Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Mikey wanted to be like Bill in every way, and by October 1960 he was making cut-ups. Burroughs acknowledges two collaborations with Michael in The Ticket That Exploded, “In a Strange Bed” and “The Black Fruit.” Bill said, “He’d written this thing, it wasn’t too bad so I included it. He’d written something for it. I fitted it in. A favor to a friend.” Although he was not a lover, except briefly, Mikey joined the pantheon of friends and characters who inhabited Bill’s dreams, and long after Mikey’s death he was still there. Bill wrote in My Education, after dreaming about Mikey, “Death hasn’t changed him a bit; the same selfish, self-centered, spoiled, petulant, weak Mikey Portman.” The fact was that Bill saw a lot of himself in Mikey, the same eternal adolescent, foot-stamping sulky child, rebelling against his mother. It was the fictional character that Burroughs would later develop using Denton Welch and Saki’s Comus Bassington as models.

  That October Bill ran short of money. He had to sell his tape recorder and moved to Cambridge in order to economize. He said he found the dreaming spires of Cambridge more congenial for work than the bustle of London.32 He rented a large room, containing a sofa and one narrow bed, for four pounds a week, including a full English breakfast, on St. Mary’s Street overlooking the market, “and the landlady was always snuffling around when we made it, so one could never relax.”33 It was in this room, looking out over the awnings of the market stalls, that Bill got his idea of color separation. “Look out there and pick out all the reds; now all the blues; now the green shutters on the stalls, and trees, and a sign; the yellows, a truck, a license plate, a fire hydrant; the reds, a stop sign, a sweater, some flowers; the blues the sky a coat, a sign on the side of a truck… later elaborated into the ‘color walk.’ I recall the feeling of strain, of not quite being able to do it.”34 The idea of categorizing one’s observations by color was used as the organizing feature of his next book, The Soft Machine, which was divided into four sections, each given a color “theme.”

  John Howe visited Bill in Cambridge, but he found Ian Sommerville very difficult to deal with. He was not only overly protective of Bill but also spoke in an elliptical, confusing way that only the initiated could understand. He had a blond young man with him, also studying at Cambridge, whom he appeared to be seeing. They came on very gay, introducing themselves to people as one another, and generally playing mind games. John was glad to get back to London.

  Burroughs made a quick trip to Paris in order to reenter Britain on another six-month permit. He stayed at the Beat Hotel, where he found a number of manuscripts he had thought lost stored in the hotel attic. He returned to Cambridge, where on November 24, 1960, at Ian’s instigation, he gave a talk to the Heretics Society. He read his article on “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.” It was a very prestigious event. The Heretics Society was founded in 1909 and previous speakers included T. E. Hulme, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bill was possibly a bit nervous as he told Allen he felt rather like Gertrude Stein.

  The locals claim that there are supposedly no hills between Cambridge and the Urals on the eastern edge of Russia to stop the icy wind and rain that lashes the city in winter.35 Bill believed them and in December decided he couldn’t stand the weather much longer and moved back to Paris to the comfort of the Beat Hotel. Allen Ginsberg sent him some mescaline. Burroughs shot it up in order to avoid the nausea associated with swallowing it, this time with very satisfactory results.

  3. L’Homme Invisible

  At the end of the Cambridge term, Ian joined Burroughs in Paris. There they put on one of their performance pieces. In order to boost the idea of Burroughs as el hombre invisible, or l’homme invisible, Bill undertook to literally become invisible. One day Ian Sommerville visited all their friends in the hotel and informed them that in two hours’ time, Bill would become invisible, and at the same time gave them all a substantial piece of hashish. At the appointed time, a dozen or so mostly stoned people gathered in room 15, where Bill sat in a chair set against a white wall. Ian projected a color slide of his face, actual size, onto him, then moved it out of focus. The projection moved slowly in and out of focus for a while, then a black wooden frame crossed by strings like a Venetian blind was lowered in front of Burroughs. The projection now focused on the strings, then on Burroughs, the strings, then Burroughs, slowly back and forth. At one point, when the image was focused on the strings, Bill lowered himself to the ground, so the projection focused instead on the white wall behind him. Bill slid along the floor and behind a curtain while the audience continued to stare first at the string frame, then at the wall, thinking it was still him. Then the lights went up and Bill vanished. Photographer Harold Chapman, who was in the audience said, “It was absolutely brilliant, and well rehearsed. Burroughs is a brilliant performer.” Chapman had sensibly not taken any of the hash because he wanted to see how the trick worked.36

  In 1961, Paula Wolfert, later the author of numerous celebrated cookbooks, spent six months in room 23. She had a small two-burner gas stove in the corner and often used to cook a hearty soup as an evening meal for her friends in the hotel. She described how much Mme. Rachou “loved the American and English writers and artists who inhabited her hotel,” which she said was “not a usual response to ‘Anglos’ in Paris at that time.” She lived across the hall from Brion Gysin. Burroughs lived in a tiny back room on the floor below. “I was attracted to the bohemian lifestyle,” she wrote, “but theirs was a gay or guy ‘thing,’ so I was never really welcome in their circle. There were plenty of other younger poets, painters, and jazz musicians staying at the hotel to befriend.”37

  However, Burroughs was not entirely uninterested in women. Felicity Mason described how one evening she dined at a cheap Greek restaurant on the rue de la Harpe with Brion and William. In the middle of it Brion had an attack of coughing, the first sign of his emphysema. Bill was already quite drunk and Felicity found herself supporting both men as they staggered back up the quai toward the rue Gît-le-Coeur. When they reached the hotel Brion had recovered but Bill was still tipsy. She wrote, “Bill was still not himself. To my amazement he said, ‘Why don’t you come up to my room with me, Anne?’ ”

  “What for?” she asked in astonishment.

  She tactfully told him that she had given up sex, and after a while he replied, almost inaudibly out of the side of his mouth, “You’ll never give up sex, man. Sex becomes a habit—the most difficult of them all to kick.” She gave him a hug and went home.38

  If the American actor and writer John Gilmore’s memoir is to be trusted, Burroughs was drinking a lot during this stay in Paris. He wrote, “Burroughs knew where to find the best absinthe in a section of Paris he called ‘the sewer’ and I went with him and another poet named Frank Milne, from Hoboken, who wore some sort of turban on his head with a bunch of fake jewels stitched to the front above the eyes. Burroughs kept staring at my crotch and almost obscenely licking his lips, or making strange remarks about ‘a penis colony in the desert.’ He drank quickly, painfully, and at one point began sweating and shaking. His eyes rolled up like an epileptic’s, and he seemed to go into a kind of fit. I got up and away from him when he started frothing at the mouth and shitting his pants. Frank Milne’s turban fell off as he tried to pull Burroughs back into a sitting position and get him out of the café. The turban was dirty inside and I didn’t pick it up, but as I followed them out I noticed Frank’s bald head had a square scar like a flap on the crown, as though he had a metal plate in his head, or his skull had been operated on.”39

  Burroughs also seems to have been short of money at the time, because he was borrowing money from his fellow residents. Bob Gardner, an American in the hotel, loaned him money on several occasions. He told John Gilmore, “I didn’t mind giving Burroughs money, even though I figured I probably wouldn’t get it back. But I did, you know. Years later I wrote him in New York, and he actually sent me a money order.”40

  Whe
n Australian poet and musician Daevid Allen moved into the hotel in 1961, he was approached by Burroughs to play music at a performance organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel at the American Center on boulevard Raspail. “I was more than a little intimidated by him,” Allen said in a later interview. “But he wanted me to play music at his poetry readings—I was a jazzer back then—so he suggested we first go up to his room where he got behind this desk like some Brooklyn insurance salesman. ‘Well, Daevid,’ he said, ‘there are two ways of doing this. One way will take ten minutes, the other will take the rest of your life.’ I assumed the first way might have involved sodomy so I opted for the latter.”41 Burroughs told him, “ ‘I’ve got this job and I want you to play.’ We put on the show and there was the weirdest collection of people in the audience. Burroughs had one scene with nuns shooting each other up with huge syringes. Terry Riley came, and we ended up playing together outside in the street with motorscooter motors, electric guitar and poetry. It was wild.”42 Years later Daevid Allen named his rock ’n’ roll band the Soft Machine after Burroughs’s novel. It was on this visit that Burroughs collaborated on Terry Riley’s tape-loop recording “Mescalin Mix” (1960–62).

  Burroughs stayed in Paris until March 15, 1961, when he flew to Tangier, telling Ginsberg, “I want to get out of Paris as quick as possible. Don’t like it, never did.”43 In Tangier he checked into his old garden room at the Muniria.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I invented the color of the vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green.—I regulated the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible some day to all the senses.

  —ARTHUR RIMBAUD1

  1. The Soft Machine

  On March 23, 1961, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky left New York on SS America on their way to France, and from there to Eastern Europe, Africa, and India. They went straight to the Beat Hotel, expecting a joyful reunion with Burroughs, but he was not there. He had checked out leaving no letter for Allen and no forwarding address. Gregory Corso was in Paris and began to fill Allen in on what had been going on at the hotel. They soon made contact with Brion Gysin, whom Bill had mentioned in his letters, and realized that there had been some momentous changes in Bill since they last saw him, mostly caused by Brion. Brion was, as usual, very mysterious and surrounded by an atmosphere of intrigue. He told Allen that Bill had left specifically to avoid seeing him and indicated that dark forces were at work. He described psychic attacks, scrying, invisibility, and, of course, cut-ups. He was very aloof and treated Allen with barely disguised disdain. The two never liked each other, Allen feeling that Gysin had usurped him in Bill’s affections. Ginsberg was unable to fully understand Gysin’s conversation, which involved Hassan-i-Sabbah and appeared to say that Bill was an assassin, responsible in some ways for the death of Joan, as well as Bill Cannastra, David Kammerer, and Phil “the Sailor” White, whose stories Bill had recounted to him.

  Burroughs and Gysin had now extended cut-ups beyond tapes and collage and into the realm of personal relations. Burroughs now suspected that the entire fabric of reality was illusory and that someone, or something, was running the universe like a soundstage, with banks of tape recorders and film projectors. He was determined to find where the control words and images were coined. He was using cut-ups in an attempt to backtrack the word lines to find out where and when the conditioning had taken place, and more importantly, who was responsible. Suspicion fell on Time magazine’s enormous newspaper clipping morgue and the files of the FBI and the CIA. But they were more likely to be the source material for control, not the masters of it. However, with the aid of a great deal of majoun, Bill had finally determined that everybody was in fact an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy, though, as usual with Burroughs, it is hard to tell how literally he meant this. However, he was certainly convinced that everyone was an agent for control and that the only way to find out who they really were was to cut them up.

  Ginsberg, ever loyal, who had grown up with his mother’s madness, made the best of the situation. When Burroughs took off he had left behind the unedited manuscript of his next book, The Soft Machine, presumably expecting Gysin or Sinclair Beiles to edit it into shape for publication by Olympia. Allen immediately took charge of editing it and Gysin deferred to his greater ability, working alongside, explaining where sections should go and the thread of ideas. Brion did a painting for the dust jacket and Allen wrote the blurb for the flap. In it he explained cut-ups, as he understood them: “Burroughs uses new methods of writing derived directly from painting techniques as first suggested to him by Brion Gysin—Cut-Ups and Permutations—extensions of the collage mosaic structure of ‘Naked Lunch’… Methods which would be vain unless the author had something to cut up to start with: in the hands of a master, the Cut Up technique produces scenes of inhuman beauty and vast Eocene nostalgia. This book is a work of art fitting to the mutant moment of the human race as it prepares to leave Earth.”2 He wrote Lucien Carr saying that Burroughs “did new book in cut-up method, very pure experiments and strangely good reading tho oft toneless, ‘The Soft Machine.’ ”3 Two years later, in January 1963, in Benares, India, Ginsberg had a dream: “I see a large rugged handsome face (later, writing, I realize it’s Brion Gysin)—a feeling of pleasure in the dream. Waking, my resentment of Gysin goes away—I must have been jealous.”4

  The book was published in June 1961. The text is a cut-up of material originating in Burroughs’s thousand-page “word hoard” left over from The Naked Lunch, arranged in four books, each of which has a color theme: “Unit I, Red, Transitional Period”; “Unit II, Green, Thing Police Keep All Board Room Reports”; “Unit III, Blue, Have You Seen Slotless City?”; “Unit IV, White, Poison of Dead Sun in Our Brains.” Within each are a dozen or so “chapters,” each with a name. The contents of each chapter become progressively more cut up, so that the same words and phrases recur over and over in a different context, with a different meaning. As the chapters are short, rarely more than two pages, this has the effect of a wave of words breaking on a shore, becoming more and more fragmented, eddies and whirlpools of words, with shorter and shorter sentences until a new wave breaks as a new chapter begins.

  The Soft Machine is the most intensely cut up of all Burroughs’s books and is essentially a prose poem in the high modernist tradition of Nightwood or The Waves. The only sustained narrative in the book lasts for about three pages before becoming progressively more fragmented, and that is not until page 158. Some of the most evocative passages that Burroughs ever wrote appear here, such as his description of Puerto Joselíto:

  Carl walked through a carnival city along canals where giant pink salamanders and goldfish stirred slowly, penny arcades, tattoo booths, massage parlors, side shows, blue movies, processions, floats, performers, pitchmen to the sky. Puerto Joselíto is located Dead Water. Inactive oil wells and mine shafts, strata of abandoned machinery and gutted boats, garbage of stranded operations and expeditions that died at this point of dead land where sting-rays bask in brown water and grey crabs walk the mud flats on brittle stilt legs.5

  It also contains some of his most amusing writing, such as this from Burroughs the intrepid British explorer: “No calcium in the area you understand. One blighter lost his entire skeleton and we had to carry him about in a canvas bathtub. A jaguar lapped him up in the end, largely for the salt I think.”6

  Eventually Bill wrote to Allen to invite him to visit in Tangier, saying that he had intended Brion Gysin to explain cut-ups to him before their reunion. Allen, Peter, and Gregory Corso made their way slowly south, stopping off in Saint-Tropez and at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival en route, where they stayed with Jacques Stern in his villa and attended screenings and parties. They arrived in Tangier at the very beginning of July but despite writing and wiring their arrival time, this time there was no welcome waiting for them on the dockside.

  2. “Word Falling—Photo Falling�
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  When Burroughs returned to Tangier in March 1961, he had been able to get his old garden room at the Muniria. Fortuitously Dave Woolman’s old room next door was also free, which he advance-booked for Mikey Portman, who was arriving with his black lover. Paul Lund was still living in the third garden room. Burroughs still regarded him as an old friend, despite his acting as an informer over the camel saddles fiasco. Bill set to work on the texts that were to become The Ticket That Exploded, but was soon distracted by a new discovery. In May he wrote to Brion Gysin, telling him, “In my spare time have done a little experiment with collage. Make collage of photographs, drawings, newspapers, etc. Now take picture of the collage. Now make collage of the pictures. Take-cut-take-cut you got it? Some interesting effects.”7 As usual Burroughs became completely engrossed, and soon he was working full-time on these experiments. He wrote Brion, “Here is another collage of collage of collage to the Nth power entitled ‘Word Falling—Photo Falling.’ Show extension of the method as applied to the image. […] Since arriving in Tangier I have been working full time and the place is littered up with flash bulbs and negatives and magazine cut outs.”8 Each time he photographed the image and doubled it up, it reduced in size by half. Soon the images were so small that it was almost impossible to distinguish them from the grain in the photographic paper, and the new overriding image was the way in which the duplications had been arranged. Usually he arranged the images in the four quadrants of a standard cut-up page, with two images reversed to make a symmetrical composition.