Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Bill’s two months away had broken the spell of Tangier. The biggest change occurred in London, where he found himself again questioning his homosexuality. He told Allen, “I feel myself closer and closer to resolution of my queerness which would involve a solution of that illness. For such it is, a horrible sickness. At least in my case. I have just experienced emergence of my non-queer persona as a separate personality. This started in London where in dream I came into room to see myself not a child but adolescent, looking at me with hate. So I said, ‘I don’t seem to be exactly welcome,’ and he say: ‘Not welcome!!! I hate you!’ And with good reason too. Suppose you had kept a non-queer young boy in a strait-jacket of flesh twenty-five years subject to continual queer acts and talk? Would he love you? I think not. Anyhoo. I’m getting to know the kid, and we get on better. I tell him he can take over anytime, but there is somebody else in this deal not yet fully accounted for and the kid’s not up to deal with him, so I hafta stay around for the present. Actually, of course the kid and all the rest of us have to arrange a merger. A ver.”9

  Bill’s heterosexual aspect was the impetus for Benway’s Reconditioning Center in The Naked Lunch. In the same letter that Bill reported his new insights, he enclosed a routine: “Benway: ‘The broken spirits of a thousand boys whimper through my dreams… ‘Let me out. Let me out.’ I can hear their boy images scream through the flesh. Always boy crying inside and the sullen averted boys’ eyes and those who still love me, and say: ‘What have you done to me? Why did you do it? WHY??’ ”10 By November 10, he reported that he was unable to interest himself in boys anymore. The words, however, continued to pour out of him. Sometimes it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle; late in November he realized that the “blue movies” hanging sections belonged in a South American Sodom section he had just written and Benway slotted into the Freeland section. He now had a structure: an American section, a long South American section, Scandinavia, and Interzone, with material switching back and forth between them.

  With nothing but marijuana, no alcohol, and no junk, Bill was engaged in a form of self-analysis. He was determined to get to the bottom of the childhood trauma involving Nursy that he felt had distorted his sexuality and shaped his life. Instead of writing all the time, he now spent each afternoon sitting on his bed in quiet contemplation, seeing no one. He told Ginsberg that he became aware of the existence of “a benevolent sentient center to the whole Creation” that gave him the courage to dispassionately examine his entire life, including his obsession with Ginsberg. He wrote to Allen, “The whole trauma is out now. Such horror in bringing it out I was afraid my heart would stop. Did get severe intracostal neuralgia and sciatica.” He said he didn’t want boys anymore, couldn’t make it. “Must have some cunt. I was never supposed to be queer at all.”11 This is when he first identified that Nursy made him suck her boyfriend’s cock and when he wrote the section of “Word” about “nature’s little white soldiers” that he used to bite it. Having brought the event to consciousness, Bill now wanted to move to Paris, not just to work on the book with Allen, but to see a psychoanalyst to clear up psychic blocks that remained.

  Suddenly Tangier was dull. Paul Bowles was away and nothing held him there except that it was a convenient, cheap place to work. Bill told Allen he was sick of Tangier, “and everybody in it, especially B.B. who is now going with eight-year-old Arabs and it is really disgusting, pre-pubescent gooks prowling about the house looking to rush in and steal something. And he says gaily, ‘Oh, it’s just that I feel inadequate with older people,’ and laughs. The stupid bastard is in the middle of a particularly undesirable section of hell and doesn’t even know it. ‘I just feel inadequate. He, he, he.’ I mean, too much.”12 Bill booked his plane seat. A new season was about to begin.

  BOOK FIVE

  The City of Light

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “She has her orders,” Brion Gysin always said. And if her orders said NO, you didn’t get in and that was that.1

  1. The Beat Hotel

  After working with Bill in Tangier, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky explored Spain and Italy, staying with Alan Ansen in Venice throughout July and again on their way back from Rome. They reached Paris on September 13 and went straight to Mme. Rachou’s hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, recommended by Guy Harloff, a Dutch painter friend of Ansen’s who lived there. Harloff introduced them to Mme. Rachou, who said that a room would become available on October 15, when the American tourists all went home after the summer. Pleased to have solved their accommodation arrangements, they continued on to stay with Gregory Corso in Amsterdam, but not before handing Burroughs’s manuscript to Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press. Three weeks later they moved into room 25. Mme. Rachou liked Allen and promised him that he could have the next available room for his friend, so when the American writer Kenneth Tindall and his Danish girlfriend, Tove, moved to a larger room with a double bed, Allen began paying the rent on room 15. It took Bill about two weeks to settle his affairs in Tangier, and on January 16, 1958, he flew to Paris.

  Burroughs arrived in a city rife with corruption as competing lobbies and interest groups took turns in the government. Between 1945 and 1958 there were twenty-five cabinets, with an average life of seven months, as the French deputies played a game of musical chairs in a seemingly endless series of coalition governments. With no clear leadership, the powerful colonial lobby had managed to thwart all efforts to solve the growing conflict in Algeria, where the French campaign of torture, reprisal, and murder only strengthened the Algerian demand for independence. As long as you had papers, and did not look like a Muslim, the Paris police left foreigners alone; they had too much else on their minds. Between 1947 and 1953, 740,000 immigrants arrived in Paris from Algeria, and the police saw them all as potential terrorists.

  For Ginsberg, and to a lesser extent for Corso, Paris was a romantic destination. They saw themselves in the great tradition of expatriate American writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, et al.—living and working in the City of Light. Burroughs was less enthusiastic; he had spent eight hours there on his way back from Copenhagen three months before and it seemed very expensive to him. At that time he said, “Paris looked pretty nowhere to me,” but he had several good reasons for being there now. He needed to be in a cultural center; Tangier was still pleasant but becoming problematic, and he felt he was atrophying there. He had changed the novel, added new sections, and wanted to work with Allen to finish it and, hopefully, find a publisher. He had made great strides with his self-analysis and wanted to consolidate these by working with a trained therapist. David Lamont’s lay analyst David Steele knew Marc Schlumberger, son of the homosexual writer Jean Schlumberger, who was associated with the early surrealists. He was a well-respected Freudian and agreed to take Bill on. Burroughs signed up for twice-a-week sessions. His parents agreed to pay the ten dollars per visit.

  The Latin Quarter of Paris was named after the use of Latin by the scholars attending the university of Paris, the Sorbonne, founded there in the twelfth century. The rue Gît-le-Coeur was a narrow medieval street running from the rue Saint-André-des-Arts down to the quai des Grands-Augustins where it met the Seine, overlooking the île de la Cité and the Palais de Justice. This part of the city has been in continuous occupation for two thousand years. The ruins of the Gallo-Roman thermes (baths) from the first to third centuries, when Paris was still Lutèce, are just a block away on boulevard Saint-Michel. The street dates from the end of the twelfth century when it was called rue de Gilles-le-Queux or Gui-le-Queux (Queux: cuisinier, or chef), which over the centuries was corrupted into “Gît-le-Coeur.” Number 9 was rebuilt on old foundations in 1671 and originally occupied by the duc de Nivernais.

  Number 9 was bought in 1933 by M. and Mme. M. L. Rachou, who opened it as a class 13 residential hotel, the minimum standard. They never did give it a name. Mme. Rachou had begun life serving tables at the age of twelve in a country inn at Giverny frequented by Claude Monet. Sh
e became one of his favorites and got to know many of the artists and writers who came to visit him. Her husband shared her enjoyment of the company of artists, and they encouraged them to stay at their hotel. All through the Occupation they managed to keep the hotel open, despite the privations and shortages of food. All was well until September 1957, when M. Rachou was killed in a car accident; Madame had no choice but to carry on.

  Mme. Rachou had curly blue-rinsed hair and round apple cheeks. Because she was so small she had to stand on an upturned wine case when serving behind the bar, her short arms folded over her pale blue housecoat with a smocked collar, engaging in conversation with residents but always with one ear listening for an unexpected creak of the floorboards or an unauthorized person entering the hotel door. Adjacent to the bistro was the small dining room, no longer used, which had a window onto the stairwell where she could literally reach out and grab someone by the ankle as they climbed the stairs. The hotel entrance was never locked, but the door made a terrible screeching sound when it closed. Someone attempting to close it quietly at night was regarded with great suspicion, and Madame would materialize in her white nightgown demanding, “Monsieur? Que voulez-vous?” Easily visible from Madame’s position behind the bar was her switchboard, mounted on the wall across the room: forty-two small light bulbs, each with a ceramic label identifying a room number. If the bulb was dark, no power was being consumed; a dim light showed that the room’s 25-watt bulb was on. When a bulb flared, someone was exceeding their 40-watt power limit, and she headed for the stairs. Electricity in France was very expensive and she monitored its use carefully. The use of a tape recorder or other electric appliances inevitably blew the fuses and plunged the hotel into darkness. You could have your power limit extended by a supplementary payment.

  There was a Turkish chiotte on each floor beneath the stairwell, two raised ceramic footprints to stand on while you squatted. Sheets of newspaper torn from France-soir were provided in lieu of toilet paper: most people bought their own and brought it from their room. Someone kept making off with the newspaper, leading Burroughs to leave a sign: “To the nameless asshole who rips off the paper—stop!” The toilets were filthy and smelled appalling; most residents preferred to piss in the sink in their rooms, including many of the women, who used buckets. There was one bath, but advance warning had to be given to allow for the water to heat, and naturally there was a small surcharge. There was radiator heat all week but the plumbing was decrepit, subject to loud clankings and vibrations, and hot water was only provided on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

  Each room had a small gas stove for cooking, and Mme. Rachou inevitably arrived at an inconvenient time with the meter reader. If you didn’t want M. Dupré to wander into your room pushing a broom, you could opt out as Burroughs did. Most of the beds had straw mattresses; there was a sink and a large armoire. The curtains and bedspreads were changed each spring and the bed linen once a week. The rooms had no carpets or telephones and the cheapest ones, the “cells,” one on each landing, were quite dark as their windows looked out onto the stairwell rather than the outside world. The corridors, which sloped at strange angles, creaked and groaned and smelled strongly of garlic, excrement, and cannabis.

  Bill’s room was not much bigger than a large cupboard. There was a single bed, two upright chairs, a table, and a single dim, naked light bulb to light the gray walls. The window looked out into the hallway so there was little natural light. He paid twenty-six dollars a month. In many of the surrounding small hotels, residents were often harassed and searched by the police. Madame’s clients, however, were spared such treatment. She had little time for the police, remembering their behavior during the Occupation, but several of the local police inspectors were old friends from the war when they had worked together in the Resistance. She occasionally gave them lunches in the small back dining room, separated from the bistro by a curtain, to discuss how times had changed. They made sure that her guests remained undisturbed.

  She was, however, unable to control visits from the immigration inspectors. As Burroughs described, “The immigration police made passport checks from time to time, always at eight in the morning, and would often take away some guest whose papers were not in order. The detainee would be back in a few hours, having paid—not a fine—but a tax, attendant on the application for a carte de séjour; though few had the time and patience to fulfil the complex bureaucratic regulations required to obtain this coveted document.”2

  Mme. Rachou loved her artists and poets, and unlike a great many Parisian hoteliers, she was delighted when they disappeared up the stairs with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, but always made sure that if they stayed the night they signed the police chit as required by law. She tended to treat her tenants as if they were her children, but as Burroughs later said, “She was very mysterious and arbitrary about who she would let into her hotel.”3 She became one of Burroughs’s stock of characters, and even twenty-five years later made an appearance in The Place of Dead Roads: “Kim heard the blast as he had an afternoon Pernod with Madame Rachau, his landlady at the theatrical hotel where he lived in his song-and-dance capacity.”4

  2. A Friendship Renewed

  Allen and Peter had traveled around Europe for six months, ever since they left Bill in Tangier. Paris had always been Ginsberg’s ultimate destination, and he hoped to spend a year or more there. Now that he had secure accommodation he unpacked his papers and portable typewriter and began catching up on his voluminous worldwide correspondence. Peter Orlovsky, for his part, had all along felt guilty about leaving his mentally disturbed family to look after themselves. When they reached Paris he received news that his brother Lafcadio had moved back home but that his mother was having a difficult time containing him. In one bad argument she threw a beer-can opener at him, cutting his arm to the bone. Peter was concerned that Lafcadio would finish up back in the mental hospital, where his brother Julius had been for years. Peter felt it was his role to be the older brother to Lafcadio, to protect his mother and sister and get Julius out of Central Islip hospital. Kerouac owed Allen $225, which would have paid for Peter’s transport, but he kept prevaricating and not sending the money. In the end Peter applied for a loan from the Veterans Administration and when it came through booked a ticket on the Mauritania.

  He left Paris on the boat train from the Gare Saint-Lazare the day after Burroughs arrived. Bill didn’t seem much changed to them; he was still mocking and aggressive toward Peter, cynical and distant toward Allen. They both worried that Bill had come to claim Allen, and after kissing Peter goodbye at the station Allen fell into a deep depression. He sat crying on his bed. He smoked some pot, but he had recently been getting anxiety attacks when he smoked it and it only made things worse. He had sex with Burroughs “for old times’ sake” and sniffed some heroin, but it did not lift his mood. Bill’s first two days in Paris were a nightmare for Ginsberg; they argued and had the usual misunderstandings.

  But on the third evening, Bill and Allen had a serious talk, sitting facing each other across Allen’s small oilskin-covered kitchen table in room 25. Allen told Bill how stressed and miserable he felt and revealed how anxious he was about Bill’s arrival. Bill carefully explained the changes he had been going through in Tangier during the last few months of 1957: how he had stopped drinking, and even stopped writing, and spent his days sitting on his bed, thinking and meditating. He had written to Ginsberg about it at the time but Allen had not realized the significance of what Burroughs had told him. Ginsberg wrote to Peter Orlovsky that it “finally dawned on his consciousness, slowly and repeatedly, every day, for several months—awareness of ‘a benevolent sentient (feeling) center to the whole Creation.’ ”5 Burroughs had, in his own way, come to a similar understanding to Ginsberg’s and Orlovsky’s “vision of big peaceful Lovebrain.” Burroughs told him that it had given him the courage to examine his whole life, including his feelings about Allen, more dispassionately and to devote his days to self-analysis. He explai
ned that his trip to Paris was not to “claim” Allen but to visit him and also to see an analyst to clear up any psychoanalytic blocks left over. They talked until 3:00 a.m. Allen told Peter they “got into tremendous rapport, very delicate, I almost trembled.”6

  They discussed sex, Allen’s willingness to have sex with Burroughs even though he really didn’t want to, and Bill finally understood his feelings. Allen wrote that Bill “has stopped entirely putting pressure on me for bed—the whole nightmare’s cleared up overnight.”7 Allen woke the next morning “with great bliss of freedom & joy in my heart. […] Bill is changed nature, I even feel much changed, great clouds rolled away.”8 They had breakfast together and talked more; the rapport was real, their relationship now on a new footing. It was a cold day but with a clear blue sky, so they took a long walk together through Paris. The next week saw many more long intimate conversations and a deepening of their understanding of each other. Allen went to bed with him a few times, and now that the tension and fear had gone there was great intimacy and relaxation for them both. Allen felt that soon they would no longer have sex, that Bill really no longer needed it.