The Art of Poetry No. 104
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
As we conducted these interviews, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was ninety-nine years old. By the time this is published, he’ll be one hundred. Simultaneous with this milestone, Doubleday is publishing his third novel, Little Boy, an autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel that his publisher would prefer were a memoir. For while his 1958 book A Coney Island of the Mind has sold over a million copies, Ferlinghetti is not simply a famous poet; he is a counterculture icon, known for his association with Beat generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and for City Lights, the bookstore/publishing house he cofounded. There are few peaks he hasn’t scaled as a public figure—talking to the New York Times is as nothing to him—but the prospect of a Paris Review interview still appealed to his sense of literary endeavor.
Born in 1919 in Yonkers, New York, Ferlinghetti grew up essentially an orphan; his father died before his birth, and his mother was committed to a psychiatric institution. He was raised by an aunt, first in Strasbourg, France, and later in Bronxville, New York, where she abandoned him to the care of her employers, the wealthy Bisland family, who sent him to boarding school. Graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1941, Ferlinghetti enrolled in the navy’s officer training school after the attack on Pearl Harbor and became the commander of a submarine chaser. He participated in the D-Day invasion and was sent to the Pacific for the proposed invasion of Japan, which was canceled after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A trip to survey the destruction at Nagasaki weeks later instilled in him a committed pacifism and planted the seeds of the revolutionary consciousness that characterizes his work both as poet and as publisher.
After the war, Ferlinghetti earned an M.A. at Columbia and a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne, both on the GI Bill. During his time in Paris, he began writing and translating poetry and also started painting, a lifelong parallel pursuit. In 1951, returning stateside, he moved to San Francisco. In 1953, he joined forces with Peter D. Martin to open the country’s first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights. In 1955, Ferlinghetti published Pictures of the Gone World, simultaneously his first book, the first City Lights book, and the first installment of the Pocket Poets series. In 1957, he was arrested and tried for obscenity for selling Pocket Poets No. 4, Howl & Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg. The ACLU’s successful defense of Ferlinghetti was one of the key battles ending literary censorship in the U.S. In addition to Little Boy, Ferlinghetti has published two previous novels and over a dozen full-length books of poetry, as well as plays, translations, travel journals, and correspondence.
Our interviews took place over several weeks in the summer of 2018, in the modest North Beach apartment Ferlinghetti has occupied since 1978. In recent years macular degeneration has destroyed his vision to the point that he can no longer read, and the once active outdoorsman has been compelled to give up long walks and bicycling around San Francisco. Yet even so, he looks nowhere near one hundred. His posture remains unbent, his grip is firm, and all attempts to persuade him to adopt a cane have been rebuffed. He continues to write, with assistance, and maintains an active social and professional life. For all his fame, he seems deficient in any aggrandized sense of self.
INTERVIEWER
You wanted to start with Paris. When were you there, nineteen forty—
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
I was in Paris on the GI Bill in the
