Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and arts ambassador who died last week at the age of 101, could not be accused of having been born on third base and then acting like he hit a triple.* The circumstances of his very early life were so calamitous that certain facts of his nativity were unknown to him into his maturity—he knew his birthday was March 24, for example, but only that the year of his birth was either 1919 or 1920 (it was 1919). His father, an auctioneer in the suburbs of New York City, died right around the time Lawrence was born—the biographical sketch in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry says the elder Ferlinghetti died "while the boy was still small" but his New York Times obituary says the death occurred "before Lawrence was born." His mother was then admitted to a state mental hospital before Lawrence, the youngest of five boys, turned 2. Nothing that I have seen takes up the question of what became of the four older boys. Lawrence was taken in by a woman he called "Aunt Emily," though she seems to have been a more distant relative of his mother. Her full name was Emily Monsanto and she took Lawrence to France, where they lived from 1920 to 1924. She then returned to the New York area with 5-year-old Lawrence. At some point, either before Emily took him to France or after they had returned and she was looking for work, Lawrence lived in an orphanage. She eventually found work as a governess for an affluent family in Bronxville—the Anthology and the obit provide different names for this family. The next awful thing to happen is that Emily went insane. By this time, however, the Bronxville family had taken to young Lawrence and he remained with them, reading through the extensive home library and eventually enrolling, presumably on their dime, at the University of North Carolina, a choice inspired by his devotion to native North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. He graduated with a BA in journalism just as the US was entering World War II. Ferlinghetti served in the navy and, after the war, attended graduate school at Columbia, for a master's degree, and the Sorbonne, in Paris, from which he received a doctorate in comparative literature. That's the first 31 years of a life that would last almost 71 more.
Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco in 1951 and opened City Lights Books two years later. His book store soon became something like a salon for the Beat movement in literature, and its small press published poetry, that of Ferlinghetti and others, including Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1955. No more obscurities in the biographical record from this point forward, but the preexisting ones persist. One of Ferlinghetti's longer poems is called "Autobiography" but its self-mockery would seem to make it an unreliable guide to biographical fact. It's made largely of two- and three-line units, the last line an undercutting blow:
I thought I was Tom Sawyer
catching crayfish in the Bronx River. . . .
I looked homeward
and saw no angel.
I got caught stealing pencils
from the Five and Ten Cent store
the same month I made Eagle Scout. . . .
I landed in Normandy
in a rowboat that turned over. . . .
I hear America singing
in the Yellow Pages.
The text of the whole poem is here. Ferlinghetti himself (I think) reads the poem, here, as a photographic montage of images whirs by, with musical interludes.
*Don't know whether it was original with him, but I'm familiar with this line because Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa, applied it to President Geo. W. Bush: "He was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple."
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