BURROUGHS: But when you say it’s hard to be a woman, you’re speaking from a woman’s standpoint, right? Things that might be very hard for you might be very easy for me, and vice versa. One man’s hell is another man’s paradise.
BOCKRIS: When did you meet Jane Bowles?
BURROUGHS: I don’t remember when I first met her. She was someone of extreme charm. It was a number of years later that I read her books and realized what an extremely talented writer she was.
Felicity Mason (a.k.a. Anne Cummings, author of The Love Habit) holding the manuscript of Cities of the Red Night. Photo by Victor Bockris
BOCKRIS: What kind of relationship did she and Paul Bowles have when you knew them?
BURROUGHS: I know nothing about their relationship. My old Uncle Willy always told me, “Never interfere in a boy and girl fight.” And the less you know about the relationship between two people who are married, or who are a couple living together, the better it is. That’s something to stay out of.
BOCKRIS: The gulf between the sexes is growing. Men think it’s harder to be a man while women think it’s harder to be a woman …
BURROUGHS: Such semantic difficulties here. What do you mean by hard to be, and who is to be the judge of this? How hard is it to be what? I think it’s very hard to be a person. I don’t know …
SONTAG: It depends for whom.
BURROUGHS: I think it’s just hard to be myself. It’s hard to draw breath on this bloody planet.
BOCKRIS: Auden said that he was so glad when his sex drive died because it had always been a terrible nuisance to him.
BURROUGHS: Well, if it’s a terrible nuisance to you there must be some conflict connected with it. “God! Thank God that’s ended!” It’s a terrible English thing. They have the same attitude toward life. Life is something you muddle through, and “Thank God this is over,” they say when they’re dying. England is very antisexual. It’s very much to do with the Queen!
BOCKRIS: How were they so successful if they had those two big problems?
BURROUGHS: They didn’t have anything else to do except get out and conquer—you know Serve the Queen, the old Whore of Windsor, she lived to a great age. Eighty-three?
JOHN GIORNO: Ninety-three.
BURROUGHS: I think it was eighty-three, because it was not long enough to occasion comment, which it would have been if she’d lived to ninety-three.
BOCKRIS: Her husband died forty years before she did.
BURROUGHS: The same is true in the western cultures and particularly true in America. Wives outlive their husbands by many years. There’s hubby working away and getting fat and under all this stress and he dies of a heart attack about the age of fifty-five. She then gets the money and lives on for another thirty years, during which she goes around the world with groups of women and they have bridge clubs. There’s all these old biddies, with three or four hundred thousand dollars, and they all live in the same sort of motel. My friend Kells Elvins’ father died and his mother got all that money, $250,000, a hell of a lot in those days. Then she married another one and he died so there was another $300,000. So here’s this old biddy, who has no habits at all, with $550,000 and she went out and established herself in some sort of condominium. They have all sorts of retirement apartments for women of fifty-five or sixty with a lot of money and they play shuffleboard.
ON MEN
DINNER WITH ANDY WARHOL: NEW YORK 1980
BURROUGHS: Cocteau had this party trick that he would pull. He would lie down, take off his clothes, and come spontaneously. Could do that even in his fifties. He’d lie down there and his cock would start throbbing and he’d go off. It was some film trick that he had.
BOCKRIS: How’d he pull that off? Have you ever been able to come through total mental—
BURROUGHS: Oh, I have indeed. I’ve done it many times. It’s just a matter of getting the sexual image so vivid that you come.
WARHOL: How old were you when you first had sex?
BURROUGHS: Sixteen. Just boarding school boys at Los Alamos Ranch School where they later made the atom bomb.
WARHOL: With who?
BURROUGHS: With this boy in the next bunk.
WARHOL: What did he do?
BURROUGHS: Mutual masturbation. But during the war this school, which was up on the mesa there thirty-seven miles north of Santa Fe, was taken over by the army. That’s where they made the atom bomb. Oppenheimer [the scientist who invented the bomb] had gone out there for his health and he was staying at a dude ranch near this place and said, “Well, this is the ideal place.” It seems so right and appropriate somehow that I should have gone to school there. Los Alamos Ranch School was one of these boarding schools where everyone rode a horse. Fucking horses, I hate ’em. I had sinus trouble and I’d been going to New Mexico for my health during the summer vacations and then my family contacted the director, A. J. Connell, who was a Unitarian and believed very much in positive thinking, and I went there for two years. This took place on a sleeping porch, 1929.
WARHOL: How great! Was the sex really like an explosion?
BURROUGHS: No no … I don’t remember it was so long ago.
WARHOL: I think I was twenty-five the first time I had sex, but the first time I knew about sex was under the stairs in Northside, Pittsburgh, and they made this funny kid suck this boy off. I never understood what it meant …
BURROUGHS: Made him do what?
WARHOL: Suck this boy off, but I didn’t know what it meant, I was just sitting there watching when I was five years old. How did you get this kid to do it, or did he do it to you?
BURROUGHS: Oh I don’t know, sort of a lot of talking back and forth …
TIME MAGAZINE CHECKING QUERY NEW YORK-PARIS NOV. 15, 1962
Checking for Time book review Naked Lunch soonest Friday is Burroughs arrested and convicted for wife’s accidental death in Mexico or if freed on what reasons or simply never brought to account or what. Also our lawyer advises we have possible libel problem on calling Burroughs homosexual unless we can prove it by his own word or other authority preferably in print. Unable to do so on evidence here. Can you help? [From Time’s morgue file on Burroughs]
REPLY PARIS-NEW YORK NOV. 16, 1962
[This is written by David Schnell, referred to in the chapter “On the Interview.”]
Burroughs gives impression wife’s death and events which followed very cloudy in his teeming mind. “It’s all on public record,” he says. “There was a hearing several days after the trial but I wasn’t there when case came up for decision one or two years later. Legal system down there is very different from our own. Think they decided it was accidental, ‘imprudentia criminale’ they called it and there was suspended sentence I guess. Don’t remember very well.”
As to homosexuality, Burroughs replied, “You’re perfectly free to say I write about homosexuals and homosexual character. Actually I think a writer says all he has to say in his work, that the life of the writer is usually uneventful, passing into the realm of mythology. But I don’t suppose Time Magazine will be very satisfied with that. Really, I am not trying to be evasive. What I will say is that I doubt any writer has life apart from his work—if he’s really serious about it.” Maurice Girodias, of Olympia Press, says Time lawyers have only to read Burroughs to convince themselves he’s homosexual. Wilde also had no doubts. [From Time’s morgue file on Burroughs]
DINNER WITH ANDY WARHOL AND ALLEN GINSBERG: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: They have this new way where you can determine the sex of your child. Apparently everyone wants a boy.
BURROUGHS: Everyone wants a boy, so we’re going to have more and more boys. It’s the best thing. I don’t mind if we don’t have any girls at all.
BOCKRIS: It could go in that direction. In South America they have the seven-year birth control pill.
BURROUGHS: It’s true: a woman went down there and found that pill. When she got back she said, “Oh well, the big drug companies will be deeply interested.” They didn’t
want to hear about it. They prefer to sell a pill every day rather than one that lasts for seven years. She was very disillusioned. It’s also reversible. If she wants to have a baby before the seven years are up she takes another pill.
WARHOL: I still never understand why a boy’s never had a baby.
BOCKRIS: Allen [Ginsberg] and Peter [Orlovsky] wanted to have a baby together.
WARHOL: There must be a way. You know how freaks are around all the time, I mean there has to be a freak who is going to have … they call a freak a genius, right, because half their brain’s gone so they discover something that nobody else thinks about, like the atomic bomb. There has to be a man, there’s always a freak.
BURROUGHS: There was a story that Mohammed was supposed to have been reborn from a man.
WARHOL: Who’s Mohammed?
BURROUGHS: Uuuuuhhhhmmmmm, Mohammed the prophet.
WARHOL: Oh. We know a lot of waiters called Mohammad.
BOCKRIS: With all the great advances in science it should certainly be possible for a man to have a baby someday.
BURROUGHS: Why bother when you have cloning?
WARHOL: Cloning’s better.
BURROUGHS: Did you read In His Image? What interested me were the objections from scientists. They thought it would be terrible that someone could reproduce himself. Scientists are the most stuffy, irrational people …
GINSBERG: I tried to put the make on this fifteen-year-old kid who is a member of gay lib up in Newcastle …
BURROUGHS: I don’t see many alternatives.
GINSBERG: But he likes young kids. I thought he would admire me as a hero of …
BURROUGHS: He doesn’t need an old man like yoooooouuuu.
GINSBERG: He admired me as a hero of gay lib, but not as a body to thrust in bed.
DINNER WITH BOCKRIS-WYLIE, JEFF GOLDBERG, GERARD MALANGA, PAUL GETTY, JR., ANDY WARHOL, AND ANDRE LEON-TALLEY, NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Gore Vidal says there’s a big sexual connection between the upper classes and the lower classes. The middle class is the sexually upright class.
BURROUGHS: I recall during the trial of Lord Montague the prosecution asked: “Lord Montague, you seem to have a predilection for associating with your social inferiors. Would you care to comment on the reason for such associations?”
“Like a spot of fun, you know.”
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: This is what Frank Harris said in 1888. You go to Tangier for kief …
BURROUGHS: And sex.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: What’s sex like in Tangier?
BURROUGHS: It’s terribly simple. The boys are poor.
BOCKRIS: Have you been having any great affairs with anyone lately?
BURROUGHS: Hmmpfh hmmpfh hmmpfh “had any good affairs lately?” Oh yes, every day or so.… It’s still the same old story, a case of love and glory.… You can’t beat it.
JEFF GOLDBERG: I’ve never gotten it straight; are there any aphrodisiacs?
BURROUGHS: Pot is something of an aphrodisiac. There’s yohimbine, which is very definitely an aphrodisiac, it enlarges the blood vessels in the sexual organs. There are of course poppers, which do exactly the same thing, they also dilate the blood vessels. They’re known as vasodilators.
GOLDBERG: Is that the common characteristic? Does dilation give you a rush?
BURROUGHS: Yes. Vessel dilation would be the common characteristic. It brings blood to the genital regions, very definitely stimulating the sexual areas.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Do you ever fear coming?
BURROUGHS: This is the basic fear, my dear, this is fear. Fear which is of death, which is regret.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Do you think if you had a sex change it would have a big influence on you?
BURROUGHS: Nothing could be further from my mind.
MALANGA: When do you fall in love? How do you know it?
BURROUGHS: I don’t know exactly what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don’t even have a word for love—that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I’m uncertain. Love; well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.
MALANGA: Do you believe in a power greater than yourself?
BURROUGHS: I think the self, what you call your self, is like the tip of an iceberg. One tenth of the ice appears above water and the rest is under water. If you could contact all your latent abilities it would be incredible! For example, everyone knows what time it is at any hour of the day or night. I can set my mind, say if I have to wake up at six o’clock. I just have to say I have to wake up at six o’clock and I will wake up right on the dot of six o’clock. I think what we think of as ourselves is a very unimportant, a very small part of our actual potential, and that this is undoubtedly part of a still larger potential. I would say that I certainly believe in powers greater than myself. I would find it difficult not to. We should talk about the most mysterious subject of all—sex. Sex is an electromagnetic phenomenon.
PAUL GETTY, JR.: I don’t think many of us are aware of how serious sex really is.
BURROUGHS: It is the one natural need that can be satisfied in a dream. To what extent do you think sex consists of wanting to be someone else, to be in their body? It’s a crucial factor in homosexual relationships, to be the other person.
BOCKRIS: I don’t understand what you mean.
BURROUGHS: In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.
BOCKRIS: But they’re not necessarily feeling exactly what you’re feeling.
BURROUGHS: No, but you can identify with them to the extent that you become them, which of course is quite impossible with heterosexual sex because you’re not a woman therefore you cannot feel or know what a woman feels. My experience with the fair sex is somewhat limited, but when I was trapped in Missouri, like someone in prison who can’t get a woman so they traffick with young boys, I used to go to whorehouses. The experience was not very enlightening.
BOCKRIS: You had such a strong desire to have sex you would have sex with anything or anyone you could find?
BURROUGHS: Like the guy said, I used to get a hard on if I saw two flies fucking …
GETTY: What about S and M?
BURROUGHS: I never had any contact with S and M except with reading and talking with a couple of people who were into it, but it did seem to me that it is so incredibly stereotyped. One relationship is the “bad boy,” that’s why you have to be spanked, but I don’t know how anyone could go through this with a straight face, really … all sorts of rules. However, sex can exist in complete dissociation from someone’s personality. We are very close to being able to provide anything we want sexually by electronic stimulation. It would not only be visible, but also tactile.
LEON-TALLEY: Do you think you should charge for sex?
BURROUGHS: It depends on the circumstances. You cannot generalize about these things. Who should pay who?
WARHOL: I think the girl who’s standing on the street corner should pay the guy who comes up to her, because she’s hot, right? The guy’s not hot. She should be on easy street and pay the person for doing it to her, don’t you think?
BOCKRIS: The prostitute should be supported by the city?
WARHOL: That’s it. They should be hired and be paid by the city instead of going to jail.
BOCKRIS: Does paying for sex heighten the pleasure?
BURROUGHS: No. The only way it could heighten the pleasure would be if you paid in the middle of sex and this is …
MALANGA: Is beauty only skin deep?
BURROUGHS: What do you mean by that?
MALANGA: Do you stop at what appears to you on the surface, or do you go further into it in detail?
BURROUGHS: If you have a relative, comparative u
niverse, then beauty only exists in relation to ugliness. What do you mean by beauty? You mean something is beautiful in relation to something that is ugly? The two concepts then become completely interrelated. Which is true of all other concepts. What does weakness mean? Weakness only has meaning with relation to strength, right? Weakness means that someone is stronger than you are.
MALANGA: A weakness can also be an advantage.
BURROUGHS: Perfect example.
BOCKRIS: What was the biggest change in sex in the seventies? Then we can see what it’s going to be in the eighties. I think there will be less and less sex.
WARHOL: Oh no, there’s more and more because there are more and more people.
BOCKRIS: Is the sex problem a population problem?
BURROUGHS: There is a relationship.
WARHOL: You’re talking about entertainment sex.
BURROUGHS: Between population and …
WARHOL: Entertainment sex is different.
LEON-TALLEY: What is entertainment sex?
WARHOL: Entertainment sex is the S and M thing when you go down to those S and M bars and it entertains you.
BURROUGHS: It entertains some people.
WARHOL: What kind of people do you like?
BURROUGHS: Young boys.
LEON-TALLEY: How young do you like them?
BURROUGHS: Oh, say from fourteen to twenty-five.
LEON-TALLEY: Is it easier to have relationships with young boys, not just sex? Can you go out with them, can you have dinner with them?
BURROUGHS: In many cases, no.
LEON-TALLEY: They don’t have the concentration.
BURROUGHS: But I don’t require that, I don’t require that at all.… I’m not looking for a relationship.
BOCKRIS: Don’t you find it harder to get sex, though?
WARHOL: Yes, really really hard.
BURROUGHS: Harder than when?
BOCKRIS: Ten years ago when you were a young febrile personality jumping around. Don’t you find it harder now?
With William Burroughs Page 7
