Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Just down the road from the Empress Hotel was the Lillie Langtry pub, where Bill often drank. The archivist Douglas Lyne tells how he arranged to meet Burroughs there. When he asked Bill if he would like a drink, Bill replied, “That’s what we’re here for,” and managed to get through five triple brandies before Lyne ran out of money. Burroughs would sometimes make reciprocal visits to Lyne and drink with him at the Surprise pub, on Christchurch Street in Chelsea, or at his home at 1 Tite Street.11

  Journalist Kenneth Allsop met Burroughs at the Empress, where he noted the sagging bed and the peeling wallpaper. Allsop described Burroughs on his way to the pub: “He drifted along the pavement beside me with reedy body effaced in neat but shabby suit and dun raglan, faded trilby lowered over peaky, pink-nosed bespectacled face, with an anonymity so theatrically emphasized that it seemed to shout in the street.” At the Lillie Langtry Burroughs told Allsop he was off junk and explained the cut-up method to him. When asked about the Beat Generation he dissociated himself from it. “I don’t associate myself with any trends, groups or political programmes, with any standardized way of living or working, and that includes the Beats. Coffee bars and Zen aren’t my scene. Ginsberg and Kerouac are friends of long standing, but they subscribe to enthusiasms I don’t share. Kerouac actually likes living in America and baseball and all that jazz, and he’s now become a Catholic, I learn.”12 Bill was beginning to enjoy being in London. He tried to get Brion Gysin to join him there. He wrote Brion, “London is a much better deal than Paris, believe me. The best thing I ever did was get out of Paris and come here.”13

  Nearer to the Empress, at 265 Old Brompton Road, was the Troubadour, a fifties coffeehouse that served everything from a full English breakfast to wine and restaurant food in the evening. It was a labyrinth of small rooms, making it a favorite for both gay and straight clientele. In the back there was a beer garden, crowded in the summer. In the early sixties performers included Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and, a little later, Jimi Hendrix. Next door was the Coleherne, at 261 Old Brompton Road, which as far back as the thirties had featured drag acts. In the mid-fifties it became a gay pub, but to avoid trouble, as homosexuality was still illegal, it was segregated by mutual agreement into two bars, one for the straight clientele and the other for gays. Bill often drank there. Many of the other nearby pubs were more or less gay, though less obviously so. “I was picking up people in bars, very good pickings. No trouble. Living cheaply. It was a very good period.”14 Bill had some memorable sex there. One encounter he remembered twenty-three years later: “I have spoken of sexual blockage. Out of thousands of orgasms I can only remember three as being satisfactory to the point of being memorable and to have some approximation to what orgasms are supposed to do. That is to relate the function of the orgasm.

  “One was with Jimmy Cookson in the Empress Hotel and just at the crucial moment. A knock at the door. Telephone. It is Kenneth Alsop’s secretary to say he twisted his ankle and can’t keep the appointment for today. What perfect timing.”15 At other times Bill named the three as one with Jack Anderson and two with Ian Sommerville.

  Bill was in London to be with Ian, whom he would visit in Cambridge, only fifty miles away, one hour by train, or Ian would come down to London. He and Ian used to like to walk in the nearby Brompton Cemetery, and they would sometimes take a picnic, spreading a rug out on a tombstone, with sandwiches and wine in paper cups. “I used to go to the cemetery with Michael Portman and Ian Sommerville for a quiet afternoon. You couldn’t find a pleasanter place to sit on your June time.” Later he and Ian made a number of recordings there, and also in Holland Park, which they played back on location. Most days Bill walked in the cemetery for the fresh air and as a welcome break from his single hotel room. Brompton Cemetery is a huge, thirty-nine-acre garden cemetery opened in 1840. A monumental entrance arch with four columns leads to a long avenue of trees behind which are large family vaults, crumbling mausoleums, stone angels, lions, ziggurats, pylons, and urns, more than thirty-five thousand of them. Everywhere between the trees are leaning overgrown tombstones, alive with squirrels, birds, cats, and foxes. Some way down the avenue are colonnades that become two huge crescents, making an enormous arched circle with catacombs beneath. Bill enjoyed spending a quiet afternoon strolling among the tombstones. It has always been a notorious cruising area and Bill sometimes picked up there.

  The Beat Hotel experiments continued with Brion and Ian at the Empress, and forty-five years later, in The Western Lands, Burroughs recalled:

  Remember when I threw a blast of energy and all the light[s] in the Earl’s Court area of London went out, all the way down to North End Road? There in my five-quid-a-week room in the Empress Hotel, torn down long ago. And the wind I called up, like Conrad Veidt in one of those sword-and-sorcery movies, up on top of a tower raising his arms: “Wind! Wind! Wind!” Ripped the shutters off the stalls along World’s End and set up tidal waves killed several hundred people in Holland or Belgium or someplace. It all reads like sci-fi from here. Not very good sci-fi, but real enough at the time. There were casualties… quite a number.16

  But mostly Burroughs worked, seated at his typewriter for hours on end, and during his first six months at the Empress produced about two thousand pages of cut-ups and material for Novia Express (as it was then called) and Towers Open Fire. This was also a period of intense tape cut-up activity, particularly cut-ups centering around the so-called last words of Hassan-i-Sabbah.

  There was an old Irish woman working at the hotel and she must have subconsciously reminded Bill of the Irish maid who worked for his parents. “I had a terrible nightmare when I was staying in the Empress Hotel, that a white worm was crawling out of my eye and I woke up screaming and clawing at it, then I remembered, what I’d forgotten all these years, the blinding worm. It all came back to me.”17 He later wrote about it.

  In July, through Brion who was visiting, Bill met Nicholas Guppy, the naturalist and explorer, author of Wai-Wai: Through the Forests North of the Amazon. His ancestor Robert Lechmere Guppy had discovered the tiny guppy fish in Trinidad in 1866 and it was named after him. Guppy asked them, “How does it feel to know that you’re one of the last human beings?” He said, “Life won’t be so bad on the reservation. We must accept the fact that women are more suited for space conditions than men, and men are going to be relegated to a reservation.”18 This was an idea guaranteed to appeal to both Brion and Bill, although Burroughs later reversed the idea completely. Guppy was a close friend of Francis Huxley’s, who had explored the Amazon basin and documented the use of psychedelic snuff by the Yanomami Indians. Huxley and Bill had much to discuss. Another friend of Huxley’s and Guppy’s was Charles Hatcher, a qualified but nonpracticing doctor, described by Burroughs to Gysin as “most interesting character here.”19 Hatcher wanted to open an “institute of far out studies” to be located in Tangier. He later became one of the directors of Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma [non] organization.

  At the beginning of August 1960, Burroughs made a one-night trip to Amsterdam for the purpose of reentering Britain with a new six-month entry permit. He thought Amsterdam was charming, enjoyed the restaurants, and thought the Indonesian people on the streets were very beautiful. He met some Dutch chemists who had developed powerful hallucinogenics but were not releasing them because they thought it was too dangerous. Back in London, he continued his investigations into drugs. Through his friend the poet Melville Hardiment he took LSD,20 but he didn’t like it. He always had bad acid trips, never a good trip.21 Allen Ginsberg sent him some mescaline from the States, where it was legal, but he did not like that or psilocybin. It was not the loss of control of his mental process he objected to, but the way it made his hands shake and the lack of coordination. Yagé was the only psychedelic he liked even though it was much stronger.

  There was also a new method of altering consciousness to hand. Ian Sommerville had now more or less perfected his design for a “flicker-machine.” On December 21, 1958, when Brion Gysin wa
s taking a short break in La Ciotat, an artists’ colony on the Mediterranean midway between Marseille and Toulon, he experienced a spontaneous hallucination as his bus was passing through an avenue of trees. “I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space.”22 The vision stopped the moment they left the trees. The regularly spaced trunks had produced a stroboscopic effect as they interrupted the sunlight on Brion’s eyes, approximating the 8-to 14-hertz oscillations of alpha rhythms, which can cause hallucinations. Brion was intrigued, but it was not until Burroughs met Ian Sommerville that he found an explanation for it and was able to reproduce it.

  Ian was familiar with the literature of the effects of stroboscopes, as much of the research had been done at the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge by John R. Smythies.23 He had also read W. Grey Walter’s 1953 study The Living Brain, which had an entire chapter called “Revelation by Flicker.” Brion wrote to Sommerville asking if it would be possible to reproduce the effects at home, using everyday materials. For Ian the problem was quite simple. There were undoubtedly many ways to create a stroboscopic flicker at between 8 and 13 cycles a second, but he came up with the simplest: a record player with the tone arm removed, a light bulb, and a cardboard cylinder with holes cut in it. On February 15, 1960, he wrote to Brion from Cambridge saying he had made “a simple flicker machine.” He set the record player to revolve at 78 rpm and made a cardboard cylinder about twelve inches across, the size of an LP. He cut slits in the cylinder so that a 100-watt light bulb suspended in the middle of it would flash through them at between 8 and 13 cycles a second. It worked. Ian told Brion, “Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colours on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of colour are pounding to get in. After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of a whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but it was well worth getting through for I found that when it stopped I was high above the earth in a universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably.”24 Using Ian’s instructions Brion constructed a flicker machine, which he called a Dream Machine, later changing it to one word, Dreamachine. He added calligraphic designs to the inside of the cylinder that made it more attractive, but as the effects were obtained with eyes closed, they added nothing to its functioning. On July 18, 1961, Brion patented the device in Paris as a “procedure and apparatus for the production of artistic visual sensations.”25 Many people felt that the patent should be in Ian Sommerville’s name as Brion had nothing to do with its invention, but Ian was surprisingly passive about matters like this.

  Burroughs spent hours sitting, eyes closed, in front of the spinning cylinder, and mentioned the Dreamachine in both The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express. It also featured heavily in The Cut-Ups, the film he made with Antony Balch.

  2. Mikey Portman

  In late September, a teenage boy of about seventeen presented himself at the Empress. This was Mikey Portman, a fan who had read The Naked Lunch and wanted to meet its author. Bill thought he was “fantastically attractive” and invited him in. He came from a very wealthy family, but the family had sold their grand country house in 1928 (it became Bryanston school) and Mikey grew up with his sister, Suna, and his parents, Marjorie and Winky, in the lodge, a white Regency house in the village of Durweston, Dorset, in the west of England. He was a nephew of the Seventh Viscount Portman, heir to the Portman Estates, a huge tranche of Marylebone that includes Bryanston Square, Baker Street, Portman Square, and Durweston Street, and worth over £1.2 billion in 2006. Mikey’s older brother got the bulk of Winky’s money when he died, and Mikey came into a trust fund for life, enough to mean he never had to work.26

  Mikey was slovenly and irresponsible; he was very selfish, greedy, and weak. He was undisciplined, he couldn’t do anything for himself, he never cleaned up, he had never known what it was like to do anything. He would borrow clothes and money and never return or repay them. Cabs were left outside, forgotten about and unpaid, holes burned in expensive carpets, checks bounced. As Michael Wishart put it in High Diver, “During his occupation of my house, gramophone records became ashtrays, sheets tourniquets. The house became a rallying ground for le tout Marseilles (quartier Arabe).”27 The problem was, Mikey would not take a hint. He latched himself on to his current object of fascination and would not go away. He hung about Bill for years, at the Empress, at the Beat Hotel, and in Tangier. He was gay, and he and Bill became lovers—“Very briefly, in an unsatisfactory way, because he just didn’t like anyone who wasn’t black.” Ian knew immediately when Bill and Mikey made it, which was not for a number of months after first meeting. Ian didn’t like him at all. Ian, who was dirt poor, thought that Mikey had had every opportunity and had bungled them all; he had made nothing of his life. Bill, however, was clearly flattered by this disciple, who imitated his every action. If Bill had mint tea Mikey would have one too; he walked like Bill and ordered the same meals as him in restaurants. Bill was obviously a father surrogate but was prepared to take on this role. He drew the line, however, at allowing Mikey to move into the hotel. “Mrs. Hardy has her orders,”28 he told Brion. This caused Mikey to disappear for a few months, but he soon bounced back.

  Bill was interested in this entree to dysfunctional British upper-class life. He got to know the family. Mikey’s mother, Marjorie, had been a Norwegian ice-skating star and had a tempestuous relationship with her younger son. Bill’s friend Christopher Gibbs remembers him chasing her around the kitchen at Portman Lodge with a carving knife. Her husband, Winky, died when Mikey was about fifteen, and when Bill met her she was going out with a Greek travel agent. Bill and Mikey would have dinner with her in London and on several occasions in subsequent years she visited Bill at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

  The family estate was looked after by Lord Goodman, who was Mikey’s godfather. Arnold “two dinners” Goodman, as he was known for his girth and appetite, looked remarkably like Alfred Hitchcock. He lived in some splendor, attended by his manservant, in a flat at 79 Portland Place, a 1780s row house by James Adam in Marylebone, an address that occurs in several of Burroughs’s texts because it is also the name of the next street to his childhood home in St. Louis; he often mixed the two in a text. In My Education: “Radio silence on Portland Place […] a remote curtained drawing room. Marble mantelpiece. Decanter of port. A table. Maps and blueprints.”29 Portland Place is also home to the BBC headquarters, thus “radio silence.” Goodman was the senior partner in the legal firm Goodman Derrick, and was still on the rise when Burroughs met him. By the mid-sixties he was Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s private lawyer, the chairman of the Arts Council, director of the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells, and held dozens of other important positions in the arts. He was a clever negotiator and Wilson used him to solve union disputes and tricky behind-the-scenes political problems. Goodman administered the affairs of the entire Portman family, including those of the Seventh Viscount Portman, who was left £275 million when he was in his early twenties. For thirty years members of the family puzzled over the figures, but Goodman was a family friend and they were more inclined to accept his explanations than query them. Suspicions mounted, however, and in 1993 Portman issued a writ. It was discovered that all through the sixties and seventies Goodman had embezzled over £1 million from Lord Portman, worth more than £10 million in the mid-nineties. Since the family did not wish to drag the family or the dying Goodman through the courts, a secret settlement was struck in 1995 whereby Goodman paid back £500,000 and Portman wrote off the rest. Goodman died shortly afterward, age eighty-two. A family member, who did not wish to be named, said, “Everyone thought he was so kind, but underneath it all he was a connivin
g old crook.”30

  Burroughs, of course, did not know any of this, and even thought that Goodman was subsidizing the profligate Mikey from his own pocket. Bill enjoyed knowing Lord Goodman and often dined with him at Portland Place. Goodman, for his part, liked Bill and thought that he was a good, calming influence on Mikey, an adult whom Mikey respected and listened to. Goodman was later to use his own influence to help Bill out in an important way.

  Bill and Ian spent several weekends at Portman Lodge with Mikey, always when his mother was up in town. It was a substantial house with five bedrooms and a cottage in the grounds for the servants. The housekeeper very much disapproved of Mikey and his friends and made no secret of it; sometimes she would refuse to speak to Mikey in the mornings. Bill was astonished to see that Mikey was scared of her. Christopher Gibbs recalls visiting Portman Lodge with Michael Wishart, whose son was at Bryanston. They collected the thirteen-year-old from the school, who asked if anyone else was staying. Wishart said, “Yes, my darling. There’s a Nigerian tap dancer practicing in the wine cellar.’ ”31 This was Mikey’s family house and the housekeepers had no doubt been told to look after him but to take no nonsense from his unsuitable friends. It was English upper-class life as Bill had always imagined it from reading Saki, P. G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh: the sulky servant, the petulant young master. He was gathering material.