The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles

Author:Barry Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

With Allen not there for companionship, Gregory naturally began to see more of Bill. Gregory had of course tried all the coke and heroin that was around when Stern and Phipps visited, but like Allen he had not taken enough, nor taken it regularly enough, to become addicted. Bill, on the other hand, now had a habit and so had heroin around all the time. Given the situation, it didn’t take long for Gregory to get hooked. When Gregory asked Bill if he could have some, Bill said, “Yeah, but it’s poison, Gregory.”

Back in Paris, Gregory and Bill developed an idea for a magazine called Interpol: “the poet is becoming a policeman.” Gregory told Allen the contents would be “of the most sordid, vile, vulgar, oozing, seeping slime imaginable. We only want the most disgusting far-outness.” They intended to include international heroin news, especially changes in the law: for instance, that a prescription for the opiate Diosan was now needed in Spain, or that certain drugs were available across the counter in France under new brand names. It was to be a forerunner of the underground press, but not surprisingly it never saw the light of day. It would surely have caused a sensation, particularly with its stated intent to review “books written by junkies, fiends, cross-eyed imbeciles, huge-footed oafs, etc. We wall praise and hail and laud all kinds of bile, and put down, pan, condemn all kinds of respectability and whiteness.”

Gregory had a tempestuous summer and managed to fall out with many of the hotel residents, including Guy Harloff, who told him he was no longer to speak to himself or his girlfriend. Gregory even got into a fistfight. He reported the details to Allen: “Dave McAdams gets me one night for not realizing how negroes suffer or something when I was drunk, on and on. So I told him I hate inferior races, Jews negroes Italians and then some creep came up to me and spilled beer on my head sarcastically thinking me real Jew hater. I get up and for first time in long long time I got to violence and punch him and punch him again, and he was big and he didn’t hit me, and they took me away and I felt good, because they are all here now picking on me with questions Beat and so on, so I just don’t go out.” Gregory holed up in room 41 and finally bought himself a little kerosene stove so that he could fix meals in his room instead of having to eat every meal out.

Gregory spent the middle weeks of August working on “Bomb” and on August 23 told Allen, “Yes, I’ve finished the Bomb poem and Paris Review is almost certain to take it . . . I had much pain trouble with ending, whether to end in joy or light or bitterness, I ended in bitterness . . .” Gregory sent copies to Isis, the Oxford University magazine Poetry London, and to Evergreen Review, but none of them were interested.

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