by Barry Miles
When Gysin left for a holiday in La Ciotat, an artists’ colony near Marseille, Burroughs began drawing glyphs himself, showing the obvious influence of Gysin, first in pen, often as parts of letters to his correspondents, then in blue watercolor on paper. But he was not yet ready to use the visual arts. He was strung out and at a stress point in his analysis. He was still visiting Marc Schlumberger twice a week and told Allen, “Analysis is coming to spectacular climaxes,”12 but did not reveal what they were. Three months earlier, he had told Allen that his analysis was coming to a head and he now was sure that he had witnessed Mary Evans, his Welsh nanny, have a miscarriage, the results of which were burned in the furnace in his presence. That was the “murder” that his analysis had revealed.13
With regards to his writing he said that he was completely dissatisfied with all the work he had done to date and with the whole medium: “Unless I can reach a point where my writing has the danger and immediate urgency of bull-fighting it is nowhere, and I must look for another way.”14
2. Psychic Discoveries
That November, Burroughs bought himself a key chain with a small stainless steel ball on the end from a magic shop on the rue de la Huchette called La Table d’Emeraude and hung it up in his room as decoration. Seeing it, Brion introduced Bill to the idea of using crystal balls for scrying, a magic technique in which you focus your attention on a shining surface, such as a mirror or crystal ball, until a vision appears; at least twenty minutes were needed for a beginner. To “descry” means “to make out dimly” or “to reveal.” Brion stared hard into Bill’s stainless steel ball and in its surface saw a Muslim funeral, with crowds of mourners on the streets of Tangier. Bill tried it and saw the same thing. They sought out all the information they could find on scrying and quickly moved on to using a mirror. As it is essentially a meditation technique giving rise to visions, it is important to be as comfortable and relaxed as possible. After some deep breathing, the scryer looks intently into the mirror or crystal ball. It is important not to stare, as that causes tears and blinking. The correct technique is to relax the focus of your eyes, while remaining alert, and to not hesitate to blink if necessary, allowing the lids to close halfway. After a while, a dark mist will cover the mirror’s surface, followed by a small light from which clouds form and spread to fill the mirror. The viewer’s inner eyes are now said to be open, and the journey into the mirror begins. The clouds clear and the pictures begin. Brion: “We did a great deal of lengthy mirror-gazing at that time. We felt that we had all the time in the world to give to such explorations and we did see some strange stuff, just like ‘they’ always said we would.”15
Thus began one of the most intense periods of activity of Burroughs’s entire stay in Europe. He told Ginsberg that the events of December were “complex and fantastic to point where coverage is difficult. Like covering events of ten crowded years.”16 In the course of one mirror-gazing session, Bill saw himself with completely inhuman hands: thick black-pink, fibrous, long white tendrils grew from curiously abbreviated fingertips as if the tips had been cut off to make room for the tendrils. Jerry Wallace, a twenty-year-old boy from Kansas sitting across the room, exclaimed in horror:
“My God, Bill! What’s wrong with your hands?”
“My hands?” asked Bill.
“They are all thick and pink and something white growing out of the fingers.”17
As Burroughs put it, “para-normal occurrences thick and fast.”18 He was continuing to add new sections to The Naked Lunch, and after completing the “Fats Terminal” section he saw Fats’s face in an amber bead that Brion showed him from a magic Arab necklace. It was like a monster virus, frozen in the precious stone, looking for a way out: “a lamphrey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow, black, erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk.”19
Another time, sitting across the room from Jacques Stern, Bill distinctly felt him touch his arm. Bill watched fascinated as Stern appeared to lose seven pounds in ten minutes when he took a shot of heroin for the first time in a week. According to Burroughs the muscle that the body first builds back when coming off junk is soft and ectoplasmic and literally melts away at the first touch of junk. The incident appeared in The Naked Lunch, albeit in a slightly exaggerated form: “I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow halo.”20
Burroughs and Gysin quickly involved fellow residents in their experiments. Baird Bryant described staring at the armoire mirror and the use of a half coconut shell filled with water. Bryant reported, “It did not take long for the water to begin glowing, subtly, very subtly, then it became a little window.”21 Their two main collaborators were Jacques Stern and Sheldon “Mack” Thomas, usually referred to as Shell by Burroughs, a tenor sax–playing novelist from Texas. Burroughs, Stern, Gysin, and Thomas all had the same vision of a coffin in a library. Gysin, anxious to retain his leadership of the paranormal experiments, embarked upon a thirty-six-hour session, gazing into the mirror on the door of his armoire. He sat lotus position on the bed and his friends handed him food, cigarettes, and joints to keep him going. He saw scientists in nineteenth-century labs, great battles, and chieftains of unknown races. After twenty-four hours the images disappeared and he wrote that “there seemed it was a limited area that one could see only a certain distance into, uh, where everything was covered with a gently palpitating cloud of smoke which would be about waist high […] that was the end, there was nothing beyond that.”22
Every night Bill and assorted residents went to Brion’s room to watch all the weird psychic experiences that were occurring. Burroughs told Ted Morgan, “It was a great period, a lot of fun, just a lot of fun. The thing about it for me, about magic, and that whole area of the occult, is that it is FUN! Fun, things happen. It’s great. And none of it ever bothers me, you can’t get too extreme.” Some residents were freaked out by what went on. Nick Smart, a friend of Burroughs’s, put his nose around the door when they were all in there and some sort of spirit materialized before his eyes. Burroughs said, “He took one look and said, ‘Oh shit!’ and walked out.”23 As far as Burroughs was concerned they were breaking new ground and making important new discoveries, and it was all thanks to Brion.
Allen Ginsberg: “So Brion was a kind of shaman.”
WSB: “He was a shaman. A very potent shaman.”24
One of the key findings in all this experimentation for Burroughs was the identification of the “Ugly Spirit” and the concept of occupation and possession by spirits. During one of their psychic experiments in 1959, Brion wrote on a piece of paper in a semitrance state the line, “For ugly spirit shot Joan because…” In his introduction to Queer Burroughs wrote, “A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed—or was it? It doesn’t need to be completed if you read it: ‘ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause,’ that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation.”25
Burroughs identified the Ugly Spirit as having to do with his privileged patrician background, received ideas and attitudes that were still lodged in him, controlling him. Now that he could name it, countermeasures could be taken. Burroughs regarded the Ugly Spirit as a “psychic entry” into his being by a malevolent force, and as the years passed, the term entered his personal cosmography. The true cause of Joan’s death was again revealed in one of Bill’s cut-ups. He wrote, “Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance blew the shot,” which he assumed meant blowing a shot of junk, when the junk squirts out the side of the syringe or dropper because of a blockage, until Brion Gysin pointed out that this referred to the shooting of Joan. It was more evidence of possession. Another suppressed area was identified in the summer of 1958. “Brion told me, ‘This is not life or death but something in between’ and at some point he said, ‘What about your brother?’ and I burst into tears, realizing the emptiness of Mort’s life and my own responsibility.”26 Scrying was as good as psychoanalysis.
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br /> In February 1959 Brion had an appendectomy and went to Marrakech to recuperate. That April, Bill decided to follow him to the sun and flew to Tangier, but on arrival he found that he was wanted by the police. About six months before, he had considered the possibility of selling some Moroccan hash in Paris and wrote Paul Lund, asking if he could supply him with any “leather goods”; the idea was to sew it into the lining of Moroccan camel saddles. Nothing ever came of it. Meanwhile, Clive Stevens, the captain of a three-masted topsail schooner called the Amphitrite and an old friend of Paul Lund’s, had been sailing for the West Indies when he was stopped and held in house arrest for a year in the Canary Islands after hitting a policeman. The boat had been impounded in Gibraltar to await the result of litigation, and when Stevens returned to Tangier he was busted trying to buy a half kilo of opium from “the Old Black Connection” in the Socco Chico.
Both Stevens and “the Old Black Connection” were held incommunicado and in an attempt to shift the blame, “the Old Black Connection” implicated Paul Lund and “an American with glasses” in the deal. Lund had been going straight and had opened a bar called the Novara in November 1957. If he had been repatriated to England he would have faced a long jail sentence. He appears to have concocted a story with Stevens and the Connection to shift the blame to Burroughs—the “American with glasses”—and make out that he was the Paris mastermind of an opium-smuggling plot. This explains how Burroughs’s “camel saddles” letter came to be found, improbably, in Stevens’s pocket. To further complicate matters, the police had somehow obtained a letter that Bill sent to Shell Thomas from London, saying something to the effect of, “Pooling our knowledge could be of great benefit to both parties,” which, although it referred to scrying, suggested to the authorities that Bill was the mastermind behind a narcotics ring.
While searching Paul Lund’s premises they found a suitcase of manuscripts that Bill had left there in storage. Bill wrote Allen that “[they] wade through a suitcase of my vilest pornography looking for ‘evidence.’ (They must figure hanging has a code significance.)”27 Burroughs was ignorant of quite how much he had been implicated and happily socialized with Paul Lund. One day he was visiting Lund when the police appeared to make another search of his premises. Miraculously they did not ask to see Bill’s papers or search him, which was fortunate because he had five grams of opium in his pocket at the time, which would have made the charges all the more difficult to explain.
After the police left, Lund was forced to shamefacedly explain that he had given them the letter and denounced him as a smuggler. Bill was outraged: his freedom was endangered, his holiday ruined. However, he continued to see Lund after that and never raised the issue with him again. One day Lund said, “You know Bill, there comes a point when you’re broken. […] They broke me.” Burroughs said, “Those were his words, I didn’t press him any further. All my annoyance having evaporated completely.”28
Bill took the packet boat to Marseille with Alan Ansen, who had also been taking a break in Tangier and had decided to accompany Bill back to Paris. Bill demonstrated his latest psychic discoveries and Alan was suitably impressed. Bill asserted that there was a magnetic attraction between his stainless steel scrying ball and a magnifying mirror he had bought. He claimed that every time the mirror was positioned near the ball, the ball moved away. Alan assured him it was indeed the case. In fact Burroughs was now finding the ball painful to use. In Tangier he had begun to feel a physical pressure operating on his body, pushing him away from the ball, which made him so uneasy that he had to sleep with the light on. Things jumped from his hands. He told Allen, “Well, I will not turn back (even if I could).”29
He also told Allen that he no longer thought about sex; he didn’t know if he was interested in man or woman, or both, or neither. He said that his analysis had, “with a slow scalpel of fact, cancelled my sado-masochist visa to Sodom. I wonder if any but the completely innocent can enter without a S-M Visa? I don’t know.” This was not the first time he had expressed doubts about his sexual orientation, but his lack of sex drive was more likely attributable to his severe drug habit. Back in Paris, in order to maintain his addiction but keep himself clean in the event of a police raid, Burroughs began taking box after box of Eubispasme pills. These were codethyline, an alkaloid extracted from opium, small black pills available at any pharmacy in France without a prescription and sold as a cure for the grippe. France is still the only country in the world where opium extract is sold freely at pharmacies.30 He even kept his supply of kif out of his room in case the police visited but was clearly not assiduous enough in his housekeeping because when they eventually came, they found a couple of cubes of hash.
Alan Ansen returned to Venice and Bill found himself more or less alone in Paris: Shell decided to return to the United States. Bill was sorry to see him go because he already regarded him as part of a triumvirate of mystical experimenters: “the three mystics I had hoped to form nucleus and get something definite and useable via cross-fertilization—Shell, Gysin and Stern.”31 Shell told Bill that he was going to buy an ounce of heroin and smuggle it back to the States. Bill didn’t want to hear about it. When Shell tried to sell it in Houston, the buyer informed on him and he got twenty years. Burroughs thought he was lucky not to be busted at customs. He told Allen, “Imagine that idiot going back with a saxophone and loud clothes… a saxophone!!! My God, how fucking stupid can a man get…?”32 Bill was sure that the police were watching him from then on. Shell served five years and while in jail had a number of stories published in Evergreen Review. When he got out, Grove published his first novel, Gumbo,33 which ran to a number of printings. Burroughs remained in touch with him throughout his lifetime.
Shell’s departure coincided with Stern going into complete seclusion, not even answering letters, saying that the presence of people was painful to him. Gysin, meanwhile, was having a paranoid episode, leaving Bill with no one. Bill thought that Brion was afraid of him as “a notorious carrier of Black Fuzz, bad luck and death.” He told Allen, “I continue to see visions and experience strange currents of energy, but the Key—the one piece that could make it useable—Stern had part of it, and so did Shell (Gysin more a catalyst or medium in strict sense).”34 Possibly Gysin’s exclusion was because of the four of them, he was the only one not on hard drugs. Burroughs was down to 120 pounds, strung out and in ill health. Two things happened to pull him from his depression: the return of Jacques Stern, and Maurice Girodias’s change of mind over publishing The Naked Lunch. He also got busted.
Stern was a complete fantasist and regaled Bill with an account of a series of improbable events, all of which Bill believed implicitly, and all of which were complete fabrication. He invited Bill to spend a month with him on his yacht in Monte Carlo (the yacht did not exist). He claimed to have hit a concrete island in his Bentley at 130 miles per hour, rolled over twice, and emerged without a scratch, and to have fallen down a marble staircase (the Bentley was intact, there was no accident). He claimed that Dr. Dent had treated him for an acute case of catatonic shock by injecting him with twelve grains of heroin in two hours, with two nurses holding him down and the pain so bad that he bit a piece of wood in half. He was given an electric shock, came out of catatonia, and wrote a novel in nine days. Burroughs read the novel, called The Fluke, which Stern claimed was going to be published by Faber in London, and was astonished by its brilliance. He told Allen that he thought Stern’s writing “is better by far than mine or Kerouac’s or yours or Gregory’s or anyone I can think of. There is no doubt about it, he is a great writer. I think the greatest writer of our time.”35 Ginsberg despaired over his old friend’s latest unrestrained enthusiasms. The Fluke, written in an inaccessible post–Finnegans Wake, post-Céline style, in short sentences, sometimes of one word, prefigures cut-ups in its overall impression but makes very hard reading:
Taking in the sight of many many people.. Many.. More than I had even seen before from any single vantage point.. At an
y one time.. There seemed to be… a multitude, I guess one would call it.. A veritable one.. The normal abnormalcy one with ordinary eyesight would see from such a height.. And I tried to count.. For then I could.. But there were so many.. too many.. That I could not.. Not possibly.. Nor choose.. One.. That might instruct me.. As I wished to be..36
Faber, of course, did not publish it and probably never even saw it. When Stern eventually decided to print it himself, Burroughs wrote a glowing introduction, concluding, “The real writer is there. And sometimes he can only send back a short wave code message of warning.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Can I bring it back, the magic and danger and fear of those years in 9 rue Git-le-Coeur and London and Tangier—the magic photographs and films.1
1. The Naked Lunch
Although he periodically added new sections to The Naked Lunch, not a great deal had happened on the publishing front since Burroughs had arrived in Paris. The first thing Allen Ginsberg had done on arrival was to show it to Maurice Girodias, but Girodias had turned it down. He returned it to Ginsberg and recalled, “It was such a mess that manuscript. You couldn’t physically read the stuff. […] The ends of the pages were all eaten away by rats or something.”2 Ginsberg was very angry with him. Over the months Burroughs had continued to tinker with it, adding some material he found in the medical library on the rue Dragon, and some new routines. Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg had tried to interest Girodias in it a second time, but still without success. Then on October 25, 1958, in the Saturday issue of the Chicago Daily News, columnist Jack Mabley, in a piece headed “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” fulminated against a magazine that he identified only as being published by the University of Chicago, calling it “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated.” Mabley concluded, “But the University of Chicago publishes the magazine. The trustees should take a long hard look at what is being circulated under its sponsorship.”3
