The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963

by Barry Miles

Book Overview

The Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was Paris, where the Beats took awestruck audiences with Duchamp and Celine, and where some of their most important work came to fruition--Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "To Aunt Rose"; Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death;...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802138179
• ISBN13: 9780802138170
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

One-star hotel -- five-star book!

The goings on in this decrepit old Paris Hotel, run by an old French lady who cooked Cassoulets for the guests, were astounding. A gathering point for starving artists, especially planetary beatniks, we discover that the unbridled use of hard drugs and graphic homosexuality were a lot more common than Eisenhower would have let us in America think! *.* This book is a hoot but I want to say up front that it was seriously well-researched by the author. It's predominantly about some well-known, perhaps infamous, American Beats, most of whom (in this hotel anyway) were bisexual drug users. There were also other 'artists' from various places in the world who either lived in The Beat Hotel (the hotel really didn't even have an official name), or they 'visited' as guests of residents for varying lengths of time. The peccadillos of these characters defy sanity. There's scrying, crying, heroin use, singing, pornography generation, speculating on psychedelic inventions, poetry readings, and tons of all manner of sex. William Burroughs seems to be the main guy in this life adventure -- we hear of the untimely death of his wife (at another location) as Burroughs was smashed, playing "William Tell" with her for the entertainment of the equally drunken and high guests, ultimately putting a bullet in her forehead. He was never arrested for this incident. The chief guy whom we expect to find lodged firmly in The Beat Hotel never made it: Jack Kerouac. But pretty much every one of his dubious associates made at least a visit. This book is well-written -- a real page-turner and quite hilarious. It matters not if the reader is gay, straight, or anywhere in-between sexually... you'll much enjoy this book. And, if ever there was a clear example of 'truth being stranger than fiction', this one is it.

Fascinating, Scholarly Sketch of Literary History

The first time I read this book, I turned back over to the first page and read it again. It was that good. I am a huge Burroughs fan, and I learned a new appreciation for Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin. The grist of this book provides insight into the day-to-day maze of creativity whose epicenter happened to be Post WWII Paris. If you are looking for a fresh, lively, intelligent glimpse into the creative process of Burroughs, Gysin, Corso, Ginsberg and others, this is the book for you.

American Bohemians in Paris

This book is an exploration of the American beat movement during a time period in which most of it major representatives, (not including Kerouac or Gary Snyder) were in Paris at a cheap, nameless hotel located at Rue Git-Le-Coeur, and managed by one Madame Rachon. The hotel was cheap and unsanitary. As long as the guests paid there bills, Madame Rachon allowed them a broad range of freedom in their eccentric lifestyles. The beat hotel was home to the beats as well as to various artists, models, and other bohemians before it closed in 1963.The book includes wonderful bigraphical pictures of Allen Ginsberg, his lover Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin (whose name was unfamiliar to me), and others who stayed at the beat hotel. There is detailed documentation on the activities of each during their stay in the beat hotel with some thought given to why each of these people are important and worth knowing something about.I found the discussion of the day to day life in the hotel the most rewarding part of the book together with a discussion of the relationships of the beats, and other guests, to Olympia Press, which published many of them together with many forgetable works of pornography at that time available only with difficulty in the United States.The book invites reflection on the nature of the beat movement and of the broader movement of bohemianism as it developed in the 19th Century. What were the beats looking for? They were full of unconventional, shocking behavior, particularly in the abuse of drugs and sex as these are documented graphically in the book. They were also serious, had a dedication to literature, a willingness to explore and to come to terms with themselves, a desire for change. The beats were perhaps the most cohesive literary movement 20th Century America has produced and in some cases produced works of merit. Miles's discussion of the work and achievement of these writers encourages one to want to know more.Miles ties the beats in to later developments in pop culture in the 1960s: rock and roll, psychedelics, open sexuality. This to me is claiming too little and too much. It trivializes this movement, I think, to watch the commercialization that took place during the 1960. The beats were isolated, troubled, and searching individuals who, in their productive days, neither had nor wanted the glare of the media. What they did was for themselves and what we make of them is a matter for reflection and not for subsequent 1960s hype.I read Miles biography of Kerouac and was moved by it to read this book. I wasn't disappointed. He is a thoughtful writer on a significant American literary movement.

A five-star Hotel.

Miles' book succeeds in answering the question, "What is Beat?" During the years 1958 to 1963, the residents of Nine, Rue Git-le-Coeur were marching to a different beat in Paris. While Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Simone de Beauvoire were exploring existentialism in nearby cafes (p. 66), the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin were rooming at "The Beat Hotel," engaged in a "sustained burst of creative activity equal to that they had achieved recently in San Francisco" (p. 18). To escape post-WWII "conformism and Puritanism" (p. 5) in the U.S., they travelled to Paris, establishing themselves among the 70 residents of the 42-room Hotel, making it "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 avante-garde, its roots firmly planted in the bohemian tradition" (p. 65). Or, in Ginsberg's words, the Hotel was a "big communal love-brain." It was "the right time, the right place, and the right people meeting there together," Brion Gysin recalls. "There were lots of experimental things going on" (p. 158)."Experimental things," indeed. The Beat Hotel was the international house of bohemia (p. 1), synonymous with sex, drugs and poetry: unconventional sex (p. 224); "massive drug use" (p. 241), including experimentation with hashish, marijuana, diosan, codeine, morphine, and heroin; and nontraditional verse. Considering Miles' detailed account of the activities at The Beat Hotel, it is not surprising that in 1961 J. Edgar Hoover declared beatniks a threat to American security (p. 216). This book also shows that for Ginsberg, "the Beat lifestyle was not a pose; for him it was the only life that made any sense, it was the only life possible" (p. 54).Miles gains access to The Beat Hotel through diaries, letters, and his own interviews with Ginsberg and Burroughs, among others. His return to The Beat Hotel may not be for everyone. But for those readers interested in the Beat movement, I recommend visiting Miles' five-star HOTEL.G. Merritt

Sex and Drugs and What it Beat

This book is an important, often funny, illuminating look at an extraordinary period in the history of popular culture. It will be enjoyed by anyone with even the slimmest interest in the history of western literature, art and the moral evolution of western man in the waning years of the second millennium. The squalid Paris rooming house at rue-Git-Le-Coeur didn't have a name. It was just an address to which, because of its arts friendly management and cheap rent, luminaries of the "beat movement" lived and labored between 1957 and 1963. In this book, which takes as its title the colloquial name for Madame Rachou's establishment, Barry Miles continues his informal history of the Beats which, in addition to this offering includes biographies of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Burroughs and Ginsberg, along with Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin form the fulcrum on which this history turns. If there are any doubts as to the absolute madness of these people, their exuberant embrace of drugs, their extravagant pursuit of sex in all of its variety, their tireless devotion to literature and to each other, this book should lay them to rest. The matter-of-fact description of life at The Beat Hotel is perhaps the greatest strength of this book. There is no question that the sensational and lurid descriptions of the Beats that were fodder for the popular prss in the late 50's and early 60's werre in no way exaggerations. The depiciton of "beatniks" as decadent, impoverished, culturally alienated, drug maniacs seems, after reading this book to be a rather tepid underestimate of just how extreme these cultural icons actually were. But Mr. Miles, in his at once familiar yet detached tone, manages to affirm the facts of "beat" existence while in no way diminishing the people he is describing. The productivity of the principals during this period would be asonishing under any circumstances; under the particular circumstances it seems simply not possible. And yet is was during these years that Naked Lunch found its final form; that Kaddish and The Lion for Real were written; that cut-ups were discovered and explored, and the Dream Machine invented; that The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded were composed, cut-up, compiled, and first presented to the public. This book, filling as it does a neglected portion of Beat history is an honest, accessible, amusing, and ultimately inspiring chronicle that no one should neglect adding to their collection.