Veronique Lane - The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouacs Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux

The French Genealogy
of the Beat Generation

The French Genealogy
of the Beat Generation

Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouacs
Appropriations of Modern Literature,
from Rimbaud to Michaux

Vronique Lane

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Pour Viviane Harris,
dont cest aussi la gnalogie

I should start by acknowledging the obvious, which is that Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouacs appropriations of French modern literature and culture reflect my own intellectual journey. While studying in my native Quebec, completing my PhD in France, teaching Comparative Literature in the United States, and researching this book as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UK, I have met and corresponded with exceptional people, who helped this book take shape and whom I wish to thank.

Without the brilliant professors of the Universities of Montreal and Paris DiderotParis VII who introduced me to the works of the French modernists that would cement the early Beat circle, this study would simply not exist. For initiating me without an inch of cynicism to their genius, my first thanks go to Evelyne Grossman, Jean Larose, Catherine Mavrikakis, Ginette Michaud, Michel Pierssens, Pierre Popovic and Sbastien Ruffo. As the following pages make clear, literary appropriation is a violent process that rarely goes without betrayal and if some of them have been encouragingin particular Michel Pierssens, who immediately saw the importance of the Franco-American genealogy I wanted to explore as well as if not better than I couldI am aware others would disapprove of my comparing the French poems and novels they taught me so well to the works of the so-called founders of the Beat Generation. That is, in Francophone even more than in Anglophone academia, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouacs works are still largely devalued, and I hope this book will prompt readers and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to discover or rediscover them.

In this vein, I would like to salute the open-mindedness of Jeff Rider and of my former colleagues Andrew Curran, Catherine Ostrow and Catherine Poisson in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University, who unconditionally allowed meinvited me, evento include Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouacs works to the reading list of one of the modules of Comparative Literature I taught there; and I thank my students for their contagious enthusiasm about the Franco-American material I brought into our classroom, in particular Sanam Mechkat, Christopher Scott and Lauren Valentino.

The patient close textual analyses that follow would also have been impossible without the two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship I was awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), to work on this book at the Research Institute for the Humanities of Keele University in the UK; and at Keele, I would like to give my warmest thanks to the members of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies for taking interest in my early research findings, in particular Ian Bell, James Peacock, Axel Schaeffer and John Shapcott.

As most comparativist studies, this book was enriched by a multitude of intercultural exchanges. The European Beat Studies Network annual conferences have been the point of departure of many such longstanding conversations, and I am deeply grateful to its members for welcoming my comparativist papers, providing orientation and instilling their own energy and excitement in my work over the years, especially Peggy Pacini and Frank Rynne, but also: Anna Aublet, Jaap van der Bent, Alexander Greiffenstern, Tim Hunt, Hassan Melehy, Gerald Nicosia, A. Robert Lee, Polina Mackay, Ian MacFadyen, Arthur Nusbaum, Jim Pennington, Davis Schneiderman, Raven See, Keith Seward, Tomasz Stompor, Chad Weidner, Regina Weinreich and Alex Wermer-Colan.

For supporting my two months of archival research in the William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac Papers kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, I thank curator Isaac Gewirtz, as well as librarians Lyndsi Barnes and Joshua McKeon for their assistance. I would also like to thank Haaris Naqvi, publisher at Bloomsbury, and his editorial assistant Katherine De Chant, for their diligence and genuine will to help at all stages of the books conception.

For permission to reproduce unpublished material and for his precious words of encouragement over the years, I thank James Grauerholz, Executor of the Estate of William S. Burroughs, and for letting me use the New York Morningside Heights photograph for the books cover and reproduce two more photographs taken and captioned by Ginsberg, Peter Hale, Manager of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. I am also grateful to Harold Chapman for his kind permission to reproduce his photograph of Ginsberg seated under the portrait of Rimbaud, as well as to Micheline Phankim, Frank Leibovici and Charles Gil at Gallimard, for allowing me to reproduce the series of lithographs that Michaux created for the first edition of Meidosems.

I acknowledge that preliminary versions of Realist Cinema, in Comparative American Studies 11.3 (2013); Allen Ginsbergs Translations of Apollinaire and Genet in the Development of his Poetics of Open Secrecy, in Comparative Literature and Culture 18.5 (2016); and Rimbaud and Genet: Burroughs Favourite mirrors, in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up The Century, edited by Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). Material for this book was also summarized in the paper I gave at the Centre Georges Pompidou in September 2016, published in French as La Littrature franaise aux sources de la Beat Generation in Beat Generation: linservitude volontaire, edited by Olivier Penot-Lacassagne (Paris: Presses du CNRS, 2017).

Special thanks to Olivier Penot-Lacassagne for organizing the latter conference at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened a dialogue between French and English speaking scholars. I am also grateful to Albert Dichy, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Christophe Lebold for their valuable comments on my paper, and to Luc Sante for inspiring discussions on the early Beat circle and New Yorks evolution since then.

Above all, I would like to thank my husband, Oliver Harris, for giving ear to my book project on that hot summer day in 2009, during the events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Naked Lunch he co-organized in Paris. The plaque of the Beat Hotel had just been unveiled and Gt-le-Coeur was in full swing, when he left aside the feast and discerned through my franglais of the time what was to become this study. Most readers of Burroughs criticism will likely recognize that I have taken further and in new directions discoveries and insightful arguments he has made over the course of his scholarship. I am so grateful to him for his sharp readings, his faithful moral support, our literary and non-literary conversations, and for all the days he spent out and about with our little Viviane, which allowed me to complete this book: I dedicate it to her, but I owe it to him! May it remind us how lucky we are to have met and shared our unabashed love for that whole boatload of sensitive bullshit [] into the street that fine day in Paris.

Allen Ginsberg sits cross-legged on the bed of his room in the Beat Hotel, posing for the camera with a self-conscious smile beneath a painted portrait of Arthur Rimbaud on the wall behind him. It is the Left Bank in Paris, late 1957, a decade after the early Beat circle formed in 1944 and Jack Kerouac hung a card on the wall of his room in Warren Hall round the corner from Columbia University, on which he had written The Blood of the Poet after Jean Cocteaus film