Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Lucien told the police the full story: how he went first to Burroughs, then to Kerouac, and how Jack helped him dispose of the evidence. The New York Herald Tribune reported that “Carr rocked his questioners in the district attorney’s office with liberal use of polysyllable words and deep philosophical observations.”9 Whenever there was a pause in the questioning, he returned to his copy of A Vision. The press reported the same withdrawn, distracted attitude in court, saying that he “listened lackadaisically to the proceedings” and “showed little interest” in what magistrate Anna M. Kross was saying in Homicide Court.

  When the police arrived at Bedford Street to question him, Bill was not home. He was in a room at the Lexington Hotel on a divorce case, listening for amorous noises through the walls. The client’s wife didn’t check in, so nothing happened. Hearing that the police were looking for him, Bill presented himself the next day at the DA’s office with his lawyer in tow to give his deposition. He was asked what he knew about the relationship between Kammerer and Carr and quite truthfully told them, “I don’t think there were any sexual relations.” They asked him if he knew that Kammerer was homosexual and Bill said, “Well yes, I frequently remonstrated with him, but in vain.” Bill’s lawyer then asked him, “Did he ever make a pass at you?” and Bill replied tartly, “Certainly not!” Bill was formally arrested as a material witness, even though his lawyer protested that he had done no wrong as Lucien had told him he was going to turn himself in. He was held for eight hours in the city prison, the Tombs, and was bailed out the same night by Mote, who flew in and paid the $2,500 bond. Bill flew back to St. Louis with his father.

  Jack and Edie were also arrested, but it did not take long for the police to establish that Edie had nothing to do with it. When Jack appeared in court he was told that he came very close to becoming an accessory after the fact, and had his bail set at $5,000. Jack whistled. He was not as fortunate as Burroughs; instead of paying his bail bond, Jack’s father exploded in rage. “No Kerouac was ever involved in murder before,” he yelled, and refused to help. He and Edie had to get married—which they were intending to do anyway—in order for Edie to get the money from her family to pay for Jack to get out. On August 22, 1944, Jack was taken from the Bronx jail to the Municipal Building, where he and Edie were wed, with Celine Young as the maid of honor, and two detectives acting as witnesses. The police bought them several rounds of drinks before escorting Jack back to jail. It fell to Jack to formally identify Kammerer’s bloated body, in the basement morgue of Bellevue Hospital. Jack was released on the thirtieth and went with Edie to her mother’s luxurious home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

  Jack had to borrow a hundred dollars from Edie’s mother and needed a job in order to pay her back. Their next-door neighbor in Grosse Pointe was Dick Fruehauf, owner of the plant that manufactured Fruehauf trucks. He gave Jack a job inspecting ball bearings. Jack was able to spend most of his shift reading and taking notes and made enough to pay Edie’s mother back twenty-five dollars a week.

  On August 24, a Manhattan grand jury returned a second-degree murder indictment against Lucien and on September 15 he appeared in court before Judge George L. Donnellan in General Sessions Court. Lucien looked visibly nervous, shifting from one foot to another, dressed in a conservative light brown suit with his hair slicked back with hair cream. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree. Lucien’s counsel, Kenneth M. Spence, told the court how Kammerer had “hounded” nineteen-year-old Carr from city to city for the past five years and said that “the older man exercised a strong influence over the boy.” Assistant DA Jacob Grumet told the court that Lucien was “emotionally unstable as a result of the improper advances” that Kammerer was alleged to have made, and said that Carr was intoxicated when he finally pulled the knife. The usual term for manslaughter was five to twenty years, but Judge Donnellan said that the sentence would depend very much on the “autobiography” that he wanted Carr to write for him. Sentencing was set for October 6.

  Bill returned from St. Louis to attend the trial. When he left the courtroom, he walked out with Lucien’s lawyer, who told him that they made the guilty plea because they had not wanted to take the case before a jury. Lucien would have had to be rehearsed in a story of attempted rape and might have ended up with ten years for second-degree murder. The lawyer told Bill, “I think it would have been very bad for his character for him to get off scot free,” which astonished Bill as it meant his heart wasn’t in the case at all. He had not wanted to get him off. As can be imagined, the West End group could talk of little else other than the subject of Kammerer’s death and Lucien’s sentencing. On October 1, a few days before sentencing, Celine Young wrote to Jack, who was still working in Grosse Pointe, outlining her anxiety that Lucien might get a long sentence because he showed no remorse:

  Had Lucien felt less pride in having Dave dog his footsteps he might have gotten rid of Kammerer before this and in a socially acceptable manner. The chief criticism of Lucien, and his probation officer observed this too, is that Lucien’s values are all intellectual ones. […] If he persists in the idea that he has done a messianic service by ridding the world of Dave, he is becoming too presumptuous a judge. When he loses that pride in doing away with Dave, then I hope he is let out immediately. I know he is very remorseful at times. […] Mrs. Carr has pictured [Dave] to me as a veritable Iago, who at every turn in Lucien’s life, has appeared and dissuaded him from the proper course, as she puts it, “purely for love of evil.” […] His influence on Lucien, this past year at least, was definitely to be destroyed at all costs.10

  Judge Donnellan sentenced Lucien to an indeterminate term in the Elmira Reformatory, saying, “It is my opinion that this boy might not have been convicted of anything had he gone to trial. Even if he had been convicted, I doubt if it would have been anything but manslaughter in the second degree.” A second-degree murder conviction could not be obtained because the knife used in the killing had not been recovered by the police and there was no eyewitness. However, the judge said, “I feel this boy deserves some punishment, but in an institution where he will be under good medical care, not in a prison where he will be constantly associated with hardened criminals.” The court was told of Lucien’s alcoholism, how he had been drinking to excess since he was fourteen years old, and was told that Lucien was unstable and had a split personality but that he could be “turned into a useful citizen” under the supervision of psychiatrists and educators. The judge explained that by giving Lucien an indeterminate term, it meant that Lucien’s release was entirely dependent upon his behavior and rehabilitation. He was warned that though he might be released within eighteen months if his behavior warranted it, he would be shifted to Sing Sing to serve a possible fifteen-year sentence if he did not comply with reformatory regulations. Lucien was taken from City Prison on October 9 and eventually served a little less than two years at Elmira Reformatory.11

  According to Edie, Bill showed no emotion at the death of his best friend, nor did he blame Lucien in any way. At first his only concern was for Lucien to get off. He regretted very much that Lucien had come to him, because had he kept his mouth shut and told no one, the murder would have been passed off as a mugging. As soon as one other person knew, then the truth would get out. Bill told Lucien, “You shouldn’t blame yourself at all, because he asked for it, he demanded it!” Burroughs said, “The real engineer of the whole thing was Dave. He was the manipulator. He was a lot older than Lucien, much older. It was Kammerer’s doing really, Kammerer’s obsession that provoked the killing. He maneuvered and engineered this whole climax.”12

  Chapter Eleven

  My emotions became like so many strange guests. As if chapter after chapter of your life, panel after panel of your psychology were opening and shutting in the twilight.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF1

  1. New Romantics

  After Lucien’s trial Burroughs spent several months in St. Louis with his parents, only returning to New York City i
n December to be psychoanalyzed. Edie Parker maintains that his parents made his monthly allowance conditional upon him attending his analyst regularly, as they were concerned about him being in the city. Burroughs began seeing Dr. Paul Federn, who had been, along with Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s official representative as well as the vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He had escaped to the United States in 1938. Federn had a bald head, an Old Testament beard, and was once described by Freud as having “patricidal eyes.”2 It was not until 1946 that he was officially recognized as a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. It had been Bill’s idea to see him, and his parents agreed. In the course of his analysis, Bill had a dream about Federn, that he had been offering candy to little girls without realizing he would be regarded as a pervert. When he told it to Federn, Federn said that this had actually happened. He had offered candy to children and then later worried what people would think. Apparently Federn had recorded more than thirteen hundred instances of telepathic contact between him and his patients.

  Federn shot himself in 1950. His wife had died and he was suffering from incurable cancer. He differed from Freud in thinking that it was an absence rather than an excess of narcissistic libido that determined the psychotic’s problems in life. As a result his approach involved supporting the patient’s efforts at integration by trying to prevent the emergence of repressed events and by strengthening the patient’s defenses, an approach hardly conducive to identifying the event involving Nursy that so disturbed Burroughs, although Federn was perplexed by it, asking Bill, “What is this? This that could have affected you your whole life long? What happened?” All Bill could say was, “Well, Doctor, I just don’t remember, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Bill saw Federn for several months but was not particularly impressed. He had been reading a lot of Freud and was getting more and more dubious about the whole process. He saw that his analysis wasn’t going anywhere, so Federn transferred him to Dr. Lewis R. Wolberg, a hypnoanalyst and specialist in the recall of buried memories.

  Burroughs was resistant to hypnosis, and in these cases, Wolberg used narcoanalysis instead, nitrous oxide or sodium pentothal to get him to a state between waking and sleeping. Many of Wolberg’s cases were battle shocked and had repressed memories because they were so horrifying. Sodium pentothal or nitrous oxide induced a light degree of anesthesia, which enabled repressed memories to surface and be dealt with. Burroughs had both treatments: when Wolberg administered nitrous oxide Bill had control of the mask, which enabled him to regulate the dose, whereas sodium pentothal, known as “the truth drug,” was administered intravenously. It is a barbiturate and knocks people out. The treatment revealed various identities or alter egos that all appeared to mirror his family upbringing: there was an English identity, derived from his Welsh nanny and his own ancestors; a southern gentleman, which was not surprising as his whole upbringing was white southern; and a Negro, which also related to his southern upbringing and Negro servants. Burroughs felt that the results, once they came, were rather banal. He did some talking in accents, but imitations of other accents and mimicries had always been one of his specialities from his college days and these were later carried over into his writing. “You have to hear your characters talking, and they talk in different voices. You have to be in a sense a medium. But in these particular sessions nothing very interesting was coming through, nothing usable.”3

  Burroughs said, “He struck me as being very nice, a very well-intentioned man. He was following more or less the Freudian line, which means that the patient must provide all the information and that the analyst should not attempt any interpretation and try to force it on the patient.”4 In the end Bill said, “Well, I don’t see anything more to be gained by this.” He felt that where it could lead, it had led.

  Burroughs had given up his Greenwich Village apartment and now moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive, lent to him by an absent friend from Harvard. It was small but had spectacular views out over the Hudson, with wonderful sunsets. He was now living close to the West End and the circle of friends he knew through Lucien.

  Jack had returned to New York in October 1944 after staying with Edie and her parents, and signed on to SS Robert Treat Paine as an able-bodied seaman. While waiting to ship out, he stayed with Allen Ginsberg in his small room at the Warren Hall Residence Club and devoted his time trying, unsuccessfully, to seduce Celine Young. The Robert Treat Paine sailed from New York in mid-October, but Jack soon got into trouble. The burly boson took a fancy to him and began calling him “Pretty Boy,” “Baby Face,” and “Handsome.” Jack, fearing that he would be raped in his bunk, jumped ship in Norfolk, Virginia, and was blacklisted by the Maritime Union for a year. He returned to New York in disgrace.

  Jack moved in with Ginsberg while he waited for a room to come up in Allen’s building. It was during one of their long late-night conversations that Ginsberg finally confessed to Jack that he was gay, that he was in love with Lucien and with him and wanted to sleep with him. It was the first time he had told anyone. Jack let out a long groan, not in anger but of dismay, knowing what complications were in store. In fact Allen remained a virgin for another six months, until Jack finally allowed him to blow him.

  Only Allen and Celine knew that Jack was back in the city. Allen borrowed books for him from the Columbia library, and he holed up in his new garretlike room at Warren Hall and wrote. Lucien’s ideas still influenced the group, and Kerouac was voraciously reading Rimbaud, Yeats, Huxley, Claudel, Louÿs, Nietzsche, and, most particularly, Les chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled comte de Lautréamont. Jack wrote by candlelight, and one evening he solemnly tied string around his arm as a tourniquet and cut his finger in order to inscribe “BLOOD” on a calling card, which he then labeled “The Blood of the Poet” and tacked on his wall to remind himself of his high ideals. He told Ted Berrigan, “I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night […] also kneeling and praying before starting—I got that from a French movie about George Frederick Handel.”5 In order to prove to himself that his art was not being produced for any commercial or practical use other than the highest artistic expression, he burned his work in the flame of the candle at the end of each day. This was because he felt he had been using the image of himself as a writer to impress people and enhance his self-image. He wrote in his journal, “Art so far has rationalized my errantry, my essential Prodigal Son behavior. It has also been the victim of an ego craving fame and superiority. I have been using art as a societal step-ladder—which proves that my renunciation of society is yet incomplete. Self-Ultimacy I saw as the new vision—but I cravenly turned it to a use in a novel designed to gain me, the man of the world, respect, idolatry, sexual success, and every other thing that goes with it. Au revoir à l’art, then.”6

  When Burroughs returned to New York from St. Louis he contacted Ginsberg, who told him that Kerouac was living in the same building. Kerouac remembered, “He showed up early that December after much candle-writing and bleeding on my part, ‘My God, Jack, stop this nonsense and let’s go and have a drink.’ ”7 Bill took him to dinner and, since he was into blood and writing, to see Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film The Blood of a Poet.

  Until then, Burroughs had always remained in the background, meekly accompanying Kammerer in his endless quest to find where Lucien was holding court. Bill only became central to the group over dinner; he was the one with the most money and was happy to buy dinner for Louise McMann, Jack and Edie, Allen, and the group. He was then receiving $150 a month (it went up later). Despite being only nineteen years old, Lucien Carr had always led the West End group, but with him away, both Allen and Jack felt adrift and lacking in a mentor. This led them to visit Burroughs with the conscious intention of finding the source of Lucien’s ideas, or, as Ginsberg put it, to “investigate the state of his soul.”8

  2. An Alternative Education

  Jack and Allen vi
sited Bill’s apartment on Riverside Drive, where he showed them his library, introducing them to many authors they had never heard of. They knew Rimbaud, of course, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, Louis Untermeyer’s poetry anthologies, the works of John O’Hara, and Raymond Chandler and other crime novelists. Bill told them that he had a scientific approach to reading, which was both functional and pragmatic. “I read for information, I read each book for a special purpose, for instance, I read Chas Jackson’s Lost Weekend to see what alcoholism is like and St.-John Perse for the foreign perfume, the juxtaposition of strange experience and the images of cities glittering in the distance.” Burroughs particularly liked the T. S. Eliot translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis. He had books on boxing and jujitsu, which he was still studying; on parlor tricks, card games, and formulas; E. A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Grammar; Kovoor Behanan’s Yoga: A Scientific Evaluation; and Abrahamson’s Crime and the Human Mind. There were books on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, including hypnoanalysis. It was the literature that interested Jack and Allen most. Here they discovered Cocteau’s Opium, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Baudelaire’s Poésies, and Kafka’s The Castle. At a time when William Blake was little known in the United States, Burroughs thought Blake was a “perfect poet” and showed them Songs of Innocence and Experience. Bill’s complete Shakespeare was well used and had many marked passages. Also on his shelves were The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; Nightwood by Djuna Barnes—one of Burroughs’s favorite books; The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell; Gogol’s Dead Souls and Nabokov’s study Nikolai Gogol. He showed them the Fischer edition of Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch, which had just been published and was to have an enormous influence on Burroughs’s work, and explained the Mayan calendar system, using a large volume of illustrations of the Mayan Codices.