Tuesday Mar. 24, 2015

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#2

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
                               at the turn of the century
              my father ran into my mother
                                                       on a fun-ride at Coney Island
                   having spied each other eating
                                          in a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
                                              that she was for him entirely
         he followed her into
                                              the playland of that evening
          where the headlong meeting
                                              of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
                      hurtled them forever together

And I now in the back seat
                                                 of their eternity
                                                                reaching out to embrace them

“#2” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Far Rockaway of the Heart. © New Directions, 1997. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1955 that the Tennessee Williams (books by this author) play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway, two days before Williams’s 44th birthday. Reviews were enthusiastic, with New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson declaring the play, “the quintessence of life.” The exception was critic Kenneth Tynan, who thought there was “an unaccountable wrongness, as if a kazoo had intruded into a string quartet.” The kazoo, Tynan wrote, was director Elia Kazan, who had battled ferociously with Williams during rehearsals for the play. Kazan insisted on removing large portions of text, in part to make Maggie the Cat, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, seem more sympathetic to the audience. Williams had not wanted Bel Geddes to play Maggie, nor did he want Burl Ives as family patriarch Big Daddy, dismissing Ives as “just a singer.”

Barbara Bel Geddes would go on to win a Tony Award for her work. Despite Kazan’s changes, the play was enormously successful, filling the 955-seat theater on a nightly basis and winning Williams his second Pulitzer Prize for drama. The first had been in 1947, for the play A Streetcar Named Desire, also directed by Kazan. Elizabeth Taylor played Maggie the Cat in the 1958 film, which Williams hated, though Taylor was a close friend. In a 1974 Broadway revival, he replaced what Kazan had omitted, and critics felt the play, particularly the ending, was richer. Late in life, Williams admitted this was the favorite of all his plays. It was, he said, “A play which says only one affirmative thing about ‘Man’s Fate’: that he has it still in his power not to squeal like a pig, but to keep a tight mouth about him.”

It’s the birthday of the geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell, born in Mount Morris, New York (1834). His father was an itinerant preacher, and the family moved around constantly, a habit that Powell kept. As a young man, he spent four months walking across Wisconsin, and he traveled by boat down much of the Mississippi River. He fought in the Civil War, and he lost an arm in combat, but it didn’t stop his adventures. He is most famous for exploring the desert Southwest: he traveled down the Colorado River, and explored what are now Zion, Canyonlands, and Bryce National Park, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. He and his companions were the first European-Americans ever to navigate the Grand Canyon Gorge.

It’s the birthday of poet and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti (books by this author), born in Bronxville, New York (1919). He was raised by French relatives after his father died and his mother was committed to an asylum. He joined the Navy, went to college on the GI Bill, and moved to San Francisco. He translated some French poems and submitted them to City Lights, a new pop culture magazine run by Peter Martin. Martin ran his magazine out of a mezzanine above a floral shop in the Italian neighborhood of North Beach. When the flower shop went out of business, Martin decided to sell paperback books out of the empty space. In those days, paperbacks were sold in drug stores or newsstands. One day Ferlinghetti walked by, and he stopped to introduce himself; Martin remembered his translations of poems by Jacques Prévert. Ferlinghetti and Martin struck up a friendship and decided to go into business together on the bookstore, each pitching in $500 for startup costs. They named the bookstore City Lights as well, and decided to sell quality paperbacks and radical periodicals — neither of which you could find in regular bookstores. In an era when most bookstores were closed in the evenings and on weekends, City Lights was open until 2 a.m.

In 1955, two years after opening the store, Ferlinghetti began City Lights Publishers. He said: “From the beginning, the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding [...] just ‘our gang.’ I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment.” He published many of the Beat writers, and famously defended Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in an obscenity trial, but Ferlinghetti himself had a different lifestyle. He said: “I was already married. I was living the quiet life. I ended up being the one that stayed home and kept the shop. I really became identified with the Beats by publishing them.”

Ferlinghetti’s books include A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), The Secret Meaning of Things (1969), A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), and Time of Useful Consciousness (2012). He said, “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.”

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