BEAT
GORDON BALL
NEGATIVE MULTIPLICITIES . AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW
DECEMBER 2007
Beat is Christopher Felver’s newest book, and it’s a charm. It consists not merely of single-image pages, but “spreads.” Felver writes, “It’s my cinema vérité movie, only in stills…of an American cultural family.” His “movie” or scrapbook collage projects chronologically, mapping major portions of the last 28 years of his life by geographical location, filling his screen with extraordinary shots of the remarkable women and men he sought out and befriended along the way, sharing it with their artifacts, mementoes, holographs, ephemera. (Its mix of image and word reminds one of his earlier The Poet Exposed [1986], but Beat features much greater variety of material and layout.)
Introductions by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, David Amram; a handwritten prison letter from Neal Cassady to Carolyn Cassady; a fine piece by Felver on Allen Ginsberg’s address book; the first purple-inked pages from the 1956 “mimeo-ditto” (as Ginsberg has it) of Howl; and other prefatory material, precede the book’s first and longest major section, “San Francisco,” where Felver settled in 1979. (Each major section is introduced from an autobiographical standpoint by the author/photographer.) “Naropa” follows, then “New York” and “Celebration” (including some shots from Europe as well as America East and West). Beat closes with “Twilight,” which offers some of Felver’s last images of Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Ginsberg, Jan Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, and Gregory Corso. (Handy and informative nutshell biographies of the 200 who’ve been pictured close the book.) The cover’s a striking, noirish close-up of William S. Burroughs bent over a book he inscribes with Bic ballpoint, fedora on head, shortened left pinkie resting on open page, Academy of Arts and Letters pin on lapel. Within, end papers consisting of the first and last pages of Jack Kerouac’s later On the Road typescript embrace the gang of souls (and then some) about whom Ginsberg once said “Jack has imagined us all.” The quality of reproductions, overall, is superb.
Beat’s mixed media format differs radically from Felver’s most recent large collection, The Importance of Being (2001), with its 400 full-page portraits, a single person to a page, no subject appearing more than once. Now, with half that number of subjects, certain individuals appear again and again (Ginsberg on 23 pages, Ferlinghetti on 19, Corso on l4); some (Richard Brautigan, Herb Gold, Jay DeFeo) appear but once. Almost all share their white space with other photos, words, musical notations, programmes, news articles. But is Felver’s formal innovation, in this, his seventh book, effective?