Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs found Maurice Girodias very likable and thought of him as an old-fashioned riverboat gambler, always with a white waistcoat18 and a dark suit. He had been seeing quite a bit of him socially before the bust and before Olympia published The Naked Lunch, and his support during the trial made Burroughs feel even more favorably toward him. Girodias had made a huge sum of money from publishing Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and had used it to start a restaurant and nightclub called Le Grand-Séverin, just a few blocks from the Beat Hotel. There was a dome-covered patio where birds flew around, shitting on the customers, and the headwaiter was always drunk; a large African served up American-style barbecue ribs in a filthy undershirt; Burroughs liked to eat Girodias’s blackbird pie.

  Ginsberg was concerned that Bill was going to be ripped off by Girodias, which he did of course do, but Bill told him, “I am sure that the deal I made with Olympia was the best deal I could have made. I saw Jack fucking around five years with American book publishers. […] Of course the two pornographic sections—‘Hassan’s Rumpus Room’ and ‘A.J.’s Annual Party’ are in, and very important part of the whole structure.”19 Girodias gave him an eight-hundred-dollar advance and took one-third of the foreign rights on the book, which was a very bad deal, but Burroughs didn’t realize it at the time. He was very gratified to get a measure of recognition and be published after so many years and to have the assurance that Olympia would publish other books. Supposedly to avoid taxation, all the foreign rights went through Odette Hummel in Switzerland, which made it even harder for Burroughs to get hold of his money. Girodias told him, “This is a complicated business full of angles. I know them—you don’t. Let me handle it. You will have to trust me.”20 Gallimard bought the French rights almost immediately and paid an advance. Eric Kahane translated it for them but it was not published until 1964 and even then was to be sold legally only under the counter.21 Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden published it in Germany in 1962 in a translation by Katharina and Peter Behrens with eight pages left in the original English to avoid prosecution for obscenity. Barney Rosset bought the American rights for Grove Press, giving an advance of $3,000, but the book was not published until March 1962 because Grove had several other obscenity cases to win first and knew that they would have to defend it in court.

  3. Ian Sommerville

  Toward the end of May 1959, the American poet Harold Norse turned up in Paris intending to write a book. He stayed, rent free, in some luxury on the île Saint-Louis, and within weeks he had found a boyfriend and made friends with James Jones, author of the 1951 bestseller From Here to Eternity. He soon ran into Gregory Corso at Les Nuages, Gregory’s favorite café on boulevard Saint-Germain. It was at Gregory’s insistence that he sought out Burroughs at the Beat Hotel. Burroughs was distant and uncommunicative, but they slowly became friends, and after about six weeks Burroughs asked him, “Where do you go to meet people?” Norse told him about Ian Sommerville, a young Englishman he had met at the Mistral bookshop who was spending the summer in Paris to learn French, working at the bookshop in lieu of rent. Norse had taken him home for dinner but he was not his type. “I’ve never been able to pick up anyone there,” Bill told him, but was clearly interested when Norse described the young man. He was rather attractive, Norse said, but had a provincial working-class Northern accent and mumbled, which made him difficult to understand. He was studying mathematics at Cambridge and was very intelligent. “The kid likes older guys,” Norse told him.22

  Bill went over to the Mistral and engaged Ian in conversation as he tidied the shelves.23 He found him reserved and “uppity,” but when Ian found out that he was the author of The Naked Lunch, he said, “Now I feel very humble,” and became quite contrite. Sommerville was just eighteen years old, Burroughs was forty-five. It was a relationship that would last until Sommerville’s death in 1976. Ian was tall and looked not entirely unlike Burroughs at the same age, with reddish-blond hair that he was continually running his fingers through so that it stood on end. He had pale, almost translucent skin stretched across a bony visage with strong cheekbones, a birdlike nose, and thin lips. Burroughs asked for Ian’s assistance in his latest attempt to cure his habit. He explained that he had what he called a drugstore habit; he was addicted to Eubispasme and wanted to get off. He got Ian a room in the Beat Hotel and gave him a rather small amount of money to oversee a reduction cure. Ian was to give him so many Eubispasme pills each morning and so many each night on a reducing scale along with doses of apomorphine. This was oral apomorphine put under the tongue; when you began to feel really nauseous you spat it out.

  On August 24, Harold Norse stopped by the hotel with a friend who wanted to meet Bill. He knocked at room 15. The door opened partway and in the dim light he saw a tall thin figure, stripped to the waist. “Bill?” asked Norse tentatively.

  “Hey man, Bill’s kicking and I’m taking care of him,” said Ian. Norse was stunned. “I thought you were Bill,” he exclaimed.

  “Everybody does,” Ian replied. “I’m a replica. Bill can’t see anyone,” he explained. “I can’t tell you what it’s been like, man. It’s been fuckin’ unbelievable. I never want to go through this again. Hallucinations, convulsions, freakouts, the edge of insanity. But it’s been worth it. He’s getting well.”24 It took eight to ten days, after which Burroughs went to London to complete the cure with Dr. Dent. A codeine habit is considerably harder and more painful to kick than heroin, the symptoms are much more extreme, and Bill swore he would never touch it again. He claimed not to have used it again for three years.

  It was a terrifying and traumatic experience for teenage Ian, whose life experience had consisted of little more than growing up in Darlington, in the north of England. His father died when he was ten or twelve years old and his mother had some difficulty in making ends meet. Ian managed to get into Cambridge on a scholarship, which was the making of him, but studying at Corpus Christi College among the quiet medieval streets of Cambridge was no preparation for what he had just been through. “I’ve spent a season in hell,” he told Norse. “I had to hang on to my sanity by my fingernails, and they’re bitten down to the moons.”25 Burroughs ran through the full gamut of his various personalities, from the giant centipede to the frog-faced “Nigger-killing” southern sheriff, from the silent icy Chinaman to the Ugly American. Brion Gysin described them as the “all-time grizzlies.” “Bone-cracking crustaceans. Mister Ugly Spirit. ‘Ah feel Ah’m about to give birth to some horrible critter,’ he moaned in front of the pulsing mirror, ‘Ah don’t feel rightly hooman!’ ”26

  Those eight days were a dramatic introduction to a new way of life, and Ian possibly never really recovered from it. He and Bill began a lifelong love affair, Ian’s first real affair. They lived together, they were lovers. Bill introduced him to his friends and he and Brion Gysin became close friends. Brion: “Ian Sommerville was skinny and quick as an alleycat with bristly red hair that stuck up all over in pre-punk style. He was crisper than cornflakes and sharp as a tack. He crackled and snapped with static electricity, often giving a strong shock with an icy handshake. He was not fond of water and panicked at the idea of rain on his hair. He was an expert model-maker, handy with tools.”27 Through Bill Ian was introduced to the pleasures of hashish, the sinister writings of Paul Bowles, the world of avant-garde literature, and the attentions of the international bohemian crowd. Brion explained surrealism and modern painting and introduced him to the mysteries of the occult. Ian was completely taken up by this new life and determined to stay on in Paris with Bill and forget about his studies. But Burroughs was adamant that he should return to Cambridge to get his degree, so at the end of the summer Ian packed his bags and left while Bill made plans to visit him. When Ian finally graduated he left Cambridge a more mature individual. His provincial accent had been replaced almost entirely by a Cambridge University drawl, and the deference shown to him in matters scientific and practical by Burroughs, Gysin, and their friends gave him self-confidence. Meeting Ian also had a profoun
d effect upon Burroughs. It was his one great love affair. After Sommerville’s death he said simply, “Ian was in every book.”28

  Off junk, Bill now began to play a greater role in the life of the hotel. He was very attracted to a boy named Jerry Gorseline. He had red hair, what Burroughs called “a cosque of curly hair,” a mispronunciation of the French casque, or helmet. But Bill’s attentions caused rather an extreme reaction. At one point Jerry told Burroughs, “There are things that I feel should be destroyed. People like you should be destroyed.” And he also spread a rumor that Bill had chased him all over Paris with a gun. Bill didn’t have a gun at that time, though he did later shoot at potatoes with an air gun in his room. There was, however, a complicated business with Gysin. Burroughs told Ted Morgan that Gorseline was “more than friendly with Brion. This was deliberate. He made it with Brion, he never made it with me. Throwing a jealousy block between me and Brion, but it didn’t work at all. He was a beautiful kid, I didn’t say I liked him, I wanted him, nothing likable about him. I would have been willing to get very close to Jerry Gorseline. He was interesting, he had glitter and glamour, but nothing special.”29

  Bill liked the young male hustlers in the gay bars of boulevard Saint-Germain, and Mme. Rachou was always very accommodating about overnight guests, as long as they signed the police ledger. Homosexuality was not illegal in France so there was no problem there. Burroughs became something of a connoisseur of the graffiti on the outdoor pissoirs. His favorite, often quoted in his books, was:

  J’aime ces types vicieux

  Qu’ici montrent la bite.

  (I like the vicious types

  Who show the cock here.)

  To which he added, “Oh oh, whoo hoo, me too!”30

  Bill spent more time at the local bars drinking with hotel residents. He gossiped at the hotel bar and visited people in their rooms but was still seen as a distant, unapproachable figure. Most of the hotel residents were much younger American and British students exploring Europe and most of them were heterosexual. Burroughs carefully modified his image to fit his chosen role. He cultivated a mysterious, disconcerting aura. One time a group of residents were sitting around in someone’s room talking. Burroughs had remained silent for the whole time, then, in a lull in the conversation, he growled, “The most addicting drug of all is silence,” and the room went completely quiet. He stood up and walked slowly from the room. They sat in silence, listening to his footsteps down the curving staircase. Then, at the sound of the street door, they threw themselves at the window to watch him turn right, walk down the street, and disappear into the mist swirling in off the Seine. This was how legends were born. The incident likely occurred when Burroughs was working on the “Rub Out the Word” section of The Soft Machine, which concerns itself with silence, ending, “Enemy flak hit him a grey wall of paralyzing jelly. Retreat. Cut Word Lines. Keep Silence.”31 By then Burroughs was working with cut-ups.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

  —HASSAN-I-SABBAH

  1. The Writing of Silence

  Shortly after the publication of The Naked Lunch, Brion Gysin gave Burroughs a copy of the recently published Le vieux de la montagne (The Old Man of the Mountain), by Betty Bouthoul.1 It is the story of Hassan-i-Sabbah, leader of the Assassins, in eleventh-century Persia, who sent his killers out from Alamut, his castle, to infiltrate the courts and governments of his enemies. They would lie dormant, sometimes for years, before receiving the signal to cut someone’s throat. Brion, of course, claimed, “The book in itself is a mystery,” and said he had met the author, who was a society portrait painter in Left Bank Paris, but that “she was oddly vague about why she wrote the book or what her sources of research were.”2 It is possible she didn’t remember anymore exactly why she wrote it because it is a revised edition of Le grand maître des assassins, published back in 1936, but as far as her sources go, it contains a four-page bibliography. But Brion always tried to make everything strange and mysterious.

  Together he and Bill pored over the book, passing it back and forth. Brion wrote, “We read and reread it. The crux of the matter, of course, is: How did he do it? And, beyond that: What is the nature of power? Bouthoul teases the reader enough to make you feel that there must be an answer and in the answer lies the key to Control on this planet. Big stuff.” Burroughs was fascinated because here was a control system, operating across time and space. Hassan convinced his followers that by blindly following his orders, they ensured to themselves after death the enjoyment of a “garden of delights,” pavilions filled with wine, sumptuous food, flowering trees, songbirds, luxurious furnishings, and beautiful young virgins, anxious to satisfy their every whim. They believed in this dream because Hassan actually had a garden of delights, housed in a series of pavilions near his castle, and would get his followers intoxicated on a beverage made with hashish so that they fell into a deep sleep. When they awoke they were in what seemed like heaven, where everything that Hassan had promised was provided. After several days they were drugged once more and returned to Alamut. They remained loyal ever afterward, intent on returning to that heavenly garden.3

  Hassan-i-Sabbah himself was a member of the Nizari Isma’ili sect who held to the doctrine that Qiyamat4—the Resurrection, the day of judgment, the fifth fundamental belief of Islam—has already come, thus obviating all their religious obligations. They could drink wine, use cannabis,5 have sex during Ramadan, and neglect their prayers. The historian Henri Corbin described the doctrine of Qiyamat as “nothing less than the coming of a pure spiritual Islam, freed from all spirit of legalism and of all enslavement to the law, a personal religion of the Resurrection which is spiritual birth.”6 But this was secret knowledge, only imparted to Masters and Fellows, the Dais or emissaries, who were initiated into all the grades of the secret doctrine. For the vast majority of his subjects, Hassan was rigid in his imposition of the strictest Islamic laws.7 The word “assassin” is a derogatory term, derived from hashishi, used by Hassan’s opponents to trivialize the assassins’ beliefs as being mere cannabis dreams.

  That everything was seen to be illusion—“nothing is true”—meant that everything was permitted, a phrase seized upon by Burroughs and Gysin as a summation of the philosophy of Hassan-i-Sabbah. (It was used by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1880.) Burroughs used it as a trope, along with Hassan’s name, cutting it up and giving it many shades of meaning. Decades later, in The Western Lands, he was to confess that perhaps his approach to Hassan-i-Sabbah had been faulty and that, “with a carry-over of Christian reflexes,” he had used Hassan’s name “like some Catholic feeling his saint medals.”8

  2. Cut-Ups

  Around lunchtime on the first of October 1959, Brion Gysin was in room 25 of the Beat Hotel, cutting mounts for some drawings, slicing through the mat boards with his Stanley knife and simultaneously slicing through the pile of old copies of the New York Herald Tribune he was using to protect the table. When he finished, he saw that where the strips of newsprint were sliced, they peeled back and the words on the next page showed through and could be read across, combining stories from different pages. He found some of the combinations so amusing that the people in the next room knocked on the door, concerned that he was having a hysteria attack. Burroughs had been to lunch with two reporters from Life magazine, and on his return, Gysin excitedly showed him his discovery. Bill agreed that the results were amusing, but immediately recognized its importance as a technique and pronounced it to be “a project for disastrous success.” He could see that cut-ups literally enabled you to “read between the lines” and find out what the newspapers were really saying.

  Together they began experimenting, initially with the magazines in Gysin’s room: the Saturday Evening Post and Time. They picked the best word and phrase combinations and used the results as poems, but quickly became frustrated by the mundane words at their disposal. They began placing the strips of newsprint on texts by Rimbaud and Sha
kespeare and the results showed a marked improvement. As Burroughs said, “A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones. […] Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.”9 He recognized the importance of good source material. “I could see right away all the possibilities of cut-ups, where you have one image, you can have six out of that. What cuts up well are images, so you take Rimbaud and start cutting it up you get all sorts of quite good Rimbaud. We made a number of experiments, cut up my own texts, cut up other texts, cut up the Bible and Shakespeare and the classics, cut up experiments.”10

  Cut-ups held an obvious appeal for Burroughs, whose work was already fragmented. The Naked Lunch, with its lack of narrative or character development, its episodic presentation and random order of chapters, has sometimes been mistaken for a cut-up text even though it was written before their discovery. Burroughs was well aware of the idea’s antecedents: Eliot’s The Waste Land, the first great cut-up collage; Tristan Tzara’s poems made from words pulled from a hat; the “Camera Eye” sequence in USA by Dos Passos. Burroughs said, “I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.”11

  Slicing lines of text from articles was cumbersome and they quickly progressed to an easier system. A page of text from a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or a letter was simply cut into four sections. The margins were trimmed off and the sections were moved against each other until a likely phrase or sentence was found. This was typed out on a new sheet of paper. The process was repeated for as long as it produced interesting new word combinations. They went through Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Life magazine features, whatever came to hand, and typed out anything that caught their eye. They did not paste up the juxtaposed pages; there was no point. In cutting the pages with scissors, some words were cut in half and could be combined to make not just new phrases but new words: cut words.