Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Korzybski was a sixty-year-old Polish war hero who emigrated to the United States after the Armistice. Described by Burroughs as a heavy, vigorous gentleman looking somewhat like Picasso, he was an emphatic and energetic teacher. He would begin his lectures by banging down his fist. “Whatever this is, it is not a ‘table.’ It’s not the label table.” That things were not their labels was one of his main points. The other was the fallacy of Aristotelian either/or logic: that a proposition is either true or false; hereditary or environment; instinct or emotion. He said the either/or contradiction does not correspond with the human nervous system at all. It is not either/or, it is both/and; not intellect or emotion, every act is both intellectual and emotional. There is no way that you can split the human organism into two halves. In fact this is a rather crude reading of Aristotle, who wrote, “It is not necessary that of every affirmation and opposite negation one should be true and the other false.”2 Another memorable Korzybski line, often quoted by Burroughs, was that the “I” is not just confined in the brain. Korzybski always told his class, “You think as much with your big toe as you do with your brain—and probably more effectively.”3 As usual, Burroughs took from it what he wanted, namely the idea that words should mean what they say. In conversation, and when he was teaching, Burroughs railed against all generalized words like “justice” and “communism,” “art” and “culture” because they have as many definitions as there are users.

  It was a small class of fifteen to twenty people. It lasted for five days and everyone had a one-on-one tutorial. Bill’s was unfortunately timed for the early afternoon of September 1, 1939. Korzybski could have been forgiven if he was distracted. That morning, at 4:45 a.m., just before dawn, 2,750 tanks, supported by 2,315 aircraft, led an army of more than a million Germans into Poland in the opening action of World War II.

  Burroughs took his fall 1939 and spring 1940 anthropology courses at Harvard but made an abrupt move to New York City before completing the course. On February 1 he wrote asking Harvard to send his papers to Columbia to enable him to study anthropology and psychology there. At first he lived in the Harvard Club on West 44th Street, a private club to which anyone who had attended Harvard could apply and which was less expensive than the University Club. He stayed there over the years when he was moving from one apartment to another. Bill moved seamlessly between the world of his upper-middle-class background and his newly found bohemia, and continued to do so throughout his life. After getting settled at Columbia, he moved around from hotel to hotel, finally selecting the huge, anonymous Taft Hotel at 761 Seventh Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets, just north of Times Square.

  Bill connected up with Bill Gilmore again, who was living with W. H. Auden in an apartment at 1 Montague Terrace in Brooklyn Heights. Auden was already seeing eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman,4 who was still living at home. Gilmore was working as a publicist and had plans to write the “Great American Novel,” but nothing ever came of it. Burroughs met Auden several times while visiting Gilmore, but he was not impressed: “He talked all the time… He was very pedantic. I was to some extent impressed by his poetry. He’s a good poet. Although it gets so far, it’s almost profound and doesn’t quite make it.” Unfortunately he met Auden just as the poet began to go regularly to church again. By October 1940 Auden had joined the Anglican Communion, so Burroughs caught the full force of his conversion period. “He got religion so then he was talking as a Christian. His whole life he was always talking as something.” Bill thought that The Age of Anxiety was the best thing he did. It was Gilmore, in Burroughs’s recollection, who also introduced him to Jack Anderson, in a downtown queer bar.

  2. Jack Anderson

  Eighteen-year-old Jack Anderson lived in an old redbrick rooming house at 55 Jane Street in the West Village near the Meatpacking District. Bill described him as having “a beautiful face and very mediocre body, and a sort of chorus girl, shop girl mentality. Cheap. Essentially cheap. Completely oriented towards money and that was it; money and having everything he wanted. He was a hustler. Not educated at all and with a great inferiority complex.” Anderson had a job as an office boy, but hustled on the side and wasted most of his money betting on the horses. He and Bill made it sporadically. The Taft turned out not to be anonymous enough. One night, Bill and Jack were having sex in Bill’s room when a hotel security man, patrolling the corridors to make sure all the rooms were locked, looked in and caught them in flagrante. Bill had forgotten to lock the door. Ten minutes later, the house detective and the hotel manager burst in and found them both stark naked. Outraged at the intrusion, Bill demanded, “What’s going on here?”

  “Well, we want to know what’s going on here!” they replied. Bill’s imperious manner didn’t daunt them and the house detective said, “You’re the wisest prick I ever walked in on.” Bill regarded this as quite a compliment. The detective asked, “Didn’t anyone ever kick the shit out of you?” Bill was given ten minutes to pack his things. He was told to go to the cashier’s window, where he was given a refund, and they were thrown out in the middle of the night. They took a cab back to Jack’s rooming house on Jane Street and the next day Bill took a room in the same building. It was a dollar a day, a considerable savings on the Taft.

  But Jack was hustling, the walls of the apartment building were thin, and Bill could hear Jack having sex with pickups. What really disturbed Bill, however, was that Jack had a girlfriend and Bill could hear them together. Bill was racked with jealousy; he became obsessed with Jack, constantly remonstrated with him, putting himself through hell. One reason for this may be that the sex was good. Burroughs said on several occasions that he had three memorable orgasms in his life, and one was with Jack Anderson.5 One of the few violent episodes of his life occurred when Jack and his girlfriend were visiting with Burroughs in his room at Jane Street:

  His girlfriend who was wildly jealous suddenly hit me and knocked my glasses off and I just hauled off and hit her one. […] She kept complaining, “I happen to love Jack, I happen to love Jack…” Drunk out of her mind. This went on for hours, then all of a sudden the bitch hauled off and hit me. Instead of acting like a professor, I just hauled off and whammed her one and knocked her across the room onto the couch. Jack did nothing. I hit her real hard, slammed her in the face. I was amazed to see this happen from my fist. I’m stronger than I know I am. She got up sort of subdued. She assumed this was her due. It really stopped the whole scene.6

  Bill was becoming irrational. He warned Jack that if he didn’t give up the women he would cut off a finger. At the same time, he recognized that his obsession with Anderson was neurotic and that he needed help. The idea was reinforced when a professor told him that no one could do really good work in social anthropology without first being psychoanalyzed. Bill looked up the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the phone book and made a blind appointment, resulting in analysis with Dr. Herbert Wiggers. Dr. Wiggers had received his medical degree from McGill in 1934 and was only seven years older than Burroughs. He was a strict Freudian and had a research appointment at Bellevue to study suicide. Bill liked him. He was very tall, six foot three or four, and ineffective-looking. He was in poor health; he had had rheumatic fever as a child and was to die suddenly at the age of forty-six. Bill’s parents thought analysis was a good idea and agreed to pay.

  They had good reason to think so. Their son was growing more dissociated from reality and unable to function normally. Anderson was his first real lover and had triggered in Burroughs a torrent of suppressed feelings that he was unable to control. He was powerless in his efforts to make Anderson return his love, and his emotions were overwhelming him: a seething mixture of rage, frustration, feelings of betrayal, erotic fantasies, and revenge. On April 23, 1940, Burroughs walked up Sixth Avenue from 42nd Street looking for a cutlery store among the pawnshops. He wanted to buy poultry shears like the ones his father used to cut through the joints when he carved the turkey at his grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinners. He found the
m: stainless steel, one blade curved and sharp, the other serrated to hold the meat in place. They were $2.79 plus tax. Paying a dollar in advance, he booked into the Ariston Hotel, an apartment hotel on Sixth Avenue famous for its gay bath scene. He unwrapped the brown paper package and placed the end joint of his left little finger between the blades. In his short story “The Finger” he wrote:

  He took a deep breath, pressed the handle quick and hard. He felt no pain. The finger joint fell on the dresser. Lee turned his hand over and looked at the stub. Blood spurted up and hit him in the face. He felt a sudden deep pity for the finger joint that lay there on the dresser, a few drops of blood gathering around the white bone. Tears came to his eyes. “It didn’t do anything” he said in a broken child’s voice.7

  He crudely bandaged his finger, put the finger joint in his waistcoat pocket, and left. He felt a wave of euphoria and stopped at a bar and ordered a double brandy. “Goodwill flowed out of him for everyone he saw, for the whole world. A lifetime of defensive hostility had fallen from him.”8 He had originally intended to present the finger to Anderson in some sort of Van Gogh gesture, but he had a meeting scheduled with Dr. Wiggers and a half hour later he was seated next to him on a park bench in Central Park. Clearly Burroughs’s real aim had been to present the finger to Wiggers, maybe as proof of the depth of his feeling for Anderson. Wiggers was terrified by Bill’s self-mutilation. He said, “Really Bill, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. When you realize what you’ve done you’ll need psychiatric care. Your ego will be overwhelmed.”9 He persuaded Bill to come with him to his office in Bellevue to have the finger dressed to avoid infection, but once he got there Bill was tricked into signing some papers and found himself in the psychiatric ward. He was interviewed and committed. The finger stub had to have its own burial and death certificate in case someone found it and the police spent time looking for the rest of the body.

  Bill’s father flew in immediately, and the next day Bill was transferred to the private Payne Whitney Clinic. Bill arrived in a taxi accompanied by his father, his wife, Ilse, and Bill Gilmore. Mote didn’t say anything but he was terribly upset. He didn’t want to talk about it any more than Bill did. Bill was in Payne Whitney for a month under the care of Dr. Lincoln Rahman and Dr. Oskar Diethelm. Wiggers came to see him and Bill called him a “Son of a Bitch!” But his resentment toward Wiggers diminished after his visit. Some years later, a more experienced analyst, Dr. Paul Federn, discussed it with Bill, saying, “Don’t you understand Wiggers’s position here? He was a young analyst and he was just scared to death? He didn’t know what would happen, and he would be held responsible. You can’t blame him for that. He panicked, that’s all.”10

  Bill remained aloof from the other patients. He spent most of his time in his room playing solitaire or reading. The nurses went through his belongings and found several joints of marijuana, which they confiscated. They also found a series of strange Brueghel-like symbolic drawings of torture and sex organs, the expression of what was going on in his head. His admission interview was unsatisfactory because Bill did not want his parents to know that the event was triggered by a homosexual relationship and told the doctors a story about being jilted by a girl. Bill’s mother arrived and Bill told her that he was interested in perceptions of pain and had cut off his little finger to be able to prove to himself that if one concentrated on not feeling pain one could cut off a finger and feel nothing. He told her he felt no pain in doing it. Laura, as usual, believed every word. On April 30, on being assured of patient confidentiality, he finally told the doctors about his homosexual affairs. Throughout his interviews the doctors reported that he spoke in an affected manner of exaggerated politeness as though condescending to explain something to someone of a lower intellect. He told them that his yoga breathing had sometimes given him hallucinations and given him feelings of unreality that lasted up to twenty hours, a state that he enjoyed. Dr. Wiggers told the doctors that he saw Bill three times a week and that Bill sometimes went into periods of catatonic rage, sat with his arms fixed rigidly, staring into space or with his eyes crossed.

  Burroughs discussed the episode with Ted Morgan. “If I was to do an analysis of the situation, I would say that Jack had very little reality so far as I was concerned, but was just a figure in some sort of psychodrama, that’s all. At any rate it was obvious that it had little to do with reality. Silly, silly. You look back on this and say, ‘What in the hell was the matter with you? To do such a stupid thing?’ I remember a dream I had of a child who had a bleeding finger, and I said, ‘Who did this, who did this?’ and the child points at me. It’s also the same hand where I had all these other injuries from the explosion. It healed quite easily.”

  Bill was discharged from Payne Whitney on May 2311 with the statistical diagnosis of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), catatonic type. A note on his discharge paper says, “The patient is likely to have further difficulty. Will probably have to be hospitalized again at some later date.” Bill had been very underweight and disheveled when he was admitted; now he had gained weight and looked five years younger.

  3. St. Louis Return

  Bill’s parents wanted him to spend some time in St. Louis after his discharge. Mort was married and living in his own place, so it was just Bill and his parents; they were very concerned about him but didn’t talk about it. Bill for his part was still acutely worried that they might find out he was a homosexual, so he dared not try to find a gay bar in the city. He continued his psychotherapy in St. Louis, first with Dr. Sidney Schwab, whom Burroughs now disliked, and then Dr. John C. Whitehorn, whom he saw until January 1941.

  Despite his anxiety that his parents would find out about his homosexuality, Bill invited Jack Anderson to visit. The story “Driving Lesson” is based on a real car crash that Burroughs had during that visit when he borrowed his father’s car to go drinking in East St. Louis, drove it too fast, and wrecked it. He was very bored and dissatisfied. His parents, who were supporting him, thought it would be good for him to help out while he was at home and set him to work as a deliveryman, driving the truck at Cobble Stone Gardens, their garden supply and gift shop. Bill found his situation almost intolerable. “I was twenty-six, working in the shop at Cobble Stone Gardens, which I hate to remember, when this Jew woman sent me around to the servants’ entrance and I drove away clashing the gears and saying: ‘Hitler is perfectly right!’ So you want it honest? You vant? You vant? You vant?”12 He was unused to being in the servant class.

  Another poignant memory dates from around this time. One night Bill went down to raid the icebox at Price Road in the night. “(I was wretchedly unhappy. No sex. No work that meant anything—nothing.) Dad was there eating something… ‘Hello, Bill.’ It was a little-boy voice pleading for love, and I looked at him with cold hate. I could see him wither under my eyes as I muttered, ‘Hello.’ Looking back now, I feel an ache in the chest where the Ba lives. I reach out to him: ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’ Too late.”13 Bill saw his main problem as sexual. “Most of my ideas about loneliness and meeting other people were sexual. I was very sexually prostrated. I didn’t have a lover. I was looking, but with such a built-in ineptitude I wasn’t getting anywhere.”14

  Bill’s friend David Kammerer had attended Washington University in St. Louis and stayed on to become an English instructor there. His senior thesis was titled “The Boy in English Fiction: To Defoe.” He was very popular with the students, probably for his adolescent sense of humor, and was eventually dismissed for a silly student prank turning on the fire hoses. Bill enjoyed his humor. “He was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality. No conventional behavior at all. He was very witty, very charming.”15 While working at Washington University, Kammerer ran a Cub Scout play group. When he saw thirteen-year-old Lucien Carr he was immediately reminded of the apache he had become obsessed with on the rue de Lappe when he and Bill had traveled to Paris in 1933. Kammerer transferred his obsession to Luci
en. David was more than twice Lucien’s age.

  Lucien was an exceptionally attractive youth, matching Proust’s description of Saint-Loup: “slim, bare-necked, his head held proudly erect, a young man with penetrating eyes whose skin was as fair and his hair as golden as if they had absorbed all the rays of the sun.”16 Burroughs told Ted Morgan, “Dave had some sort of a blond image that was perfectly fitted by Lucien Carr. I know that he didn’t get Lucien. Lucien Carr was a beautiful boy, he was blond, he had perfectly molded features, slender and wiry, just a beautiful young upper-class kid.”17 Bill told him, “This is silly, this is awful. It’s also completely selfish, you’re not really interested in him, you’re interested in some idea of him that you have. And what you’re trying to do is not at all to his advantage.” But Kammerer couldn’t see it; he just said, “Oh well, it’s my obsession.” Burroughs frequently remonstrated with him, even though he didn’t feel that it was any of his business, but in vain. He could see the harm that Kammerer was doing to young Carr. There was an early incident when Kammerer’s motive for running a Cub Scout pack was revealed: once a week he would fill his Model T with the den, six to eight grade-school boys, and drive out to St. Charles County for the afternoon. On one occasion, after some romping around in a hayloft, Kammerer burst a blood vessel in his penis and had to be taken to hospital.