Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The American poet Harold Norse was also at the hotel, and hung out with Burroughs and Gysin. Around the time Naked Lunch was published, Norse introduced Burroughs to someone who would remain with him for six years: a nineteen-year-old, reddish-brown-haired Briton named Ian Sommerville, who was studying at Cambridge in England and working at the Mistral Bookshop in Paris for the summer. Sommerville had a natural gift for mathematics, audio engineering, photography, and computers, all talents that he later shared with Burroughs in their collaborations. For the moment, though, Sommerville was just helping Burroughs kick a codeine habit. It was the first love affair that Burroughs had dared to undertake since his romantic failures with Marker and Ginsberg.

  After Burroughs survived a court appearance in Paris on a trumped-up drug conspiracy charge, he was visited in October 1959 by photographer Loomis Dean and writer David Snell. They were working on a story about the Beat “revolution” for Life magazine, and they made a lasting impression on Burroughs: he saw them as mouthpieces and insiders from the world of the Insect-manipulated Control media of the Western world: “LIFE TIME FORTUNE INC.” The Burroughs-Gysin “third mind” needed a manifesto for action within this shared worldview, and that same week, Gysin discovered a principle of random text manipulation: he was cutting a matte for one of his drawings when his Stanley knife sliced through some pages of the New York Herald Tribune underneath the matte, revealing new, seemingly meaningless phrase combinations that, as a former Surrealist, Gysin recognized as art. Gysin demonstrated the technique to Burroughs, and they quickly adopted the “cutup method” as a revolutionary approach to writing.

  When Naked Lunch was edited in 1959, the previous draft, called Interzone, was ripped apart and reassembled by Burroughs with Gysin and Beiles. The published version contained most of the routines and “journals,” but very little remained of the “WORD” section. That manuscript survived, however, and was discovered by Barry Miles in 1984, in the Ginsberg collection at Columbia University. When Burroughs and I edited the Interzone collection four years later, we combined the material published in Early Routines (Cadmus Editions, 1981) with a revised version of the “WORD” chapter from the 1958 Interzone manuscript. The new Interzone was published by Viking in 1989.

  “International Zone” is a travel piece that Burroughs wrote for magazine submission; the character he calls “Brinton” is clearly himself, and gives an idea of his assessment of his own persona at this point in his life. Also here are excerpts from “Lee’s Journals,” including an early statement of Burroughs’ radical artistic prolegomenon. Written partly in Tangier’s Benchimal Hospital, where Burroughs was undergoing a cure for his Eukodol habit, the “Journals” portray his state of ultimate dejection and lostness, his bravado and his still-wicked humor.

  In one bravissimo passage, Burroughs writes, from Benchimal: “God grant I never die in a fucking hospital! Let me die in some louche bistro, a knife in my liver, my skull split with a beer bottle, a pistol bullet through the spine, my head in spit and blood and beer, or half in the urinal so the last thing I know is the sharp ammonia odor of piss … Anyplace, but not in a hospital, not in bed. . . .” He recites a list of his friends who have died violently already, including David Kammerer, Joan Vollmer, William Cannastra, and a junky named “Marvie” whom Burroughs used to service in Greenwich Village, who overdosed in front of him. Much later in his life, Burroughs wrote: “When you face Death, for that moment, you are immortal.”

  “WORD,” written in 1956 and 1957, marks the turning point in Burroughs’ writing: the moment when he dared to gamble everything for immortality. If the voice he was struggling to find seems a bit forced today, we must remember he was trying to do the not-yet-done, and that he chose to omit “WORD” from Naked Lunch, perhaps for that reason. But “WORD” is also crammed with lurid snippets and phrases, as from a fevered brain, which show Burroughs straining to achieve a rapid-fire free association, or automatic writing—and this, in turn, would lead him to “the cut-ups.”

  The publication of Naked Lunch in Olympia’s “Traveller’s Companion” series was a literary event. Too extreme in its content to be printed in the U.S., the book was smuggled into America and England by intellectuals and young travelers. Maurice Girodias also licensed editions to publishers in France, Germany, Italy, and England: Editions Gallimard, Limes Verlag, Sugar Editore, and John Calder Ltd. A few years later, when Barney Rosset was ready to publish Naked Lunch in the U.S., Rosset and his editor, Richard Seaver, dealt directly with Burroughs and his New York attorney, Eugene Winick. Girodias was a groundbreaking publisher, but he was unscrupulous with money; in 1967, he lost all his rights in the novel.

  Laura Lee Burroughs heard about her son’s scandalous book, and she wrote him an angry letter from Palm Beach in late 1959, excommunicating him from the family. Burroughs’ joshing, reassuring answer to her shows his reliance on her forgiveness and the closeness between mother and son. All that was changing, though, because his mother was beginning to exhibit confusion and incipient dementia. Burroughs’ reliance on his parents’ money was nearing an end. He had terminated his last psychiatric relationship, after nine months of sessions with Dr. Marc Schlumberger in Paris that year. Burroughs concluded that the promise of Freudian analysis—to cure neurosis once the original trauma is recovered—was a false promise. He ended by questioning the very concepts of “neurosis” and the psychiatric “cure.” At the age of forty-five, Burroughs came into his own.

  Burroughs and Gysin were busy with their cut-up experiments, collaborating on small editions of the earliest cut-up texts, like The Exterminator (Auerhahn Press) and Minutes to Go (Two Cities), both published in early 1960. Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso were also invited into the Minutes to Go manifesto, but Corso had a problem with the coldness of the method—or, perhaps, of its practitioners. In true Surrealist fashion, Burroughs and Gysin envisioned their discovery as the foundation of a new worldwide movement in all the arts, but specifically in writing—and a literary “Cut-Up Movement” took root during the middle to late 1960s in Germany, England, and the United States. The lasting effect of the cut-ups, however, would be felt in other mediums many years later.

  In April 1960, Burroughs was threatened with deportation from France for drug-related reasons. The Beat Hotel’s season in the sun had come to an end; the old Paris crowd was moving on, and a younger group of proto-Beatniks was coming in. Burroughs had a collaborator, a boyfriend, and a literary mission; he had no need of a fixed address. He relocated to a hotel room in London, with a large sea-trunk full of papers from his manic production in 1956–58—which he would now proceed to cut up.

  from interzone

  INTERNATIONAL ZONE

  A miasma of suspicion and snobbery hangs over the European Quarter of Tangier. Everyone looks you over for the price tag, appraising you like merchandise in terms of immediate practical or prestige advantage. The Boulevard Pasteur is the Fifth Avenue of Tangier. The store clerks tend to be discourteous unless you buy something immediately. Inquiries without purchase are coldly and grudgingly answered.

  My first night in town I went to a fashionable bar, one of the few places that continues prosperous in the present slump: dim light, well-dressed androgynous clientele, reminiscent of many bars on New York’s Upper East Side.

  I started conversation with a man on my right. He was wearing one of those brown sackcloth jackets, the inexpensive creation of an ultra-chic Worth Avenue shop. Evidently it is the final touch of smartness to appear in a twelve-dollar jacket, the costume jewelry pattern—I happened to know just where the jacket came from and how much it cost because I had one like it in my suitcase. (A few days later I gave it to a shoeshine boy.)

  The man’s face was grey, puffy, set in a mold of sour discontent, rich discontent. It’s an expression you see more often on women, and if a woman sits there long enough with that expression of rich discontent and sourness, a Cadillac simply builds itself around her. A man would probably accrete a Jaguar. Co
me to think, I had seen a Jaguar parked outside the bar.

  The man answered my questions in cautious, short sentences, carefully deleting any tinge of warmth or friendliness.

  “Did you come here direct from the States?” I persisted.

  “No. From Brazil.”

  He’s warming up, I thought. I expected it would take two sentences to elicit that much information.

  “So? And how did you come?”

  “By yacht, of course”

  I felt that anything would be an anticlimax after that, and allowed my shaky option on his notice to lapse.

  The European Quarter of Tangier contains a surprising number of first-class French and international restaurants, where excellent food is served at very reasonable prices. Sample menu at The Alhambra, one of the best French restaurants: Snails à la bourgogne, one half partridge with peas and potatoes, a frozen chocolate mousse, a selection of French cheeses, and fruit. Price: one dollar. This price and menu can be duplicated in ten or twelve other restaurants.

  Walking downhill from the European Quarter, we come, by inexorable process of suction, to the Socco Chico—Little Market—which is no longer a market at all but simply a paved rectangle about a block long, lined on both sides with shops and cafés. The Café Central, by reason of a location that allows the best view of the most people passing through the Socco, is the official meeting place of the Socco Chico set. Cars are barred from the Socco between eight A.M. and twelve midnight. Often groups without money to order coffee will stand for hours in the Socco, talking. During the day they can sit in front of the cafés without ordering, but from five to eight P.M. they must relinquish their seats to paying clients, unless they can strike up a conversation with a group of payers.

  The Socco Chico is the meeting place, the nerve center, the switchboard of Tangier. Practically everyone in town shows there once a day at least. Many residents of Tangier spend most of their waking hours in the Socco. On all sides you see men washed up here in hopeless, dead-end situations, waiting for job offers, acceptance checks, visas, permits that will never come. All their lives they have drifted with an unlucky current, always taking the wrong turn. Here they are. This is it. Last stop: the Socco Chico of Tangier.

  The market of psychic exchange is as glutted as the shops. A nightmare feeling of stasis permeates the Socco, like nothing can happen, nothing can change. Conversations disintegrate in cosmic inanity. People sit at café tables, silent and separate as stones. No other relation than physical closeness is possible. Economic laws, untouched by any human factor, evolve equations of ultimate stasis. Someday the young Spaniards in gabardine trench coats talking about soccer, the Arab guides and hustlers pitching pennies and smoking their kief pipes, the perverts sitting in front of the cafés looking over the boys, the boys parading past, the mooches and pimps and smugglers and money changers, will be frozen forever in a final, meaningless posture.

  Futility seems to have gained a new dimension in the Socco. Sitting at a café table, listening to some “proposition,” I would suddenly realize that the other was telling a fairy story to a child, the child inside himself: pathetic fantasies of smuggling, of trafficking in diamonds, drugs, guns, of starting nightclubs, bowling alleys, travel agencies. Or sometimes there was nothing wrong with the idea, except it would never be put into practice—the crisp, confident voice, the decisive gestures, in shocking contrast to the dead, hopeless eyes, drooping shoulders, clothes beyond mending, now allowed to disintegrate undisturbed.

  Some of these men have ability and intelligence, like Brinton, who writes unpublishably obscene novels and exists on a small income. He undoubtedly has talent, but his work is hopelessly unsalable. He has intelligence, the rare ability to see relations between disparate factors, to coordinate data, but he moves through life like a phantom, never able to find the time, place and person to put anything into effect, to realize any project in terms of three-dimensional reality. He could have been a successful business executive, anthropologist, explorer, criminal, but the conjuncture of circumstances was never there. He is always too late or too early. His abilities remain larval, discarnate. He is the last of an archaic line, or the first here from another space-time way—in any case a man without context, of no place and no time.

  Chris, the English Public School man, is the type who gets involved in fur farming, projects to raise ramie, frogs, cultured pearls. He had, in fact, lost all his savings in a bee-raising venture in the West Indies. He had observed that all the honey was imported and expensive. It looked like a sure thing, and he invested all he had. He did not know about a certain moth preying on the bees in that area, so that bee-raising is impossible.

  “The sort of thing that could only happen to Chris,” his friends say, for this is one chapter in a fantastic saga of misfortune. Who but Chris would be caught short at the beginning of the war, in a total shortage of drugs, and have a molar extracted without anesthetic? On another occasion he had collapsed with peritonitis and been shanghaied into a Syrian hospital, where they never heard of penicillin. He was rescued, on the verge of death, by the English consul. During the Spanish occupation of Tangier, he had been mistaken for a Spanish Communist and held for three weeks incommunicado in a detention camp.

  Now he is broke and jobless in the Socco Chico, an intelligent man, willing to work, speaking several languages fluently, yet bearing the indelible brand of bad luck and failure. He is carefully shunned by the Jaguar-driving set, who fear contagion from the mysterious frequency that makes, of men like Chris, lifelong failures. He manages to stay alive teaching English and selling whiskey on commission.

  Robbins is about fifty, with the face of a Cockney informer, the archetypal “Copper’s Nark.” He has a knack of pitching his whiny voice directly into your consciousness. No external noise drowns him out. Robbins looks like some unsuccessful species of Homo non sapiens, blackmailing the human race with his existence.

  “Remember me? I’m the boy you left back there with the lemurs and the baboons. I’m not equipped for survival like some people.” He holds out his deformed hands, hideously infantile, unfinished, his greedy blue eyes searching for a spot of guilt or uncertainty, on which he will fasten like a lamprey.

  Robbins had all his money in his wife’s name to evade income tax, and his wife ran away with a perfidious Australian. (“And I thought he was my friend.”) This is one story. Robbins has a series, all involving his fall from wealth, betrayed and cheated by dishonest associates. He fixes his eyes on you probingly, accusingly: are you another betrayer who would refuse a man a few pesetas when he is down?

  Robbins also comes on with the “I can’t go home” routine, hinting at dark crimes committed in his native land. Many of the Socco Chico regulars say they can’t go home, trying to mitigate the dead grey of prosaic failure with a touch of borrowed color.

  As a matter of fact, if anyone was wanted for a serious crime, the authorities could get him out of Tangier in ten minutes. As for these stories of disappearing into the Native Quarter, living there only makes a foreigner that much more conspicuous. Any guide or shoeshine boy would lead the cops to your door for five pesetas or a few cigarettes. So when someone gets confidential over the third drink you have bought him and tells you he can’t go home, you are hearing the classic prelude to a touch.

  A Danish boy is stranded here waiting for a friend to come with money and “the rest of his luggage.” Every day he meets the ferry from Gibraltar and the ferry from Algeciras. A Spanish boy is waiting for a permit to enter the French Zone (for some reason persistently denied), where his uncle will give him a job. An English boy was robbed of all his money and valuables by a girlfriend.

  I have never seen so many people in one place without money, or any prospects of money. This is partly due to the fact that anyone can enter Tangier. You don’t have to prove solvency. So people come here hoping to get a job, or become smugglers. But there are no jobs in Tangier, and smuggling is as overcrowded as any other line. So they end up on
the bum in the Socco Chico.

  All of them curse Tangier, and hope for some miracle that will deliver them from the Socco Chico. They will get a job on a yacht, they will write a bestseller, they will smuggle a thousand cases of Scotch into Spain, they will find someone to finance their roulette system. It is typical of these people that they all believe in some gambling system, usually a variation on the old routine of doubling up when you lose, which is the pattern of their lives. They always back up their mistakes with more of themselves.

  Some of the Socco Chico regulars, like Chris, make a real effort to support themselves. Others are full-time professional spongers. Antonio the Portuguese is mooch to the bone. He won’t work. In a sense, he can’t work. He is a mutilated fragment of the human potential, specialized to the point where he cannot exist without a host. His mere presence is an irritation. Phantom tendrils reach out from him, feeling for a point of weakness on which to fasten.

  Jimmy the Dane is another full-time mooch. He has a gift for showing precisely when you don’t want to see him, and saying exactly what you don’t want to hear. His technique is to make you dislike him more than his actual behavior, a bit obnoxious to be sure, warrants. This makes you feel guilty toward him, so you buy him off with a drink or a few pesetas.

  Some mooches specialize in tourists and transients, making no attempt to establish themselves on terms of social equality with the long-term residents. They use some variation of the short con, strictly one-time touches.