Well researched, with detailed descriptions, with name-dropping reminiscent of Andy Warhol's Diary, and comparisons to other writing groups. Highly readable insightful observations to the main four key members of the beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Burroughs.
Below are my notes:
Description of the place, including small details of how the streets were washed.
Short biography of Gregory Corso.
So many names, like Andy Warhol's diary, it makes it difficult to keep track of all the people involved, but the author writes coherently. (For example, all these following names appear on page 33: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Alan Ansen, Herodotus, Tacitus, Goethe, W. H. Auden, Peggy Guggenheim, Guy Harloff, and Paul Goodman).
Useful summary of what Howl is about on page 40, a quotation from the judge who deemed it not obscene at the trial "The first part of 'Howl' presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. 'Footnote to Howl' seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name. It ends with a plea for holy living. The theme of 'Howl' presents 'unorthodox and controversial ideas. Coarse and vulgar language is used in treatment and sex acts are mentioned but unless the book is entirely lacking in 'social importance' it cannot be held obscene." He concluded, "In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense," and found the defendants not guilty.
Well researched, often quoting from letters written by the beats.
Explains how Kaddish is a lovely poem to Ginsberg's dead mother.
Great summary of the book in chapter Expatriates: "At the Beat Hotel, Allen, Gregory, and the other residents lived in 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 avant-garde, its roots firmly planted in the bohemian tradition."
This chapter also recounts the story of visits to the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Compares the beat group to other literary group of the 1920s, with Beat Allen Ginsberg to Ezra pound.
Interesting how the beats in Paris avoided Arts and literary figures at the times, including Jean Paul Sartre because they didn't share their interests
Also didn't mix with Camus, de Beauvoir, Francoise Sagan, Brigitte Bardot, Eugene Ionesco (Theatre of the Absurd), and Samuel Beckett; didn't seek these out because "the Americans preferred their own company".
Troubles between Kerouac (promising money, but never delivering) and Burroughs (as a sexual predator towards Ginsberg), and Gregory Corso's ability to rub people the wrong way.
Includes a short biography of Boroughs' life.
Allen Ginsberg was visited by Günter Grass in 1958.
Olympia Press being integral to the beat hotel's creative movement
In the chapter titled Bomb, the author describes Edith Sitwell in London.
Another little detail of getting to attic room in beat hotel by having to crawl hands and knees up last part of spiral staircase.
Surrealists, and other authors, including John Clifford Brian Gysin.
Bill and Brion. Instructions for scrying, and the dream machine, cut-up technique.
Burroughs' difficulties with his publisher and the Tangier drug affair. "The Invisible Man."
Harold Norse wrote descriptions of the beat hotel.
Influence of Hasan-i Sabbah on Burroughs' works
His followers obeyed every command and we're rewarded with... powerful hashish. The word assassin is thought to have it's root in hashishin
Burroughs' interest in Scientology
Visiting the stained glass of Notre dame
Hilarious story of the friends listening to Antonin Artaud's tape in the beat hotel.
Anthony Balch filming around the beat and Chelsea hotels
Iain Sinclair The Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971 about Allen Ginsberg)
James Campbell Paris Interzone. ( )

Burroughs biographer Barry Miles assiduously pulls together letters and fragments of recollection from various sources to create a historical narrative of the so-called Beat Hotel, the nameless, ramshackle Paris hotel where Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs (among others) lived and created during the mid-twentieth century. Miles is a good writer and the book is engaging and well-paced, but from a purely human perspective the whole thing comes off as rather pathetic. Hey, these guys made history, so how pathetic could they have been, right? Well, how pathetic are any bunch of noisy drunks insisting that they're great poets, bending over backwards to draw attention to themselves (even mortifying W.H. Auden by trying to kiss the cuff of his pants, as Ginsberg and Corso did on a visit to London)? Because that's the mundane reality of the Beats: some American expatriates living in a dirty, rat-infested hotel with a shit-clogged Turkish toilet, drinking and getting laid and drinking and writing and drinking and generally behaving like asses. That in itself is not art. Yes, some of what was created during that period qualifies as literature (such as Ginsberg's "Kaddish"), but a lot of it falls well short of the mark. (And that includes Burroughs's celebrated Naked Lunch, which finally found a publisher not because it was a novel of such unparalleled brilliance that the world couldn't survive without it, but because it contained a handful of pornographic scenes and the publisher reckoned that it might be a moneymaker. Burroughs was a talented and occasionally even great writer, but Naked Lunch is not among his best work.)

It bears repeating that Miles is a fine writer and sets down nothing more or less than the truth in The Beat Hotel; my beef is with the sad debauchery of the author's man-baby subjects, not with the manner in which their story is told. If my analysis of them sounds harsh, it was intended to. I'm a fan of Burroughs--and Ginsberg, to a lesser extent--but not an uncritical one. No other literary movement has been so fundamentally defined by madness and murder (indeed, might never have come into being if not for madness and murder), nor seen its every masturbatory gesture exalted as high art. ( )

Ginsberg and friends lived in Paris during the Howl trail and in the immediate aftermath of Howl's international fame. Unfortunately, there is no index in this book, but there is a bibliography for further reading on Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg.

American literature > 20th century > History/and criticism/Beat generation/Burroughs, William S., 1914- > Homes and haunts/> France > Paris/Ginsberg, Allen, 1926- > Homes and haunts >/France > Paris/Authors, American > Homes and haunts > France/> Paris/Americans > France > Paris > History > 20th/century/Corso, Gregory > Homes and haunts > France >/Paris/Paris (France) > Intellectual life > 20th/Authors, American > 20th century > Biography/Beat generation > France > Paris