Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Everybody paid and walked out leaving the loud-mouthed character yelling “Viva el Partido Conservador!” to an empty house.

  As Ever, Bill

  May 23 Lima

  Dear Al,

  Enclose a routine I dreamed up. The idea did come to me in a dream from which I woke up laughing—

  Rolled for $200 in traveller’s checks. No loss really as American Express refunds. Recovering from a bout of Pisco neuritis, and Doc has taken a lung X-ray. First Caqueta malaria, then Esmeraldas grippe, now Pisco neuritis—(Pisco is local liquor. Seems to be poison)—can’t leave Lima until neuritis clears up.

  May 24

  Ho hum dept. Rolled again. My glasses and a pocket knife. Losing all my fucking valuables in the service.

  This is nation of kleptomaniacs. In all my experience as a homosexual I have never been the victim of such idiotic pilferings of articles of no conceivable use to anyone else. Glasses and traveller’s checks yet.

  Trouble is I share with the late Father Flanagan—he of Boy’s Town—the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.

  Got to lay off the juice. Hand shaking so I can hardly write. Must cut short.

  Love, Bill

  ROOSEVELT AFTER INAUGURATION

  Immediately after the Inauguration Roosevelt appeared on the White House balcony dressed in the purple robes of a Roman Emperor and, leading a blind toothless lion on a gold chain, hog-called his constituents to come and get their appointments. The constituents rushed up grunting and squealing like the hogs they were.

  An old queen known to the Brooklyn Police as “Jerk Off Annie,” was named to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so that the younger staff officers were subject to unspeakable indignities in the lavatories of the Pentagon, to avoid which many set up field latrines in their offices.

  To a transvestite lizzie went the post of Congressional Librarian. She immediately barred the male sex from the premises—a world-famous professor of philology suffered a broken jaw at the hands of a bull dyke when he attempted to enter the Library. The Library was given over to Lesbian orgies, which she termed the Rites of the Vested Virgins.

  A veteran panhandler was appointed Secretary of State, and disregarding the dignity of his office, solicited nickels and dimes in the corridors of the State Department.

  “Subway Slim” the lush worker assumed the office of Under Secretary of State and Chief of Protocol, and occasioned diplomatic rupture with England when the English Ambassador “came up on him”—lush worker term for a lush waking up when you are going through his pockets—at a banquet in the Swedish Embassy.

  Lonny the Pimp became Ambassador-at-Large, and went on tour with fifty “secretaries,” exercising his despicable trade.

  A female impersonator, known as “Eddie the Lady,” headed the Atomic Energy Commission, and enrolled the physicists into a male chorus which was booked as “The Atomic Kids.”

  In short, men who had gone grey and toothless in the faithful service of their country were summarily dismissed in the grossest terms—like “You’re fired you old fuck. Get your piles outa here.”—and in many cases thrown bodily out of their offices. Hoodlums and riffraff of the vilest caliber filled the highest offices of the land. To mention only a few of his scandalous appointments:

  Secretary of the Treasury: “Pantopon Mike,” an old-time schmecker.

  Head of the FBI: A Turkish Bath attendant and specialist in unethical massage.

  Attorney General: A character known as “The Mink,” a peddler of used condoms and a short-con artist.

  Secretary of Agriculture: “Catfish Luke,” the wastrel of Cuntville, Alabama, who had been drunk twenty years on paregoric and lemon extract.

  Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s: “Blubber Wilson,” who hustled his goofball money shaking down fetishists in shoe stores.

  Postmaster General: “The Yen Pox Kid,” an old-time junky and con man on the skids. Currently working a routine known as “Taking It Off the Eye”—you plant a fake cataract in the savage’s eye (savage is con man for sucker)—cheapest trick in the industry.

  When the Supreme Court overruled some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile rout, Roosevelt forced that august body, one after the other, on threat of immediate reduction to the rank of Congressional Lavatory Attendants, to submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon; so that venerable, honored men surrendered themselves to the embraces of a lecherous snarling simian, while Roosevelt and his strumpet wife and the veteran brown-nose Harry Hopkins, smoking a communal hookah of hashish, watched the lamentable sight with cackles of obscene laughter. Justice Blackstrap succumbed to a rectal hemorrhage on the spot, but Roosevelt only laughed and said coarsely, “Plenty more where that came from.”

  Hopkins, unable to control himself, rolled on the floor in sycophantic convulsions, saying over and over “You’re killin’ me, Chief. You’re killin’ me.”

  Justice Hockactonsvol had both ears bitten off by the simian, and when Chief Justice Howard P. Herringbone asked to be excused, pleading his piles, Roosevelt told him brutally, “Best thing for piles is a baboon’s prick up the ass. Right Harry?”

  “Right Chief. I use no other. You heard what the man said. Drop your moth-eaten ass over that chair and show the visiting simian some Southern hospitality.”

  Roosevelt then appointed the baboon to replace Justice Blackstrap, “diseased.”

  “I’ll have to remember that one boss,” said Hopkins, breaking into loud guffaws.

  So henceforth the proceedings of the Court were carried on with a screeching simian shitting and pissing and masturbating on the table and not infrequently leaping on one of the Justices and tearing him to shreds.

  “He is entering a vote of dissent,” Roosevelt would say with an evil chuckle. The vacancies so created were invariably filled by simians, so that, in the course of time, the Supreme Court came to consist of nine purple-assed baboons; and Roosevelt, claiming to be the only one able to interpret their decisions, thus gained control of the highest tribunal in the land.

  He then set himself to throw off the restraints imposed by Congress and the Senate. He loosed innumerable crabs and other vermin in both houses. He had a corps of trained idiots who would rush in at a given signal and shit on the floor, and hecklers equipped with a brass band and fire hoses. He instituted continuous repairs. An army of workmen trooped through the Houses, slapping the solons in the face with boards, spilling hot tar down their necks, dropping tools on their feet, undermining them with air hammers; and finally he caused a steam shovel to be set up on the floors, so that the recalcitrant solons were either buried alive or drowned when the Houses flooded from broken water mains. The survivors attempted to carry on in the street, but were arrested for loitering and were sent to the workhouse like common bums. After release they were barred from office on the grounds of their police records.

  Then Roosevelt gave himself over to such vile and unrestrained conduct as is shameful to speak of. He instituted a series of contests designed to promulgate the lowest acts and instincts of which the human species is capable. There was a Most Unsavory Act Contest, a Cheapest Trick Contest, Molest a Child Week, Turn In Your Best Friend Week—professional stool pigeons disqualified—and the coveted title of All-Around Vilest Man of the Year. Sample entries: The junky who stole an opium suppository out of his grandmother’s ass; the ship captain who put on women’s clothes and rushed into the first lifeboat; the vice-squad cop who framed people, planting an artificial prick in their fly.

  Roosevelt was convulsed with such hate for the species as it is, that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition. He could endure only the extremes of human behavior. The average, the middle-aged (he viewed middle age as a condition with no relation to chronological age), the middle-class, the bureaucrat filled him with loathing. One of his first acts was to burn every record in Washington; thousands of bureaucrats threw themselves into the flames.

  “I’ll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate,” he
would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.

  INTERZONE

  interzone

  by james grauerholz

  William Burroughs took a steamer to Rome in late December 1953, but after only a few weeks in Rome he moved on to Tangier, Morocco, where he knew Paul Bowles lived. Burroughs had read The Sheltering Sky, and from that book and Gore Vidal’s The Judgement of Paris he had heard about the permissive environment for Western hashish smokers and boy-lovers in this partitioned city. Tangier was jointly ruled by military forces of the postwar governments of France, England, Spain, and the United States; this “International Zone” would mutate in Burroughs’ work into “Interzone,” the setting for some of his most prophetic writing.

  Soon after his arrival in Tangier, Burroughs turned forty. He continued writing: long letters to Ginsberg, some sent, others not; journals and notes; story sketches; pieces intended for sale to magazines (none were sold). He was introduced to Bowles, but the two writers did not hit it off at first. He met Kiki, a Spanish boy who offered him uncomplicated friendship and sex, for a small price. Burroughs was relieved, after his disastrous pursuits of Anderson and Marker, to have a new amigo in his life. He was also readdicted to junk; Kiki helped him to kick in the spring, just in time for a visit from his old friend Kells Elvins.

  Burroughs longed for a new romantic beginning with Ginsberg. They corresponded often; in the fall, Burroughs conceived a plan to visit Ginsberg, who was living in San Francisco. He traveled in September to New York, then spent two months in Palm Beach with his parents and Billy, now seven. While he was in Florida, Burroughs was devastated to receive a letter from Ginsberg, who had decided not to receive him in California. The San Francisco trip was canceled, and Burroughs retreated to Tangier.

  Still writing, and hooked again, Burroughs began sending Ginsberg the early pages of what he called Interzone, expanding upon the short sketches that were published years later in “Lee’s Journals”: an ongoing first-person account of his habits and cures, routines and table talk, amidst the chaos of that summer’s Arab nationalist riots in Tangier. Also at this time he met his great collaborator, Brion Gysin—although at first Burroughs was not especially taken with him. Gysin was a painter and restaurateur whom Burroughs associated with Tangier’s uppity queens; Gysin’s restaurant, The 1001 Nights, featured dancing boys and the “Master Musicians” from the Moroccan highlands of Joujouka. Burroughs was also initially unimpressed by Gysin’s paintings, which he saw at an exhibition soon after arriving in Tangier.

  Ginsberg was still in San Francisco, where he had met the teenaged poet Peter Orlovsky, and they were in love. Their partnership would continue, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of their lives. In the early years they were almost always seen together, often naked in public or in photographs, like revolutionary queer newlyweds. With renewed energy, Ginsberg composed Howl, and performed it for the first time in October 1955 at the now-legendary Six Gallery reading. A big part of the poem’s initial impact was the poet’s open homosexuality. Ginsberg was soon offered publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and publisher in San Francisco whose City Lights Books was already a flagship of new poetry and fiction. The “Pocket Poets” edition of Howl was published in summer 1956.

  Meanwhile, in May, Burroughs went to London for treatment by Dr. John Yerbury Dent, an innovative physician who offered an “apomorphine cure” for addiction. This treatment left a lasting impression on Burroughs as the best drug cure yet, and he later developed it into a metaphor for liberation from other forms of addiction. Burroughs joined Alan Ansen in Venice; as before, with his drug habit removed, Burroughs’ drinking got out of control. Ansen’s own situation in Venice became delicate, too—his promiscuous boy-chasing had apparently drawn the authorities’ attention.

  Back in Tangier in late 1956, Burroughs made his literary breakthrough. He was off junk, physically fit, often rowing a boat in the harbor, and writing madly. This is the notorious period of the chaotic typed pages that Paul Bowles described as being scattered on every surface, scuffed with heel marks, all over the floor—as Burroughs rushed from ashtray to ashtray, puffing on multiple kif cigarettes and reading hilariously from his new routines. He called this wild, incantatory work of compulsive obscenity his “Word Hoard”—or alternatively, “WORD”—and he was unleashing it as fast as he could.

  Jack Kerouac had been living in Mexico City, using narcotics with Old Dave Tesorero and Dave’s junky girlfriend, Esperanza; Kerouac later called her “Tristessa” in his novella of the same name. Kerouac arrived in Tangier in February 1957 with the news that Old Dave had suddenly keeled over and died on the sidewalk in Mexico City. Kerouac read and discussed Burroughs’ “Interzone” manuscript with him, and retyped large portions of it, sharing his keyboard prowess as a favor to his old friend; Kerouac later reported he had many nightmares during this period. He also offered Burroughs a new title for the book: Naked Lunch. But Kerouac’s neuroses eventually began to annoy Burroughs again, and Jack left Tangier in late April.

  Just as Kerouac departed, Ginsberg arrived, with his new boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. Burroughs was jealous and annoyed, but he took pains to show indifference. Alan Ansen was also in Tangier, and he and Ginsberg took a keen interest in Burroughs’ manuscripts. Together they did much collating and typing, creating the next draft of Naked Lunch. Before summer, Paul Bowles was back in town, and all of them were spending time with him and his wife, Jane Bowles, and the painter Francis Bacon. The season of “the Beats in Tangier” was soon over, and Ginsberg and Orlovsky left in late June to travel through Spain; Ansen had already departed. Kells Elvins was now living in Copenhagen, and Burroughs spent the month of August with Elvins and his third wife, working on the “Freelandia” section of his book, satirizing what he felt was the oppressive sterility of Scandinavian socialism.

  Kerouac’s novel On the Road, written six years earlier, was finally published in the U.S. by Viking Press at this time, and the book caused an immediate literary sensation. In this context, with Ginsberg’s Howl already a succés d’estime, Burroughs set his literary sights higher than before. Ginsberg, visiting Paris, offered Burroughs’ book to Maurice Girodias, whose censorshipdefying, English-language Olympia Press seemed a likely publisher; but Girodias refused to deal with the tattered manuscript. When Burroughs returned to Tangier in September 1957, he learned that Kiki had been stabbed to death in Madrid by a jealous lover, and that Bill Garver had died in Mexico of malnutrition and drug abuse. In January, Burroughs went to Paris to meet Ginsberg, and he took a room in the hotel where Ginsberg and Orlovsky, and the young New York poet Gregory Corso, were staying, at no. 9, rue Git-le-Coeur: the “Beat Hotel,” as it later came to be known.

  Paris in 1958 was the beginning of Burroughs’ annus mirabilis. He was writing steadily on Naked Lunch. With Ginsberg and Corso as his companions, he met Marcel Duchamp and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, among other notable figures. After Ginsberg left Paris that summer, Burroughs continued to spend time with Corso, who introduced him to a brilliant, eccentric distant cousin of the Rothschild banking family, a wheelchair-bound neurasthenic named Jacques Stern. Together they built up a new drug habit, and in October, Burroughs and Stern went to Dr. Dent’s clinic in London for the apomorphine cure. In the course of this trip, they had a falling-out, a rift which was not repaired for two decades.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti had declined Burroughs’ chaotic manuscript, but the poet Robert Creeley, an editor at Black Mountain Review, published a portion of it in March 1958—a month before Irving Rosenthal and the University of Chicago students who edited the Chicago Review planned to publish more excerpts. The Chicago group reaped the whirlwind when a local conservative journalist raised such an outcry that the next issue of the Review, which included chapters from Naked Lunch, was impounded by university trustees. Widespread resignations from the magazine followed, and Irving Rosenthal and his associates independently published the material in the first issue of Big Table a
year later.

  Brion Gysin moved into the Beat Hotel in November 1958. He had lost his Tangier restaurant the year before, in a tangle with some early members of the Scientology cult. Now Gysin was painting and exhibiting in Paris. Ginsberg later commented that he found Gysin “too paranoid” when they met in 1961, but Burroughs was becoming progressively more paranoid in his worldview, and Burroughs and Gysin soon became inseparable. Gysin had attended the Sorbonne, and his work had first been exhibited with the Surrealists in 1935 in Paris. He knew his way around Paris, he knew “tout le monde,” and with his unequaled gift as a raconteur, Gysin propelled Burroughs to a new plateau of independence and competence. Together they formed a “third mind.”

  In April 1959 Burroughs ventured back to Tangier, but he was quickly in trouble with the authorities, due to information given up by a small-time English thief of Burroughs’ acquaintance named Paul Lund. After Morocco’s independence in 1956, there were outbursts of nationalistic frenzy and xenophobia in the streets. Burroughs made his way back to Paris within the month. In Chicago, Big Table 1 was finally published, but again Burroughs’ work and the magazine that printed it were impounded, this time by U.S. postal authorities. Judge Julius Hoffman ruled that Naked Lunch was not obscene, and the magazine was released in the United States in June 1959 with an aura of literary scandal. Maurice Girodias now changed his mind about that “ratty junky,” and he sent his emissary, the South African poet Sinclair Beiles, over to the Beat Hotel to ask if Mr. Burroughs could deliver a finished manuscript of Naked Lunch within ten days for publication by The Olympia Press.

  Burroughs and Gysin took up the challenge; with Beiles’ help, they were sending marked-up pages to the typesetters daily and receiving typeset galleys as they went along. The book’s final sequence was mostly determined, at Beiles’ suggestion, by the “random” order in which chapters had been finished and sent for typesetting; but Burroughs would later pose the paradox: “How random is random?” In any case, the book was at press that same month, and in stores in Paris by August 1959. By now, the Beat Hotel was a thriving international young-hipster meeting-place. Burroughs and Gysin were pushing the limits of cannabis inspiration and paranoid genius, and Burroughs had begun to make drawings and collages with cursive and typewritten texts, photos, drawings, and magazine pictures.