BOCKRIS: Were you at any point in London close to the mythical swinging London scene?
BURROUGHS: No, not at all. It was going on; I wasn’t involved in it except very moderately, it didn’t interest me much. So-called “swinging London” seemed to occur when London, to my way of thinking, was very much on a downgrade, and I always wondered where is this swinging London?
BOCKRIS: A lot of people say that. Were there any English writers you had contact with?
BURROUGHS: I met Anthony Burgess in London. We went out to a number of pubs. I had been very much impressed with his novel Clockwork Orange and had written something for it; that was the basis of the relationship. I found him extremely charming. Very much interested in my work as I was in his. I asked him if he saw many other writers in London, he said, “No, they’re all a bunch of swine.”
MILES: I think William felt a crossover of literary ideas into music, but I don’t think he picked up on any kind of musical ideas that he could use. He was a little bit impressed that literature had moved out of being a gentleman’s pursuit and now he could actually talk to people about it. The avant garde was out in the open again, here he was talking to musicians. That side of it excited him I think, but the kind of writing that William produced in 1964, 1965, and 1966 was totally nonmarketable. It was either cut-up experiments on tape or else multicolored collages in notebooks, which would have cost an absolute fortune to reproduce and again were noncommercial. He had some extremely lean years financially where he engaged in a lot of cerebral activities, extending cut-ups way beyond cutting up words as entities but into imagery. I think Bill was really questioning his medium. He finally came back to writing because writing was what he knew and he was, after all, as Genet said, “a man of letters.”
William was very much under the spell of Brion in those days. Brion remains a significant person in William’s personal history. Brion would say, “We’re going to go and see the Rolling Stones. You can’t possibly wear those awful clothes; we’ll have to go and get some flared trousers.” And there’d be William in these awful flared trousers which didn’t suit him at all, designed for someone forty years younger, looking quite uncomfortable, but he would do it because Brion said so.
BOCKRIS: Burroughs moved to Flat 22, 8 Duke Street, St. James in 1967 and began to write again after a long period of tape recorder, scrapbook, and cut-up experiments that had produced no major work. He completed The Wild Boys in August 1969 and then began to gradually slip into an isolated and unproductive existence at the beginning of the seventies.
His flat was expensive and small. Burroughs saw hardly anyone except constant companion Johnny, pictures of whom appear in the Covent Garden Edition of Port of Saints [London 1974], Brion Gysin, and Anthony Balch, who lived in the same building.
MILES: While he was living at Duke Street, Bill didn’t communicate with people very much. He was purposely ex-directory. People would come by, students and others, the kind of guys who he would probably be very friendly with these days. He would answer the door and they’d say, “Are you William Burroughs?”, and he’d say, “Yes.” He would totally freeze them out, they’d get really upset and embarrassed and have to turn around and go away.
He always had Johnny. You know—Johnny. They were always called Johnny for some reason. But he really did get way out on a limb when he was living at Duke Street. He was writing away, studying these Egyptian texts. He was happy seeing Brion and Anthony. His ideal restaurant was one which was totally empty.
Brion and William at 8 Duke Street, St. James, London, 1972. Photo by Gerard Malanga
BOCKRIS: Johnny’s influence was ambiguous; on the one hand he was fiercely protective of Burroughs and a strong bond of affection existed between them. On the other hand, he constantly brought pimps, hustlers, and small-time gangsters to the flat.
Burroughs may have enjoyed his Dickensian view of lowlife London, but it did no good for his health when the gangsters stayed all night, paying little attention to his needs and taking advantage of his hospitality. On top of this, Johnny was not an amanuensis and Burroughs relies a lot on friends and companions to help him in the editing and retyping of his work.
A picture emerges of Burroughs in London sitting in his apartment day after day smoking cigarettes, drinking tea, looking over old pieces. He has said that he is never lonely, but admits that a novelist “needs the reader in that he hopes that some of his readers will turn into his characters. He needs them as vessels on which he writes.”
Increasingly isolated, Burroughs lost contact with this audience he needed, lost his ability to write fiction, and his life became burdensome.
MILES: I think Bill felt that he hadn’t written anything significant since Nova Express in 1964. He’d gone through a number of years of experimentation with tapes and collages and most people in the literary world had almost forgotten about him. He hadn’t published anything at all and then when he did it was The Wild Boys, which was not greeted as the greatest novel of the century. It was not understood, in fact. And William was working in a vacuum.
BURROUGHS: On the contrary, The Wild Boys was an English best seller. Also produced in this period: The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, the Mayfair articles and The Job, Port of Saints, Exterminator. I would say that I was less available then, I was seeing fewer people. In Paris, we had this whole hotel where we were seeing a great number of people. In Tangier, I also used to see more people. In London, in the mid to late sixties, there weren’t many people around that I wanted to see.
MILES: I think William started to wonder whether or not he was still a writer, because he was having to depend almost entirely on Brion to tell him so. He didn’t see any other writers. A lot of his evenings were spent alone. When Brion was away, since he didn’t want to eat by himself, he just didn’t eat. It must have been a very strange and lonely period, living in his pied-à-terre, which he never dusted the entire time he was there—the dust was inches thick.
But when William was living in London, we all did regard him as a significant figure, thinker, and part of the underground scene. I remember him coming to Indica [Miles’ bookshop] on Christmas Eve one day to see a poster that we’d done. He wished everyone a Merry Christmas and put up a notice saying that if anyone wished to be audited they could call him up. He was very much with scientology, but it cut him off from a lot of people.
BOCKRIS: It was in this state of malaise that Allen Ginsberg, visiting London in the summer of 1973, primarily to spend time with Burroughs, found the confrere he had seen only briefly for years. Always the organizer, Ginsberg found a solution. He knew that the City College of New York was looking for an established American writer to give a course of lectures on writing between February and May 1974. Would Burroughs like to give the lectures? It could be arranged.
Burroughs had lectured before, but never at an American university and not for a full term. He considered the proposal—inspected his life, his apartment, his checkbook, and his prospects—and decided there was nothing to be lost by taking the job. It would earn him some needed money with which he could return to London and continue …
Burroughs arrived in New York in January of 1974. Ginsberg introduced him to James Grauerholz, a young Kansan who had just arrived in New York. James became Williams’ amanuensis-companion, and Burroughs began to give his lectures. It usually took him from six to eight hours to prepare each lecture. The course became a full-time job with two lectures a week, two office hours for consultation, and papers to be read in the evening.
GRAUERHOLZ: Soon after he arrived in New York Bill told me, “I don’t know if I can still write fiction.” I had only just met him at the time and I was very much in awe of him. I can’t tell you how I felt when he said that; all I could say was, “Oh, man … don’t say that.” What really pulled William out of that slump was the series of public readings he gave for virtually the first time in his life. The response he got from the lectures led to his decision to give up the London flat and remain in N
ew York.
William looks out his window at London, 1972. Photo by Gerard Malanga
ANDREAS BROWN: Burroughs had gotten very paranoid in London and it was a great thing to see him come alive again. I was at the first reading he gave in New York. You could see his face change as he realized that people wanted to hear him.
BURROUGHS: If you’re still there after the fear then you got the courage, baby, that’s all. If you’re not, then you’re dead.
DINNER WITH SUSAN SONTAG: NEW YORK 1980
BURROUGHS: England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs. “I’ll write a preface for you if you give me a blurb.”
BOCKRIS: Is there an advantage for a writer to be in New York?
SONTAG: People are very isolated in New York, everybody’s essentially alone here, but there’s probably less hack work. I not only agree with what Bill said about the English literary scene, but I can think of hardly any writers I even admire in England. The whole thing has become so genteel and diluted. I like Ballard.
BURROUGHS: He’s good.
SONTAG: It’s so philistine.
BURROUGHS: Incestuous! Incestuous!
SONTAG: Writers do dissipate their talents doing television and reviewing, two things which are much less developed here. Television doesn’t exist here as an outlet for any serious writer, and reviewing is a very minor occupation.
BURROUGHS: English writers have to write four reviews a week and then do several radio shows just to get by.
SONTAG: The funny thing is, they always thought that they should do it even when they didn’t need the money. Virginia Woolf for instance, who certainly didn’t need the money, was doing two or three reviews a week, which is an enormous amount of literary journalism. That’s the sort of thing you do if you’re a writer over there, you turn out this enormous amount of junk.
BURROUGHS IN NEW YORK
BOCKRIS: You first lived in New York during the Second World War. What was the atmosphere like then?
BURROUGHS: The place was full of uniforms and there were incredible amounts of money being made in any business. You just had to run a laundry or any fucking thing and you could make a fortune, because the services were all broken down. They were pulling people off the streets to get them to work in anything. It was extraordinary. Personally, I had the distinction to be actually fired from a defense plant during the war.
I lived five months at 69 Bedford Street. That was when David Kamerrer lived around the corner at 35 Morton Street. Sixty-nine Bedford Street was on the second floor; it was a furnished apartment; it had a couch and a few chairs and a table; it had a closet, kitchen, and bathroom. Very mediocre. I lived there by myself. That was when I was working as a bartender and later as a private detective. I didn’t do very much. I wasn’t working most of the time. I had two jobs. I spent a great amount of time at home in the pad.
Kerouac took this word picture of an always courteous Burroughs at 69 Bedford and printed it in The Town & the City, Jack’s first novel: Dennison [Burroughs] had concluded his own ministrations and was punctiliously cleaning out his needle and eye-dropper with water.
“Yes, Johnson wasn’t a bad sort at all,” he was saying.
“Yes,” said Al, daubing his bleeding scar with a piece of cotton, “he came from a good family, you know, but found it hard going to live up to their square standards, you might say.”
“Well I suppose they’ll take his license away from him, but he’ll get another one somewhere else.”
“Yes, I suppose he’ll make out some way. We all have to take the bumps when they come and try to make the best of it.”
They cleaned everything up, put away their pills and needles and cottons with great care, Dennison washing out glasses and spoons, Al rubbing the top of the table with a cloth, and everything was neat again. Al put on his coat and hat, and Dennison said he would accompany him downstairs.
“I’ve got to get a few quarts of milk at the grocery, Al, and some Benzedrine and codeine cough syrup at the drugstore, a few suppositories I want to try out, headache powders for pickup in the mornings, a few things like that, so I might as well walk with you downstairs.”
Whereupon the tall cadaverous Al opened the door and said, “After you, Will.”
But Dennison bowed slightly at the waist, smiling, “Please, Al, I am home here.”
DINNER WITH GERARD MALANGA: NEW YORK 1974
MALANGA: Are you surprised by your life?
BURROUGHS: Yes, sometimes. If you weren’t surprised by your life you wouldn’t be alive. Life is surprise.
MALANGA: What does living in New York City have that no other city you’ve lived in has to offer?
BURROUGHS: One very important thing. Every other city I can think of is going down, getting worse, and this is not true of New York. New York is a much pleasanter place to live now than it was when I was last here for any length of time, which was in 1965. London has been going down steadily. I just got to the point where I couldn’t stand it. Higher and higher prices. More and more money to buy less and less. Duller and duller. I think that is certainly unique about New York as the cycles go up and down. It’s one of the most polite cities I’ve ever lived in. I’m very well satisfied with my decision to return here.
MALANGA: Do you attract comments from people on the street? Do people recognize you?
BURROUGHS: Much more here than they do in London. I’ve had quite a few very pleasant encounters with people on the street.
DINNER AT FRANKLIN STREET 1974
For the first few months Burroughs lived in a loft on Broadway. He then moved into a fourth floor walk-up loft at 77 Franklin Street. I visited him there shortly after he moved in, and wrote this account of our first evening together later on the same night:
It’s a rainy Thursday evening when I step out of a cab at the corner of Broadway and Franklin streets in lower Manhattan on my way to dinner with William Burroughs.
I gaze down a line of warehouses with a haphazard mixture of small trucks and old cars parked in front of them, spot Burroughs’ four story building, hurry diagonally across the street, push open the door and step into the foyer. The hall light is out and I feel cautiously for the banisters as two bottles of cold white wine clink in the crook of my arm. Warped wooden stairs lead to the top floor past a series of wall paintings.
I knock on Burroughs’ green door and James lets me in. Burroughs is standing in the middle of the room. He walks toward me, hand outstretched. The loft is impeccably clean. The old wooden floors beam with polish, the bed is neatly made, all surfaces are devoid of other than essentials. A manuscript is lying on the kitchen counter next to a stack of black and white 11 x 14 prints of photographs of Burroughs by Peter Hujar just delivered. In one he is lying on the bed, head propped on hand, grinning, a silk scarf wrapped around his neck, a cheerful check jacket with graceful lapels slung over his shoulders.
As James takes my coat and hat and Burroughs busies himself putting the wine in the refrigerator, I notice that an efficient looking brand new kitchen has been installed. The loft feels warm and lived in whilst remaining concisely organized. Three small paintings by Brion Gysin decorate one wall.
Bill makes me a vodka and tonic. We all drink the same without ice, and as the conversation begins we are discussing the King of Morocco’s birthday party which terrorists attacked with machine guns.
“Can you imagine all those people angling for invitations to his birthday party and when they get there they get shot?” Bill chuckles. “I think the Belgian Ambassador was killed. Some guys were brighter, they stood behind pillars …”
Since settling in New York, Burroughs has taken to buying American clothes. He usually adopts attire in some way suitable to the area. He is wearing a good-looking dark green single breasted blazer with gold buttons
, a pair of well-cut tan slacks and dark brown highly polished English leather boots with a regular heel. A slightly wide green tie is knotted carefully between the long straight collar of a tan shirt. Burroughs carries his outfit well, managing to look relaxed and comfortable.
“I really enjoyed your reading the other night,” I tell him. “Your timing was perfect.”
“I rehearse a lot for these readings, and for a long time. It’s a performance,” he nods.
We sit around the table by the kitchen, talking about collaborations in literature. “Conrad’s done some quite remarkable books in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford which are very little read now. I’d mention The Inheritors and Romance. There are passages where he seems to be escaping from words or going beyond words, in a quite conventional, quite classical narrative form,” Burroughs tells me.
Twenty minutes later dinner is ready and we carry the plates up to a low table past the curtain by the bed. Bill opens a bottle of wine, and we sit down to a delicious meal—the fish accompanied by rice and broccoli. I ask him what he thinks of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
“Never heard of him.”
“But …”
“Nope.”
“He was on the cover of Time.”
“Never heard of him.”
“What would you do if you weren’t a writer?”
“I figure I could do anything—run a corporation—but they wouldn’t let me.”
Over coffee Burroughs says: “Most people don’t notice what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.”
My eyes travel to the spectacles of Burroughs as he turns and says, “Guns are a part of my life. I was brought up around them.” Suddenly in the middle of the meal, he walks calmly over to a storage area behind a small walk-in closet and re-emerges carrying a toy M-16. Posting himself in the middle of the room, some six feet away from the table, he snaps the thing up to his shoulder and carefully aims at the other end of the loft. “Yep! This is what they use,” he states flatly—and for a moment I get a frozen flash of him, a close-up that knocks me out of my seat.
With William Burroughs Page 9