Provenance
Allen Ginsberg Estate; Ellen and Gary Davis, Greenwich, CT (through Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York); gift to NGA, 2008.
Gregory Corso, his attic room 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, wooden angel hung from wall right, window looked on courtyard and across Seine halfblock away to spires of St. Chapelle on Ile St. Louis. Gregory’s _Gasoline_ was ready at City Lights, in attic he prepared “Marriage,” “Power,” “Army,” “Police,” “Hair” and “Bomb” for _Happy Birthday of Death book_. Henri Michaux visited, liked Corso’s “mad children of soda-caps” phrasing Burroughs came from Tanger to live one flight below, shaping _Naked Lunch_ manuscript, Peter Orlovsky and I had window on street two flights downstairs, room with two-burner gas stove, we ate together often, rent $30 a month. I’d begun Kaddish litany, Peter his “Frist Poem.”
1957, printed later
Accession Number
2008.131.10
Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
image: 35.6 x 35.5 cm (14 x 14 in.) | sheet: 50.2 x 40.5 cm (19 3/4 x 15 15/16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Credit Line
Gift of Gary S. Davis
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Herbert E. Huncke, author _The Evening Sun Turned Crimson_, who introduced "hip" vocabulary & attitudes to writers later labeled "Beat", his room Hotel Elite, N.E. corner 8th Avenue and 51'st street diagonally opposite Madison Square Garden. Rare glimpse of Huncke, then hustling bread on Times Square, strung-out - he fixed at the sink. Saw him infrequently that season, though we'd known each other well since 1945, found his room to say good bye, leaving New York to hitch south, Mexico and Bay area, here just before Christmas, Manhattan 1953.
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