From 1957 to 1963 in one of the cheapest and filthiest hotels in Paris, key members of the Beats: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin reached creative heights with their verbal, sonic and visual experiments, and produced some of their finest work.

The Beats were a loosely knit group who took an iconoclastic approach to language, and angrily rebelled against conservative post-war society, its hypocrisy about sex, race and class. They spurned the shallow materialism of American culture, its smothering of the individual, and instead sought to define more spiritually attuned ways of thinking. Championing Walt Whitman, they advocated for rootlessness, introspection and spontaneity, and dragged poetry from its rarified podiums, to the street.

Arrival

On October 15, 1957, Allen Ginsberg, his ‘wife’ Peter Orlovsky  and their friend, Gregory Corso (dubbed the Shelley of the Beat Generation), took a room with a double bed in a hotel on the left bank near the Seine. Corso, a charming conman, had already been leading a wild life in the hotel’s attic. He was straight, so he took the floor.

Despite the stinking squat toilets on the landings, the stark rooms with naked bulbs, paper thin walls and the sagging beds, the Beat Hotel, as it became known, became a sanctuary for creativity as well as down and outs. It was owned and run by the short, white-haired Madame Rachou who had to stand on an overturned wine case to serve behind her zinc-topped bar. Her stern face hid a tolerant, understanding disposition. She was a woman of the world: if you wanted to smoke dope in your room or invite a hustler to stay the night, well she wasn’t one to judge. But she either liked or disliked you on the spot and if you weren’t popular, she would not let you occupy a room.

Madame Rachou had a soft spot for artists and writers. As a young woman she had worked at an inn frequented by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, and would accept manuscripts or paintings in lieu of rent (she had a huge store of them in her cellar). She also gave artists permission to paint and decorate their rooms any way they wanted. Over the years, her clientele grew into one big extended family. The artistic community that evolved at the Beat Hotel thrived on the freedom to come and go, eat and sleep, or play music loudly when ever they wanted. They cooked in their rooms on alcohol stoves – ‘Beat cuisine’, as it became known. The cheap rent meant they could refuse jobs or assignments that held no interest for them so they could focus on their own work instead.

Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg had gained notoriety owing to a censorship case in San Francisco that was widely publicised. In March 1957 his book Howl and Other Poems had been seized by U.S. Customs on the grounds of obscenity for its many references to sex and drugs, and its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, was arrested.

‘Howl’ was part spiritual confession, part directive for misfits; a cry of rage against a destructive, mechanistic society that destroys the spirit. Later that year, in a trial that helped liberalise publishing in the US, Ferlinghetti won the case when the judge decided the poem was of ‘redeeming social importance’. ‘Howl’ became a manifesto for the Beat Movement. Its rawness and ‘Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath’, as Ginsberg described it, marked a distinct break from the genteel, slightly drab old guard. In it he describes his generation as:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats

floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…

Robert Lowell, the venerated poet of the day, took a swipe at what he described as Ginsberg’s ‘raw’ (as against ‘cooked’) poetry. This he deemed ‘jerry-built and forensically deadly…often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro.’ But Paul Zweig wrote that Howl ‘almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s.’

That summer, too, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) was published in the U.S. to immediate acclaim. Its lyrical use of the American landscape to evoke the life of the spirit, and its advocacy for rootlessness and mobility over stasis and possession, offered a new take on Whitman’s assertion that, ‘Americans should know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.’

The Beats were hot news and Life magazine quickly sent a writer and photographer to the hotel to interview them.

As usual on arriving in a new place, Allen Ginsberg wanted to see and do everything, and meet everyone. The city was full of diversions. He only had to lean out of the hotel window to see the bookstalls along the Seine, and the Louvre was just a ten minute walk away. Boulevard St. Germain was around the corner and he liked to sit at the famous cafés, writing or talking with the intellectuals he met there. He was at that point still lean, and his spectacles gave him a nerdy look, until you peered closer at his eyes. Many years later R.Z. Sheppard described them  in an article for Time:

the poet’s eyes are the most fascinating and haunting thing about him: the right is narrow, brooding, ghostly, dark, skeptical. The left wide open and wondrous – allowing the whispers and diamonds of light to flow through. His eyes: they tell his story and the stories of one thousand other poets who’ve come and gone like the howling midnight winds they worshipped so…

Initially Ginsberg wandered around the city’s arrondissements, noting his impressions in his journal. He listened to the jazz rhythms of the Club St. Germain, savoured his first pernod and rode the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower, which he described as a beautiful dream machine in the sky. At dawn, after an all night ramble, he found himself in the middle of the butcher’s market in Les Halles. He was struck by the surreal sights of carts filled with lungs and livers which he worked into the poem ‘Apocalypse at Les Halles’.

With Orlovsky Ginsberg visited Père Lachaise Cemetery, inspiring the beautiful poem ‘At Apollinaire’s Grave’. It describes how they had held hands while lingering over the ‘foggy graves’ in a search for the great poet’s ‘rough menhir’. Ginsberg left a copy of Howl and Other Poems on the head-stone. In the poem he wrote: ‘I hope some wild kid monk lays his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me on cold winter nights in heaven.’

Ginsberg was intensely relieved to be writing again after a bout of writer’s block. In the Montparnasse café Le Select, ‘haunted by Gide and Picasso’ (and where Hemingway and Fitzgerald had sat), he began to set  down a formal poem about his mother, Naomi. She had been a beautiful communist-bohemian in twenties and thirties New York: a lover of art, nature and justice. Naomi also had paranoid schizophrenia which became increasingly acute over time. Family life was frequently disrupted by her emotional storms and suicide attempts, and throughout Ginsberg’s childhood and early adulthood she was in and out of asylums. According to his biographer Barry Miles, in witnessing Naomi’s struggle, Ginsberg had developed enormous empathy for those with mental illness. ‘Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness’, he later wrote.

Here in this Parisian cafe all his unacknowledged, complex feelings about Naomi spilled onto the paper in a cathartic rush. Ginsberg had wanted to do justice to his mother since her death a year before and he wept while composing the fifty-six lines that would become part of ‘Kaddish’. It is arguably his best poem: an elegy to his mother based on the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead.

In November, Ginsberg reported to Jack Kerouac, who had stayed in the U.S., that he was learning French and had enough to be able to read Apollinaire’s poetry and have a feel for the words. In a bookshop he had eyed shelves full of the French bohemians: Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, Reverdy, Fargue, Cedrars, Prevert, and ‘all the funny surrealists’. He added that he was avoiding his typewriter as he felt obliged to answer the letters of lots of unknown businessmen who ‘tearfully congratulate me for being free and say they’ve lost their souls.’

Corso had become a junkie since moving to Paris and with his help Ginsberg and Orlovsky scored some fine quality heroin. It was so pure that they snorted it for longer lasting effects. It was cheap enough that even they, on their shoestring budget, could indulge now and then.

Ginsberg and Burroughs Make Up

In January 1958  the cadaverous and sardonic William Burroughs arrived in Paris. Ginsberg found him a room at the Beat Hotel that smelled of dust and Gauloise cigarettes. He was in a better state than Ginsberg had seen him for years.

A forgiving friend, Ginsberg had tolerated Burroughs’s many years of amorous flirtations and for a while they had an intense sexual relationship. Burroughs had been his mentor, the sage of their group, and he said he had felt flattered, even privileged to receive his attentions. Yet he had also felt smothered: Burroughs used to talk longingly about how their identities could meld into one, in an act he called ‘schlupping’. Ginsberg had felt terrified by this prospect and after six months, broke it off with him. Heartbroken, Burroughs left for Tangiers where he spent the next four years in a male brothel.

Prior to coming to work in Paris, Ginsberg had brought his new lover Peter Orlovsky with him on a disastrous visit to see Burroughs in Tangiers. From the start Burroughs had disliked Orlovsky. He froze him out, then grew increasingly hostile towards him. At one point, high on a combination of opium and hashish, he had menaced the couple with a machete. But it seemed as though Burroughs’ mad old ways of Tangiers, ‘all his old evil Baudelairian ennui’ had gone. Now they were able to clear the air, and talk through their misunderstandings and feelings.

Facing each other across the kitchen table, Ginsberg wrote, he had confessed his ‘doubt and misery’ about seeing Burroughs again and in front of his eyes, Burroughs had turned from a devil into an ‘Angel’. He revealed that for the last few months in Tangiers he had stopped the drink and the drugs, and began to meditate alone. Gradually he became aware of a consciousness, ‘benevolent’ and ‘sentient’, a big peaceful, loving being that gave him the courage to look at his life dispassionately. He now shared with Ginsberg a vision of a greater central force. He was no longer hankering after a sexual relationship; all that neediness was gone. Burroughs simply wanted to continue their friendship.

Ginsberg wrote an ecstatic letter to Orlovsky (who had by then returned to New York, out of harm’s way), describing how they had:

talked a long time got into tremendous rapport, very delicate…the whole nightmare’s been cleared up overnight, I woke this morning with great bliss of freedom and joy in my heart, Bill’s saved, I’m saved, you’re saved, we’re all saved, everything has been all rapturous ever since.

Corso

From the Beat Hotel Gregory Corso dashed off poems for his first major collection Gasoline (1958). Ginsberg wrote to Ferlinghetti that Corso was turning into a golden and prolific Apollinaire:

..in his poverty too marvellously, how he gets  along here hand to mouth, daily begging & conning & wooing, but he writes daily marvellous poems, every morning he wakes and types last nites 2 or 3 pages of poems,…his life is too unstable for him to sit down for long cool afterthoughts & assembling of book properly…

For much of his early life Corso had been institutionalised, first as an orphan, then as a prisoner at the age of seventeen on a charge of theft. Despite being abused by other prisoners, he read the better part of the prison library there, and his poetic sensibility blossomed. He discovered Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose poetry was to inspire him for the rest of his life.

Shortly after his release in 1950 he met Allen Ginsberg in a Greenwich Village bar, who was impressed by his ‘angelic mind’. At the time Corso was writing conventional verse and Ginsberg introduced him to surreal word combinations and the longer lines of Whitman. Ginsberg became his mentor and always fought in his corner (as he did for Burroughs, Kerouac and anyone whose work he admired). Until his death, Ginsberg continued to claim that Corso had been the better poet.

In the summer of 1958 the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull visited Corso at the Beat Hotel. He wrote in his journal that he was living in a little attic under the roof which had such limited access that one almost had to crawl on hands and knees to make the final spiral turn into his room. He described Corso as small, with a cheeky grin on an ‘Italian face, restless and almost aggressive at times, under pressure, dynamic, black curly hair and burning black eyes, a face of a faun, something elemental and Mediterranean in a miniature bouncing sort of way.’ Corso had been invited to Lappland by an explorer he had met only the day before, and to Turnbull

it was obvious that he had to go as he had to breathe – walking back and forth, up and down the room – every now and then, grinning in spontaneous friendship like a street urchin – then intent again, off to the North Pole to write a poem that would melt all the icebergs…

Corso later told a reviewer that while in Paris ‘things burst and opened, and I said, ‘I will just let the lines go…’ Of all the Beats, Gregory Corso had the greatest enthusiasm for jazz. He aimed to write poetry in the same way that Charlie Parker and Miles Davis played music, and in Paris he regularly went to the newly opened Blue Note jazz club to see Bud Powell play. Although Corso’s poetry began with standard rhythm, he would intentionally move into subtly changing, linguistic fusions that were constantly surprising, just like the best jazz improvisations. He enjoyed assembling what he described as: ‘great eye-sounds placed into an inspired idea’.

Childcity, Aprilcity,

Spirits of angels crouched in doorways,

poets, worms in hair, beautiful Baudelaire,

Artaud, Rimbaud, Apollinaire,

– Paris

In his introduction to Gasoline, Ginsberg wrote:

Corso is a great word-slinger, first naked sign of a poet, a scientific master of mad mouthfuls of language. He wants a surface hilarious with ellipses, jumps of the strangest phrasing picked off the streets of his mind like ‘mad children of soda caps’.

Meetings

By May 1958 Ginsberg had decided to return to the US. He felt pressured to surpass the hugely successful ‘Howl’ but his attempts were falling short. Frustrated that he could not seem to write on demand, his natural melancholic tendencies came to the fore and he was plagued by old suicidal thoughts. In his journal he noted he was getting old (he was close to thirty-two) and he still felt spiritually unsatisfied. ‘I leaned out of the window and implored the sky to take my consciousness away. But jump? I couldn’t – too sudden and brutal, even to think of, when high.’ It was time to see his old psychiatrist in New York and reunite with Orlovsky, whom he was missing.

But before leaving Paris, Ginsberg was determined to meet the writers and artists he admired, and the person at the top of his list was regarded as the greatest living French novelist: Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline’s capacity to discover humour in every squalid corner of life, his ribald language and distrust of others, had endeared him to the Beats. He was still practicing as a doctor and lived in a stone house in the Parisian suburb of Meudon on the Seine.

Ginsberg and Burroughs were greeted at the door by fierce dogs and an elderly man who looked like an old concierge, swathed in shawls in spite of the summer heat. Céline unleashed a litany of woes: people were out to get him; his chemist would not fill his prescriptions; Denmark was a country full of ‘snivelling cowards’. Burroughs asked whether he was still able to make a decent living as a doctor. Céline replied: ‘Oh no, most of the people who come to doctors are middle-aged women, and they only want to take their clothes off in front of a young man.’ Ginsberg later discovered this was a line from one of Celine’s own novels: he had been reduced to quoting himself. The encounter appeared in Allen’s poem ‘Ignu’:

I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk

with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck

brown mould under historic fingernails

At a soiree in a fine apartment in the 16th Arrondissement they met another living icon: Marcel Duchamp, the master of Dada. But the meeting did not go to plan: Ginsberg and Corso turned up drunk and Burroughs was too stoned to move. At one point Ginsberg began a pursuit of Duchamp on all fours, feeling him up his pant legs, begging his blessing and calling him ‘master’. Chuckling, Duchamp kept replying ‘I am only human’. Then in an act of Dadaistic irreverence, Corso cut off Duchamp’s tie with a pair of scissors. Duchamp was said to have been charmed.

Burroughs

William Burroughs felt at home at the Beat Hotel and quickly became a favourite of the cool cats who hung out there, chatting endlessly with them in his flat, Midwestern drawl about anything from heroin to tomato growing in Texas. But as one acquaintance who was living in the hotel at the time observed, his geniality was a mask for a deep reserve. Burroughs rarely let people come close.

After he fled to Tangiers, Burroughs had written regularly to Ginsberg, always enclosing what he called a ‘routine’. This was usually an amusing piece taken from a real event, but pushed to surreal extremes. Flavoured by his Harvard classical education and his lust for junk, these pieces took on a life of their own. After a few years, Ginsberg realised Burroughs had a book.  Prior to leaving Paris he helped to give these random ‘routines’ some shape and Burroughs was able to complete the text of Naked Lunch (1959).

This choose your own adventure style, hallucinatory extravaganza, drew on Burrough’s experiences in Tangier, Mexico and the U.S. and his addiction to drugs. It is also a scathing indictment on the conformist American society he had left behind. He hated the hypocrisy and obsession with power displayed by the wealthy class from which he had come. In the book he offers an alternative: ’Artists to my mind are the real architects of change and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.’

The manuscript was sent to Maurice Girodias, owner of Olympia Press around the corner from the Beat Hotel, in rue Severin. When Girodias finally agreed to publish the book a year later, Burroughs and his Beat friends, including Corso, were given just ten days to prepare the manuscript for the printer. They worked feverishly as a team to type it into a more coherent form, sending section by section from the Beat Hotel to the offices of Olympia by hand. Although these sections were sent in random order, they seemed to gel when the galleys came back, so they largely stayed that way.

Ginsberg described his friend’s prose style as

pure free association of visual images, a sort of dangerous bullfight with the mind, whereby he places himself in acute psychic danger of uncovering some secret which will destroy him…

After Ginsberg’s departure, Burroughs began a lifelong collaboration and friendship with the English writer, painter and sound poet Brion Gysin, who introduced him to the cut-up technique. This chance-based process involves cutting up prose and rearranging it in random order, creating new, unexpected meanings and, as Burroughs later described it, causing one’s ‘range of vision to expand’. It had been done before by Tsara, Eliot, and Duchamp among others. For Burroughs it represented a liberation from the antiquated structure of the novel and in the juxtaposition of separate yet simultaneous views, Burroughs and Gysin saw themselves as doing for print what Cézanne had done for painting.

Soon Burroughs was devoting his time entirely to cut-ups and word got out that he had hit on a great artistic breakthrough. Shortly afterwards he found himself sitting at a restaurant table opposite Samuel Beckett, who leaned across and asked: ‘What can you tell me, Mr. Burroughs, about this cut-up method of yours?’ Burroughs described it and added that he might for example take a page of Beckett’s writing, cut it up and rearrange it. Becket was annoyed that he was using the words of other writers. Burroughs replied: ‘Words don’t have brands on them like cattle do. Ever heard of a word rustler?’ Beckett retorted: That’s not writing, it’s plumbing.’

In 1960 Burroughs published a collection of these cut-up experiments of his own and other Beats in Minutes to Go. It included this piece (an extract here) by Burroughs:

FORMED IN THE STANCE

The beautiful disease and
The government falls
along the weed rooms
flesh along the weed government/ / / /

The girls eat morning
Dying peoples to a white bone monkey
in the Winter sun
touching tree of the house. $$$$

At the Mistral Bookshop (later renamed Shakespeare and Company) Burroughs met Ian Sommerville, a student from the University of Cambridge who was working in the shop that summer. Sommerville was a rangy mathematics genius with a preference for older men. He helped Burroughs kick a codeine habit, only just managing to hang on to his own sanity, while Burroughs fell victim to hallucinations of Uranian people dressed in robes.

Once Burroughs had recovered they became lovers and their attachment existed in some shape or form over the next seventeen years, until Sommerville’s death in 1976. Although he was more than twice his lover’s age, they shared a largely equal relationship, with Sommerville deferring to Burroughs as a talented writer and Burroughs deferring to Sommerville’s expertise in science. As one friend put it: ‘Ian was William’s little Einstein, explaining what the stars are up to.’ Burroughs had managed to get close to someone at last.

Closing

Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs lived in the Beat Hotel on and off until Madame Rachou sold it in 1963. The new owners were keen to go upmarket and in an act they would live to regret, they burned Madame’s hoard of paintings and manuscripts in the basement.

The Beats were constantly on the move between Europe and America, and in Ginsberg’s case increasingly to the east as well. They formed, performed and reformed in different permutations, embraced ‘subversive’ pursuits, had endless love affairs, worked hard at their art, and created a cultural ferment that was to become the hippie counter-culture. In their disaffection with morally smug American values and cold-war suspicions, the Beats found a more vital, audacious way of living, inspiring and releasing others to follow in their wake.

Music

April in Paris, Bud Powell

The signature music for the Beats is mid century American jazz bebop by the likes of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. Its improvisational spirit, complex chord progressions, numerous key changes and rapid tempo inspired the rhythm and improvisational methods of Beat poetry.

Many believe the jazz piano of the child prodigy from Harlem, Bud Powell, comes closest to encapsulating the spirit of bebop.  Jazz great Bill Evans said of him: If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the incomparable originality of his creation and the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell. He was in a class by himself.’ Like a lot of Beat Generation artists, poets and writers, Powell struggled with addiction (heroin and alcohol). He also experienced mental illness, spending significant periods of time in institutions.

But Powell hit his stride when he moved to Paris in 1959. He formed a legendary trio called Le Trois Patrons (The Three Bosses) with drummer Kenny Clarke and bassist Pierre Michelot and played at the Right Bank’s most famous club for jazz, the Blue Note, on rue d’Artois, near the Champs-Elysees (it is now a private club). Bebop was hugely popular with French audiences. They took to its unusual harmonies and fast tempos way before American audiences did but it polarised the French critics. There were loud complaints from traditionalists who preferred swing and New Orleans jazz.

Bud Powell lived around the corner from the Beat Hotel, in Hotel Louisiane, where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre both lived during and after the war. It was a hotel renowned as a home for jazz musicians with at least one piano on every floor. If there was a spare, a musician was allowed to move it into his or her room.

Connection

The legacy and influence of the Beats on the art, writing and music of subsequent generations is enormous. Here are just three instances of their impact.

When he was eighteen Bob Dylan fell in love with Beat writing. He borrowed a copy of Naked Lunch from a friend who had ordered it directly from Olympia Press in Paris, as it seemed probable that like Howl, authorities would ban its release in America.

Dylan met Allen Ginsberg in 1963 and he became his lasting friend, mentor and collaborator. The writings of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and others were essential to Dylan, as he later said:

I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected. It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti…I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic…it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.

Ginsberg can be seen lurking in the left hand corner of Dylan’s video for Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Patti Smith befriended Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs towards the end of their lives. In the early seventies she became interested in doing public poetry readings and to encourage her, Corso began taking her to readings hosted by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village. There she watched him heckle mediocre performances: ‘Shit, Shit! No blood! Get a transfusion!’ After a year or so, Smith had the opportunity to open for a poet, and on the advice of Sam Shepard, she added music to her melodic chanting, with Lenny Kaye on guitar. Kaye later said: ’I hesitate to call them ‘songs’, but in a sense they were the essence of what we would pursue.’

About Corso’s final collection of poems The Golden Dot (2022) Smith said:

Place this book in your survival kit. Let Gregory, the youngest, most high-spirited of the Beat poets guide you through the hallowed days, as he did for my generation. He will steer you through the minefields of existence, poem by poem, drawn from his irreverent benevolent revolutionary heart.

Gregory’s ashes were scattered next to the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley as he had requested. Here is Patti Smith’s touching tribute to Gregory Corso at his memorial.

It was David Bowie’s step brother Terry who introduced him to jazz and the writing of the Beats when he was still a student. He was particularly affected by the work of William Burroughs and became intrigued by his use of cut-ups. Its randomness and spontaneity appealed to him and he borrowed the technique for Diamond Dogs.

I have always been drawn to the Bill Burroughs of this world, who produce a vocabulary that is not necessarily a personal one, but something that is made up of ciphers and signifiers which are regurgitated, reformed and re-accumulated.

Bowie talks about his own use of cut-ups here.