by Barry Miles
Bill explained his method of meditation to Allen in detail: how he cleared his mind to stillness “so he sees his important benevolent sentient soul emerge.”9 He used a method similar to the meditation techniques of Tibetan Buddhism, which he first encountered at Harvard. He would sit and let his thoughts come freely. Rather than combat the chatter and fantasies that immediately filled his mind, he encouraged them. He explored all his hostile fantasies, like killing Ginsberg or his nurse; this latter theme had been much worked over by his various analysts. He recognized that these were a part of himself and that he had to deal with them, rather than rejecting them as unwholesome and suppressing them. No matter how painful they were, he accepted their reality. Burroughs, as a dispassionate observer, watched these feelings take over his mind, change, disappear, and be replaced by new ones. Only when the fantasies were accepted as a component of himself were they drained of their power and lost their horror.
Despite all this, Burroughs recognized that there was something beneath all this that he could not get at, something powerful to do with his early trauma with his nurse. Whenever he got near to it, he would experience such a feeling of fright that prickles ran up his neck and he was afraid to continue, afraid that some horrible ghost would break through into consciousness, a memory of something so horrible that he had suppressed it all his life. He was hoping Schlumberger could help him to reach it. He tried to demonstrate the feeling to Allen. He stood by the bed, looking at him in silence. The air seemed to thicken. Bill looked blank-eyed and strange and Allen began to feel scared himself, worrying that Bill might suddenly up and kill him. He began to fight it but then realized it was better to remain calm. He relaxed, Bill relaxed and soon returned to normal.
They also talked about sex. Bill thought that he might be switching his attention from boys to women. When Allen and Peter arrived in Paris they had been having sex with a girl named Françoise, who was still very hung up on Allen, and before Allen got together with Peter he had been living in a relationship with Sheila Boucher in San Francisco, so the question of his orientation was also something to be worked out.
In the two months Ginsberg had been in Paris he had developed a light heroin habit. Heroin was easily available, cheap, and so pure that they could sniff it rather than inject. By the time Bill arrived it had become more difficult to get, but he soon found that paregoric, an elixir of opium, was available without prescription at any drugstore. By mid-February he had a light habit, but by the end of the month Ginsberg had found him a doctor who would prescribe apomorphine and he began to kick. Ginsberg attributed his lapse to his depression about the state of the world. “He was glooming about state of the world, all them armies & armories & closing down of soul maybe forever, in oncoming civilization.”10
While Ginsberg was in Paris, he and Bill usually cooked at the hotel, shopping at the market on the nearby rue de Buci. Ginsberg made pea and ham bone stews, lamb stews, dishes that lasted several days. Though Paris was more expensive than Tangier, Burroughs was surrounded by good cheap restaurants. There was Chez Jean at 132 boulevard Saint-Germain down a passageway, one of few cafés that still had sawdust on the floor and where a huge meal was only 250 francs (420 francs was equal to one dollar). It was very popular with the Beat Hotel crowd. Au Petit Source, next door at 134 boulevard Saint-Germain, had charcoal-grilled steaks and frites until 1:00 a.m. and was often crowded late at night with Beat Hotel residents. Bill particularly liked the Beaux Arts at the end of the street, and the Balkan. The local Chinese was Au Dong, at 8 rue de la Place, where a good meal cost 250 francs. Even cheaper was Chez Marta on rue Mazarine, where steak and frites, fried eggs, and omelets cost only 180 francs. It was a bit greasy and usually resorted to late in the month. There were also late-night places like Le Cujas, off boulevard Saint-Michel, open until 4:00 a.m. for onion soup and good, filling plats du jour. The hotel crowd and local students used to gather in the back room, often with their guitars. And for really late-night dining, there was the Pergola, behind the Mabillon Métro station, open all night but 500 francs for a meal. It was crowded with late-night people, mostly gay, effeminate young men and masculine young women and great for people watching. Nearby was the Rhumerie Martiniquaise bar, for punch and hot rum on a cold night, and the Old Navy, on boulevard Saint-Germain, one of Allen Ginsberg’s favorites, where the art students hung out.
As his room was so small, Bill spent a lot of time in the bistro, usually seated at the traditional zinc-topped bar, exchanging pleasantries with Mme. Rachou. The room had four cast-iron tables with spindly legs on the cracked red tiles. There were several spiky aspidistra plants in the wide window that Madame peered through to see what was happening in the street. Coffee and croissants were served in the mornings, and hearty, inexpensive dishes of cassoulet or rabbit stew were available at lunchtime. Local workmen would often bring their prepared lunches in for Mme. Rachou to reheat in the stove. Bill often lingered over a forty-centime watery coffee after lunch, chatting to the young Americans and Britons who congregated at the bar.
Unlike his early days in Tangier, Burroughs had dropped right into the middle of a ready-made social scene. Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso were already installed in the hotel, all living together in chambre 25 on the third floor, and had got to know dozens of the hotel’s residents as well as many of the British and American expats and students living in the neighborhood. Allen’s room was next door to the Dutch painter Guy Harloff’s. Bill met him within days of his arrival and liked him, though he was skeptical about his avowed communism and penury. Bill noticed that Mme. Rachou gave him unlimited credit and that he was able to buy drinks on credit at several local bars. It soon turned out that he came from a wealthy family who gave him a large monthly allowance. He was a big man, towering over most people, and had loud drunken arguments with Sharon Walsh, his girlfriend, though at other times they could hear him through the walls as he read aloud to her from Henry Miller. Burroughs remembered witnessing one argument with a small Japanese man in which Harloff bellowed, “Watch you talk. I beat you down to a pulp.”
Bill got to know Graham Seidman, “the foggy hipster,” who blew the fuses all the time in his small attic room, five floors up with only a skylight. He painted one wall black, another ochre, and the rest white. Like the rest of the rooms, the floor was made from eight-sided terra-cotta tiles, and when it was really cold in the mornings he would splash alcohol on the tiles and set fire to it, which warmed the room just enough to get up. Even with an increased wattage, his record player caused the electrical system to trip. “I can’t give up my hi-fi system,” he said, so Madame asked him to leave.
Bill knew Kenneth Tindall and Tove from his first day, because he had taken over their room. Kenneth would often visit Bill to discuss the political situation in America. One of the locals tried to move into Allen’s room while he was visiting London. Bill reported, “ ‘NOOOOO’ I brayed with inflexible authority. ‘Don’t like you and don’t know you. I need two rooms. When I get tired of sitting in one I go and sit in the other.’ Such crust. These Paris mooches would move right in and shove a man out of his own bed.”11
That March the New York critic and novelist Herb Gold was in Paris and came to visit several times. They all had long talks together. Gold had previously been critical of the Beats, not helped by Allen losing his temper with him virtually every time they met, but with the publication of On the Road and Howl he was now beginning to show more sympathy for their attitudes. Ginsberg read the then unpublished “County Clerk” section of The Naked Lunch aloud to him, “which he dug.” Burroughs had read Gold’s work and liked it, particularly his novel about heroin addiction in a traveling carnival, The Man Who Was Not With It, which was probably the source of the word “rube” in Burroughs’s work.12 Bill told Gold that his was the most accurate description of kicking a habit that he had ever read. Bill invited him to dinner, along with Allen and Gregory. “Beat cuisine,” he said. But Gold arrived with a girlfriend, the b
ourgeois daughter of a French general, which no one was expecting. Gold thought that Bill had silently showed his displeasure by pissing in the sink while preparing the lettuce (which he carefully avoided), but virtually everybody used the sink in this way as the toilets were so disgusting. It didn’t do much for Gold’s relationship with the general’s daughter.13
Gregory Corso had been visiting with Alan Ansen in Venice but now returned and on March 26, 1958, celebrated his birthday. Gregory wrote that he received no presents, “only a wild party at Allen’s with four girls and Bill Burroughs, two Frenchmen, and the drummer Kenny Clarke. […] We all took off our clothes and turned on.”14
Burroughs began accompanying the hotel residents to the local cafés and bars, the Bonaparte on the Palais du Luxembourg and in particular the Monaco near the carrefour de l’Odéon. A number of folksingers hung out there, including Alex Campbell and Derroll Adams. Adams wore a ring through his ear, unusual for the time, and was a close friend of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s. Adams used to visit Bill in his room at the hotel. Ginsberg, normally the gregarious one, was surprised and wrote Peter, “Bill strangely more open & enterprising in seeking out the cats than I am, but he found some nice ones.”15 There was one called B. J. Carroll, described by Ginsberg as a “big tough lookin fellow […] with wild black hair & weird eyes, young, enthusiastic”16 whom Bill liked. B.J. was six feet two inches tall with a full black beard and dressed as a biker, modeling himself on Brando in The Wild One. He and Bill bought hash at Zizi’s Moroccan café, next to the police station near the Hôtel de Ville, or visited Ali’s at the Bastille. B.J.’s life was complex. Every time Claude, his live-in girlfriend, got angry about his other women, she retaliated by sleeping with someone famous. She boasted about Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and others, and when she found B.J. in bed with GiGi she chased her out with B.J.’s belt and vowed to retaliate heavily. A few days later she shouted, “Guess what? I just fucked Marlon Brando.” “Brando,” a defeated B.J. exclaimed. “Where is he? I’ve got to meet him.”17 Brando was shooting The Young Lions outside Paris.
B.J.’s best friend was Baird Bryant, an American novelist who had been around the hotel for some time. He had worked on Merlin magazine with Alexander Trocchi and his then girlfriend, Jane Lougee, who financed the magazine in its last days. He lived by writing pornography for Olympia and was responsible for the first, 1954, translation of The Story of O, which was so bad that a new translation by Austryn Wainhouse had to be commissioned for all future editions. The next year he turned to fiction and, as Willie Baron, wrote Play This Love with Me, while at the same time his wife, Denny, wrote Tender Was My Flesh under the name of Winifred Drake. Bill enjoyed his company and Bryant claimed in his memoirs that they shot up heroin together, but unfortunately his memoirs are unreliable, being semifictional, so this may be invention.18 Bill enjoyed being around these young people, most of whom were in their early twenties. Allen wrote Peter, “Bill thinks new American generation will be hip & will slowly change things—laws & attitudes, he had hope there—for some redemption of America, finding its soul.”19
Burroughs kept hearing stories about a mythical character named Peter Webber, a handsome young Englishman, a poet, who had died in 1956 or 1957 at the age of twenty-one. Most of the stories surrounding him were conflicting: he was in a clinic in Paris, in a clinic in London, he had died of an overdose, he died of a brain tumor. Alex Trocchi had known him, so it was probably Trocchi who got him onto junk. One day Webber’s girlfriend approached Burroughs at the Camelia Café on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts. She said, “I’m so sick of people asking me about Peter Webber, here, here are his papers, all I’ve got,” and gave him a packet of papers: a few lyric poems, some fragments of prose. The last entry on the last page had scrawled across it, “Sir, a young man is dying…” then trailed off the page. Peter Webber was a comet that burns itself out, and Burroughs tried to reconstruct some of the legends and find out the truth. This proved to be impossible—there were too many conflicting stories—so instead Bill “built him into an idealized character of youth and daring.”20 Several years later, Burroughs made a lot of cut-ups using Webber’s poems, cutting them in with Rimbaud and other texts. He also makes an appearance in Port of Saints: “Audrey is with Peter Webber and they both can fly about thirty feet in the air above the small trees.”21 His brief biography is told in Exterminator!: “W.E.9 could tick off a list of agents who had been murdered because they might learn to read and write Arabic—P.W. a young poet who had learned Arabic in a matter of days—Addicted to heroin by J.S. Died 1956 in Paris… cause of death unknown.”22
3. Librairie Anglaise and the Mistral
The hotel was situated between the two English bookshops, Librairie Anglaise in a seventeenth-century building at 42 rue de Seine, and the Mistral at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, which had a magnificent view overlooking Notre-Dame and the river. The Mistral used to be an Arab grocery until it was bought by George Whitman in 1951. There was a maze of small rooms on different floors, all crammed with books. One room was a library where the books were not for sale, but where people could settle and read. Whitman held many vaguely communistic beliefs. There were cots and long couches in many of the rooms where “book people” could stay, usually writers or poets, preferably published. It was not uncommon for someone to wake up midmorning and find people reaching over them to take a book from the shelf above. The bedbugs tended to make most residencies short ones, at least until the end of the sixties. Guests were expected to do some work about the shop in lieu of rent. Over the years George acquired more rooms in the building and people began to stay for longer periods. George lived upstairs and was a constant presence. He added strange eccentric features, one of which was a wishing well right in the middle of his main sales room on the ground floor. He would turn on a tap and gas would bubble up through the water. He would throw a lighted match in and the flames would dance on the surface. He was hoping people would throw money into it. People were always stepping back from the shelves and nearly falling in. He cooked huge, cheaply sourced meals for his guests, using a pressure cooker that made a terrifying whistling sound. Burroughs sometimes ate there. George’s prices were high and he was notoriously parsimonious, buying all his clothing at the flea market and living very frugally. Although many of the people who spent their days reading in the library, or even living there, were writing porn for Girodias, George Whitman refused to stock any of their books, not even Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, J. P. Donleavy, or, later, Gregory Corso or Burroughs. It was quite legal to sell them, but not to display them; all the respectable Right Bank shops had cupboards full of Olympia titles, but George was terrified of getting busted and thrown out of the country, so no Olympia books. Because of its large size and accommodation, the Mistral was where American students tended to congregate, and it had something of the atmosphere of an American college campus bookstore.
Although very much smaller, Gaït Frogé’s Librairie Anglaise was the literary center of the Left Bank. Many of the Americans and Britons had their mail sent there, and there were frequent book launches, readings, and art exhibitions. According to the artist and poet Jean-Jacques Lebel, “It was a wonderful, friendly place to be, much more of a center than the Mistral.”23 The Librairie Anglaise was inevitably much more Parisian, with Gaït Frogé acting as a go-between, introducing French and other European writers and artists to Americans and Britons. She was tiny, pretty, and spoke English with a very proper English accent. She had a great fondness for American writers and lived above the shop with the American author and painter Norman Rubington, the “Akbar del Piombo” of the Olympia Press books. Often there was no one in the shop after lunch, but puzzled visitors could hear the bedsprings going in her tiny flat above. She stocked a full range of Olympia books and held book launches for the more literary titles. She specialized in small-press poetry, literary journals, and self-published volumes; there was not enough room for other subjects. The shop was in a curious triangular-shaped room
on the corner of the rue de Seine and the rue de l’Échaudé and was dominated by a huge circular table, piled high with books and magazines that were in a constant state of flux as people moved the piles around to see what was underneath. The Librairie Anglaise was the logical successor to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. as the Paris literary meeting place, and Gaït was outraged when in 1964, two years after Sylvia Beach died, George Whitman appropriated the name in what Gaït saw as a crass commercial move designed to pull in the tourists as if his shop had been the birthplace of Ulysses.
In the medieval stone barrel-vaulted cave, or cellar, beneath the shop, Gaït used to hold readings and art exhibitions, and it was at one of these, when Bill read some extracts from the work in progress The Naked Lunch, that he first met twenty-two-year-old Jean-Jacques Lebel. Gregory Corso was there and approached Lebel, thinking him to be a young American, and asked if he knew where they could score some hash. Jean-Jacques said he did. He had been educated in the States and spoke unaccented English, so when they inquired his name they were surprised to find out he was French. He took them on the Métro to Bastille and from there to the nearby passage Thiéré, off the rue de la Roquette, to Chez Madame Ali. Ali was a rotund Algerian in a wheelchair, and his wife was French. It was her café. Jean-Jacques described the place: “The first room was tables and you would eat couscous and when you entered there you were stoned immediately because the thickness of the smoke, like in a Moroccan place, was so heavy that you couldn’t breathe without getting stoned. Madame Ali had a dog, and the dog was so stoned, the dog was very nice, and he would always bump himself into chairs, the dog was totally out of his mind, he couldn’t walk straight. The dog was completely wrecked.”24 They bought little cubes of the celebrated black hash from the Rif town of Ketama in Morocco for three francs each. As Jean-Jacques said, it was “really good stuff.” There was a second room, a secret room, in the back where they had meetings of the FLN, which tommy-gun-wielding police would sometimes raid. They beat up the Algerians but were uninterested in American passport holders and unconcerned about any drugs they may have had.
