Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Allen asked him if he was a good doctor. He said he was “reasonable” and told them that he still practiced, but “all the young women want a young doctor to look at them, and all the old women want to stand naked in front of a young doctor,” so what could he do. Besides, “It’s too filthy here to practice.” He gave them a tour of the house, through huge messy downstairs rooms and upstairs to the study where he wrote, filled with piles of papers and books. At the gate as they left, Allen said, “We salute you from America as the greatest writer in France!” to which Lucette playfully added, “In the universe!”14

  To Burroughs, Céline was primarily a humorist in the picaresque tradition, and couldn’t understand why people often regarded him as a vortex of despair. To him, Céline’s books were funny, full of life, and an obvious inspiration for his work. He wrote, “Dead people are less frightening than live ones,” taking Céline’s famous line, “Sick people are less frightening than well ones,” just a little bit further. Bill agreed that Céline had been foolish politically. He saw no point in taking any political position unless you were going to do something about it, like join the Resistance, whereas Céline had antagonized both the Nazis and the French Resistance and finished up being branded as a collaborator.

  Allen left for New York in mid-July, but managed to make contact with Henri Michaux before he left. He came to supper at the Beat Hotel, bringing a chicken for them to cook. They were most interested in his experiments with mescaline, and after Allen left, Michaux returned several times to continue the discussions with Burroughs. Gregory Corso wrote to his publisher, Don Allen, “Henri Michaux sees me and Burroughs for supper at our place, he’s really inspired, great talks. He and Bill talk about various kinds of effects from nutmeg […] even with my poor French and his poorer English we had rapport.”15

  Burroughs’s everyday life at the Beat Hotel is glimpsed in the journals of the English poet Gael Turnbull:

  July 31, 2:30 P.M. I knocked on the door of this other friend of Ginsberg’s, called Bill Burroughs—he only just up, in pyjamas, looking like a man dying of cancer, thin, pale, unsteady, the curtains still drawn—he made some tea. […] Burroughs dressed, an older man, about 40 I’d say, very slow speaker—two themes in his talk, a hatred of America, the physical culture of it, and also an interest in all forms of drugs of all kinds—eventually monotonous, but despite this, a rather pathetic sort of sad stick, one couldn’t help liking him.

  August 1, 4 P.M. Went to see Burroughs, and had more tea with him, he must consume as much tea as Dr. Johnson is said to have drunk.16

  On June 26, before returning to the States, Allen, high on Jacques Stern’s cocaine, had written a long letter to Kerouac telling him what was going on: “I’m full of snow right now.”17 Kerouac was living at home with his mother in Northport, New York, and she intercepted the letter. She immediately wrote to Allen insisting that he stop writing to Jack or attempting to contact him through other people, calling Allen an immoral lout not fit to associate with Christians like Jack and herself. She told Allen that on his deathbed her husband had made her promise to keep Allen away from Jack, and she swore that she would honor that promise. She said she had given Allen and Bill’s names to the FBI. “You miserable bums all you have in your filthy minds is dirty sex and dope,” she wrote, and warned them, “Don’t ever mention Jack’s name or write any more about Jack in your ‘dirty’ ‘books’ I’ll sue you and have you in ‘jail.’ […] We don’t want sex fiens or dope fiens around us.” She put a six-cent stamp on it, not knowing that overseas mail cost extra, so it went sea mail, arriving in Paris after Allen had already returned to the States.

  Allen had asked Bill to open any mail for him before forwarding it in case it was important. Bill sent her letter on to Allen, commenting that she was a “stupid, small-minded vindictive peasant incapable of a generous thought or feeling. I mean, she really is evil in her small way. In your place I would show Jack the letter. If he is content to be treated like a child and let his mother open his mail and tell him who to see and correspond with, he is a lost cause.”18

  But when Jack’s mother told him what she had done, instead of writing to apologize, Jack instead quickly wrote to defend her, justifying her position and saying, “I agree with my mother on the point of your not using my name in any activities of yours (other than pure poetry and prose) such as politics, sex, etc.” The letter was also sent to France, and this time Bill’s reaction was more extreme. He wrote Allen, “I herewith forward Jack’s weak and cowardly letter, like some cat explaining to a former friend how he ‘can’t have him to the house anymore because of the little woman don’t like Jews, and after all I am out of “all that” now. Not that we can’t meet now and then (not too often) for a glass of beer someplace maybe,’ etc. Weak and cowardly, ‘and of course you understand I can’t help out with Neal or Julius. After all why should I involve myself. Must consider Mother first. She is easily upset you know, and I did warn him after all.’ And a Catholic-Buddhist yet, My God! She really has him sewn up like an incision.”19

  Bill told Allen that he could tell Jack from him that no one could achieve the fence-straddle he was attempting. “No one can simultaneously stand behind those filthy letters of Mrs. Kerouac and be in any meaningful sense a friend of the person to whom those letters were addressed. Jack has reaped fame and money telling Neal’s story, recording his conversation, representing himself as Neal’s lifelong friend. Maybe the fuzz got onto Neal through Jack’s book. In any case he sold Neal’s blood and made money. Now he will not lift a dollar to help. I don’t see it, Allen.”20

  Bill brooded over Jack’s behavior overnight and the next day added a postscript to his letter, still furious at Jack’s treatment of Allen: “He seems to forget all your hours of work getting his manuscripts before publishers, agents, etc. I don’t like the way he shrugs off the horrible injustice of Neal’s imprisonment. All he wants is security for himself. A weakling and a coward who cannot be trusted under any pressure. He doesn’t want his name mentioned. What about your name and Neal’s and mine in his books??” Jack had not told his mother that Allen was back in New York, so she continued to bombard Bill and Allen with letters in Paris. The last letter Bill received he burned in his bidet, and then wrote to her saying he would not forward any more of her insane letters to Allen but would destroy them unopened. He told Allen, “More I think about it, the less I think of him, and the less desire I have to see any more of him.” It was the end of Burroughs’s fourteen-year friendship with Kerouac. He saw him again, once, a decade later when Kerouac, incoherently drunk, attempted to get him to accompany him to William F. Buckley’s television show. Burroughs refused and Kerouac himself was thrown off the show during the ads because he was being so abusive. Kerouac never understood what he’d done wrong. In a letter to Ginsberg five years later he asked, “And Bill, how come I don’t ever get to see him anymore and if I journeyed to Paris via Air France or Lufthansa jet would he be kind to me when I rushed up to him? Or laugh at me for being fat? Or WHAT?”21

  That August, before his trip to London with Stern, Burroughs took a holiday in Tangier. His analyst was on vacation and Bill needed a break from the continual interruptions of the hotel. The full effect of the independence movement’s cleanup campaign was now clear. “Tangier is finished,” Bill wrote Allen. “The Ouab days are upon us. Many a queen has been dragged shrieking from the Parade.”22 Rupert Croft-Cooke and his boyfriend Joseph had been questioned. Dave Woolman left the country. Tony Dutch fled to Málaga, and his boys, “many beaten to a pulp,” gave the police a list of hundreds. Bill thought he might well be on it, but as there was always preliminary warning of interrogation, Bill had his suitcase packed and could leave town in minutes. With most of his friends gone he told Paul Bowles that he had never spent a quieter and pleasanter month, eating majoun and working.

  Back in Paris, a month before his cure with Dr. Dent, Bill was shooting up with Gregory Corso, who told Allen that “he is hooked, and his roo
m is black, and fumes of PG, etc. etc.. It is not good for me but then again, I ask for it.”23 This was a period when Bill and Gregory had a close friendship. Gregory described it: “we are very much in closeness; almost a love. How nice, I never thought that possible.”24 They sat up for hours talking. Bill found him very entertaining.

  At the beginning of October 1958, Bill ran into Brion Gysin on the place Saint-Michel. Though Burroughs had occasionally eaten at Gysin’s restaurant in Tangier, they had never connected, and in fact barely knew each other, but Bill had some pot to sell and muttered, “Wanna score?” They began talking and suddenly found that they had much in common. They went to Brion’s place and he showed Bill a large pink painting—one that Bill subsequently owned—and Bill began to have all sorts of visions looking at it. Brion had been removed from his Tangier restaurant and had come to Paris, where he had been lodging with Princess Martha Ruspoli, but after three months he had rather outstayed his welcome on the île Saint-Louis. Bill suggested that he move into the Beat Hotel and took him to meet Mme. Rachou. Brion charmed her and she promised to find him a room. In the meantime, Brion moved into the hotel next door and he and Bill began to see a lot of each other.

  Chapter Thirty

  The years at the Beat Hotel were full of experiments… it was the right time, the right place, and the right people meeting there together, there were lots of experimental things going on.

  —BRION GYSIN1

  And all this I owe to one man—Brion Gysin. The only man I have ever respected.2

  1. Brion Gysin

  Brion would have liked to have been a black African prince—tall, finely featured, and wealthy. He was tall, but with large features, curly sandy hair, intense ice-blue eyes, freckles, and an oatmeal-colored complexion. His many years of exposure to the sun in Tangier had given him spider veins on the nose and cheeks that increased with age. He claimed that immediately after his birth he screamed, “Wrong address! Wrong address! There’s been a mistake in the mail. Send me back. Wherever you got me, return me. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong colour.”3 Brion mythologized his past. He claimed a Swiss father when in fact it was his grandfather who was Swiss but who immigrated to England at age twenty and married an Englishwoman. Brion’s father had been born in London but emigrated to Canada to seek his fortune. He met and married Brion’s mother there but returned to Britain to fight for his country in the Great War. Brion was born in 1916 in the Canadian military hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. He never knew his father, who was killed in the Battle of the Somme, six months after Brion’s birth.

  Brion was a poet, a novelist, biographer, artist, photographer, multimedia performer, and restaurateur but was ultimately best known for his paintings. He attended Downside College, known as “the Eton of Catholic public schools,” before moving to Paris in 1934, where he joined the Surrealist Group. A year later, aged nineteen, he was expelled from the group on the orders of André Breton, who told Paul Éluard to remove Brion’s paintings from a group show held at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins where he was shown together with Arp, Bellmer, Picasso, Magritte, Duchamp, Dalí, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. It seems that Brion’s poster for the show, of a large calf’s head wearing a perruque, abandoned on a deserted beach, resembled rather too closely the surrealists’ leader. Decades later, Gysin was still fulminating about his expulsion, which his biographer, John Geiger, has suggested “had the effect of a curse.” During the war Brion served first in the U.S. Army and then in the Canadian army, where he studied Japanese and Japanese calligraphy in preparation for the American occupation, but the war ended before he could go east.

  After the war he became a naturalized American, changing his name from Brian to Brion at the same time. In 1946 he published To Master—A Long Goodnight, a biography of Josiah Hanson, the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which also included a related text on The History of Slavery in Canada. He continued to paint, and in 1950 he went to Morocco with Paul Bowles and fell in love with the country and its music. He was to live there for twenty-three years. In 1954 Brion opened his famous 1001 Nights restaurant in Tangier with Mohamed Hamri so that every day he might hear the wild flutes of the hill tribe, Ahl Serif, whom he hired as the resident entertainers.

  Although Burroughs did not know Brion very well in Tangier, he did include him, and his restaurant—renamed the Baghdad—in one of his routines. “After a shot I went up to the Baghdad and met Leif and Marv. The manager is an artist named Algren. If he has a first name I never heard it. Tall, broadshouldered, handsome with a cold imperious manner. […] As a fashionable restaurateur, Algren is superb, just the correct frequency of glacial geniality.”4 Brion was a mythmaker, a storyteller. He would lower his voice, lean toward you, and reveal intimate details about the court intrigues of Eleanor of Aquitaine as if he were gossiping about mutual friends. He saw plots and schemes everywhere; he imagined slights and made malicious gossip about his friends, while always remaining loyal to them. The simplest facts were imbued with mystery. His closest woman friend, Felicity Mason, whom he always introduced as his “sister,” wrote, “He was by turns hospitable, inhospitable, friendly, unfriendly, misanthropic, misogynous, tolerant and intolerant. He was not an easy man. […] ‘I’m a butch queen,’ [Brion] said one day on the porch of the Café de France. ‘I can’t stand fairies.’ He was the most masculine homosexual I had ever met.”5 Burroughs was fascinated by Brion’s stories and was drawn close to him, becoming a lifelong friend and collaborator.

  Brion believed that it was magic that closed his 1001 Nights restaurant. When his musicians learned that he had been keeping notes and drawings about Moroccan magic they were furious. According to Brion they twice tried to poison him before resorting to more efficacious means to get rid of him. During a routine kitchen inspection he called for a ladder to see if a kitchen ventilator had really been oiled. In the ventilator he found a magic spell: seven round speckled pebbles, seven large seeds in their pods, seven shards of mirror arranged around a small square packet made from folded paper. The charm was sealed with glue made from gum, menstrual blood, pubic hair, and newt’s eyes. Inside was a text, written in brownish ink, from right to left across the paper, which had then been turned ninety degrees and written over again to form a cabalistic grid. It called upon the Djinn of the Hearth, “May Massa Brahim [Brion] leave this house as the smoke leaves this fire, never to return.”6 When the kitchen staff saw it they ran from the kitchen in terror. Seven days later, on January 5, 1958, he lost his business to Jim Skelton and his friend Mary Cook, a couple of American Scientologists who had “only wanted to help him out.” They foreclosed on the loan and owned the restaurant. Brion was out. However, some good came of it: Brion was to use this method of creating a calligraphic grid in his paintings from then on. Some of his most beautiful paintings were done in room 25 of the Beat Hotel not long afterward: “I write across the picture space from right to left and, then, I turn the space and write across that again to make a multi-dimensional grid with the script I picked up from the Pan People.”7

  Burroughs began to spend much of his free time in room 25, watching him paint. Gysin told Terry Wilson, “William often sat in on painting sessions, following big oils on canvas from inception to completion. Here was I teaching myself to do something bigger and a lot different from what I had ever attempted and I let him sit in on it. There he was and I just had to get on with it. I never let anyone do that before nor would again in my right mind. The process is more solitary than masturbation, or should be.”8

  Bill had never seen anything like it before, and the experience of watching Brion paint influenced him enormously when he began to paint himself in the early eighties. He wrote to Allen that Brion was doing “GREAT painting. I mean great in the old sense, not jive-talk great. I know great work when I see it in any medium. I see in his painting the psychic landscape of my own work. He is doing in painting what I try to do in writing. He regards his painting as a hole in the texture of
so-called ‘reality’ through which he is exploring an actual place in outer space. That is, he moves into the painting and through it, his life and sanity at stake when he paints.”9

  Burroughs’s approach to the paintings, and his use of them, was not that of the usual appreciative observer. Gysin’s canvases were a complex overlay of glyphs, painted first one way and then the other to produce a deep picture space, not unlike the work of his friend Matta, filled with passages and tunnels. Burroughs described it as “a three-dimensional frieze in plaster or jade or some other precious material.”10 He told Gysin that to enter the picture he needed a “point of entry”: an archway, a special spot of color, something to draw him in. “You can see way deep into all sorts of landscapes,” he said, “and then you flash back to what appears on the surface. The substance of the painting exists with a double motion, in and out. When you see one layer of the picture, then you suddenly see it all. The eye which I am using as a port of entry jerks me abruptly into a landscape I never saw before. It is a sort of toy world, and one that is somehow alarming, populated with mechanical insects attacking each other, and men in armor from other planets. Or they may be simply modern welders with bridges in the background.”11