Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Peter Christopherson, and Jon Savage (review)

A book of interviews, His Name Was Master is a languorous affair: some parts are thrilling, others pleasantly boring. The interviews cover four days of epic, rambling, generous kef-hazed conversations with Brion Gysin, in Paris, in April 1980. The bulk of the book consists of raw, unedited transcripts of two day-long conversations in early April between Gysin and the artist and "cultural engineer" Genesis P-Orridge (now Genesis Breyer P-Orridge), also with chitchat from sound artist Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson. The first day alone covers some 180 pages. The final section includes two days of conversations between Gysin and the punk historian Jon Savage. P-Orridge is wonderfully intuitive and unrehearsed, an interviewer without methodology; Savage is usefully more acute, prepared, and direct. I ate up its near-four-hundred pages of insight, remembrance, gossip, memoir, reflection, grumbling, and non sequitur in vague drifts and hungry gulps.

Gysin is a strange master: prolific, polymathic, prescient, and connected—yet slippery, and oddly hard-to-find despite his relative ubiquity in accounts of midcentury avant-gardism and counterculture—although this is being rectified by recent careful exhibitions and publications since his death in 1986. His Name Was Master comprises a sort of disordered, assisted autobiography, broadly covering his time as an unenthusiastic conscript in the Second World War, and his many years in Paris—"the brothel of the Western world"—and New York, then Tangier, and Paris, again, from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Gysin recounts his friendships with the Surrealists (he was a member of the movement for a short time before being routinely excommunicated by André Breton), with William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, the Master Musicians of Joujouka, and dalliances with international riffraff, especially in Tangier in the 1950s, where he was the jewel in its queer expatriate crown.

With seductive nonchalance, P-Orridge opens Gysin to a dizzying jungle of topics, which often loops forward in later moments of reverie or arcane reflection. Gysin discusses his invention of the Dreamachine and its failed potential as the "drugless turn on" of the 1960s, the "art rag trade" and "deceptual" art (his witty dig at what he perceives to be the empty promise of contemporary art after 1960), the Beat Hotel, the Beats more broadly and Burroughs in particular, the shooting of Joan Vollmer, sex with Moroccan trade and London "dilly boys," drugs, drinking, censorship, the publishing racket, colonialism and slavery, telephone surveillance, literary disappointment, space travel, pagan princes, magic brain breathing, dream frequencies, and much more. When Savage asks him what his most important field of artistic practice has been, Gysin answers with uncomplicated precision, "Interior vision, really. That's the 'field' I've touched."

While his intellect and knowledge are capacious, Gysin is also encumbered by troubling aspects, pace his putdown of feminism as "the hardening of the American matriarchy" in the course of a long admission of his misogyny. Gysin was a man out of time, in some ways, yearning for the pre-industrial world, a gay male countercultural idyll he found (not unproblematically) in the "desert ecology" of Morocco.