Читать книгу The Beat Hotel - Barry Miles - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
The Beat Hotel is no more. The ground-floor façade of 9, rue Git-le-Coeur has been rebuilt, and the building—once a decrepit rooming house with hole-in-the-floor toilets shared by all the residents—is now occupied by the Relais-Hôtel du Vieux Paris, with wall fabrics by Pierre Frey, individual room safes, nineteen television channels, direct-dial telephones with modems, minibar, and white marble bathrooms complete with hair driers and terrytowel robes. The narrow street, however, is little changed; each morning to this day water runs down the gutters in a complicated medieval street-cleaning system controlled by rolls of rags placed strategically at various drains, where water either bubbles up or swirls away. The ancient gray walls on either side are still chipped and patched, unchanged these forty years. The drains whiff a bit, as ever, and at the end of the lane the view across the Seine to the Palais de Justice and the thin tower of Ste. Chapelle has altered little in hundreds of years.
Nine, rue Git-le-Coeur, the Beat Hotel, is one of those legendary addresses, along with the Hotel Chelsea in New York and the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood—these are the addresses of international bohemia. There were more: the Mills Hotel and the Albert in New York, the Swiss American and the Hotel Wentley in Sail Francisco, the Tropicana Motel in Hollywood: these were places where artists and poets lived, addresses mentioned in poems, glimpsed in blurred avant-garde movies, used as the titles of huge dripping abstract paintings, the care-of addresses on mimeographed poetry magazines, scribbled suggestions for lodging at which to stay if you ever made it out of Britain.
I was sixteen when I went to art college in England in 1959, but I had already heard of the Beats and within a matter of months I had obtained some of their writings. I was immediately attracted to their ideas and knew that these were the people I had to meet; the days of artists in garrets were long over but these people seemed to be continuing the tradition. To my regret I never visited the Beat Hotel when it was up and running. By the time I got a passport it had closed in 1963. For years I had heard travelers’ tales from friends, usually students who had hitchhiked to Paris in the best On the Road tradition. Fellow art students, friends, and older flat-mates would arrive back from Paris, smoking Gitanes or Gauloises, a fresh copy of Naked Lunch hidden in their shirt in the hope that customs would not find it and confiscate it.
Paris itself was an exotic location in those days. It had bars that stayed open later than the 10 P.M. closing time then in force in England. French cigarettes were stronger and more fragrant, the Metro had first- and second-class seats. One listened in astonishment to descriptions of the hole-in-the-floor toilets, open-air pissoirs, and the ladies who ran the public lavatories. Visitors described student bistros and casual jazz clubs; London had only one jazz club—Ronnie Scott’s—and that was prohibitively expensive. They described the easygoing sex and the freely available drugs, and though we knew they must be exaggerating, it sounded a good deal more interesting than life in Britain. Everyone said the Beat Hotel was the place to stay, but if it was full, or the owner did not like the look of you, there were plenty of other, equally inexpensive places within a few blocks. Some people had actually managed to meet William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, or Allen Ginsberg—already legendary names.
My own involvement with these individuals began in 1964 when I started corresponding with William Burroughs, who was then living in Tangier. I was putting together a literary anthology called Darazt and wrote asking for material. He sent me a manuscript and we kept in touch. I met Allen Ginsberg the following year when I was managing a bookshop in London and arranged for him to read at the store. He needed somewhere to stay in the center of London and moved in with my wife and me. This was when the famous poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall was being organized and Ginsberg was joined by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Corso, and dozens of others to read before an audience of seven thousand or so people in July of 1965. Corso and Ferlinghetti made frequent visits to my flat to see Ginsberg, and by the end of the summer, when they all moved on, I had become friendly with them all. Later that year Burroughs moved to London and so I got to know him as well.
Over the subsequent years I worked closely with all of these writers. I produced an album of Allen Ginsberg singing William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and lived for a year on his farm in upstate New York, cataloging his tape archives; Gregory Corso was also living there at the time. 1 wrote Ginsberg’s biography and edited an annotated text edition of “Howl.” I saw him whenever I was in New York and he frequently stayed with me on visits to London. Allen was always generous with his time, and though I had already interviewed him about the Beat Hotel for my biography, he was happy to answer more specific questions about it for this book. My working involvement with William Burroughs was closest in the 1960s and early ’70s when he lived in London. I published numerous articles by him in underground-press publications. I also cataloged his archives, coauthored his bibliography for the University of Virigina Bibliographical Society, and wrote a short biography of his life. During my last visit to William’s home in Kansas, I tape-recorded an interview with him for this book. Over the years we had often talked about his time at the Beat Hotel, which he regarded as a high point in his life, and he was always happy to revisit those times and recount the stories again.
By the 1980s, the Beat Generation was no longer regarded as a threat to the American establishment, its surviving members sufficiently old not to give further offense, and so they were accepted, with only slight reluctance, into the American academy. When Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs died—four months apart in 1997—they both were canonized in The New Yorker, a sure sign of establishment recognition. The Beat Generation had become America’s Bloomsbury Group, its first homegrown literary movement, complete with its own canon of books, memoirs, volumes of letters, albums of photographs, biographies, and scholarly studies.
American Puritanism and Prohibition as well as a strong dollar abroad had caused previous generations to choose self-imposed exile, usually in Paris. Between 1903 and 1939 Paris was home to virtually every American writer, poet, or composer of note: Ernest Hemingway, e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter Piston, Henry Miller, to name some of the most noted—a virtual roll call of the Modernist movement. After World War II Paris was more expensive for Americans, and the United States had, in any case, developed its own arts centers. However, for African-Americans the lure of Paris continued into the 1940s and ’50s as a place of shelter from racism, prejudice, and segregation at home, including writers such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin, and jazzmen Sidney Bechet and Bud Powell.
Some American writers continued to live in Paris: Ned Rorem, James Jones, George Plimpton and The Paris Review crowd, and, of course, the Beats, but with few exceptions, such as William Burroughs, theirs was not permanent exile; a year or two abroad at the most and then they returned to the States. The Beats went to Paris to be free not from racism—they were primarily from white middle-class college-educated backgrounds—but to escape the conformism and Puritanism of America after the war. Many of them were gay, and they could lead a freer life in France, and most of them were using illegal drugs. In the ’50s the French police knew little about drugs, and were, in any case, much too preoccupied with the terrorist attacks in Paris provoked by the independence struggle in Algeria to seriously care about the activities of a few British or American tourists.
For a brief period, from 1958-63, the Beat Hotel in Paris was the site of the largest concentration of Beat Generation activity. Most of the founding members of the movement lived there at one time or another. The only major Beat figure not to set foot in the rue Git-le-Coeur was Jack Kerouac. In many ways, what the Beats staged in Paris was a second round of their activities in mid-’50s San Francisco. In 1955-56 Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso—though not Burroughs—were at the center of what came to be known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. It was then that Ginsberg wrote “Howl and gave its first performance. In 1957-58 Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, and William Burroughs—though not Kerouac—became the central figures in the Beat Hotel.
It was there that Ginsberg wrote some of his best-loved poems, including “To Aunt Rose,” “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” and a long section of “Kaddish,” his great elegy to his mother, Naomi, who died in a mental hospital. It was there that Corso wrote his famous poem, “Bomb,” shaped on the page like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. It was in Paris, too, that Corso composed most of the other poems in his popular book A Happy Birthday of Death. It was in the Beat Hotel that Burroughs completed Naked Lunch and where Brion Gysin invented the infamous Cut-up technique. Burroughs, Gysin, and others produced two collaborative books of Cut-ups there: Minutes To Go and The Exterminator, and Burroughs went on to write the first of his Cut-up novels, The Soft Machine, and much of the second, The Ticket That Exploded, in his room in the hotel. In room 25, Gysin and Ian Sommerville built the first Dreamachine, a means of employing flickering light at the alpha frequency to create visual hallucinations. Gysin and Sommerville together formulated the first multimedia light shows and body projections, precursors of psychedelic rock shows half a decade later. Filmmaker Antony Balch shot a quarter of the footage for his film Cut-ups in the hotel and among its surrounding streets. This is an amazing inventory of activity focused within and around just one building, a creative epicenter that has been virtually overlooked in the majority of studies on the Beats.
The Beat Generation had a worldwide impact, like the Lost Generation preceding it, but I believe this has not been sufficiently appreciated in the United States. The 1995 exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965, for instance, was divided simply into “East Coast” and “West Coast.” This awkward national arrangement of material meant that they had no effective way to present the work of William Burroughs, who spent all but a few months of that fifteen-year period of time living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London. Nor did they present any of the Beats’ overseas activity—no Dreamachine, no Olympia magazine, no foreign Beatnikery—with the consequence that the work of Brion Gysin was almost entirely overlooked and, instead, many little known West Coast artists had huge amounts of wall space devoted to their work.
I am not alone in thinking that the international aspect of the Beat Generation has been underappreciated. Allen Ginsberg spent years of his life traveling to all parts of the planet, spreading the word and developing internationally solid ongoing contacts with poets, writers, and artists who were of similar mind. Ginsberg felt strongly that the Beat Generation was an international phenomenon, that it embodied an approach to life, a set of beliefs that transcended national barriers, and in virtually every country he was able to find a local “Beat” scene: the circle of writers and poets surrounding Simon Vinkenoog in Amsterdam; the group involving Carl Weissner and Udo Breger in Germany; Miguel Grinberg’s Eco Contemporaneo group in Buenos Aires; Sergio Mondragón and the El Como Emplumado folks in Mexico City; Pradip Choudhuri and the writers of the Hungry Generation in Calcutta. His travels were paralleled by those of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and some of the younger poets associated with the Beats, such as Anne Waldman and John Giorno, who read at summer arts festivals in many European countries and elsewhere, sharing the stage with local poets, writers, and translators who were mining the same vein.
This book is an attempt to fill this gap in Beat Generation history. At the Beat Hotel the members of the original New York faction of the Beat Generation were hard at work, and many of the ideas first formulated there went on to have an impact not only in art and literature but in the wider culture: the credits on CNN now move faster than the edits in Antony Balch’s Cut-ups, which was regarded at the time as unwatchable; Burroughs, Gysin, and Sommerville’s performances were among the earliest “Happenings,” and Burroughs’s and Sommerville’s Cut-up tapes, with the sounds of radio static and pneumatic drills mixed with read text, were definite precursors of Industrial music. Cut-ups themselves were later used by rock artists such as David Bowie, who used the technique in writing his Diamond Dogs album. Here were people experimenting with drugs, with psychic phenomena, with new models of community. The sixties were just beginning; a new generation of young people had arrived, a postwar generation that required maps to investigate for themselves the new areas and possibilities that were being presented. The residents of the Beat Hotel were making the first sketches of unexplored terrain—sometimes they explored dead ends, and at other times the trail was more dangerous than they thought, but they were leading the way.
I also want to tell the story of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, who, in other circumstances, would have a higher profile in the history of this movement. Like Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Harold Norse, and Neal Cassady, they too played their significant parts in Beat Generation history. Finally I wanted to write a tribute to my friends. Walking the ancient streets around the rue Git-le-Coeur, researching this book, I felt an enormous sadness at the loss of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gysin, and Sommerville, all of whom I had known and worked with since the mid-1960s. I deeply miss them all.
It seemed at one point that Bill Burroughs’s influence was at work as I wrote this book, for there occurred an example of synchronicity and coincidence that he would have enjoyed. I had written a passage within which Allen Ginsberg took Alan Ansen to a small bar on the rue de la Huchette, and a half hour later I wrote a paragraph about Bernard Frechtman, Genet’s translator. When researching a book, I always try to use contemporary maps of the period I am dealing with but I was unable to find my 1960 Paris map to see if the rue de la Huchette was as close to the hotel as I remembered. 1 happened to have Kenneth Tynan’s copy of the Michelin Paris Index and Plan, dating from 1973—given to me by Kathleen Tynan after Ken’s death, and as yet unopened by me—and when I turned to the page I wanted, there was Ken’s place marker with a note to himself: “Caveau de la Huchette. 5 rue de la Huchette. 9.30 Bnd Frechtman.” Voices speaking to us from the past.