Our Man in Sahara: Will the CanLit and CanArt establishments ever lay claim to Beat pioneer?

By Christian Bok

Calgary Herald, Saturday, December 17, 2005

John Geiger, in Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted (Disinformation, 320 pages, $37.50) recounts the biography of Brion Gysin -- one of the most important, yet most neglected, members of the Beat Generation (the famous clique of radical writers, whose members include Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs).

Born in England, but raised in the hidebound community of Edmonton during the 1920s, Gysin leaves Canada for Europe in order to embark upon a lifetime of bohemian artistry as a gay man.

Geiger (author of Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Flicker)remarked that, for Gysin: "Canada was a frontier of stiff white collars and dirty little secrets. He wanted out. He wanted to be where the action was."

So Gysin studied abroad in Britain, but hobnobbed in Paris with modernist painters and modernist literati until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he returned to Canada to work for S-20 at the Canadian Intelligence Corps, translating Oriental languages.

Gysin later moved to Tangiers, befriending Paul Bowles (author of The Sheltering Sky), and there Gysin became so entranced by the hypnotic stylings of the Master Musicians of Jajouka that he opened a cafe called 1001 Nights to introduce Westerners (like Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones) to the wonders of such music. Gysin even confessed to Bowles that he wanted to hear the music everyday for the rest of his life -- to which Bowles replied: "laudable enterprise."

Gysin was an enterprising restaurateur, but after his business failed (allegedly because of a curse cast by one of his employees), he moved to 9 rue Git-Le-Coeur in Paris, the vaunted address of the Beat Hotel, where Gysin collaborated with many of the most renowned beatniks, perfecting his own innovative techniques of experimental literariness through the use of drugs and rotating strobes, but also with paint and collaged writing.

He fostered many advances in the folklore of the avant-garde.

Gysin, for example, contributed his fabled recipe for cannabis brownies to the literary cookbook of Alice B. Toklas (the lover of Gertrude Stein), thereby ensuring the fame of this culinary resource.

Gysin also gained modest renown for painting subtle images of the Sahara in watercolour, and even though he could not impress the Surrealists with his own abstract artistry, he did go on to perfect a painterly technique that superimposed the flourishes of Moroccan calligraphy upon the flourishes of Japanese calligraphy.

Gysin, moreover, designed the Dream Machine, a kinetic artwork that consisted of a turntable, upon which was set a vertical cylinder, perforated with holes and illuminated from within by a suspended light bulb, so that when the cylinder revolved, it flickered at a rate that would induce hallucinations in any observer who gazed upon the lamp with eyes closed. Gysin hoped to sell the device to the masses as a safe form of delirium, but despite plans for mass producing and mass marketing the gadget, it never sold.

Gysin, however, became most renowned for his collaborations with Burroughs, co-authoring the book entitled The Third Mind, a treatise on the use of the "cut-up technique" -- a process that involved permuting scissored fragments of newspaper in order to generate an unanticipated configuration of text, like, for example, the sentence: "Swiss boys were absolutely free from outboard spiritual homes" -- and eventually both writers applied this same technique to their own recordings of respliced audiotape.

Geiger (who has co-authored Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition with Owen Beattie) remarks in conversation that he himself has taken a personal interest in the biography of Gysin, because Gysin is an "explorer of inner space" -- an explorer, whose legacy has exerted an important influence upon the history of the avant-garde without receiving much notable acclaim, despite efforts by the Beats to credit Gysin as the most brilliant innovator among them.

Geiger hopes this biography might redress this oversight.

While Gysin may have spent much of his upbringing in Edmonton, the Canadian literati have never seen fit to lay claim to his achievements as part of our own Canadian heritage, nor do we identify him as one of our own, most irrepressible, contributors to the cosmopolitan, experimental scene.

Even Gysin is fabled among the Beats for disavowing his provincial background, demanding that all biographic references to his Canadianness be "removed, deleted, expunged" from any publicity for his novel The Process.

Geiger wonders how both the CanLit establishment and the CanArt establishment can still allow Gysin "to get away with it."

After all, Gysin never seems to have captured the imagination of the public (in the way that Ginsberg and Burroughs have), failing to earn for himself a cult of personality. Even at the end of a rich life, while battling both gastric cancer and pleural cancer, Gysin describes his career as a "life of adventure, leading nowhere, plagued at every turn by a conspiracy of un-acknowledgement."

Geiger notes: "Gysin had sort of creative ADD. He was neither a painter nor a writer. He was both -- and a lot of other things. He was an inventor of the multimedia age at a time when there was no box big enough to contain him."

Geiger implies that, in an era before such artforms, scholars may have simply found Gysin too polymathic and too unfocused to fathom: "Gysin's life was a spontaneously occurring 'cut-up.' My job was to find the narrative somewhere within it -- and believe me, it wasn't easy. . . ."

Christian Bok is the author of Eunoia. He lives in Calgary.