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Introduction

Brion Gysin used to refer to himself as the man from nowhere—not surprising, given his multiple origins and thoroughly international existence. When Paul Bowles ran across him in New York in the 1940s, he described Gysin as then being into his fourth nationality. But perhaps the phrase that Jorge Luis Borges used to describe some of his own characters might be more appropriate: in his life as in his art, Gysin was “a man from the border.” His restless curiosity kept him always on the move, going where it pleased him, carrying no baggage; such perhaps was the ideal, yet it was also, in large measure, his inescapable reality. A nomad at heart, he kept returning—physically or imaginatively—to the various far-flung locales that had formed him.

In this age when scholars and readers are eager to think across the disciplines, to find connections between cultures, to discern the underlying matrix of an artistic moment beyond fixed notions of identity or traditional expectations—as if any of these tendencies were new—surely it is time to reassess the work of Brion Gysin. As singular a figure as any, he was often dismissed for not being entirely a painter, nor entirely a writer, though he continued to explore both domains for some fifty years with an inquiring instinct that expressed itself differently according to the occasion. Worse for him, he did not hold still within these media, nor devote the bulk of his efforts to a chosen genre. Rather, he came and went, alert to creative openings, following his ideas in and beyond such practices simultaneously, alternately, sequentially. If some consider him essentially a painter, and his production in the visual arts possibly more accomplished, his fascination with writing and the mysteries of language remains nonetheless central to all his output—he did, after all, learn to speak seven languages. As a writer, his insightful understanding of history combined with the expansive flair of a born raconteur to set his prodigious imagination in motion: he produced long and short fiction, historical narrative, poems, song lyrics, travel pieces, memoirs, experimental forms, and more. Taken as a whole, his great versatility should be regarded not as a wild display of excess talents but instead as an ongoing method in his art of the opening, of uncovering paths which many younger artists took up in turn.

Though Gysin has been peripherally associated with the Beat Generation writers, it is more by intermittent points of convergence and especially his long friendship with William S. Burroughs that the affiliation holds. However, his multinational background and interdisciplinary perspective as an artist, as well as a healthy skepticism toward the spiritual yearnings of many among the Beats, rather set him apart. A foreigner everywhere, he did not claim any one culture as his own; despite the fact that he rubbed shoulders with various aristocracies all his life, his sympathies lay most often with the outsider, whether in the guise of artist, immigrant or heretic, not to mention the added markers of racial or sexual difference. He recognized the advantages of his hybrid origins, which allowed him more freedom of movement as an artist and as a person, so that whatever sparks of rebellion may be found in his work can be traced to his attitude toward the fixed thinking and implicit limits of all groups. His independence, of course, had a price: if by nature and temperament he dodged most efforts to package him as a recognizable commodity, given his many fields of action, he seldom had an easy time of it when he did seek to market his products.

Practical (or at least commercial) matters aside, the question of identity did not plague Gysin; on the contrary, it provided ample room for play. Indeed, the theme of the search for identity is found often in his work, and most especially, its opposite: the yearning to be free of identity, to vanish in the sea of language, the texture of vision. This is not unlike James Joyce’s description of the artist in A Portrait of the Artist as someone who would ultimately disappear into the work of art. Gysin effected that move repeatedly in his various practices; in writing, the cut-ups were the first of his disappearing acts, and he revealed a like impulse by other means in his novel The Process. In a text first printed in Udo Breger’s journal Soft Need (issue 17: Brion Gysin Special [1977]), he reflected on the matter of his own identity:

A sorcerer’s apprentice, follower of Aleister Crowley, once asked me if I knew my real name. I was dumbfounded, I don’t. Burroughs has told me he knows his: not me. I have often been in doubt about it and written a number of poems in which I attempt to disassociate my I from my Me. Without pushing this to the point of schizophrenia, I have always felt rather doubtful about my Me.

To begin with, I have an unusual surname of Swiss origin, fairly rare even in Switzerland, I am told. This family came down from the hills in the Middle Ages and settled in Liestal, a small town just far enough and independent enough from Basel to wage a petty provincial war with the big city and lose. The Gysin of the day lost his head and the family moved into Basel around 1500. My given name is Brion. My Celtic mother was thinking of one of those insufferable phony kings of Ireland and spelled it with an ‘a’: Brian. Official documents took care of that and spelled it Brion, like the famous wine of Bordeaux, Haut Brion. I accepted this gladly and dropped all my other given names when I became an American citizen.

I was sent to Downside, a school for hybrids in the west of England, run by Benedictine monks, a triumph of my Catholic mother whose zealous decision sat so ill with my Zwinglian Protestant family that I ended up with no inheritance at all. My mother’s family barely survived on pseudo-aristocratic pretentions while my father’s family liked to think of themselves as solidly Republican middle-class folk. I have never accepted the color or texture of my oatmealy freckled skin: ‘bad packaging’ I thought. Certain traumatic experiences have made me conclude that at the moment of birth I was delivered to the wrong address.

I have done what I could to make up for this.

Throughout his life, Gysin moved back and forth between three continents. Born in London in 1916, he didn’t really know his father, who was declared missing in action before the end of the First World War. His mother raised him in western Canada, in and around Edmonton, till he was sent off to be educated in England in the early 1930s. In 1934 he moved to Paris, studied briefly at the Sorbonne, and made his first literary and artistic contacts by way of Sylvia Beach and the surrealists. The following year he was to have his first show as part of the surrealist drawings exhibit, but his work was taken down the day of the opening on orders from André Breton, for alleged insubordination. Later in the decade he traveled in Greece and the Algerian Sahara, then returned to Paris where he had his first one-man show in 1939 and lived on the Rue Gît-le-Coeur near the Place Saint Michel. When next he stayed in Paris for an extended period, twenty years later, it would be on that same street in what became known as the Beat Hotel.

With the onset of the war, he went to New York, where he worked as an assistant costume designer on Broadway musicals and then as a welder in the Bayonne shipyards, before joining the American army. From there he managed to get transferred to the Canadian army, which had him studying Japanese—crucial for his later calligraphic paintings—and where he met Tex Henson, great-grandson of Josiah Henson, the real-life model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. After the war, having become an American citizen and returned to New York, Gysin published his first book, To Master—A Long Goodnight, a historical narrative based on the life of Josiah Henson, which included a long appendix on the history of slavery in Canada. On the basis of this work, he was awarded one of the first Fulbright fellowships and so returned to Europe, where he did further research in Bordeaux and Seville on the history of the slave trade.

On the invitation of Paul Bowles, he went to visit Tangier in the summer of 1950 and soon established residency there. In the winter of 1951–52, he journeyed across the Sahara, an adventure that not only inspired his sketchbooks of the time but also became part of The Process years later. Through Bowles he first heard the Master Musicians of the hill town of Jajouka, and enchanted by their music Gysin went into business with them for about three years, when he opened his restaurant The 1001 Nights, where they performed; he was to maintain a friendship with the musicians for the rest of his life, introducing them in later years to Brian Jones, of the Rolling Stones, and saxophonist Ornette Coleman. There in Tangier he met William S. Burroughs, whom he had first encountered in New York, and though a friendship slowly developed, it was not until the end of the decade in Paris that they became close collaborators. In the mid-1950s, as Morocco gained its independence and took over the international port of Tangier, Gysin traveled to Algeria and got tangled up in the extravagant affairs of John and Mary Cooke, resulting in the loss of his restaurant; the Algerian episode as well reappeared in The Process. By 1958 he was back in Paris and residing at the Beat Hotel, where Burroughs also had a room and Ginsberg and others lodged when passing through. It was there that Gysin first discovered the cut-up technique of writing and the principle of his Permutation Poems, while he also painted extensively, coinvented the Dreamachine with mathematician Ian Sommerville, and performed numerous experiments, often with Burroughs, using tape recorders and other materials. The Permutation Poems and his use of tape recording led to Gysin’s being regarded as one of the founders of Sound Poetry; from then on through the rest of his life he performed such work at galleries and poetry festivals.

Intermittently during the early and mid-1960s, Gysin tried to market the Dreamachine, hoping at last to resolve his perennial financial problems, but it never caught on in a big way. He described the Dreamachine as “the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed,” and, with some practice, it could indeed provoke a dreamlike state. The contraption seemed simple enough: a transparent cylinder encasing a slotted cylinder that rotates around a light bulb, flashing stroboscopic pulses of light at a speed corresponding to the alpha band. Throughout the decade, he was back and forth among Paris, London, New York, and Tangier, working on various projects. His literary work mainly comprised the collaborations with Burroughs on The Third Mind (though it was not published until some ten years later, first in French translation), The Process (written in Tangier), and at the end of the decade, his own screenplay, based on Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which was never produced.

In the late 1960s he also began to write a new work of fiction. With each draft the novel evolved ever further from its original purpose of chronicling the Beat Hotel. It was published in 1986, shortly after his death, as The Last Museum. Meanwhile, he had returned definitively to Paris (in 1973) and eventually settled in an apartment directly across from the Centre Pompidou, which was then being built. By 1975 he was stricken with colon cancer, and after surviving an infernal series of treatments and operations he was determined to put his house in order. He continued to experiment with different media in his visual artwork, such as his use of photography in the mid- to late 1970s, and in a new development, he began to collaborate with saxophonist Steve Lacy on a number of songs. He had written song lyrics on at least two occasions previously, though they were never produced. Lacy recuperated many of these lyrics and wrote new music for them, and Gysin contributed new lyrics for Lacy’s group well into the 1980s. In addition, Gysin and Lacy performed these songs as a duo, with Gysin’s energetic spoken-sung delivery, at poetry and jazz festivals. Some of the lyrics and others—both on the shelf and several newly written—were also set to music in the early to mid-1980s by guitarist Ramuntcho Matta, who performed them with Gysin. Amid occasional gallery and museum shows and tributes to him and Burroughs—the Nova Convention in New York (1978), the Final Academy in London (1982)—his main literary project in later years remained his novel, The Last Museum. Partly due to a lack of space, his work as a painter became rather dormant until one final burst that resulted in the ten-canvas work Calligraffiti of Fire in 1985.

On the last page of his introduction to The Last Museum, Burroughs drew a telling portrait of Gysin:

Brion Gysin died of a heart attack on Sunday morning, July 13, 1986. He was the only man I have ever respected. I have admired many others, esteemed and valued others, but respected only him. His presence was regal without a trace of pretension. He was at all times impeccable.

Who was Brion Gysin? The only authentic heir to Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain? Certainly that. Through his painting I caught glimpses of the Garden that the Old Man showed to his Assassins. The Garden cannot be faked. And Brion was incapable of fakery. He was Master of the Djoun forces, the Little People, who will never serve a faker or a coward.

Brion was suffering from emphysema and lung cancer. He knew he had only a few weeks to live. I was preparing to go to Paris when Brion died. I have this last glimpse through a letter, in her own English, from my friend Rosine Buhler:

“Brion asked to wear his Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et de Lettres medallion in a very elegant way and we started dinner with a wonderful Chinese soup. Brion finds the wine slightly ‘rapeux’ to tease François de Palaminy, who has spent and concentrated to find a non-alterated wine which is not so easy even in Paris. After occurs a dreamlike talk about to have a large house by the sea in August, the shadowed room where all is burning hot outside. Brion said he knew he would sleep well and was really happy of that good day. He wanted no help to lift himself up from his green armchair, and went to his room. I was watching his tall straight way to walk, his secure path … only kings and wild people have this way.”

More than a decade after his passing, Gysin has continued to gain new admirers. There have been more gallery and museum shows of his work as a visual artist, including the major retrospective at the Edmonton Art Gallery in the summer of 1998, with a comprehensive book published by Thames & Hudson. However, his work as a writer has become almost entirely unavailable. This anthology, I hope, will correct that imbalance and, for old friends and new adventurers alike, will restore some measure of the worldly vision that was Gysin’s trademark.