The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  The Waste Land is not much different than Burroughs. Burroughs’s method of cut-up and T. S. Eliot’s method [of] collage are practically the same. They both have that montage or collage method that Burroughs calls cut-ups and Eliot got from Apollinaire, which I’ve described as a jump-cut montage, swift moving from one perception to another or one picture to another. I think that the thing that Burroughs and Eliot have most in common is “music down a windy street,” in other words, spare, nostalgic, pungent images that will haunt you with an echo of time past.

  Burroughs learned lots from Eliot’s translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis. I remember that that was one of the books that Burroughs gave me and Kerouac back in 1944 when we first met. If you take a combination of Saint-John Perse and The Waste Land you’ll have much of the nostalgic aftertaste of Burroughs.

  CHAPTER 23

  Burroughs and Queer

  Queer was written right after Junkie, but there was no way it could be published, in fact it wasn’t published for thirty years. In the preface Burroughs talks about how he came to be a writer. It’s actually quite a revelation.

  So I had written Junky, and the motivation for that was comparatively simple: to put down in the most accurate and simple terms my experiences as an addict. I was hoping for publication, money, recognition. Kerouac had published The Town and the City at the time I was writing Junky. I remember writing in a letter to him, when his book was published, that his money and fame were now assured. As you can see, I knew nothing about the writing business at the time.

  My motivations to write Queer were more complex, and are not clear to me at the present time. Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories? While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation. As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage when a weakened virus has created alerted antibodies. So I achieved some immunity from further perilous ventures along these lines by writing my experience down.

  At the beginning of the Queer manuscript fragment, having returned from the insulation of junk to the land of the living like a frantic inept Lazarus, Lee seems determined to score, in the sexual sense of the word. There’s something curiously systematic and unsexual about his quest for a suitable sex object, crossing one prospect after another off a list which seems compiled with ultimate failure in mind. On some very deep level he does not want to succeed {this is Burroughs writing about himself}, but will go to any length to avoid the realization that he is not really looking for sex contact.

  But Allerton was definitely some sort of contact. And what was the contact that Lee was looking for? Seen from here, a very confused concept that had nothing to do with Allerton as a character. While the addict is indifferent to the impression he creates in others, during withdrawal he may feel the compulsive need for an audience, and this is clearly what Lee seeks in Allerton: an audience, the acknowledgement of his performance, which is of course a mask, to cover a shocking disintegration. So he invents a frantic attention-getting format which he calls the Routine: shocking, funny, riveting.117

  Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since it is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not. Lee [Burroughs] is being inexorably pressed through the world of fiction. He’s already made the choice between his life and his work.118

  There’s an odd [moment] in Kerouac and Burroughs and van Gogh and Artaud and Ezra Pound and probably my own writing, and certainly in Kerouac and James Joyce above all, where the identity of the private person merges with his identity as a writer. The person becomes committed to being a writer and that’s what he is in the universe, a scribe, or someone whose action in the world is writing, or art, or painting. Someone whose life and whose writing have merged as one thing. There’s a specific point in Burroughs’s life where his writing and his life suddenly merge, as there was in Kerouac probably around the time he decided to abandon all revision and just write down what was going on in his mind. Where he became completely a writer in the sense of his life became a life of writing. And in a sense the writer Kerouac replaces the person Jack Kerouac, who used to be just a guy who wrote.

  In a sense, what’s happening with Burroughs and with Kerouac, the person has become a shaman, the body of the life has turned prophetic, and the message is coming through that body. The person has dedicated himself to being open to the message with more than just his reason, but with his whole body and his imagination and his dreams. His unconscious life and his everyday life are merged. With Burroughs writing becomes a probe into consciousness, or a probe into depth.

  Burroughs’s preface to Queer is something written recently about a book written thirty years ago.

  When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer’s block like a straitjacket: “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by which one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded.—Painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951.

  I get exactly the same feeling to an almost unbearable degree as I read the manuscript of Queer. The event towards which Lee feels himself inexorably driven is the death of his wife by his own hand, the knowledge of possession, a dead hand waiting to slip over his like a glove. So a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one’s teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind or to one side of them, a presence palpable as a haze.

  Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: “For ugly spirit shot Joan because . . .” A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed—or was it? It doesn’t need to be completed, if you read it: “ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause,” that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. (As if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer.) I mean a definite possessing entity.119

  This is also the parable of hanging, orgasm, possession that appears in Burroughs’s work. A sense of being taken over and invaded and that’s why we have all the images of virus and of addiction, addiction as virus, addiction as a possession, in his books.

  CHAPTER 24

  Burroughs and Naked Lunch

  Naked Lunch was a series of sketches, or fantasies, or routines, that we originally did for our own amusements. They were imaginative leaps and just pure fun. [Burroughs] was in Tangier, taking eukodol, an artificial junk, when he was at the height of producing Naked Lunch. It was [written as] a series of discontinuous sketches. In 1957 Kerouac went to Tangier to help Bill put the whole book together from a big black spring-board binder full of letters and sketches. The problem was, how to separate the letters from the sketches and how to order the routines? How to take Dr. Benway and introduce him and then bring Benway back twice as funny with even more monstrous routines? Appearing over and over, there was a lot of repetition. [Burroughs] would write one routine and then a month later he’d make an improvement on it and so on. It was a vast accumulation of material, a thousand pages at least.

  Kerouac was just about to publish On the Road and had some money so he went to join Bill in Tangier and then Peter Orlovsky and I went to join him. Kerouac went ahead of
us to type up the whole manuscript and find an order to it. Kerouac started typing it, then I arrived and I continued typing, and then a guy named Alan Ansen, who had been secretary to W. H. Auden in Auden’s most fertile period writing The Age of Anxiety, he came. Ansen was a great admirer of Burroughs’s work early on. We all typed routines and put the manuscript together as best we could, but we couldn’t solve the problem of continuity.

  I thought it should be chronological, to show the development of his mind. But that didn’t work and besides he was still adding material. There was a lot of overlapping since he developed the routines and added details over time. It was too hard to take all those versions of the same routine and try to edit them into one single section.

  I left to tour Europe in late 1957 and Burroughs went to Paris where we brought some of it to Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press. Then we got a letter from the Chicago Review at the University of Chicago asking for material from me and from Burroughs and from Kerouac and from Corso and from Orlovsky. We put together a rough sequence of things from Naked Lunch, including the talking asshole [section], and sent about eighty pages of that to the Chicago Review. It was accepted by the editors and printed, but then seized by the university administration [before distribution]. When news of the scandal in Chicago reached Paris, Girodias decided that he wanted to publish Naked Lunch immediately. However, all Burroughs had were these various routines and he still didn’t know how to organize it into a rational continuity, in other words, into a novel.

  At the time Burroughs was working on the manuscript with the painter Brion Gysin, who was living in the same hotel. It was Gysin who suggested to Burroughs that he could solve his problem by seeing the novel not as a linear, chronological progression but as a painter sees a painting, seeing the whole thing at one time as a collage, where all the elements are juxtaposed. They just passed it through the typewriter in whatever order it came and sent them over chapter by chapter to Girodias. Brion looked at it and said, “Well, you know Bill, if you read it this way, it looks as good as any other way.” That’s how it got put together.

  The juxtaposition of these elements was sufficiently illuminating to turn the reader on and the sharp images, routines, comedies, disparate materials that make up Naked Lunch need only be put together in some artistic order, sections didn’t need to be connected. The “Interzone” section doesn’t have to be connected with the Dr. Benway [section] by any kind of a logical order, as if you were taking the reader from New York to Timbuktu and then from Timbuktu to Venus and then from Venus to Tangier, or as Burroughs said, “I’m not American Express.” The novelist is not American Express, he doesn’t need to provide the reader with a ticket from one place to another, he just presents the places and the reader can juxtapose these places.

  CHAPTER 25

  Burroughs and the Cut-Up Method

  Around 1960, much had been stirring with Burroughs in Europe relating to his idea of cut-ups. The first published evidence of it was a pamphlet put out in Paris, a collaboration between him, Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, [Sinclair Beiles,] and myself called Minutes to Go. I was in South America at the time, but I thought that this cut-up thing was a little bit too frivolous and mechanical. It was inorganic and I figured that in order to get to unity of being or supreme reality or total consciousness it had to be organic.

  I was not able to detach the words from the things. Actually it was a challenge to cut up “Howl,” which I would have been smart to do way back then. But I felt that the cut-up lacked sufficient reverence for literature, it was too heartless. When Corso objected to the cut-up and said, “My poetry is a natural cut-up,” I thought ah-ha, the poet’s got it over these rationalistic cut-uppers. I figured there was an element of impersonal heartless Raskolnik intellect at work.

  I think “Interzone” is the essence of Burroughs, it’s his acme [of] writing. It’s a natural cut-up, a cut-up of time, space, various civilizations, and different biological life-forms. “Interzone” is his primary vision in a way and that’s developed throughout the rest of his books. Burroughs’s notion of cut-up was a spiritual notion in the sense that it was a consequence of his previous searches for enlargement of consciousness and attempts to get away from language. He wanted to get outside of the prison of language and also wanted to get beyond the senses, beyond all thoughts, feelings, and apparent sensory impressions. That was his phrase. He wanted to cut out of reality as we are conditioned to understand reality, out beyond the senses to a place open, blue, like the skies, silent, outside of the body where there are no forms. That was the spiritual or mental ambition behind the cut-up principle. It was the presupposition that all of our sensory impressions were conditioned by language and by the thought forms we grew up with. He began suspecting paranoically (or non-paranoically) that these apparent sensory impressions were programmed into our bodies.

  His first attempt was to trace back along the word lines to find out how the words had first appeared and been inserted into our consciousness. He assumed that all of reality, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, was some sort of hallucination or maya and that behind maya was some kind of empty, unthreatening, open space and that the actual existence of the body and the senses was some kind of plot. He had various theories as to who the senders were. In Naked Lunch there’s a great political division between the factualists, like Burroughs himself, investigating the senses, the facts; the divisionists, who want to replicate themselves and have dummy images of themselves everywhere so that if they’re traveling in foreign countries they’ll always have some friends; and the liquifactionists, who want to liquidate everybody who isn’t like them, who want to liquidate all opposition.

  Burroughs suspected that the entire fabric of reality as we know it is completely conditioned and he began suspecting that the conditioners, the people who were behind the conditioning, were running the entire universe. It is somewhat like an engineer running a sound studio with lots of tape machines and film. It was a question of exploring along word lines and picture lines, in other words, tracing the words that you use and are implanted in your brain, tracing them back to where you first heard those words or where those words and images were coined, to find [the source of] the image bank and who’s in control of it. He thought that maybe all senses, all visual impressions, are superimposed on us.

  This was very serious as a political proposition. I remember once arriving in Tangier and having to undergo Burroughs’s interrogation as to who I was representing. He could detect certain parts of my father or certain parts of Columbia University in intonations of my voice and words and attitudes. It was interesting, but it was a little difficult to see old friend Bill looking at me as if I were a robot sent out to check him out. He assumed that everybody was an agent at that point, not necessarily from the government, but actually an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy. Women were suspect as being some evil Kali mother figures and at one point Burroughs thought maybe you ought to exterminate all the women, just get rid of them all, let them drop off like an unwanted appendage and evolve a male that could give birth. It was just a theory, but typical Burroughs. Kerouac used to appreciate that quality of Burroughs as sort of Faustian experiment, willing to experiment and explore ideas to the extreme, like get rid of all women and see what’ll happen.

  Minutes to Go and The Exterminator were notions that Burroughs developed a few years later into Nova Express. Nova is an exploding sun. Burroughs theorized that the purpose of all the hallucinations being laid out was that the planet was being prepared for a takeover by a virus-like form which didn’t need people. So the virus had entered the human body as language. Language itself was the virus or the vector for the virus. It was mind-blowing.

  Burroughs’s thinking is parallel to the Buddhists’, except that Burroughs has this trust of giant feminine insects from another galaxy. He’s trying to put the blame somewhere in the external universe for this fix that we’re all in, whereas the Buddhist view i
s that we created the whole thing ourselves. They both require strenuous alertness and attention and examination minute to minute, thought by thought, image by image of the entire fabric of appearance and phenomenon. Whether you’re a Buddhist or an atheist or a Burroughsian, you still can’t get away from examining the entire fabric of reality.

  Minutes to Go meant that there are only minutes to go before the atomic explosion that would create nova conditions on this planet. It would be a disturbance on this planet that would extend to the sun if the manipulators had their way. There would be an actual nova in our solar system. At that time there was a great deal of anxiety about the bomb exploding, which was reflected in Burroughs’s consciousness (exaggerated and hypersensitized perhaps).

  In Minutes to Go or The Exterminator you’ll see the first experiments with the raw material of cut-up. Here is the first notion of tracing along the word lines. If you want to find out where these ideas got implanted on earth or into you, you trace back along the lines of the words, historically, to find out who the ultimate authors of these words were.

  Tracing along the word lines, he began examining notions of God and language. In Genesis, remember, “In the beginning was the word.” Burroughs wondered who said that? Who laid that trip down? He took a Gnostic interpretation of that opening sentence, “In the beginning was the word,” and his conclusion was “rub out the word.” If you examine Gnostic versions of the Bible and the word and the Garden of Eden you’ll find parallel notions to Burroughs’s exterminating angel idea. In the beginning of The Exterminator you’ll find that these are among the first and earliest explanations of cut-ups.