Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  It was obviously directed against the autumn edition of the Chicago Review, which opened with “Chapter Two of Naked Lunch.” The article caused little more than a ripple. Some students felt insulted, and the campus newspaper, the Maroon, ran an editorial calling Mabley irresponsible, saying his contemptuous remarks about the Beat Generation were “more an attack on the University than a literary criticism of its publications.”4 Mabley quickly responded in his column, writing, “If in criticizing half a dozen University of Chicago students, I reflected on the whole student body, I apologize.”5

  Meanwhile, although there was a tradition of editorial autonomy, the dean asked to see a list of contents for the upcoming winter issue. Among the pieces he objected to were ten chapters from The Naked Lunch, Jack Kerouac’s “Old Angel Midnight,” and three poems by Gregory Corso. In the first week of November, Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton called an emergency meeting of the faculty advisory board and told them that he was under pressure from the university’s fund-raising and public relations departments, who were concerned “over the possible consequences of continued adverse publicity.” On November 11, Kimpton called a meeting of the nine-member committee of the council of the university senate to discuss the Chicago Review, but the matter was unresolved. After more discussions, Dean Wilt informed Irving Rosenthal that the winter issue could not be published as it stood and must be “completely innocuous.” He suggested that the offending articles could be spread over a number of subsequent issues. Rosenthal and six members of his staff resigned in protest, leaving only one, Hyung Woong Pak, who stepped in as editor as he was prepared to accept censorship from the university authorities.

  Rosenthal resolved to publish the offending issue himself, and on January 29, 1959, there was a benefit poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who traveled to Chicago specifically for it. (Kerouac refused to help even though his piece was one of those instrumental in getting the winter issue suppressed.) Their visit was front-page news in the Chicago press. Society hostesses vied to put them up and even Time magazine covered the event. The reading and donations from the Shaw Society of Chicago raised enough money to publish the suppressed issue. The new magazine was called Big Table.

  And there it might have ended, except for a surprise intervention from an unlikely source. August Derlith, the first publisher of H. P. Lovecraft and the author of numerous horror stories and science-fiction novels, read a review copy of Big Table and was so offended by its contents that he contacted the postmaster in Chicago to get the magazine banned from the mails. Under the Comstock Act, the U.S. Post Office had stringent laws to prohibit “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” articles from going through the mails. Derlith “evidenced a desire” to testify against the magazine in any hearing designed to determine its mailability. Without realizing it, this self-appointed guardian of public morality did Burroughs a huge favor.

  In March, the Post Office refused to give Big Table second-class mailing privileges and launched an inquiry into its mailability. The American Civil Liberties Union got involved, appointing Chicago attorney Joel J. Sprayregen to represent them. A formal complaint against the magazine was made suggesting that Big Table violated U.S. Code 18, Section 1461, because “ ‘Old Angel Midnight’ and ‘Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch’ were ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, and filthy.’ ” A hearing was eventually set in Chicago for June 23 (always a good number for Burroughs). The ACLU was sure that the case could be won, if not at the Post Office level, then at some future federal court level, and began to gather testimonials. On May 30, The Nation ran an article on the case, criticizing the Post Office, and other magazines and newspapers began to take notice.6 Maurice Girodias in Paris saw all the controversy being caused by The Naked Lunch and decided that now was the time to publish.

  Moving swiftly, he dispatched his assistant, a young South African poet named Sinclair Beiles whom Burroughs had known in Tangier, to the Beat Hotel. He told Burroughs that Girodias wanted the manuscript in two weeks to capitalize on the publicity generated by the court case and news articles. Burroughs already had a lot of it prepared. For instance, no further work was required on the ten chapters published in Big Table, and other sections were almost ready. Burroughs had a large suitcase containing six or seven hundred pages of manuscript and he would rummage around in it looking for material that needed the least amount of work to include. Brion Gysin and Alan Ansen were summoned to do the typing. Burroughs: “I’d say, ‘Here, this section. I can get that together easily,’ and reach into this great suitcase full of manuscripts and assemble it. Nobody had any part in the editorial process. I didn’t organize it, I just got the pieces together. I said, ‘Here’s piece one, piece two…’ I said, ‘We’ll worry about the order later.’ ”7 As soon as a section was typed, Beiles took it to the typesetters, and so the order was determined by the arbitrary order in which the pages were retrieved from the suitcase. Burroughs did little or none of the typing; he was coming off paregoric and in no shape to type accurately. In between annotating sections for typing he busied himself with sticking photographs from his South American trip to the wall of his hotel room with adhesive tape. These were to act as an aide-mémoire for his next book, The Soft Machine, which was set entirely in South America. Burroughs was already thinking ahead. Eventually this photographic collage, made up of corner-pharmacy-size black-and-white prints, covered a large section of the wall and was the genesis of his photographic collages and the illustrated scrapbooks of the early sixties.

  When the galleys came back from the printer, first Sinclair Beiles looked through them, then Brion Gysin took a look and said, “Why change the order at all? It’s perfect!” The only change that Burroughs made was to move the beginning to the end so that the policemen Hauser and O’Brien bookended the text. He already had the name The Naked Lunch, ever since Ginsberg was reading aloud from the manuscript of Queer and misread “naked lust” for “naked lunch” and Kerouac identified it as a good name for a book. At the time Burroughs thought it was a bit pretentious, but when the time came to give the book a name it seemed all right. In July, four weeks after Beiles came knocking on his door, Girodias had printed five thousand copies and it was out in the bookshops. Burroughs himself designed the jacket using some of the calligraphs he had been experimenting with under Gysin’s tutelage, and Allen Ginsberg took the portrait of the author on the inner flap.

  The Naked Lunch takes place in a number of different locations or sets but is “much more of a surrealist extrapolation than a journalistic account”8 of these places. Burroughs has described the book as a group of free-association vaudeville routines, and he was later to use them in readings to great comic effect. “A series of episodes, misfortunes, and adventures happening to the protagonist, but no real plot, no beginning, no end.”9

  The book uses the oldest novel format in the world, the picaresque, which developed in sixteenth-century Spain but has roots going back to the Satyricon of Petronius. The word picaresca comes from pícaro or “rogue,” and inevitably the protagonist is an antihero, usually living by his wits in a corrupt society. Examples are Don Quixote (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749), and The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe (1594), books well known to Burroughs from his degree studies at Harvard. In The Naked Lunch, Lee is the narrator just as Jack Wilton was the narrator in The Unfortunate Traveller. The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett (1748) has been cited by Burroughs as an influence on the book, particularly on the character of Dr. Benway. Smollett’s book contains a description of the sea battle of Cartagena in 1741, in which the ship’s doctor is unable to tend the wounded until he has drunk enough rum to completely dull his senses and by then there are limbs flying all over the deck. It was a book that Kells Elvins and Burroughs discussed when writing “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” at Harvard in 1938, where Dr. Benway first makes an appearance.

  Burroughs’s classical education played a powerful
but invisible role in much of his writing, particularly his study of the picaresque novel. Modern picaresque novels would include Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the works of Céline. Burroughs often spoke of The Naked Lunch as being in this tradition, with characters like Dr. Benway, Carl, or A.J. appearing fully formed with no character development; they are what you see. Like Benway, A.J. had no life model, though it pleased Alan Ansen to think it was based on him. The initials stood for nothing. He was another Burroughs figure of outrage, putting piranha into Lady Sutton-Smith’s swimming pool and decapitating Dame Sitlong’s Afghan hound at a party.10 Just as Burroughs found characters waiting in other people’s novels, so Terry Southern deliberately appropriated A.J. whole for his book The Magic Christian, where he became Guy Grand.

  The Naked Lunch introduced a stage full of Burroughs characters, many of whom were to reoccur in subsequent books. Some were taken from real life, others were composites, but most just came from Burroughs’s dreams or imagination; he once said that he dreamed at least half of his characters. Real-life characters included Pantopon Rose, an old whore who hung around 103rd Street and Broadway in 1945 who sometimes had pantopon on prescription. Some of the old junkies Burroughs knew then would say, “Maybe Pantopon Rose is holding,” a phrase that Burroughs filed away. She charged two dollars per tablet. (Pantopon is opium in an injectable form with all the tars and other insoluble material removed, and is nearly as potent as morphine by weight.) Several characters came from Tangier: Marvie was Dave Woolman and Leif the Unlucky was Eric “Calamity” Gifford. Andrew Keif and Arachnid his driver were based very much on Paul Bowles and Temsamany.

  Many of the characters were composites or stereotypes mixed with real characters such as Carl, who was a generic Scandinavian boy, or Hauser and O’Brien, who were the cops who busted him in 1945, but in a wildly exaggerated form. Clem and Jody were stereotype “Ugly Americans,” saying the most outrageous things just to annoy the local people.

  Among the characters that came from dreams were the mugwumps. The character came to him as a picture: an Egyptian face with purple lips and black eyes with no irises, like a character in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. The Mugwumps were a nineteenth-century American political grouping, but Burroughs had no interest in them except to appropriate their name. The final passage in The Naked Lunch, where David Lamont throws gasoline over a group of Arabs and sets fire to it, came to Burroughs in a dream in London in 1956.

  There are clear models for the book. For instance, the interview between Dr. Benway and Carl Peterson is consciously modeled on the interview between the protagonist of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Councillor Mikulin; Burroughs used Mikulin’s broken-off, unfinished sentences and even some of his words. Burroughs mentioned in writing classes that he regarded it as perfectly legitimate to take a scene from someone else’s book and use it in another way.

  The political parodies in the book included the Moroccan nationalist party, the Istiqlal. Having observed the Istiqlal at close quarters in Mme. Porte’s Salon de Thé in Tangier, Burroughs was engaging in light parody and getting back at all the shoeshine boys who would snarl at him and say, “We will push you into the sea!” The other political parties of Interzone were Burroughs’s inventions: the Senders who stood for control addicts; the Liquefactionists who were the exploiters and absorbers of youthful energy; the Divisionists who stood for multipliers of their own personality; and the Factualists who were the pure in heart.

  The most notorious passages in the book are the hanging scenes featuring John and Mary, which were included in counterpoint to all the idyllic sex with boys. Burroughs had read about autoerotic sex where young men part-hang themselves to enhance their orgasm, but mostly it was the image of hanging itself that he was interested in. Hanging was the form of capital punishment in Missouri and Illinois when he was a child in St. Louis and there were many photographs of hanged criminals in the newspapers in those days. The image of a hanged man was one of his earliest memories; it was the sort of thing children dwell upon. Hangings were often public and the prison authorities could not keep photographers away, so they were often right up close when the prisoner was executed, producing dramatic, if prurient, pictures for the popular press. There were fewer photographs of electrocutions because photographers were not allowed into the chamber.

  Burroughs’s intention to present a positive image of sex with boys was perhaps hampered by the hanging scenes. Certainly Alan Ansen thought so. He wrote to Ginsberg saying, “There does seem to be a multiplicatio coitum praeter necessitatum, or in the vernacular, too many fucks in a little room. And of course, if you’re trying to show sex as something nice, obscenity is a very two-edged tool […] what description wants to do is suggest the physical centrality […] boy is a sexier word than cock.”11 But Ansen was in awe of the book, which he saw as a giant step in literature.

  Bill’s friends loved it. Burroughs sent Paul Bowles an inscribed copy and he had it bound in Moroccan leather in Marrakech. “I loved it. Read it through three times. I think I laughed more each time. It’s a comic classic. He’s one of our greatest comedians. A sophisticated Will Rogers. Nothing since was as funny.” It rapidly became a cult book, smuggled through customs into London and New York, passed around until it was in tatters. Girodias quickly printed a second run of five thousand. The only review, if it can be called that, was by Alan Ansen, who wrote a biography of Burroughs and a survey of his unpublished work, plus Junky, in the second issue of Big Table.12 Working from a manuscript copy, he refers to The Naked Lunch as Interzone throughout but gives a very good account of the work, complete with an explanation of the political parties in the book. This was the first critical piece on Burroughs. In the original draft he mentioned Joan’s death and showed it to Burroughs. Ansen: “He made me take it out. ‘I wouldn’t put that in if I were you.’ ”13

  2. Busted

  One morning at the Beat Hotel at 8:00 a.m. there was a tap tap tap on the door of room 15. It was the police with an arrest warrant dating back to April 9. It had taken them three months to find him. They asked a lot of questions and searched his room, finding nothing but a little less than a gram of hash. Bill was bustled into an old Citroën traction avant and taken to the prefecture, just across the river, where he spent a junk-sick twelve hours while they typed up forms and took his photograph. When they developed it there was nothing on the plate. They tried again and still nothing. Two hours later, only on the third attempt, were they able to get an image. As Bill told Allen, “Not for nothing am I known as ‘The Invisible Man.’ ”14 After he was released he made a quick trip back to the hotel for some Eubispasme tablets, then headed over to the rue Saint-Séverin, where Maurice Girodias had his headquarters, interrupting him in the middle of his tango lesson. Girodias arranged for him to meet his lawyer, Maître Bumsell.

  In France you are entitled to know who denounced you, and Bumsell obtained copies of Paul Lund’s statement. He had told the police in Morocco that Burroughs was an international opium smuggler; this was the reason Burroughs had been arrested. Bumsell spoke good English and coached Burroughs on what to say and how to behave: stand up if the judge addresses you, just answer the question and don’t elaborate, never laugh, even if the judge does, keep a calm demeanor at all times. Bumsell knew that the key to the case was to find the right juge d’instruction for the preliminary hearing, and he located one whose wife had been an addict. The juge d’instruction’s estimation of the case is very important because his assessment of the accused goes on to the court. The judge had the letter referring to camel saddles and asked Burroughs what it referred to. He could have bluffed it, but decided to be honest and told the judge that it did indeed refer to importing hash, but explained that the plan was never put into action. After Bill admitted his guilt everything went well and the juge d’instruction sent a favorable recommendation to the court.

  At the actual hearing, before three judges, Maître Bumsell used as his defense that Bill was a man of letters w
ho had fallen into bad habits and mixed with the wrong people as so many poets had done before. Back in September 1959, when the case looked more serious than it turned out to be, Burroughs had written a deposition to shield himself from accusations of promoting—or indeed dealing—drugs. Called “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” it had been translated by Maurice Girodias’s brother, Eric Kahane, and published in the January 1, 1960, issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française,15 the prestigious literary journal. He explained it to Allen as being “essential for my own safety at this point: Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus, the manner in which it operates, and the manner in which it can be brought under control. This is no act. I mean it all the way. Get off that junk wagon, boys, it’s going down a three mile grade for the junk heap… If you can help get the Beatniks off the junk route, then maybe other routes won’t be so difficult as they are now.”16 He wanted the authorities to understand that he was anti-junk, that he wrote about it as an example of a control system, not as a romantic escape. Maître Bumsell made his speech, explained that Bill was “a man of letters, not a criminal,” and read aloud from sections of “Témoignage à propos d’une maladie” before giving copies to the three judges. Bill had to say very little except, “Oui monsieur le juge.” He was fined sixty dollars. Bill gasped audibly with relief. It took all of ten minutes. Brumsell’s fee was very modest.

  Ginsberg reacted critically to “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” in which he felt Burroughs was abdicating responsibility for the book by saying, “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch,” and of adopting an unnecessarily humorless and high moral tone. Burroughs reacted sharply, telling Ginsberg, “The article is intentionally humorless and moralistic, like I say. A loveable hepatitis carrier is no ad for hepatitis.”17