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.

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