The Beats’ countercultural ferment still bubbling
An exhibition in Paris keeps the memory of a literary movement alive
Visitors to Paris’s Pompidou Center this summer are greeted with a vitrine that stretches uninterrupted before them for 35 linear metres. Unspooled inside it is the 1951 typescript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, page after page of tracing paper taped together to form a single continuous sheet, the defining road novel of its time laid out before them like so much two-lane blacktop. “That river of words,” mused Jean-Jacques Lebel, an artist and one-time associate of the Beats who helped organise the museum show this manuscript introduces. “That Mississippi of words.”
“The last part of it got chewed off by a dog,” he added.
Lebel was a 21-year-old artist when he met William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso at a Left Bank poetry reading in 1957. For the next few years, he hung out with them at the squalid “Beat Hotel”, working with Allen Ginsberg to translate his poem Howl into French, helping to find a publisher in Paris for Burroughs’ Naked Lunch at a time when no American publisher would touch it — not even Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had recently won an obscenity case that had been brought against him for publishing Howl.
Now, white-haired and goateed at 80, Lebel has become an archivist of the movement he once served as an acolyte. As an associate curator of “Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris”, at the Pompidou until Oct 3, he was a key force behind the first major retrospective on the subject since the Whitney Museum of American Art staged its “Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965” show in New York more than two decades ago.
“They were my buddies,” Lebel said as we spoke in his art-filled studio, an expansive, ground-floor space set in a cobblestone courtyard at the foot of Montmartre. “I felt like I owed it to them. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they’re not here.”
Unlike the Whitney show, which focused on the Beats’ activities in the United States during their peak years, the Pompidou exhibition traces their wanderings over more than a quarter-century, from their start at Columbia University in 1943 to their sojourns in San Francisco, Paris and Morocco, to the mainstreaming of the counterculture in 1969. It does not repeat the Whitney’s attempt to group them with the abstract expressionist painters who were making their mark in New York around the same time. “That’s another exhibition, even if they did go to the same bars,” said PhilippeAlain Michaud, the show’s chief curator and conservator of the cinema collection at the Pompidou. But it does seek to place them in an intellectual context that goes beyond poetry and drugs.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, much of that context is provided by Paris. “Not France,” Lebel said. “Paris. All these people who run away from their own countries” — James Joyce and Samuel Beckett from Ireland, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris from Spain, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin from the United States — “they all end up in this mythical place called Paris. It’s not France — it’s universal.”
Lebel is one of the people who made the myth mythical. Ginsberg and company were unknown in Europe when they arrived, but Lebel decided to remedy that by introducing them to the dadaist master Marcel Duchamp, whom he knew because his father, an eminent art historian, had been friends with Duchamp for years. So he invited them all to his parents’ apartment, a sprawling affair in the exclusive 16th Arrondissement, along with Man Ray, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and any number of others.
The evening did not go as expected. Ginsberg and Corso showed up drunk, as Lebel recalls it; Burroughs was too stoned to move. On being presented to the great artist, Ginsberg dropped to the floor and kissed the man’s knees. Corso found a pair of scissors and, in a supreme act of dada adoration, snipped off Duchamp’s tie. Duchamp is said to have been charmed.
For the Beats, as for many others, Paris was one stop among many. The Pompidou show is organised accordingly, moving from New York, where the group members coalesced around Ginsberg and Kerouac in the 1940s, to San Francisco, where they gravitated in the 50s, to passing destinations like Big Sur, Los Angeles and Tangier before culminating in Paris, where Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso lived off and on in the Beat Hotel until it closed in 1963. Along the way, the galleries present a host of artefacts: Kerouac’s hand-drawn map of the cross-country adventure that inspired On the Road; a violently scrawled self-portrait on paper by Burroughs, his face looking even scarier than in photographs; the black-and-white film Pull My Daisy, an antic short by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie that featured Kerouac as narrator and Ginsberg and Corso as wildly misbehaving poets. About the only things that are missing are the squat toilets on the Beat Hotel’s stairway landings.
In fact, the show speaks as much to the fascination many Europeans have with American popular culture as it does to the special role Paris has played in nurturing that culture as a civilisation-in-exile. Perhaps for that reason, it concentrates on tracing intellectual currents even as it memorialises places and things. Constantly on the move, forming and re-forming in myriad permutations, embracing “subversive” pursuits like homosexuality and drugs, the Beats generated a slipstream of cultural ferment that pulled much of America along despite itself. Nomads alternately in search of and running away from themselves, they sought some form of affirmation they found difficult to define, much less attain. But their search was no less productive for that.
One fascinating image in the exhibition is the opening scene from Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, in which a self-consciously bored-looking Bob Dylan flips cue cards that mangle the lyrics of his Subterranean Homesick Blues while Ginsberg, looking vaguely rabbinical, chats away with someone else in the background. Another is a double photograph by Ginsberg showing Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s one-time road buddy and Ginsberg’s sometime lover, and Timothy Leary on the Merry Pranksters’ Day-Glo-painted bus, which Cassady had just driven cross-country. And then there’s a blow-up of a 1957 photo of Ginsberg at the Beat Hotel, a small portrait of the 19th-century symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud hanging on the wall behind him, and behind that a poster for a show of paintings by Cézanne.
Lebel admits to disappointment that no American museum has agreed to take it on, even though the New York Public Library and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions, lent works and Rani Singh of the Getty Research Institute was an associate curator. (The exhibition is travelling to the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2017.) But he’s gratified to see people in their 20s clustered around the television screen in the exhibition’s reading room, watching a four-hour edit of a series of interviews he conducted with Ginsberg in Paris in 1990.
“I use the term ‘rhizome’,” Lebel said, referring to the spreading stem systems of plants like ginger and bamboo — a term applied to the transmission of ideas by the post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari. “It’s the contrary of roots. Once your roots dig in, you’re trapped — you can’t move. But artistic and philosophical movements work as rhizomes do — they’re continually spreading across time and space. That’s what I tried to do in the show, and in life.”