Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  “But why Billy? Why?”

  “Well if you don’t know I can’t explain it to you. Let’s go back to the car.”

  We drove back in silence and when we came to his house he opened the door and got out. He looked at me for a second as if he was going to say something then turned abruptly and walked up the flagstone path to his house. I sat there for a minute looking at the closed door. Then I drove home feeling numb. When the car was stopped in the garage I put my head down on the wheel sobbing and rubbing my cheek against the steel spokes. Finally Mother called to me from an upstairs window was anything wrong and why didn’t I come in the house. So I wiped the tears off my face and went in and said I was sick and went upstairs to bed. Mother brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray but I couldn’t eat any and cried all night.

  After that I called Billy several times on the phone but he always hung up when he heard my voice. And I wrote him a long letter which he never answered. Three months later when I read in the paper he had been killed in a car wreck and Mother said, “Oh that’s the Bradshinkel boy. You used to be such good friends didn’t you?”

  I said, “Yes Mother” not feeling anything at all.

  Prynne had been killed in the early hours of Monday, December 17, in New York City when the car he was in swerved to avoid wet trolley tracks and struck a pillar. There were four other Princeton students in the car. Later that day, Bill’s father cabled Harvard to ask that his son be excused from classes for three days, December 19–21, to attend Prynne’s funeral in St. Louis on Thursday, December 20, 1934.

  Homosexuality was so forbidden that many people, like Bill’s grandmother, had never even heard of it. His sense of alienation and being different put him into a mental turmoil. He didn’t know “why I couldn’t go out and get boys, which I didn’t at all… I just somehow didn’t know how to do it! It wasn’t a question of being forbidden. I was scared of everything, practically, and no wonder.”20

  Chapter Five

  Veritas

  1. Harvard

  It was the done thing for someone of Burroughs’s class and background to go to Harvard, but he had not reckoned with the attitude of the boys from the East Coast prep schools who wanted nothing to do with him. He was unable to get into a club; “those were a very snobbish thing, they were all people from the eastern prep schools. They got into the clubs and other people didn’t and that was that.”1 He could have involved himself in the Harvard Advocate, the Lampoon, or the Crimson, the daily student newspaper, but chose not to, nor did he join the Dramatic Club. The 1932 Harvard academic year began on September 25. Burroughs lived at Straus dormitory in room D-41, a new block in Old Yard, overlooking Massachusetts Avenue and Harvard Square. The suites had wood-burning living room fireplaces and the use of a mahogany-paneled common room furnished with leather armchairs and oriental rugs. It was a world away from the Ranch School’s outdoor bedrooms. He ate at the Freshman Commons and joined the Harvard Coop to buy his books and equipment. Freshmen were required to do at least one afternoon a week of athletic activity. Burroughs did swimming and individual sculling. He loved swimming; he was buoyant and able to lie still in the water without sinking. He complained that there was nowhere to do target practice, but he could have joined the Harvard Rifle Club, which had facilities for pistol shooting at their Walnut Hill Range in Woburn.2 He sometimes saw movies, still mostly silent, such as Charles Chaplin’s The Floorwalker, at the large Common Room of the Freshman Union. Mostly he spent his time reading until the Widener Library closed at six.

  Burroughs delved into witchcraft and Tibetan tantricism and read numerous books on the subject. His professor, George Lyman Kittredge, had published Witchcraft in Old and New England three years before, and Burroughs also read his Notes on Witchcraft (1907). “I was interested in any kind of witchcraft and the occult to learn more about my own visions. If your totem animal is a deer, this will be revealed in a vision of a deer. Now that means for one thing you’re not allowed to kill the totem animal. Technically you shouldn’t eat the totem animal, but I have eaten venison frequently, but I would never kill a deer. My other vision was of little men playing in the blockhouse. I think of these in cinematographic terms: one is slow-down, and one is speed-up. The little men were moving fast, speeded-up; the deer was in that slow-down medium.”3 He read The Tibetan Book of the Dead in the W. Y. Evans-Wentz translation and Sir John Woodroffe’s translation of the Mahanirvana Tantra. His mother had introduced him to the Buddhist concept of the Four Noble Truths in their long talks together (she later gave him her copy of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, published in 1951). He was years ahead of Ginsberg and Kerouac in his study of Buddhism, but though he was interested in many of the ideas, he rejected Buddhism as requiring too much scholarly study for an individual from a Western background. He studied astrology and took up yoga, sometimes locking himself in his room for several days. Friends heard him mumbling to himself, and Bill told Bill Gilmore it was subvocal speech, part of his yoga training. He had a French book describing various forms of torture and delighted in shocking people with it and explaining in detail what went on in medieval torture chambers. Many of the Radcliffe women found this objectionable.

  The biggest subject of debate on campus at the time was communism and the “Russian experiment”; all the Harvard bookshops were filled with books about it. The idea never appealed to Burroughs at all; in fact, as he put it, “I was never tempted by any political program. […] I don’t want to hear about the fucking masses and I never did.”4

  Burroughs was an English major. He graduated with honors and got an A in every course. “I’ve never seen a course that I couldn’t pass the exams with an A after three days’ study. My technique was to memorize certain sections so I could quote them verbatim. So there was just nothing to it when it came to getting ready for an exam, it was a snap.”5 He went to hardly any lectures, nor was he required to attend classes. He was taught ethnology by Carlton Coombe, who concentrated on the most sensational things like homosexuality and anything of a violent nature to make his lessons entertaining. Burroughs thought Professor Greenhaup’s lectures on seventeenth-century literature were the dullest he had ever heard, but went to everything by John Livingston Lowes, who wrote The Road to Xanadu. Another professor whose lectures he found to be a real pleasure was the young Bartlett Jere Whiting, who taught his Chaucer course. “He was marvelous!” Burroughs attended Kittredge’s lectures on Shakespeare and delighted at his showmanship: Kittredge started his class on the dot and did not tolerate coughing or sneezing. At the end of a talk he would come down from the platform, still talking, and deliver his last lines from the door just as the bell rang. Kittredge assigned a lot to be learned by heart, several hundred lines for an exam, and Burroughs remembered them all his life. When he published The Exterminator in 1960, he provided an epigram for the title page. Though misquoting (not corrected by the publisher), he pulled from memory an apposite line from The Rehearsal by George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, published in 1672.

  T. S. Eliot was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry during 1932–33 and delivered eight lectures under the general title “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.” Burroughs attended one of them. “He had a very conservative attitude but well presented, and he was quite humorous and knew how to talk. Very dignified, very decorous, he gave teas every week that were open to the undergraduates as part of his duties, but for some reason I never went.”

  Harvard could have been a lonely place; it was possible to stay in your rooms and be completely isolated. Fortunately Bill knew a half dozen or more people. At Harvard he was reunited with Kells Elvins, who had gone from the John Burroughs School to the University of Missouri and then transferred to Harvard. But Kells was living off campus; he had married a red-haired woman named Brick (“Brick top”) Orwig after getting her pregnant, and the couple lived with their son, Peter. Several of Bill’s other classmates from John Burroughs were also there, including Jay Rice, who also went to Los
Alamos and whose parents owned a large department store in St. Louis; and Eugene Angert, a beautiful fragile boy who became a hopeless schizophrenic. Angert had already begun to display the symptoms that would eventually hospitalize him. He was sent to the Blaine Sanatorium outside Boston, where Burroughs visited him several times, but by then his conversation did not make much sense and he giggled compulsively.

  Bill’s brother, Mort, also arrived at Harvard. He had gone to Princeton and studied architecture in Paris before taking an architecture course at Harvard. Bill saw him once a week for dinner. “Mort was much more interesting in those days, he even read some. We talked about Freud and neurosis and psychoanalysis, things like that. But as time went on he became less and less interested in anything. Morose, sort of sullen. Not at all fun.”6 Bill’s friends called his brother Glum Burroughs because he was so dour. Mort graduated but never practiced architecture. He married Miggie when he was twenty-three, got a job with Emerson Electric in St. Louis as a draftsman working initially on the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber aircraft, and stayed there for the rest of his life until he retired. “My brother is a cipher, a blank, a zero. We had some talks about the past and about this nurse that we had together and things like that, but if I ever got close to anything that would mean anything he would immediately break off the conversation.”7 Mort had no small talk and little sense of humor; nothing seemed to really interest him except his family and fishing. “He was a pretty square, regular sort of a guy, so we didn’t have all that much in common. He couldn’t read my books.”8

  In 1933 Bill was still adjusting to his new surroundings. He read Kafka and continued his studies of tantra and witchcraft. That summer his parents permitted—and paid for—him to go on his first trip to Europe without them. He was accompanied by his friend David Kammerer, whom he had known from the Community School and the Burroughs School and who was now at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was three years older and presumably trusted to take care of Bill. They went to England and to Paris and had a great time. Bill knew that Kammerer was gay, and Bill had probably revealed his own interest in men to Kammerer. One of their subjects of conversation was Kammerer’s obsession with an apache they met at a bar on the rue de Lappe, probably at La Boule Rouge at number 8, where knife-wielding young petty criminals liked to gather, plying for trade with tourists. His attraction is unlikely to have been reciprocated, given the vigorous heterosexuality of most apaches, though money may have exchanged hands. Bill and David were not lovers; it was a friendship based on mutual experience and interests, and Bill enjoyed being with him because Kammerer had a great sense of humor and was always fun to be with. While in Paris Bill added a few items to his arsenal, including a sword cane and a shotgun cane that fired deadly .410 cartridges.

  For his sophomore year, Burroughs moved to Adams House, one of the private “Gold Coast” dormitories built around 1900 to provide luxurious accommodation for Harvard undergraduates. Russell, the block containing the dining rooms, kitchen, library, and common room, was not completed until 1932, just before Bill moved in. Unlike most of the dormitory blocks, Adams had multiple, unguarded entries, making it difficult to enforce the college’s strict nightly curfews, and was therefore a desirable place to have rooms. He was required to eat two meals a day in house. Most halls shared central kitchens, but Adams had its own, as well as a reputation for the best food on campus. This was not the view of Burroughs, with his epicurian tastes, but he could do little about it.

  Bill sometimes drove to New York to see Rex Weisenberger, his friend from John Burroughs. That summer, 1934, Bill planned to go down to Mexico with Rex, who was at Yale. That trip did not work out and instead they went to Paris together and then down to Algiers. It was then that Bill found out that Rex was gay. “We wouldn’t make it together, he was not my type.”9 They continued on into the Sahara. It was summer and so hot and dry that they couldn’t drink hard liquor and instead drank enormous beers called Formidables. They went as far south as Touggourt in the desert, spent one day there, and returned to Biskra. Next they stayed at a little place in the mountains, which was a relief because it was cool. From there they traveled to Malta, where they split up and Rex returned to the States. In Malta Burroughs read a German newspaper report of how Hitler came upon Ernst Röhm, the Sturmabteilung chief of staff, “in a disgusting position.” The story read: “A shameful sight greeted the eyes of the Führer, there was Röhm with his Lustknabe—his pleasure boy.” That June 30 was the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler purged the entire leadership of the SA, murdering eighty-five or more members, including Röhm, and arresting thousands. Bill’s normal indifference to politics was breached by the homosexual element in the story.

  By now Bill was beginning to make friends at Harvard. He met James Le Baron Boyle, who was also studying English and who later went to the Sorbonne and got his PhD with a thesis on Proust. He was a member of the Advocate team. He had a big red Irish face, full lips with crooked teeth, and smoked a pipe. He had developed a number of idiosyncratic mannerisms, all designed to amuse and entertain. He claimed to descend from royalty, but his mother was a cleaning woman. He was gay and Burroughs went to bed with him once, but not until after Harvard. Boyle’s mother wouldn’t let Bill in the house because she thought he was sinister.

  About a year after getting to know Boyle, Burroughs met Richard Stern, of the Stern investment bank family, who was at Harvard Business School. Although it was illegal to have a gun in Massachusetts, the Harvard authorities never searched the students’ rooms and Burroughs had with him the .32 Smith & Wesson revolver that he had bought at Los Alamos. Not long after their meeting, Richard Stern and Burroughs were both drunk in Bill’s rooms and Bill began waving his gun around. He pointed it at Richard’s stomach, some three feet away, and pulled the trigger, sure that it was not loaded. Fortunately Stern was in the fencing club, and as soon as Bill pointed the gun he turned to the side. The gun went off, blowing a hole in the wall. It was a close thing. Another time, Bill invited Stern over for a drink and James Boyle was already there visiting. Bill introduced them and they hit it off right away and became lovers. James had no money but Richard had plenty. They lived together at Harvard and on and off the rest of their lives, spending summers together and making foreign trips. Boyle turned up in Tangier in the fifties when Burroughs was there and spent two weeks.

  Through Stern, Bill met the Honourable Graham Eyres-Monsell,10 whose father was then the First Lord of the Admiralty. He was nine years older than Burroughs (born in 1905) and doing postgraduate studies at the Harvard Business School. “Ears” was the social arbiter of the queer set at Harvard, such as it was, and he knew everyone on the international gay scene: Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Dwight Fiske. Burroughs saw him with Baron Wolfner in Budapest in 1936 and later in Tangier with Lord David Cecil. He was very grand and used to being deferred to. Though Burroughs saw quite a bit of him at Harvard, they were never really close.

  A good friend was Robert Miller, whom Bill met in his first year. Miller later became a priest, but not until after he had accompanied Burroughs on a trip to Vienna and Eastern Europe. Bill described him as “a sort of a high Episcopalian pederast type-person, all very precious.”11 Miller described Bill as a tall, lanky, pleasant guy, amusing, with a dry wit, and wrote that he had nothing but good memories of Bill: “he was placid and good natured, easy to get along with and entertaining.”

  There were speakeasies in Boston, and Bill used to sometimes cruise Scollay Square, which catered to sailors and gay men, but it was safer for Harvard boys to go to New York to get drunk and have sex. It was also the Big City in a way that Boston never could be. “In the early 1930’s, when I was studying at Harvard University, New York was a glamorous, sophisticated, romantic, glittering metropolis. The place where things were happening. Anyone trapped in the provinces with artistic or theatrical or deviant tastes was inexorably drawn to New York. Greenwich Village in that time, that remote epoch, was peopled by real artists an
d bohemians. Rents were low, restaurants were cheap. Used to drive down to drink at the speakeasies on 52nd Street, to visit Harlem night clubs, to eat in the Village.”12 Richard Stern, James Boyle, Robert Miller, and Bill went to Tony’s on 52nd Street and Jimmy Daniels’s, a high-class place with a floor show. Daniels was a good-looking young man and every evening would sing “Miss Otis Regrets.” Burroughs remembered, “He had a very low key and gentlemanly delivery of his songs.” But music was not the point there at all; these were gay clubs.

  Clint Moore’s place in Harlem was not so luxurious: up three flights and knock three times. It cost a dollar to get in, which entitled you to drink some terrible-tasting liquor from a punch bowl. Most people brought their own rather than drink what was offered, and smoked pot and sniffed coke. Moore had a dimly lit flat, with everyone circulating around, both black and white, making contacts. They met some older people: Bernard Pyle and Thomas Jeffreys, both art teachers at Barnard. It was Clinton Moore who gave Burroughs one of his best lines: “A wise old black faggot said to me years ago, ‘Some people are shits, darling.’ ”13 There was a cheap “anything goes” apartment hotel on Central Park South at four dollars a night where they always stayed.

  In his junior year Bill took refuge from the food at Adams House by moving to rooms in Claverly Hall, just up the street. Built in 1892–93, it had fifty expensive suites, and when it opened it offered the young gentlemen such modern improvements as private baths, electric bells, speaking tubes, valet and maid service, steam heat, a swimming pool on the ground floor, and squash courts. Bill ate in the various nearby cafeterias and tea rooms, and in the evenings he would drive his Ford V8 into Boston to places like the Locke-Ober at Winter Place,14 Parker House on School Street, or the Union Oyster House on Union. Most of all he liked eating communally at the long paper-covered tables at Durgin-Park in the Faneuil Hall area; it was in the market and catered to the stallholders, there was sawdust and “one of the best chicken pies I’ve ever eaten.”15 Burroughs’s memories of places and situations often involve food, and Harvard was no exception. Bill and Robert Miller often ate at the Bowl Waffle Shop and sometimes at the grill at Harvard’s Eliot House, which sold hamburgers and beer. It was at Harvard that Burroughs began his habit of eating all his meals out.