The Beat goes on

IN 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and publisher at a tiny storefront called City Lights Books, was ordered into the Hall of Justice here on obscenity charges after police officers from the juvenile department turned him in for selling a slender volume, “Howl and Other Poems,” by an obscure poet named Allen Ginsberg.

In a decision that surprised authorities and delighted Ferlinghetti, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that a work could not be deemed obscene if it had “redeeming social significance.” The legal precedent paved the way for the U.S. publication of a raft of contemporary classics, from “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” to “Naked Lunch” and “Tropic of Cancer”; Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” ushered in the American counterculture.

Today this cultural icon -- Ferlinghetti, at 86, is a rangy, 6-foot, vigorous-looking presence -- sits in his upstairs office at City Lights, explaining his mixed feelings about accepting a lifetime achievement award tonight in New York from the National Book Foundation when so many Beat poets were passed over by the literary establishment. Not that Ferlinghetti is eager to join.

“Allen Ginsberg was a major force in American poetry and he never got much recognition from the literary establishment. He never got a Pulitzer, he never got a Nobel Prize,” Ferlinghetti said, lounging in blue jeans and a black sweater against a wall of windows with a sweeping sunset view of cafes, bars and glowing strip-joint lights in North Beach.

“I think it’s an honor, but I still consider myself a dissident,” he said, his arresting blue eyes gazing brightly from a kind and surprisingly smooth-skinned face.

Ferlinghetti is one of the last living poets of the Beat generation. He was San Francisco’s first poet laureate. When he becomes the first recipient, in New York, of the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, he will be honored for something for which he himself takes pride: his 50 years as anchor of the hole-in-the-wall Beat bookstore that helped reshape the language of American modernism.

Ferlinghetti still works at City Lights. He just co-translated a book of poetry by the late Pier Paolo Pasolini. He rides his bike to work every day from the small apartment near Washington Square Park where Ferlinghetti, who divorced in 1970, lives alone, though he’s talking about getting another dog to replace his beloved late companion, Pooch.

He still paints, at his studio in a shipyard at Hunter’s Point. On his wall at home, his painting “The Death of Neal Cassady at San Miguel de Allende” alludes to wilder days, when hard-living Beats were fueled by drugs, alcohol and mind-expanding travels.

In this world, Ferlinghetti is a celebrity. Strangers recognize him on the street and stop to talk to him. There is a Via Ferlinghetti near Cafe Trieste. City Lights is an official city landmark, bordered by an alleyway called Jack Kerouac Lane.

“I keep telling people I wasn’t a member of the original Beat generation,” Ferlinghetti said. “I was sort of the guy tending the store.”

This from a guy whose praised poetry collection “A Coney Island of the Mind” has sold a million copies, and keeps on selling.

“My poetry had a very different aesthetic,” he insisted. “The Jack Kerouac school of disembodied poetics is ‘first thought, best thought,’ where you write down the first thing that comes to mind, to get close to the essential being of yourself,” Ferlinghetti said, referring to the author of “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums.”

“My poems were not written that way,” he said. “I think it can sometimes be ‘first thought, worst thought,’ unless you have an original genius mind like Allen Ginsberg and everything that comes out of that mind is interesting.” With less original minds, he said, the method produces “acres and acres of boring poetry.”

Ferlinghetti came by his original mind the old-fashioned way, through a Dickensian childhood. It began in South Yonkers, N.Y. By his account: He was the fifth son of an Italian-born father, who died before he was born, and a mother of Caribbean Sephardic lineage who suffered a post-partum breakdown so severe that the week-old Ferlinghetti was handed to a French aunt.

He lived with his aunt in France, then spent his sixth year in a Chappaqua orphanage, until his aunt found a job as a live-in governess for a member of the family that founded Sarah Lawrence College. They lived in the servant’s quarters until his aunt left the house and never returned. He later heard she died in a mental institution.

Ferlinghetti resided with his aunt’s employers until he went to college and the Navy. He got a literature doctorate from the Sorbonne on the GI Bill and moved to San Francisco at 32.

The Bay Area was filling up in those days. There were World War II veterans who didn’t want to go back to Texas or Tennessee. Black Americans who left the South for wartime shipyard jobs. Interracial military couples who sought camouflage in a multiethnic society.

“There was a whole historical and social mix in flux in the 1940s and ‘50s,” Ferlinghetti said. “It took 10 years for it to really coalesce into the new culture. That was really the beginning of the hippie movement.”

The core Beat movement -- Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg -- began to drift from New York to the West, to flirt with Buddhism, Big Sur and mind-bending experiences. Ferlinghetti credits Kerouac with popularizing the Beat name with his rap about living beatifically, “not really in a religious sense, but more in the sense of having a free spirit and having a sort of visionary consciousness.”

Ferlinghetti founded City Lights in 1953 with Paul Martin, the son of an assassinated Italian anarchist and editor. He discovered its first significant work in October 1955, when he went to the Six Gallery to see Ginsberg read his incendiary poem “Howl,” an existential rant that opens with the line: “I saw the best minds of my generation....”

City Lights published “Howl” in November 1956, in a tiny paperback edition. But it was a ticking time bomb.

“American poetry until then was very academic,” Ferlinghetti said. “It was ruled by literary journals. It was pretty tame poetry. [‘Howl’] was a little like the rock revolution. ‘Howl’ was a turning point.”

Authorities heard the explosion. In June 1957, police officers from the juvenile department, apparently moonlighting as literary critics, arrested City Lights’ manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, for selling “Howl.” Charges against Murao, a Japanese American who endured an Idaho internment camp for two years during World War II, were dropped.

But Ferlinghetti and the bookstore were prosecuted. The American Civil Liberties Union defended him, and City Lights unrepentantly sold “Howl” throughout the trial.

When the judge ruled in their favor, “the floodgates were opened,” Ferlinghetti said.

“When you have a trial like that you get a lot of notoriety that really puts the poet and the bookstore on the map,” he said. “It was just what we needed.”

San Francisco hosted a Beat renaissance, nourished by such poets as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. There were female Beats as well: Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, Joan Vollmer and Diane di Prima, whom Ginsberg proclaimed “a great woman poet” -- language that would eventually be viewed as a reflection of Beat sexism and misogyny.

“I felt that Allen was really afraid of women, probably going back to his childhood experiences with his mother, who was in and out of mental institutions,” Ferlinghetti said. “Allen tended to look through women.”

It was a raucous fraternity. Gregory Corso once broke into City Lights and plundered the cash register, something Ferlinghetti chose to interpret as an advance on royalties. Burroughs became a junkie, married Joan Vollmer and killed her in a drunken re-enactment of the William Tell story in Mexico City in 1951, trying to shoot an apple off her head, that was ruled an accident. Cassady’s south-of-the-border sojourn ended with his death in San Miguel de Allende in 1968.

Ferlinghetti, too, dove into the ‘60s, reading poetry between Jefferson Airplane sets at the Fillmore. He smoked marijuana, tried LSD a few times, but “I didn’t want to take any of the harder stuff. I didn’t want to punish my mind and body like that,” he said.

Besides, he was running a business, and in that milieu, his stability was an element of his genius.

“A lot of his contribution was the store itself. Larry provided a place where people could come together, and he took on the court cases,” said his fellow Beat poet Di Prima. “He is a unique individual who provided the opportunity for people to express their feelings.”

The Beat generation, she said, “opened people’s eyes to the amazing and difficult culture that America is. It’s because of this populist approach that people like Ginsberg didn’t get more awards, but their message reaches the people they need to reach. What do awards mean? There’s no answer to that. I say, yeah! Go Larry go.”

Ferlinghetti is still a quiet firebrand. He’s repelled by the growth of consumer culture. Since 9/11, he says, “civil rights are more threatened than ever before.” As he watches the Valerie Plame affair, he thinks: “Why not indict Bush for a major crime -- lying about the weapons of mass destruction?” His great regret, he said, is that he did not remain married. His ex-wife lives in Bolinas, in Marin County, near his son and two grandchildren. His daughter, Julie, lives in Nashville with her husband and their child. Ferlinghetti will spend Thanksgiving there. “If I had stayed married, I might have had a more settled life,” he says.

His true home, according to his friends, is City Lights. The bookstore operations are mostly run by City Lights publisher and co-owner Nancy Peters, the widow of poet Philip Lamantia. It has never been very profitable, so they are creating a foundation to make sure its legacy lives on.

Where does the Beat legacy live on? Ferlinghetti sees it everywhere, disseminated in popular speech, in contemporary ideas, in modern music and prose.

Today, “poetry is more or less restricted to poetry journals,” he said. “I think the real poetry today is with music. Bob Dylan was a real poet. There’s the poetry of folk singers, bluegrass and country-western. Rap poets are more alienated from society than the Beat poets ever were, and they have a lot to say. That’s where the poetry is that isn’t sidelined today.”

Not that he has ever felt sidelined in the creative counterculture.

“The dominant culture of technology and big business and big government is not the important lasting culture of our civilization,” Ferlinghetti said. “The important culture of our civilization is the literary and artistic and intellectual culture. That’s the mainstream, and I’m proud to be part of that.”