My brother told me that wearing a beret meant that you were a poet, and I believed him until I went to Paris in 1971 to live for a couple of years, and discovered that bakers wear berets there, fruit-sellers, coal delivery men - all sorts of people. Poets, too, I imagine.
In any case, the men at the Trieste were not scrubbed. Some had beards. Most had just a few days of growth, and didn't seem to care at all that they looked so scruffy. Indeed, as I looked around, I saw that scruffy was the standard. My recently bathed appearance was the anomaly.
Our father, who would never appear in public without having shaved and combed his hair, would not have been able to tolerate the place. Still struggling against my first espresso, I wondered whether it was even legal to look the way so many of the patrons there looked.
Did the now famous black and white cover of Howl and Other Poems, peeking out of shirt and jacket pockets through the café, make those pockets profane? Was I to be badly thought of because I'd visited such an iniquitous chamber? Should I go to confession?
The end result of the trial a few weeks later — as in all such governmental idiocies — was that Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti had become world famous and the book itself a best seller. It still is, with one million copies of it in print, and luckily "Howl" is also a great poem:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
A lot of very bad writing has come from conversations in the Trieste since then, writing that has now been forgotten entirely - the lurching shouts of second-rate wannabe poets; the self-important ruminations of men and women who, believing themselves great, were really thoughtless; the recitations from books of essays, fiction or poetry that were consigned to oblivion by the audience on that very afternoon in 1959, 1968, 1983, or last week; unreadable foolishness, published in books with press runs of fifty copies.
Article comments
1 - alessandro
About scrubness: Un touche de negligence pour l'homme elegant as the French would say.
I hope the kick of the espresso has dissipated by now.