In 2010, one of the last figures of the beat generationPeter Orlovsky, victim of cancer; in reality a victim of a life of excesses with drugs and alcohol. The life of a cursed poet, of a madman forged in that group that formed Jack KerouacWilliam Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, her partner for more than three decades, until he died in 1997. Authors who tended towards the surreal, towards the most daring stylistic imagination, to the disinhibition that marked so many young people thirsty for sexual freedom, experimentation with prohibited substances and naturalist and orientalist ideology. “Generation of awake, eager, nonconformist, restless, hallucinated, horny, wandering, misplaced,” he wrote about those writers, in the prologue to an anthology by Ferlinghetti, “Populist Manifesto and Other Poems” (2005). ), Jesus Aguado. Orlovsky’s work It is brief, scattered. Her greatest creation was a life of strong emotions; his greatest achievement, his own presence alongside the great beats, hence he died better known as a “couple of”, or as an image of a libertine, unlimited, fresh and bold world that Andy Warhol portrayed, in a 1965 documentary, precisely with Orlovsky as one of the main characters. The star in that context was the one who wrote “a fast car, a long road and a woman at the end of the road”: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969). His work “On the Road”, created in the early 1950s and published in 1957 after many editorial rejections, impacted young Americans of that time. fascinated by the free and innovative gaze of the writerboth in life and in literature.
The entire Beat phenomenon sought to change the conservative and militarized American society for a place where peace, Eastern spirituality (especially Zen Buddhism) and sexual freedom were fundamental premises for coexistence. If to this position we add an artistic approach free of prejudices and reservationswe then have as a result a technique explained by the same author in the following way: «No intervals that break the structures of the sentence already arbitrarily interrupted by false periods and timid commas, in most cases useless, but rather vigorous hyphens that They isolate the respiratory moments (like jazz musicians catching their breath between two long phrases), the measured pauses that articulate the structure of our speech.
Something of this type of “spontaneous writing” or “kickwriting” that is Kerouac raised for the writing of “On the Road”, it is also in another recent text by Ferlinghetti (who never really considered himself a pure beat), originally from 2019, his memoirs “The Boy” (translation by José C. Vales), with a narrative discourse that eludes punctuation and seems to emerge poetically where we open the book: «Let blasphemies rain down, let tragedies and cataclysms rain down on our heads that we are not so easy to defeat because even in the face of death the clowns laugh in our theaters of the absurd where a piece of shit can become a fucking attractive man or a charming whore and who is going to tell you that you are wrong…». A textual torrent, thus, hence the author subtitles the book with «Dreamy Memories» of everything he was, until his death in 2021: editor, poet, journalist, painter and bookseller. But, before all that, Jordi Carrión says in the prologue that Ferlinghetti «was above all a reader […]. The entire volume is the rewriting of multiple rewritings. Because that is life,” hence he says that “we are not faced with a book of memoirs, but rather with a literary manifesto: life is the verses, the lines, the poems and the fictions, the books we have read.”
Ferlinghetti was born in New York, in 1919: “So I came into this world with the astonished look of an owl awake to tell my stories,” he says at the beginning, and there is another reference to birds at the end of the book, and the fact that He would miss the Hudson River, in his childhood, marked by orphanhood. Her father died before Lawrence was born, and her mother suffered from a mental illness that landed her in a psychiatric hospital when the child was not yet two years old.
In any case, the author, despite having graduated from Columbia University in 1948, studied English literature and wrote a thesis on the art critic John Ruskin and the painter JMW Turner after participating in the Second World War (he also graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris), We will forever associate him with the city of San Francisco, where in 1952 he founded the City Lights bookstore and publishing house, where he himself distributed his works and those of the beat poets. “A Coney Island of the Mind”, “From San Francisco”, “Tyrannus Nix?”, “Landscapes of Life and Death” are some of the poetry collections he left behind, apart from the novel “She” and several plays. In “The Boy” he recalls his life in New York, the Normandy landing in a submarine or his bohemian life of Parisian nights, and in the last part he offers reflections, from his ecological and political side, on what lies ahead for the human race.
Pure history
However, the true memories of this poet will always be his establishment (he lived upstairs), located in the North Beach neighborhood, City Lights, on Columbus Avenue, so much so that it was designated a historic site in 2001. And Ferlinghetti was pure history of North American literature, as happened in 1956 with the controversial publication of Ginsberg’s most famous poem, “Howl”, which led to the arrest of the editor, accused of printing “indecent writings” in a “willful and lascivious” manner.
Proof of how transcendent this episode was in the literary social life of the time is that the trial was made into a film through the film “Howl” (2010), in which Andrew Rogers played Ferlinghetti and James Franco played Ginsberg. He himself, two years later, with his collection of poems “A Coney Island of the Mind”, ignited the indignation of a New York congressman, Steven B. Derounian, who defined the text as blasphemous when he understood that it mocked the crucifixion of Christ.
And in the final stretch of his centenary life, in 2019 his book “Little Boy” saw the light, which he had been writing for the last two decades and which he defined as the closest thing to a memoir that he was never going to write, although, Of course, it was not a typical book, as it was closer to an experimental narrative that had, as its protagonist, “an imaginary self.” In some way, finally, “The Boy” also has as its central character that voice that emerged from literary memory, from linguistic creativity, since style is the true core of the book, beyond the real, concrete references to his career. : «Don’t give me anything because I have enough of everything and I’m looking for my own happiness and don’t bother me in that happy search and there are other types of smaller doors and smaller doors or swing doors instead of golden doors and the hinges can can be changed anyway so that they rotate in both directions or so that they do not rotate at all…”
