The honors never stop for famed City Lights owner and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who will accept the country’s top cultural honors: Commandeur des Arts et Lettre. “I am delighted. France has always been my second home. When I first showed up to San Francisco after World War II, I was still wearing my French beret,” Ferlinghetti told the SF Chronicle’s Delfin Vigil upon hearing the news. The award, a large necklet medallion, will be bestowed upon Ferlinghetti by Frederic Desagneaux, the San Francisco consul general of France, at a private party in Pacific Heights on Dec. 8.
Past non-French honorees include David Bowie, Jackson Pollock and Ferlinghetti’s old friend Allen Ginsberg. There are a few knights in the Bay Area, but Christophe Musitelli, cultural attache with the San Francisco French Consulate, believes Ferlinghetti will be the first Commandeur in San Francisco. “We can’t point to just one thing in his life,” said Musitelli of Ferlinghetti’s automatic acceptance by the culture minister in Paris. “He had a huge intellectual impact on France in the 1950s. Ferlinghetti was the bridge in bringing the literature of the beatnicks to Paris and shared it with the Left Bank writers.”