / exactly at the moment when / they
first attained the title of / ‘suffering humanity.’”
We generations affected by Ferlinghetti’s book (over a million copies
sold) may never have seen a Goya image, but we could intuit that name’s
resonance with the poem’s closing phrases:
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
and the “strange license plates / and engines / that devour America.” I
know the limitations of this writing, but can you dare say you’ve
outgrown a poem if you’re gratefully indebted to it?
Goya and the billboards and the story of “Little Boy” echo a great
national question. From the sublime mass-art works of Buster Keaton, now
preserved in university archives, through the ebullient logic of
classical music in “Looney Tunes,” to the absurdity of a president
rising from a dumb “reality” TV show, from Coney Island to the Mind:
Who, little boys and girls, juvenile yet old, do we think we are?
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