Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Harold Norse (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2002

By the author of 12 volumes of poetry and the novel "Beat Hotel", this autobiography describes the life of a man who was for over 50 years at the centre of creative culture and homosexual subculture in three continents. Friend and secretary of W.H.Auden in 1939, he became an intimate friend of James Baldwin and lived with Tennessee Williams during the writing of "The Glass Menagerie". He spent time at the Beat Hotel with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, in Tangier with Paul and Jane Bowles, in Spain with Robert Graves, and in Greece with Leonard Cohen. In the late 1960s he moved to California, where he formed a literary alliance with Charles Bukowski and did bodybuilding with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He presents vivid portraits of the great writers of his time.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Norse ( Beat Hotels ) immerses the reader in bohemian and gay subcultures in this freewheeling, name-dropping autobiography. In the early, slightly acrimonious chapters, W. H. Auden steals his lover, Chester Kallman, who became Auden's lifelong companion. Norse dispenses an abundance of stories: he read James Baldwin's first novel in an early draft; he shared a cabin with Tennessee Williams in Massachusetts; William Carlos Williams was a mentor of sorts; Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas were his drinking buddies. He spent time in Paris with William Burroughs; lived in Rome; practiced Buddhist meditation in Spain; made the Venice, Calif., "scene" in the late 1960s. Among the friends and acquaintances here are Anais Nin, Ezra Pound, Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles and John Cage. Yet some of this memoir's most powerful scenes occur far from the glitter, as when Norse recounts his squalid Brooklyn childhood or describes how, while working in a WW II shipyard, he witnessed a black man beaten to death. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Norse, author of Beat Hotel (1983) and over a dozen book of poetry, has written a gossipy, bawdy memoir recounting an adventurous life on three continents. Although he describes himself as an outsider, Norse was friendly with some of the most important writers of his time, and his book includes anecdotes on a host of literary lions, among them W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. The discrimination Norse encountered as a homosexual and a Jew is a central theme in this memoir celebrating tolerance and love over prejudice and hatred. While the book may not win Norse many new readers, it will be welcomed by those already familiar with his work.
- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• ISBN-10: 1560253851
• ASIN: B000I0RRE4
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,890,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Writer you've never heard of..., June 24, 2002

By 

Jim Camp (The Arizona Desert) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (Paperback)

Over the past decade or so, The Beats have become white hot...so much so imitators have come crawling out of the woodwork with their own bad poetry or semi-autobiographical tales of the East Village.

Make no mistake about it: Harold Norse is the real thing...and more. From Barry Miles's book, The Beat Hotel: "...for a brief period -- from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963 -- it was home to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation."

Norse was there -- no only as witness -- but, much more importantly, particpant. And he wrote. Here's one of my favorite parts of the book:

"In February 1960, before moving into the Beat Hotel, I began doing ink drawings and cut-up poetry at the Hotel Univers on rue St. Grégoire de Tours next door to Edouard Roditi. He had often put me up at number 8 where, he said, Théodore de Banville had rented a room for Rimbaud.

Shortly after I moved into the Beat Hotel in April, I wrote Sniffing Keyholes, a sex/dope scene between a muscular black youth called Melo and a blond Russian princess called Z.Z. It was my first narrative cut-up. I felt I had broken through semantic and psychological barriers; hashish and opium helped with the aleatory process.

My experience of breaking new ground alarmed and exhilarated me. For awhile I believed I had lost my reason but didn’t consider it a great loss—the mind works in mysterious ways. Actually, word, image, and perception come together in a simultaneous jumble, not, as grammar and logic would have us believe, in a linear structure. I telescoped language in word clusters in a way James Joyce had pioneered, but with this difference: I allowed the element of chance to determine novel and surprising configurations of language. John Cage had done it in music, Pollock in painting. When I showed it to Brion Gysin he raved, “You’ve done something new! It’s a gas! Bill must see this right away.”

Bill Burroughs came down to my room. “Well, Harold, Brion says you’ve written a very funny cut-up. I’d love to see it.” In his fedora and topcoat he sat at the edge of my bed reading the piece, exploding in little sniffs and snorts, his equivalent of lusty guffaws. “This is marvelous,” he said, looking up. “You must show it to Girodias.” Maurice Girodias, owner of Olympia Press, had published Naked Lunch; his father had published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. But I wasn’t so sure he’d go mad about a few typewritten pages of cut-up. Burroughs disagreed. “I’m calling him right away to get you an appointment.”

A day or two later I trekked over to the office a few blocks away on the rue St. Séverin. I was right. Girodias read it and thought it similar to Burroughs. He wanted to see more but didn’t sound enthusiastic. “He missed the point,” snorted Burroughs. “He rejected Naked Lunch the first time it was offered to him.”

Poetry (Norse is one of Ferlinghetti's "Pocket Poets"), cut-up, essays, important correspondence (his letters to William Carlos Williams have been published, and soon to be are his letters to Charles Bukowski) and, most recently, this memoir; it's a fascinating look into the life of a writer who can't be pigeonholed into any category, whether it's Beat, Gay, or Counterculture. Norse is more than any label the critics will try and stick on his forehead. If you ask me, he's one of the 20th century's most overlooked writers, and with the paperback edition of this fine work, maybe His Day is just around the corner.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the Back Cover, January 12, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Memoirs of a Bastard Angel (Hardcover)

Harold Norse is the author of 12 volumes of poetry and a novel, Beat Hotel. His selected poems, Hotel Nirvana, was a National Book Award nominee in 1974. His numerous grants include one from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in San Francisco. Of his writing, Christopher Street said: "Norse's work is one of the foundations of a post-World War II tradition that includes the prose art of John Rechy and Jean Genet." Anis Nin wrote "I enjoyed the Memoirs tremendously... So well written so honest.. The Memoirs are a live and powerful". Of his latest volume, Love Poems, Booklist wrote: "A major work of gay literature". Library Journal concurred "An elder statesman of homoerotic verse, making this volume an important addition to poetry collections". And James Baldwin wrote: "If light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold Norse will be one of those who have helped to set it there.