BURROUGHS: I would say these scenes were overambitious and didn’t come across. Perhaps the filmmakers were not quite sure what they were doing. The way I read it, Andy, is this: The CIA has a time travel project. Using Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a peg to hang it on, a landing field you might say, the Colonel was in a very sensitive area, which is why he had to be terminated with extreme prejudice, he had been indulging in extreme experience, and had set up a romantic nineteenth-century time capsule. All those shots of heads and good-looking corpses hanging from trees all so quaint like a postcard: Death by a Hundred Cuts in the Market Place of Peking sent by some languid Etonian to a friend in Capri. “Having fine time, wish you were here.” Time travel is an actual possibility, in fact a hot project. The CIA doesn’t want any offbeaters mucking about with this sensitive shit.
Television with immediate film coverage of events is quite new. The extent to which fictional areas may be burned down by TV coverage is difficult to ascertain. No successful novels on the 1968 student riots in Paris, very few on the Vietnam War. I think people feel that they have already seen it on television and they don’t want to read about it. There are always exceptions. Trinity on the Irish thing was a big best seller. It got terrific coverage on the Belfast riots when I was in London. A car with a bomb in it set off by the bomb disposal squad. BOOM! And pieces of bodies being swept up into body bags after a bomb went off in a pub. And that’s a powerful sight. And these kids, thirteen, fourteen years old, romping through the wreckage like little sprites. Thirty of them suddenly erupt around a corner and start throwing rocks at the police, then skitter away yipping like foxes. Roving bands of stone-throwing youths. They shot them with rubber bullets.
BOCKRIS: Perhaps the interview is really a dead form. That’s what I’m wondering.
BURROUGHS: The interview stands exactly where it did a hundred years ago and serves exactly the same purpose. What’s the difference between someone going out to interview Billy the Kid approximately a hundred years ago and Frank Zappa today? It’s very unsatisfactory. What are they trying to get? “When did you kill your first man?” “Now let’s see …”
MALANGA: Do people tend to love you for who you are or what you do?
BURROUGHS: That is a very difficult question. Say with a stranger—someone I don’t know. Often they have a picture—an image—that they have projected on me which may have nothing to do with me at all. Whether it’s the media or their impression of me they’ve gathered from my writing, anyone, I think, will tend to have a certain image imposed on them which may not have anything to do with what is actually there. I also feel that for a writer to be a novelist, he doesn’t have, by nature of his profession, a clear-cut image of himself or a clear-cut image in general. If he cultivates his image too much his work will suffer. For example, a perfect case in point is Hemingway. His determination to act out what I might call the least interesting aspects of his own work. And to do everything that his characters could do and do it well limited and eventually crippled his work, down to shooting and fishing and all that. I feel that his work suffered from that. So, finally you get the image of Papa Hemingway which took over more and more. I think The Snows of Kilimanjaro is one of the best stories in the English language on the subject of death. In his later years the image of Papa Hemingway took over—struggling with some noble marlin, dropping a wildebeest sweet and clean with a spine shot at three hundred yards, fucking the beautiful young Countess across the river and into the trees. Now off on another silly safari, his image led him to Kilimanjaro, the scene of his classic sellout. In a light plane crash near Kilimanjaro, Hemingway suffered brain damage as Papa butted his way out.
Involvement with his own image can be fatal to a writer. Was it Yeats who said every man must choose at some point between his life and his work? Artists usually choose the work, and compromises are usually unfortunate. Hemingway’s life posed a deadly threat to Hemingway as a writer, moving in a wildebeest at a time. “I have just fired a shot!” said Baudelaire turning from an 1870 barricade, intoxicated by his accomplishment. “Ah yes, the artist so longs to be a man of action.” “To fire a least one shot is it not?” Stein lifts his hand from Lord Jim.
BOCKRIS: Can you remember when you gave your first interview?
BURROUGHS: One of the early interviews was by Life, Time, and Fortune. See, they sensed that there was something here with this whole Beat Generation and sent a team around to meet me and Brion just after the publication of Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959. They were really creepy … I felt like I was at lunch with the Time police, putting down a con, old and tired as their namesake: “Mr. Burroughs, I have an intuition about you … I see you a few years from now on Madison Avenue … $20,000 per year … life in all its rich variety … Have an Old Gold.
“Twenty thousand a year,” they said. “Now what do you think about that?” I said, “Cheap bastards.” But in those days that was a lot of money. In those days I had two hundred dollars a month, which was sent to me by my parents, and I had more money than I do now. I was the rich man in the hotel. So creepy stuff like that and really heavy, heavy, one takin’ pictures and one tellin’ you all these stories about the reason trained lions react to blank cartridges is that they train the lion by shooting a blank cartridge pistol into his eyes, and that’s why the lion reacts reliably to the report.… Schnell and Dean.
BOCKRIS: Schnell and Dean!
BURROUGHS: Schnell and Dean. And the first thing that Schnell said was, “Have an Old Gold, Mr. Burroughs.”
BOCKRIS: He did not, Bill!
BURROUGHS: Yes he did. I remember it exactly. He was playing the soft cop. It was goddamn great, you know—“just like a cop to smoke Old Golds, somehow.”
BOCKRIS: It was Hauser and O’Brien [the Narcotics police in Naked Lunch].
BURROUGHS: Oh man, did they know my books. He knew my books practically by heart. He said it was the greatest book since Moby Dick, maybe a greater book. Oh, he was a real fan. And then they were both very offbeat people, see. Schnell weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, about six foot one, built like a wrestler, and he had been a wrestler and a bouncer and was quite a literate man too. And Dean was a crackerjack photographer. They’d been picked to interest me and I spent several days with these people and subsequently I’ve seen Dean in Paris. Schnell, man, I later picked up the Reader’s Digest and there was Schnell’s account of how he had almost died from penicillin. He had a penicillin allergy and he had a cough and he took a lozenge which had a tiny amount of penicillin. His wife happened to come home as he’d just about had it. They get him over to the hospital and he’s barely making it, and all the symptoms of death that he describes are exactly the symptoms described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Like intense heat, freezing cold, and then a feeling of explosion. He had all these symptoms. He was a very interesting man. I’d like to see him again. I’d like to see both of them again. Loomis Dean and David Schnell.
BOCKRIS: Next time you get interviewed you should make it up to keep the interviewer happy. Say, “I like to go out to a nightclub and get really high and come back about three o’clock in the morning, drink a bottle of brandy and work until midday, then I like to eat a really big lunch, have sex and pass out. I wake up about seven or eight in the evening, my pet gazelle runs by, I take a sauna and my servant Juan comes in and gives me a massage.”
BURROUGHS: I’ve been tempted to do that, but I’ll tell you, it can bounce back like Our Man in Havana. Suddenly your man Juan there wants his salary and the IRS immediately says, “Well he isn’t living like that off what he’s declared.” Another thing you always have to think about—giving out lies of affluence. Lies of affluence are the most dangerous. You’ll have the IRS auditing you, you’ll have a lot of people asking you for money.
BOCKRIS: How could you end a bad interview?
BURROUGHS: If I were going to end an interview I’d just say, “Look, I just don’t think we’re communicating. I don’t see any point in continuing. I’m sorry, u
h, go home and do your homework and come back.”
LOOKING FOR IAN
Thursday, August 21, 1975
With Paul Bowles and Ian. Showed them how I could fly. Tried to teach Ian, who was wearing heavy grey lumpy tweed suit. He couldn’t. In plane 30,000 up. They showed me map of landing place. I would fly, they take plane down.
Warm place behind a pine tree.…
—Dream Note from Burroughs’ Retreat Diaries
Ian Sommerville was a young Englishman with whom Burroughs lived and worked for a few years in London in the mid-sixties. He died in a car crash in England on February 5, 1976, a few years after they had separated, on William’s sixty-second birthday. Nobody knows who was driving or what caused the accident.
One evening William asks me to come by at 6:00. He will have to go out at 7:30 with Carl A. to a seance.
“A seance!?”
William has been trying to make contact with Ian and another man called Spence who died violently on Burroughs’ sixty-fifth birthday.
“Yes, Carl knows this medium and I’m trying to get in touch with these two friends of mine.”
Carl comes over. He appears slightly nervous on seeing me until I reassure him that I’m just stopping by for a drink.
The following week Bill visited His Holiness the Dudjom Rinpoche (a Tibetan Buddhist monk) through the auspices of the monk’s social secretary, John Giorno, to seek out the same information. The Dudjom specializes in locating people who have died and informing the interested party as to their well-being.
BURROUGHS: One man was killed by robbers. They called in a rinpoche and he said he couldn’t find him. So then they called the Dudjom and he said, “Well, the trouble is he doesn’t know he’s dead yet. It happened so suddenly.” “Rinpoche” means His Holiness. It’s simply a title. They have a center on the East Side. It’s in a townhouse with several floors; the Dudjom Rinpoche lives there with his two sons, and John stays on the top floor. Another flat on the top floor is now occupied by a visiting lama. John arranges the Dudjom’s appointments and helps take care of his daily needs.
BOCKRIS: Are these attempts to contact dead friends something new?
BURROUGHS: I haven’t attempted it before because I’ve never had any reliable sources. The Dudjom is much more exact in his information than this medium.
BOCKRIS: Do you have any kind of definition of what death is?
BURROUGHS: No. [Impatiently]: Read The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“There is nothing to fear.”
—Burroughs to Ginsberg, Yage Letters
The subject turns to Hitler’s use of amphetamines. “Well, I dunno,” Burroughs opines, “Hitler was an excellent marksman. He would be walking along and a guy used to say, ‘Throw up a snowball!’ They would throw it up. Hitler hauls out his Walther and blam the snowball goes apart in the air.… One thing for sure, no one on speed could do that.”
Suddenly, in the middle of dinner, Burroughs is walking quietly over to a storage area behind a small walk-in closet. He re-emerges carrying a model of an M-16, walks into the middle of the room some six feet away from the table, and posts himself in a shooting stance. He snaps the gun up to his shoulder, aims at the other end of the loft: “Yep! This is what they use,” he announces in a pallid monotone. And for a split-second I get a close up of William Burroughs that knocks me out of my seat.
“Not many writers can survive being burnt alive like Burroughs has. His consequent irony gives his writing an essential distance. For me, Burroughs writes from a distance beyond death,” says Sylvere Lotringer, professor of French Literature at Columbia University, where Burroughs is taught in French, not English.
One night after a reading, four or five of us accompany William to a bar. In a good mood, he loosens up quickly and starts telling stories. “My Uncle Ivy used to be Hitler’s PR man for the Do Business With Germany campaign in the late thirties. He had many conversations with Hitler and he once said, ‘Hitler told me, “I haven’t got anything against the Jews.”’ Old Ivy died four months after that conversation … of a brainnn tumor, you could feel the fuzziness in his voice.”
When Burroughs returned to New York, he had been out of the States for so long his audience had dwindled, and a lot of people thought that, like Kerouac, he had simply died. Others point out that he seems extremely concerned with death, talking and writing about it all the time. “Intellectually concerned,” agrees Grauerholz, “but not personally. He’s in good health, his teeth are in better condition than mine will be when I’m sixty-two, and he hasn’t put on any weight, as you can see. But yes, the drugs did take a lot out of him; his system has had to pay.”
“I may or may not have ten years,” Burroughs has recently written.
Allen Ginsberg tells this story about a dinner in London in 1973. “One night Burroughs and I went to have dinner with Sonia Orwell and the conversation went on and on in that British manner, you know—light and polite—until I said, ‘Let’s talk about something!’ And Sonia Orwell said, ‘Oh, you know Mr. Ginsberg is so American, always wanting to discuss something serious.’ Burroughs leaned forward and said, ‘Well … let’s discuss something serious. Let’s talk about death.’”
FRIDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 31, 1979
I had been invited for dinner with William and Stewart Meyer by John Giorno. I arrived at the Bunker at 6:30 and proceeded to John’s quarters on the third floor. The others were already there. Vodka and tonics were passed around. William had cooked up a batch of majoun in the afternoon and he, John, and Stewart had all eaten some of it. Stewart suggested that I might like some. Bill said, “Perhaps Victor would prefer to wait until after dinner and have it with his dessert.” John hardly said a word during the dinner because the effect of the majoun was so strong he couldn’t speak. (Majoun is a fudge cooked up with marijuana or hashish in it. Each wafer contains an extremely potent dose.) When you eat a piece of majoun you receive the equivalent effect of smoking twenty joints at the same time.
BOCKRIS: It seems very fitting that we should meet on this night. Do you think it’s going to be a crazy night?
BURROUGHS: Something’s bound to happen in Times Square. There’re always atrocities in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
BOCKRIS: Did you see those three grinning youths who were arrested for stabbing people on the subways? There was a big picture of them today, quite good-looking. Were you patrolling the streets at all today?
BURROUGHS: Yes, I was up at the bank on Union Square. But they’re not going up against a very sympathetic court this time. The sentiment is running high against these young criminals; no matter what their age is, I think they’ll get a good stiff sentence. They’re trying juveniles as adults these days and they can get sent away. They don’t get off with this family-court business anymore. They should have a special tough group for these particular strata of criminal. For attempted robbery with violence we have a minimum of five years and treat ’em right, teach ’em! I’m sure New Year’s Eve in Times Square will take its toll. Let’s have a little bet.
BOCKRIS: We’ll each put up ten dollars.
BURROUGHS: I’ll put up ten.
BOCKRIS: Everyone put ten dollars in the kitty and when the reports come through whoever guesses nearest to the correct number wins the pot, right?
BURROUGHS: I WANT A DEATH!
MEYER: Actually there’ll be a lot of violence possibly without a death.
BOCKRIS: I got forty dollars tonight.
MEYER: We’ll all be checking out the paper tomorrow. Are we actually going to call the police department to discover the number?
BURROUGHS: No, we’ll accept the newspapers. What else can we do. Well, of course [chuckling], if you can scrape up an unreported death …
A few hours later, around 10:30, Udo Breger, who picks up the evening’s story in a report he later sent me, arrived at Giorno’s as I was leaving.
UDO BREGER: It is an exceptionally warm soft winter night when we stroll down the Bowery to celebrate New
Year’s Eve. Crossing Prince Street there is Victor already on his way to the next party. All in black. Tight fitting coat. Black woolen cap drawn over his face. Walking stick and little far away eyes. He spins on the spot, bye bye, is off. John Giorno comes downstairs to open up the gate. Soon we’re upstairs and among the first guests of this New Year’s celebration. John’s studio is spacious, a lot of green around, all kinds of plants and small trees. William Burroughs is present, Allen Ginsberg and Fernanda Pivano, his Italian translator from Milan. Angel-eyed Herbert Huncke and Louis Cartwright, Anne Waldman, Lucien Carr and friends. Carl Laszlo and Michael from Basel, accompanied by myself, Soft Need editor Udo Breger. Michael is rather silent and smiles. Carl is very excited about being invited to this party. There are a lot of drinks and a cold buffet. Flashbulbs pop constantly.
It’s just about eleven o’clock. The party is in full swing when everyone suddenly freezes on the spot. Painstruck, Carl has got a piece of meat in the wrong pipe. He can’t breathe and fights it in convulsions. All the guests are struck with terror. If nobody acts right away this man might die.
Louis Cartwright is the first one to act, then Michael instinctively does what’s suggested on posters in the restaurants of Chinatown for “Choking Victims.” He folds his arms tightly around Carl’s waist and pulls back hard. Finally the piece of meat has moved up or down, and this two-minute incident that seemed to last an eternity is over. Carl breathes again and finds some courteous words of excuse.
Carl asks if he could lie down for a while. On the way out to the other apartment downstairs Michael says: “One more minute and I would have cut your throat open to make you breathe.”
Very slowly the conversation picks up again. What kind of curse could it have been that brought Death so close?
Here is a piece of prose, taken from Ah Pook Is Here, that Burroughs often performs at readings:
At this point I put some questions to control. A word about this control. Some years ago in London I contacted two computer programmers who purported to represent something that called itself CONTROL, allegedly from the planet Venus. CONTROL will answer any questions for one dollar. You give your question to the programmers who feed it into a computer some way and out comes the answer. So these are the actual questions that I sent in with my dollars and the answers I got back from CONTROL whoever or whatever CONTROL may or may not be.
With William Burroughs Page 20