The Beat Hotel
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The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period—from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963—it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation. Now, Barry Miles—acclaimed author of many books on the Beats and a personal acquaintance of many of them—vividly excavates this remarkable period and restores it to a historical picture that has, until now, been skewed in favor of the two coasts of America.A cheap rooming house on the bohemian Left Bank, the hotel was inhabited mostly by writers and artists, and its communal atmosphere spurred the Beats to incredible heights of creativity. Its inhabitants followed the Howl obscenity trial, and they corresponded with Jack Kerouac as On the Road was taking off. There Ginsberg wrote “Kaddish,” “To Aunt Rose,” “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” and “The Lion for Real,” and Corso developed the mature voice of The Happy Birthday of Death. The Beat Hotel is where the Cut-up method was invented, and where Burroughs finished and published Naked Lunch and the Cut-up novels. From a party where Ginsberg and Corso drunkenly accosted Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, to an awestruck audience with Louis-Ferdinand Céline a year before he died; from a drug-addled party on a houseboat on the Seine with Errol Flynn and John Huston, to Burroughs’s near arrest as a heroin dealer: mischief, inspiration, and madness followed the Beats wherever they went. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at a crucial period for some of the twentieth century’s most enduring and daring writers.
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Praise for The Beat Hotel:
“[The Beat Hotel was] a potent interzone of deep culture, unvarnished self-indulgence, and unbridled creativity. . . . Barry Miles knows his Beats, and he is a generous and salubrious host. The Beat Hotel . . . is packed with visceral history, making for a nicely decadent read.”
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The summer visitors had left and, as promised, Madame Rachou moved Allen and Peter to a better room. They were given room 25, on the third floor, next door to Guy Harloff, the painter who was responsible for getting them into the hotel. A Dutchman who held an American passport, Harloff was over six feet tall with long black hair slicked back with hair cream. If he was not painting, he read Henry Miller and had loud drunken arguments with his girlfriend, Sharon Walsh, sometimes breaking the furniture. But he was kind to Allen and Peter and often gave them food; on the day they arrived he presented them with a pound of English bacon and a packet of English butter. Peter was impressed with his style, writing to the poet Ron Loewinsohn that Harloff “always has girls at candlelight night in bed and cooks good food.” Harloff came from a well-off Dutch family who provided him with a generous allowance, which was why Madam Rachou was prepared to give him credit at the bar and allow him to owe back rent.
The new room was a great improvement. It appeared to have changed little since the nineteenth century, though the walls were considerably older than that. To reach it, they first took a gas-lit staircase, which in turn led to an eighteenth-century staircase, and finally reached a set of rooms that were probably originally used by well-to-do people who lived far from Paris and who would take them for a few months at a time when they visited the capital. Room 25 was in the front of the hotel and had two windows with long drapes overlooking the street. The walls were whitewashed. There was a big bed, a large wardrobe with a built-in mirror, a sink, and a worktable. It was one of the few rooms in the hotel to have a gas range. They stowed away their knapsacks and unpacked their clothes; Allen took his red portable Royal typewriter from its carrying case, arranged his piles of notebooks and manuscripts on the worktable, and, tacking his portrait of Rimbaud to the wall, he made himself at home.
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