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Jean-Jacques Lebel

THE BEAT HOTEL YEARS

Given the cosmic scheme of things, it is quite logical that so many scientific or artistic breakthroughs have occurred by accident. The discovery of the cut-up method by Brion Gysin and its systematic application to textual production by William Burroughs is but one example of the positive impact such accidents can have. Genius in the arts as well as in science often consists of letting an accident happen then exploiting its full unprogrammed potential. Another such example is LSD which Albert Hoffman stumbled upon by mistake. Jackson Pollock didnt invent dripping he just let it be and expanded it whereas tens of thousand of other draftsmen, whose liquid paints or inks also dripped, behaved as taught by wiping it off or by covering it up. So, when Brion showed Bill the surprising scriptural combines he had unvoluntarily begotten by cutting through several layers of newsprint under one his drawings Bill adopted that technique as the non grammatical writing process he needed to wage his no holds barred uprising against the official discourse of Amerika. Never mind the not too relevant comparison between the cut-up method and Tzaras picking out words at random, from a hat, and other such procedures. In my view the dynamic clashes produced, in the minds of readers or listeners, by randomly slicing thru linear story lines and, breaking apart linguistic structures is more akin to visionary schizo-writing and preverbal sound-speech as practised by Kurt Schwitters or Antonin Artaud. As a matter of fact, I vouch for an Artaud / Burroughs connection via the use of cut-ups as a tool, or a weapon, they both used to mount attacks on the dictatorship of normalcy, ie. the grammar and syntax of social and sexual normalcy. Way back in the days of the Beat Hotel I think it was in 1958 I had the honour of introducing Burroughs, Ginsberg, Gysin, Corso, and Somerville to the sound and the fury of Artaud. R.C. Richards English translation of Theatre and its Double was not yet a must and all they knew of Artaud was his legend which Carl Solomon who had witnessed Artauds famous public breakdown at the Thtre du Vieux Colombier, in 1947 had brought back from Paris and shared with Ginsberg at the New York psychiatric hospital where they met. Burroughs as well as Ginsberg were eager to

find out more about Artaud, his struggles with opiates and with the reinventing of language. I had put my hands on a fresh copy of the original tape of Artauds To end the judgement of god which had been liberated by an anarchist friend of mine from a locked metal cupboard at the ORTF (the French National Radio Station, which had banned it and had never aired it). So I invited them to my home to hear it. We got stoned, sat on the floor and huddled around a large Grundig tape recorder. We placed the reel on it and pushed the buttons. The result was a flow of high-pitched beastly blasts, in languages (plural) unknown to us, which we listened to in stupefied awe. When the tape came to an end, we were transfixed and puzzled, knowing that Artaud had indeed been fluent in idioms current only in his own mind. Then Ginsberg, always the practical one, said Lets hear it again and, as we struggled with the tape recorder, we discovered we had put the reel on upside down. Stoned as we were, we had not listened to the radio-play as recorded by Artaud with Roger Blin, Maria Casares and Paule Thvenin but to an accidentally reversed version of it. Which goes to say that art is not only in the eye of the beholder but also in his ear or, as John Cage put it :

NEW MUSIC = NEW LISTENING

At last we got the tape on right and were able to catch Artauds magnetic mix of schizo sound poetry and sublime antichristian, antimilitaristic and anticapitalist imprecatory hollering in classical French. Burroughs was visibly impressed. As for Ginsberg he borrowed the tape from me, made several copies and mailed them in the U.S. to Judith Malina and Julian Beck, to LeRoy Jones (later named Amiri Baraka) and to Michael McClure. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Artaud rhizom crossed the Atlantic and spilled over into the American counter-culture. On several other occasions, in Paris, London or New-York, Burroughs and I discussed the hallucinatory substance of Artauds aural language which he seemed to have put together from fragmented audio snippets heard by him in many foreign tongues all minglud together and retransmitted by him thru his singular ultra-sound mental radio system (in 1962, as a tribute to him, I constructed a sculpture entitled Radio Momo). Burroughs once told me that, when, sitting, completely stoned, on a Paris street bench near Saint-Michel, he had absorbed unrelated bits and pieces of conversations spoken in

French, Italian, English, German, Greek and other lingoes, by people walking by him, all adding up to a transcultural sound collage of phrases chopped up and put together again by the listener, in a transformational way resembling the cup-up method. To this day I wonder if Artaud and Burroughs werent pursuing a similar goal. There was an ongoing conflict between Brion Gysin and Allen Ginsberg on how to best translate the extraordinary illustrated mixed-media Burroughs scrapbooks made of texts and images from various sources, pasted into large black accounting books Bill had bought in a Paris stationery store so as to deliver a printable manuscript to a publisher. Ginsberg won and he mailed his version of Naked Lunch to Ferlinghetti in San Fransisco (City Lights Books) who rejected it (too much sex and violence). Then the manuscript was handed to Maurice Girodias (Olympia Press, in Paris) by Gregory Corso who was under contract with him for American Express. That seemed like a good idea since Girodias father had published Henry Millers Paris novels and he himself had printed books by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. But Girodias too rejected Naked Lunch and, though he was to falsely claim to have discovered Burroughs, he did finally put the book out, but only after bowing to the strong pressure put to him by Gregory, Allen and many others. Some years later, Brion retaliated with the The Third Mind, a major collaborative work he produced together with Bill, which has yet to be recognized for what it is : a cut-up masterpiece. The years Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsberg, Corso and their associates spent at the Beat Hotel in Paris were absolutely essential to the consolidation and expansion of their specific creative projects. Although nationalistic American academics and historians have done their best to ignore and hide that fact, one has only to consider the works they produced then and there, to understand how true that fact is. The Burroughs scrapbooks are probably one of the most important literary/artistic accomplishments of the second half of the twentieth century. Corsos Paris poems are superb. As for Ginsberg, he wrote many major poems while in Paris, including Europe ! Europe !, To Aunt Rose !, The Lion for Real !, Death to Van Goghs Ear !, At Apollinnaires Tomb (a fundamental text) and, most of all, he there began writing Kaddish, a seminal hymn if there ever was one, indeed as powerful as Howl. In a weird way, the Beat Hotel residents related to the extraterritorial mythical place called Paris which, before them, had attracted no less than James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Nathalie Barney, Nancy Cunard, Sylvie Beach, Mina Loy, Man Ray and scores and scores of poets, artists, philosophers, musicians, political activists in need of existential umbilical cord cutting. Were not Joyces Ulysses, Millers Tropics, Becketts Molloy and Nabokovs Lolita

first published in Paris ? The Beat Hotel was cheap and dirty, a very far cry from the Ritz where Fitzgerald and Hemingway had hung out, but the great Henri Michaux lived around the corner (Ginsberg wrote admiringly of his pioneering use of psychedelics and his visits to Burroughs and he). Burroughs first recorded L.P. the magnificent Call me Burroughs was taped in the vaulted medieval cellar of the English Bookshop (42 rue de Seine) and produced by the owner, Gat Frog, who asked Emmett Williams and I to write the liner notes for the album cover. We obliged, of course. In that tiny cellar occurred many a bilingual poetry event including some by Burroughs, Gysin, Corso and myself. An another such occasion across the street, at the Galerie 55 Gregory, American bassist Max Harstein and I, with other poets, held an international poetry fest. Burroughs sat in the audience next to Octavio Paz, Mandiargues, James Jones and a host of French poetry freaks mixed together with American expatriates. Gregory read Mariage and Bomb and among the poems I read I included Epitaph pour les morts de la guerre, an exhilaratingly funny antiwar tract by Benjamin Peret which Burroughs liked a lot. He often mentioned that to me in our subsequent encounters. One of the most comical historical events of those Beat Hotel years was the one I had managed to engineer who knows how at my fathers home, bringing together Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsberg and Corso with Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Benjamin Peret and Andr Bretons wife, Elisa (Breton himself was bedridden with the flu). Burroughs was stoned and mute as always. Corso got drunk and cut off Duchamps tie with a pair of scissors emulating what he thought was a seminal dadaist action. Allen too was drunk, he went down on his knees in front of Duchamp and kissed the bottom of his trousers. Believe it or not the grand Dadaists laughed like crazy and actually took a liking to my Beat friends although my mother never forgave me for inviting such durty bums to her literary party. Ginsberg gives a rather cold description of that intense evening in a letter to Peter Orlovsky (re Gay Sunshine Letters). Most parts of Burroughs life are well documented except the Beat Hotel years. Why is that? We know almost all there is to know about the Columbia years, the Tangiers years, the London years, the Chelsea Hotel and the Bunker years (thanks, mostly, to John Giorno who has safeguarded Bills windowless orgone box like room as if he had just left it), even the last years spent in Lawrence, Kansas, are known. Why and to what end, one wonders, have the Paris years been overlooked by most Burroughs scholars except for Barry Miles, who did a brilliant job and why has that part usually been edited out of textbooks and by whom? In the last and mainly solitary period of his life, spent in a hidden away

isolated country house in Kansas, Burroughs was lured but to no avail into producing mainstream (ie linear and commercial) literature, practically devoid of the cut-ups, the sex and the inventive, subversive madness which were the trademarks of Minutes to go, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket that exploded, in other words he was made to reneg on his genius. What a tragically ironic climax. Nevertheless, I couldnt agree more with Jonas Mekas when he states that, for him and his friends, the discovery of the first chapters of Naked Lunch, published in Big Table Magazine, was an event of monumental proportions, like a new beginning in American literature. I might add: in world literature. What better tribute is there to that great innovator than to dedicate to him the cut-ups we keep stumbling upon when doing our stuff ? Heres to you Bill: