WRITING ACROSS LANDSCAPE

This long-awaited volume provides a panoramic portrait of art and life across the twentieth century, from Mexico to Morocco, Paris to Rome, and beyond: The travel journals of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, at 94 one of the last living links to the Beat generation.

Million-copy selling poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes this book himself as follows: I see this book in the tradition of D.H. Lawrence’s travels in Italy or Goethe’s Italian journeys. ...It is as if much of my life were a continuation of my youthful wanderjahr, my walk-about in the world. I wrote these peripatetic pages for myself, never thinking to publish them. I never reread them until Giada Diano and Matt Gleeson brought me photocopies of the original notebooks that had been slumbering away in the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley. Seeing myself years later through the wrong end of the telescope, a wandering figure in momentous times. ... I was part of that “Greatest Generation” (so-dubbed by a newsman) that came of age at the beginning of the Second World War. ... As I worked in San Francisco and travelled, days and years fell away into the great maw of time. ... The war ends, decades whir by, there is a rumble in the wings, the scene darkens, and Camelot lost! America went through a sea-change after that. San Francisco, which had been a small provincial capital, grew up. So did I, and I started voyaging. I was usually traveling to some literary or political event or tracking down some author for an undiscovered masterpiece to publish at City Lights Books. Europe of course was a “going back,” finding roots. Since my earliest days in France with my French Aunt Emilie, I had always thought of France as my second home. When my ship was able to dock in Cherbourg after the Normandy invasion, I felt like kissing the ground. Three years later as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, I still felt that way. I came late to my father’s Italy, first as a student of Italian, la bella lingua, and later to track down my father’s birthplace. So much came from that! I didn’t keep journals consistently, so that some literary capers went unrecorded, as when I visited Paul Bowles in Tangier to pry from him his Moroccan tales in A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. This was agreed to, and then we sat dully in his high-rise apartment near the American Embassy. And when Jane Bowles suggested we turn-on, Paul said he didn’t have any hash. I was clean-shaven in a white suit, and I imagine he thought I was a narc. Paranoia, the doper’s constant companion! What else can I say about these interior monologues, except that some may pass as newsstories filed by a reporter from Outer Space, to cover the strange doings of these “humans” down here, sent by a Managing Editor with a low tolerance for bullshit. Born in Bronxville, New York, in 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the cofounder of San Francisco’s hallowed City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. He lives in San Francisco. Giada Diano is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's translator and biographer in Italy. Her biography is published by Feltrinelli (Milan). Matthew Gleeson is a writer and editor who has spent over a decade with City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.