Artists, Beats and Cool Cats

By Jim Burns

This fifth collection of essays and reviews ranges over a variety of subjects, some of them connecting to material in the earlier books. The Beats are an obvious example, though it’s perhaps using the term loosely to link someone like Herbert Gold with them. But he did comment on the Beats in writing and perhaps saw himself as having had experiences which gave him insights into what Kerouac and Ginsberg and the others were doing. I’ve included a short piece about an obscure poet, Marty Matz, because it shows what fringe figures like him got up to. And Robert Reisner was someone who was on the fringes of the bohemian scene, though in a more productive way than Matz. It seems to me that people like Reisner ought to be remembered, if only in a short article.
There are surveys of several little magazines, as there were in my previous collections. I’ve always thought that they deserve to be written about because of how they can often evoke a particular period better than a detached history can.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244076672

Jim Burns

Jim Burns, PhD, is president of HomeWord and executive director of the HomeWord Center for Youth and Family at Azusa Pacific University. Host of the nationwide HomeWord radio broadcasts, he also speaks around the world at seminars and conferences. His many books include Confident Parenting, Pass It On, Teaching Your Children Healthy Sexuality, and 10 Building Blocks for a Solid Family. He and his wife, Cathy, live Southern California and have three grown daughters.

Book preview

Artists, Beats and Cool Cats

ARTISTS, BEATS AND COOL CATS

JIM BURNS

PENNILESS PRESS PUBLICATIONS

www.pennilesspress.co.uk

Published by

Penniless Press Publications 2014

© Jim Burns

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

ISBN  978-0-244-07667-2

Cover: Boulevard St Michel 1971 – photo Ken Clay

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

DADA IN PARIS

ANOTHER CORNWALL

SVEN BERLIN

JACKSON POLLOCK

WORDS FOR PAINTERS

MAGGIE CASSIDY

BEATNIK DAZE

ROBERT REISNER

ORIGIN

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

THE VILLAGE VOICE

KEROUAC GOES COMMERCIAL

MARTY MATZ

TANGIER

HERBERT GOLD

OLYMPIA PRESS

THE COLONY ROOM

ART & LITERATURE

YIDDISH POETS

AN ARMY OF PHANTOMS

DOROTHY PARKER

BEAUTIFUL FAILURES

WRITE AS SHORT AS YOU CAN

THE NOBLE SAVAGE

THE OBJECTIVISTS

DRUMS WITHOUT END

HARD TRAVELLING

MISSION TO MOSCOW

ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONARY

FILM ON THE LEFT

LITTLE MAGAZINES

MODERN READING

EDWIN BROCK

IVORY TOWERS?

THE SWINGING DETECTIVE

THE HUNT

BEBOP SPOKEN HERE

WEST COAST SOUNDS

BILLIE HOLIDAY

JOE GUY

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Dada in Paris, Northern Review of Books (on- line), October, 2012

Another Cornwall, Northern Review of Books (on-line), July, 2012

Sven Berlin, Northern Review of Books (on-line), November, 2012

Jackson Pollock, Northern Review of Books (on-line), December, 2011

Words for Painters, The Penniless Press 5, Preston, Summer, 1997

Maggie Cassidy, Beat Scene 67, Coventry, Spring, 2012

Beatnik Daze, Poetry Information 15, London, Summer, 1976

Robert Reisner, Beat Scene 59, Coventry, Summer, 2009

Origin, Poetry Information 15, London, Summer, 1976

Black Mountain College, Beat Scene 38, Coventry, 2001

The Village Voice, Beat Scene 52, Coventry, Spring, 2007

Kerouac Goes Commercial, Beat Scene 60, Coventry, Autumn, 2009

Marty Matz, Global Tapestry Journal 30, Blackburn, 2006

Tangier, The Kerouac Connection 24, Glasgow, Winter, 1992

Herbert Gold, Beat Scene 65, Coventry, Summer, 2011

Olympia Press, Beat Scene 25, Coventry, 1996

The Colony Club, Northern Review of Books (on-line), May, 2013

Art and Literature, Prop 7, Bolton, Summer, 1999

Yiddish Poets, Northern Review of Books (on-line), April, 2013

An Army of Phantoms, Northern Review of Books (on-line), January, 2012

Dorothy Parker, Ambit 56, London, 1973

Beautiful Failures, The Wide Skirt 23, Barnsley, February-May, 1994

The Noble Savage, The Penniless Press 19, Preston, Spring, 2004

The Objectivists, Prop 2, Bolton, Winter, 1996

Drums Without End, Iron 51, Cullercoats, February-May, 1987

Hard Travelling, Beat Scene 70, Coventry, Spring, 2013

Mission to Moscow, Palantir 18, Preston, September, 1981

Romantic Revolutionary, Palantir 21, Preston, 1982

Film on the Left, Palantir 20, Preston, 1982

Little Magazines, Palantir 4, Preston, November, 1976

Modern Reading, Prop 8, Bolton, Spring, 2000

Edwin Brock, Prop 7, Bolton, Spring, 2000

Ivory Towers? Ambit 57, London, 1974

The Swinging Detective, The Penniless Press 12, Preston, September, 2000

The Hunt, Beat Scene 69, Coventry, Winter, 2012

Bebop Spoken Here, The Penniless Press 20, Preston, Autumn, 2004

West Coast Sounds, The Penniless Press 9, Preston, Spring, 1999

Billie Holiday, Palantir 3, Preston, May, 1976

Joe Guy, Jazz Journal, London, March, 1998

The essay, Write as Short You Can, was originally written for The Penniless Press magazine, but was never used in that publication. This is its first appearance in print.

My thanks to all the editors concerned, and, as always, to Joan Mottram and Ken Clay.

INTRODUCTION

This fifth collection of essays and reviews ranges over a variety of subjects, some of them connecting to material in the earlier books. The Beats are an obvious example, though it’s perhaps using the term loosely to link someone like Herbert Gold with them. But he did comment on the Beats in writing and perhaps saw himself as having had experiences which gave him insights into what Kerouac and Ginsberg and the others were doing. I’ve included a short piece about an obscure poet, Marty Matz, because it shows what fringe figures like him got up to. And Robert Reisner was someone who was on the fringes of the bohemian scene, though in a more productive way than Matz. It seems to me that people like Reisner ought to be remembered, if only in a short article.

There are surveys of several little magazines, as there were in my previous collections. I’ve always thought that they deserve to be written about because of how they can often evoke a particular period better than a detached history can. And there are often poems, stories, essays, and other items in them which may never have been reprinted in book form, but which have much to offer to alert readers. Forgotten and overlooked writers are a constant source of discovery and pleasure for me.

Jazz is here, too, and the article about the obscure trumpeter, Joe Guy, is included partly because of his relationship with Billie Holiday, who I also write about. Guy may be an example of a seemingly talented musician who failed to live up to his early promise and succumbed to drugs. It was probably the drugs that caused him to fail. There were many like him in the 1940s. There’s an essay about some of the lesser-known West Coast jazzmen of the 1950s. My reason for including it is simple; few other people bothered to write about them, so I have. It’s what I like to do.

The book kicks off with several pieces about artists of one kind or another. I have an interest in several areas of art, such as the artists’ colonies of the late-19th Century, but also the Dadaists and Surrealists, and abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock. I can’t claim to be an art critic and my responses to paintings, etc. are personal. As with other things I write about I focus on what I like rather than attempting to be purely objective, if it is possible to be that. I have my doubts about it.

A few personal favourites have been recovered from the magazines they were originally in. Dorothy Parker at her best is a terrific writer, and though I can’t claim that she’s unfairly neglected it does occur to me that she ought to be better known for her stories than she is. I do think that the poet, Edwin Brock, is neglected. There was a time when some of his poems were in numerous anthologies designed for use in schools, but I suspect that isn’t true now. And he’s not the sort of poet that academics are likely to study or teach, more’s the pity. The essay, Beautiful Failures. adds a few more names to the list of the forgotten.

There’s a thread of bohemianism running through the book, as there was in its forerunners. The review of the colourful book about the Colony Room in London’s Soho and the review of a biography of the radical journalist, John Reed, illustrate it in different ways, as do the surveys of Tangier and Black Mountain College. Bohemianism expresses itself in numerous ways, most of them lively and entertaining, though it can sometimes have a dark side.

The various essays and reviews were contributed to a variety of publications, so there are some differences in formats. I haven’t tried to standardise them, preferring to let the differences reflect the idiosyncratic world of little magazines and the like. Nor have I updated references, though I have provided some notes at the end of the book which may be of interest.

DADA IN PARIS

One of the fascinating aspects of the Dada movement, if it was a movement, is that no-one can ever really succeed  in saying exactly what it stood for. Or against, for that matter, though it might be easier to deal with the negative side of the question than with the positive. Michel Sanouillet, discussing Hugo Ball's contribution to the formation of Dada, says that he laid down the ideological foundations of Dadaism as early as 1916. And he further refers to Ball's notion of Dada primitivism and its corollaries, the search for creative spontaneity and the opposition to every manner of fabrication and routine in art; the artist's awareness of his strict dependence on an outside world that until then had been an object of scorn; and, most of all, the beginning of the major action brought by Dada against language. There is a mixture of the positive and the negative in that summary, with the search for creative spontaneity requiring opposition to every manner of fabrication and routine in art.

That the Dadaists might have had a positive programme, if they had a programme, wasn't something that occurred to many people when Dada was in its heyday, roughly 1916 to 1923. The antics at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and later at various locations in Paris, seemed to be just provocations. Which they were, though with the intention of not just upsetting the largely bourgeois audiences attracted to the events, but of also trying to break new ground. For many people, however, the pronouncements by Dada activists seemed to sum up what was intended. Dada smells like nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing, wrote Francis Picabia, and Tristan Tzara said: Do not trust Dada. Dada is everything. Dada doubts everything. But the real Dadas are against Dada.

It's usually accepted that Dada was born in Zurich in 1916, with Tzara, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, and others, all present. And it was in many ways a cry of rage against a world which was tearing itself apart and slaughtering millions as it did. But there had been stirrings elsewhere which perhaps indicated that, even prior to 1914, something was about to happen. The Italian Futurists provided an example to follow. Tzara and Janco were Romanians and brought certain absurdist Yiddish traditions with them (see Tom Sandqvist’s Dada East:The Romanians of the Cabaret Voltaire) to Zurich. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings had participated in Berlin cabaret performances. And though they were not involved directly in what went on in Zurich, in New York Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, appeared to be working along parallel lines. Duchamp's A Bicycle Wheel and A Bottle Rack were, in the words of C.W.E. Bigsby, anti-art gestures, mocking the whole idea of taste and form.

When the Zurich group began to break up after 1918 some of its members moved to Berlin, where Dada took on a much more strident and often political form and allied itself with the newly-formed German Communist Party. The most significant move was to Paris, where an existing body of poets, painters, and others, had been awaiting the arrival of Tristan Tzara. Copies of Dada had already reached Paris from Zurich, and Max Jacob had written enthusiastically to Tzara as early as February, 1917. Picabia's 391, then being published from Barcelona, had also come to the attention of the Parisian avant-garde. There was already a receptive audience for what Dada seemed to represent. Philippe Soupault later wrote: Revolt was fomenting. We were sharing our anger. It was at that point that we intercepted signals that were so disruptive it was as if they had come from another planet. Soupault, André Breton, and Louis Aragon decided to start a magazine, Littérature, to promote their ideas, though from Sanouillet's description of its contents it strikes one that it was, in many ways, fairly conventional in tone. The editors, after their demobilisation, had done what ambitious young writers do and had mixed with established writers and editors and attended sophisticated matinees and literary meetings. The need for recognition within an existing framework perhaps pointed to a difference between the Parisian would-be Dadaists and those who had been active in Zurich.

A further indication  of a separation of intentions before Breton and Tzara had met can be found in The Magnetic Fields, a text by Breton and Soupault published over several issues of Littérature in 1919. Breton in retrospect declared that it was the first surrealist (and in no sense Dadaist) work, since it was the fruit of the first systematic applications of automatic writing. Sanouillet challenges Breton's claims which were, no doubt, written to suggest that he owed little to Dadaism, and he points out how examples of automatic writing can be found in Dada poems and in the writings of Francis Picabia.

Leaving aside this dispute (and  others like it were soon to become a regular occurrence between Dadaists and surrealists, and among the Dadaists themselves) it was Breton's meeting with Picabia in December, 1919, which is generally taken to be the starting point for Paris Dada. Tzara turned up in January, 1920, and the scene was set for a period of activity involving provocation, in-fighting, and a form of power-struggle between Breton and Tzara for leadership of the new movement. Sanouillet's description of those early days is fascinating to read, though cynical readers with an amused awareness of how  and why literary movements rise and fall will not be surprised by the tales of writers plotting against each other. Sanouillet tells how Tzara negotiated with Paul Dermée to distribute Dada and act as a kind of publicity agent for Dada in France. But Dermée had angered Breton and his followers with a lecture he'd given on Max Jacob, so a message was sent to Tzara to warn him that if he printed any of Dermée's poems then Breton, Soupault, and Pierre Reverdy would refuse to be in the same issue. Soupault also wrote to inform Tzara that his whimsical literary connections (Sanouillet's phrase)  would not add to Dada's reputation, and that an eclectic policy was open to criticism. What can be seen at work is, of course, an attempt by Breton's followers to exclude those outside their circle, a not unusual activity among small avant-garde groups but hardly in the Dada spirit. Sanouillet mentions Picabia's disgust at returning to Paris after four years and finding that people were behaving exactly as before: all these men who turn art and intelligence into a performance, all these individuals who work at being great men and nothing more.

Once the Paris Dada group got into its stride there were the usual public events to outrage the general public and publicise Dada, though not all of them succeeded. Sanouillet provides a detailed account of them and the audience reactions and newspaper reports. There are useful observations to be made. The audiences were inevitably bourgeois and expected to be provoked and reacted accordingly. I'd guess that they were disappointed if the poets and others didn't do or say something outrageous. When the Dadaists tried to break away from their bourgeois origins and appeal to a working-class audience they failed. The account of an event at the Université populaire du fauborg Saint-Antoine is revealing. Referred to by Sanouillet as this old institute with its anarchist tendencies, it provided an audience of enlightened workers, simple, attentive, and even ready to be open to anything new, providing that it went against bourgeois values. The Dadaists launched into readings of their poems and manifestos, But faced with that sea of confident faces completely indifferent to cubism, artistic squabbles, and modern poetry, most of the manifestos rang false, and evoked nothing more than tepid surprise. Sanouillet adds that, instead of revolting, the proletarians just asked for explanations. Disconcerted, since it is easier to read a Dadaist text than to comment upon it, Aragon and Ribemont-Dessaignes launched, unsuccessfully, into a long-winded defence of Dada's aims and methods, with their patient Marxist hecklers dogging them at every step.

Even at the early stages of Paris Dada there were indications of divisions in the movement. According to Sanouillet, in January, 1920, there were signs of the schisms that would take place later within Dada, as various people, principally Tzara, Picabia, and Breton, vied for, if not control, then acknowledgement as a  leader of Dada. It was difficult to deny Tzara's claim to being its founder, though Janco, Huelsenbeck, and Ball would dispute this, but Picabia had the money and the contacts to place him in a prominent position, and Breton had a strong following among Parisian intellectuals and writers. Tzara was, in Sanouillet's words, a simple, penniless Romanian immigrant, for all his liveliness and activity in Zurich.

With Breton's clique falling out with Picabia, and Tzara increasingly sidelined, the nature of Dada was changing. Breton and Aragon began to plan a new programme which, according to Sanouillet, would no longer be improvised and fanciful, as before, but concerted and meticulously organised. The part that Breton and Aragon played in this plan's conception can be easily discerned; the seriousness of the programme, the absence of spontaneity and humour, the rejection of improvisation, the threatening tone of the attacks - all of this prefigured surrealism. He quotes Aragon justifying what might be described as the new hardline policy, and suggests that delegates to the founding convention of the French Communist Party, which was taking place around the same time, would have fully approved of it. Needless to say, Tzara and Picabia were not in agreement with what Breton and Aragon saw as the future of Dada.

Breton increasingly dominated any gathering of Dadaists (even get-togethers in cafes became more like seminars than easy-going gatherings) and the mood was changing. He decided to set up a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, who had, at one time, been a role-model for young writers but had turned increasingly conservative. The affair went ahead, and only Tzara seems to have treated it in true Dada fashion. For Picabia it was a defining moment and he promptly made public his disassociation from Dada. Another event master-minded by Breton was the 1922 conference which highlighted the difference between how Breton and Tzara thought of Dada. Breton proposed that cubism, futurism, and Dadaism are not, all things considered, three distinct movements, but rather that all three are part of a more general movement whose meaning and scope are not yet fully known to us. Tzara replied: Modernism is of no interest to me, and I think it will be a mistake to say that Dadaism, cubism, and futurism rest on a common foundation. These latter two tendencies were based on an idea of intellectual or technical perfection above all, whereas Dadaism never rested on any theory and has never been anything but a protest.

By 1923 it was all over and Breton had established the surrealist movement. Sanouillet, summing up, points to the primarily literary vocation of Parisian Dada, while in the United States the Dadaist revolution initially played out on the artistic plane, and in Germany on the political level. He says that Dada and surrealism each expressed in its own way, in their entirety and complexity, the anxiety of an era and the pronounced wish of some particularly exacting minds to feel no satisfaction with partial solutions. They had their sights on the same objective: the destruction of art, or at least of a certain conception of art. Surrealism provided a semblance of coherence to a doctrine that had none but it was too often Dada without laughter.

Dada in Paris was first published in 1965, and this is a new edition, revised by Anne Sanouillet and translated by Sharmila Ganguly. The main text is supported by almost 200 pages of correspondence between Breton and Tzara, Picabia and Breton, and others. There are extensive notes and a large bibliography, plus details of on-line sources. It is obviously an essential book for anyone interested in the Dada movement generally and Paris Dada in particular.

It's perhaps useful at this point to look at where the word Dada originated as a name for the movement. Tzara was generally given credit for finding Dada in a French dictionary where it was shown as relating to a child's hobby-horse. Jean Arp in an idiosyncratic statement (I am convinced that this word is not of the slightest importance and that only morons and Spanish professors can be interested in dates) testified that Tzara found it. However, Richard Huelsenbeck, in a 1936 document, claimed that he had noticed the word in a dictionary that Hugo Ball was leafing through: I was standing behind Ball looking into the dictionary. Ball's finger pointed to the first letter of each word descending the page. Suddenly I cried halt. I was struck by a word I had never heard before, the word dada, and later, in 1949, Huelsenbeck thought it necessary to state that Dadaism was not founded by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. It's interesting to look at Tom Sandqvist's Dada East, where he says that the Romanian Orthodox Church has two saints by the name of Dada.

It was this kind of claim and counter-claim that bedevilled Robert Motherwell as he compiled his ground-breaking anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets in the late-1940s (it was published in 1951). Motherwell is a key figure in Catherine Craft's An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism, along with Marcel Duchamp whose presence in New York was important, even if he produced little that could be said to be directly influential. In fact, Duchamp was critical of much of the art coming out of New York in the 1940s and 1950s, though he doesn't seem to have made public pronouncements about, for example, the Abstract Expressionists. But his general comments indicated how he felt: I was interested in ideas - not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. Duchamp saw America as an open country and a perfect terrain for new developments, and was disappointed that artists continued to use the same old materials in well-established ways.

Duchamp's relationship to Dada was always problematic. What he had done prior to 1916 quite clearly tied in with what happened in Zurich, but he never allied himself totally with Dada. Craft says that he kept a careful distance from the movement during its existence, reluctant to relinquish his independence especially as he saw Dada shape itself into a movement like any other, its members bickering over control and fighting with other cliques in the art world. He did use the word Dada, but just as a conveniently vague word denoting freedom, nihilism, humour, and iconoclasm. It was some time later, in the 1940s, that he began to identify with Dada as a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic. Craft suggests that he reached for Dada as a way to fit into the history of modern art without conforming to it, to belong without joining.

Robert Motherwell was probably the most intellectual of the Abstract Expressionist painters, though Barnett Newman perhaps matched him in terms of analysing and documenting events and personalities and ideas. Motherwell said he decided to get involved with compiling his anthology because he wanted to know more about surrealism and he realised that Dada was a precursor of surrealism. When he started to gather material he discovered that Dada was a much broader and varied subject than he'd originally thought. Contact with Hans Richter, who had been involved with Dada in both Zurich and Berlin, persuaded him that Dada wasn't, as he initially believed, a French movement, and that it came out of the general European situation, and that every country made something different of it.

The anthology was certainly important in terms of drawing attention to Dada at a time when it had tended to sink from sight, or had become just a footnote in the development of surrealism. Craft refers to the uncertainty about how much Dada influence can be discerned in the work of the Abstract Expressionists. She quotes Motherwell as saying that he detected a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade. But, as she says, cubism, abstract art, and surrealism were of much more importance in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Some painters, such as Clyfford Still, did make statements to the effect that it was necessary to reject the whole of the past completely, but this didn't necessarily align them with Dada. Craft has it that most of the Abstract Expressionists were intensely critical of Dada, explicitly including it in the heritage of modern art they felt compelled to reject - even as they learned about Dada from Motherwell's work. Motherwell himself wondered how it was possible to think of Dada as a part of Abstract Expressionism, when we all loved art, a most anti-Dada attitude.

To be fair to Catherine Craft, she does highlight the frequent inconsistencies in trying to trace a direct line from Dada to Abstract Expressionism. As she points out, the visual evidence of Dada's influence on Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and Motherwell can be linked just as readily - and often more convincingly - to other artists, such as Miro, Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Personally, I' m not sure that attempts to show that Dada influenced Pollock and Kline and de Kooning can be usefully sustained. Pollock may well have said, You've got to deny, ignore, destroy a hell of a lot to get at the truth, but that remark doesn't necessarily have a Dada strain in it. It seems to me to be far too practical to be akin to the negation apparent in Dada. The Abstract Expressionists may well have revisited issues associated with Dada, such as the promise of a new beginning offered by a tabula rasa, negations relation to creativity, and the fragmented availability of the past, but did they do it knowingly, or were they doing what each new group of artists did as they struggled to establish a new beginning?

Craft devotes a chapter each to Motherwell, Pollock, and Barnett Newman, and they're interesting in themselves but add little to the case for seeing a Dada influence in their work. In Newman's life she admits that there is very little in his work to link it directly with Dada, as he would be the first to insist. Elsewhere, she quotes tellingly from a talk that Newman gave in which he attacked Dada and pointed out that the insistence that a coat rack or urinal could be a work of art led to museums showing screwdrivers and automobiles because who's to say what is art? He extended his comments to suggest that the Museum of Modern Art ought to put on an exhibition of machine guns. After all, they beautifully function, they're wonderful forms, they're full of content, and they actually make noise. He then said that the result of an anti-art situation like the one he'd described was an alliance between a good many artists and a good many aestheticians with the philistines. The philistines also believe that you can't tell one thing from another, and that a toilet is as good as a Titian, really.

As with Paris in the 1920s the New York art scene of the late-1940s and the early-1950s had its own cliques and feuds, and Craft's chapter about them makes for lively reading. She indicates that the reactions of other artists were essential, and that even a negative appraisal of one's work was better than no appraisal at all: Not to be seen by other artists was not to exist as an artist oneself. Barnett Newman stopped exhibiting in public for several years after fellow artists failed to attend the opening of his 1951 show. There could be positive aspects to one's work being seen by other artists, but it didn't always turn out that way. After he'd visited another Newman exhibition, Willem