Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 Book

I have been wanting to buy Barry Miles's "The Beat Hotel" for several years, but every copy I've found in bookstores has had a split or a binding problem serious enough that I wouldn't add the copy to my collection. But I still wanted to read the book, and came across it recently in the public library.

"The Beat Hotel" was a filthy, seedy, run-down hotel on Paris's Left Bank that was operated by an old woman who enjoyed the company of writers, artists, and other creative types, and who wasn't bothered by drug use or sexual experimentation. In the last few years that the hotel was open, it was home to almost all of the major Beat writers (Jack Kerouac being the most notable exception), who had taken to traveling the world just as the Beat movement was being discovered stateside by the American media and the public in general.

The Beat Hotel era had two main periods: 1957-1958, when the leading Beat figure in residence was Allen Ginsburg, with Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs as supporting players, and 1958-1963, when Burroughs, Corso, Brion Gysin, and various Burroughs collaborators dominated the scene. It was a time of enormous creativity and discovery, with Ginsberg and Corso writing some of their most important poems, "Naked Lunch" finally getting published, and Burroughs and Gysin examining alternative states of consciousness and understanding, working with the cut-up technique, the "dreamachine," and audio-visual experiments.

The book confirmed something I've been suspecting for a few months now--that Allen Ginsberg, rather than Jack Kerouac--was the central figure of the Beat movement. While Kerouac is bathed in a legendary aura of unapproachable coolness and hipness, and indeed freed up the language with his spontaneous prose and poetry, he was also a mama's boy, who spent the last decade of his short life drinking himself to death and stewing in paleo-conservative bigotry.

If Kerouac was the Christ of the Beat Movement, then Ginsberg was its St. Paul, and he worked diligently to encourage his friends in their creative endeavors, and to get their work published. He traveled all over the world for fifty years, preaching the Beat gospel of liberation, and if some of his pronouncements occasionally bordered on the ridiculous, there was no doubting his sincerity or enthusiasm.

But to get back to the book, it is a breezy, enjoyable read, although I noticed a good deal of typos and editorial goofs towards the end. It also would've benefitted greatly from an index. Still, if you're a fan of the Beats, or are a creative person yourself, you'll be carried away by Miles's descriptions of Paris in that period as a Bohemian Eden, and will be sick with jealousy that you weren't around the Beat Hotel in those days to bask in the glow of so much brilliance concentrated into one small spot.