The Beat Goes On
News: City Lights and San Francisco have changed a lot in the last 50 years, but Lawrence Ferlinghetti's corner bookstore is still the coolest room in town.
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One Saturday morning in June 1953, a poet and painter named Lawrence Ferlinghetti drove up Columbus Avenue in San Francisco's bohemian North Beach neighborhood. As he approached the intersection with Broadway, he saw a man putting up a sign that read "City Lights Pocket Bookshop" on the tiny storefront at 261 Columbus. Ferlinghetti had previously submitted translations of some French poems to a magazine of that name, and perhaps that made him stop. In any case, he pulled over and began to talk with the man, who turned out to be Peter D. Martin, a sociology instructor at San Francisco State and the editor of the magazine, which he published from a small loft above the store space.
Fifty years later, Ferlinghetti sits in his pleasantly cluttered office above the store and recalls the moment that changed his life -- and the history of American bookselling and poetry, among other things: "We were talking on the street there, and he said that he wanted to start an all-paperback bookstore to support the magazine, but he didn't have enough money to start it. He said, 'I've only got $500.' And I said, 'Well, I've got $500 also' -- and he said okay. [The idea of an all-paperback store] was a brilliant idea and it was Pete's idea. Because there was no such thing at the time. Paperback books weren't considered real books by the book trade."
A half-century later, the store has prospered and expanded up the block almost to Broadway, but it is still the coolest room in San Francisco. It is a place where signs urge "Have a seat and read a book" at the café-style tables scattered around, where vintage photos of Lord Buckley or the poet Gregory Corso crop up in odd corners, where the slogans of a long-ago tenant, a Holy Roller church, adorn the basement walls: "I am the Door" is visible, while bookcases largely obscure the motto "Born in Sin, Shaped in Iniquity." The original triangular space contains the checkout desk, art books, and surrealist literature. The big room once occupied by the Fratelli Forte travel agency next door now holds fiction, while the next room down specializes in fiction from the non-Western world -- Tariq Ali's Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, Dai Sijie, and V.S. Naipaul. A rack in an alcove displays literary magazines you'll never find in a Barnes & Noble, like Slouch, the Cherotic [r]Evolutionary, and the Rejected Quarterly (Fine Literature Rejected at Least Five Times). The upstairs room stocks the best collection of poetry in America. The basement covers a fabulous range of nonfiction, including a section called "Commodity Aesthetics" -- semiotics, literary theory, and the like. There is nuance here, subtlety and feeling. In short, the joint's (still) got soul.
Though City Lights was Martin's idea, it wasn't long before he moved on; it would be Ferlinghetti who would make City Lights the model, really, for what a bookstore should be. Ferlinghetti had been born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, orphaned early, and raised by relatives and foster parents. A love for Thomas Wolfe took him to the University of North Carolina, and he eventually completed a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne before giving up on the academic world. He served as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II, commanding a ship at the invasion of Normandy. Sent to Japan, he made a pilgrimage to Nagasaki six weeks after the atomic destruction of the city. The sight profoundly radicalized him, and he shifted from his Eagle Scout/All-American childhood roots to an independent anarchist/peacenik outlook that proved to be a perfect fit with the zeitgeist of San Francisco.
From the very beginning, City Lights resonated with the fundamental attitude that defines its home city. Ferlinghetti's first impression was that the locals "had a kind of island mentality, considering themselves San Franciscans first, on an island which wasn't necessarily part of the United States." Indeed, the authentic San Francisco mindset is not merely politically liberal but insouciant, fond of eccentricity and good living. One of Ferlinghetti's mentors, the poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth, a leading member of the "San Francisco Poetry Renaissance" of the 1940s, noted that San Francisco, unlike every other American city, had been founded not by merchants but by romantic failures from the rest of the world who had converged on Northern California after 1848 in pursuit of gold. Along with more conventional traits like a distinguished opera, greedy developers, and a police department that protects its own, San Francisco has a legacy that cherishes lunacy, frequently of a left-wing nature. Iconoclasm in literature goes back in the city at least to Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. In the 1930s, a general strike led by dockworker union leader Harry Bridges made him a folk hero in large parts of the city, while in the '40s, newly liberated World War II conscientious objectors established the radical radio station KPFA across the bay in Berkeley.
San Francisco is not really a city, but an extremely hip small town, a collection of villages/neighborhoods of which North Beach was and is the most European. In 1953, it was home to a thriving working-class Italian enclave -- restaurants, coffeehouses, bars, delicatessens, bakeries, and stores selling lots of good, inexpensive red wine -- that centered on a charming green called Washington Square Park, which lay in front of the giant church of Saints Peter and Paul. Despite the Roman Catholic overtones, North Beach exuded a relaxed and civilized ambience that Rexroth called dolce far niente -- roughly translated, "carefree idleness." The tolerant atmosphere and the low rents made it a natural destination for bohemians, and it was a perfect home for the bookstore.
City Lights provided not only literature but a sense of community. "Right from the beginning," says Ferlinghetti, "we had the slogan, ‘A Literary Meeting Place.' Later on we added ‘Since 1953.'" After his long sojourns in Parisian bookshops, where one could hang out and read undisturbed for hours, the hovering, intrusive clerks in American shops appalled Ferlinghetti. "I always thought it was funny that they'd ask somebody if they needed help to read. ... And there was no place where you could sit down."
City Lights was a club, but without a velvet rope; the founders made it look and feel like a café, and the welcoming maître d' for the first 20 years was an early employee and later part owner, Shigeyoshi Murao, known to all as "Shig." "He was a great bookman," says Ferlinghetti. "He used to put on the customers. He had one of those wooden eggbeaters from Chinatown, a stick with a bulb at the end. ... He'd be fiddling with it at the counter, someone would come in and ask, ‘What's that you've got?' And Shig would say, very seriously, ‘It's a Tibetan prayer wheel.'"
From the beginning, City Lights had style and plenty of customers, in part because it was the first bookstore in local memory that stayed open late and on weekends -- seven days 'til midnight. After his time in Paris, Ferlinghetti had found the all-paperback concept perfectly normal -- Hachette and Gallimard had been printing paperbacks for years -- and by 1955 he wanted, also in the European style, to build on their success and publish books as well as sell them. He began the "Pocket Poets" series with his own Pictures of the Gone World in 1955, but it was another poet's work that catapulted City Lights Publishers into the stratosphere. That fall, a young New Yorker named Allen Ginsberg came to Ferlinghetti with some poems; Lawrence was impressed, but lacked the money to put out a book. Then on October 7, six local poets read at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. One of them was Ginsberg, and for the first time in public, he read his volcanic new poem, "Howl." It was a transcendent evening. Echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Ferlinghetti telegraphed Ginsberg that night: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do we get the manuscript?"
"Howl" was a revolutionary poem, and its second printing, run off in England, was seized by a zealous U.S. customs agent named Chester McPhee, who declared it obscene. When McPhee, the best publicist American poetry has ever had, was overruled by his superiors, the juvenile division of the San Francisco Police Department took up the cause of civic decency and arrested Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao. Their trial in the summer of 1957 would prove critical to the history of both American poetry and American censorship. Though Ferlinghetti was personally inclined toward shyness, his politics as well as simple survival instincts demanded that he fight back, and San Francisco and its literary community -- including the book review editors of both major local papers -- rallied behind him, as did the national poetry world. Barney Rosset and Donald Allen of the Evergreen Review, Robert Duncan, and James Laughlin of the important poetry publisher New Directions Press, all voiced their support. And on October 3, 1957, Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn issued an emphatic defense of the poem, ruling that it had "redeeming social importance" and so could not be considered obscene.
As he looks back on it, Ferlinghetti is characteristically modest. "There was really nothing courageous about it. It just happened, and we were this little two-bit bookstore, and thank God for the ACLU -- we would have been out of business without them. ... We kept Howl in the window all during the trial. It wasn't heroic or anything; it was just -- we were trying to make it through." Howl went on to become a best-seller (by 2003, about 1 million copies had been sold), establishing City Lights Publishers as one of the nation's essential outlets for poetry and literature; over the next 50 years, Ferlinghetti and his eventual business partner and co-publisher, Nancy Peters, would put out Rexroth, Patchen, William Carlos Williams, Corso, Yevtushenko, Lamantia, Picasso, Bly, Bukowski, Burroughs, Cocteau, García Lorca, and Sam Shepard, among many others. The list is staggering.
And for the next half-century, every literate kid in America would know that when Baltimore or Cleveland or Framingham got too suffocating, it was time to head to San Francisco, where there'd be magic -- poetry and mind-altering books that would invoke ideas that just didn't seem all that available in Ohio. Or Texas: Janis Joplin read Jack Kerouac's On the Road -- he was of course Ginsberg's and Ferlinghetti's literary cohort -- and headed for San Francisco to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Beat poets Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure, among others, became the wise elders of the hippie music scene of the '60s, reading poetry in between the rock bands at the landmark Golden Gate Park "Human Be-In" in January 1967. Even more important, early in the '60s City Lights published Ferlinghetti's, David Meltzer's, and McClure's Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a critical document in the intellectual history of the environmental movement that germinated in that era.
In the '70s, San Francisco became the mecca of the emerging public gay culture. City Lights had prefigured much of that development, carrying the earliest gay and lesbian publications. The store's anarchist streak has also ensured that whatever develops in street and punk culture in the future will, if it has any remote connection to words, likely be found at City Lights.
It isn't all Ferlinghetti, of course -- "I don't run the store," he protests. "I have 16 friends that are running it." It is indeed a terrific staff; the chief book buyer, Paul Yamazaki, enjoys a reputation as one of the finest bookmen in the country.
City Lights endures; it even triumphs. It is, says Neal Sofman, owner of the distinguished San Francisco bookstore A Clean Well-Lighted Place, "the most famous bookstore in the world." And that worldliness has brought great change. The fame of the Beats brought '50s tourists seeking a thrill -- "Look! Beatniks! Maybe they'll offer us some tea [marijuana]!" -- to North Beach, and now, long after the Beats have fled, the city of San Francisco as a whole has become overwhelmingly dependent on tourist dollars, a little hollow at the center. More important, the essence of bohemia is life lived on the cheap; there are no such rents in North Beach or anywhere else in San Francisco. Still, much of the island mentality remains, even when a large part of the citizenry must serve the god of tourism.
In respect to such visitors, City Lights remains at one with the city; its customers come from all over the world to visit a beacon of artistic freedom. Now, says Nancy Peters, "it's kind of a world neighborhood bookstore. They fly in from Prague or Tokyo -- we had a whole busload of South Africans saying, ‘They've got my books in here.'" Václav Havel did the same thing. "The president of the Czech Republic came by to pay us a state visit," Peters explains. "[Havel] turned to the shelf, and his book was there. ‘Look, they've got my book.'"
And now the alley next to City Lights is named for Kerouac and the alley across the street honors William Saroyan, thanks to a late-'80s Ferlinghetti-inspired campaign to rename streets after these writers and others like Rexroth, Twain, and Dashiell Hammett. Ferlinghetti became the city's poet laureate -- naturally, his first official statement was to chide the establishment by observing that the diverse San Francisco to which he'd migrated was becoming a fully gentrified, "homogenous, wealthy enclave," a one-dimensional city that does not care for its poor. At 84 he is energetic, seemingly fulfilled, clearly enjoying his life. He chuckles at his iconic status, murmuring, "No, I like it very much. There's nothing wrong with it. ... It's not like taking grants from the NEA or something."
Early this spring, as smart bombs descended on Baghdad, the storefront was draped with five banners, each with a word and an image: "Stop War" (the twin towers in flames) and "War Makers" (a picture of George W. Bush). There is modest merchandizing -- a bag, T-shirt, and poster depicting Beat legends Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady are displayed in the window. The store remains a genuine literary center, home to constant signings and gatherings; in April it scheduled events that ranged from Sam Shepard celebrating his son Jesse's new collection of short stories to signings for a new book on the Black Panther Party, a biography of Emma Goldman, and a collection of poetry from Mexico.
It's 2003. The world shrinks and goes gray, losing diversity, biological and cultural, every day. Every city has a Starbucks, a Gap, and a Borders. But the unique texture of a City Lights cannot -- should not -- be replicated. Along with the city whose very soul it has come to embody, City Lights remains a little altar to Dionysus -- the god of crazed joy, laughter, and inspiration.
Photo: Sarah Kehoe
