A Long-Ago North Beach That Smells Like Words
(City Lights Books)

Jack Foley

"We never really conceived of it as a business," says poet-painter-editor-publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti about his famous bookstore, City Lights: "Everybody around here seems to avoid the word. The idea was that it would be a place where people could sit and read by the hour and no one would bother them."

City Lights was also designed as a place of political education. Nancy J. Peters, Executive Editor of City Lights Books, says of City Lights' publishing company, "Our intention [was] to publish the dirty truth and to be a voice for social responsibility."

In a radio report on City Lights, National Public Radio commentator Cy Musiker remarks that the bookstore "has never been a place for squares": "In fact, [it's] shaped like a triangle, housed in a quirky structure with odd-shaped rooms containing entire sections of books devoted to radical politics and international literature. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's office is upstairs next to the poetry room. He sits at an old desk with books piled here and there...."

The bookstore was co-founded in June, 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (whose idea it was). Over the past forty-seven years, it has been a center for what Nancy J. Peters calls "the insurgent imagination": innumerable literary hopefuls stream into San Francisco and make a beeline for 261 Columbus Avenue. Recently, San Francisco's Landmark Preservation Board recommended that City Lights be designated as a historic landmark. The decision is a tribute to the bookstore's importance as a center of Beat culture and a recognition of its owner, now a much-honored and vigorous man of eighty-one who can often be seen working in his City Lights office.

In 1948, the twenty-nine-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti was in Paris attending the Sorbonne.  While there he produced a novel and met George Whitman, who later founded the famous French bookstore, Shakespeare and Company.  Neeli Cherkovski, one of Ferlinghetti's biographers, writes in "Ferlinghetti: A Biography," "The entire French capital was a school for Ferlinghetti.  He might have finished the work on his thesis much earlier than he did, but his wide range of interests kept him from working on it steadily." The thesis, when it was finally completed, was significantly titled, "La Cité: Symbole dans la poésie moderne: À La recherche d'une Tradition Métropolitaine" ("The City as a Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition").

Ferlinghetti returned to America in December, 1950.  Hearing that San Francisco resembled Paris, he and his new wife, Kirby, headed west.  Lawrence worked on translations of the French poet/songwriter Jacques Prévert and on an experimental novel, "Her."  He also wrote art criticism for "Art Digest" (later "Arts Digest"), an influential journal published in New York City. He was responsible for the newsletter from San Francisco.  Lawrence's assignments put him in touch with the works of the various Abstract Expressionists working in the city, and he got to know the artists themselves.  His own work was deeply influenced by theirs.  The young man also attended gatherings at Kenneth Rexroth's house, where he met writers such as Thomas Parkinson, Philip Lamantia, James Broughton, and Robert Duncan.  The opening poem of Ferlinghetti's "Pictures of the Gone World" is a powerful, ecstatic evocation of his life at that time:

                Away above a harborful
                                                                           of
caulkless houses
                               among the charley noble chimneypots
                                                                 of a rooftop
rigged with clotheslines
                                             a woman pastes up sails
                                                                        upon
the wind
                                    hanging out her morning sheets
                                                                             

with wooden pins
                                                     O lovely mammal

Five of Lawrence's Prévert translations were published in a North Beach magazine called "City Lights."  The editor, Peter Martin, was an ex New Yorker, the son of Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca and the nephew of U.S.Communist Party leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.  Martin's  magazine was a reflection of the cultural ferment occuring in the San Francisco area.  He wished to open a bookstore specializing in paperback books.  Paperbacks, he felt, were the coming thing, and he wished to be the first person to open such a shop.  With Ferlinghetti's help (each man contributed five hundred dollars) Martin was able to realize his ambition.  It was Ferlinghetti's idea to publish a series of poetry books under the City Lights imprint.  The first of these, his "Pictures of the Gone World," appeared in August, 1955.  Other City Lights authors included William Carlos Williams, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, and Diane di Prima.

In 1955, two years after the bookstore opened, Peter Martin returned to New York, where he opened the New Yorker Bookstore on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and Ferlinghetti became sole owner of City Lights. 

On March 25, 1957—the day after the poet's thirty-sixth birthday—five hundred and twenty  copies of a book his press had published were confiscated by US Customs, acting under the order of Chester McPhee, US Collector of Customs. McPhee called the book "obscene": "you wouldn't want your children to come across it," he groused. The book was Allen Ginsberg's "Howl and Other Poems."

Ferlinghetti had heard Ginsberg recite "Howl" at the now famous Six Gallery reading on Friday night, October 7, 1955. This legendary San Francisco event was organized by Ginsberg and emceed by Kenneth Rexroth; it featured--as Ginsberg's announcement put it--"Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John Hoffman--Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new straightforward writing--remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry."

For many, the "6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY" reading marked the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance. Ginsberg read only Part I of "Howl," but it galvanized the crowd. Jack Kerouac was in the audience and wrote about the event in his novel, "The Dharma Bums" (1958). Michael McClure's reminiscence is in "Scratching the Beat Surface" (1982). "At some point," writes McClure, "Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO' in cadence" as Allen read the poem:

In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before--we had gone beyond a point of no return--and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void--to the land without poetry--to the spiritual drabness.

After the reading, Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram which deliberately echoed a remark made by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman. After reading "Leaves of Grass," Emerson wrote Whitman, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Ferlinghetti sent the same message to Ginsberg but added, "When do I get the manuscript?"

"Howl and Other Poems" was published in 1956 as number 4 in City Lights' Pocket Poet Series. Copies sold quickly, and it soon went into another printing. US Customs seized "Howl" on March 25, 1957 but released it on May 29th, following a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union. Three days later, however, Captain William Hanrahan of the Juvenile Department of the San Francisco Police Department, perhaps remembering Chester McPhee's assertion that "Howl" was something "you wouldn't want your children to come across," sent two of his officers to arrest Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner, and Shigeyoshi Murao, manager, of City Lights Books. The charge against Ferlinghetti was that he "willfully and lewdly printed and sold obscene and indecent writings: 'Howl and Other Poems.'"

"Howl" came to trial in mid-August, 1957, in the courtroom of Judge Clayton W. Horn, who was, in addition to being a judge, a Sunday school Bible instructor. Before "Howl" was even printed, Ferlinghetti had sent the manuscript to the American Civil Liberties Union to be sure that they would defend the book in court should the need arise.

The trial received national attention. Another of Ferlinghetti's biographers, Barry Silesky, writes in "Ferlinghetti: The Artist in his Time" that the ACLU saw the trial "as a fundamental free- speech issue and got two top lawyers to defend Ferlinghetti and Murao. A third lawyer, J. W. K. (‘Jake') Ehrlich...had gained a major national reputation for defending condemned murderer Caryl Chessman, whose endless appeals from death row had forestalled his execution...." Ehrlich made a significant point when he asserted that "As I understand the law, the court must construe the book as a whole. I presume that I could take the classic 'Leaves of Grass' and by cutting it to pieces find a word here or there or an idea that some people might not like."

Among the people testifying on behalf of the poem were writer/professor Mark Schorer; poet/professor Thomas Parkinson; James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions; poets Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and Kenneth Patchen; Henry Rago, editor of "Poetry"; Barney Rossett, editor of Grove Press; and Donald Allen, who with Rossett co-edited "Evergreen Review." (The 1957 "San Francisco Scene" "Evergreen Review" featured a bowdlerized version of "Howl.") Schorer's eloquent statement included the assertion that "One must always be in rebellion. Each person [has] to determine his or her own language--from the level of their own body."

The prosecution had only two "expert" witnesses. One of these was an elocution teacher who said that "you feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff. I didn't linger on it too long, I assure you." The other, an instructor from the Catholic University of San Francisco, opined that "every great piece of literature, anything that can really be classified as literature, is of some moral greatness, and I think this fails to the nth degree."

On October 3 Judge Horn ruled in favor of the defense. Ferlinghetti himself commented, "The judge ruled that you could not judge a work obscene if it had the slightest redeeming social significance...And that precedent has stood up all these years, even though it wasn't a federal court precedent." Part of Judge Horn's thirty-nine page opinion reads, "In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense (Shame to him who thinks evil thoughts)."

"The victory for Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and 'Howl and Other Poems' was complete," writes Barry Sileski:

Besides establishing the "nonobscene" character of the book, the trial ensured its financial success, and as a result, the future success of City Lights Books as a publisher...Throughout the trial, copies of the banned book had been displayed in the window; now they could be freely sold for their list price of seventy-five cents each, and the trial publicity  had ensured unprecedented demand...Ten thousand copies of "Howl" had been printed by the trial's end.  [It was] on its way to becoming one of the best-selling poetry books in American history.  In fact, one of the only poetry books whose sales surpassed it would be one published two years later, writtten by [its] own publisher, "A Coney Island of the Mind," by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

NPR reporter Cy Musiker has called City Lights Bookstore "a lighthouse of international literature and radical thought."  Richard Brautigan's daughter Ianthe writes that she loves "purchasing a book [at City Lights] because the clerk treats me with the same sense of efficiency and indifference that I recall from my childhood. I'm allowed to fool time, and once again follow an invisible father around a long-ago North Beach that smells like words, roasting coffee, sour bars, and freshly baked bread."

For Ferlinghetti, that long-ago North Beach has changed considerably: "It's becoming more--I suppose I have to use the term ‘yuppified,'" he says, "just like the rest of the city, and it's lost that island mentality"; "now, what I call the boring corporate monoculture [is] sweeping around the world and making every place the same." Ferlinghetti complains bitterly about "the dumbing-down of America," which he blames "partly on television and partly on the 1960's, among other things." He sees his bookstore as a "bastion" against such dumbing-down.

His devoted customers would agree. People remember City Lights less as a place than as an event--an outward and visible sign of a true historie which has become nothing less than a legend. For once in America, the courts supported poetry. You can buy things at City Lights, but the store has a magical quality, too. Ghosts inhabit it, man; it allows us all to "fool time."