Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  He stood there in a 1920 straw hat somebody gave him . . . soft mendicant words falling like dead birds in the dark street. . . .

  “No . . . No more . . . No más. . .”

  A heaving sea of air hammers in the purple brown dusk tainted with rotten metal smell of sewer gas . . . young worker faces vibrating out of focus in yellow halos of carbide lanterns . . . broken pipes exposed. . . .

  “They are rebuilding the City.”

  Lee nodded absently. . . . “Yes . . . Always . . .”

  Either way is a bad move to The East Wing. . . .

  If I knew I’d be glad to tell you. . . .

  “No good . . . no bueno . . . husding myself. . . .”

  “No glot. . . C’lom Fliday”

  Tangier, 1959

  THE CUT-UPS

  the cut-ups

  by james grauerholz

  Living alone at the Empress Hotel in London, visiting Ian Sommerville (who was back in school at Cambridge), and renewing his literary work, William Burroughs began in 1960 to create his “cut-up trilogy”: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. He was mixing new pages with older writing, cutting up everything from his past to write an as-yet-unimagined future. His publishers waged legal and literary battles on his behalf, even as they began to recognize that this new work Burroughs was turning in was hardly as accessible to his growing public as Naked Lunch had been—that novel did, after all, contain plenty of satirical humor and titillating sexual and drug-related material.

  Now that Burroughs had achieved a measure of fame, he began to attract young admirers; Michael Portman, aged seventeen, was the first of these, stalking Burroughs in the fall of 1960 and making himself irresistible. But “Mikey” was a trouble-child from the English upper classes, and he tried to outdo Burroughs in narcotics and alcohol consumption. This pattern continued, worsening throughout his short life. Portman was around Burroughs and Gysin, in London and Tangier, for only about three years; he died in his late thirties, from what Brion Gysin termed “wretched excess.”

  A relationship that, in contrast, would last all Burroughs’ life, but that—like so many of his important friendships—started off on the wrong foot, began in early 1961 when Burroughs received a letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., Harvard. Leary was a psychological researcher, but soon would leave that far behind. His specialty was the relatively new field of hallucinogenic drugs, which he termed “psychedelic”—mind-expanding. The history of these substances encompasses some interesting anthropology and pharmaco-botany—as well as a political intersection with the “Control machine,” in the person of the CIA, whose secret experiments with LSD in the fifties and sixties were later revealed to have been widespread. Of course, Burroughs’ early interest in yagé, had put him in contact with these discoveries, and Leary recognized this. He sent some psilocybin mushrooms to Burroughs in London in early 1961, at a time when Burroughs was planning to spend the summer in Tangier with Ian Sommerville.

  Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso arrived in Tangier in June 1961, just as The Olympia Press published The Soft Machine in Paris. Alan Ansen was not far behind, and everyone was now taking a potpourri of psychedelic drugs in the name of spiritual discovery. Leary arrived in Tangier at the climax of the summer, and persuaded Burroughs to join him in Newton, Massachusetts, for a month. As Corso, Ansen, and Ginsberg all departed Tangier in September, Burroughs flew to Boston to participate in Leary’s experiments. But Leary was entering a messianic phase, and after a few weeks he and Burroughs did not see eye to eye.

  Barney Rosset offered Burroughs a basement apartment in Brooklyn, where he worked on Nova Express. In New York at this time, Le Roi Jones and Diane Di Prima published their ninth issue of Floating Bear, which included the suppressed “Roosevelt After Inauguration” routine—for which they were arrested. Burroughs spent only two months in Brooklyn, returning to London for his forty-eighth birthday in February 1962. He came home to the sad news that Kells Elvins, passing through New York just after Burroughs’ departure, had died of a heart attack. Back at the Empress Hotel, living with Sommerville (and Portman), Burroughs returned to work on The Ticket That Exploded, finishing the manuscript at this time—just as Naked Lunch was finally published in the U.S. by Grove Press in March.

  With his publishers in France, England, and the U.S. fighting various court battles for the right to print his books (and the works of Henry Miller, James Joyce, Frank Harris, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. P. Donleavy), Burroughs seized the opportunity to rewrite some of his books between editions. After The Soft Machine was published in Paris in 1961, Burroughs significantly expanded the text for its 1966 publication by Grove in New York, and again for John Calder’s 1968 London edition, giving rise to three separate states of the novel. The Ticket That Exploded appeared in Paris in 1962; for Grove’s 1967 edition, Burroughs expanded the text, but he left it alone for Calder’s 1968 edition, so there are just two states of Ticket. Grove was the first publisher of Nova Express, in 1964, and the (unchanged) U.K. edition, two years later, was given to Jonathan Cape Ltd., due to the reluctance of Burroughs’ U.K. agent to grant Calder a monopoly.

  As Barry Miles pointed out in his 1993 biography of Burroughs, the new material in the second and third states of Soft Machine, and in the second state of Ticket, contain passages that provide a bridge to Burroughs’ next phase of writing: a polemical period that parallels his erotic revival in his early fifties. For this collection, however, the American editions have been used.

  The Edinburgh Conference was an annual literary event in Scotland, and by the early 1960s it was exerting a notable attraction for American and European literary figures. John Calder arranged for Burroughs to be invited to Edinburgh, Calder’s hometown, in August 1962. Attended by such luminaries as Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Henry Miller, the conference became focused on Naked Lunch, pro and con. McCarthy’s controversial appreciation of the novel—a defection from her social class—gave new momentum to Burroughs’ career. His remarks at the conference were entitled “The Future of the Novel,” and he ended with this statement: “I am primarily concerned with the question of survival—with Nova conspiracies, Nova criminals, and Nova police—A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroes and villains with respect to intentions towards this planet—the future of the novel is not in Time, but in Space.”

  Around Christmas 1962, The Ticket that Exploded was published in Paris, and there was bad news from Palm Beach: Burroughs’ fifteen-year-old son had accidentally shot a neighbor boy in the neck—an accident with disturbing overtones. But Burroughs was not about to go back to Florida now. In London he had recently met Antony Balch, a filmmaker and distributor who suggested a collaboration, and Burroughs—living with Sommerville, with Balch and Gysin nearby—was in a new period of inspiration. He worked on a film called Towers Open Fire, with Balch filming Burroughs, Gysin, and Portman on leftover 35mm B/W negative stock; Sommerville, meanwhile, was busy with Burroughs’ tape-recorder experiments. In mid-1963, they went to the Beat Hotel in Paris, where Balch did more filming, and Burroughs gave a few avant-garde son-et-lumière musical performances with Daevid Allen and Terry Riley. In June, Burroughs moved to Tangier with Sommerville and Portman; they lived at 4 calle Larachi, in the Arab quarter.

  After a guilt-ridden correspondence with his overburdened older brother Mort, Burroughs agreed to take his son into his Tangier home while the boy attended the local American School. Billy arrived in July 1963, just before his sixteenth birthday. He was thrilled to be near his glamorous father and living in the romantic seediness of Tangier. But his father’s homosexuality, and his two younger roommates, were confusing to the adolescent boy. Burroughs offered Billy the freedom to smoke hashish and play guitar, but he realized by December that the situation was too overwhelming for his son, and perhaps for himself. The emotional distance between them was at least as great as that between himself and his own father.

  When Billy returned to his gra
ndparents’ home in Florida in January 1964, Burroughs made a trip to Paris in a foredoomed attempt to collect several thousand dollars in royalties that Girodias owed him. Just two months earlier, John Calder had published a relatively “safe” selection of Burroughs’ writings from Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and Ticket, which Burroughs named Dead Fingers Talk—again adding new emendations to the excerpts, creating slightly new substates of the latter two novels. And in December 1963, City Lights published The Yagé Letters, which by now included a final exchange of letters between Ginsberg, who had reached the yagé highlands seven years after his mentor, and Burroughs, who was already becoming the literary seer of his cut-up period.

  Back in Tangier in February, Burroughs turned his attention to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag, a mimeographed publication from England, which featured Burroughs’ collaged communiqués in twenty-one issues between 1964 and 1966. All was not quiet on the domestic front, however; Sommerville was picking up Arab men for sex, and as they were living in the Casbah, this flagrant activity brought on the opprobrium of their Arab neighbors—especially the women, who openly harassed them in the street. In May 1964, Burroughs finally began to earn a bit of money from his books, and he and Sommerville moved to a more gracious penthouse apartment in the Lotería Building, in downtown Tangier.

  With an assignment from Playboy to return to his hometown of St. Louis, Burroughs went to the Chelsea Hotel in New York in December 1964. Sommerville wanted to accompany him, but he had visa problems; these could have been overcome, but Barry Miles, an eyewitness, suggests that Burroughs was willing to walk away from his growing ambivalence toward Sommerville. It was a subtle abandonment, one that would haunt Burroughs for a decade. He had little time to ponder it, though, because in January he received word that his seventy-nine-year-old father had died suddenly in Palm Beach. Burroughs went to Florida for the funeral. Laura seemed to be bearing up fairly well; the faithful Mort and his wife Miggy would keep an eye on her, from their home in St. Louis. Burroughs returned to New York, and sublet a loft at 210 Centre Street.

  In early 1965, Naked Lunch was tried in Boston for obscenity. Burroughs’ supporting witnesses included Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and John Ciardi. In 1963 at the Beat Hotel, Sommerville and Gysin had developed a device that they called the “Dream Machine”: a slotted, spinning cylinder that was brightly illuminated from within, so that, gazing into it, one experienced alpha-wave “flicker” and mild hallucinations. Gysin came to New York to join Burroughs and to market the invention; the literary agent Peter Matson met both of them at this time, and he represented Burroughs for the next nineteen years. The Dream Machine was a sensation, but no one wanted to manufacture a device that could provoke seizures.

  Burroughs’ reputation was already such that he was the toast of downtown New York in 1965. He made friends with a circle of young painters around the emerging pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, including David Prentice. A cosmetics-fortune heir named Conrad Rooks invited Burroughs to play a deathly, top-hatted character in his avant-garde film project, Chappaqua. Burroughs was royally feted at parties and readings thrown by such hostesses as Panna Grady, in her apartment at the Dakota Hotel, and Wyn Chamberlain, in his penthouse at 222 Bowery, an address which Burroughs would make his own ten years later. Brion Gysin was with Burroughs in New York, using his diplomacy and charm to brighten all social situations, and working daily with him on their collaborative chef d’oeuvre, a text-and-collage work that they called The Third Mind. Through Panna Grady, Gysin met the poet John Giorno, a twenty-eight-year-old Columbia graduate who would play a major role in Gysin’s and Burroughs’ lives; Giorno and Gysin became lovers.

  Burroughs spent time with David Budd, a painter from Sarasota, Florida, with a lively circus-people background, whom Burroughs had first met at the Beat Hotel in the late 1950s. Budd brought to Burroughs’ attention the last words of Dutch Schultz, a New York gangster who was shot down in Newark in 1935 and whose disconnected ramblings, recorded by a stenographer as he lay dying in a hospital, were reminiscent of Burroughs’ cut-up texts. This relationship led to a film project in 1968, and Burroughs tried his hand at a screenplay based on the gangster’s life story, called The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. This text was published in four different states: in England in 1965 by Jeff Nuttall in My Own Mag; in Boston, by the Atlantic Monthly, in 1969; in London by Cape Goliard Press in 1970; and in New York in 1975, by Viking. But the movie project never took off.

  Burroughs’ six months in the loft on Centre Street were busy times. He collaborated with Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett on TIME (“C” Press, 1965), and again with Ed Sanders, who published APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator (Fuck You Press, 1965). Burroughs’ collage book with Gysin, The Third Mind, was unpublishable in its full-graphics form at the time. (The original boards were finally exhibited by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in their “Ports of Entry” exhibition in July 1996—more than thirty years after The Third Mind’s creation.) Burroughs was also making “scrapbooks,” with input from Gysin: usually not very large, these hardbound journal-books were filled with collaged images culled from the press, typed and handwritten texts, drawings in colored inks, and so forth. From 1960 to 1976 he made about two dozen such scrapbooks. Burroughs also began to explore live performance in the mid-1960s; he made several public appearances in New York, sometimes with Gysin. On a trip to Paris around this time, Burroughs recorded his first long-playing record, Call Me Burroughs, with Sommerville; Gait Frogé, the owner of the English Bookshop, published a thousand copies of the vinyl album in 1965, and the following year it was released in the United States on Bernard Stollman’s ESP-Disk label.

  The end of Burroughs’ year in New York was at hand. In September 1965, as Gysin made ready to take John Giorno with him to Morocco, Burroughs decided to return to London to see what remained of his domestic situation with Ian Sommerville. Immediately he faced a new visa hassle upon landing at Heathrow, due to his growing media notoriety. Mikey Portman’s godfather, the chairman of the Arts Council, intervened with the immigration authorities, but Burroughs was obliged to quit England temporarily, three months later. He went to Tangier for a brief vacation with Gysin and Giorno.

  It was the swan song of the Tangier scene: Paul and Jane Bowles were still there, and many others of the mid-fifties Tangerine set, but most of them for only a little while longer. On Christmas Day 1965, Jay Hazelwood (the longtime genius loci of the Parade Bar, the HQ of the expat group) died in his bar, of a heart attack. It marked the end of an era: the “anything-goes” international crowd was fleeing the now-Muslim Morocco. Burroughs returned in January 1966—the midst of the “Swinging Sixties”—to London, the city that would be his home for the next eight years.

  from the soft machine

  DEAD ON ARRIVAL

  I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not do bad. Fifteen cents on an average night boosting the afternoons and short-timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free. But I was running out of veins. I went over to the counter for another cup of coffee . . . in Joe’s Lunch Room drinking coffee with a napkin under the cup which is said to be the mark of someone who does a lot of sitting in cafeterias and lunchrooms. . . . Waiting on the Man. . . . “What can we do?” Nick said to me once in his dead junky whisper. “They know we’ll wait. . . .” Yes, they know we’ll wait . . .

  There is a boy sitting at the counter thin-faced kid his eyes all pupil. I see he is hooked and sick. Familiar face maybe from the pool hall where I scored for tea sometime. Somewhere in grey strata of subways all-night cafeterias rooming house flesh. His eyes flickered the question. I nodded toward my booth. He carried his coffee over and sat down opposite me.

  The croaker lives out Long Island . . . light yen sleep waking up for stops. Change. Start. Everything sharp and clear. Antennae of TV suck the sky. The clock jumped the way time will after four P.M.

  “The Man is three hours late. You got the bread?”

  “I got three cents.”

>   “Nothing less than a nickel. These double papers he claims.” I looked at his face. Good looking. “Say kid I known an Old Auntie Croaker write for you like a Major. . . . Take the phone. I don’t want him to rumble my voice.”

  About this time I meet this Italian tailor cum pusher I know from Lexington and he gives me a good buy on H. . . . At least it was good at first but all the time shorter and shorter . . . “Short Count Tony” we call him . . .

  Out of junk in East St. Louis sick dawn he threw himself across the washbasin pressing his stomach against the cool porcelain. I draped myself over his body laughing. His shorts dissolved in rectal mucus and carbolic soap, summer dawn smells from a vacant lot.

  “I’ll wait here. . . . Don’t want him to rumble me. . . .”

  Made it five times under the shower that day soapy bubbles of egg flesh seismic tremors split by fissure spurts of jissom . . .

  I made the street, everything sharp and clear like after rain. See Sid in a booth reading a paper his face like yellow ivory in the sunlight. I handed him two nickels under the table. Pushing in a small way to keep up The Habit: INVADE, DAMAGE, OCCUPY. Young faces in blue alcohol flame.

  “And use that alcohol. You fucking can’t-wait hungry junkies all the time black up my spoons. That’s all I need for Pen Indef the fuzz rumbles a black spoon in my trap.” The old junky spiel. Junk hooks falling.

  “Shoot your way to freedom kid.”

  Trace a line of goose pimples up the thin young arm. Slide the needle in and push the bulb watching the junk hit him all over. Move right in with the shit and suck junk through all the hungry young cells.

  There is a boy sitting like your body. I see he is a hook. I drape myself over him from the pool hall. Draped myself over his cafeteria and his shorts dissolved in strata of subways . . . and all house flesh . . . toward the booth . . . down opposite me. . . . The Man I Italian tailor . . . I know bread. “Me a good buy on H.”