Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  There were many different methods of cutting text, but they all had one thing in common: they introduced a random juxtaposition of texts to give new word combinations. Only those lines of literary interest were typed up on a separate page. Sometimes Burroughs would only get one or two lines from the combinations offered and move on to another. These new pages might themselves be cut up, removing the material even further from its source.

  Naturally they wanted to share their discovery with everyone, and soon Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles were engaged in cut-ups as well. Beiles had been persuaded to move to the hotel by Gysin, who thought that he really belonged there, with them, after his sterling work on getting The Naked Lunch into print. Corso was torn between his desire to be part of the experiment and join in the enthusiasm and excitement it was causing, and his core belief in the power of the muse. His contribution consisted mostly in cutting up the work of others: letters from friends, a poem by Allen Ginsberg, a stanza or two of Shelley. When the results of these initial experiments in cut-ups were published as Minutes to Go, Corso dissociated himself from the other three contributors, writing, “I join this venture unwillingly and willingly. Unwillingly because the poetry I have written was from the soul and not from the dictionary; willingly because if it can be destroyed or bettered by the ‘cut-up’ method, then it is poetry I care not for, and so should be cut-up. […] to the muse I say: ‘Thank you for the poesy that cannot be destroyed that is in me’—for this I have learned after such a short venture in uninspired machine-poetry.”12

  Sinclair Beiles took the opposite path and cut up his source texts—articles from the Observer, Life, Encounter—again and again until they had such a density as to be bereft of meaning. The arguments between the four of them became so intense that Beiles, who was already in a mentally fragile state, had to sometimes leave the room to throw up. His mother later accused Burroughs of driving her son mad. Beiles has given two similar accounts of what appears to be a conscious imitation of Tristan Tzara’s pulling words out of a hat: “The four of us got together in Gysin’s room. We cut up bits of books and put them in wooden bowls. We then extracted piece after piece and put them together. The result was Minutes to Go.”13 As this is his memory of his involvement, there must have been at least one experiment of this type.14

  One of the people that Burroughs and Gysin knew from Gaït Frogé’s Librairie Anglaise was Jean Fanchette, a psychiatrist from Mauritius, who was also the editor and publisher of Two Cities, a bilingual arts and literature magazine. He agreed to publish Minutes to Go, and designed it to look like his magazine, using the same format and blue cover. Unfortunately he ran out of money and the book was impounded by the printer. Gaït Frogé came to the rescue. She paid the printer’s bill of three hundred dollars and took delivery of one thousand copies of Minutes to Go plus ten signed by three of the participants—Corso refused to sign. The book was published on April 13, 1960, with a launch party at the bookshop. Cut-ups were launched on the world. It was clear that from the beginning Burroughs saw cut-ups as weapons. Early copies of Minutes to Go were issued with a wraparound band reading, “Un règlement de comptes avec la littérature.”15

  Even before Minutes to Go was published, on December 24, 1959, a second batch of material, called The Exterminator, was sent to David Haselwood at the Auerhahn Press in San Francisco. At the time Burroughs appears to have seen it more as a bulletin or magazine than as a book. He told Haselwood, “I enclose first issue of The Exterminator which will appear from time to time in response to civic need.”16 The manuscript clearly went through many changes. On February 23, 1960, Burroughs apologized for the delay in sending the completed manuscript, saying, “I found it necessary to make so many alterations, deletions and additions in the MS that it split into separate sections.” Some of the material was hived off and later became part of The Soft Machine. It was not until March 21 that he wrote enclosing the completed book. It would appear that The Exterminator was originally Minutes to Go, volume two, as Burroughs explained: “Difficulties with my colleagues resulted in a considerable shift of material, as you can see. Leaves only two names connected with The Exterminator. Brion Gysin who discovered The Cut Up Method. And William Burroughs.” It is unlikely that Corso would have wanted to collaborate on a second volume, so this must refer to “difficulties” with Beiles. More corrections followed on May 22 and May 24, but by May 27, Burroughs was pressuring Haselwood to publish the book: “I think you realize how explosive the material is. […] Are you willing and able to publish?”17

  The Exterminator was published in July 1960 with an uncredited epigram on the title page: “Let petty kings the name of party know / where I come I kill both friend and foe.” This was Burroughs’s classical Harvard education at work, though the quotation from The Rehearsal by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was misremembered. It should read: “Let petty Kings the name of Parties know: / Where e’er I come I slay both friend and foe.”18 The final form of The Exterminator consists mostly of blocks of cut-up prose by Burroughs, occasionally interspersed with single-page permutations upon a single phrase by Gysin. Toward the end of the book, Gysin experiments by replacing the words “Rub Out The Words” by the typewriter symbols % $ & and #. This was an experiment that Burroughs later appropriated for himself. The Exterminator ends with four pages of Gysin’s calligraphic drawings, in which words have been replaced by glyphs.

  The first extension of the cut-up method was when Brion Gysin applied it to tape recordings. They read aloud texts taken from poems and newspaper articles and recorded them. Then the tape was rewound and new passages were cut in at random. Where these cut-ins occurred the old words were wiped off the tape and replaced by the new ones, often giving some interesting juxtapositions. Burroughs wrote, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not simply get random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I’ve made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or in a book, or something that happened. To give a very simple example, I made a cut-up of something Mr. Getty had written, I believe for Time and Tide. The following phrase emerged: ‘It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.’ About three years later his son sued him. Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”19

  As usual, Burroughs experimented exhaustively: inching the tape past the record heads, superimposing tracks, playing the tape backward and recording the drop-ins in the other direction, speeded-up and slowed-down recordings, echoes, and the addition of music and sound effects. He liked radio static, with its intergalactic origins, the sound of pneumatic drills, and the high-pitched wail of Moroccan flutes. He experimented with playing three tracks at once: “There are all sorts of things you can do on a tape recorder that cannot possibly be indicated on a printed page except very crudely through the use of columns and even so the reader must follow one column down.”20 Unfortunately the technology did not yet exist to publish and distribute these new experiments, and so this aspect of Burroughs’s work was to remain unknown to the general public for many decades.

  BOOK SIX

  London Town

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rub Out The Word “Accent.” Rub Out The Word “Class.” “Rub Out The Old School Ties.”1

  1. The Western Suburbs

  Fulham had been described as one of the visually least attractive boroughs of London.2 It was dull and anonymous, just perfect for Bill: a bleak grid of late-nineteenth-century streets, broken by bomb sites, within a great loop of the River Thames to the west of Chelsea. It was only developed as a smart annex to Chelsea in the mid-sixties. The Empress Hotel, at 25 Lillie Road, was in northeast Fulham, bordering on Earl’s Court, an area known then, as now, for its Australian community and its gay pubs. The neighborhood was shabby and run-down, a few bomb si
tes covered in buddleia still in evidence, with desultory rebuilding near the main junctions. There was not much traffic as Londoners were still poor, recovering from the war. The Empress comprised a row of low stucco Victorian villas, like the ones still standing across the street, knocked into a labyrinthine series of bed-sitting-rooms, and is long demolished. Bill’s rooms were usually quite large—he had a number—over time he lived in rooms 7, 8, 25, 28, 29, 32, 35, and 37, never being particularly concerned to get his old one back. Each had a locking bathroom down the corridor and “a sink to piss in.” He moved there toward the end of April 1960. It was to be his headquarters for the next year, and on and off for some time afterward. He preferred the back rooms like number 29, off the street and away from traffic noise, and remembered it still twenty years later: “Room 29 was on the back overlooking back yards with outside stairways and clothes on lines and trees. It is Sunday. There are 3 shillings on the mantelpiece over the boarded up fireplace. My portable on a table overlooking the one window. The bed is comfortable. I am wondering where I can get some more shillings… for the gas meter. Sunday in London is always a gloomy day. The pubs don’t open until 7. The Empress is long since torn down.”3

  Not long before, Bill had sworn he would never visit London again. Now he changed his mind. “I love London,” he said, “it was very cheap.” Bed and breakfast at the Empress was five pounds a week, and it was the kind of English breakfast Bill liked, with bacon and eggs, toast and tea. (In Paris he had to go over to the Right Bank to get a proper breakfast.) North End Road, with its cheap cafés, was a few blocks to the west, where he could get a home-cooked meal of lamb, roast potatoes, broccoli, bread and butter, a cup of tea, and a pudding for less than a dollar in the working-class cafés. To the east, where Lillie Road became Old Brompton Road, was West Brompton tube station, on the rather inconvenient Wimbledon branch of the District Line. However, Earl’s Court station was only another two blocks, with direct links to most parts of town.

  Bill already knew a few people, as many British students and writers had visited the Beat Hotel, among them Michael Horovitz, who had published two chapters from The Naked Lunch in the first issue of his magazine New Departures in Oxford in 1959. Horovitz’s coeditor, the partner who put up most of the money, was David Sladen, though Burroughs himself gave them fifty pounds toward the first issue. One day, Sladen mentioned to John Howe, a fellow Oxford graduate, “You know Burroughs is in town, man?” Sladen had already told Bill that Howe might be able to get him some dope. Bill was new to Britain and didn’t know where to score safely. John called Bill and visited him in his room at the Empress. They got on well and Bill gave John two pounds. John went to Brick Lane in the East End. Pot there was half the price it was in Notting Hill and almost as good. He bought the equivalent of eight five-bob deals (pot was usually sold in a five-shilling wrap, about 70 cents in those days). He then called Bill, told him he had the stuff, and they arranged to meet at the Venice Restaurant (Bill pronounced it “the Venus”), a cheap Italian restaurant around the corner from the hotel. Bill was excited and went to a red phone booth on the corner and stood hunched up by the receiver. He tore a page from the phone book and wrapped up a portion of pot for John for getting it. Bill was laughing: “Reminds me of my days dealing junk in New York.”4 John was an appropriate person to score from because he had himself been turned on to pot by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso while punting on the Cherwell in Oxford with Dom Moraes and the poet Peter Levi in 1958. It was a full circle.

  John introduced Bill to Graham Wallace, who had been his schoolmate at the Jesuit public school.5 Wallace was energetic, intelligent, with a very quick wit of the kind that Bill appreciated. He was in his early twenties, but had a spinal deformity that twisted his body and had given him a hunchback, something that caused difficulties in his relations with women and was probably one of the reasons he took up heroin. Bill liked him and they became good friends, with Wallace often stopping by the hotel to smoke pot in Bill’s room. They collaborated on a number of cut-ups, and Wallace began making his own cut-up texts that Burroughs liked. When Jon Webb, editor of Outsider magazine in New Orleans, wrote asking for advice for a cut-up issue, Burroughs listed Graham along with Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Stewart Scott as potential contributors.6 Graham Wallace died in his twenties.

  Michael Horovitz was in his final year at Oxford when Bill came up for a visit. The intellectual undergraduates were expecting someone unusual, but they were genuinely shocked when Bill turned up with a rent boy. Homosexuality was illegal and though there was a large gay scene at Oxford, where the majority of colleges were male only, it was very discreet. They were nonplussed by the straightforward way in which Bill introduced the boy to them, expecting him to be treated as an equal. For them it was an unexpected introduction to American democracy.7

  That summer Horovitz was able to obtain some mescaline and brought it to Burroughs at the Empress. Horovitz had a vivid memory of its effects: “I struggled in vain to keep the swirling Van Goghy changes hitting me distinct from what I fancied Burroughs might be making of it, so was relieved at his suggestion we go out. The waves of near-nauseous claustrophobia ebbed, but I had to pinch my leg to make sure I wasn’t freaking when, sat an eternity later in an Earl’s Court transport café, he appeared to be bashfully chatting up the buxom waitress. Sure she was ‘kind of cute’ as he said, but it felt so out of character.”8

  Another person often to be found in Bill’s room, sitting in the corner, quietly rolling joints, was Jane Armitage, an attractive young upper-class woman, described by John Howe as “blonde, very cool, not voluble, obviously intelligent.” Then there was Nicolette; Burroughs took a number of photographs of her in 1960 at the Empress. Bill’s supposed misogyny was clearly not as active then as was later thought.

  Burroughs appears to have first met his friend Dennis Evans in Tangier or Paris. He was reading in organic chemistry at Imperial College, London, and famous for his work with a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer and on the magnetic properties of oxygen. His colleagues thought him eccentric, partly because he kept locusts, a Lord Kitchener lizard, a cayman alligator named Augustus, a bird-eating spider, a giant black scorpion, and a five-foot-long sand snake named George, which he would feed live toads obtained from his local pub. After George escaped and was found slithering down the King’s Road, Dennis donated him to London Zoo.9 Some friends were also dubious about his interest in the recreational aspects of organic chemistry. Evans used his enormous skills in synthetic organic chemistry to synthesize new derivatives of compounds such as diethyltryptamine in his basement lab at Imperial that he would first test on himself to discover their effects. He synthesized a number of other psychoactive molecules, such as bulbocapnine. Burroughs presumably tried it, as he has Dr. Benway use it in The Naked Lunch, which means he first met Evans prior to the summer of 1959. Other hallucinogens were also experimented with, including LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin (Dennis grew the mushrooms and extracted the chemical).

  Professor Hannah Gay, who was a PhD student under Evans from 1961 to 1964, remembers that there were a number of experiments conducted with Burroughs such as getting the exact mix of cocaine with heroin to counteract the negative side effects of the coke; the perfect speedball. “Dennis engaged in this too but it did not appear to affect his work or everyday behaviour.” Burroughs visited the lab about once a week, occasionally bringing in bags containing several weeks’ supply of heroin. Hannah Gay and another student, John Maher, helped to weigh out exact safe individual doses of heroin using the lab’s electronic scales. One can assume that some of these doses were for Evans, and of a different strength than those for Burroughs. According to Christine Keeler, Evans was taking heroin in the early sixties when she sheltered from the press in his flat at the height of the Profumo affair.10 Keeler, a high-society call girl, was found to be having sex with both the Russian military attaché and John Profumo, the UK minister for war; Profumo denied it and when the truth emerged it
almost brought down the Macmillan government. Evans gave public lectures on hallucinogenic chemicals and was often called upon as an expert defense witness for those accused of possessing illicit drugs (sometimes proving that the substance was not what the accused thought it was).

  Burroughs was sometimes accompanied to the lab by a man whom Hannah Gay took to be his partner: “He was a little flamboyant (carried a fancy walking stick with silver knob, though not needing it to get around).” Burroughs usually wore a cloth cap and “looked rather drab, but well dressed,” as befitted someone living in an anonymous area like Earl’s Court. Several people say that prior to 1961, Evans once rescued a very ill Burroughs in Tangier and brought him back to London for treatment, but further details are unknown; it was possibly the 1956 trip.

  Evans liked to party and was a well-known, well-liked member of the Chelsea Arts Club. He was notorious for his party tricks, often performed at the Imperial College summer fairs. He would “drink” liquid oxygen and exhale the gas through a lighted cigarette, ignite ammonium dichromate, freeze rubber tubes in liquid nitrogen then smash them. He would pretend to eat 78 rpm phonograph records and lighted candles and would munch on wineglasses (he would store the thin-walled glass fragments in the inside of his cheek for later disposal.). He could always get a laugh by speaking in a Donald Duck voice after inhaling hydrogen or helium. Despite his thin, stooped frame, he always stood up to intimidation, like the famous occasion in a Fulham nightclub when he reacted to a physical threat by unscrewing a light bulb and appearing to eat it. His assailants fled. Evans was exactly the sort of person whose company Bill enjoyed. They drank in the beer garden of the Chelsea Arts Club and more formally at the Savage Club, where they dined in splendor in the huge colonnaded restaurant of the National Liberal Club, the premises used by the Savage.