by Barry Miles
She was frantic with worry. Her Yugoslavian visa was about to expire, but as a Jew she could not renew it. She would have to return to Germany. There the Nuremburg Laws8 had already excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship, prohibited them from holding public office and from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or German-related” blood. She could see what was coming. She asked Bill to marry her. For her it was a matter of life or death, whereas for Bill marriage meant nothing; he knew he was gay and unlikely ever to want to marry. He told Ted Morgan, “Obviously she was pushing this, I guess I was pretty malleable. I said, ‘Well, it wouldn’t hurt anything.’ Remember there’s a lot of pressure coming from a very experienced woman who knows how to exert pressure, on someone who at that time had no very clear orientation. And she was also being pushed by a desperate need.”9 Bill was twenty-three and she was thirty-eight, but they were genuinely good friends so, as he said, “I was doing it to be a nice guy.”
Predictably, Bill’s parents went berserk. To them she was a grasping European gold digger, an older femme fatale who had ensnared their naïve young son. They bombarded Bill with phone calls, telegrams, and letters. His mother understood why he was doing it and attempted to find other means of getting Ilse into the country without resorting to marriage, but Bill was determined.
The American consul in Athens, Henry A.W. Beck, was an old friend of Romney Summers’s. On July 26, Ilse, Bill, and Romney took the steamship Prestolonaslednik Petar from Dubrovnik down the Adriatic coast to Athens, where Beck arranged all the paperwork with no trouble. Americans marrying abroad had to complete a number of forms. It turned out that Beck was living with Fritz Tunnell, an old acquaintance of Bill’s from Harvard. Next they needed to find someone to marry them. The first priest refused to do it: he said he had “scruples” and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He thought there was something suspicious about this callow youth wanting to marry a monocled, mannish woman who looked old enough to be his mother. Undaunted, they quickly found a priest with no scruples who was prepared to take the ten-dollar fee, and on August 7, 1937, at the American embassy, they were wed. They had forgotten to buy a ring, so during the ceremony Ilse had to pull a large turquoise ring from her finger and give it to Bill, who then replaced it on her wedding finger. Beck and Tunnell showed them all around Athens, where they ate in a number of fashionable restaurants, drank a good deal of retsina, and walked in the parks full of pepper trees.
Bill’s family were still sending frantic messages, and so he returned to New York. Marrying an American citizen does not automatically make you American, and there were a number of obstacles to be overcome before Ilse could join him. Burroughs contacted Mrs. Lipp, a powerful Jewish matron in a hotel in Park Avenue who had known Ilse in Dubrovnik. She remembered Ilse as a charming, magnetic person and that Ilse had once helped her out. “We want to get this straightened out, Bill,” said Mrs. Lipp.
“We certainly do,” Bill told her.
“I’ll send you to see the man,” she said.
Bill went to see the man, a dignified white-haired old gentleman in an office in a hotel with an American flag on the wall behind him. He asked Bill, “Young man, this was a perfectly sincere marriage, wasn’t it? It wasn’t in any sense a marriage of convenience.”
“Certainly not!” said Bill. “I love my wife and I want to have her in the United States with me.”
Bill answered all the questions and the man said, “Well, all right.” Bill let himself out. Three weeks later Ilse had her entry visa and traveled to the United States as a non-quota immigrant. Burroughs had saved her life.
The marriage caused considerable tension between Bill and his parents, but it never erupted into a row; Bill never ever witnessed a raised voice or argument in the Burroughs household, just resignation, disappointment, and sad looks.
Bill had exhibited various types of compulsive behavior ever since he left Los Alamos. From the age of eighteen he always had to have a coin in his pocket, which he took out and looked at frequently. Since marrying Ilse he had compulsively stuck bits of torn newspaper beneath his nails. Bill knew that his behavior was neurotic, but couldn’t stop himself. He enrolled in a psychology course at Washington University in St. Louis, hoping to cure his neurosis, but he was soon unhappy with the tuition and looked for somewhere better.
3. Enter Dr. Benway
Burroughs had always been interested in the whole area of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. He enrolled in a psychology course at Columbia University for the winter 1937 term, intending to write a dissertation. When he decided to move to New York, his father contacted James Wideman Lee Jr., Laura’s brother, who worked for Ivy Lee in New York and belonged to a lot of clubs. Mote asked him if he could get Bill into the University Club. Uncle James pulled a few strings, Bill was interviewed by the club secretary, and he was in. The club, in a nineteenth-century mansion at 1 West 54th Street at Fifth Avenue, was founded in 1861, originally for the “promotion of literature and art,” and housed a magnificent library and art gallery. Bill moved in.
Bill had already read most of Freud, and now extended his studies to Carl Jung on alchemy, archetypes, and the psychology of the unconscious, Otto Rank on dreams and “Will Therapy,” and Theodore Reik on masochism.10 He read the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and theoretically he was very well informed. He worked hard in class but was stopped cold by statistics. They were a very important part of psychology studies but he was unable to master them.
The Manhattan that Burroughs entered in 1937 is long gone: when jazz played on the radios in corner stores, the Third Avenue Elevated shook the windows when it passed, and everyone wore a hat. Even the light was different then; John Cheever called it “river light,” when Manhattan had working piers all along the Hudson and the harbor was filled with ships. Great transatlantic liners—RMS Queen Mary, SS Normandie—docked on the Hudson. The recently completed Empire State and Chrysler buildings towered over Midtown.
Burroughs headed for Greenwich Village where there was a run-down block directly across from the Provincetown Players on MacDougal Street between Washington Square South and West 3rd Street that housed a row of gay bars, collectively known as the Auction Block. The San Remo and the Minetta Tavern were both in the next block, and he soon got to know all the regulars like Maxwell Bodenheim, a successful author back in the twenties—Burroughs liked Replenishing Jessica—who was now down on his luck. Another was Joe Gould, who was supposedly compiling an Oral History of the World, a tiny toothless figure who, when plied with enough liquor, would do his seagull imitation, flapping his arms, skipping from one foot to another, and screeching.
Bill saw a lot of his Harvard friend Bill Gilmore, the notorious check dodger. Gilmore was always sponging off Bill, asking to dine at the University Club, where he knew all Bill had to do was sign the tab. Bill sometimes had a pickup stay over. As long as you wore a jacket and tie “you could take anyone you wanted there. I’ve seen some guys in the dining room with screaming faggots. You could do pretty much anything you wanted.”11
Bill remained in touch with Rex Weisenberger and together they would make the rounds of gay bars. Sometimes Rex would hock his stamp collection to get money to go out and get drunk. Rex lived in the family house in Bronxville, and he commuted every day to his job at McGraw-Hill. Rex hated his mother and Burroughs remembered, “Staying at Rex Weisenberger’s family’s house was something. He was quite likely to have two sailors for breakfast and his parents frowning over their coffee and orange juice as if to say, ‘You know what happens to people who go out with sailors.’ ” Rex had a model electric train set arranged in the family basement, and Bill was visiting one day when his mother threatened to throw it out. Rex retaliated by saying, “If you do, I’ll saw the legs off your goddamn antique table.”12
That summer Burroughs moved back to Harvard to do graduate work in anthropology and Mayan archaeology. He did a summer course, then enrolled for the fall term. Kells Elvins was also at
Harvard, doing graduate work in psychology. Bill, Kells, and “a snippy queen” named Alan Calvert rented a wooden suburban frame house on the outskirts of Cambridge in a tree-lined street behind the Commodore Hotel. They had a black manservant who did the cooking and cleaning while they attended to their studies. Kells was still married but he and his wife were no longer together.
Ever since the Los Alamos diary, Burroughs had disliked the whole process of writing; however, in Cambridge writing was a frequent subject of discussion, and Kells persuaded Bill that they should write a hard-boiled detective story together in the style of Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, and the writers in Black Mask magazine. They read Felix Riesenberg’s The Left-Handed Passenger about the sinking of SS Morro Castle, which caught fire and burned off the New Jersey coast with loss of two hundred lives on September 8, 1935. The first mate was in the first lifeboat to leave the burning ship, and the official inquiry condemned the crew’s behavior. Similarly they researched the sinking of the Titanic in the Widener Library and found that one of the survivors in a lifeboat was a man dressed as a woman.
Sitting in the screened porch of their house, they acted out the different roles of their characters, laughing uproariously as they did so. It quickly became a Burroughs routine, marrying shocking stories of cowardly behavior with elements of his recent medical training. This was taken to a grotesque extreme in a story called “Twilights Last Gleamings” that Burroughs later used, almost verbatim, in Nova Express.13 “We acted out every scene and often got on laughing jags,” Burroughs wrote. “I hadn’t laughed like that since my first tea high at 18 when I rolled around on the floor and pissed all over myself.”14 They decided that acting out the parts was the best way to gain understanding of the characters and their physical actions. “Acting things out is a very very good practice. Somebody came into the room, where did he come from? What door? Lots of times there’s something wrong with a scene and what’s wrong with it is, it couldn’t possibly have happened. You’ve got someone coming through the wall. […] That’s a very useful exercise that I started when we were writing this story together. Kells was great, he was funny. That was the first appearance of Dr. Benway. Kells just dredged him up, the name and the personality: a completely irresponsible doctor that gets into the first lifeboat. ‘You all all right? I’m the doctor.’ ”15 Dr. Benway, who became one of Burroughs’s best-loved characters, was based on a real doctor whom Elvins once knew.
The writing of “Twilights Last Gleamings” cemented Bill and Kells’s friendship for life, and Elvins always encouraged and supported Burroughs in his literary endeavors, long before he was published. They sent their story to Esquire magazine, which rejected it saying, “Too screwy, but not effectively so for us.” “I see now that the curse of the diary was broken temporarily by the act of collaboration,” Burroughs wrote.16 It was a temporary respite and Burroughs wrote nothing more until 1945, when once again a collaboration raised him from his torpor.
On September 21, Bill was having a nap in his room when Alan Cowley knocked on the door and said, “Well, Bill, I think the house is being blown down, in case you’re in-ter-ested.”17 Bill got dressed and they went out into the street. Trees were uprooted and they saw the wind disintegrate a shop window and blow a great cloud of broken glass down the street, so they hurried back inside and stayed away from the windows. It was the great hurricane of 1938. Boston was only on the outer edge of the storm, which killed approximately six hundred people in New England, mostly in Rhode Island, and destroyed over forty-five hundred homes, damaged twenty-five thousand more, and uprooted an estimated two billion trees.
Around this time, Burroughs finally achieved the sexual experience he had been looking for. He told Victor Bockris, “I don’t think I was fucked until 1938, in Cambridge. […] I’d known Lloyd Hathaway before, and we jerked off together, and this particular occasion he fucked me. I asked him to.”18 Life in their frame house was enjoyable, but in the spring of 1939 Kells left to do graduate work in the state prison in Huntsville, Texas, where he had been offered a place as prison psychologist. The household broke up.
Bill was at a loose end and, after giving Kells time to settle in, went down to visit him in Texas, where he was now living with a woman named Jean. Huntsville was a tough jail; the prisoners were kept in stockades and worked at the prison farms, but Burroughs proclaimed the food as excellent. Kells did the psychological evaluations. Elvins’s master’s thesis in psychology was titled “Forty-Four Incestuous Fathers of Texas,” based on interviews with the prison’s inmates. There was one man who had gone through three generations, getting his daughter pregnant and then his granddaughter. He got out of jail when he was about eighty years old, and said, “I don’t see anything wrong with raising your own tail. I guess the other one’s about right now.”19 The prison authorities were not pleased when Kells presented his thesis to the university.
Ilse Herzfeld Klapper Burroughs arrived in New York on MS Vulcania on January 19, 1939, and found herself a small apartment at 230 West 61st Street. Her first job was as secretary to Ernst Toller, the leftist German dramatist whom she almost certainly knew from Dubrovnik or Berlin. Toller had escaped to the States and was living in the Mayflower Hotel at 61st Street and Central Park West. Developments in Europe had left him very depressed, and several times Ilse had returned from lunch at two o’clock sharp to find that he had tried to hang himself. She was back in time to cut him down, as he obviously intended. Then one day, May 22, 1939, she ran into a fellow German Jew whom she had been concerned about, not knowing if he had escaped. They discussed who got out and who was in the camps and she was a half hour late getting back. She told Burroughs, “I sit down and get my notes, and then it comes up the back of my neck and I know he is hanging up somewhere.” She opened the bathroom door. He’d hung himself with his bathrobe cord, expecting her to be back in time to prevent him from dying. She cut him down and called the hotel manager, whose first reaction was, “We don’t want any scandals here and…” She said he was “like ice.” Toller had actually broken his neck, so even if she had been back on time it would have made no difference.
At Toller’s funeral she met Kurt Kasznar, a penniless Austrian actor who had married the American heiress Cornelia Woolley, an admirer of Toller’s work. Ilse moved in with them and became the Kasznars’ social secretary. They were multimillionaires and gave big parties to which Bill was occasionally invited. He met John La Touche there and also Mrs. Mathews, his old next-door neighbor from Pershing Avenue, who was there with a young gigolo. Bill saw Ilse from time to time, whenever he was in New York, meeting at modest French restaurants she knew where they could get a good meal for a dollar. Never once did she ask Bill for money or make any claims or demands on him.
When Kasznar’s wife died unexpectedly in June 1944, the maid accused Kasznar of having poisoned her. She was exhumed, but it wasn’t true; she had died of liver failure from years of excessive drinking.
Ilse next worked as a secretary for John La Touche, a close friend of Brion Gysin’s, though Burroughs and Gysin did not meet for another decade. La Touche wrote the lyrics for such hits as “Taking a Chance on Love” in the musical Cabin in the Sky (1940) and acted in Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947). Ilse did not think much of La Touche’s songs but conceded, “He has a tremendous talent—for this shit.” John La Touche did an act about Burroughs; prancing around the room he would say, “I am Bill Burroughs. I’ve got a gun here, don’t come near me!”
Bill and Ilse divorced amicably in October 1946, after she moved back to Europe. They last met in New York in 1965. On his return to New York in 1974 he looked up all the Burroughs names in the phone book without success. Then he heard from his friend Timothy Baum that he had met her in Zurich. Bill was never able to locate her. She died in Ascona, Switzerland, in August 1982.
Chapter Seven
If we enquire about the “meaning” of a word, we find that it depends on the “meaning” of other words used in defining it.
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br /> —ALFRED KORZYBSKI1
1. Count Alfred Korzybski
That summer, 1939, Burroughs attended a weeklong seminar given by Count Alfred Korzybski at his Institute of General Semantics in Chicago. He first heard about Korzybski at Harvard and then read his enormous book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, first published in 1933. In it Korzybski attempted to show how “factors of sanity” can be tested empirically using modern scientific methods, and illustrated his findings with hundreds of pages of material drawn from all the many different branches of science from biology to mathematics, psychics to semantics. Intrigued, Bill applied for Korzybski’s course. In order to be accepted he had to submit an essay, and chose as his subject the eighteenth-century London dandy Beau Brummell, examined in the light of the work of Trigant Burrow, John W. Dunne, and Korzybski. The paper, written in July 1939 and unfortunately now lost, is described as an examination of Brummell as an “oral personality” in the context of “projection” that touched on the future possibilities of television, the new media introduced to the American public two months earlier when Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first person to address the American public live on television. Baudelaire’s famous 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life” proposed the dandy, or flâneur, as a model for the modern artist; he was opposed to bourgeois society and was aloof from the everyday crowd, having no interest in everyday trivialities—“the soccer scores are coming in from the Capital… one must pretend an interest”—he was distant, detached, removed, an observer, and, of necessity, emotionally cold. These are all traits that Burroughs must have recognized in himself.
