Lawrence Ferlinghetti
*

by Philip Gambone; drawings by Ferlinghetti

The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), one of the West Coast "Beats," was an inveterate traveler during his long, productive life. A restless soul, he journeyed far afield, sometimes on literary business, sometimes for the sheer heck of it. On these trips, Ferlinghetti kept brief travel journals. They "show that the poet's journeys around the world form one of his most crucial and rich sources of creative inspiration," write Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson, who have edited an edition of these occasional diaries.

Ferlinghetti never re-read his journals and never thought to publish them. The one exception was a little 58-page book he brought out in 1970, The Mexican Night, which gathered together the notes and sketches he had kept, up to that time, during his frequent trips to Mexico. In the journals, as well as in the rest of his prodigious literary output, the prime motive was "self-searching," writes one of his biographers, Larry Smith. Ferlinghetti faced life by "putting it down in writing, much as the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau had done."

Ferlinghetti first went to Mexico in 1939, the summer after his sophomore year in college. With two friends, he rode freight trains and hitchhiked through the country. Hoping to be a foreign correspondent, he wrote news stories about the political scene in Mexico, which he "naively sent off to such outlets as Time magazine," writes another of his biographers, Neeli Cherkovski. Nothing came of this early literary venture, though years later Ferlinghetti still remembered the nauseating smell of a Mexico City pension where he and his buddies had stayed. It was another twenty years before he returned to Mexico, but once he did, he kept going back. In fact, Mexico was the foreign country the peripatetic poet visited more than any other.

The Mexican Night begins in the late fifties with a visit to Mexico City that Ferlinghetti made after attending a literary conference in Concepción, Chile. A one-page entry kicks off the stream-of-consciousness style that characterizes much of the writing in the little volume: "Pardon me if I disappear in Mexico, wearing a mask and strange suspenders. Puncho [sic] Villa. Wandering about, speaking my curious 'spagnol…. My soul in various pieces and I attempting to reassemble it, mistaking bird cries for ecstatic song when they are really cries of despair."

In October 1961, he returned for a five-day trip through Baja California and was happy to discover that the new Mexico was "still the Old Beat Mexico." He started out in Tijuana, "digging the jumbled streets, eating roast corn from street-vendors, drinking Cerveza under arbors in back gardens of crazy hillside restaurants, stopping to watch local celebrations at Mexican Lions Club …. A dead dog lay on its side by the entrance, flies in his eyes, up his nose—the Lion that didn't make it."

This is Ferlinghetti in a nutshell: the language of the Beats, the keen attention to detail—the picturesque, the unexpected, and the ugly brought together—and his mordant wit. His was a "profoundly entangled consciousness," Smith says.

On to Ensenada, which he didn't like. "Yet the people here smile at each other from time to time & act as if they still had some great slut of hope somewhere." Then on to Mexicali. The trip took all day—nothing but "endless riprap roads, hills, mountains, hopeless houses, trees, sagebrush, fences, dust, burros, dry land." Mexicali proved to be "another dust town, only worse." The bus station was crammed with campesinos "looking grim, tough & hungry." Under their enormous sombreros and ponchos, they were "waiting for country busses and revolutions." He saw them as "the Front Teeth of Latin America."

Later, in the tourist part of town, he crossed over to the U.S. side, where, at a movie theater, he watched bingo games until midnight. When he walked back to the border station, there was no one on the Mexican side to check—"completely open in that direction." A sign in English said, "Narcotics Addicts & Users Are Required by U.S. Law to Register Before Leaving the Country."

This precipitated a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek rant on protecting the borders: "An insane fluidity & deracination surely would prevail without them—no countries, no nations, nothing at all to stop us anywhere, nothing to stop the hordes of the world still starving and howling like Calibans at the gates, no customs, no wars, no protective tariffs, no passports, no immigration and naturalization papers, none of the old protective barriers protecting everyone from everyone else … leaving us no alternative but to recognize Indians as brothers."

Ferlinghetti was a free spirit, a man who recognized how, at our best, "we continuously improvise our existence, make up our lives as we go, improvise our present, our future." That jazz-like, improvisational approach to life, his joy in the "intolerable sweetness" of life, and the playful, and sometimes angry, mockery which he often launched at whatever stifles freedom are at the heart of his work, both in the journals and in the poetry.

Ferlinghetti was next in Mexico in 1962, and then again in September 1968, during the widespread demonstrations against the government, and just before the October 2 massacre of 500 students and citizens by government troops: "I stand on an island in the middle of Avenida Juarez, trying to snare an impossible taxi, all full, all careening thru the massed screaming traffic…. Suddenly a sharp cobblestone strikes through my left shoe sole & the forgotten beginning of a hole, and I understand in a dumb flash how revolutions die on foot."

Recreo 27, photo by the author
*

In 1969, he was back again, this time in San Miguel de Allende. It was a year after the Beat poet Neal Cassady had died here—"in the rain at night along the railroad tracks, counting the ties to Celaya," Ferlinghetti imagined. He was intent on gathering and "deciphering" Cassady's manuscripts. He stayed in a "semi-ruin of a house" at Recreo 27. "A criada (a house maid) was killed in this room when the old wood & stone roof fell in a few years ago," he noted. "At night in that room you can see the stars, pure & brilliant as through a wide telescope." During the day, the sun beat down directly into the room "as into some ruined temple."

The notebook Ferlinghetti kept during his weeklong stay in San Miguel is one of the longest (eight pages) in The Mexican Night and, certainly for those of us who live here, one of the most interesting. When he arrived, the trees in the Jardín were full of boat-tailed grackles, "beautiful blackbirds crying out all at once in the last of the sunset." It was the feast of the Señor de la Conquista. He noted the Aztec dancers "in front of the cathedral" (he meant, of course, the Parroquia). "A tall young Indian prince, very bronze and very beautiful, with long bronze legs, dancing with an Indian maid in feathered headband …. The faint rattle and whir of their ankle bells, echoing hollowly, fills the sweet air."

A few days later, Ferlinghetti visited the hot springs at the "half-built resort" at Atotonilco. A breeze from the mountains blew through the willow trees, but "some butch gringos from New Jersey" were blasting songs by the British group, the Incredible String Band, over a tape recorder. He was always alert to strange, telling juxtapositions of details.

On his last night in San Miguel, Ferlinghetti attended a "barbarous party." Someone passed him a pipe and he took several tokes. It sent him on a "bad trip," which he describes in vivid, fulsome detail for several pages. This was the black "Mexican night" which later provided the title for the entire collection of his early Mexican journals.

The Mexican Night ends in 1969, but Ferlinghetti returned to Mexico several more times after that and kept further little journals about these visits. On a bus trip from Manzanillo to Guadalajara (May 1972), he noted the hands of middle-class Mexican women, "like hen's feet—crooked or curved … hooked, with painted nails … brown-white wrinkled skin, with gold rings, forearms stringy, veined, ringed with gold-plated wrist watches, hands clutching handbags when not gesturing, palms heavily lined.…" Fun to see a poet at work, his attention not filtering out anything, even "culturally insensitive" observations.

Other trips followed: one in the fall of 1975, a trip from Mexico City to the Gulf and back, which occasioned a series of "Beatitudes Visuales Mexicanas"—short, haiku-like prose observations: "On the bus again to Veracruz—everything small except the landscape, horses the size of burros, small black avocados, small strong men with machetes—each still saying to himself Me Llamo Yo."

Another trip followed in July 1989. He was accompanied by his 27-year-old son Lorenzo, during which Ferlinghetti kept a journal inspired by a "funny-looking dog" he saw on the beach at Puerto Escondido. This Mexican perro came to represent the pure, non-judgmental observer—half animal, half Ferlinghetti himself.

There were four more trips to Mexico: in 1991, to Baja; in 2004, to Oaxaca, to attend the Coloquio del Arte de la Imaginación, where a Spanish translation of The Mexican Night was read; in 2006, to Puerto Vallarta, where he attended a bullfight, mostly populated by "American tourists in shorts and golf shoes"; and lastly in 2008, to Yelapa, where once again the boat-tailed grackles delighted him. He was in his 89th year, still up to smoking a little weed, still delighted by "the riot of vegetation," still railing against "the juggernaut of the 21st century, the American corporate culture steamroller, obliterating all indigenous cultures as it goes, grinding them into dust, for the new electronic flat earth, the new avaricious empire."

The very last words in Ferlinghetti's last Mexican journal were "the Heart of Lightness." In contrast to "the darkness of the American Empire," he found in Mexico a place of "ever-increasing light." Indeed, Mexico was a country that aroused in him "the desire to live forever, to live and live and live, to breathe forever, a terrible hunger in the sultry air that was more than ever like love..."

**************

Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarn Press and is available on Amazon and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar