Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  1. The Edinburgh Literary Festival

  Bill left the States and by the end of 1961 was settled back at the Empress Hotel in London. Convenient as it was, with its full English breakfasts, Bill really needed more space. Through John Calder, who published his “Thing Police Keep All Boardroom Reports” in volume three of his International Literary Annual in 1961, Bill met Marion Lobbenberg, who was soon to marry Arthur Boyars and join forces with John Calder to create Calder and Boyars, publisher of the UK editions of The Soft Machine, The Wild Boys, and others. Marion had just moved to a large new flat in Chelsea and sublet her flat at 52 Lancaster Terrace to Bill. On February 29, 1962, together with Mikey Portman, Bill moved in. He was now living just across the Bayswater Road from Kensington Gardens, a very desirable location even though most of the crumbling Regency buildings had been crudely subdivided into flats and the area had not yet gentrified. Most days he would walk in the gardens, past the ornamental fountains and along the banks of the Serpentine, sometimes heading for Kensington Palace itself, with its formal rose gardens and orangery. Although the walks continued, Bill’s tenancy of the flat didn’t. As he might have predicted, living with Mikey was a nightmare: holes burned in the bedding, cigarette burns on the tables, Bill’s clothes borrowed without asking him and instead of being laundered and returned just thrown in a heap, dirty, in the corner. Like many spoiled rich people, Mikey never seemed to have any actual cash on him, so Bill was constantly paying for cabs, meals, and drinks. It lasted about ten days, but during this time Antony Balch shot some of the footage for Towers Open Fire in the flat.

  Bill liked the neighborhood, though, which was much closer to Soho and the center of town than Earl’s Court, and at the beginning of March he moved just a few doors down the street to a basement at 5 Lancaster Terrace. Instead of Mikey, who was banished, he now shared with Ian. Ian played quite an important role in the creation of Nova Express, contributing the technical notes to the “Chinese Laundry” section and cowriting “This Horrible Case.” In addition, several sections of the book utilized tape recorder cut-ups, usually manipulated by Ian, which were then transcribed.

  Bill met many of the writers associated with New Worlds magazine, edited by science-fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, whom Bill knew through John Calder. Moorcock had been expecting someone more bohemian: “Bill was a bit formal. I was a little disappointed, to be honest, because Bill was more laid back than I was at the time, being very engaged with confronting the world, whereas he was more detached and amused by it.”2 It was at a party given by Moorcock for science-fiction writer and anthologist Judith Merril that Bill first met Arthur C. Clarke. They were both gay writers of about the same age, and Burroughs, always on the lookout for a utopia, was interested to know the conditions in Sri Lanka where Clarke lived for much of the time.

  In the late spring of 1962, John Calder took Burroughs to lunch and asked if he would participate in a literary conference to be held in Edinburgh that summer. Bill readily agreed. The conference paid him a fifteen-pound honorarium—a very good fee in 1962—and he was put up by Andrew Boddy, a young Edinburgh doctor, who also hosted Alexander Trocchi. Burroughs and Trocchi first met on the plane to Edinburgh; Trocchi had left Paris years before Burroughs moved there, but by sharing both a platform and accommodation they quickly became friends. Bill was not on heroin at the time, but Trocchi was, which was why they were staying with a doctor. Dr. Boddy wrote prescriptions for Trocchi and almost immediately a policeman came round to investigate. The doctor explained that Trocchi was an addict who had been getting his prescriptions in London and he was in Edinburgh for the festival. The police were very polite and nice about it and went away. Bill had no contact with them but was intrigued to see British drug laws in action. It seemed so much better than the situation in the States.

  The proceedings, which were held in the University of Edinburgh’s twenty-three-hundred-seat McEwan Hall, lasted for a week beginning August 20, and gave a tremendous boost to Burroughs’s career. Bill was in some very interesting company. Maurice Girodias was there. Lawrence Durrell was very friendly toward Burroughs and had read his books—Olympia published Durrell’s Black Book—as well as another Olympia author, Henry Miller, who spoke well against censorship and received a standing ovation. Angus Wilson, Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, and Richard Hughes were there; seventy writers in all attended. This was the first time that Burroughs had met Norman Mailer and so was able to thank him for praising Naked Lunch. Mailer had been very complimentary about Burroughs and his work, telling Mademoiselle magazine, “If I were to choose a style, I think a man who writes better than I do is William Burroughs. I think he’s going to last a long time after me because he’s more intense. He’s got a quality I don’t have.”3 He repeated the compliment to the Texas Observer, saying, “There’s one man writing today who is fantastic. William Burroughs. He writes incredible prose. He’s the only writer I’m profoundly jealous of, nervous about.”4 Bill and Norman spent quite a bit of time together, along with Mary McCarthy, whom Bill had met on several occasions in Venice with Alan Ansen.

  As is usual at these things, the conference broke down into cliques: Burroughs, Trocchi, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and Gerard Reve, a gay Dutch writer, formed a group. Reve spoke out about homosexuality, causing a Sikh writer named Khushwant Singh to denounce him, saying, “Of course true love is denied to the homosexual.” It later turned out that his own son was homosexual, something that caused him great distress. Reve’s defense of homosexuality, then still illegal in Britain, provoked Hugh MacDiarmid, the seventy-year-old communist Scottish nationalist poet, to stamp around the stage in his kilt denouncing them all, complaining that the discussion was “all heroin and homosexuality,” saying to their face, “People like Burroughs and Trocchi belong in jail and not on the lecture platform” and calling them “vermin who should never have been invited to the conference.” He was particularly incensed by Trocchi, who told the conference that “of what is interesting in the last, say twenty years or so of Scottish writing, I myself have written it all.”5 This infuriated MacDiarmid, who called him a “cosmopolitan scum, a writer of no literary consequence whatsoever.” Spender then sided with MacDiarmid and Singh against them. Burroughs told Peter Manso, “Mary McCarthy countered by speaking of my work, and also Nabokov’s, in very high terms, which went down very, very badly with Spender, and it got fairly acrid.” Bill loved it all: “Oh the walkouts and all kinds of stuff. It was a great conference.”6

  The last day was billed as “The Future of the Novel,” with Norman Mailer and Khushwant Singh as the moderators. Burroughs explained the cut-up and fold-in technique, stressing the magical powers it unleashed, and told the audience that he had once caused a plane to crash by naming the pilot and the circumstances leading to the accident. He had been cutting up the text at exactly the same time as the crash occurred. “Are you serious?” asked Singh, who was sitting behind him. “Perfectly,” said Burroughs.7 Bill was delighted with the whole event and said, “I was treated very well, very well indeed.”

  Alex Trocchi, then thirty-seven years old, was a Glaswegian with a bony, angular face and a very large nose. He had moved to Paris in the early fifties, where he edited the literary magazine Merlin. They did seven issues between 1952 and 1954, publishing work by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Editions Merlin published Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) and Molloy (1955). Trocchi lived by writing pornography for Olympia Press as Frances Lengel and Carmencita de las Lunas. His claim to fame rests on one title, Cain’s Book, about life in fifties Greenwich Village and as a junkie working on a boat in New York Harbor, that was assembled from notes by his wife, Lyn. Burroughs said, “Whatever talent he had was in Cain’s Book, and after that he never wrote anything.” This was true; Trocchi had an almost complete writer’s block and wrote virtually nothing from 1960 until his death in 1984.

  Burroughs and Trocchi became good friends, but only saw each other occasionally.
Bill was wary of him, not wanting to get drawn into Alex’s various schemes, all of which, in some form or another, were intended to fund his heroin habit. Alex was an exhibitionist junkie, who made a point of shooting up in public and even once tried to shoot up live on a television program. For Burroughs, who at the best of times liked to keep a low profile, association with a professional junkie was not a desirable thing. He attended few public events with Trocchi, preferring to see him at dinner parties or at home.

  Relations between Ian and Mikey at Lancaster Terrace had not been improved by Mikey getting strung out on heroin. Bill, naturally, proposed that he enroll with Dr. Dent, but Lord Goodman had other ideas. He was a friend of Lady Isabella Frankau’s, the “writing doctor” who did little else but prescribe heroin and morphine to wealthy clients from her Harley Street clinic. She was very opposed to Dr. Dent and his apomorphine treatment as she didn’t particularly want her clients cured. Bill and Mikey had been to see Goodman and Lady Frankau at Goodman’s house on Portland Place, where it was explained that Goodman had arranged for Mikey to enter a sanatorium with Lady Frankau as his doctor. They had just returned to Lancaster Terrace. Bill, Mikey, Brion Gysin, and Ian Sommerville were all together in the living room when Bill experienced a “psychic attack.” Mikey had a cold sore on his lip, herpes simplex, which according to Burroughs is a specific avenue of entry for the Ugly Spirit. Something seemed to slide off Michael’s shoulder and hit Bill right in the stomach. Bill stood up, intending to go to the bathroom for a glass of water, and passed out on the floor. He came around a few minutes later. “I not only felt it, I saw it, it was something slid off his shoulder like silver, silver light. You could see it very clearly.”8 Bill regarded it as a skirmish in the battle for Mikey. Mikey did eventually take the apomorphine cure, lots of them. They worked, but he was so weak that he’d get straight back on alcohol or junk, or both, drinking a quarter of vodka a day on top of methadone and heroin.

  Perhaps inevitably, Mikey’s mother, Marjerie, blamed his heroin addiction on Burroughs, and as Mikey tended to ape all of Bill’s actions there was probably an element of copying Bill in it. But Bill was not on heroin at this time and was not impressed. Mikey caused enough attention with his alcoholism as it was, but at least that was legal. The last thing Bill needed was a coterie of teenage junkies hanging around, attracting the attention of the police. Mikey’s mother was in Greece at the time, going out with future filmmaker Conrad Rooks, who, far from being the arbitrator and explaining Bill’s position, was inflaming the situation between them. Lord Goodman interceded and explained that Bill had nothing to do with Mikey becoming a junkie, and eventually Mrs. Portman accepted that Bill was not to blame and had in fact done all he could to get him treated.

  In the first of several attempts to film Naked Lunch, Conrad Rooks paid Burroughs five hundred dollars for an option on the rights. As an heir to the Avon Cosmetics fortune he had a lot of money to play with but had no direction in his life. However, when Rooks began to seriously consider making the film, Bill backed out because he thought that Rooks would make a mess of it. Burroughs said, “Ian with his female intuition said, ‘Don’t you understand he wants you! He’s trying to buy you for five hundred dollars. Don’t be a fool, don’t have anything to do with this!’ So I just told Conrad Rooks, the deal’s off. And as for your five hundred dollars, I’ll pay it back, sometime. I never had any intention of paying it back.”9

  2. The Ticket That Exploded

  Bill continued to move between London and Paris, always staying at the Beat Hotel. On July 16, 1962, he participated in an event billed as La Bohème, held in Montparnasse. It was here that Bernard Heidsieck and a group of other French artists approached Bill, Ian, and Brion and said, “We hear that you are doing things with projections and sounds and wouldn’t you like to join in with us?” As Gysin described it, “In La Bohème we had some very strange things that we did along that line: reading poems off shuffled cards along with tapes running and stuff like that.”10 They did in fact do a number of joint performances with the French poets in the early sixties as a result of that meeting, and Bernard Heidsieck became a friend.

  As usual Burroughs continued to experiment. One long-term project was to disrupt the time-space continuum in a noticeable way. That September, each Thursday at exactly 7:30 p.m., Bill, Ian, and Mikey Portman would arrive at the Café des Arts on the rue de Seine and meet Joseph Geraci and Arnold Rosen outside. They would enter and sit in the same place at the same long table, reserved on their behalf, with baskets of bread, candles in bottles, vin ordinaire, and exhibition posters on the walls. It was Bill’s theory that if you did the same thing at the exact same moment each week then the intersection of the repetition with the time-space continuum would cause a rupture. It was based on his understanding of one of Heisenberg’s more obscure observations. Burroughs did most of the talking.

  After the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference Burroughs went straight to the Beat Hotel and resumed work. In November 1962 he finished both Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. He also compiled a book of selections from The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded, to be published by John Calder in England under the title Dead Fingers Talk. He told Alan Ansen that “by rearranging the material and adding some new sections I have endeavored to create a new novel rather than miscellaneous selections.” He said he expected the book to be out in March 1963, the same time that Grove was to publish Nova Express in New York. In the course of selecting and rearranging he became so dissatisfied with The Soft Machine that he completely rewrote it, taking out most of the cut-ups and substituting sixty-five pages of new material in a straight narrative line. He told Ansen, “One has not been idle.”

  Nor was Bill altogether satisfied with Ticket, and did indeed later rewrite that as well, but in the meantime he asked Ansen if he liked the nova police in the book. He told him, “I endeavored to distil an archetype of the perfect police officer in Inspector Lee and find that the part has taken over to an extent where some of my old connections have been alienated—Well, it’s all show business what?” He may have been referring here to his estrangement from Allen Ginsberg eighteen months earlier, when Inspector J. Lee sliced their friendship to ribbons at the Hotel Muniria, leaving Allen shattered and confused. In many ways, Ansen and Gysin had now taken on the role that Allen previously had as Bill’s literary adviser. Burroughs summed up the book for an American journalist: “The Ticket That Exploded involves the Nova Conspiracy to blow up the Earth and then leave it through reincarnation by projected image onto another planet. The plot failed, so the title has both meanings.”11

  Had The Ticket That Exploded been accessible to more people it could have been this book that established Burroughs’s credentials as a science-fiction writer, for here is the planet with four colored suns and a green sky, here are the green fish boys and the green newt boys. Ticket contains the more or less straight narrative of Ali—“In a Strange Bed”—and introduces the Nova Police: “I am sure none of you have ever seen a Nova police officer—When disorder on any planet reaches a certain point the regulating instance scans POLICE—Otherwise—Sput—another planet bites the cosmic dust.”12 It contained numerous passages that read like prose poetry: “Lonely lemur calls whispered in the walls of silent obsidian temples in a land of black lagoons, the ancient rotting Kingdom of Jupiter—Smelling the blackberry smoke drifting through huge spiderwebs in ruined courtyards under eternal moonlight.”13 The blackberry smoke turns out to be powerful stuff. The book also contains a graphic account of sex with Kiki, which Burroughs said was an accurate description and affirmed that Kiki’s speech is always verbatim.14

  Maurice Girodias, as usual, did one of his quick print jobs, and The Ticket That Exploded was out in December 1962, a month after Burroughs handed it in. The launch party for Ticket was held December 1962 at Girodias’s Le Grand-Séverin, a multilevel nightclub and restaurant complex at 7 rue Saint-Séverin. That same week there was a book signing at Gaït Frogé
’s Librairie Anglaise. Bill was fêted and wined and dined and enjoyed the whole trip apart from one unfortunate incident. He subsequently wrote Alan Ansen, “I have been on the wagon for some months following a horrible traumatic incident at a party in Paris where I ended up in bed with a woman.” He said that the plain fact was that he couldn’t handle hard liquor and claimed he was going to remain off the hard stuff. He still took wine with meals, of course, but nothing else.

  Burroughs returned to London in December 1962, telling a journalist, “I like England. There is much respect for your privacy. It’s very easy to be left alone here, a good place to work. I prefer it to Paris which I don’t particularly like to live in, though I have spent quite a lot of time there because my publishers were there.”15 He stayed first at the Empress, then switched to a nondescript block of flats at 51 Gloucester Terrace, just around the corner from his old place in Lancaster Terrace. That December a pea-souper, a thick layer of sulfur dioxide–rich smog, covered the city for four days, making it almost impossible to see across the street. Burroughs enjoyed it immensely, sidling along the streets, bumping into people, hearing the crunch of cars gently crashing into each other. It was a genuine Sherlock Holmes “London Particular.” He preferred Bayswater to Earl’s Court; he enjoyed the proximity of the park, its closeness to the West End with all its pubs and restaurants, and the fact that there were far more cheap good restaurants in easy walking distance. One of his favorites was the Kalamaras Taverna at 66 Inverness Mews, just off Queensway, something of a sixties celebrity haunt, which he returned to time and again over the next decade, despite its then lack of a liquor license (you brought your own).

  Burroughs first met Anthony Burgess in London in January 1963, six months after the publication of A Clockwork Orange. Burroughs liked the book because it dealt in a serious way with two of Bill’s major interests: methods of conditioning and brainwashing, and experiments with language: it introduced more than two hundred loanwords from Russian. Bill wrote to him and they met up the next time Burgess visited London. Although Burgess and his wife, Lynne, lived in Etchingham, Sussex, they often visited London and they all became friends. That summer, when Burgess and Lynne holidayed in Tangier, Burroughs visited them at the Miramar Hotel, where Lynne had one of her frequent alcoholic collapses. She lay in bed, exhausted, as Burgess incessantly rolled kif cigarettes for her while Bill read aloud from Jane Austen’s Persuasion.16