Early years John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at the Canadian military hospital in
Taplow,
Buckinghamshire, England. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from
Deseronto, Ontario. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the
Canadian Expeditionary Force, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in
Edmonton, Alberta where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school". Leaving that school at the age of fifteen, Gysin was sent next to
Downside School in
Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near
Bath in England, a prestigious school for boys run by Benedictine monks. Despite attending both Anglican and Roman Catholic schools, Gysin was already an atheist when he left St Joseph's.
Surrealism In 1934, he moved to Paris to study
La Civilisation Française, an open course given at the
Sorbonne where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche,
Max Ernst's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began associating with
Valentine Hugo,
Leonor Fini,
Salvador Dalí,
Picasso and
Dora Maar. A year later, he had his first exhibition at the
Galérie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso,
Hans Arp,
Hans Bellmer,
Victor Brauner,
Giorgio de Chirico, Dalí,
Marcel Duchamp,
René Magritte,
Man Ray and
Yves Tanguy. On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by
André Breton, who ordered the poet
Paul Éluard to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world. He gave various explanations for the expulsion, the more elaborate involving 'insubordination' or
lèse majesté towards Breton".
Morocco and the Beat Hotel In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin opened a restaurant called The 1001 Nights, with his friend
Mohamed Hamri, who was the cook. Gysin hired the
Master Musicians of Jajouka from the village of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters. The musicians performed there for an international clientele that included William S. Burroughs. Gysin lost the business in 1958, and the restaurant closed permanently. That same year, Gysin returned to Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9
rue Gît-le-Cœur that would become famous as the
Beat Hotel. Working on a drawing, he discovered a
Dada technique by accident: William Burroughs and I first went into techniques of writing, together, back in room No. 15 of the Beat Hotel during the cold Paris spring of 1958... Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another, than occupied with editing the monster manuscript...
Naked Lunch appeared and Burroughs disappeared. He kicked his habit with
Apomorphine and flew off to London to see Dr Dent, who had first turned him on to the cure. While cutting a mount for a drawing in room No. 15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my
Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters' techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as "First Cut-Ups" in
Minutes to Go (Two Cities, Paris 1960). When Burroughs returned from London in September 1959, Gysin not only shared his discovery with his friend but the new techniques he had developed for it. Burroughs then put the techniques to use while completing
Naked Lunch and the experiment dramatically changed the landscape of
American literature. Gysin helped Burroughs with the editing of several of his novels including
Interzone, and wrote a script for a film version of
Naked Lunch, which was never produced. The pair collaborated on a large manuscript for
Grove Press titled
The Third Mind, but it was determined that it would be impractical to publish it as originally envisioned. The book later published under that title incorporates little of this material. Interviewed for
The Guardian in 1997, Burroughs explained that Gysin was "the only man that I've ever respected in my life. I've admired people, I've liked them, but he's the only man I've ever respected." In 1969, Gysin completed his finest novel,
The Process, a work judged by critic
Robert Palmer as "a classic of 20th century modernism". A consummate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase was repeated several times with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. An example of this is "I don't dig work, man / Man, work I don't dig." Many of these permutations were derived using a random sequence generator in an early computer program written by Ian Sommerville. Commissioned by the
BBC in 1960 to produce material for broadcast, Gysin's results included "Pistol Poem", which was created by recording a gun firing at different distances and then splicing the sounds. That year, the piece was subsequently used as a theme for the Paris performance of
Le Domaine Poetique, a showcase for experimental works by people like Gysin,
François Dufrêne,
Bernard Heidsieck, and
Henri Chopin. With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", the flicker device uses
alpha waves in the 8–16
Hz range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers.
Later years In April 1974, while sitting at a social engagement, Gysin had a very noticeable rectal bleeding. In May he wrote to Burroughs complaining he was not feeling well. A short time later he was diagnosed with
colon cancer and began to receive cobalt treatment. Between December 1974 and April 1975, Gysin had to undergo several surgeries, among them a very traumatic
colostomy, that drove him to extreme depression and to a suicide attempt. Later, in
Fire: Words by Day – Images by Night (1975), a crudely lucid text, he would describe the horrendous ordeal he went through. In 1985 Gysin was made an American Commander of the French
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He'd begun to work extensively with noted
jazz soprano saxophonist
Steve Lacy. They recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring Gysin singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Lacy,
Don Cherry,
Elli Medeiros,
Lizzy Mercier Descloux and more. The album was reissued on CD in 1993 by
Crammed Discs, under the title
Self-Portrait Jumping. ==Death==