Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  It had been more than three years since Bill and Allen had seen each other, and there was a lot to talk about. Bill would stumble around the room, visiting the two or three kif joints that sat burning in ashtrays in different corners, stirring his drink with his index and middle fingers, gesturing and interrupting. Sometimes his voice rose high in protest at one of Allen’s suggestions and Allen gleefully provided him with ammunition for the sheer joy of hearing Bill shoot it down. Art, literature, the politics of the independence movement, Wilhelm Reich, Tangier were all covered as well as gossip about Bill’s neighbors and Paul Bowles. Jack was withdrawn and often retired early to read and pray, his demeanor possibly still affected by the toxic hash. During the day, Peter and Allen would sometimes stand in the garden outside Bill’s room and call up to him on his roof terrace, “Jack-eee! Jack-eee!” like children calling up to one of their friends’ bedrooms, asking him to come out and play. Allen and Peter explored the Medina, drinking mint tea in Arab cafés, relaxing on the beach, walking on the Old Mountain. They were on a tight budget and hoped to spend a long time in Europe, so they couldn’t afford Bill’s nightly restaurant regime. Instead they mostly cooked in Burroughs’s room on his kerosene stove. Allen shopped at the market, often with Alan Ansen, who had arrived from Venice to help with the typing, and each evening they prepared huge meals: baby tuna or little perch from the harbor, or Allen would make his famous linguini with clam sauce.

  Paul Lund shared a lot of the cooking. Lund was going through a bad period financially and Alan Ansen often bought him dinner. Before the meal they usually gathered on the terrace outside Allen’s room to watch the sun go down and drink sherry provided by Ansen. It was during one of these terrace sessions that Ginsberg took the famous photograph of Burroughs acting out the hanging scene in The Naked Lunch with Ansen.

  Shortly after they got there, Allen received news that on March 25, 1957, U.S. Customs had seized copies of Howl and Other Poems arriving in the country from Villiers Press, City Lights’s British printer. City Lights quickly produced an offset reprint in the States, exempt from Customs control, and announced they would fight the seizure. At the end of May, Customs backed down, but that was only the beginning of the book’s notoriety. It was enough, however, to make Allen famous, and literary Tangier wanted to hear him read “Howl” aloud.

  On April 5, two weeks after Allen and Peter’s arrival, Jack took the packet boat to Marseille. He had been bored and withdrawn, but shortly before leaving “a lovely flute began to blow around three o’clock in the morning, and muffled drums beat somewhere in the depths of the Medina.”28 It was the beginning of Ramadan. Jack suddenly felt sorry that he had already bought his boat ticket and was leaving Tangier.

  Allen and Peter immediately moved from the Hotel Armor, across the street from the Muniria, into Kerouac’s wonderful rooftop room. Now they settled into more of a routine. Allen would rise at dawn as the muezzin made the first call to prayer, and write letters or journals sitting out on the tiled patio, watching the sun rise and the city come to life. Each day, the Vietnamese maid brought a delicious lunch to Allen and Peter’s room. They spent hours on the patio, looking out at the rooftops of the Medina, the harbor, and the boats, or leaning over the concrete parapet to watch Bill putter about in the garden with the hotel cats. Bill had a Russian blue with a silky gray-blue coat and blue eyes that could catch a scrap of meat in the air between its paws like a monkey. Most days Allen and Alan Ansen would spend five or six hours working on Bill’s manuscript, continuing the sterling work done by Jack Kerouac. By late May, they had completed over two hundred pages of Interzone, as the book was still called.

  Next came the harder task of pulling out biographical material, routines, and narrative fragments from Bill’s letters to Allen over the past three years that had not already been developed as part of the main text. As far back as June 1954, Bill had remarked to Allen that “maybe the real novel is letters to you,” and though not all the routines and fragments had been sent to Ginsberg, most early drafts of large sections of The Naked Lunch first appeared in his letters to him. As time went by, Bill developed a number of people in Tangier—“receivers”—to read the routines to, among them Paul Bowles, Eric Gifford, Paul Lund, and David Woolman, and Allen’s role as receiver became less important. But no matter how finished the texts were, it all had to be retyped because Bill’s typewriting was so sloppy, filled with misspellings, excisions, and annotations. Allen wrote Lucien, “It’s quite a piece of writing—all Bill’s energy & prose, plus our organisation & cleanup & structure, so it’s continuous and readable, decipherable.” But according to Bill, Allen had considerable reservations about the book, despite his later efforts to champion it. “Allen did a lot of typing, retyping parts of the manuscript, which he didn’t like at all. He said, ‘I don’t like it.’ He thought it was meaningless. He didn’t like it at all.”29 Allen believed in Bill’s genius, but knew that the book was not yet ready for publication. He had felt the same way about Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, which in a later draft became On the Road.

  Inevitably Bill’s assertion that he would feel no jealousy toward Peter was proved wrong, and it was not helped by Peter’s eccentric behavior, which Bill found acutely embarrassing. Peter would constantly stop strangers on the street and talk to them, drawing attention to himself and therefore to Bill and Allen. Bill hated him. “He was so nutty, he just acted like a retard. I found him extremely annoying. It was embarrassing.”30 Bill adopted a contemptuous attitude toward Peter, either teasing him and putting him down, or else completely ignoring him. As well as upsetting Peter, Bill’s attitude also offended Allen, and things got so bad that after an evening’s mocking and ridicule, high on majoun, Allen’s patience finally snapped and he leapt up and, grabbing a hunting knife, ripped open Bill’s khaki shirt. But even though this shocked everyone into a momentary sobriety, it did no good. Bill simply loathed Peter and could not see why Allen found him in any way attractive; at twenty-four, Peter was too old to be a kept “boy,” and yet as far as Bill could see that was what he was. “I didn’t like Peter’s looks, never have. He just does nothing for me.” Bill was further irritated when Allen and Peter dragged a schizophrenic Swede back to the hotel and insisted on introducing him to Bill.

  Allen, of course, tried to mediate between Bill and Peter, telling Bill it would be good for both of them if they got along, but they never did. Bill never liked him, even later in life. Alan Ansen shared his opinion and told Bill that as far as he could see Peter was “a free loading bitch imposing his persistent mahatma on you,” a view that was reinforced when Allen and Peter stayed with Ansen in Venice a month or so later. To Jane Bowles, however, Peter was a “saint.” She loved talking to him. Jane, on the other hand, harbored a great dislike of Allen Ginsberg. On April 4, 1957, shortly before Allen and Peter got to Tangier, Jane had had a stroke and was in bad shape. She was afraid that she was losing her sight, she couldn’t read, and was in a continual dithering panic. Allen told her that William Carlos Williams had just had the same problem, with many similar symptoms, and had been left half blind and deaf. Allen joked that she had better get a good seeing-eye dog. Jane was furious. She never forgave him for his insensitivity and refused to ever see him or talk to him again.

  It was through Paul Bowles that Burroughs first met Francis Bacon. Bacon had first come to Tangier in 1955, driven by Paul Danquah in his white Rolls-Royce, and he went annually for the next six years, often renting an apartment. He had a boyfriend there, Peter Lacy, a former Battle of Britain pilot, who finished up a complete alcoholic, playing piano at Dean’s Bar, often until 7:00 a.m. Bill introduced Allen to Bacon and he frequently came over to the Muniria to visit, though Bacon, who was used to drinking from Waterford cut glass, objected when Ginsberg offered him a drink in an empty tin can, retrieved from the garbage. He later said he had been worried in case he caught typhoid. Bacon was a wonderful addition to the late-night conversations and, unusual for Bacon, he talked a lot about art
to both Allen and Bill. Burroughs said that he had a lot of interesting things to say about modern painting: “he said so much of it is nothing, it’s decoration, it’s not painting, and as to what painting actually is, his views were hard to understand but very interesting to hear.”31 Bill asked him how he knew when a painting was finished. Bacon told him that he completed a painting with a chance brushstroke that locked in the magic, a fortuitous thing that he couldn’t predict or orchestrate. Bacon found he had much in common with Burroughs, and they saw each other in both Tangier and London for the next three decades.

  Paul Bowles had been in Ceylon when Ginsberg and Orlovsky first arrived but returned not long afterward. It was Bacon who introduced them. Francis Bacon first encouraged Ahmed Yacoubi, Bowles’s boyfriend, to paint by letting him watch him work and by importing paint from Winsor & Newton in London for him. Allen Ginsberg got on particularly well with Yacoubi and invited him over to the Muniria thinking he might like to hang out with a younger crowd. Yacoubi and Bill became friends and he continued to visit after Ginsberg left for Europe and even after Yacoubi married an American woman writer at the end of the year. Burroughs liked him because he was very much into magic, and Yacoubi thought Bill was a great magic man. They enjoyed each other’s company. For the same reason, although Bill did not exactly click with Jane Bowles, he got on fine with Sherifa, her Moroccan girlfriend. “I had no difficulties with Sherifa. She thought I was a sorcerer, I was a magic man, a holy man.”32

  Jane had a stroke. A packet containing a spell was found in a houseplant in Jane’s room and the story went round that Sherifa had poisoned her, but Burroughs thought that was nonsense; it looked to him like a plain ordinary stroke. What worried him was Paul Bowles’s passive attitude toward Jane’s illness. As far as Burroughs was concerned, if there was any suspicion of brain damage that person should not be given electroshock treatment, but Bowles just went along with what the doctor said without getting a second opinion. Bowles told Bill, “Well, if you hire a doctor, and if you pay him, he should know what to do. You have to rely on his judgment!” Bill’s reaction was, “Well, that’s just bullshit. […] It just seemed to me outrageous on Paul’s part to retreat behind this.”33 With Allen around, Bill got to see even more of Paul and grew to like him very much. He detected a rivalry between Paul and Jane because many people regarded her as a much better writer. Bill agreed, but liked Bowles’s early work. His translations from the Maghrebi he found very slight and uninteresting.

  The work on Bill’s book progressed. Alan Ansen made a trip to Granada and Córdoba to see the Moorish architecture in early June and then returned to resume typing. Bill had liver trouble and had to stop drinking. He also cut out majoun. The manuscript gradually took shape, and by June 11, when Allen and Peter finally left to begin their exploration of Europe, it was ready to offer to a publisher. They had begun with about six hundred pages of notes, some of it more or less finished, much of it not. Over the ten weeks that they worked on it they concentrated on the finished or nearly finished portions, to get it as much completed as possible. Allen Ginsberg remained concerned that there was no character development, no narrative, and no apparent order. He thought that it was, essentially, unpublishable. But Bill was not prepared to make any compromises. As he wrote in “Ginsberg Notes,” “How can I write a ‘novel’? I can’t and wont. The ‘novel’ is a dead form, rigid and arbitrary. I can’t use it. The chapters form a mosaic, with the dream impact of juxtaposition, like objects abandoned in a hotel drawer, a form of still life.”34 Alan Ansen stayed on a few more days to finish off the final details before returning to Venice. As Bill saw it, leaving aside the “Word” section, the manuscript was ready for presentation to a publisher. “Word” he rewrote as soon as Ansen left, cutting it down to thirty pages, but even this he thought he would split up and scatter the material throughout the other sections. “There will always be time for additional changes,” he told Ansen, and he was right.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull my God.1

  1. Freeland

  Bill had planned to join Allen and Peter in Spain at the end of June, but by the time he got to Madrid—after first visiting Barcelona, which he hated—they were already with Ansen in Venice. Bill managed a half hour in the Prado but spent most of his time lying in a curtained room, laid up by a mystery illness. He could not even drink one glass of wine without feeling sick. He went straight from Madrid to London to the only doctor he could trust, Dr. Dent. Dent ran a series of tests and determined that he had a mild atypical form of hepatitis and that there was nothing wrong with his liver. Bill found London dull as ever, and rather than go to Venice, he decided to first visit Kells Elvins in Copenhagen, then join Allen in Paris on his way back to Tangier.

  His decision to give up his room at the Muniria was based, to an extent, on the great changes sweeping through Morocco. Bill knew that Tangier would not ultimately be exempt and that the sweet life of the expatriates, with their protected legal status, drugs, and boys, was doomed by the nationalist takeover. He went looking for a new utopia, somewhere cheap where he could live as he liked without censure. He had already investigated Algiers, Tripoli, and the whole Near East “during my last bout of inconvenient, expensive, and totally unrewarding travel,”2 and now he could cross off Barcelona and Madrid as well.

  Bill arrived in the Danish capital at the end of July 1957 and booked into a hotel in the center. Copenhagen was cheap, a room for a dollar and thirty cents for a meal, but alcohol and boys were expensive. Kells Elvins and his wife, Mimi Heinrich, the Danish actress, lived at Jaegersborg Allé 67, a single-story modern building in extensive grounds in the leafy Charlottenlund suburb on the coast north of Copenhagen, and Bill spent many evenings with them. Bill liked Mimi. “She was real nice and said she’d fix me up with a boyfriend.”3 Much of the time, however, it was just Bill and Kells out on the town. They took the ferry to the Swedish town of Malmö, just across the strait. Liquor on the boat was tax-free and people would ride back and forth, getting drunk and not even get off the boat in Sweden. When they disembarked the first thing they saw was a cemetery. Bill said, “Kells, let’s get right back on that ferry,” a line he used in the “Rube” section of The Naked Lunch. Bill had a low opinion of Malmö. “God what an awful place that is. Very bad vibes. It was at that time one of the great centers for the distribution and disbursement of anti-Semitic propaganda.”4 Sweden had very strict liquor laws; people had ration cards allowing them so much a month. There were no bars as such, and if you went to a restaurant and ordered a drink you had to eat. They would put dried-out, curled-up sandwiches on the table to show you had ordered food, but only two drinks were allowed, then people had to find another place. There were doormen who would sniff your breath to see if you had already been drinking. As a result there was a lot of illegal moonshine and people were reeling about and puking on the streets. Bill and Kells quickly returned to Denmark.

  After spending three weeks in the Danish capital, Bill reported to Allen, “I cannot say that the present trip has been lost on a connoisseur of horror. […] Scandinavia exceeds my most ghastly imaginations. Freeland in the Benway section was underdrawn. […] Curious that I should have known without ever having been here that the place is a series of bars along a canal.”5 It was August, and Bill went with Kells and Mimi to stay at their beach house in the country. Kells loved Denmark and was clearly enjoying his marriage to Mimi. He told Bill that he could still have sex three times a day, and compared himself to the old bull apes, who continue until they drop dead.

  As for Bill, he was gathering material for his book thick and fast. He told Allen, “Copenhagen is looking up. I am engaged in most curious affair with young man whose face was destroyed in an accident and completely rebuilt by plastic surgery. His pre-surgery picture is as beautiful as I ever see, and he looks just like a copy of it […] but no life in his face now. In fact I think he died in the accident.”6 The boy wouldn’t tell Bill w
here he lived and appeared at arbitrary and unexpected times like 6:00 a.m. “I seem able to conjure him up like a junk pusher.” By the beginning of September Bill told Allen, “This novel is now taking shape faster than I can write it down. […] I made no mistake to come here. […] Only Scandinavia could have catalyzed the Great Work, and no other place could be the background.” He got an enormous amount out of his monthlong visit that was in such extreme contrast to Tangier. The wealthy Scandinavians were so unhappy compared to the Spanish Moroccans who had nothing. The visit gave rise to Carl, the “Joselito” and the “Examination” sections, and the idea of Dr. Benway’s Reconditioning Center. Scandinavia itself was, of course, Freeland, “a place given over to free love and continual bathing.”

  Freeland had provided the missing set. The Naked Lunch has four main sets, inspired by Burroughs’s life experience. One was Interzone, based on his four years in Tangier; another was the whole of South America, all the centipede cults and Mexican imagery gathered in the jungles and his years in Mexico City; the third was the United States, both the good ol’ boys in Texas and years in New York City as a junkie and rolling drunks. He had only been in Scandinavia for a month but it gave him what he needed. It marked a turning point when the book began to gel into a whole. He told Allen, “I have always felt that the MS. to date was in a sense notes for a novel rather than the novel itself.”7 He hesitated to leave this source of inspiration and wanted to travel north to see the aurora borealis, but practicalities won out; he was short of money and he was out of marijuana. By mid-September, after a brief eight-hour stopover in Paris, he was back in Tangier, where he was delighted to find that his old room at the Muniria was still available. It was a relief to unpack and organize his papers. He had decided that Queer and The Yage Letters had no place in Interzone and should be published as separate works. The Naked Lunch was finally taking shape. “The MS. in present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected—by theme—but separate short pieces. My feeling is that it will eventually grow into several novels all interlocking and taking place simultaneously in a majoun dream.”8