table of contents, introduction, and opening from beats abroad

7/25/2019 Table of Contents, Introduction, and Opening from Beats Abroad

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The

BEATSABROADA Global Guide

to the Beat Generation

Bill Morgan

City Lights Books San Francisco


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Copyright 2015 by Bill Morgan

All Rights Reserved.

Cover photograph Allen Ginsberg LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMorgan, Bill, 1949

e Beats abroad : a global guide to the Beat Generation / BillMorgan. pages cmISBN 978-0-87286-689-8 (paperback)1. Beat generationTravel. 2. Literary landmarks. 3. Authors,American20th centuryTravel. I. Title.PS228.B6M576 2015810.9'0054dc23

2015026728

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.Visit our website: www.citylights.com


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CONTENTS

I. France and Mediterranean Europe 11

II. Northern and Central Europe 91

III. Eastern Europe 127

IV. Africa 141

V. Middle East 167

VI. Asia 175

VII. Australia and Pacific Islands 209

VIII. Canada and Greenland 215

IX. Latin America and the Caribbean 225


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INTRODUCTION

When City Lights published the third in this series ofBeat guidebooks in 2011, I felt it might be the final one.By then I had tracked the writers of the Beat Generationthrough their haunts in New York City, San Francisco,and all the fiy states. It wasnt until fans asked for spe-

cific information about sites in Paris, Mexico City, andTangier that I realized there was one more guide to create,an international one. Although it wasnt intentional, thepublication of this fourth book also rounds out a roughchronological survey of the Beat movement itself. Duringthe 1940s and 1950s, the writers we think of as beat first

became friends in New York City. In the mid-fiies theyjoined other writers in San Francisco to form the groupthat came to be known as the Beat Generation. By the1960s their books had become well-known through-out the United States and served as seminal texts for theyouth counterculture that was emerging. e final dis-

semination of their works was international and beganin the later sixties, a diaspora that continues to this veryday. Many of these writers developed international repu-tations, as translations of their works found publishersaround the world from China to South Africa. Globallythere were surprises. Translations of Bob Kaufmans po-

etry made him more popular in France than he was inAmerica. Although he considered himself to be French asa boy, Lawrence Ferlinghettis fame in Italy continues togrow. Ginsbergs work has always enjoyed a wide audiencethroughout Eastern Europe, where the communist gov-ernments mistakenly believed his anti-capitalist stancemade him their ally. And to this day nearly every book-

store in Rome carries a large selection of Kerouac titles,oen displayed on the most prominent tables in the frontof the shops.

is volume documents that final international


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phase of the Beat Generations story in three ways. Firstand foremost, it identifies specific places where the Beatshung out. Second, it shows how the Beat Generation in-fluenced the work of authors in those countries. And fi-nally, it shows by example the tremendous influence thatinternational travel had on these writers.

e earliest international traveler was LawrenceFerlinghetti. Due to a strange twist of fate that will be ex-plained later, Ferlinghetti was taken to France as a babyand raised there until the age of five. William S. Burroughs,the oldest of the core group of Beat writers, was the firstone to voluntarily decide to live abroad. Never truly com-

fortable in the States, he moved to Vienna following hisgraduation from Harvard in 1936. He planned to contin-ue his studies in an Austrian medical school, but stayedonly one term. During that period he sampled the inde-pendence and liberation that life as an expatriate offeredhim. When Burroughs eventually returned to America,

he brought with him a bit of the polished continental life-style that his younger friends found charming and seduc-tive a decade later.

In 1949 Burroughs le the country again and livedabroad for the next twenty-five years. He was followedby the others: Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Orlovsky, and

Ansen, who all traveled to Europe and North Africa inpart to follow in Burroughs footsteps. Later Snyder,Whalen, Kyger, and Waldman would each spend timein Asia, while McClure, Jones, Bremser, Ferlinghetti,Lamantia, and Cassady fell under the spell of Mexico aswell as Central and South America. e Beat writers ap-peared at countless international poetry festivals over the

years, and in the course of their travels, they influenced anew generation of writers. Each incorporated their travelexperiences into their writing, reacting to the new sur-roundings. As they grew older and visited more widely,

INTRODUCTION


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their own opinions about the world changed. Burroughshated everything about Italy on his first trip, but mel-lowed with time. Ginsberg, perhaps the most widely trav-eled, was changed dramatically by the two years he spentin India, but later in life was reluctant to make the tripagain when he had the chance. Initially Kerouac foundMexico magical, but on later trips he grew disappointed

by the changes he found there. Each had his or her ownadventures on the road abroad, and this book will guidethe reader who wants to follow in the footsteps of theBeats worldwide.

e book is arranged geographically by continent,country, and city. No attempt has been made to be com-

prehensive in coverage. Including every town each visitedwould be overwhelming and unrewarding, for the rangeof their travels was encyclopedic. Locations were selectedbased on their importance to authors writings and bi-ographies. e fact that Ginsberg and Burroughs readin Finland was not in itself important enough to merit

inclusion, but the fact that Corso had a mystical visionon the island of Hydra, or that Kerouac wrote Doctor Saxin a room on Orizaba Street in Mexico City makes thoseplaces essential to the Beat story.

Allen Ginsberg in particular seems to have visitedevery country on earth during his reading tours, and list-

ing every one of those places would be pointless. GregoryCorso probably stayed in more than a hundred apart-ments in Paris and Rome alone, and citing each addresswould be futile. Even Kerouac, who traveled abroad lessthan others, passed through dozens of Mexican towns ontrips to and from Mexico City, oen mentioning them inhis prose. Only the more important locations have been

described in the pages that follow. And so, for the fourthand final time, grab your passport and follow along.

INTRODUCTION


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FRANCE

ANDMEDITERRANEAN

EUROPE


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PARIS

e city of Paris was one of the central ports of call forthe members of the Beat Generation during the middle ofthe twentieth century. Not only did they find the literaryand artistic heritage of the city inspiring, but the pace of

life was more to their liking, as was the relative freedomthey enjoyed. A few of the Beat writers visited Paris intheir youth, but most came as young adults, lured by thecarefree lifestyle and more liberal drug policies that hadbeen glamorized by the writers of the Lost Generation.We begin with two locations that will feature in many of

the stories to follow, and then move on through the au-thors and their Parisian adventures.

1. The Beat Hotel.e legendary hotel at 9, rue Gt-le-Cur, in Pariss Latin Quarter, deserves an en-try all its own. For thirty years, beginning in 1933, the

manager, bartender, and concierge of the building wasMadame Rachou, a woman who enjoyed the company ofwriters and artists and madeallowances for them whenthey were financially downon their luck. Although the

forty-two-room hotel nev-er actually had a name, somany of the writers of theBeat Generation stayed herebetween 1958 and 1963 thatit became widely knownas e Beat Hotel. e

rooms were tiny, dark cells;each floor shared a singledingy bathroom; the heatand electricity were sporad-

Gregory Corso at the Beat

Hotel, 195758

Photo

Allen

GinsbergLLC


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BEATS ABROAD

ic, and the walls so thin that residents could hear theirneighbors breathing. e low rent and the landladyspermissive attitude were ideal for poverty-stricken writ-ers. William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg,Peter Orlovsky, and Harold Norse all made it their home,and nearly every one of our writers, with the exception ofJack Kerouac, stayed here at some point.

Madame Rachou closed the hotel in 1963, and herBeat tenants, unable to afford the higher rents imposedby the new owners, found lodgings elsewhere. HaroldNorses eulogy for the hotel, e Death of 9, Rue Gt-Le-Cur, appeared in the first issue of City Lights Journal.In it, on the eve of the hotels renovation, he describes the

habitual goings-on: dreamachine spins round & roundopening up hash visions & colors as it crashes the sightbarrier & changes cells of the brain . . . a great Americanwriter receives whole episodes in his sleep for the novelof the century . . . a poem like a BOMB goes off. Butthen he goes on: the hotel has changed hands. Workmen

hammer & plaster, halls full of tools & bags of cement,old spiral staircase white with dust. No more all night jamsessions under ceilings about to fall, cats on the floor insleeping-bags, eight or nine to a pad. No more guitars &horns. Although it is still a hotel today, it has been greatlygentrified and only the exterior walls remain as they were

during its Beat heyday.

2. Shakespeare and Company. For more than sixtyyears, the English-language bookstore founded by GeorgeWhitman at 37, rue de la Bcherie has attracted Beatauthors and their fans on visits to Paris. Founded inAugust 1951 as the Mistral Bookshop, the store was re-

named Shakespeare and Company a decade later, aerthe famous Parisian bookstore that first published JamesJoyces Ulysses. Whitman got his start in the book busi-ness by selling textbooks to American students at the


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FRANCE AND MEDI TERRANEAN EURO PE

Sorbonne, and one of his ear-liest customers was LawrenceFerlinghettithe two wereto become lifelong friends.Once hed opened up hisbookstore, George was notcontent to merely operate a

commercial business, and hemade the shop into a hostelfor visiting writers: Whenthe store closed at night, theywere free to sleep on cots orin sleeping bags among the

bookshelves, and were of-ten fed soup and wine fromGeorges own kitchen. Overthe years Whitman managedto host an estimated 50,000people in this way, many of

whom might otherwise nothave been able to visit Paris (or perhaps would have end-ed up on park benches). Ginsberg, Burroughs, Orlovsky,Corso, Ferlinghetti, Norse, and others either stayed over-night or had readings at the bookshop (or both). Whitmandied in his apartment above the store on December 14,

2011, at the age of ninety-eight. His daughter carries onthe bookstore tradition to this day, and literary travelersare still welcomed as tumbleweeds, invited to stay over-night in exchange for a bit of work and the promise ofwriterly efforts.

3. William S. Burroughs. William Burroughs spent sev-

eral years in Paris, and many of his books, most notablyNaked Lunch, Minutes To Go, and e Exterminator, wereeither written or assembled here. He made his first trip toParis in 1933, escaping the Midwest for the summer with

George Whitman at

Shakespeare & Co.


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BEATS ABROAD

his friend David Kammererfrom St. Louis. (is was the

very same David Kammererwho would be killed ten yearslater by Lucien Carr in NewYork City, a murder that fig-ures prominently in the his-

tory of the Beat Generation.)In 1936 Burroughs took

another trip to Paris, but itwasnt until January 1958that he settled down to livehere, leaving Tangier to take

a room in the Beat Hotel. Hislife was in crisis at the time, and he signed up for psy-chological analysis with one Dr. Schlumberger. BrionGysin arrived in Paris later that spring and bumped intoBurroughs on Place Saint-Michel. ey hadnt caredmuch for one another in Tangier, but now they struck up

a friendship that was to last the rest of their lives. On April13, 1958, Burroughs joined Allen Ginsberg and GregoryCorso to give a small reading at George Whitmans MistralBookshop: Burroughs read a section of Naked Lunchthat had just appeared in the Chicago Review. Corso andGinsberg encouraged the shy and private Burroughs to go

with them to bohemian parties, where they met Frenchartists and writers including Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp,and Henri Michaux. Before long Burroughs addiction toheroin began to take its toll and he became more reclu-sive, oen staying alone in his room at the Beat Hotel fordays on end.

In the summer of 1959 Burroughs met Ian

Sommerville, a young student working in GeorgeWhitmans bookstore, and they became lovers for a pe-riod of time. Burroughs had just been arrested in connec-tion with a drug affair in Tangier and had decided it was

William BurroughsPhoto

AllenGinsbergLLC


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time to kick his habit. In August, Sommerville moved intothe Beat Hotel to help Burroughs get off drugs. e curewas torturous but successful, and the criminal chargesagainst William resulted in only a fine and a suspendedsentence. It was an important year for Burroughs in otherways as well. On October 1, 1959, while cutting a mountfor a picture in his room at the Beat Hotel, Brion Gysin

sliced through some newspapers and by chance invent-ed the cut-up method. What at first seemed like only aninteresting accident to Gysin became an obsession withBurroughs. For years he experimented with the processof cutting up pieces of writing and pasting them back to-gether in random ways, trying to discover the true mean-

ings below the surface of the words.Aer a stint in England, Burroughs returned to

France in 1962, in an unsuccessful effort to wrest his over-due royalties for Naked Lunchfrom Maurice Girodias, theowner of the Olympia Press. When Mme. Rachou sold theBeat Hotel in January 1963, William moved to an apart-

ment in the Hotel Pax [30, rue Saint-Andr-des-Arts].In the years that followed, Burroughs visited Paris fre-quently, even flying from Kansas in 1985 when he learnedthat his old friend Brion Gysin was terminally ill. In thelast decades of his life his trips were more oen centeredaround readings and public appearances.

4. Brion Gysin. William Burroughs friend and collabo-rator Brion Gysin lived in Paris for many years. On his first

visit to Paris in the summer of 1938 he met Jane and PaulBowles, who would become his close friends; in fact it wasPaul Bowles who encouraged Gysin to move to Tangier.Twenty years later, when Gysin le Morocco for Paris, he

moved into the Beat Hotel. Here he invented the cut-upmethod that Burroughs found so inspiring, and alongwith Ian Sommerville he developed the Dreamachine,a device that used stroboscopic light to create visual


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BEATS ABROAD

hallucinations. Burroughs and others used the machineto induce visions, and incorporated some of those visionsinto their writings. Gysin died in his apartment at 135,rue St. Martinin July 1986.

5. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. As a boy, AllenGinsberg dreamed of visiting Paris and all the European

capitals, but it wasnt until he was over thirty years oldthat he made his first trip. In mid-September 1957, heand his companion Peter Orlovsky arrived in Paris, hop-ing to stay with Gregory Corso. When Corso turnedout to be unavailablehe was on an unscheduled tripto Amsterdam to hide from his creditorsthey walked

around all night, awed by the citys beauty. e next nightthey stayed near Place Pigalle, and then they moved on toHolland to find their friend on the lam. When the threeof them returned to Paris together the following month,they moved into the Beat Hotel on the Rue Gt-le-Cur,all of them sharing the same small room until Corso

moved into an inexpensive attic room of his own. eBeat Hotel became Ginsbergs preferred address when-ever he was in Paris.

Ginsberg and Orlovsky in their room at the Beat Hotel. 195758PhotobyChapman


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In Paris, Ginsberg continued to act as his friends un-official agent, as was his wont, lobbying Maurice Girodiasto publish Burroughs Naked Lunchand then helping witheditorial work on the book. Allen wrote some of his bestpoetry on that first trip, including To Aunt Rose, AtApollinaires Grave, and the very first dras of Kaddish,oen considered his greatest work. Some of the poems

were written in the hotel, but many were composed ashe sat at a table in the Caf Select [99, boulevard duMontparnasse]. e Select seems to have been Ginsbergsfavorite among the many cafs he frequented, though hesometimes took Alan Ansen to a bar called the Caveau dela Huchette [5, rue de la Huchette] where they hoped to

pick up men.Peter sailed for America on January 17, 1958, and

on the same day William Burroughs made his arrival inParis, conveniently timed, given that he had a crush onGinsberg and was jealous of Orlovsky. Allen remained inParis for six more months, giving

readings at venues in and aroundthe city, and making side tripsto England. Just before Ginsbergreturned to America in July, heand Burroughs visited the Frenchwriter Henri Michaux, who lived

onRue Sguier

, and whose expe-riences with mescaline intriguedthem as much as his poetry. Yearslater, Ginsberg wrote an introduc-tion to a translation of Michauxsbook By Surprise in which he de-scribes their various meetings and

discussions during the Paris years.On April 1, 1961, Ginsberg

and Orlovsky returned to Franceon board the S.S.America and once

Man Ray, Peter

Orlovsky, and Gnsberg

in Paris

Photo

AllenGinsbergLLC


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BEATS ABROAD

again settled into a room atthe Beat Hotel. (is time theenvious Burroughs made it apoint to leave for Tangier justbefore Allens ship arrived sothat he wouldnt have to seethem.)

Over the course ofthe next thirty-five yearsGinsberg returned to Parisdozens of times. In thesummer of 1967 he hostedhis father, the poet Louis

Ginsberg, who was travel-ing in Europe for the firsttime with Allens stepmother,Edith. As Ginsberg becamemore and more famous, histrips to Europe centered

around readings in Paris andother cities. Sometimes these were small, intimate affairsand at other times, such as the 1982 UNESCO War OnWar festival, they included dozens of other internationalwriters. In 1990 the FNAC Galerie mounted a giant ex-hibition of Ginsbergs photography and Allen was on

hand for the opening. Two years later he was awarded theChevalier de lOrdre des Artes et des Lettres by JacquesLang, the French Minister of Culture. His last trip to Pariswas in 1996, less than a year before his death.

6. Gregory Corso. Gregory Corso spent a great dealof time in Paris, perhaps more time than any other Beat

writer. In late 1956, he and his girlfriend Hope Savageplanned a trip to Europe, but Gregory was ambivalentabout leaving the U.S. Hope sailed alone for Paris, and bythe time Corso arrived in March 1957, she had already le

Allen Ginsberg, Gregory

Corso, Ed Freeman, Peter

Orlovsky in Paris

Photo

AllenGinsbergLLC


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for parts unknown. At first Corsolived in a room at the Hotel descoles on rue de la Sorbonnewitha woman named Nicole whom hehad met by chance. He was livinghere when Jack Kerouac stoppedto visit in April. Gregory, afraid of

incurring the wrath of his landlady,wouldnt let Jack stay with him,and Kerouac le the city a few dayslater, blaming Corso for the rapiddepletion of his cash.

Within a few months, Corso

moved in with another friend at 26, rue Saint Benot,where he managed to stay rent-free for a while, andthen he moved on to another cheap apartment at 123,rue de Svres, where he had a bed and cooking privi-leges. It wasnt long before he discovered the little hotelon rue Gt-le-Curin fact, it was Corso who had the

distinction of dubbing it e Beat Hotel sometime inearly September 1957. While living in the Beat Hotel in195758, Corso wrote many of the poems that were col-lected in e Happy Birthday of Death, including his mostfamous poem, Bomb. Images of Paris creep into his po-etry in lines such as A bird looks like me | flying over the

Monoprix (a reference to a large French retail store), orI dreamed Ted Williams | leaning at night | against theEiffel Tower, weeping.

Once the word was out, all the poets began to stay atthe Beat Hotel on their trips to Paris, until all of the roomsseemed to merge at times into one continual literary sa-lon. Gregory preferred to write privately in his own room

and then go to Ginsbergs or Burroughs rooms for social-izing. Cheap as it was, Corso could not always pay therent, so from time to time he had to move to even morerock-bottom places like the Hotel de LAcadmie [32, rue

Gregory Corso in his

tiny attic room at the

Beat Hotel

Photo

AllenGinsbergLLC


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BEATS ABROAD

des Saints-Pres]. But he could most oen be found onrue Gt-le-Cur, faithful to the hotel until it closed. eever sociable Corso made many friends in Paris, includ-ing well-known artists and writers such as Jean Genet,whom he met in March of 1958. at same spring Corso

introduced Burroughs to a wealthy polio victim namedJacques Stern who was interested in the Beats and drugs(not necessarily in that order). For a while, Stern becamepart of the Beat Hotel circle. e availability of heroin inParis led Corso to develop his first habit. Over the courseof the next forty years, drugs would take their toll on

Gregory, and his creative output declined as a result.In 1961, Corso was living with still another friend,the artist Guy Harloff, in his room at 33, Rue St. Andr-des-Arts, another short-lived arrangement. He thenmoved on to the American Hotel [14, rue Bra] and theHotel Stella [41, rue Monsieur le Prince]. During the1960s he became engrossed in the study of geometry and

ancient hieroglyphics, topics that would be assimilatedinto his works.

By 1975 Corso was living with Jocelyn Stern in hermothers house at 67, avenue Paul Doumer, awaiting

Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in ParisPhoto

AllenGinsbergLLC


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the arrival of their baby, Max. Gregory used this addressfor several years, a short respite from his usual habit ofserial moves; though he was still heavily involved withdrugs, this was a more stable living arrangement for himthan most. When his relationship with Stern came toan end, he once again lived on his own, and by 1983 hecould be found in a room at 11, rue Scribe. It would be

impossible to track all the locations where Corso sleptover the years, sometimes moving daily from place toplace, but these will serve as examples of his peripateticwanderings.

7. Harold Norse. Paris was the European city where

Harold Norse most wanted to live. It was also beyond hismeans, but in May 1959 he was given the opportunityto house-sit for a wealthyfriend. His host put him ina backyard studio at 9, rueiers, an out-of-the-way

place that he soon foundboring. As he wrote in hisautobiography, Memoirs of aBastard Angel, I had artisticfreedom, no financial wor-ries, and no life. ree weeks

later Norse was able to moveinto a small, cozy apartmentowned by the same friendon the rue St. Louis en lle,where he was asked to keepwatch over a collection ofantiques. Here he met a lover

and had an affair that lastedthe better part of a year.While living in the neigh-borhood, Norse would oen

Gregory Corso and Harold

Norse in front of Notre-Dame

Cathedral, Paris

Photo

AllenGinsbergLLC


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BEATS ABROAD

sit in the cafs, especially Les Nuages in St. Germain, andtalk with friends like Gregory Corso or Jim Jones, authorof From Here To Eternity. In late June 1959, Corso toldNorse to look up William Burroughs, and the two metfor the first time in the Tabac St. Michel caf [22, rueSaint-Andr-des-Arts]. In addition to frequenting thecafs in the area, Norse could also be found at the Mistral

Bookshop or at Gat Frogs Librairie Anglaise at 42, ruede Seine, both bookstores where English-language writ-ers were welcome. To support himself Norse taught andworked at George Whitmans bookshop. It was at theMistral that Norse met Ian Sommerville. Knowing thatSommerville liked older men, Norse introduced Ian to

Burroughs that summer.Following his stint as a house-sitter, Norse moved

to the Htel de lUnivers, [6, rue Grgoire de Tours],where he worked on cut-up poetry and pen-and-inkdrawings. In March 1961, Harold Norse had his first one-man show of drawings at the nearby Librairie Anglaise.

In April 1960, he ingratiated himself with Mme. Rachouat the Beat Hotel and moved in for an extended stay.Shortly aer arriving he wrote the cut-up story SniffingKeyholes, which was to appear in his book Beat Hotel,though it wasnt until 1983 that an English edition of thebook would be published. InMemoirs of a Bastard Angel

he wrote, I cant say that we attained perfect life at theBeat Hotel, but if for the artist perfect life can be definedas living in a community of fellow artists, with constantcreative activity and the freedom to come and go as youplease while satisfying the appetites of the flesh and tohave all this in Paris when you were still young enough tosubject the body to long bouts of sensual explorations and

dissipations, then we lived the perfect life.


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8. Lawrence Ferlinghetti

e white sun of Parissoens sidewalkssketches white shadows on skylightstraps a black caton a distant balcony

On a 1980 trip to Paris, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrotea long series of poems called Paris Transformations,which move back and forth across the city from the Garedu Nord to Montparnasse to Pre Lachaise to Place SaintSulpice. It wasnt the first time that the city of Paris played

a central role in his writing, and it wouldnt be the last. Inaddition to countless poems written in and about Paris,Lawrences two published novels, Her and Love in theDays of Rageare set in the city as well.

Ferlinghetti probably passedthrough Paris for the first time as

a baby, on his way to his new homein eastern France with his aunt.Since he lived the first five years ofhis life here, French came easily tohim, and following World War IIhe studied for his doctorate at the

Sorbonne under the G.I. Bill. FromJanuary 1948 until the fall of 1949he received a monthly governmentcheck for $65 to attend classes, andwrote and successfully defended adissertation titled La Cit Symboledans la Posie Moderne de Langue

Anglaise (A la Recherche duneTradition Mtropolitaine). At firsthe lived with the Edgar Letellierfamily at 2, place Voltaire, not far

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's

Student ID card photo,

Sorbonne, Paris

PhotoCo

urtesyofCityLightsArchive


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from Place Bastille, before moving to Montparnasse [89,rue de Vaugirard]. Here he worked on a novel called eWay of Dispossession. (Although he entered the manu-script in a contest run by the publisher Doubleday, Doranand Co., it was never published.)

ese Paris years were formative for Ferlinghetti.It was here that he first met his lifelong friend GeorgeWhitman, whose sister Mary he had known as a stu-dent at Columbia University. At that time Whitmanwas selling textbooks to the American students out ofa book-crammed, windowless room at the Htel Suez

[31, boulevard Saint-Michel

]. On their first meeting,Whitman sold Ferlinghetti a volume of Proust while sit-ting in a rocking chair and cooking himself dinner ina tin can over a tiny stove. e tone was set for an en-during friendship. (Aer Whitman opened the MistralBookshop in 1951 and Ferlinghetti founded City LightsBookshop in San Francisco in 1953, they oen talked

about swapping stores.)In the summer of 1948, on his way to study at the

Sorbonne, Ferlinghetti met a woman named MarieBirmingham on a ship bound for France. She and her

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and George Whitman at Shakespeare & Co.PhotobyHansErixon


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friend Mary Louise Barrett lived onRue du Cherche-Midi, the samestreet as the fictional characters inDjuna Barnes novel Nightwood.ey gave him a copy of thatbook, and it had a great impacton Ferlinghettis own work. Later,

Marie married a French painter,Claude Ponsot, and Lawrence pub-lished a collection of Marie Ponsots poems as the fihin the City Lights Pocket Poets Series (directly followingGinsbergs Howl and Other Poems).

e poems of Ren Char also influenced

Ferlinghetti, and in his first book of poetry, Pictures of theGone World, he writes, remembering those early days inFrance: In Paris in a loud dark winter | when the sun wassomething in | Provence | when I came upon the poetry| of Ren Char | I saw Vaucluse again | in a summer ofsauterelles. . . .

Lawrence and his roommate, Ivan Cousins, oensat in cafs because there was no heat in their apart-ment. Our concierge looked upon us as Communistsand treated us badly, Ferlinghetti wrote. One might callit a localized front in the Cold War. On chilly days theyfrequented Les Deux Magots [6, place Saint-Germain-des-Prs

], the terrace of Le Dme Caf [109, boulevard

du Montparnasse], and especially Le Select [99, boule-vard du Montparnasse]. In Le Select, Ferlinghetti oensaw Samuel Beckett, but was too shy to say hello. is wasalso the period when Ferlinghetti began to paint, an arthe would continue to practice for the rest of his life. Hewent to drawing sessions at the Acadmie Julien [31, rue

du Dragon] and the Acadmie de la Grande Chaumire[renamed Acadmie Charpentier, 14, rue de la Grande-Chaumire] where the artists painted from the nude forno charge. Lawrence painted the walls of his apartment


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BEATS ABROAD

white and decorated them with a large mural depictingthe head of a classical nude and a quotation from EdgarAllan Poes To Helen.

In 1949 he met his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith,and they hung out together in Paris discussing the work of

D.H. Lawrence, her special area of study. ey spent timetogether at the Caf Mabillon [164, boulevard Saint-Germain] and on occasion he took her to the ComdieFranaise [2, rue de Richelieu].

Although he has resided permanently in SanFrancisco since 1951, Ferlinghetti has always retained a

special relationship with Paris, returning again and again.On a 1963 trip he stayed at the Htel de Seine on Ruede Seineand found the city changed, yet haunted by oldmemories: us returned to Paris thirteen years later . . .still the loneliest city in the world, now buried in a welterof automobiles, traffic lights and neon. . . . Walked aboutthe night city for about three hours. . . . Walked into the

dark courtyard of 89 rue de Vaugirard, where I had mytwo room cave those years, pressed the minuterie, and thehall and courtyard lights came on. Saw the shuttered win-dow of my room on the courtyard, felt the new front door.

Kirby and Lawrence FerlinghettiPhotobyRuthHeller


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BEATS ABROAD

returned more than a dozen timesand wrote a good deal of poetryduring his stays.A Trip to Italy andFrance, written in 1979, includessome of his best poems from thatperiod.

In 1985 Ferlinghetti traded

apartments with Jean-JacquesLebel to pursue his art as a painter.Using a studio given to him by theCit Internationale des Arts in the

center of town, Lawrence attended more drawing ses-sions. In the aernoons he visited the library at the Muse

de Pompidouwhere he researched the periodicals collec-tion for background for Love in the Days of Rage.Everymorning I would wake up and go swimming in a poolfrom which you could see the Panthon. . . . I worked outthe plot of the novel while I was doing my laps. en Iwould go to one or another caf and write in a spiral note-

book for two or three hours. en I would go down toGeorge Whitmans bookstore around noon or one oclockand run into people.

9. Jack Kerouac. ough a native French speaker, JackKerouac visited Paris only twice: once for five days in

1957, and once in 1965 for another short stay. In April1957, aer helping Burroughs organize Naked Lunch inTangier, he stopped over in Paris on his way to London,arriving at the Gare de Lyon train station hoping to en-

joy a few days speaking French and seeing the sights. InLonesome Traveler, Jack writes about going directly to acaf on Boulevard Diderotto fortify himself with espres-so and croissants before taking a very long walk aroundthe city. By following Kerouacs itinerary in that book,youll be able to see a good deal of the town. GregoryCorso wouldnt let Kerouac stay with him in his room


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at the Hotel Des coles, and Jackgrumbled about having to searchfor his own cheap room aer spend-ing most of his money carousingwith Corso that first night. Whilein the city, Kerouac delivered themanuscript of Burroughs Naked

Lunch to Bernard Frechtman, anoccasional editor for the OlympiaPress, who lived at 5, rue Joansat the time. Eventually MauriceGirodias, Olympias owner, wouldagree to publish the book. During

a visit to theLouvre Kerouac wasimpressed most of all by the paint-ings of Brueghel, David, Goya,Rembrandt, Rubens, and Tiepolo.In the days before the more con-temporary collections were divided and sent to different

museums, Van Goghs pictures were in the Louvre, andthey hit him with an explosion of light of bright goldand daylight.

On June 1, 1965, Jack Kerouac took his second andfinal trip to Paris, flying into Orly airport on an Air France

jet from Florida. He had grown increasingly interested in

his familys French roots and hoped that he could trace hisancestors back to their original village in Brittany, but thetrip turned into a drunken fiasco, all honestly described inhis short book Satori in Paris. He found a cheap room nearLes Invalides (the burial place of Napoleon) [129, rue deGrenelle]. Initially he planned to look up specific rare vol-umes in the Bibliothque Mazarine [23, quai de Conti],but the librarian informed him that the Nazis had burnedthe ones he needed in 1944. At the Bibliothque Nationale[58, rue de Richelieu] and the Archives Nationales [60,rue des Francs-Bourgeois], the librarians offered little

Jack Kerouac posing

as Gide

Photo

Allen

GinsbergLLC

table of contents, introduction, and opening from beats abroad

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