Philip Lamantia

Philip Lamantia: An American Original

Peter Faulkner

"An American original, soothsayer even as Poe, genius in the language of Whitman, companion and teacher of myself."

- Allen Ginsberg

When the American poet, Philip Lamantia, died he was mourned in Britain by a small, discriminating group of poets and poetry enthusiasts who had long been familiar with his radiant, disturbing poems, in many cases first encountered in the trail-blazing edition of Penguin Modern Poets Lamantia shared with expatriate gay icon, Harold Norse, and the later to be mega-famous, Charles Bukowski. But in general, his passing wasn't greatly noticed. The Independent published a warm tribute by Marcus Williamson but, in the main, there wasn't a great deal of attention paid to the poet who was at the heart of both the second wave of French Surrealism and the exuberant birth pangs of the San Francisco Renaissance. Things were very different in America, where it was realised that a unique talent, and a connection with a gradually vanishing literary culture - the original Beats - had departed the material world.

Philip Lamantia was born October 23rd, 1927, the son a well-to-do American-Sicilian family prominent in the grocery business in San Francisco. In his very early teens, with the encouragement of a sympathetic High School English teacher, Philip started writing highly visual, very imaginative free-associating poems. Like Dylan Thomas slightly earlier, he was writing Surrealist poetry before he knew what Surrealism was. That was all changed by the arrival, when Philip was still at school, of the great Dali retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The show had a momentous effect on the perceptive teenager, an impact which was reinforced by the later Miro exhibition at the same venue.

In the excitement generated by his encounter with Surrealism, Philip discovered that Andre Breton, the magisterial founder of the movement, was living in New York. Here he was doing in America what he did in France or Mexico or Haiti, or wherever he happened to be living: writing, editing, collecting "curiosities", and championing the artists he felt deserved his patronage and condemning those who did not. Breton could be mercilessly scathing towards those poets and artists who did not live up to his (often impossibly high) standards of commitment, but he could also be unfailingly generous to, and supportive of, those he believed in.

Philip sent some poems to Breton's luxuriously produced magazine, VVV, and the senior poet sent a laudatory letter back, announcing that the precocious kid from San Francisco was "a voice such as arises only once in a hundred years." Encouraged by this approval from the master, Philip decided to move to New York.

In the War years, New York was a hotbed of Surrealist activity. Several European artists, too old for military service, had moved there and were having a stimulating influence on the city's already lively gallery scene. As well as Breton's VVV, there was another Surrealist orientated magazine, View, edited by the poet Charles Henri Ford. Although still in his mid-teens, Philip managed to get a job on View, mainly seeing to the rejection slip side of the enterprise. At the same time, he was expanding his store of esoteric knowledge, researching Alchemy and Hermeticism and exchanging ideas with the Russian artist, Pavel Tchelitchew, painter of vast, swirling esoteric canvasses and object of Edith Sitwell's unrequited passion.

When the War ended, Philip had fallen out with Ford, New York was no longer such a haven for expatriate artists and he felt a move back to San Francisco was in order. Philip also realised that, in spite of being on easy social terms with some of the most innovative creative spirits of the Twentieth Century, he had yet to graduate from High School! On returning to his home town, he entered a progressive secular school and got through two year's worth of academic work in half the allotted time.

Then started the second major phase of Lamantia's creativity. San Francisco, at this time, was no less a centre of literary and artistic activity than New York, but with a significant Buddhist input, largely unrepresented on the East Coast. The most significant presence on the San Francisco arts scene was the poet, painter and veteran radical, Kenneth Rexroth. An anarchist, Anglo-Catholic and (sometimes) incorrigible snob, Rexroth could be, like Breton, loudly dismissive of lesser talents but - also like the French poet - he would campaign tirelessly on behalf of those he believed in. He was also dazzlingly erudite. Not only did he appear to know everything worth knowing about world literature from Beowulf onwards, he was also on seemingly intimate terms with a vast spectrum of major league poets, artists and political activists. Rexroth was at the centre of a progressive discussion group called The Libertarian Circle. Originally, they met in Rexroth's living room but eventually, the meetings became so popular they had to be held in a dance studio. There were lectures on radical icons like Peter Kropotkin, but the group also had a strong mystical orientation and figures studied included spiritual mavericks like the medieval Catholic dissident theologian, Meister Eckhart. Philip plunged enthusiastically into Rexroth's hectic program, eagerly attacking his demanding reading lists. The Libertarian Circle added a political layer to Philip's poetic vision, one very far from the doctrinaire leftism of former Surrealists, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. Rather, Philip developed a mystic, though practical, respect for the natural world - a standpoint that spookily anticipated the environmental concerns of the 1990s and beyond.

In 1954, Philip Lamantia moved to Mexico, while maintaining personal and literary contacts with San Francisco. Although primarily located in Mexico City, he also journeyed to remote rural areas where he observed - and sometimes participated in - the peyote rituals practiced by various Native Mexican tribes. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Antonin Artaud, the visionary Graeco-French poet, actor and theatre director whose revolutionary ideas were, at that time, being promoted in San Francisco by Lamantia's friend, Mike McClure.

Paradoxically, this close encounter with age-old pagan ritual resulted in Lamantia's re-adoption of the Catholic faith of his childhood. Mexican Catholicism, with its shawled peasant women kneeling in gorgeously bedecked churches, was dramatic, colourful and sometimes bizarre. (One strand of belief suggests that believers have two souls, one human, one animal). From 1956, Lamantia became, in his own words, "a fervently practicing Catholic."

Lamantia's renewed embracing of Roman Catholicism brought him into a close relationship with Jack Kerouac. The two men shared a love of the French Symbolist poets and the legacy of a Catholic upbringing, but their approaches to the Church of Rome were radically different. For a couple of weeks, the already troubled novelist moved in with Lamantia and his mother, during which time Philip tried to impose some order on his friend's warring selves: his commitment to writing versus his family's proletarian work ethic; his concept of beer-swilling, football playing masculinity versus his bisexuality and - a major consideration - the uneasy balance Kerouac established between Buddhist and Roman Catholic devotional practices. Inevitably, perhaps, Lamantia's efforts failed. Kerouatfs Catholicism was too inflected with a Buddhist reverence for all beings, his Buddhism was too structured round a Catholic system of iconography, for Lamantia to effect any meaningful change in emotional and spiritual direction.

Lamantia failed to perform what Robert Duncan called "a Catholic rescue" on Kerouac, but the two men remained friends, praising and promoting each other's work. Lamantia makes a dazzling appearance as David D'Angeli in Kerouac's acutely autobiographical novel, Desolation Angels - "There was David, that night, lying elegantly on a white fur cover on a bed, with a black cat, reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead and passing joints around, talking strangely ..." Leaving aside the transparent pseudonym, the portrait is an accurate one. Photos of Lamantia from this time show the darkly beautiful young man with the slightly sinister edge — balanced by a genuine piety - present in Kerouac's portrayal. It doesn't take too much effort to work out why he was such a distinctive figure on the San Francisco art and literature circuit.

Once accepted as a part of The Bay Area's creative community, Lamantia became a key player in what the popular and literary press styled "The San Francisco Renaissance". The poets involved were young, erudite but not pedantic, dynamic and, without exception, extremely good looking. John Wieners had a life-long battle with heroin and mental instability, only partially kept at bay by a highly idiosyncratic brand of Roman Catholicism. Mike McClure's interests included Blake, Milton, Abstract Expressionism and wildlife conservation. David Meltzer combined esoteric Judaism with jazz and pornography. A group photo of them looks like a publicity still for an upmarket rock group. (Meltzer actually had a musical career running parallel to his calling as a poet, with his band Serpent Power and, with his wife Tina, as one half of the acoustic duo, Poetsong).

Lamantia was also central to one of the most significant events of Twentieth Century poetry: the now legendary Gallery Six reading of 7th October, 1955. Although the initial idea came from Mike McClure, impending fatherhood obliged him to turn the organisation over to Allen Ginsberg, then a fairly new arrival from New York. 'Ginsy', as he was known to his innumerable friends, rented the Gallery Six, a small independent art gallery housed in a converted garage on Fillmore Street, and contacted the most dynamic poets he knew. Mike McClure read his great eco-poem, "For the Death of 100 Whales". Lamantia didn't read any of his own poetry. A friend of his, John Hoffman, had recently died of a peyote overdose in the Mexican desert and Lamantia read some of Hoffman's poems from what Kerouac called, in his novel The Dharma Bums, "delicate onion-skin yellow pages". Kerouac himself was in the audience, with his friend and inspiration, Neal Cassidy, cheering enthusiastically and shouting, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" as Ginsberg read the notorious ‘Moloch Choruses' from his epic poem, Howl, lambasting the rabid materialism eroding Whitman's dream of an egalitarian America.

The reading had a major implication for American literary publishing: also in the audience was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an Italian-American poet and artist who, unlike most of his contemporaries, combined personal creativity with a keen business sense. After the reading, he offered to publish Howl as part of his Pocket Poets series of attractively produced, but inexpensive, poetry collections. Ginsberg accepted, at the same time politely declining the offer of a literary-minded millionaire to issue the poem in a luxury limited edition. The precedent was set for neat, affordable poetry books distributed from Ferlinghetti's own City Lights Bookstore, and (at last!) in 1967, Pocket Poets published Lamantia's Collected Poems,

Lamantia's poetic domain is colourful, vibrant and in a constant state of change: "The children who are ten feet tall are wet./ Their faces are scorched, their eyes cut by glass./ They play their games as a steeple topples, as a clown's laugh is heard in church." ("A Civil World") But, again and again, no matter how threatening Lamantia's personal world is, his creations keep turning into love poems: "Your hair is mingled with little children/ Laughing in the moonlight;/ Butterflies have come to rest on your lips/ Whose words clothe the dancing stars/ Falling lightly to earth." ("Awakened from Sleep") or ""My love/ my gypsy/ among the fallen you are luminous/ You wander with those who are a mystery/ with a naked heart upon your breast" ("Mirror and Heart").

Lamantia's wanderings continued into the Sixties. Between 1963 and 1968, he lived in Morocco, Southern Spain, Greece and Italy, prior to re-establishing himself in San Francisco. In 1978, he married Nancy Peters, a poetess and businesswoman who would later become part-owner of the City Lights Bookstore. After their marriage, Lamantia embarked on yet another outlet for his creativity, as a lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also took an avuncular interest in San Francisco's punk rock movement, then fermenting in clubs like Mabuhay Gardens. A portrait of late-life Lamantia is provided by Neeli Cherkovski in his book, Whitman's Wild Children, in which the great poet is seen as being as maniacally erudite and talkative as he was in the Fifties, but with coffee replacing more exotic substances as his drug of choice.

Lamantia died on March 7th, 2005, after a period of relative seclusion in his beloved hometown. He was mourned by the many people whose lives he had "touched with the marvelous" and who remembered his boundless energy and endless freeflowing conversation. Poetry lovers the world over revered him as a vital link between the French Surrealists and the American Beats. - "What is not strange?/ now that I've swallowed the Pacific Ocean/ and sabotaged the Roman Empire/ and you have returned/ from all your past lives/ to sip the snakes of my fingertips:// Go Away & Be Born No More!" ("What is not Strange")