Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

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  To Rosemary

  Acknowledgments

  My relationship with Burroughs began in 1965 when I published one of his three-column texts in an anthology called Darazt. I already knew his boyfriend, Ian Sommerville, and through Ian I became the UK distributor of Burroughs’s first spoken-word album, Call Me Burroughs, that Ian had recorded. In October 1966, I cofounded International Times, known as IT, and Burroughs was closely involved from the very beginning. He gave us the script for Towers Open Fire for our second issue and published a number of articles in IT over the years. He liked the immediacy of being able to give us a text and see it in print a few days later. He ran an article on tape recorder experiments in the third issue. His interest in tape recorder experiments began in 1960 and extended for about a decade, as part of his extension of the use of cut-ups from written texts into tapes, and from there to photographic collages, films, and scrapbook layouts. Many years later, in 2007, I produced a three-CD set of his tape cut-ups called Real English Tea Made Here.1

  Burroughs often visited when Ian Sommerville was installing the lighting and power circuits at Indica, the bookshop/art gallery I co-owned with John Dunbar and Peter Asher, in 1965, and when we moved the bookshop to a different address, he used the shop’s bulletin board to advertise his availability as a Scientology auditor. In 1972 I spent about five months—spread over a seven-month period—cataloging his archives. This was when we became good friends, because in addition to working with him each day, we almost always had drinks and dinner together afterward. In the course of cataloging his papers, I was able to assemble what was then the only known copy of Queer, which was scattered throughout his folders and tied-up bundles of manuscript. It made sense to follow up on the catalog of the archives with a bibliography of his work, using the information I had uncovered. This was eventually coauthored with Joe Maynard (who did the books) and published by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia in 1978. James Grauerholz and I coedited the restored text edition of Naked Lunch, published in 2001.

  In 1984, while researching a biography of Allen Ginsberg at the Butler Library of Columbia University, I ordered up a letter from Burroughs to Lawrence Ferlinghetti in order to see what the cryptic “enclosure” was. It turned out to be the complete manuscript of Interzone. I had it photocopied and gave it to my agent, Andrew Wylie, who also represented Burroughs. Interzone, along with Queer, was to form the backbone of a multibook publishing deal with Viking. In 1992, I published a “portrait” called William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, which began as part of the Virgin Modern Idols series, and finished up as a half biography, half introduction to his work. Over the years I visited Burroughs in London, New York, Boulder, and Lawrence, Kansas, and consequently met and got to know many of the characters in this book, beginning with Allen Ginsberg, who first stayed with me in London in 1965 and became a great friend. I also got to know Antony Balch, Robert Fraser, Herbert Huncke, Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, Brion Gysin, Alan Ansen, Ian Sommerville, Mikey Portman, Gregory Corso, Panna Grady, John Giorno, Timothy Leary, Victor Bockris, Stewart Meyer, and of course James Grauerholz and his Lawrence, Kansas, circle. Many of them became friends, and over the years, as a result of countless hours of conversation, I accumulated a huge store of Burroughs lore.

  Without James Grauerholz this book would simply not have been possible. James was William Burroughs’s friend, companion, and manager from the time of his return to the United States, aged sixty, in 1974 until his death in 1997. James was commissioned to write a full-length biography in 1999 and did an enormous amount of research, but a combination of family matters and medical problems eventually caused him in 2010 to propose that I take over the project. I have drawn heavily on James’s research into Burroughs’s childhood and family history, particularly the story of Uncle Horace; his research into Burroughs’s time at Harvard; his period in Chicago (in fact, we found the site of Mrs. Murphy’s Rooming House and A. J. Cohen Exterminators together); his psychiatric history—Grauerholz had obtained many of Burroughs’s psychoanalytic records—and the results of his trawl through Austrian paperwork to find traces of Burroughs’s stay in Vienna, where he studied medicine, and Dubrovnik, where he met his first wife, Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, in 1937. I am deeply indebted to James for his book-length paper The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened?, which is available online. He has uncovered literally thousands of new facts about Burroughs and corrected many hundreds more. I cannot thank him enough for sharing his discoveries with me. In addition I thank him for his friendship, for sharing his archives, for giving his time, and for his kind hospitality in Lawrence over the years. James is the master of all things Burrovian.

  For the section on Burroughs in South Texas I have relied heavily on Rob Johnson’s thorough study of the subject, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, and for Burroughs’s late career years in New York I have drawn upon the unpublished journals of Stewart Meyer, and on Victor Bockris’s With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. I am enormously indebted to Simon Johnson, who shared with me his extensive research into Burroughs’s family background and has corrected numerous errors. I am most grateful. Tribute must be paid to Ted Morgan, author of the groundbreaking Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. I have purposely not reread Morgan’s book but I have used some of his research. On completion of his book, he sold his interview tapes, notes, and papers to the Rare Book Library of Arizona State University in Tempe, where they are all available for study and use by scholars. In the course of researching the restored text edition of Naked Lunch at Tempe, James Grauerholz and I made copies of Morgan’s taped interviews with Burroughs, which I then transcribed, originally for another project, since abandoned. All quotes from these tapes in this book come from my own transcripts of Burroughs’s words. I have drawn heavily on this archive of tapes, which is a treasure house for present and future Burroughs scholars.

  In addition I must thank Christopher Gibbs for his kindness and hospitality in Tangier and assistance in seeking out traces of Burroughs’s residency in that city. To John Howe, Christopher Gibbs, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Tom Peschio (TP), Jim McCrary, James Grauerholz, and Udo Breger for granting me interviews, and to Ed Sanders, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jean-Jacques Lebel, the late Allen Ginsberg, the late Lucien Carr, and the late Eugene Brooks for interviews given for a previous project, portions of which are used here. To Victor Bockris for transcripts of his interviews with Burroughs and for his hospitality, friendship, and conversation over the decades; to Stewart Meyer for granting me access to his Bunker journals; to Theo Miles for his translations from the French. To Andrew Sclanders at Beatbooks.com for photocopies and CDs of manuscripts and interview material. I’d like to thank my agent, James Macdonald Lockhart, at Antony Harwood, and Cary Goldstein, Deb Futter, my editor, Sean Desmond, and my copy editor Roland Ottewell at Twelve, and most of all, Rosemary Bailey, who has lived with all stages of the book, providing encouragement, editing skills, valuable suggestions, and love, as always.

  Research on this book took me from London to Paris several times, to Vienna, to Tangier, New York, and to Kansas. For useful conversations, photocopies, CDs and DVDs, and helpful assi
stance on my travels I’d like to thank Patricia Allmer, Eric Anderson, Sophie Andrieu at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris; the late J. G. Ballard; Hervé Binet; James Birch; Jed Birmingham at Reality Studio; Charlotte Black; Jonathan Blumb; Udo Breger; Roger James Elsgood; Colin Fallows at Liverpool John Moores University; Neal Fox; Raymond Foye; Professor Hannah Gay at Imperial College London; Synne Genzmer at the Vienna Kunsthalle; Joseph Geraci; Hilary Gerrard; Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at New York Public Library; Jeff Goldberg; Kathelin Gray at the October Gallery; Theo Green; Fran Greenwood of Harrogate Festival of the Arts; Peter Guest at Image; Hammond Guthrie; Peter Hale at the Allen Ginsberg Estate; Oliver Harris; Chili Hawes at the October Gallery; Axel Heil at ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Kurt Hemmer; Stellan Holm; John Hopkins (photographer); John Hopkins (writer); Michael Horovitz; John Howe; Rob Johnson; Elisabeth Kamenicek in Vienna; Catheryn Kilgarriff; Tom King at the WSB Estate, Kansas; the late José Ferez Kuri; Elisabeth Lalouschek at the October Gallery; George Lawson; Jean-Jacques Lebel; Liliane Lijn; Ed Maggs at Maggs Bros.; Alexandra Mattholie at BBC Arena; Ian MacFadyen; Paul McCartney; Jim McCrary; Sophie Parkin; Jim Pennington; Jim Perrizo; Tom Peschio at the WSB Estate, Kansas; Dick Pountain; Wayne Propst; Marcia Resnick; Frank Rynne; Jon Savage; John Sears; Keith Seward at Reality Studio; Bernard Sigaud; Ira Silverberg; Iain Sinclair; Martin Stone; Tony Sutcliffe; Anthony Wall, Series Editor BBC Arena; Ken Weaver; Maxine Weaver; Peter Weibel at ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Sylvia Beach Whitman at Shakespeare and Co., Paris; Carl Williams at Maggs Bros.; Andrew Wilson at Tate Britain; Shawn C. Wilson at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction; Terry Wilson; Peter Wollen; Eddie Woods; and Yuri Zupancic at the WSB Estate.

  Proper names in Burroughs’s books and letters, particularly of places in Central and South America, have been silently changed to their correct or current spellings. “Kasbah” is used except when in quoted letters from Burroughs or Kerouac, as that is the street name spelling in Morocco. “Story” in describing buildings uses American usage: i.e., “second story” is the European “first story.” The Naked Lunch refers to the first (Paris) edition; Naked Lunch is the later U.S. edition and the restored text edition.

  Introduction

  The sweat lodge utilizes all powers of the universe: earth, and things that grow from the earth; water; fire; and air.

  —BLACK ELK

  The sweat lodge ceremony had to be performed in darkness. Deep in the two-foot firepit the stones glowed, tended by the firekeeper, whose tasks were to heat and replenish the stones, guard the lodge, and make the food. Over the pit, the roof of the lodge was shaped like an igloo, carefully constructed from interlaced twigs and branches, covered with black plastic. The shaman himself was Melvin Betsellie, a Diné elder Navajo from the Four Corners area of New Mexico. He was young, round-faced, heavily built, his hair center-parted in the traditional manner like Geronimo in the old black-and-white photographs. Betsellie’s calm, placid expression inspired confidence. He was a highly regarded shaman—the Oinkiga, purification ceremony, must be performed by an initiate who has had at least four years’ apprenticeship, including the vision quest and four years of the sun dance, climaxing in the ceremony of being painted. Only then do the shamans have the right to pour the water of life (mini wic’oni) on the stone people (inyan oyate)—the hot rocks—to create Inikag’a, the purification ceremony.

  Betsellie had been invited to Lawrence, Kansas, by Bill Lyon, an anthropologist who specialized in shamanism. Lyon had spent twelve years with Wallace Black Elk, a Sioux medicine man, and wrote Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of a Lakota, in which he explained how Black Elk called up animal spirits of all kinds. Lyon was a friend of William Burroughs’s and they had a number of conversations about the efficacy of shamans in expelling evil spirits from the body. Burroughs had spent most of his life trying to exorcise what he called “the Ugly Spirit” and wondered if a Navajo shaman might finally succeed. Lyon arranged for a ceremony for the purification of Bill’s spirit in March 1992, to take place on the grounds of his house.1

  In the sweat lodge, all had stripped in preparation for the smoke and heat and had towels wrapped around their waists. Burroughs wore just his shorts, the scar from his recent triple-bypass operation showing as a brown line on his wrinkled chest. Though stooped and soft-muscled, his skull bony, at seventy-eight years he was still vigorous. His old friend Allen Ginsberg was completely naked except for his glasses, as was his wont. The author of “Howl” was now sixty-five years old, his trimmed beard and mustache threaded with gray, potbellied with scrawny legs, slightly stooped. Also present were Burroughs’s old friend James Grauerholz, Grauerholz’s twenty-five-year-old boyfriend Michael Emerton, Burroughs’s assistant Steven Lowe, and Bill Lyon.

  Burroughs had warned the shaman of the challenge before the ceremony: He “had to face the whole of American capitalism, Rockefeller, the CIA… all of those, particularly Hearst.” Afterward he told Ginsberg, “It’s very much related to the American Tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That’s exactly what it is.” William Burroughs believed in spirits, in the occult, in demons, curses, and magic. “I do believe in the magical universe, where nothing happens unless one wills it to happen, and what we see is not one god but many gods in power and in conflict.”2 He felt himself possessed, and had spent much of his life trying to isolate and exorcise this demon. Asked how he would describe his religious position, Burroughs replied, “An Ismailian and Gnostic, or a Manichean. […] The Manichean believe in an actual struggle between good and evil, which is not an eternal struggle since one of them will win in this particular area, sooner or later.”3 Throughout his life Burroughs felt engaged in this struggle against the Ugly Spirit. This time he was determined to win.

  Burroughs had first identified the Ugly Spirit very early on, back in St. Louis: “When I was a young child, a feeling of attack and danger. I remember when I was five years old, I was sitting with my brother in the house that we had on Pershing, and I got such a feeling of hopelessness that I began crying. And my brother said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ and I couldn’t tell him. It was just a feeling of being completely at a hopeless disadvantage. It was a ghost of some sort, a spirit. A spirit that was inimical, completely inimical. After that there were many times the condition persisted and that’s what made me think that I needed analysis to find out what was wrong. […] It’s just I have a little bit, a much more clear insight than most people have, that’s all. No problem like that is peculiar to one person.”4 He knew already that he had been invaded by the Ugly Spirit. It took him a lifetime to expel it.

  Burroughs believed the Ugly Spirit was responsible for the key act that had determined his life since September 6, 1951. That day he had been walking in the street in Mexico City when he found that his face was wet. Tears were streaming from his eyes for no logical reason. He felt a deep-seated depression and when he got home he began throwing down drinks very quickly. It was then, later that day, that Bill killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, fatally wounding her while attempting to shoot a glass from her head in a game of William Tell at a drinks party. Burroughs never really understood what happened that day, except to recognize that what he did was madness. Near the end of his life he said, “My accidental shooting of my wife in 1951 has been a heavy, painful burden to me for 41 years. It was a horrible thing and it still hurts to realise that some people think it was somehow deliberate. I’ve been honest about the circumstances—we were both very drunk and reckless, she dared me to shoot a glass off her head, and for God knows what reason, I took the dare. All my life I have regretted that day.”5 It was not until 1959 that the malevolent entity was given a name. Burroughs and his friend Brion Gysin were conducting psychic experiments at the Beat Hotel in Paris when Gysin
, in a semitrance state, wrote on a piece of paper, “Ugly Spirit killed Joan because…”

  In the much-quoted introduction to Queer, Burroughs explained how writing became his main weapon against possession by the evil spirit: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

  The shaman was making his way around the lodge. He thanked each one of them, starting with Burroughs, for inviting him to share the traditional medicine of his grandfathers and giving him the opportunity to use his healing medicine to drive the bad spirit from Bill’s body and out of his life. He turned to each of the four directions and prayed to the grandfathers, the water, the earth, the rocks, and the red-hot coals in the firepit, thanking them all and asking them to use their power to help Bill. He took a feather and wafted smoke toward each of the people there, and repeated the action with his hands. Then he threw water onto the hot stones, which exploded in great clouds of smoke and steam, filling the enclosed space, making it unbearably hot like a sauna. All anyone could see was the glow of the fire in the pit, and the vague shadowy outlines of their neighbors in the darkness, through the swirling, suffocating smoke. Their eyes ran with burning tears and the sweat began to pour off them. The ceremony was now under way. Chips of cedar wood thrown onto the stones gave off a powerful fragrance, mixed with the steam.