Literary history breeds familiarity
On my first trip to New York City over a decade ago, I felt an uncanny need to walk the path of Holden Caulfield, the coming-of-age protagonist of J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I had read the book in college, and now that I was in New York, I headed straight to the iconic Central Park. While I ambled along the walkways, my thoughts veered toward Caulfield’s cynical ways of dealing with his struggles. This literary pilgrimage to Central Park, in an undefined way, was my acceptance of failure and growing up in the process. Again, on a recent trip to Ireland, I felt drawn to places James Joyce and W. B. Yeats wrote about – Dublin and County Sligo. The places felt so familiar even though I was visiting them for the first time. While traveling in South America, I derived much of my understanding of Spanish history, culture, and way of life from the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda that I had read before.
The location illuminates the story and provides a bridge between the writer and reader across time and space. A story can live forever through the glory of the place and vice-versa.
While writing my latest book, Yosemite of My Heart, Poems of Adventure in California, I discovered various literary landmarks in the San Francisco Bay Area. To me, San Francisco is a city built on an eternal quest, right from the days of 1849’s gold rush to the San Francisco Renaissance in the late 1940s, leading up to the Beat generation who came here looking for creativity and freedom of self-expression and found it in the air of the city. Poetry and music were integral parts of the bohemian culture that followed in its wake. Haight-Ashbury’s diverse group of artists, poets, writers, and musicians in the 60s gave the world Beat Poetry.
Inspired by the unique “California vibe”, I turned my gaze locally to record some of the literary landmarks of the area. The literary contributions of these locations proved instrumental in boosting my budding writing efforts.
North Beach, San Francisco – Beat Writers
In the 1950s, Beat writers – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others found their solace in the bohemian climes of San Francisco, with its “eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time”, wrote Kerouac in his novel, On the Road.
Allen Ginsberg wrote about societal issues of his times in post-World War 2 America, and raised the countercultural flag with his poetry, exclaiming, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” in his epic work Howl; his work triggered jury trial on charges of obscenity, but eventually was deemed fit for publication.
William Burroughs expounded on the famous maxim, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” in Naked Lunch influencing popular culture with the power of words.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another Beat poet, established the country’s first paperback-only bookstore, City Lights, in 1953 in San Francisco. To this day, the store remains relevant to the city’s cultural vibrancy. The nearby Beat Museum houses various Beat memorabilia and hosts frequent book readings. Collectively the Beats generation left their indelible mark on popular literature, movies, and songs.
Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco – Hunter S Thompson
This colorful neighborhood with its Victorian houses, wide murals, and trendy boutiques still retains an air of bohemia from the 1960s in its heyday, when it reverberated with path-breaking music of rock icons like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. During the same period, Hunter Thompson lived in Haight-Ashbury, riding with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, which formed the narrative of his prominent book, Hell’s Angels, The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It’s a fascinating read with lucid prose and some remarkable insights, including the following:
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
Sonoma County – Jack London
Jack London, arguably the first American writer who made a fortune from writing, was born in San Francisco in 1876. He became internationally known for his books, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. He lived a life full of adventures and wrote about them. Towards the later part of his life, he lived on a ranch in picturesque Glen Ellen, trying to build his mansion, Wolf House. Many of his novels and stories, such as The Valley of the Moon mention Glen Ellen and Sonoma County in vivid detail.
The site of his ranch is now Jack London State Historic Park, which contains the ruins of Wolf House, several ranch buildings, and his remarkable writing exhibit. Writing of Sonoma, London says,
“The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame.
Across Sonoma Mountain, wisps of sea fog are stealing.
The afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive.”
Salinas and Monterey – John Steinbeck
Nobel laureate John Steinbeck was born in Salinas and wrote about the Salinas Valley in several of his works including, The Pastures of Heaven and East of Eden. Describing the Fremont Peak in Salinas, he writes, “This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth.” To commemorate his works, the National Steinbeck Center opened in Salinas in 1998. During my visit, I was delighted to see the GMC pick-up truck that he drove across the country in 1960 becoming the basis of his book, Travels with Charley.
Another of Steinbeck’s work, Cannery Row, set during the Great Depression, highlights the declining fishing industry and the plight of individuals caught on the margins of society in the eponymous community of Monterey. The modern-day Cannery Row looks, feels, and smells very different from what Steinbeck described as a street lined with fishing establishments and “shops packed like sardines.” A book tends to freeze a place in time and even though the shape and form of the place change due to ensuing development and gentrification, the original energy of a bustling place doesn’t dissipate. I could feel the air and the vibrant energy of Cannery Row, as described by Steinbeck.
Carmel-by-the-sea – Robinson Jeffers
A little south of Monterey lies the scenic coastal town of Carmel-by-the-sea, which the poet Robinson Jeffers called home for most of his life starting from 1914. Jeffers is known for his poetic works on the central California coast, and his Carmel home called Tor House, standing on the edge of a cliff, is a testament to this day of his love of wild outdoors, craggy coastlines, and ocean waters.
In Carmel Point, he juxtaposes the pristine beauty of the ocean and cliff with the modern human condition and writes:
“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”
Big Sur – Henry Miller
The iconoclastic and bohemian writer, Henry Miller, moved to Big Sur in the late 1950s and described the place in his book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, as, “This is the face of the Earth as the creator intended it to look.” Miller wrote path-breaking semi-autobiographical novels, blending streams of consciousness, philosophy, and spirituality. He is considered a huge influence on the writers of the Beat Generation. He lived a peripatetic life and declared, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”