Literary San Francisco by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy J. Peters (review)

264 Western American Literature Shakespeare, Jesus, and Homer. But the real homecoming, described in “The Journey’s End,” occurred when he was totally alone. One day while exploring the Gorge he lost his map. “At first I am sorry, for on these trips I have always kept it with me.” (p. 265) But with the lost map comes a discovery, a highly symbolic event, “the culmination, the final insight” — namely, the cleansing, freeing vision of creation itself. “It is a great Work. It is a great Work.” (p. 262) Creation is Berry’s theme. The clue is connection, wholeness, health, holiness, never as an order we impose but one within creation itself, an order sustained by its various parts and energies. His theme, although simply stated, is nevertheless complex, extending not only to the predictable lyricism of the natural world where days are full of sabbaths and where flowers resemble “Easter gone wild.” (p. 226). Berry also finds analogies of order and wholeness in memory (the dynamic within consciousness), especially in the richness of his childhood, now given resonance that only time and growth and wisdom can supply. Moreover, wholeness embraces human relationships (his ideas concerning marriage and fidelity make profound sense). Urgent as these topics are, Berry’s most frequent subject is the earth itself. Much can be reviewed here; let his own summation suffice: “There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth.” (p. 304) Throughout the book runs a counter theme — frightening, deadly, and always present — “the diseases of the disconnected parts.” (p. 286) Symp­ toms are everywhere: consumerism, strip mining, “progress,” the Pentagon, “sexual capitalism” (ownership and exploitation), divorce, television, tech­ nology, et cetera. Berry trembles at human behavior. We share his fears. Ecological justice is always done, though not necessarily to those who deserve it. Berry thinks that with such justice we need no other to bring about our end. HAROLD P. SIMONSON University of Washington Literary San Francisco. By Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters. (San Francisco: City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 1980. 254 pages, $15.95; paper, $9.95.) Two associates at San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore collaborate here on a brief, extensively illustrated (in black-and-white) historical survey of literary life in San Francisco — as the sub-title has it, “A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day.” Labors are divided: Peters is Reviews 265 responsible for coverage up to 1910, and for the brief Epilogue; Ferlinghetti deals with “The Twentieth Century” and furnishes a three-page Introduc­ tion. Peters approaches her tasks as the writing of (informal) history; Ferlinghetti, dealing chiefly with his own time, relies more heavily upon his personal observation and experience, though he writes with an objectivity which occasionally surprises me. The format is large (8 5/2” by 11”), the work is at least 70% illustration, and treatments of the separate topics are seldom more than a page in length. Yet Literary San Francisco avoids being simply a “coffee-table book.” The verbal vignettes are incisively written and the selection of subjects well-considered. Peters can become a trifle “gee-whiz,” which is probably inevitable with some of her semi-legendary, highly colored subject matter. The illustrations chosen are not, I think, particularly rare, but they are apt, representative, and, above all, interesting. Some of the figures treated have at best a tenu­ ous connection with what many readers may think of as “literature,” and a sizeable number reflect the author’s social conscience more strongly than her subject’s literary influence and value. Take, for example, her two pages on John Rollin Ridge, half-white grandson of a Cherokee chieftain, who constructed a fictional history of persecution and oppression for “Joaquin Murrieta,” who may never have existed. But well-written portraits are here of both better- and lesser-known figures, from Dana to Bierce. Anyone interested in the 19th-century West will find much to appreciate in Peters’s work. Turning to Ferlinghetti is hardly “entering another world,” though some of us who grew up in the relatively quiet, tolerant, outwardly staid, yet busy San Francisco between the Wars may find Ferlinghetti’s San...