Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  In November 1963, Lynne and Anthony Burgess once again found themselves in Tangier. Lynne had collapsed yet again, and on this occasion it was in the Hotel Velasquez that William read aloud from Jane Austen to her.17 In the spring of 1964, the Burgesses moved to Chiswick and Anthony became something of a drinking partner with William, but they lived too far apart for it to become a regular thing except when Burgess was in the West End in his capacity as drama critic for the Spectator or as concert and opera critic for Queen. Lynne Burgess was to die of cirrhosis of the liver in March 1968.

  Through Mikey, Bill had now met a number of the key figures in the so-called Chelsea set, where Mikey was well known. Two in particular became good friends, Christopher Gibbs and Robert Fraser, who had been at Eton together and were once described by Francis Bacon as “the Belgravia pansies” (a term that Christopher found amusing and Robert did not). Bill and Christopher first met in Tangier, when Mikey took Christopher around to see Bill at the Muniria, but it was in London that they became friends, and Bill would visit Christopher at Lindsey House at 100 Cheyne Walk, a mansion dating from 1674, remodeled from an even older building. Bill appeared very at home, lounging on the sofa smoking hashish in front of the huge bay window with its magnificent view of the Thames (James McNeill Whistler, who did many studies of the Thames in the 1870s, had lived next door), attended by his smartly turned-out boys. The room was dominated by an enormous painting by Il Pordenone that had previously belonged to the duc d’Orléans. A huge Moroccan chandelier cast a thousand pinpoints of light over Eastern hangings and silk carpets. In the summer, afternoon tea was taken under the mulberry tree in a garden designed by Lutyens. Christopher was an aesthete, antique dealer, and interior designer who would find a beautiful country house for a client and fill it with faded, slightly shabby antiques and paintings in the most exquisite taste. An expert in the genealogy of British aristocrats—he was one himself—he found much of his stock in the attics of old country houses. He was largely responsible for the artistic education of his friend John Paul Getty. Here Bill was at his most refined and anglophile. He liked Christopher and could relax with him. Christopher remembered him as diffident and quite shy, but not in an off-putting way, as some people thought. “He was terribly unfrosty. I found him quite cozy actually. Cozy old thing. He was always very nice to me, always.”18

  Robert Fraser had left Eton and joined the King’s African Rifles to serve in Uganda. Robert’s sergeant major was Idi Amin, with whom, Robert told Marianne Faithfull, he had a fling, probably just a one-night stand. (Amin was president of Uganda from 1971 until 1979.) Slim, conservatively dressed in pinstriped suits and dark glasses, Fraser stood to attention, ramrod tall, but had to bend virtually double to reach into his pockets because his trousers were so tight. He mumbled, drawled, and slurred his words, stammering when stressed or nervous, and stuttered terribly when his father was around. He liked rough trade and was very adventurous sexually. A rent boy came most afternoons at 2:00 p.m. After dinner he would cruise the gay clubs, the Rockingham and bondage clubs. He loved Arab boys, and there was usually a Mohammed to open the door and serve drinks.

  Sometimes Bill would arrange to meet Francis Bacon at Muriel’s club, the Colony Room, upstairs at 41 Dean Street, Soho, and dine afterward in Wheeler’s fish restaurant on Old Compton Street. Through Bacon he met many of the Colony Room regulars, including Michael Wishart, whose autobiography, High Diver, Bill very much enjoyed when it was published in 1977. These were not close friends of Bill’s but were drinking and dining companions. Though Bacon was gay, his taste was for older working-class men, whereas Bill preferred much younger men. Early in 1963 Bacon took Bill to the Watermans Arms pub on the Isle of Dogs in the East End, owned by his friend Dan Farson. The Watermans Arms was a “singing pub” with a small but elaborate Victorian proscenium arch. Cheeky Cockneys sang out-of-tune old-time music hall songs backed by a three-piece combo, men with huge mustaches drank yards of ale, and a crush of locals and tourists swilled back pints of warm beer. Farson was a well-known television personality, and his celebrity was able to summon up Jacques Tati, Clint Eastwood, Judy Garland, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, and even Groucho Marx to the depths of the East End. It was through this meeting that Burroughs was invited to appear in the fourth edition of Farson’s Granada television show, Something to Say, alongside Alex Trocchi, but by then Burroughs and Ian were living in Tangier.

  In January 1963, still at 51 Gloucester Terrace, there was a sudden flurry of activity and Antony Balch’s film, Towers Open Fire, was completed—or so they thought—in a two-week spurt. The script was based on a passage from the “Combat Troops in the Area” section of The Ticket That Exploded: “Word falling—Photo falling—Time falling—Break through in Gray Room.”19 Balch had shot footage of Burroughs and Gysin at the Beat Hotel in Paris and on the street. In London he filmed at Lancaster Terrace and Gloucester Terrace. The first footage shot was in the boardroom of the British Film Institute on Dean Street and featured BFI luminary Liam O’Leary as well as John Gillett, David Jacobs, Bachoo Sen, and Andrew Rabanech. Alexander Trocchi played the chairman of the board. The “towers” in the film are the lighting gantries of the Gibraltar football stadium, and more footage was shot in Tangier with Burroughs, Ian Sommerville, and Mikey Portman. Further footage was shot in Paris of endlessly spinning Dreamachines at an exhibition called The Object held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1962. There are many groundbreaking elements, among which is a sequence, in this black-and-white film, where Mikey Portman sits on the ground in front of a cinema then looks up across an eyeline match. We follow his gaze and see through his eyes a sky filled with vibrating colored dots that appear to descend upon him in a roar of Joujouka flutes. The frames themselves were originally blank. It is a literal transcription of Burroughs’s idea of replacing words with colored dots. Balch hand-colored each frame with scores of dots of colored emulsion, and did the same to all the prints that were issued, an enormously time-consuming practice (which of course made each print different). The film opened at the Paris Pullman on Drayton Gardens in 1963 as the supporting short to Tod Browning’s Freaks, also distributed by Balch.20 Towers was a groundbreaking film in another area, in that it was possibly the first film made in which the entire creative team—Burroughs, Balch, Gysin, Sommerville, and Portman—was gay.

  This was one of the periods in the early sixties when Burroughs was back on junk and saw much more of Alex Trocchi because Alex was getting him his heroin. Burroughs told Bill Rich, “Great person. I liked him. We shared many a shot.”21 Because Trocchi had a doctor’s prescription for heroin he was able to give Bill however much he wanted. Naturally money was involved. Bill would contribute to Trocchi’s household expenses. “He would talk to me about his bills, and I would say, ‘Listen, don’t worry about that rent bill. I’ll take care of it.’ In other words, for his taking care of me with heroin, I made it well worth his while.” Bill could have obtained a prescription of his own, had he wanted to, but the doctor was Lady Frankau and Burroughs had already had a run-in with her over Mikey Portman, and had no intention of getting involved with her. “She was the supplier. She always wanted to get her hands on me.”22

  In February 1963 Burroughs paid one last visit to the Beat Hotel, which had been sold and was about to be redeveloped. At a party he got drunk and once more ended up in bed with a woman back at the hotel. “I don’t remember her. I suppressed it, she had red hair… not much happened… American… it was not enjoyable, it was terrible.” It was on this visit that Burroughs met Samuel Beckett, one of his literary heroes. Beckett had two objections to his fold-in method. He called it “plumbing” over and over again in the conversation and complained, “You’re using other writers’ work.” He thought Bill believed that the writers he used for fold-ins—Shakespeare, Blake, Rimbaud, Beckett himself—had answers. “You should see what I’ve done with your work, Mr. Beckett,” Burroughs said. But Beckett objected, “There are no answers! Our despair is total! Total!
We can’t even talk to each other. That’s what I felt in Naked Lunch and why I liked it.” Bill had been very drunk and remembered little of the conversation, but he disagreed with Beckett and thought there were answers. After the night he met Beckett he stopped drinking for a while as it was obviously affecting his memory. “I feel 100 percent better giving up drinking.”23

  More and more, Bill felt that his future was tied to Ian Sommerville. When the Beat Hotel finally closed they moved around the corner to the Hotel Pax at 30 rue Saint-André-des-Arts before returning to 5 Lancaster Terrace. He was happy to be back in London. “It’s a man’s town.” Bill and Ian were working closely together and decided to present a version of the Domaine Poétique in London, similar to the multimedia events in Paris. On March 28th, 1963, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) on Dover Street, Bill, Ian, and Antony Balch presented an evening of cut-ups. Bill sat in a chair and stared at the audience, a powerful blue spotlight making it difficult to see him, while earsplitting cut-up tapes were played featuring distorted Moroccan flutes, pneumatic drills, radio static, fragments of radio broadcasts, and Bill’s own flat, dry voice reading texts and news reports. Stills from Towers Open Fire were projected on a screen above his head (they had intended to screen the film but it was not ready). The Evening Standard reported, “The club was filled to busting point with intrigued spectators even standing outside in the passage to catch one or two eerie twangs of Burroughs’ voice. I found him mysterious as ever. He sat with hands folded and a deadpan expression in front of a blue screen as his voice, sometimes crackling into a strange blend of humour and irony, came over a recording machine.”24 Fed up with constantly moving and with hotel living, Bill decided to settle down, and invited Ian to join him.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Two short months later it dawned on me fully what Burroughs was attempting. It was like the earth opening under your feet.

  —JEFF NUTTALL1

  1. Billy Burroughs Jr.

  On June 25, 1963, Ian and Bill arrived in Tangier, intending to set up house together. They had been house-hunting for two weeks and the house at number 4 calle Larachi on the Marshan, off the avenue des USA, was the first that seemed at all possible. The house looked charming. It was on a quiet side street shadowed by trees and they even thought the little Moroccan children were cute as they clustered around them smiling. “Fingaro? One cigarette?” At the large American-owned villa across the street, the old bearded guard looked like someone straight out of the Arabian Nights. Later Burroughs felt that he should have known something was wrong; the agent had not wished to show the house to them and sent his assistant, Abdulla. When they arrived there had been a bad omen: the cab door slammed on Abdulla’s thumb as he was getting out.

  The house was conveniently laid out on three floors. The kitchen was dark, since the only light came from a high barred window, and next to it was the hole-in-the-floor lavatory. The floors were tiled and so easy to keep clean. Two bedrooms faced the street and a bedroom in the back had a window looking out over the garden of the next-door villa. This room was bathed in a cool underwater green light, and Burroughs immediately annexed it as his own. Burroughs described their initial attraction to the house: “Upstairs was a large room running the length of the house with a balcony facing on the street; leaf shadows dancing on the white plaster walls. We would fix it up Arab style with benches and low coffee tables. This would be our reception room. There was a small cell-like room facing the back garden, with a single window like a square of blue set in the wall. The roof was flat and we planned a summer house up there of split bamboo with straw mats under trellised vines. I do not recall if I felt any twitches of foreboding on that remote summer day. (The young man’s thumbnail was already turning black.)”2

  They moved in on July 15, 1963, the day after visiting Joujouka with Mohamed Hamri, who had been Brion’s partner in the restaurant. Burroughs was very familiar with the music of Joujouka from tapes made by Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin. There was not a special ceremony—the musicians were just playing—but it was a wonderful experience. Ian liked Arab music very much and they had a good time. They only stayed one night because the accommodation was basic. They slept on the floor and there were fleas. Back on calle Larachi, to Ian’s great annoyance, Mikey Portman arrived and settled in with them. As soon as they moved in several cats assembled at the open door, afraid to come within reach but hoping for food. One white cat inched forward and Bill reached to pat it. He was the first cat to get inside the house.

  Another reason for finding a house was that Bill had decided that it was time he got to know his son, Billy Jr., and had made arrangements for him to attend the American School in Tangier. Burroughs claimed it was Billy’s idea; he wanted to get to know his father.3 Burroughs had not seen his son since October 1954 when he was seven. A few days after they moved in, Burroughs met Billy’s plane in Lisbon. They caught a connecting plane to Madrid and went from there to Tangier. Sixteen-year-old Billy had woken up in Palm Beach, Florida, and now found himself in the Parade Bar, the only place that served decent hamburgers, being introduced to Mikey Portman—“Michael, this is my son”—and fending off propositions from an aging queen: “I know I’m old. But I really haven’t lost my figure, dear. You know, half the old Tangerines knew you were coming and wondered what you looked like. Well Baby! I mean, if you ever want your nuts blowed???”4

  They finally reached 4 calle Larachi, where, despite traveling to Portugal and Spain to get him, Bill had made no sleeping arrangements for Billy. They toured the house, using a flashlight because the electricity was out. “Wait for Ian,” Burroughs said. Ian eventually arrived and fixed the electricity supply by going outside and banging on the pole that carried the power line.

  Next morning Billy awoke to find Ian Sommerville sitting on his bed, gazing at him like a loving mother. Billy recalled, “We talked for a few minutes and then he took my hand gently, ever so gently, and tried to draw it to his groin.”5 Ian didn’t take the rejection badly and they became friends. That evening when Bill, Ian, and Mikey fired up their long kif pipes with clay bowls, Billy asked if he could try some. “All in good time,” said Ian, but the next day Bill asked Ian to take Billy down to the Grand Socco and help him pick out a pipe.

  Billy found Bill’s kif too harsh on the throat for his liking, so Bill gave him some majoun instead. They appear to have got off to a reasonably good start. The first problem arose when Bill took Billy to meet Omar Pound, son of Ezra, to enroll him in the American School where Omar was headmaster. Billy wouldn’t say a word. He had wanted to come to Tangier to get to know his father; the idea of going to school hadn’t entered his calculations. Back in Palm Beach he had gone from one school to another in a series of fiascos, attending, not liking it, and quitting, moving on to another. Bill’s parents were paying his tuition so it was no wonder they encouraged the idea of Bill looking after Billy for a while. The American School was not very far away from the house and there was a bus. Billy went for three days. He was surly and uncooperative. Then he quit, telling Bill that it was too much trouble to get up and go on the bus. “They weren’t teaching me anything anyway,” he said. Bill explained to his friend Joe McPhillips who was one of the teachers there, “What can I say? This has happened with so many schools previously, you see.” Bill told Ted Morgan, “There was not a goddamn thing that I could do. He didn’t want to go to school, I can’t do anything about it. I couldn’t find anything that worked.”6 The one constructive thing Billy did at school was take a couple of flamenco guitar lessons, and he continued to play afterward. Bill got him a tutor for a while, Chuck Wein, but Wein returned to New York at the beginning of March 1964 to become Andy Warhol’s film assistant and sometime director.7 One-on-one tuition seemed to work better. Ian gave him lessons in mathematics. Billy and Ian got on well, but they never spoke of the fact that Ian was living with Bill as a couple. Billy got to know a group of young people, some of them from the school, including some hip young Moroccans, a
nd would invite his friends back to play music, dance, and smoke pot. Bill’s biggest worry was that Billy’s friends would talk and news of his drug-taking gay ménage would get back to the consulate.

  The contrast between his grandparents’ house and his father’s must have been extreme to young Billy. His father spent the day working in his spartan room: an army bed, a filing cabinet, desk, the austerity only relieved by a beautiful Gysin painting of the moon over the Sahara. Thanks to Billy we have a description of his father writing Nova Express: Burroughs would spend hours at a time smoking kif while sitting in the orgone accumulator in the upstairs hallway, then suddenly rush out and begin pounding the keys of his typewriter. As soon as the sun began to set, Burroughs would go to the roof to watch the colors of the sky change. He would stand, his mouth partly open, transfixed at his favorite spot, absolutely motionless, a cigarette staining the fingers of his right hand, which he would drop when it burned him.8 Only when it was completely dark and the great band of the Milky Way competed with the intense moonlight to light up the deep midnight-blue sky did he make another sudden dash to the typewriter. They avoided the roof by day because rooftops were traditionally the women’s province where they did their washing and gossiped. Billy made the mistake of going there one day and was seen from other roofs. The Arabs threw little pieces of mud at their front door for the next week, the beginning of a campaign of harassment that intensified after Billy left.