Kerouac was similar, in that his investigation into his prose was also spiritual, it was a spiritual tool for him. Gregory Corso later used the word “probe,” poetry as a probe into death, future, police, marriage, hair, bomb, all the conceptions possible gathered from both the conscious and the unconscious. Kerouac’s view underwent various changes in the early forties. When he was a young romantic kid of twenty, writing was a kind of Faustian alchemy in his book The Sea Is My Brother. When he was reading Rimbaud, the great writer was a seer, who arrived at visions through the long wizened derangement of the senses. Kerouac knew the great line in Rimbaud which is the key to it all: “And springtime brought me the idiot’s frightful laughter.”90 That was the payment for deranging his senses.
Burroughs took the Chandler-O’Hara, hard-boiled American fiction and turned it into a total satire of the American character, as in the ship that was sinking and everybody’s out for themselves. He revealed the bones of human behavior, exposing what people were really like.
Burroughs is an old faggot, so he’s got this protective coloration of a tough exterior, implacable fact. His routines get outrageous, becoming surrealist in fact, and he goes beyond the bounds of propriety. This phase of Burroughs’s writing grew out of charades that he played with Kerouac and myself and others. In these we would all assume roles. Kerouac played a young American bumpkin in Paris, innocent in a straw hat. I played a well-groomed Hungarian refugee bringing with me my fake family art collection to sell. And Burroughs played a Lotte Lenya character, a phony lesbian baroness, who would go out and entice young Americans. I was this phony Hungarian of uncertain morals who was a con man and Burroughs was the shill preying upon Kerouac. At one time Bill got up in drag and acted it out, but he would get so carried away that he’d fall down on the floor laughing sometimes, because it was so funny. He would take it to slightly psychopathic, or psychotic, lengths. He would get beyond the bounds of what Jack or I thought was reasonable and would get into boundless, genius strangeness.
That strangeness was partly an outcome of a very interesting psychoanalysis he was going through. He had been psychoanalyzed by Dr. Federn, who was one of Freud’s direct pupils, one of the elders in the American Freudian community. Then Burroughs went to Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who was a specialist in hypnotherapy, and under hypnosis Burroughs began to reveal many layers of character. Right underneath the surface of this dignified St. Louis aristocratic Harvard gent was a very prim English governess. She was always taking tea in the afternoon and would have nothing to do with any obscenity, except ultimately she was completely obscene and rapacious. Underneath that were several layers. I think he had six or seven going down, but one of the layers going down was Old Luke, an old white-trash Mississippi anti-Semitic, anti-nigger guy sitting on his back porch near a river, talking about how “I just sit there all day long and fish come floating down the river and pass by . . . and there ain’t nothing happening round here except another fish come floatin by, catfish passes by. Did you ever gut a catfish?” Some sort of psychotic Southern sheriff type.
Then underneath that was a Chinaman, on the banks of the Yangtze, living in mud, half human and half mud and half primordial, maybe a junkie even with his opium pipe. He’s living on the banks of the Yangtze with nothing to do with any civilization or anything, dumb almost mute, but with a kind of imperturbable Chinese, empty-eyed tolerance of everything. In Naked Lunch he evolves into the Chinaman who has the last line in the book, which is the Chinese laundryman, “No glot, c’lom Fliday.” Meaning like no answer. There’s no god, no answer, no glot, I can’t satisfy you. This Chinaman was not vocal, hardly talking, impassive, with a bland impassive gaze. Way down in a basic level of observation more or less from the bottom of the barrel. The ultimate beat character, I guess. The bottom of the economic and social ladder and the bottom of the human ladder of the world. Reduced to the ultimate essential, just coping with the Yangtze, and the mud.
Burroughs had these characters within him, along with several others. I think one of the reasons for that is because Burroughs is a homosexual who has one peculiar erotic situation. I thought it was rare, but he insisted it was not at all, but his favorite way of cumming is when he is screwed by a man. There are a lot of homosexuals who like that, but there are very few who cum from being screwed. However, Burroughs is a very dignified, Harvard man, and this is not exactly a situation where he is in control of his sexual life. He found this, as the Bible says, “inconvenient.” When he was younger, he found it demeaning, pretty much against the dignified outer mien that he had, to have to be prone and be screwed in order to have an orgasm.
In the forties he was experimenting with different levels of his own consciousness. There was a prim governess somewhere in his hypnoanalysis, who would cum sighing and fluttering her fan. He found a schizophrenic split between his exterior laconism and dignity and his interior squishiness, or vulnerability. It was an enormous disparate and could be seen as an enormous split in his nature. At that point he got a little bit sick and tired of being the victim, the guy who had to be fucked in order to cum, so there’s a whole rehearsal of all these obsessions in Naked Lunch. The blue movie section in Naked Lunch is really a symbolic playing out of this same objection. He has the image of a guy cumming involuntarily as he was being hung. He sees his situation as similar to the guy being victimized or possessed unto death by being hung. In the blue movie, he makes a kind of cut-up of his own sexual obsession by repeating it over and over in different combinations, Johnny, Mark, and Mary; and then Mary and Johnny hang Mark; and Mary and Mark hang Johnny; and then Mark and Johnny hang Mary; and over and over until he gets bored. That was one method of cut-up, the beginning of cut-up and one motive of cut-up, to cut out all apparent thoughts, feelings, and sensory impressions, including the ultimate sexual conditioning. Burroughs was basically trying to cut out of the body. Thus, his title The Exterminator, [a] kind of nihilism.
A lot of Burroughs’s writing has to do with a dignified exterior and a completely terrorized, victimized, hung-up, cowardly, schizophrenic interior; the dignity on the exterior and supposed degradation of the interior, of the inside life. It’s a real situation for him psychologically. Here’s this very intelligent, dignified, aristocratic guy with a good education, who was smart enough to acknowledge it and to deal with it imaginatively with a sense of humor. To a certain extent it is the key to a lot of Burroughs, the key to his understanding of America. It’s another form of addiction also, in a sense an addiction to sex. Writing is a way of exorcising obsessions. It’s an old tradition. In Burroughs’s case it is therapeutic, by replaying it over and over and over again in different forms it is washed clean of obsessive emotion.
CHAPTER 19
Burroughs, Joan Burroughs, and Junkie
In 1951, through inadvertency, Burroughs killed his wife in a William Tell shooting in Mexico City. She had put a gin glass on the top of her skull and drunkenly insisted that he shoot it off and he missed. I had been with her for the month previous and she had been in a suicidal state, so when I heard of the accident I figured that she had, in a sense, killed herself and used him as a means. It was after that that he began writing. Most of the book Junkie is his writings that were sent to me in the form of letters from Mexico. It was first published in 1953 and I was the coeditor and agent for those texts.
In the preface to Junkie, Burroughs has a couple passages. “I’ve learned a great deal from using junk. I have seen life measured out in eye droppers and morphine solution.”91 Here he is paraphrasing T. S. Eliot. Both Eliot and Burroughs are from St. Louis and they have a similar tone of voice, [that of] the St. Louis aristocracy. Ultimately they are very similar in [their] method of composition. The later cut-up prose of Burroughs is actually an extension into a larger scale of the panoramic prose novel of The Waste Land, which is also collage or cut-up. The Waste Land and Burroughs could be almost interchanged. Take a hundred lines of Burroughs’s Cobblestone Gardens or some lat
er work and integrate them into The Waste Land, stylistically they’re very similar.
For all of his breakthrough genius, Eliot didn’t produce more than four or five pages of such high-class collage. [It was as if] that were the limit or that he didn’t want to. In the preface to Junkie is another interesting phrase: “They knew that basically no one can help anyone else.”92 There’s no key, no secret that someone else has, that Burroughs can give you. That’s pretty implacable.
He looked like George Raft, but was taller. Norton was trying to improve his English and achieve a smooth, affable manner. Affability, however, did not come natural to him.93
This is a very funny way of saying he was really mean. A super understatement, like in Hemingway or hard-boiled detective fiction. Some phrasing emerges here which will recur over and over again in Burroughs’s later work, like the more famous Naked Lunch.
Jack [. . .] was not one of those lost sheep looking for a shepherd with a diamond ring and a gun in the shoulder holster and the hard, confident voice with overtones of connections, fixes, setups that would make a stickup sound easy and sure of success.94
“A confident voice with overtones of connections, fixes, setups” comes back over and over again as the voice of the CIA agent or the voice of the supreme mafioso in later books by Burroughs.
The man sat up straighter and swung his legs off the couch. His jaw fell slackly, giving his face a vacant look. The skin of his face was smooth and brown. The cheekbones were high and he looked Oriental. His ears stuck out at right angles from his asymmetrical skull. The eyes were brown and they had a peculiar brilliance, as though points of light were shining behind them. The light in the room glinted on the points of light in his eyes like an opal.95
It’s kind of like a light that throws itself directly into your consciousness, some insect consciousness. There is an impersonality, some insect-like or reptilian impersonality to the description. The effects of the description are to make the person’s face look like [a chimu] urn, or a Mayan urn, or an empty-eyed statue. I guess it’s the vacant look he wanted to capture.
Junkie begins in New York City in the mid-forties, before Burroughs met Joan and before he became addicted. [The following is] Burroughs’s description of his first meeting with Herbert Huncke.
In many tenement apartments the front door opens directly into the kitchen. This was such an apartment and we were in the kitchen.
After Joey went out I noticed another man who was standing there looking at me. Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast. The effect was almost like a physical impact. The man was small and very thin, his neck loose in the collar of his shirt. His complexion faded from brown to a mottled yellow, and pancake make-up had been heavily applied in an attempt to conceal a skin eruption. His mouth was drawn down at the corners in a grimace of petulant annoyance.
“Who’s this?” he said. His name, I learned later, was Herman.
“Friend of mine. He’s got some morphine he wants to get rid of.”
Herman shrugged and turned out his hands. “I don’t think I want to bother, really.”
“Okay,” Jack said, “we’ll sell it to someone else. Come on, Bill.”96
So that is Burroughs’s first notice of Huncke.
A few nights after meeting with Roy and Herman, I used one of the syrettes, which was my first experience with junk. A syrette is like a toothpaste tube with a needle on the end. You push a pin down through the needle; the pin punctures the seal; and the syrette is ready to shoot.97
These were syrettes of morphine which were left over from World War II and were being sold by army or navy characters loose on Times Square. In those days much less surveillance and much looser scene.
Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in the clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath: the stopping of blood.98
Just in that one sentence you get a whole key to all of Burroughs’s later development as a writer. It’s an amazing description of a daydream or half-dream, hypnogenetic state, with an image that simply gets larger and larger until you fall completely into a dream state. It is a perfect reproduction of the state of picture consciousness during a virgin opiate experience. What’s also interesting here is the montage effect, which is characteristic of later Burroughs. The seeds of his montage, cut-up effects are already present in these earliest writings, which are just realistic, naturalistic noticings of phenomena in his own mind and optical experience. Something amazingly intelligent about writing it down, being able to write your dream down that quick, sharp and fast, basically because he’s interested in states of consciousness, as well as external description.
I’m going to go through Junkie and give highlights like this. I realize that they are keys to the development of his later writing and the images persist throughout his later writing. They were first introduced in the earlier text “ Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” about the sinking of the Titanic, the sinking of Western civilization. Some images come from that, but the whole gamut of Burroughs’s vocabulary of hallucinatory images comes from Junkie. Once you know the roots you can see the recombinations and permutations of these images and the humor of that in his later work. He met Huncke again in the Angler Bar, which here is called the Angle Bar.
I began dropping into the Angle Bar every night and saw quite a bit of Herman. I managed to overcome his original bad impression of me, and soon I was buying his drinks and meals, and he was hitting me up for “smash” (change) at regular intervals. Herman did not have a habit at this time. In fact, he seldom got a habit unless someone else paid for it. But he was always high on something—weed, benzedrine, or knocked out of his mind on “goof balls.” He showed up at the Angle every night with a big slob called Whitey. There were four Whities in the Angle set, which made for confusion. This Whitey combined the sensitivity of a neurotic with a psychopath’s readiness for violence. He was convinced that nobody liked him, a fact that seemed to cause him a great deal of worry.99
It was Burroughs’s take on not wanting to be liked himself, he wasn’t worried if nobody liked him. Burroughs said that when he was young he felt totally out of it, felt like a pariah. This will lead on to the talking asshole in Naked Lunch who complains that nobody loves [him].
Burroughs’s first impression of teaheads is pretty funny. I thought this particular passage was funny at the time and so did Kerouac. Burroughs’s adventures trying to be a marijuana pusher, trying to make his living selling grass. And this was his cynical comment on the romantic idea of going out and being a criminal heroic peddler of weed.
Herman contacted other teaheads. They all gave us static.
In practice, pushing weed is a headache. To begin with, weed is bulky. You need a full suitcase to realize any money. If the cops start kicking your door in, it’s like being with a bale of alfalfa.
When I got this in the letter I just laughed, it was so obviously true and funny. His idea, the humor of being trapped with a bale of alfalfa, something that you couldn’t dispose of.
Teaheads are not like junkies. A junkie hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But teaheads don’t do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars’ worth of weed, if you c
ome right to the point, they say you are a “bring down.” In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler. No, he just scores for a few good “cats” and “chicks” because he is viperish. Everyone knows that he himself is the connection, but it is bad form to say so. God knows why. To me, teaheads are unfathomable.
There are a lot of trade secrets in the tea business, and teaheads guard these supposed secrets with imbecilic slyness. For example, tea must be cured, or it is green and rasps the throat. But ask a teahead how to cure weed and he will give you a sly, stupid look and come-on with some double-talk. Perhaps weed does affect the brain with constant use, or maybe teaheads are naturally silly.100
I had a romantic notion of smoking grass at that time, but Burroughs was really cynical and really intelligent. He sees right through everything immediately with no illusions. I had this inoculation of disillusionment through Burroughs way back in 1950, but there was still the romanticism of the 1960s that we all had to go through. Everybody got goofy with the teahead sweatshirts and a romanticization of the whole tea ethos.
The doctors of that era—1945–48—had an historical recollection that opiates weren’t always illegal and there wasn’t always this nationalistic paranoid hysteria about junk and junkies. Around the World War II era junkies were [thought of as] sick people who went to doctors or went to the pharmacy and bought their heroin or opium on an open market. The number of junkies in America was somewhat limited, nothing like they have now, because the cash nexus has entered into the peddling of junk. It is that cash nexus that causes the spread of junk more than the charm of junk itself, oddly enough. In other words, junkies have to go out and score and because the market is so unstable they can’t go to a job. [For example], their pusher at eleven in the morning is late so you gotta meet him at two. It’s an unstable life and therefore you got to make your living by peddling junk to other people. Therefore, every junkie wants to have clients so that he can score for them and take his junk off the top, that’s how the cash nexus enters into the spread of junk addiction.
Best Minds of My Generation Page 16