Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  That year, at Claverly, Burroughs and Richard Stern sent away for a ferret. It cost two dollars from the ferret farm, and though it was jointly owned, it lived in Bill’s rooms. It was a nice little animal, quite tame, and they fed it dog food. It would curl up in the fireplace in the summer where it was cool. Bill called it Sredni Vashtar, after the little boy in Saki who uses his pet ferret to kill his grandmother.16 Bill held an open house on Sunday afternoons and the ferret would hide under the couch and nip at the ladies’ heels. He had it for more than a year, but there were too many complaints from the cleaners and eventually he put up a notice on the house board and gave it away. There were three girls from Radcliffe in the group, but Bill never had any luck with them; there was just something about him they found wrong. “Rex Weisenberger told me, ‘the girls are down on you.’ I don’t know what for. It wasn’t any particular thing. It was just my emanations, they felt were not… I didn’t feel bad about it.”17

  That summer, 1935, Bill did not go abroad but instead took a job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, thanks to his father’s friend, the managing editor, O. K. Bovard. Bill was a poor reporter. He would be sent to get a photograph of a dead child, but if the grieving parents saw no reason why they should give him one he was inclined to agree. He would not pressure or cajole them like most reporters. He hung around the police courts and called in any stories that seemed possible. Bill found the editor, Bill Reese, to be a very disagreeable person; the whole job went against the grain and he was glad when it was over.

  Bill was twenty-one, but he had never had a lover. His sexual experience was restricted to mutual masturbation and blow jobs. He wanted a boyfriend, but had no idea how to find one. The final realization that he preferred boys had resulted in a complete paralysis of action and no sex at all. None of his visits to New York had resulted in full sexual relations, although his friend Bill Gilmore claimed that Bill was very promiscuous in his first years at Harvard, but much less so in the last two years. He was socially inept; he didn’t know how to act, and didn’t know the right things to say in order to pick someone up, even in a gay bar in New York. He obtained temporary relief in the traditional manner, by visiting the whorehouses of St. Louis. The best one was on Westminster Place. It didn’t have a name. The madam knew who everyone was, and if someone was coming in or out, she would shunt Bill into an alcove and draw the curtain in case it was the judge, or his uncle or a friend of his father. There was one African American woman whom he really liked and whom he would always ask for. “She was real motherly, big boobs. She was gentle and receptive. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was better than nothing.” Coming from a family where there was little in the way of hugging, the best thing was the physical contact. It was five dollars for half an hour. “I did all kinds of things, I came between her breasts.”18

  He remembered, “It was alright. You get a sense of release and pleasure and you feel you’ve done a very socially acceptable thing. I used to drive from there over to Culpepper’s bar on the corner of Euclid and Maryland. Go there and talk to your buddies and get a little drunk, made you feel a man.”19 The extent of Bill’s sexual ignorance emerged when he was in his senior year. “Until the age of twenty-two I thought that children were born through the navel. I did. It was an evening with James Le Baron Boyle, Richard Stern, and Graham Eyres Monsell that I expressed this theory, which I thought was a fact, and they said, ‘What?!’ Then they enlightened me to the horrible fact, the facts of life. I knew about female genitals, I knew they had a hole down there, but I did not know that the baby was born down there. […] I never had one of those man-to-man talks with my father. He would have been shit scared. He was the most prissy heterosexual I have ever known.”20

  In his final year of college Bill still had no idea what to do with his life. Mort had done postgraduate studies, and Bill must have been considering some further study. He made plans for another trip to Europe that summer, this time with Robert Miller. Harvard meant so little to him that he left before commencement. His parents were clearly still concerned about him, because they arranged a follow-up meeting with their psychiatrist friend Dr. Sidney Schwab to see how he was doing.

  Chapter Six

  The sky over Vienna was a light, hard, china blue.1

  1. Mitteleuropa

  Although the trip to Vienna began as another summer vacation, it turned out to have profound repercussions for Burroughs. By the time he returned to the States he had studied medicine in Vienna and was a married man. Burroughs and Robert Miller left for Europe in the early part of June 1936, sailing on SS Bremen, which made the crossing in under five days. They went first to Paris for a week, staying on the Left Bank near boulevard Saint-Germain, where they spent most of their time in cafés, people watching. From there they continued to Vienna, arriving on July 4. Gay friends had recommended them to the Hotel König von Ungarn (King of Hungary), at Schulerstrasse 10, on a narrow medieval street close to the twelfth-century St. Stephen’s Cathedral. It is supposedly Vienna’s oldest continuously operated hotel, first opening to guests in 1746. Mozart lived there from 1784 until 1787 and there composed Die Hochzeit des Figaro. Once a pied-à-terre for Hungarian noble families visiting the city, by the time Burroughs stayed there it had become notorious as the place the international queer set took their boys any time of day or night. Burroughs liked to tell the story of someone bringing back a queen in drag to the hotel to be told, “I am sorry, sir, you simply cannot bring a woman into the hotel.” The man took off his wig and the doorman quickly apologized—“Terribly sorry, sir!”—and welcomed them in. An arched doorway led to a central courtyard and a maze of small rooms, each of which had a porcelain stove almost the height of the room.

  They swam at the beaches on the Danube and met up with Bernard Pyle and Tom Jeffreys, whom they had first met in New York. Bernard and Tom introduced them to the Romanische Baden, the huge Turkish baths complex at Kleine Stadtgutgasse 9, with its marble hot-water pool, its hot and cold showers, Roman sweat room, and wide colonnaded central hall. Burroughs remembered it fondly. “Vienna was a great gay place […] they had beautiful boys in the afternoons, the most beautiful boys from twelve to twenty, so it was great from that point of view.”2 Bill had no hesitation in taking advantage of the situation, in fact quite the opposite. He enjoyed Vienna.

  They took a short trip to Salzburg, where they saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte and also encountered a parade of banner-waving Nazi sympathizers. On July 19, they left the König von Ungarn for Budapest, where they took a pension in Buda on the west bank of the Danube for a week. Bernard Pyle and Tom Jeffreys came with them and they all met up with Graham Eyres-Monsell, who was in Europe for the summer. Monsell introduced them to Baron Janos “Jansci” Wolfner, a well-known character in the international gay set whom Monsell had known in London. Wolfner was a Hungarian nobleman with a monocle, described by Burroughs as “a very purposeful fascist-minded elitist.” He was the Baron in Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains, which Burroughs claimed was a lifelike portrait. Wolfner was who you went to to get boys. Many of the Hungarian noblemen were gay, with big estates where they had the pick of all the boys. They would be brought in, made to take a bath, and then be paraded for the guests. Wolfner took his work seriously. Bill often reenacted him in later days: “Vee vill haff FUN. Vee vill haff an ORGY!” Bill went with him to a bar with loud gypsy music. “Do you see anybody here that you want?” Wolfner asked. Burroughs pointed to a boy across the room and Wolfner snapped his fingers. Burroughs had been worried that he would be unable to perform, frozen in self-conscious embarrassment, but “in that case there wasn’t any block,” he said. “No block there.” Burroughs found Wolfner rather dull; still, it was Wolfner who informed him that vitamin A in megadoses of between 200,000 and 500,000 units is a cure for the common cold, something Burroughs swore by as being effective for the rest of his life. With the rise of the Nazis, Wolfner obviously had to get out. He returned to London, but his old famous friends who ha
d been delighted to receive his hospitality in Budapest shunned him, and he ended his life in much-reduced circumstances.

  Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia was an important stop-off for the international gay set. Bill and Robert arrived on July 29. The medieval walled city occupies a promontory overlooking the Adriatic with a harbor on either side. It is a town of stone steps and alleys where even the roads are made from white marble. Cars were banned completely, and there were many wonderful bars and restaurants. Sometimes they took trips out to the beaches at Lapad and spent the night in a pension. Burroughs loved it there.

  Graham Eyres-Monsell introduced him to Romney Summers, an English remittance man who moved on the gay circuit and knew everyone. He was a heavy drinker who was sometimes abusive when drunk. He had been a great friend of Somerset Maugham’s until they had a falling-out over cards. Through Monsell Burroughs also met Jock Jardine, another wealthy, well-connected Briton. They showed Bill and Robert all the best places to go.

  “Ears” Monsell had given Bill a letter of introduction to Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, who made a career out of playing hostess to the visiting gay set, mostly English. She was someone whom everyone called upon when in Dubrovnik. She always knew who was in town and who was expected. She saw Bill and Robert every day, showed them the sights, and introduced them around. Ilse was born on April 19, 1900, fourteen years before Burroughs, and came from a very wealthy haut-bourgeois Jewish family in Hamburg. She knew the cream of the Weimar Republic. Kurt Weill and the American actress Lillian Gish were friends of hers; in fact, Gish was a witness to Ilse’s U.S. naturalization petition in January 1944. Burroughs had grown up watching Lillian Gish’s films and later met her in New York through Ilse.

  Ilse had married Dr. Klapper, a German physician, and they had moved to Dubrovnik, but they were divorced and no longer saw each other. He was Aryan, but had been an outspoken anti-Nazi and was now practicing medicine illegally in a small Croatian community some miles out of town. Ilse had lived in Dubrovnik for many years and had made it her own. She was the city’s social arbiter, and she knew all the countesses and artists, all the intrigue and scandal, but had continual problems with the social split between her Serbian and her Croatian friends. Her affairs had taken a downturn: recent developments in Germany meant her stipend from her family was cut off and she was forced to give English lessons and take other odd jobs to earn an income. She was living in a tiny room in a hotel when she met Burroughs and Miller.

  She was small-boned but of average height, with brown eyes in a small, birdlike face that was framed by a tight bob of brown hair. Burroughs described her as having “definitely a shrewd birdlike look.” He liked her complete lack of any pretense and the fact that she could see straight through any phony. He said, “Ilse was a terrific person. She wore a monocle. She was very straightforward and mannish. Partly a dyke but not really, she was much more into men. She told me a lot about her affairs.”3 Burroughs thought she was “terrifically intelligent” and they became very good friends. He liked the way that no one could put one over on her: she was a survivor. She told him about an affair she had with a White Russian taxi driver, a tough Cossack type. One day in conversation he referred to her hotel room as “our little room.” She immediately thought, “I must get rid of this man! It’s not ‘our little room,’ it’s my little room,” and he soon went on his way.

  2. Mrs. Burroughs

  On August 21, Bill left for Vienna. Bill and Robert had been due to return to the States from Dubrovnik in September, but Bill had always considered becoming a doctor, and in order to get into American medical school he needed pre-med qualifications in biology, chemistry, and mathematics. In Vienna, all he needed was his high school diploma as the university system in Europe meant anyone could enroll in a course and keep taking the examinations until they eventually qualified, although the dropout rate was considerable. Bill enrolled at the fourteenth-century University of Vienna Medical School for the winter term, October 1936 until mid-February 1937, and paid his half-yearly fee of three hundred schillings, the most expensive course on offer. The anatomy was in Latin, which he knew from Los Alamos and Harvard, and he spoke decent enough German. He improved his reading using a method he discovered in one of Somerset Maugham’s books: taking a book he knew in English, and a copy of the book in translation, then reading a page from each with the aid of a dictionary. He used books by Maugham. After three books, he could read the language.

  The Nazis were growing increasingly more powerful and he followed their rise with deep fascination. He read the local Austrian newspapers, the daily Völkischer Beobachter, owned by Hitler and published by the German Nazi Party, and the weekly downmarket Der Stürmer. “[I] saw the emergence and manipulation of these fiendish archetypes. A Jew head with a spider body. Picture of a Jew accused of some crime: ‘From his horrible Jew eyes speaks the crime world of the Talmud.’ And this image was then grafted onto the homosexual.”4 He found that almost all the students he talked to at the medical school were pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic, unless of course they were Jews. It seemed obvious that the Nazis were going to take over Austria with the massive support they had among the population and the police, and in Vienna, despite its left-wing traditions, there was growing support for them, with swastikas on buildings and marches and demonstrations. Only eighteen months later, on March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed into the German Third Reich.

  Before starting his studies Burroughs took a bus trip south through Albania, first to Tirana then Durrës on the coast. He and a German were the only tourists. The Albanians were not used to foreign travelers and were unfriendly. There were no proper restaurants or hotels and the food was awful. Burroughs thought it was a very strange, primitive country; the thick forest on the coast did not look Mediterranean at all, but as if it had come from elsewhere.

  After another week in the König von Ungarn, Burroughs rented a large flat near the university at Garnisongasse 1, flat 26 on the fourth floor in a huge ornate building overlooking Universitätsstrasse with a rusticated doorway complete with an elaborate pediment. Sigmund Freud lived about four blocks away, but although many Americans visiting Vienna made a pilgrimage to visit him, Burroughs was not among them. Though living in “the City of Dreams,” he had not yet realized the importance of his own dreams, which were to provide him with about half of his characters.

  As was usual for Burroughs, he moved around a lot, relocating on October 1 to the Hotel Dianabad, at Obere Donaustrasse 93, on the recommendation of friends. It was a huge wedding-cake building with 125 rooms, taking up a whole block on the Donau canalside just over the Marienbrücke bridge. Rooms started at eight schillings a night but the main attraction was that the whole building was essentially one huge Turkish bath. It was clean and very well heated and had a dining room where Burroughs took most of his meals even though he was not too keen on wienerschnitzel or any of the local cuisine. Burroughs described it as “a spa with queer sections.” There were quite genuine health baths, but “you could rent a whole section of the Turkish bath for sexual orgies, all the waiters were queer, oh it was a marvelous place!”5 There was a swimming pool on the roof, and Bill had a room two floors below. He spent his twenty-third birthday there. Some days he would walk to the Prater, the huge amusement park that was on his side of the canal. He went on the Riesenrad, the giant Ferris wheel built in 1897 and featured in Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man, but the Prater itself was equally well known as a gay cruising area. Then Bill found that he had contracted syphilis from a boy in New York and now had secondary symptoms. He initiated a course of intravenous Salvarsan injections but felt that he was “unclean.” He became wary of sexual entanglements, not knowing at the time that after a month of treatment using Salvarsan he was no longer contagious. This dampened his appetite for sexual adventures.

  In his fourth and final move in Vienna, Burroughs now took a large flat at Auerspergstrasse 21, flat 5 on the fifth floor on the corner of Josefsgasse just one block from the parliament building a
nd still close to the university. He shared it with a man in his fifties who worked as a civil servant at the nearby Rathaus Wien (Town Hall), who appears to have been a sexual partner rather than just a roommate. There was a marble staircase, wrought-iron balusters, and huge double doors leading to his apartment with an elaborate husk garland and cartouche above. His two hundred dollars a month meant that he could live in style. By the end of term, in the middle of February 1937, Burroughs could see that the situation in Vienna was now so unstable that he would never be able to complete his medical education there. He also felt that “I could never have been a doctor. I did right to quit. My heart is too soft and too hard, too quickly moved to love, anger or indifference. I would care too much for some patients and nothing for others.”6 On March 1 he enrolled instead in the Diplomatische Akademie, a postgraduate school founded in 1754 that provided training for careers in international business, public service, and political science. There were courses in German language, French, economics, and international relations, and it might have been useful if Burroughs was intending to join the Burroughs Company, but it was a stopgap move and short-lived.

  While visiting Prague, Burroughs came down with acute appendicitis and quickly returned to Vienna. A Dr. Thibes examined Bill, told him, “We can’t wait a second,” and took him straight to the Sanatorium Hera.7 They operated that night. In those days before antibiotics, peritonitis was lethal, so he was fortunate. The Sanatorium Hera, at Löblichgasse 9, was a maternity hospital, and it is likely that Bill was the only male patient. He recuperated for seventeen days before being discharged on April 4. He dropped out of the Diplomatische Akademie, and on May 1 he returned to Dubrovnik to recuperate from the operation. There he naturally contacted Ilse.