One Shot: A Beat Generation Mystery is a study of a single photo. That may strike you as the most ludicrous or boring concept for a book, but somehow it makes for an incredibly interesting read.

The photo in question is the one on the cover of John Tytell’s Naked Angels:

You have certainly seen it before and perhaps you’ve seen it many times. But do you realise its significance? I didn’t until Oliver Harris, the author of this wonderfully obsessive work, explained how the captions typically given to this photo attempt to stress its importance but somehow miss the most important part:

The penny didn’t drop for a while, until I began looking not at this picture but at the others, all the others online, in books, in magazines, in the archives. And then I knew for certain what was wrong. To describe it as “the very earliest group photograph” is to imagine comparing it to all the others that followed. But it’s impossible to compare this photograph of Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg to any other photograph of them together, before or after, for the simple but surprising reason—in fact, for the astonishing reason—that this is one of a kind. It’s not simply the first such photograph; it’s the only such photograph. And not just the only one from the 1940s. I mean, the one and only ever of Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg together.

That alone is an incredible realisation. The Beats lived long before the era of camera phones but they were photographed often enough, with Ginsberg himself frequently carrying a camera and documenting the lives of his friends. Yet in all the years they knew one another, the Big Three of the Beat Generation were only photographed together one time.

Okay, that is interesting… but is it worth a whole book? I would not have said so, and yet I read One Shot with rare delight. I was riveted. The subtitle is “A Beat Generation Mystery” and the cover shows pieces of evidence pieced together as though a prop in a TV murder mystery, and indeed that’s why this book, with its absurd premise, is so enjoyable. Like a murder mystery, it presents a crime and then takes you down all sorts of false avenues of inquiry before finally… well, I’ll let you read the book for yourself. I’ll say little of the last few dozen pages.

What Harris attempts to do in this book is to find out the origins and meaning of the photograph. In fact, although he himself describes it as “[a] whole book about this one snap that everybody already knows,” it is about two photos, really. The main one is the one mentioned above, but as it turns out, there were others, including a photo of Burroughs and Kerouac together. Harris realised this photo was taken in the same place and probably on the same day as the previous one, which guides much of his investigation.

The investigation, like a murder mystery, involves attempts at establishing the basic facts of the case, and then following up little clues, such as things that appear in the photos. He also looks at the numerous captions given to the photo in the books that have reprinted it, as well as analysing contemporary documents for clues. It is all, however, frustratingly difficult to establish. Even pinning down a year is hard.

Harris looks at the photo’s location. He analyses its composition. He tries to figure out the time of year by measuring shadows and analysing the volume of snow on the ground. He spends a vast chunk of the book relating the photo to his personal passion: hats. Again, this sounds ridiculous but he’s going somewhere with it. After all, how often do you see Jack Kerouac in a hat? Harris takes us through a history of hats and what they might mean for the photograph. Most of this is aimed at uncovering the motivation for the photo being taken, but a lot of it is simply interesting in and of itself. So much of the book pushes back against that tendency to see a photo like this and simply accept it without thought. How many people have seen it and wondered where it was taken or when, or for that matter why they are acting like they are and who was behind the camera. Yet, as Harris shows, these are fascinating questions. They are not easy to answer, but he pulls us into what he freely admits is an “obsession” for him, and as I’ve said, the murder mystery aspect makes it absurdly readable.

Complicating this mystery—as so often is the case in Beat Studies—is a long legacy of lazy assumptions. Harris has collected thirty captions that are quite random in how they locate the photo in place and time, with some even claiming that the fourth man (Hal Chase) is actually Lucian Carr. Harris points out that we too often read captions and then look at a photo, essentially seeing what the caption told us to see. My own recent inquiries into overlooked parts of Beat history have involved similar problems and show a disturbing trend in Beat Studies to merely repeat the claims of prior generations of scholars even when their statements are easily disproven. (See, for example, this piece on the origins of “Howl” and this one on the death of Natalie Jackson.) Harris contends with this several times throughout his book.

The best thing about this book is the process. Like a detective, Harris takes us through his investigation, thoroughly explaining many promising leads that end up as dead ends or are simply unknowable. Were they acting out scenes from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks? Were they playing characters from a Dashiell Hammett novel? What about a Hemingway book? (And before you scoff, Harris has some interesting points about Burroughs and Hemingway…) Were they re-enacting the famous but hard-to-date Night of the Wolfeans? And is there a connection to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks?

You’ll have to read it to find out.

One more thing before I end this review. As I was reading this book, I felt that to some extent it was a very strange autobiography. Of course, it’s not an autobiography in any traditional sense, but amidst his various investigations of clues and his analysis of elements of the photo(s), Harris presents fragments of his life. They are carefully tied to the photo and the larger story, but nonetheless he seems keen to present his own life story alongside this Beat tale. I’m not sure Harris would agree but that’s a dimension of the book I certainly noted. He describes it himself in uncertain terms:

[W]hat is the secret in the form of One Shot? Depending on how you look at it, this is either a triumphant tour de force, a virtuoso performance of scholarly ingenuity and passion, or an indulgent self-parody, a reductio ad absurdum of academic work. I like to think that it’s hard to tell the difference, that the secret lies in the ambiguity. I go along with the idea that a good reading depends less on making one objectively convincing case than on maximising subjective, open-ended personal pleasures, private fascinations.

I would have to say I agree.

This book was published by Moloko Print. They do excellent print work but their books can be hard to find, hardly even showing up on Google when you search the exact title. Here’s a direct link to the publisher’s webpage. Annoyingly, there is no “buy” link but you can click “shop” and make your order using the form. This book was also discussed on the Allen Ginsberg Estate website, where you can see more of the photos used in the book.