Little Boy is a book by an old man: Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrated his 100th birthday this year with the publication of this novel-cum-memoir-cum-grand-finale. Even if Ferlinghetti’s great age were irrelevant – which it is not (“the only plot of this book being my constant aging”) – it would be pretty much unreviewable because … well, because Ferlinghetti is Ferlinghetti, the founder of City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, publisher and friend of the beats, poet, artist, activist and living legend, and no one in their right mind wants to argue with a living legend.
Especially when that legend is aged 100 and writes likes this:
AND Little Boy, grown up after an endless series of confusions transplantations transformations instigations fornications confessions prognostications hallucinations consternations confabulations collaborations revelations recognitions restitutions reverberations misconceptions clarifications elucidations simplifications idealisations aspirations circumnavigations realisations radicalisations and liberations, Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him.
A final loosening of a word-hoard is exactly what Little Boy is, and who could object to such an exercise of freedom? This isn’t a book: it’s a reckoning.
Having seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by mental illness, drink and drugs, and generally defeated by life, Ferlinghetti clearly feels at liberty to say whatever he wants, about whoever he wants, however he wants, and in whatever order he wants. Thus there are various reminiscences about “Ginzy” and “Ti Jean Jack Kerouac” and “Neal Cocksman”; William Seward Burroughs, “the original genius con-man”; “Tea Ass Eliot he of Sant Louey posing as a perfect British gentleman”.
Many a hobbyhorse is relentlessly ridden: “Well so let me tell you I mean that the single root problem in the whole world the problem of problems underlying all the ills of the world can be traced back to overpopulation like why is there so much pollution because there are too many cars and too many coal-burning plants because too many people want cars and heat etc etc.” The book might best be described as one long etc etc.
The most affecting parts of Little Boy are in fact those that most closely resemble a traditional memoir or autobiography, because Ferlinghetti’s life, even simply told, is utterly extraordinary. “Little Boy was quite lost,” the text begins. “He had no idea who he was or where he had come from. He was with Aunt Emilie whom he loved very much. She had taken him in swaddling clothes from his mother who already had four sons and could not handle a fifth born a few months after his father died of a heart attack.”
After this unofficial adoption, Little Boy – who seems to be Ferlinghetti in all but name – is taken to France, and then to Strasbourg, and then back to an orphanage in New York, before ending up in the charge of a wealthy family, the Bislands, who have employed Little Boy’s aunt as a governess. By chance, the Bislands had a little boy of their own named Lawrence who died in infancy, and so they duly set about raising Little Boy as if he were their own: this is his second unofficial adoption. After boarding school he goes to the University of North Carolina and then joins the US navy, ending up in Nagasaki, where he “saw the landscape of hell and became an instant pacifist”, before returning to the US to go to grad school and then the University of Paris on the GI Bill. You’re with it so far? Because that’s only the beginning.
After all of that there’s the bookshop, and the beats, and a lifetime in publishing and politics. A few years ago Ferlinghetti published Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960–2010, in which he chronicled many of his adventures and activities; Little Boy represents the corresponding journey inwards. In the end, he writes: “I am just an old guy singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in a high drunken voice and reliving all his lives on earth like Krapp in his Last Tape recording everything he remembers or in the Nothing because the older he gets the more he forgets until in the end it’s all amnesia and he can remember nothing at all of vast spaces of time and he’s left only with his present moment or everybody’s present moment the great terrible moving moment of Now alone with himself and his lonely consciousness alone on his own little island of me, and so is that it?”
So is that it? Who knows. Centenarian authors are certainly few and far between, but Ferlinghetti has been surprising himself and defying others for years: there may yet be more to come. Many happy returns.
• Little Boy is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
