VB: He was right there in the room?
WB: No, right in me. He’s not just wandering around—he was in me. Genet, Genet, Genet. Oh!
JG: I am born. “Genet” means “I am born” in French.
WB: That’s true, but I just had such a tremendous feeling of his spiritual presence. Wow!
JG: William, if Genet has come into you tonight, can we interview him for just a few questions?
WB: [formally] Well, of course. Go ahead.
JG: Monsieur Genet, what is the meaning of this sentence: “There was me and there was the French language. I put one into the other and …”
WB: [as Genet] “C’est fini. That was all that I could do. I could take myself and I could put myself into the French language. It is the only language I could put myself in, just as I could only have been a French thief. And when I had done that I had done everything that I could do.” [reverts to himself] He died in a hotel. He always lived in sort of this anonymous …
VB: Do you have a good memory?
WB: Yes, I have an almost photographic memory.
VB: Even going back fifty years you have vivid images of particular events?
WB: Wait a minute, this isn’t quite true. Some instances I’ll remember very clearly, and others I will not remember at all. My memory for years back is much better than my recent memory. This is my earliest conscious memory: I came down the stairs and there was a mirror and I was three years old and I said to the mirror, “Three, three.” There was another one, I don’t know if it was earlier or later, drinking Whistle in the backyard and it was very hot. I remember the taste of Whistle. I can see the Whistle bottle.
JG: So if I got you a bottle of Whistle today you might, like Proust, have a real flashback.
WB: I doubt it. It was just … it wouldn’t be the same Whistle. [Eyes hooded, with a tranquil expression, William looks as if he is seeing something very far away and dimly lit. He hums.] Whistle, Whistle, Whistle, Whistle. Yes.
This interview with William Burroughs was originally published in Interview magazine Vol. XXII No. 4 April 1991. Copyright © 1991 Victor Bockris and William Burroughs.
IDENTIFICATION CHART
DON BACHARDY is an artist who has done portraits and drawings of Burroughs and James Grauerholz, among many other subjects. For many years he shared a house in Los Angeles with Christopher Isherwood.
PETER BEARD is an anthropologist and photographer who has produced several documentary films and books on Africa, specifically The End of the Game. He has known Burroughs for some time in London and New York.
VICTOR BOCKRIS is a writer and photographer. He has written portraits and biographies of numerous leading figures in the worlds of sports, the arts, music, and literature. He is currently writing the biography of Patti Smith and the autobiography of John Cale. He lives in New York City where he continues to focus on the entertainment industry in all its guises.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE represents two people, Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie. I worked with Wylie as an interview team called Bockris-Wylie and we were referred to as an individual from 1973 to 1975. When I first met Burroughs in 1974 I was part of Bockris-Wylie, and it was as Bockris-Wylie that I first interviewed him. Andrew Wylie is an internationally famous literary agent.
UDO BREGER is a writer in Basel, Switzerland. He is the editor of a magazine called Soft Need.
ANDREAS BROWN is the proprietor of The Gotham Book Mart in New York City, and is a friend of Burroughs.
RAYMOND FOYE was an interviewer from Search and Destroy (San Francisco), under the pseudonym Ray Rumor when he interviewed Burroughs. He has worked with Ferlinghetti on City Lights projects and is currently living in New York and Woodstock, where he continues his activities as an archivist, chronicler, and editor.
PAUL GETTY, JR. [the notorious one-eared grandson of the late oil billionaire] has known Burroughs in London, New York, and Los Angeles for some years. William always rather fondly called him “Young Paul.”
ALLEN GINSBERG is the most famous poet in the world. His friendship with Burroughs, which has been a mainstay of the latter’s career, continues to be the longest standing collaborative-relationship in Bill’s life.
JOHN GIORNO is a writer and performer who runs his own record label, Giorno Poetry Systems. He has produced many of Burroughs records. He lived in Burroughs’ building on a different floor and was a regular guest at his table. Giorno, at William’s request, holds the Bunker at all costs and continues to work closely with Burroughs and Grauerholz. He is a practicing Buddhist and runs the AIDS Treatment Program from 222 Bowery, New York, New York.
MAURICE GIRODIAS was the French publisher who ran The Olympia Press in the late fifties and early sixties. Lolita, Candy, and Naked Lunch are among the many works published by him at that time. He died in Paris in the early nineties after successfully publishing his autobiography.
JEFF GOLDBERG is a science writer.
JAMES GRAUERHOLZ is William Burroughs’ amanuensis. Grauerholz is from Coffeyville, Kansas. As a teenager, he corresponded with both Ginsberg and Burroughs after discovering their work. His arrival in New York coincided with Burroughs’ arrival from London. In early 1974, the night Grauerholz arrived, Allen Ginsberg suggested he contact Burroughs, who shortly thereafter offered him a place to stay while he was in town. They soon started working together and Grauerholz became William’s full-time secretary, organizing appearances, dealing with finances, contracts and mail, aiding in the production of pieces and arranging William’s social schedule. In early 1979, after producing the Nova Convention with John Giorno and Sylvere Lotringer, James moved back to Lawrence, Kansas. Burroughs joined him there in 1982. They have continued to work together with ever greater success.
DEBORAH HARRY is a very successful singer, songwriter, and actress. She is the lead singer of Blondie and The Jazz Passengers.
RICHARD HELL is a songwriter, singer, poet, and movie star whose classic “Blank Generation” was punk rock’s American National Anthem. He recently published his first novel, Go Now, (Scribners).
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD was a novelist whose portraits of Berlin made him famous in the thirties. He moved to the United States on the eve of World War II and lived in Los Angeles. He was an advocate of the Gay Rights Movement throughout the seventies and helped introduce a finer understanding of Eastern religion through books on Ramakrishna and his own guru. He died in the 1980s.
FRED JORDAN was an editor at Grove Press for two decades. He was also managing editor of the Evergreen Review. He continues to work in publishing.
ANDRE LEON-TALLY lives in Paris where he works for Condé Nast and is a leading trendsetter.
SYLVERE LOTRINGER is a professor of French Literature at Columbia and the editor of Semiotexte. He was the originator of the concept of the Nova Convention.
GERARD MALANGA is a poet and photographer. He has published numerous books of poetry here and in Europe and shown his photographs in galleries across the world. He is also a social historian and commentator whose ability to operate in the deepest basements of literature and the highest towers of fashion has provided him with a wide angle to view his subjects through. In the 1990s his photographs have been published in numerous books. He lives in New York City.
LEGS MCNEIL is a leading writer on New York’s New Wave scene. He started Punk Magazine with John Holmstrom and then created and managed America’s new number one hitmakers, Shrapnel. In 1996 his first book, Please Kill Me, was published to wide acclaim.
STEWART MEYER is a fiction writer and regular guest at Burroughs’s table. His novel The Lotus Crew is a classic in its own time.
MILES [his first name is Barry but everyone just calls him by his surname, Miles] is a pop historian, archivist, rare book dealer, magazine editor, and author of numerous cultural reports. He lives in London and France. A bibliography of Burroughs, co-written by Miles and Joe Maynard, was published by the University of Virginia Press, 1978, and his Catalogue of the William Burroughs Archive was published b
y Covent Garden Editions in London, 1974. His biographies of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs have established him as the leading international authority on the Beats.
GLENN O’BRIEN is one of the most successful writers in New York City. He writes for many magazines and advertising for Barneys, Calvin Klein etc., as well as being a consultant at Island Records. He is among the leading authorities on the New York music scene and has worked closely with many of the bell-wethers of our times, including Tom Forcade, Jann Wenner, and Andy Warhol.
PETER ORLOVSKY is a poet in his own right.
LOU REED is the William Burroughs of Rock and Roll, who has often investigated similar landscapes in his lyrics to those Burroughs covers in his novels. Among his greatest works are “Berlin,” “Coney Island Baby,” “Street Hassle,” and “Growing Up in Public.” He has recently added the great trilogy “New York,” “Songs for Drella,” and “Magic and Loss” to his ever-growing seminal oeuvre.
MARCIA RESNICK, who took the cover photograph for this book, is among the leading photographers on the New York scene. Her book, Re-Visions, won her acclaim in the 1970s. Her upcoming book, Bad Boys, will do the same for her in the 1990s.
NICOLAS ROEG is an English filmmaker whose productions range from Performance and Walkabout in the sixties, through Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth in the seventies and Bad Timing in the eighties. He continues to be among the most vital, creative filmmakers of these times.
PATTI SMITH burst into prominence as a singer and writer around the time that Burroughs returned to New York. She subsequently became friendly with him and he has attended a number of her concerts and appreciated her work. She has spoken publicly of the importance of his work in making her work possible. After a fifteen-year sabbatical, in which she married and had two children, Patti Smith has recently returned to the world of music and literature with the album, Gone Again and the book The Coral Sea. Like Burroughs himself, she stands as one of the seminal figures of her time.
SUSAN SONTAG is the author of many novels, including The Benefactor and Death Kit. Her other books include collections of essays: Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will; On Photography; I, etcetera, and Illness as Metaphor. She has written and directed three films: Duet for Cannibals [1969], Brother Carl [1971], and Promised Lands [1974]. Sontag continues in the nineties to be among the most relevant, active minds of her generation.
TERRY SOUTHERN was the American novelist who put laughter back into sex in the sixties. An outstanding man of letters and brilliant screenwriter and storyteller, he was a long-time confrere of Burroughs’ and great companion in adventure. Burroughs always laughs when he mentions Southern. Southern and Burroughs together could almost have been a vaudeville team. Terry Southern’s death in 1995 was among the saddest denouements of this volume. His was a distinct, moving, passionate voice that guided many of us through the grim spectacle of the fall of America.
CHRIS STEIN was the lead guitarist and musical whiz-kid collaborator on the concept of Blondie, the rock band starring his girlfriend Deborah Harry. In between writing international number one hit singles and performing around the world, he was the guest host on Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, produced The Lounge Lizards and Walter Stedding, and takes photographs, many of which appeared in Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie.
ANNE WALDMAN is a poet and literary organizer who has worked with Burroughs at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and in many performances in the United States and Europe. Her work has received widespread acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s, and she is considered to be among the most influential, lasting American poets of the post–World War II period.
ANDY WARHOL was the greatest and most famous American artist of the post–World War II era. His worldwide influence has still not been fully digested, but when it is his critics may stop their stunted carping. He was also the greatest man, apart from Burroughs, I have ever met. He died in 1987. Those who knew him will always miss him.
CARL WEISSNER is a German writer and translator. He is responsible for translating most of the Beat literature in German and is Burroughs’s translator. He is a brilliant catalyst on the German literary scene.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, the great playwright, often quoted long passages of Burroughs at the drop of a hat. They knew each other since meeting in Tangier in the 1950s. The conversations included here were taped by Burroughs for a piece he was doing about Williams after a Broadway production. Tennessee Williams died tragically in the 1980s.
INDEX
A., Carl, 197
Ah Pook Is Here (Burroughs), 202
Ali, Muhammad, xxii–xxiii, 217
American Field Service, xxi
American Institute of Arts and Letters, 19
Angel in the Alcove, The (Williams), 109
Anslinger, Harry, 11, 111–12
Apocalypse Now (film), 192–93
Asher, Peter, 72
Asimov, Isaac, 218
Auden, Elsa Mann, 41
Auden, W. H., 41, 50
Autobiography of a Wolf, The (Burroughs), xvii, xxii
Bacall, Lauren, 126
Bachardy, Don, 90–91
Balch, Anthony, 70, 75, 76, 220
Ballard J. G., 79
Bangs, Lester, xv
Barnes, Djuna, 42
Barris, Chuck, 120–21
Basquait, Jean, Michel, xiv, xv
Baudelaire, Charles, xx, 16, 100, 101, 194
Baum, Timothy, 160–61
Beach, Mary, 42
Beard, Peter, 108, 135, 148
Beatles, the, 72, 172
Beautiful and the Damned, The (film script), 119
Beauvoir, Simone de, 15
Beckett, Samuel, 3, 15, 132, 152, 207–15, 224
Bellow, Saul, 130
Benedict, Ruth, 170
Billy (Strieber), 242
Billy the Kid, 192, 193
Biological Time Bomb, The (Taylor), 106
Birthday Book on Bill (Bockris), 153
Black, Jack, xx–xxi
Bowie, David, 228–30
Bowie, Colonel James, 229–30
Bowles, Jane, 42, 49–50
Bowles, Paul, 50, 63, 109, 110, 197
Bradbury, Ray, 218
Brando, Marlon, 192
Breger, Udo, 158, 201–3
Brezhnev, Leonid, 38, 172
“Brian Jones Plays with the Pipes of Pan” (recording), 219
Brighton Rock (Greene), 12
Brookner, Howard, xiii
Brown, Andreas, 78
Brown, Jerry, 126–27
Bryant, Anita, 179
Bucher, Francis, 231
“Bugger the Queen” (Burroughs), xii
“Bunker Mafia,” xii–xiii, xiv
Burgess, Anthony, 74
“Burroughs” (documentary), xiii
Burroughs, Ilse, 41–42
Burroughs, Mortimer (William’s father), xvii, xviii, xx
Burroughs, Mrs. Mortimer (William’s mother), xvii, xviii, xx, 27
Burroughs, Mortimer, Jr., (William’s brother, xvii, xviii
Burroughs, William, Jr., 136
Calder, John, 26, 207, 210, 213
Carr, Lucien, 201
Carter, Jimmy, 172
Carter, Rubin Hurricane, 34
Cartwright, Louis, 210
Cassady, Carolyn, 121–22
Cassady, Neal, 121–26
“Cassandra” (Robinson), 168–69
Cat Inside, The (Burroughs), 248
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 15–16, 21
Céline, Mme. Louis-Ferdinand, 15
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 19–20, 130, 149, 151, 156, 167, 171, 174–76, 192–93
Chappaqua (Rooks), 8
Cities of the Red Night (Burroughs), ix, xiv, xxiii, 2, 11, 14, 32–34, 87, 135–36, 158
City College of New York (CCNY), 77, 135
City of Night (Rechy), 18
Clash, the, 228
Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess), 74
&nb
sp; Cocteau, Jean, 14–15, 53, 110
Colacello, Bob, xiv
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 110
Colette, 42
Columbia University, 198
Communion (Strieber), 242
Connell, A. J., 56
Conrad, Joseph, 16, 23, 46, 84, 192
Cook, Peter, 218–19
Corso, Gregory, 15, 152–53
Cronenberg, David, xv
Crowley, Aleister, 116
Cummings, Anne (Felicity Mason), 42
Dali, Salvador, 217
Dalton, David, 220, 222
Davis (Los Angeles police chief), 11
Day of the Jackal, The (Forsyth), 167
De Gaulle, Charles, 167
De Quincey, Thomas, 110
Dean, James, 127, 221
Dean, Loomis, 195
Derringer, Liz, 222, 223
Deutsches (student leader), 6
Dewey, John, 170
Didion, Joan, 42
Donovan, Bill, xxi
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 170
Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S., 107
Drugstore Cowboy (Van Sant), xv
Dunbar, John, 72
Dudjom Rinpoche, 197–98, 204
Duncan, Robert, 152, 214
Dunne, J. W., 140
Dunsany, Lord, 117
Dylan, Bob, 34, 35
Eberhardt, Isabelle, 42
Edinburgh Literary Conference (1962), 127
“Eleanor Rigby” (song), 72
Eliot, T. S., 93
Elovich, Richard, 133
Elvins, Kells, 51
Encyclopedia of Occultism (Spence), 185–86
Endgame (Beckett), 213
Esquire magazine, 16, 24
Evans, Mary, xvii–xviii
Experiment with Time (Dunne), 140
Exterminator (Burroughs), 32, 38, 76
Eyelids of Morning (Beard), 135
Factory, The, 17, 35, 162–65, 203, 220
Faithful, Marianne, 72, 73
Faulkner, William, 233
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 174
Federal Narcotics Bureau, 109
Film Notebooks (film), 35
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 21
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 100, 119–20
With William Burroughs Page 25