Remembering Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is dead at 101 -- the bard of San Francisco bohemia; the cofounder of City Lights Books (after nearly seven decades, still a great world oasis of literary freedom); the crusty defender of creativity and weirdness. I remember having lunch with Lawrence at my former watering hole, Francis Coppola’s Café Zoetrope in North Beach, where the old poet and bookseller was also a frequent diner. I was interviewing him for my book about San Francisco’s raucous history, Season of the Witch. At one point, Lawrence turned around the interview on me and began asking questions. Why the title, he asked me? I think Lawrence was more a fan of jazz than rock. I began quoting lines from Donovan’s strangely dark hit song from 1966. When he heard Donovan’s dystopic line, “Beatniks out to make it rich,” Ferlinghetti exploded.

 “We were NEVER out to make it rich!” Ferlinghetti nearly yelled at me, as we sat in a corner booth at the café sipping a Coppola red. “The Beats were always broke. Ginsberg only got some money near the end of his life when he sold all of his stuff to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.” I explained that Donovan was being ironic, that he was warning about a world turned upside down with greed. But Ferlinghetti was still in a foul mood as lunch ended.

 That’s one of the things I loved about Ferlinghetti – his toughness. That’s why San Francisco radicals like him went the distance, turning their cultural creations into beloved institutions. City Light Books has become so revered that its current operators, set up for continued success when Ferlinghetti wisely bought the landmark building, were able to raise nearly a half-million dollars from loyal customers during the Covid-19 lockdown.

 It took someone as ornery as Ferlinghetti, who was already the grownup during the Beat years, to fight for “Howl,” Ginsberg’s anthemic poem, when the poet took flight, leaving his publisher to stand trial on obscenity charges. When Ferlinghetti prevailed in the 1957 trial, it was a blow for the cultural revolution that was beginning to take shape in San Francisco.

 But even as that revolution rose into a wave at the Human Be-In, where the Beats handed the baton to a new generation of seekers, massed in Golden Gate Park on a sunny winter afternoon in January 1967, the counter-culture elders still had a healthy skepticism about the oceanic upheaval they had helped create. Looking over the teeming humanity from the stage where the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary and they had held forth, Ginsberg turned to his old friend Ferlinghetti and asked, “What if we’re wrong?”

 Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were not wrong about the hippie invasion of San Francisco in the 1960s, which led to the gay revolution of the 1970s and the creation of the “San Francisco values” embraced by progressives around the world – and reviled by Fox News and its right-wing legions.

 And Ferlinghetti was not wrong decades later when he turned against another invasion of our city, this time by the robotic hordes of the tech industry, whom he castigated as a "soulless group of people" -- a "new breed" of men and women too busy with their digital gadgetry to "be here" in the moment.

 Yes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti could be as crusty as day-old San Francisco sourdough. But his cantankerousness was always in defense of the right principles and people --  the exploited, the underdogs, the freaks who make all the beauty in the world. Until the very end, he stayed in North Beach, he painted and he wrote poems, and he sipped wine and ate pasta at neighborhood cafes.

I want to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti when I grow up.

 (That’s Ferlinghetti, far right, with Ginsberg, Dylan and poet Michael McClure outside his bookstore.)