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

Barry Miles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2000

Called "a vivid picture of literary life along the Left Bank in the late 1950s and early 1960s . . . [and] fun reading" by Library Journal, 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; and Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at a place that, the San Francisco Chronicle has written, "gave the spirit of Dean Moriarty and the genius of Genet and Duchamp a place to dream together of new worlds over a glass of vin ordinaire".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Miles (Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, etc.), who has been intimately involved in the documentation of the Beat scene, focuses here on an international aspect of Beat work: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso's escape from "the conformism and Puritanism of fifties America" during the six years (1957-1963) they lived at a cheap hotel on Paris's Left Bank. During this period, the three pursued such now-famous creative endeavors as "Kaddish," Naked Lunch and "Bomb." Their important work during this time, particularly the "cut-up" method pioneered by Burroughs, had an important formative influence on the next generation of artists, according to Miles. Part scholarly study and part gossip-fest, this account traces the aesthetic, sexual and social goings-on in Paris: "Within the shelter of the Beat Hotel," Miles writes, "they had mapped out many of the paths that the 'sixties generation' was to actually follow: the recreational use of drugs and experiments with psychedelics..., investigations into magic and mysticism..., gay rights and sexual freedom , the legalization of 'pornography' and challenges to obscenity laws." The hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur, closed for nearly four decades now, still symbolizes the fruitful ground of collaborative creation among the Beats. The significance of this period in Paris for the Beats may be slightly exaggerated by Miles to justify this book-length study, but those interested in the lives of these cult figures will most likely forgive such overdetermination in the interests of learning in an entertaining narrative about important writers now considered American literary heroes. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The cheap rooming house at nine rue Git-Le-Coeur became known as the Beat Hotel after several Beat writers made it their home in Paris. In this interesting blend of sexual gossip and literary scholarship, Miles, author of full-length biographies of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, paints a vivid picture of literary life along the Left Bank in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He recounts not only the Beat writers' creative interactions with one other but their relations with such Frenchmen as Maurice Girodias, publisher of the Olympia Press, and Henri Michaux, an author who shared their fascination with the use of drugs to heighten consciousness. Miles also documents the influences of a number of European writers on the Beats, including Andr Breton, Louis-Ferdinand C line, and Sergei Esenin. Finally, he is particularly good at exploring the collaboration between Brion Gysin and Burroughs that led to their famous cut-up method. This is fun reading, especially for those steeped in the Beats. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-DWilliam Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; 1st edition (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080211668x
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116680
• ASIN: 080211668X
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #884,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ok! but lots of repetition, March 19, 2001

By 

Graham Z. Seidman (SAN LUIS OBISBO, CALIFORNIA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 (Hardcover)

I lived at number nine rue Git-le-Coeur from 1955 until 1958 and visited there often until 1960 and knew most of the people mentioned in the book. I was an ex-Korean War Vet studying on the G.I. Bill as were thousands of "Americans in Paris" in the 50,s. I can attest that most of the events related are accurate. The Hotel was special because of the freedom the owner granted us: cooking in our rooms, decorating them, allowing overnight guests, etc.) I believe it was the Hotel that helped form the "Beats" rather then the other way around since it was a creative beehive before they got there. My main argument with the book is the insistance of the hotel as being sordid, rat-ridden and dirty. This was not true. I never saw a four-legged rat there and the only roaches were the cannibis kind. The rooms were swept and mopped daily. It was a great place to be even before the "Beats" arrived and should not be defamed by exaggeration at the expense of the wonderful blue haired MadameRachou who owned it and took care of us, her Americains.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sex and Drugs and What it Beat, July 25, 2000

By 

Guy S. Evans - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A five-star Hotel., October 11, 2000

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 (Hardcover)

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