Читать книгу The Beat Hotel - Barry Miles - Страница 12

3Expatriates

The disturbing effects of a sudden change of environment on even the tolerably well-educated are always and everywhere apparent. On their first arrival in Paris young English and American men will behave as they would never dream of behaving at home. Young women, too, one is forced to add. It was ever so.

Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate

Bill Burroughs, still in Tangier, wrote frequently to Allen, often twice in one week. He was still adding new passages and sections to his book, such that it no longer resembled the original manuscript that Allen had delivered to Maurice Girodias on his arrival in Paris. Bill sent Allen copies of all the revisions and new material so he could continuously update Girodias’s copy—a hapless task. In mid-November Allen gave the latest version of Bill’s manuscript, now called Naked Lunch, to Mason Hoffenberg, an “adviser” for Olympia Press who had just co-authored Candy with Terry Southern for Girodias. Hoffenberg was amazed by Bill’s writing and pronounced it the “greatest greatest book” he had ever read. He assured Allen that Olympia would take it on his recommendation, and Allen gave a sigh of relief, thinking the book would be published at last. Meanwhile Bill sent Allen another thirty pages to add to the manuscript, telling him that there were a further hundred pages to come. Yet, though he looked through the manuscript a second time, Girodias still rejected it on the grounds that there was no sex in it, despite Southern’s claim that the title referred to an American tradition not dissimilar to the French cinq a sept, when Frenchmen visit their mistresses in the hours before dinner. Girodias also objected to the drug references, something Olympia had not previously had to contend with as subject matter in their books.

On November 24, 1957, Peter wrote his first poem, which he titled “Frist Poem.” Peter’s eccentric spelling was retained when it was published and is partly responsible for its charm—”I look for my shues under my bed” or “I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut.” It was written just as Peter spoke—as William Carlos Williams said about Orlovsky’s work, “Nothing English about it—pure American.” On December 27, he wrote “Second Poem,” which is largely about their room in the Beat Hotel: “Is there any one saintly thing I can do to my room, paint it pink / maybe or instal an elevator from bed to the floor, maybe take a bath on the bed? / . . . There comes a time in life when everybody must take a piss in the sink—here let me paint the window black for a minute.” The poems were described by Allen as “Both unmistakably his own weird surreal style & both exact & great round poems. New poet actually to be sure!” Europe inspired Peter to write. His first attempts were in Cannes, when he and Allen were on their way to stay with Alan Ansen that spring. There he wrote the long scroll entitled “One Line Scrapbook,” which appears in his City Lights Pocket Poets volume. Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs.

Peter was happy because there were lots of young women in the hotel. They also met two French shopgirls who took a liking to them. Peter wrote to Jack Kerouac, “Allen & Gregory have erections pointed at 2 french girls all 4 on the iron bed bouncing, Gregory going out to score for H, let me tell you theres fucking in the house tonight.” Alas, this time it was not to be. Gregory returned with the dope and, later in the letter, which was written over several days, Peter commented that he had read 120 pages of Jean Genet’s Thief's Journal “wile Allen & Gregory were trying to fuck with limp hard ons because of the dope.” They stayed up all night talking, and when the girls left to go to work, Allen, Gregory, and Peter took a walk to the part of Paris where Gregory thought Genet now lived, but they were unable to find him.

Twenty-five years later, remembering the girls, Allen said, “They were the first real French people we met. . . . One of them, Françoise, was really hung up on me. I didn’t realize the consequences, I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t realize it was real. It’s apparently a big neurotic problem of mine, not recognizing genuine affection. I thought anybody in love with me must be crazy! Since I’m gay anyway and I’ve been living with Peter, that if anybody gets fixated on me there must be some misalliance or misjudgment of some sort. I didn’t see it, as I might now, as an indication for an open situation, more as a fixed obsession on her part. So I probably hurt her a great deal. Being so closed off. She was very young. I was thirty by then.”

Allen wrote to his old friend Lucien Carr, using an abbreviated code (x for sex, and T for tea [marijuana]): “We’re crowded & have usual choice collection of interesting screwballs dropping in for supper, X, T, heroin or whatever’s on menu. Also making time with two french shopgirls & Peter makes ladies of the streets.” Peter would go off alone to the wine warehouses half a mile away on the quai Saint Bernard where the prostitutes gathered next to the Port au Yin and serviced the men handling the great barrels of wine. They looked older than they were—working-class girls who drank the cheapest vin ordinaire, dressed in black high heels, nylons, and skirts to mid-calf, with their hair sprayed into shape.

One of the many people who showed up at room 25 was the English translator Simon Watson-Taylor. Watson-Taylor was a member of the College of ’Pataphysics, the French literary group founded in honor of Alfred Jarry, and was a translator of French avant-garde and Surrealist literature into English. He had somehow obtained their address and wanted to meet someone who could explain the Beat Generation to him. When he arrived, Allen and Peter both had bad colds and were tucked up in bed sniffling, surrounded by Kleenex. He entered the room and burst out laughing at the state they were in. Watson-Taylor was very amicable and took them both out for a good meal. He knew Marcel Duchamp and many of the Surrealists and was able to recommend many books and authors to Allen.

November came and the streets were cold. The rue Git-le-Coeur was sheltered but a vicious wind cut along the river. To visit the little tabac on the quai des Augustines near Picasso’s old studio meant turning the comer into art arctic gale. Allen usually awoke about midday and frequently spent the afternoons walking the cobbled streets alone, looking at the winter rain on the cobblestones, cold sunlight on gray walls, the statues and plaques commemorating dead artists and statesmen and heroes. He would climb the butte of Montmartre to the row of ramshackle wooden studios on the rue Ravignan, dubbed “Bateau Lavoire” by Max Jacob, where Picasso. Juan Gris, Kees van Dongen, and their poet friends lived before the Great War.

Allen often took long walks along the river and examined the jumble of used books and prints for sale at the bookstalls on the quais beneath the branches of the plane trees. There he found all the Olympia Press editions of Henry Miller and Genet that were banned in the United States. Allen was unaware that the poet Guillaume Apollinaire had written pornographic novels and was delighted to find copies of Amorous Exploits of a Young Rakehell and The Debauched Hospodar. After they had all read them, Allen sent the books, one at a time, back to his parents in Paterson. His father had remarried after his divorce from Naomi and Allen told his stepmother, Edith, “OK for you to read them if you’re not shocked but don’t burn them they’re expensive and rare in the US.”

These books inspired Allen to reread Apollinaire’s poetry, and toward the end of November Allen and Peter went in search of his grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Père-Lachaise, opened in 1804, is a vast, picturesque garden, an overcrowded jumble of mausoleums and statuary in every conceivable style, filled with huge trees and winding footpaths, the final resting place of Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, Gérard de Nerval, Théodore Géricault, Frédéric Chopin, Colette, and Marcel Proust among thousands of others, the celebrated and the unknown. Allen and Peter walked quietly hand in hand through the winter trees and fantastic statuary, following the street names until they found Apollinaire’s grave. The headstone was a menhir, or standing stone, a rough, thin slice of granite, taller than Allen, incised with his full name—Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitski—and two of his poems. There was a jam jar filled with daisies and a cheap gift-shop ceramic rose on the tomb. Allen sat on the mossy roots of the tree next to the grave and smoked a cigarette, watching an ant walk over his corduroy sleeve, Apollinaire’s Alcools in his pocket. He laid a copy of Howl on the gravestone for Apollinaire to read in Heaven. This same division held the grave of the poet Henri de Régnier, one of the founders of Symbolism, and in the next division lay Proust. After a while, Allen and Peter looked around the rest of the cemetery.

Back at the rue Git-le-Coeur, Allen and Peter’s visit to Père-Lachaise inspired a typical Beat Hotel prank. A painter named Howie, who had listened to Allen talking about the cemetery, was about to return to the States and, in early December, the night before he was due to leave, he got drunk and decided he wished to take Baudelaire’s gravestone with him as a souvenir. He recruited helpers from around the hotel, including Allen, and they all piled in a cab and went to Montparnasse cemetery on Blvd Raspaïl, where Howie climbed the wall and disappeared into the darkness. The others waited for a while, then walked down the Blvd Montparnasse to the Café Select to wait for him. Howie arrived eventually, saying that the wall was too high and that the tombstone, which he never found, was probably too heavy anyway.

Because it was so cold, they spent less time exploring and sightseeing. Gregory bought some oil paints and brushes and began to paint abstract pictures on canvas paper tacked to the hotel wall. He bought a sketchbook and did a series of humorous and lighthearted line drawings. Peter bought some colored crayons and drew strange red angels sitting in red trees. Allen was too shy to try, even though his journals often contained expressive pen-and-ink drawings. They found one excursion they could make and keep out of the wind: on December 7, Allen, Peter, and Gregory spent the afternoon walking underground in the Paris catacombs for a mile, starting from Place Denfert-Rochereau. The vaulted passages were stacked with human bones and skulls like logs stored for a winter fire, moved there in the 1780s because the cemetery at Les Halles was filled to overflowing. Peter described the scene to Robert LaVigne: “Eerie haunting damp and partly sweet odor from millions of leg bones & skulls piled up neatly along the tunnel way. All that death in a small place. I felt I was dead myself walking there—Gregory stole a leg bone & its now laying next to Rimbaud on the wall.”

Allen usually cooked supper in the room for himself and Peter, and Gregory if he was around, and the evenings were spent reading and writing, with occasional expeditions. Allen made many visits to the Musée Guimet on Place de l’Iéna, looking at the Indian miniatures and Tibetan tankas, and mentioned it several times in his journals—”The stone of Scone sits like winged victory / In Musée Guimet’s intestines.” They went several times to the Chinese Ballet and, when they could afford it, to Gregory’s favorite café, the Bonaparte, on Place St. Germain, which was the preferred meeting place for their growing circle of friends and acquaintances. Jean-Paul Sartre lived in the apartment building above the café, but strangely the Beats were never interested in the existentialists and did not read their books. Ginsberg wrote, “I thought, and still do, that existentialism was an intellectual practice rather than a physical practice. It was a theory of being spontaneous, and theory of confronting the void, but they weren’t out there. And even when they went out there to do it, it was in purely political terms which involved a tremendous amount of aggression and hatred.” Despite his political involvement Allen professed to share Kerouac’s detached view of life, often claiming it as the official Beat Generation line. Kerouac proposed complete noninvolvement, or as Allen termed it, “the lambiness of non-existence, the lambiness of illusion.” Kerouac went further; he was sympathetic to the American far right and a great supporter of Senator McCarthy. He saw existentialism as a communist plot. Kerouac writing in 1963 stated, “In the long run men will only remember the lamb. Camus would have had us turn literature into mere propaganda, with his ‘commitment’ talk. . . . Myself, I’m only an ex-sailor, I have no politics, I don’t even vote.” For Ginsberg, who was not an academic, existentialism was too European, too intellectual. Many years later, when he was teaching poetry at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg still had not read any literary theory or made any attempt to engage with the critical discussions concerning textual analysis and deconstruction that were then raging in English departments across the country.

On November 16, Alan Ansen arrived in Paris to spend three weeks visiting Allen and Peter. They took him to the Café Le Royal, a homosexual meeting place on St.-Germain-des-Pres. The café was described by a later resident of the hotel, Harold Norse, in his poem “Green Ballets’”: “Shlepping from St. Michel along the pissoir route to the Flore . . . the cold whipping into the make-up of the hopefuls at the terrace tables. Across the street at the Café Royale gray old swindle—worse there is—the Youth Swindle. Blade-sharp hustlers. Gray old fag swindle. It’s an insult when they regard you from under age on show. Sweeping coiffures, every dyed hair counted, every advantage price-tagged. To your disadvantage, dig? Makes you feel old & sin. Can’t join the Youth Club now.”

Ansen preferred the scene on the rue de la Huchette across from Place St. Michel, where the students and young people hung out in the basement jazz clubs and bars like Chez Popov and the Caveau de la Huchette. Allen and Peter took Alan to their favorite rue de la Huchette bar, where runaway high school boys with shoulder-length hair and wispy d’Artagnan beards stood in corners with their even younger-looking girlfriends, none of them able to scrape up the 40 francs (10¢) needed for a glass of red wine.

Ansen took a great liking to Gregory and his work and invited him to come and stay in Venice whenever he wanted. At that moment Gregory was not in need of a patron because he had met a rich Mexican girl in the Louvre and she had somewhat eased his financial crisis. She even had a car and promised to drive them all to Chartres. Gregory was writing really well and Allen wrote a glowing description of his work to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, commenting on his penury and saying, “. . . in his poverty too marvellously, how he gets along here hand to mouth, daily, begging & conning & wooing, but he writes daily marvellous poems. . . . Gregory is in his golden inspired period like in Mexico, but even more, & soberer solemner, calm genius every morning he wakes and types last nites 2 or 3 pages of poems, bordering on strangeness, now he’s even going further . . .”

Though Ferlinghetti had accepted Gregory’s book Gasoline, he and Gregory were now replacing poems in it, having decided that the selection of poetry was not quite right. Allen now had certain reservations about the book, even though he had written an enthusiastic introduction when they were in Amsterdam. He told Ferlinghetti, “I’m glad you dug the new Gregory poems, ‘Coit Tower’ is certainly approaching something really great like Fern Hill. I was depressed when I finally saw his proofs because I really do think he’s one of the greatest poets in US but it wasn’t in the book. I like his short poems, but I dig his genius best in the long wild incomprehensible blowing, the pure phrasing—His life is too unstable for him to sit down for long cool afterthoughts & assembling of book properly—it should have had more long poems . . . I hadn’t realized in Amsterdam how much crap like ‘America’ fragment had crept in & short meaningless poems. But almost everything now is near perfect—strangely he’s best when he’s serious I mean, not when he’s being Little Gregory writing about his dollies. I’m glad it’s all OK to rip up & delay the book again to include ‘Coit Tower.’” Ferlinghetti had reached the same conclusion and did revise the book to include Gregory’s new poems, though he still refused to include “Power.”

Though Gregory’s work was becoming more spontaneous, with less rewriting and fixing, he was still not a convert to Kerouac’s belief in total spontaneity. Jack insisted on spontaneous composition—that nothing should ever be changed, not even the punctuation. Jack wrote poems by the yard, their composition time determined only by his typing speed, whereas Gregory believed that the poet should be a craftsman, should know how to construct a poem. It was a long-standing disagreement between them and a frequent subject of debate when Gregory was discussing poetry.

Irritated that Jack had criticized his work methods in a letter, Gregory replied with his own criticism of Jack’s recent poems, referring him back to Shelley: “When I look at your poem I know to myself that this poem was written with the fast finger, well all I can say is that if beauty were to pass my window I would her to move slow slow slow, not shot, whiz, tennis ball, was that beauty? O why didn’t she linger? I guess for those who have never seen beauty before should be satisfied with the shot, but I, like you, who have seen her, would now prefer examination—ergo, you write not for me but for the lack, and of course that is your way and that is good, that is why I prefer your prose which is poetry better than your poetry which is almost bullet . . . whiz.” He ends by saying, “You, who have written a book of verse in an hour, can write 24 books in a day . . . no, I’m sorry Jack, but poetry is Ode To The West Wind.”

Thanksgiving came and Allen's father sent him $15 so they were able to fry a chicken to celebrate the holiday. Allen was snowed under with correspondence and complained that he had no time to work on his own poetry—a situation that would persist for the rest of his life. Some of his friends inundated him with letters, making Allen feel guilty—by mid-November he owed Robert LaVigne six letters. Letters arrived from Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen’s family, Neal Cassady, Ron Loewinsohn, and Jack Kerouac, and he received unsolicited poetry manuscripts by the score from all over. He received letters from unknown young businessmen who had read about him in Life, one of whom congratulated him on being free, on leaving the rat race, and complained that he had “lost his soul. Allen told his father, “Spend or waste a lot time answering strange letters, everything from Jesuit appeals to Christ in me to young poets who write in on toilet paper.”

The latter referred to LeRoi Jones, then living in the Village, who had been very influenced by “Howl” and was thinking of starting a new literary magazine called Yugen. In his autobiography, Jones wrote,

Wanting to be as weird to him as I thought he was to me, I wrote him a letter on toilet paper, sent to the 9 rue Git-le-Coeur address, asking was he for real. He sent me back a letter, also written on toilet paper, but the coarser European grade that makes better writing paper. He told me he was sincere but he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg. (The notoriety was just starting.) He signed the letter and had a drawing under his signature of a lineup, a parade of different beasts and animals, all with halos over their heads in some weird but jolly procession.

Allen sent LeRoi four short poems and suggested that he contact Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Corso, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Whalen sent him work immediately, and Allen mentioned the magazine in his wide correspondence. Jones wrote, “He was the poetry advertiser of that age, the role that Ezra Pound played during the 20s, hipping people to each other, trying to get various people published.” He described Ginsberg’s letters as being like “quick courses in contemporary American poetry.”

Allen was very keen to get Jones to publish Kerouac’s poetry, as Ferlinghetti had just rejected Jack’s Book of Blues for City Lights. And early in November, Allen had received a group of poems from Ray Bremser, via Bordontown Reformatory, which he liked enough to pass along. Suddenly LeRoi was at the center of Beat Generation small-press publishing and the magazine, Yugen, which he edited with his girlfriend Hettie Cohen, became one of the most influential of all the Beat periodicals.

Once Jones had published the Beats in his magazine, Allen began to suggest other poets he should publish. According to Jones, “Ginsberg also hipped me to the San Francisco School (old and new, some of whom were known as the Beats), the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler) and a host of other young people. Older poets like Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Trendsetters like Robert Creeley and all kinds of other names. Kerouac and Burroughs of course. John Wieners, Ron Loewinsohn, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Ferlinghetti, Jack Spicer . . .” Allen was in contact with all of them, putting them in touch with one another and with editors, sending poems and receiving news.

In December, Allen wrote the first draft of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” which was to become one of his most anthologized poems. Like many of Ginsberg’s poems it is universal, addressing eternal verities, and specifically dated; for instance, he mentions President Eisenhower’s visit to Paris for the NATO conference. Ike left on December 19 and Allen wrote, “So let it be the airport at blue Orly in the winter day / and Eisenhower winging home to his American graveyard.” Though at the time Ginsberg did not feel he was producing much in the way of poetry because he was so busy socializing and writing letters, he later found that he had accumulated a large body of work during his stay in Paris. By situating himself in the Beat Hotel, he was removing himself from the constant bombardment of images from the mass media, all-pervasive in daily city life hack home. Paris supplied its own equivalent, but it was a foreign culture and most of the messages went unheeded because he didn’t know the language sufficiently well, or understand the references.

Though he was removed from the immediate effects of American culture, Allen recognized that his work fell within a literary tradition and that he was influenced on an unconscious level by conventions, parental views, and by the values of American society, despite his making a conscious effort to strip away preconditioned notions. He would no doubt have agreed that his past experience governed what Walter Benjamin called the “overtaxing of the productive person in the name of . . . the principle of ‘creativity,’ in which the poet is believed on his own and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work.” At the Beat Hotel, Allen, Gregory, and the other residents lived in a micro-climate of their own creation, self-referential and hermetic. It was an ecosystem that fell within the emerging drug culture, with its background in jazz and the avant-garde, its roots firmly planted in the bohemian tradition.

That Christmas, Thomas Parkinson came to Paris. He was a professor of English at Berkeley and had been a member of Kenneth Rexroth’s anarchist circle in the Bay Area in the 1940s. Allen knew him from his year in San Francisco. Parkinson had received a Guggenheim award and he and his wife, Ariel, had moved to London in order for him to write on Yeats and Pound. Allen contacted him in London inviting him to visit. When the couple arrived at the Beat Hotel, Allen showed Parkinson the manuscript of the first part of “Kaddish,” which in Parkinson’s memory was written in red ink to “simulate blood running out onto the page, his own and his mother’s.”

Allen and Gregory’ accompanied Parkinson around Paris and he was particularly impressed by the Musée Gustave Moreau. Parkinson invited Allen to stay at their house in Hampstead, and also to contribute to a series of programs on American poetry that he was recording for the BBC Third Programme. Allen wanted to go but was still awaiting Kerouac’s $225. He wrote to Louis, “I may go over there in February if Jack ever sends that money. He mentions it (the money) in every letter and said originally he’d pay it Xmas, then January when he got his royalties, now he says royalties don’t come till February’ and’s left me broke waiting.” Meanwhile Allen was being hounded by the owner of the local grocery over a small bill for milk and eggs.

It was too cold to go walking so Allen devoted much of his time to reading, trying to finish the more obscure Shakespeare plays that he had not yet read: The Life of Timon of Athens; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and Coriolanus. He also read Balzac, Dickens, and the complete works of Vachel Lindsay’ given to him by Gregory, which prompted the poem “To Lindsay.” He sampled various modern French poets but he made surprisingly little effort to contact any of the young French writers.

This was regrettable, as it was a high point in French culture: the Beats were living within yards of the cafés where Camus, Boris Vian, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir were holding court. They could have met Françoise Sagan, whose Bonjour Tristesse was then a worldwide best-seller, Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, and the young filmmakers of the French Nouvelle Vague, who could be found then on Paris’s Left Bank. Eugène Ionesco was developing his Theater of the Absurd, and Fernando Arrabal and Arthur Adamov were producing new works on a regular basis. In fact, Adamov lived on the rue de Seine and was frequently ensconced at the Old Navy on Blvd St. Germain where many of the Beats hung out. Even Samuel Beckett was accessible and was often to be found at the Falstaff bar.

But the Americans preferred their own company, content to celebrate their own genius. They were living in a Paris of dreams—a fantasy of James Joyce and his Ulysses, Sylvia Beach, and Ezra Pound, not the actual Paris of thirty years later, which has now become just as mythic. Allen spent his time reading Russian poetry and applied to the Soviet Embassy for a grant to travel to Moscow. Using a French dictionary, he began making rough English translations of Essenin’s poems from the 1922 French versions by Franz Hellens and Marie Miloslawsky in La Confession d’un voyou.

Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, was in Paris over the New Year and took Allen, Peter, and Gregory to supper with some of his friends. Lord described the first night of Jack’s series of readings at the Village Vanguard, and how smashed he was. Kerouac was reading his work accompanied by a jazz combo but was too nervous and too drunk, stumbling over words, sweating heavily, and the open-ended residency closed in only one week. Allen made arrangements for Lord to offer Howl to foreign publishers.

Allen had no money with which to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Instead of seeing in 1958 with his friends in a café, he wrote a catalog poem about the sink in his hotel room, describing the long chain attached to the plug, his and Peter’s toothbrushes, the black abrasive pad used to scrub the cooking pots, and listing the many activities he performed standing before it. Gregory was off with his girlfriend and Peter now had his own group of friends, but later in the evening someone gave Allen a lift to Place Pigalle in Montmartre to see the groups of people kissing one another at midnight, twice on each cheek, a ceremony destined to last for hours in so big a crowd. He walked all night, musing “under the noisy stars,” heading south toward the red-light district around Les Halles where revelers staggered drunkenly in the street, then crossed back over the river to the Left Bank. He felt subdued and anxious about his relationship with Peter, who was shortly heading home. The United States Consul had finally accepted Peter’s need to return to the States to look after his family and had arranged an assisted passage on the Mauritania, leaving January 17, 1958.