The Departed: The Last Lighthouse

where are Whitman’s wild children,where the great voices speaking out,with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,where the great new vision,great world-view,the high prophetic song….

From “Populist Manifesto, #1” Lawrence Ferlinghetti

As Gary Snyder has affirmed, poet, painter, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti “was the biggest, clearest, most consistent supporter of radical, adventurous, experimental writing on the West Coast.” Author of many books of poetry, fiction, travel writing and translations, Ferlinghetti was a member of the Academy of American Arts and Letters and named a Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His autobiographical novel Little Boy (2019) was published two years before his recent death at one hundred and one.

His life was auspicious and eventful. Ferlinghetti was born in South Yonkers, just outside of New York City, in a small two-story gabled wood frame house situated near the crest of a hill. His beginnings were perilous: his Italian father died six months before his birth and his Sephardic Portuguese-French mother was committed to an asylum a few months after. Placed in an orphanage, he was rescued by his mother’s sister who brought him to France, so his first language was French. When, a few years later, she returned to New York, she arranged for his adoption by the family that employed her as a French tutor.

Ferlinghetti was raised in Bronxville, a wealthy suburb north of the city. In his poem “Autobiography” he recalled, with the genial warmth that pervades his work:

I was an American boyI read American Boy Magazineand became a boy scoutin the suburbsI thought I was Tom Sawyer catching crayfish in the Bronx Riverand imagining the Mississippi

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he studied journalism. Enlisting in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, he served as an officer on subchasers, escort vessels that dropped explosives on German submarines. Participating in the invasion of Normandy, he continued in the Pacific. In Writing Across the Landscape (2015), a recent book culled from diaries kept over the years, he remembered when he was the navigator on an attack transport, the USS Selinur. His ship docked in Sasebo, a few hours south of Nagasaki, Japan. With a few shipmates, he took a train to the scorched earth site of a city that had vanished “except for one teacup with bottom melted out.”

The event is presented with a minimum of detail, understated I suppose because language often becomes insufficient in the face of death and catastrophe. He sees the bombing as a “monstrous racist act” which would never have been committed had the Japanese had white skin. What is remarkable about the entry to me is not the driven nail of this judgment, but the fact that Ferlinghetti understood in 1945 that the instantaneous erasure of an entire city was something (despite the radiation exposure) that obligated a poet to bear witness. With his extensive travels in his own country, in Europe, Asia and South America, he would continue to document inequality, social injustice and political cowardice in his poems

On the G. I. Bill, he did graduate work at Columbia University, and then went to France in 1947 to study at the Sorbonne where he received a doctorate in 1951. Then, in San Francisco he began working with Peter Martin on his magazine, City Lights (named after Chaplin’s film) and where Ferlinghetti’s first translations of Jacques Prevert appeared. So he began his literary career by translating and editing a little magazine.

With Peter Martin, Ferlinghetti started a paperbound bookstore — a novel idea after the war as the book market was changing — located between North Beach and Chinatown. What began in a small one room bookstore would enable a new world of small-press alternative publishing.

Also called City Lights, it was intended as a gathering place to foster intellectual inquiry and activity. At the same time he created a publishing outlet with the same name which like Barney Rosset’s Grove Press was based on the notion that freedom of speech needed advocacy...