by Barry Miles
He also made photomontages: “I was back in Tangier in my old garden room at the Villa Muniria, and it was here that I first started making photo-montages. This happened after a bad trip on DMT, which is described in The Night Before Thinking […] the sensation of being in a white-hot safe. The following day, a sudden cool grey mist came in from the sea and covered the waterfront and I spread some photos out on the bed with a grey silk dressing-gown from Gibraltar along with several other objects and I photographed the ensemble. During that summer I made many of these montages in different ways and combinations. Ian Sommerville arrived during the summer and took over the technical aspect of the montages.”9 Although he was unaware of it, the method Burroughs used was groundbreaking. Until then collage, as developed by Picasso, Braque, and Kurt Schwitters, had been created using elements selected for their color, shape, or texture. Though Burroughs arranged them aesthetically in formal compositions, he chose the elements only for their meaning to him: photographs of his family, of boyfriends past and present, photographs he had taken of street scenes and of places where he had lived. He was systematically cutting up friendships, memories, and attachments, all of which he regarded as potential elements of control that needed to be analyzed. These collages were a cubist-like portrait of Burroughs’s mind state, each element provoking an emotional response in him, either of his mother or father, of boyfriends, sentimental attachments, pictures of particular events, sexual situations, or places, all combined into a series of frozen moments. By photographing the elements, then rearranging them, and continuing the process until the end of the roll, he was analyzing different sets of responses, different arrangements of his mental state.
As Burroughs did not stick the elements down to make a conventional artwork, but just photographed them and rearranged them slightly for the next photograph, the collages only ever existed as photographs, one of the first times this was done.10 As he always worked in series, using a selected group of images arranged in different positions on his table, the pictures should be viewed that way. Later, many of the photographs he used in collages and in his subsequent scrapbooks were specially posed and often related to the characters in the book he was working on, but in the spring of 1961 he was pursuing two lines of development: the formally arranged collage series concentrating on his emotional life, and the infinity fold-ins that grew more and more abstract.
In his experiments Burroughs always investigated every possible avenue; he was thorough, though not particularly well organized. By May 16 he had started using color photography. He wrote to Brion Gysin, “This is a major breakthrough, Brion, and you have the equipment necessary to pick up on it. Like take color shots of your pictures close ups angle shots etc. Mix in with color postcards and advertisements from Life and Time. Take. Make collage of shots cutting into fragments and rearranging at random. Take. Cut. Take. Just as photography a series of these collage concentrates would be spectacular.”11 At the end of May he began a series on rubbing out the word. He replaced the words with symbols and the symbols with colors, then photographed them, collaged them, and rephotographed them. “Something happens when you take pictures of pictures of pictures,” he told Gysin. “Notice how the color dots seem to be in clay and not paper. I am now making a color series of rub out the word.”12 By June 14 he told Gysin he had enough photographs for a collage exhibition. The ideas came quickly to him. “The collage is an art like flower arranging. Say a blue collage. Select from blue file. Wait for a perfect blue sky. Arrange collage on mirror and catch the sky in your collage. Take your collage between glass and take pictures over the bluest spots in the sea, etc. ‘Pay back the blue you stole. Pay it back to sea and sky.’ I have given myself a brief rest from writing. Will now apply what I have learned from the photo collages back into writing. ‘Cut and arrange the cut ups to other fields than writing.’ ”13
With the arrival of Ian Sommerville—“Technical Tilly”—at the end of May, more ambitious experiments were conducted. There was a long series of superimpositions where negatives of collages were superimposed upon each other and printed, something that gave the corner pharmacy print shops in Tangier considerable difficulty despite Sommerville’s careful instructions. With Ian there, Burroughs continued to develop the “emotional” collages, whereas Sommerville took over the “infinite reduction” collages and made them his own.
3. Paul Bowles
On arrival in Tangier Burroughs looked up Paul Bowles. Over the years they had become very friendly and this summer was to be when they spent the most time together. There had been a little frostiness when Burroughs applied his new cut-up technique to The Sheltering Sky and showed him the results: “He didn’t express any opinion on them. From that I concluded that he just wasn’t interested.”14 But that soon passed. Bowles now lived in the Immeuble Itesa, a gray concrete block built by the Italian government in the early 1940s, surrounded by fields and empty lots. Paul and Jane lived in two separate apartments. Jane and her girlfriend Cherifa lived on the floor above Paul and his boyfriend Mohammed M’Rabet, and communicated using a squeaking mauve plastic child’s toy telephone. John Hopkins remembers Jane calling up: “Fluffy, (squeak) come on up, dinner is ready (squeak).”15
Burroughs and Bowles together made a distinguished pair, sitting at Mme. Porte’s Salon de Thé or in the Café de Paris, Bowles quite formal with his carefully combed white hair, black cashmere cardigan, gray flannel slacks, houndstooth sports jacket, polished black Alden shell cordovans, and one of his many hundreds of ties. Though he was never seen without a tie, he sometimes wore moccasins without socks. From crush-proof packets he smoked filter cigarettes in which the tobacco had been replaced with kif.
Burroughs in Tangier went for a more colonial attire: during the hot months a short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck but lacking the tie, carefully pressed trousers, black fedora, and always in socks and lace-up shoes. In the colder months he returned to his standard three-piece suit and tie, shirts with cuff links, and shoes highly polished by the shoeshine boys in the Socco Chico. Later, when living in the Marshan, he affected a hooded burnoose that gave him greater anonymity.
Burroughs knew Mohammed M’Rabet from 1956 when he was a bartender at the Tangier Inn. Bill was wary of him because he had a penchant for violence: he had been a weightlifter and was always doing handstands, punching people, and arm-wrestling. He had a history of mental problems and had been in various institutions as well as jail. Burroughs thought that the shock therapy he’d received did him more harm than good. Brion Gysin once visited Bowles and found him being carried around the room slung over M’Rabet’s shoulder. “There’s only one thing to do when he’s like this,” Bowles explained, “and that is to make yourself a limp rag.” M’Rabet hated Gysin because he always talked about him in the third person as if he weren’t there, saying things like, “I knew him when he was rough trade in the port.”16 Bowles told Burroughs that M’Rabet had threatened him, saying, “One day, you’ll go out of here in two suitcases, or maybe one, you’re very skinny.”
According to Burroughs, Bowles himself had a hidden violent side and had several times tried to kill people, once succeeding. It was Brion Gysin who said that Bowles confided in him that he once killed a man. It occurred when Bowles was in Mexico near a work compound. There, once a week, the peons would drink themselves into unconsciousness. Then they would be thrown in the back of a truck and taken back to the compound. One of them had fallen off the truck and was lying by the side of the road near a cliff. Bowles seized his opportunity and rolled the unconscious man to the edge and pushed him over. There was no way this story could be proved, but Burroughs was convinced that Bowles was capable of such an action. It was the menace and fear that Burroughs most admired in his writing.17
Burroughs himself was responsible for one episode of fear. Bowles told Ned Rorem that he did not experience fear with mescaline, but “with Prestonia—given me by Bill Burroughs—yes.”18 This occurred shortly after Burroughs reached Tangier in March 19
61, when his friend in London Dennis Evans synthesized some Prestonia amazonica, from the same group of Amazonian hallucinogenics known to Burroughs as yagé. In 1957, the chemists Hochstein and Paradies analyzed ayahuasca, naming it Banisteriopsis caapi, and, from the same region of Peru, yagé, which they named Prestonia amazonica. They reported that the natives of the Río Napo area “commonly consume a mixed extract of the B. caapi and P. amazonica leaves in the belief that the latter suppress the more unpleasant hallucinations associated with the pure B. caapi extracts.” The mixture Evans made contained N,N-dimethyltryptamine, now better known as DMT, the active ingredient of yagé.
It came in powder form. Bill asked Paul how he wanted to take it: inject it or sniff it? Bowles was having nothing to do with needles, so he elected to sniff it. Burroughs poured a little of the powder from a dirty gray bottle and made a small cone. He gave himself a sniff, then retired to the kitchen to inject himself with it. Bowles took a sniff and felt a terrific explosion in his head. He had a vision of his head blown open, as in a comic strip. He thought he was flying through the air, twenty-five thousand miles from anywhere, all by himself, “like a melting baby bird on a bough.” He was terrified. This unpleasant vision continued for some time, then Burroughs returned and asked him how it was. Bowles said he didn’t know. “You’re probably getting bum kicks,” Bill said. Bowles later remarked, “That kind of explosion, certainly nobody could call that fun.”
Burroughs took DMT about ten times, injecting it in a dosage of about one grain, “with results sometimes unpleasant but well under control and always interesting,” but then he took a grain and a half and suffered “unendurable pain.”19 “Doctor Benway was conducting experiments with some kind of new hallucinogens and had inadvertently taken a slight overdose of N-dimethyltryptamine dim-N for short class of South American narcotic plants Prestonia related to Bufotina which a species of poisonous toads spits out its eyes.” Burroughs also related it to a type of fish poison, “causes a pain so intense that morphine brings no relief. Described as fire through the blood… A blast of pain and hate shook the room as the shot of dim-N hit and I was captured in enemy territory Power of Sammy the Butcher. The Ovens closed around me glowing metal lattice in purple and blue and pink screaming burning flash flesh under meat cleaver of Sammy the Butcher and pitiless insect eyes of white hot crab creatures of The Ovens.”20 He did not have a good trip. He reached for his box of apomorphine and took twelve twentieth-grain tablets and staggered out to Mme. Porte’s Salon de Thé.
Paul Bowles saw a lot of Bill that summer;21 he is there in the photographs taken in the garden of the Hotel Muniria. However, Bowles did not like all of Bill’s company. Ginsberg he became very friendly with and Ian he liked, but Mikey Portman he could not abide because he ate all the food in his house. Bowles was by nature very parsimonious, and it pained him enormously when Mikey would go in and clean out the whole kitchen like a vacuum cleaner. He hated Mikey’s sloppiness, like the time he left a heavy platinum cigarette case, given to him by his father, on a table at the Café de Paris, or the time he came knocking at his door at 1:30 in the morning after a party on the ground floor of Bowles’s building. Mikey had left a cab waiting outside all evening and needed to borrow 25,000 francs.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I thought it was overblown fake, this ready made enlightenment, and it turned out to be that.1
1. The Psychedelic Summer
Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso could not afford the Villa Muniria, and stayed instead at the cheaper Hotel Armor next door where rooms were two dollars a night. They had a room on the roof with whitewashed walls, red floor tiles, and a small patio with a superb view out over the harbor. Alan Ansen arrived for the summer and joined them in the Armor. Francis Bacon was also there. As Allen and Peter were trying to save money for their onward trip to India, and Gregory and Paul Lund were both broke, they all cooked together using Bill’s little kerosene stove. Baby tuna, fresh perch, and other delicacies could be bought fresh at the harbor, and they all ate well. But eating together was the area of the most cooperation. Bill was cold and distant toward his old friends, and Ian and Mikey sided with him. Just as Burroughs had been cutting up his relationships and attachments to his parents and lovers with his photographic collages, he had moved on and was now doing it in person. Instead of his old friend and ex-lover, Ginsberg found a remote, emotionless, suspicious individual who snarled that friendships were just another form of control that had to be cut up. As far as Bill was concerned everyone was an agent under someone else’s control. “If we cut you up, who would we find inside?” he asked. “Lionel Trilling? Louis Ginsberg?”2 Ginsberg later recalled, “I remember arriving in Tangier and having to undergo an interrogation as to who I was representing because he could detect certain parts of my father, Jewish ancient elements, certain parts of Columbia University, Lionel Trilling in the intonations of my voice, in the words, in the attitudes, physical postures, so who was conditioning me?” Allen said it was “a little difficult to see old friend Bill looking at me as if I was a robot sent to check him out or be checked out. And also to be suggested by him that I examine him to see who he was representing, who he was an agent of, because he assumed that everybody was an agent at that point. Not necessarily for the government at all, an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy actually.”3 Burroughs now felt that cut-ups were the only way to cut through the unthinking acceptance of everyday thought and behavior that acted as controls on most people’s lives. Ginsberg anguished over Bill’s new attitude, particularly when Bill criticized him for his attachment to Peter and himself and was scathing about Allen’s reliance on his old friends, something that Bill thought of as mere sentimentality. Allen felt trapped because he was unable to display the same indifference toward Bill that Bill felt toward him.
Though Bill was claiming to be immune from attachments, he was clearly relishing his role as mentor to Ian and Mikey and had wasted no time in showing them off to the expat gay community in Tangier, though they were not all impressed. Rupert Croft-Cooke met Mikey and described him as “a young man named Portman who arrived once with Bill Burroughs, his face an extraordinary shade of green ‘from staying too much indoors,’ I was told.”4
Allen said later, “My feeling was that they had replaced us in Bill’s affections and intimacy.” Allen wrote Lucien, “Bill’s all hung up with 18 yr old spoiled brat English Lord who looks like a palefaced Rimbaud but is a smart creep—Apparently Lady Portman his mother gave him into Bill’s hands to look after here—platonic anyhoo—But Bill got some kinda awful relation with him and the kid bugs everyone so intimacy with Bill is limited and Bill absentminded all the time—however very busy with his cut-up experiments and applying it to pictorial collages and taking brownie photographs and very busy and creative.”5
Gregory, however, was having none of it. Gregory had always been skeptical about cut-ups, and Bill’s pontificating put him in a bad mood. He raged against Bill, only to be told by Alan Ansen, “The trouble with you, Gregory, is that you can never be a leader of men the way William can.” Gregory lost his temper and yelled at Bill, “You’re not a big guru, all you care about is getting your cock up those boys’ asses.”
“You little wop,” Bill replied.
“And ya didn’t kill me with your air rifle, did ya?” Gregory said. “The way ya said ya would.”
But it was Peter Orlovsky who had the worst time. He had never got on well with Burroughs, who had always felt jealous of him, and now, with Burroughs in full misogynist mode and the two boys backing him up, Peter came in for a barrage of rancor. Bill’s theories, developed into bizarre routines over many long nights of majoun-fueled talk, had reached the stage where he now proposed that women were not human at all but had been sent from a distant galaxy as agents for a giant trust of insects that were manipulating the Earth. Burroughs suggested that all women should be exterminated just as soon as males had found some form of parthenogenesis. Peter, u
nable to see that Burroughs was taunting him, always took these ideas literally, and to Burroughs’s delight he argued vociferously in favor of women and heterosexual love. Peter was no match for their quick wit and became red-faced, hoarse, and angry at their jibes. The more he argued in favor of love, the more and more outrageous Swiftian routines Bill came up with. “What if we cut up Peter? Peter likes girls so we’d probably find a Venusian inside,” cackled Burroughs, and Mikey Portman joined in: “That’s right! Peter’s a Venusian!” Allen tried to get him to not respond, to walk away, but Peter felt he had to defend the things he held most dear and always took the bait. By this time Mikey Portman had been joined by his black lover, who said, “Oh Mikey, it is terrible what is going on. Here there is spirits fighting, spirits fighting all the time. Spirits fighting!”6
All this caused tremendous problems between Allen and Peter and brought to a head the central contradiction in their relationship: that Peter was fundamentally heterosexual. At this time, Allen and Gregory had been asked by Lawrence Ferlinghetti to interview Burroughs for his new magazine, Journal for the Protection of All Beings. While Allen typed up the interview—Burroughs said things like, “I feel like I’m on a sinking ship and I want off”—Peter did his own experiment in typing up their conversations:
PO: “I didn’t want to do it. You made me queer. It had to be you. Big cocky you. But you pulled me so and then I knew. I tried hard to fight it.”
AG: “That’s right you did. You always did keep telling me at the beginning you just wanted to be friends and you were afraid I was just acting nice so I could get in your ass. And now look at us.”
