Ferlinghetti Does it Again

Many admirers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and you may count me among them) may not know that before the became identified with the cultural underground, his area of concentration was underwater.

As a commanding officer on a U.S. Navy sub-chaser during D-Day, he became intimately acquainted with the pathology of war, and became a pacifist after doing his duty and leaving the service with an honorable discharge.

The Normandy invasion, it would seem, whetted his appetite for travel and adventure:

And in the very first light on the western horizon behind us were just beginning to see a forest of masts rising up from below the horizon, first just the tops of the masts and then the hulls – a huge armada of thousands of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels steaming together from separate ports, converging with the first light off the coast….And fair stood the wind for France!

These anecdotes and scores of other gems are contained in his latest book, Writing Across the Landscape, which chronicles his physical and spiritual journeys around the world. The subterranean elements, as one might imagine, are often the most compelling.

Readers must keep in mind, too, that these impressionistic musings are jotted down in a journal. The author of carefully crafted poetry takes license here to indulge in stream of consciousness, sharing the moment by relating immediate and profound recall without too much reflection.

The book, edited by Giada Diano and Matt Gleeson from Ferlinghetti’s notebooks, now collected at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, also features about 50 reprints of Ferlinghetti’s childlike sketches, mostly crude self-portraits and nudes. The illustrations, such as they are, might seem unnecessary, until the reader arrives at an entry from a trip to “the Roman Carnival” in the ’80s.

“I have to get a sketchbook and start doing heads,” he enthused, “nothing but heads and faces. ... Faces and hands, what a universe. No need to draw anything more.”

We sincerely hope that he does not feel the same way about limiting the scope of his writing, and indeed, he tells us that “a new novel is in the works.”