Beat It

Brion Gysin's posthumous sixties parable

BOOKS

Brion Gysin died in Paris this past July at the age of sixty-one. Dilettantish and dandified, he was a member of the international culturati spawned by the Beat movement. Artists considered him a rarely published writer; writers looked upon him as a rarely shown painter. His friend William Burroughs considered him a mentor and something of a genius, and now the gray eminence has added a new introduction to The Last Museum (Grove Press), Gysin's long-awaited novel-memoir of the post-Beat experience in Europe. Burroughs regards the book as a modem version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and "a map for navigating the area between Death and Rebirth." Well, maybe so, but it is also a rollicking Rabelaisian remembrance of a time (the sixties) and a place (Paris) by a man who lived it to the hilt. Gysin was a brilliant raconteur with a superb ear for bitchy conversation and a keen eye for caricature. If there seems to be more than a soupgon of Burroughs's fractured collage in his prose, it seems a fair enough swap for the man who taught El Hombre Invisible "to see painting and to hear music."

RICHARD MERKIN