![]() But clowning offends nobody and involves no risks it is the San Francisco literary mode par excellence. Typically, he won his earliest distinction as a practitioner of “jazz poetry” at reading sessions in San Francisco dives. Like Prévert, Ferlinghetti always preferred clowning to writing. By his own admission Ferlinghetti refused to publish some erotic works of Guillaume Apollinaire because he feared the censorious reaction of feminists, who might object to Apollinaire’s humorously explicit use of anatomical language and he has turned down projects to translate other important foreign writers (for example, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, Julien Gracq, and Lacenaire) because they are not yet sufficiently known in the United States. His horizons as a poet ended with his recycling the justifiably forgotten verse forms of Kenneth Fearing as a translator, he has managed to bring out only English versions of Jacques Prevert, the ex-Surrealist turned nightclubbish clown. Their “aging caudillo”-as one used to hear General Franco described-is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose publishing house, City Lights, has seemed to establish as its standard: “When you cannot, after much effort, find something bad to publish, then you might as well publish something good.” Few people ever took Ferlinghetti seriously as a poet or translator. The Beats deserve nothing other than burial, with a minimum of public grief. The literary products of such movements are mostly composed of enervating repetition: of street-talk reminiscences, Latin American historical revisionism, expressions of cloying man-hatred, or memories of bath-house sex-as if each recounting redeemed, rather than emphasized, the nullity of the matters addressed. Of course, there are the prophets of Blackness, Hispanicness, womanness, and homosexualness, but none of them makes a serious attempt to associate himself with something intrinsically new. Indeed, a kind of leftist miasma covers the entire literary terrain it seems to be taken for granted that to be involved with letters is to be on the Left. Among the young, there are cults: the followers of neo-Surrealism and “language poetry,” and various kinds of mostly unserious Marxists. Is there even something that can be called an intelligentsia? We have a tired clique of old Beats and their squalid groupies, picking over their own detritus. There is, then, no avant-garde in San Francisco worthy of the title. ![]() Most of the local inhabitants read little or nothing of significance. A similar silence normally surrounds the subject of what one reads. When a conversation comes to the question “What do you do?” and you answer “I am a writer,” there is no progress to the logical next step: “What have you published?” It is as if the interlocutor knows too well the dangers of that particular swamp. In San Francisco, there is no failure all is permitted, if not encouraged. Not from jail or mental treatment, but from the harsh realities of life on the East Coast-from marriage, debts, snow, or the shame of failure in the New York literary world. Many San Francisco intellectuals are not actually intellectuals at all, but escapees of one sort or another. Never were the Surrealists of Paris so fanatical, intolerant, and violent as their San Francisco imitators a half century later never were the Marxist intellectuals of Berlin, or even of Moscow, more bigoted, rigid, and Jesuitical. They are then transformed into the cynosures of enthusiasts, who flourish the faded and tattered banners of distant revolutions with an extreme and ugly fervor. Ideas or fashions arrive late, bedraggled, emaciated, stunted. But it must be said that San Francisco has never been much more than a backwater intellectually. It has been my home for nearly all my life. The sad truth seems to be that the only achievement to be properly claimed by a tradition of “San Francisco writers”-as opposed to writers who happen to live in San Francisco-is the ostentatious exhibition of new clichés. ![]() Even the stars of the Beats-Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg-can now be seen to have owed most of their output to the New York environment from which they sprang. No significant intellectual movement has begun here the “Beat” excitement of the Fifties proved in large part barren, having produced writers who were, in the end, undistinguished when not downright banal. ![]() But unlike Paris, Berlin, and Leningrad in the Twenties, or New York in the Forties, San Francisco has been much less a laboratory of the avant-garde than a cheering section. The San Francisco Bay Area has long enjoyed a reputation for experimental behavior on the part of its intellectuals-a confusion of art and life, if you will. ![]()
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