The Ghost in Their Machine

The posthumous show of collages by Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu -- now at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller through Oct. 13 on Manhattan's Upper East Side -- comes as something of a surprise. Their work is not high on the list of swank art collectors. Hell, I'd be surprised if it's on the list at all. And I don't think McWhinnie's appreciation will change that. As the former Newsweek art critic (and painter) Peter Plagens remarked about a Nelson Algren video I praised yesterday, "The trouble with being dead is you can't fight back against tributes people pay to you."

The show itself is eye-popping, however, and so is the gorgeously
printed catalogue. Maybe that will bring on the collectors. I hope so.
Of course, I'm partial to Mary and Claude. I knew them in San
Francisco, back in the late '60s, when we created a little magazine
together. They were doing collages then, too, though they weren't
nearly as polished as these -- not even close. It seems to me that by
2001, the year all the collages in this show were executed, they had
fully absorbed the influence of Norman O. Mustill (who also
collaborated on the magazine).

Mustill is not mentioned in McWhinnie's appreciation or in the
catalogue or anywhere in the show itself. But I believe it was
Mustill's work in the first place that turned Mary and Claude onto the
method and style of the collages here. (They were so taken by his work
that they commissioned an entire book of his collages. It was called
"Flypaper," and they published it in 1967 under their Beach Books
imprint.) So this show may be regarded as an unspoken homage to
Mustill. He's the ghost in their machine.

This is not to say the furious accomplishment of the "2001" collages
is not their own. Mary, who died in 2006, had already been a painter
many years before meeting Mustill, and it's evident. Her collages,
along with a handful of paintings also on exhibit, are more
freewheeling, less "designed" than Claude's. Claude, who died in 2002,
was first and foremost a writer. A prolific one. He was large in
everything he did. And this show, though it only scratches the surface
of his output, indicates how prolific a collagist he became as well.
And how proficient.

Speaking of prolific, proficient and accomplished . . . Ted Morgan,
author of more than a dozen books -- including biographies of
Churchill, FDR, Somerset Maugham and, not least, William S. Burroughs
-- was at the show's Sept. 14 opening. (So were rockers Grant Hart and
Thurston Moore, and poet-photographer Gerard Malanga.)

When he met Pelieu in 1970, in London, Morgan recalled, they used to
swap stories about the French Army. Morgan had served as an
intelligence officer in Algiers. (See his latest book, the memoir My
Battle of Algiers, a swift, informative and, despite the subject,
entertaining read.) "Pelieu was an army deserter," he said. "Claude
was full of funny stories. We laughed like crazy."

At the time Morgan was staying in Brion Gysin's apartment on Duke
Street during a visit from Tangiers, where he'd been living since 1968
and where he'd first met Gysin and Burroughs through Paul Bowles. I
asked him about Gysin, a special interest of mine.

"You know how Brion always hated government or any governing
authority," Morgan said. "Well one day, probably through one of his
friends, he was offered an apartment-cum-painter's-studio in Paris
owned by the Ministry of Education. More or less against his
principles, he agreed to take it. The hitch was that the education
ministry was entitled to purchase whatever work he turned out while he
lived there. So, whenever the ministry felt like it" -- Morgan didn't
say exactly how often, but it sounded like a regular affair -- "Brion
had to receive a ministry delegation who came to inspect his work."
Morgan laughed. "They never offered to buy a thing."

Did Morgan write the Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw as a change
of pace from Churchill and FDR? "That's it exactly," he said.
Burroughs, it turned out, actually was proud to be in their company.
"He even boasted about it." Guilt by association, I guess.

As good a story teller in person as he is on the page, Morgan
recounted how he searched through crates of the Burroughs archive
before anyone else -- it was purchased in 2006 by the New York Public
Library's Berg Collection -- and how he found a letter from his first
wife warning Burroughs it would be a mistake to let Morgan write his
biography. He laughed at the memory.

You'd think that at 75 -- with all sorts of accolades to his credit,
including a Pulitzer Prize for reporting -- he'd be interested in
taking it easy. Forget it. Morgan, who is tall, tan, modest and
attractive, and who looks younger than his years, says he's working
feverishly on a new book, Dien Bien Phu: A Tragedy in Four Acts.

"It sounds like you're taking a run at Graham Greene," I told him. He
laughed. "I've been to so many places," he said, "I could write a
hundred books like that." Unlike his Algiers memoir, however, this one
is not personal history. "I'm not that old," he said.

Comments

[JanH]

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