Little Boy

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Copyright © 2019 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design and illustration by John Gray/Gray 318

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, author.

  Title: Little boy / by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018027160 | ISBN 9780385544788 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385544795 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. | Poets, American—20th

  century—Biography. | Political activists—20th century—

  Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC PS3511.E557 Z46 2019 | DDC 811/.6 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018027160

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544795

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Little Boy

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  for Julie and for Lorenzo

  La vida es sueño.

  —CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA

  little Boy was quite lost. 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. His brother Harry aged twelve found their father dead on the back cellar steps of their little house just north of Van Cortlandt Park, Manhattan. “Poor Mom, no money, Pop dead,” wrote Harry years later. His mother, Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Sephardic parents who had immigrated from Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, where the family had been established for a very long time as wealthy planters until a collapse of the sugar market in the late 1890s impoverished them. The family had originally fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal but didn’t arrive in the New World in steerage with nothing but their clothes. They arrived with all their possessions in steamer trunks, including candelabras, gold, and jewels, and thus were able to set up as merchants and planters in Saint Thomas where they soon had a great house on a hill with wide verandas looking down on the center of the town, and a family album showed them in broad-brimmed hats and black string ties. Saint Thomas was a Danish crown colony until America snatched it early in the twentieth century, and the Monsantos had intermarried with the Danes as well as with French settlers, and there were many French relatives who visited and were visited in France. Clemence Albertine had a French mother of vague aristocratic origins, and she still spoke French. So it went that Clemence Albertine’s uncle married Emilie from northern France, and thus it was that Emilie who had always wanted a child came and took the newborn Laurent from his distraught mother and bore him off to France by herself. Little Boy surmised many years later that her husband, Ludwig Monsanto, a professor of languages, and quite a bit older than Emilie, did not at his advanced age want to adopt a son, and thus left Emilie with little Laurent. And so it was that Tante Emilie took him back to her hometown near Strasbourg (the town near where the famous Captain Dreyfus was from) when he was perhaps two years old, and there they lived long enough for him to speak French before English, and his very first memory of existence was being held on a balcony above the boulevard where a parade was going by, and someone was waving his hand at the great parade with band music wafting up and strains of the “Marseillaise” echoing. And the next thing he remembered was that they were back in New York in a big high-ceilinged apartment on the Upper West Side overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades across the great river and steamboats hooting their whistles and Aunt Emilie and Ludwig somehow back together again. He had a prickly beard when he embraced Little Boy, and the sun shone on them for a brief time until suddenly Uncle Ludwig was not there anymore, and this time for good. So then again it was himself and Aunt Emilie in the big elegant flat, but not for long, because she had no money, and soon a Health Department man came and took him away to an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York, because she had no money to buy him milk and the man said Little Boy would develop rickets. And there was much weeping when they took him away from Emilie, and so it was he stayed in that orphanage, and years later the only memory he had of it was having to eat undercooked tapioca pudding the kids called Cat’s Eyes. Oh the time lost and no other memory of it, until a year later Aunt Emilie came and got him, and it was still the 1920s in America. And how he remembered her back then. She wore cloche hats and had her hair cut short like Louise Brooks and wore always the same elegant dress in the 1920s style, with low-cut bosom and a long string of beads, and scent of eau-de-cologne always about her. And of course it was not “always,” except in Little Boy’s memory, but it must have been her thread-bare elegance (well hidden in her elegant spoken French) that got her a position as French governess to the eighteen-year-old daughter of Anna Lawrence Bisland and Presley Eugene Bisland in Bronxville, New York, where they lived in an ivy-covered mansion not far from Sarah Lawrence College founded by Anna Lawrence’s father. And so Aunt Emilie came and got him, and so began their life in a third-floor room near the attic where steamer trunks with Cunard Line stickers on them shared space with old saddles and ancient bric-a-brac. But Little Boy remembered especially the dinners every night in the formal dining room with the big-boned Dutch butler who also served as chauffeur and was not used to butlering and juggled the serving dishes, while Tante Emilie conversed in French with beautiful daughter Sally, and the parents at opposite ends of the long table chiming in from time to time, or at least Madame Bisland did, for it was stylish back then to speak French and make grand tours of the Continent, especially Paris, and Aunt Emilie no doubt charmed them until a few months later she must have charmed Presley Bisland a little too much for Madame Bisland, and suddenly Aunt Emilie was gone from that house, and they told Little Boy that Emilie had gone away on her day off and had just never come back. Now, inasmuch as the Bislands had had a baby boy named Lawrence who died in infancy, it seemed an act of divine providence that they had now been provided with another Lawrence. And so it went, and Little Boy went on with them in the late 1920s in that fine mansion in Lawrence Park West, Bronxville. But he was of school age by then and they first sent him off to boarding school at Riverdale Country School at Riverdale-on-Hudson of which Little Boy remembers nothing but a kind headmaster looking after him, the youngest boy in the school, and they had a summer camp in the Adirondacks where Little Boy learned to swim and tie knots and saw for the first time the great woods, the huge straight pines, the shimmering lakes, the hidden streams, and the light shining down on them, as in the first morning of the world. But this was all a brief idyll he would long remember, while between camp and school back at the mansion in Bronxville it was a very lonely life for Little Boy, with the nearest neighbor out of sight and no children of any age to play with, and there were only the grown-up Bislands who to Little Boy seemed very old, though perhaps they were only in their fifties, and he had a room in a wing of the house where great oaks leaned their branches over his windows, and the wind howled against the stone walls of the great house, but the wind was his companion in that r
oom that seemed so distant from the rest of the house. It was only at mealtime when a dinner bell sounded that he descended to the family table to sit between Presley and Anna Bisland who talked to each other as if at a great distance. Now to describe each of them was a task for a writer like Charles Dickens, for indeed they were like Victorians in every way, each such a unique character of another age, at least to Little Boy. And Presley Eugene Bisland had been born into a noble but impoverished family in Natchez, Mississippi, a couple of decades after the American Civil War in which they had lost all but their great old mansion Mount Repose. And Presley was the last son in a large family, and there was no inheritance for him. So at age fifteen he took off to the West, hoping to strike it rich in Gold Rush California. He rode the Chisholm Trail on cattle drives, learned to break horses, and worked his way west as a cowboy. Somewhere in northern California he put his stake into a promising gold mine, only to lose every cent of it as the mine failed to pan out. Broke but still only twenty, he made it to New York City where—through his family’s connections—he was soon hobnobbing with rich distant cousins (everyone in the Old South being related to everyone else) and was invited to many parties on upper Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue. A handsome man he was indeed, and although he had only a lowly job in the Abbot Coin Counter Company, he was much in demand among the debutantes of that period, including the young Anna Lawrence whose family had a mansion on upper Fifth Avenue. It was there that a marriage was arranged (with or without love one never knew) between the very handsome well-spoken Presley and the plain but demure Anna Lawrence. So then after a grand marriage they settled in Bronxville, some twenty miles from the city. At that time, Bronxville was little more than open country, and Anna’s father had bought up most of the acreage, planning a model town, with fine houses designed for artists and writers, its own water and electrical systems, etc, all owned originally by the Lawrence family. Into this fair enclave moved Presley and Anna early in the twentieth century, and by the time Little Boy showed up they were already along in years. To Little Boy they were always very very old, too old in fact for a young child to make any kind of contact. But Little Boy did love Presley Bisland. He had a wit about him that sparkled through the courtly conversations with his wife, the stately old lady who wore black Victorian gowns, always with a diamond choker around her neck. Years later, when Little Boy came to know the writings of Mark Twain, he realized that Presley Bisland was cut out of the same cloth, with the same satiric humor as Twain, the same southern background, even the same way of dressing. Presley had grown up in a household steeped in the classics, and had learned Latin at an early age. His library at Plashbourne (as their house was called) was full of Greek and Roman classics, as well as more modern writers like Lafcadio Hearn. The library was a small comfortable room just off the dining room paneled in dark oak, with heavy easy chairs and nooks for reading. At the dinner table, Presley would address Little Boy with questions like “Young man, you’ve been to school—who was Telemachus?” or he would recite old chestnuts like “Horatius at the Bridge,” thundering out the rhymes, or “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” making Little Boy feel the flames of the battle with “Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred…Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them,” and the great phrase “Someone had blundered!” rang through the dinner-table air. Or he would give Little Boy silver dollars to recite some chestnut by heart at the table. And Anna Bisland would fade from their presence and there was only the gracious witty old man challenging the world. (Little Boy didn’t know but perhaps she was pure Republican and he was Mark Twain), and if things ever seemed to be headed toward an argument, he usually answered, “Right or wrong, madam, you’re right.” She perhaps believed in God, and he didn’t. And when he was dying he forbid any kind of clergy to enter the house, but she snuck one in anyway, having a priest in an adjoining room mumble the last rites and then being spirited out the kitchen entrance. While all that Presley said was “Out of the house tonight, dead or alive!” Years later, reading Tolstoy, the Grown Boy imagined Presley like Tolstoy leaving his death-bed for the train station…And many years later, Grown Boy realized how much he loved that man, and knew not how to express it. But he remembered how once in deep winter, with snow blanketing the formal gardens around the mansion, he happened to see the old man in his pajamas in the middle of the night stumbling out the front door into the deep snow and starting to stumble into the storm, and Little Boy running after him and bringing him back into the house, and the dear old man would have frozen to death out there if it hadn’t been for Little Boy.

  AND Grown Boy in later years would never forget how when he was barely six years old his own mother, Clemence Albertine, and two of his brothers, Harry and Clement, came to the Bisland house one summer afternoon but were not invited into the house itself but stood on the great lawn in front, while armchairs were brought out for Presley and Anna Bisland while Little Boy stood sort of between them all, and the question was put straight to Little Boy, which way did he want to go, stay with the Bislands or go with his own mother and his own brothers, and there was a great and timorous silence in the summer air between them, and Little Boy was totally at a loss as to what to say or do, since no one had discussed this with him before and he did not remember ever having seen these strangers who were his mother and brothers, and he finally stuttered out, “Stay here,” and that was it, as his true mother and brothers just went away, and he only half realizing at all what he had done, his whole life decided in an instant, and he stayed on there, as it were, “forever,” and he never saw them again until he was grown, oh, what could the little kid know, what could the little kid know about “class” or “class distinctions” in the 1920s in Bronxville, New York, when his mother and brothers were not invited into the big house, although many years later he did remember being very shocked by that…And life went on, and there were no children to play with in the great mansion, the nearest house being a quarter mile away, and his best friends were the old Italian hunchback gardener who lived in a shack behind the garage and smelled of garlic—and the Irish housekeeper Delia Devine who had a sharp wit and a sharp tongue in her head with an Irish brogue that could cut butter—and the young Dutch chauffeur who drove the big Cadillac and doubled as butler with his big rawboned hands clumsy with the serving dishes—and the Swedish cook Annie who didn’t stomach any frivolity in her domain….And the house and all its inhabitants never faded away in his memory…The moving finger wrote and, having writ, moved on.

  AND the time came when they decided Little Boy did need some company his own age and that he should go to the Bronxville Public School which was several miles away in the center of Bronxville, so that Little Boy would have to be farmed out with someone in town so that he could attend the public school. And so it was arranged that he would be boarded with a certain Zilla Larned Wilson, a widow with one son of fifteen, who lived down by the railroad tracks on Parkway Road (the only “poor” street in town). And it was a shock for Little Boy to be suddenly transplanted to a totally different level of life, from the rich house to what seemed a poor house with its back porch backed up fifteen feet from the track where the New York Central Railroad thundered by in the night, rattling the windows. And so began some seven or eight years with the cold Widow Wilson and her son Bill who became a big brother to Little Boy, and there was also a ragged gang of kids to play or battle with. And Little Boy had one fistfight with a kid known as “snot-nosed Red Neer,” and then there formed a small gang of kids with whom Little Boy played Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the wooded park by the Bronx River Parkway, and they fished for crayfish in the little Bronx River in the park, and Little Boy wanted more than anything a buckskin suit like Robin Hood’s, and would have robbed a traveler to get it (that’s how rebels are born). While back at the house on Parkway Road he slept on a cot on the back porch with the trains rumbling by, and he got up every morning at five to run a paper route with Bill, and it took until seven to finish delivering th
e papers, and then he had to tend a newsstand at the train station, selling the New York Herald Trib and the Times to the well-heeled commuters heading for the City in their Chesterfield topcoats and fedoras or derbies on their way to Wall Street. And then there was just time to rush home, change clothes, eat a muffin, and take off for school by 9 a.m. And life went on like that for a full seven years, except that when he got to twelve years old he was able to go to Boy Scout camp for a month in upstate New York somewhere. And all that time he never heard from the Bislands (although they must have been paying his board). But by the time he was going on fifteen, he was beginning to get into trouble after school, running around with small hoodlums shoplifting stuff and stashing it in a cellar behind the stores, and Little Boy was caught stealing pencils from the five-and-ten-cent store the same week he made Eagle Scout, and the scoutmaster had to come and get him and take him home for a spanking, after which the cold widow decided he had become too much for her to handle and called the Bislands to come and get him, which they did, and so began another totally different life in the saga of Boy who was no longer little. Lonely was the word, and looking back years later he realized that neither the Widow Wilson nor the Bislands had ever given him a hug or a kiss. Now school was out and summer came on, with the Bislands taking him with them to their summer lodge on Big Wolf Lake in the Adirondacks where he did the chores and chopped wood and dug in the sawdust of the icehouse for huge blocks of ice that he split and carried into the kitchen icebox. And there was a boathouse with rowboats and a sailing canoe which he was allowed to take out by himself on the lake, and many were the sunny hours he spent learning to sail by himself, and it was the best summer he ever had. In the main lodge there were birchbark signs that read things like “Come when you wish, go when you will, and do what you damn please” though he knew quite well that he could not do what he damn pleased, but another birchbark sign proclaimed “Behold the Fisherman. He ariseth at dawn and disturbeth the whole household and goes forth full of hope and returneth late at night smelling of strong drink and the truth is not in him,” and he was allowed to be a fisherman and caught lake trout as the summer passed away and then the Bislands sent him away to Mount Hermon School on the Connecticut River one hundred miles west of Boston, where for the first time he experienced real camaraderie with other boys in the dorms. His first year he had a roommate on the ground floor of an old dorm, and this roommate was a senior and was from India. His name was Jim, son of missionaries in India, born in India, and he became big brother to the boy, and one day something happened that awakened the boy to consciousness. In old age he still remembered it. Jim had Small Boy down on the floor, sitting on him astraddle. He was gentle but he would not let Small Boy up until he would admit that he could not prove he was alive and that he was not dreaming, and Small Boy kept crying “But I am alive, I am alive!” and Jim kept saying how can you prove it, and Small Boy was crying and Jim just kept sitting on him until he let him up. And life went on in his first year at Mount Hermon School on the Connecticut River, due west of Boston, and almost three years later he did graduate and went on to Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina and graduated from journalism school and went straight into the U.S. Navy at the beginning of World War Two, and commanded a navy subchaser in the Normandy landings and went to the Pacific as navigator on an attack transport and saw Nagasaki seven weeks after the second bomb was dropped and saw the landscape of hell and became an instant pacifist and was discharged from the navy in Portland, Oregon, in the fall of that year, and got his first job in NYC in the mail room of Time magazine in the basement of the Time-Life Building, Rockefeller Center, and quit after three months and went to Columbia University graduate school and got an MA in lit and went to the University of Paris on the G.I. Bill and after three and a half years got a doctorate and split for the States and “home.”