Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  They were an unlikely combination: Nuttall was resolutely working-class with a deep distrust of public-school boys. When Nuttall met Burroughs at the Devonshire Hotel, Mikey Portman and Antony Balch were already there. As Nuttall wrote later, “Balch and the boy had both got my grammar school blood up a little with their Senior Quad drawls. I was half-determined to be as gauche as possible.”23 They went to a nearby pub. The more upmarket saloon bar was full, so they settled around a table in the public bar. Nuttall wrote, “There was a lot of bright glass and a dart game. My customary sentimentalization of the crowd ran on to very dry ground.”24 Nuttall was at his happiest in a smoky public bar filled with workers in flat caps supping their pints, whereas Burroughs was indifferent. He saw pubs just as places to get alcohol. Nuttall drank pint after pint of beer; Bill stuck to gin and tonic. When Nuttall asked if he could buy him another, Bill replied, “Yes, I want more.”25 This “plain, dry statement of physical fact” was to Nuttall an example of Burroughs’s lack of any “side.” They went to the drabbest egg-and-chips café on Queensway to eat.

  In Bomb Culture, Nuttall wrote, “The similarity to my own imagery showed that we were in the same place but Burroughs was travelling in the opposite direction. It took me some time to realize this.”26 Nuttall’s aim, like that of Burroughs, was to get people to acknowledge the way life really was: the presence of thermonuclear weapons, of starvation and hunger, as well as corruption and hypocrisy at home. He wanted them to accept and explore obscenity, death, and the reality of their everyday existence. Nuttall wanted to create an aesthetic of obscenity, inspired by the images of horror in Picasso’s Guernica and the screams of rage from the ghetto translated into beauty by bebop saxophone players. He wrote, “I thought, let us take that obscenity and make beautiful things with it.”27

  Burroughs had a much more radical program: that of dissolving the opposites and dualities that trap humanity in time and space. He used obscenity and humor to attack control systems and saw cut-ups as a weapon to dislocate language, the main agent of power control. Burroughs told Nuttall that he was interested in the newspaper format with its juxtaposition of columns, pictures, and headlines, in which the viewer is constantly absorbing peripheral information from the adjacent columns or the blaring headline or news photographs as each column is read. Jeff was impressed by Burroughs’s ideas and invited him to publish his own newspaper as the last two pages of My Own Mag. The first manuscript of the Moving Times reached Jeff in May 1964, a three-column text designed to read like a newspaper. Jeff used it in a special Tangier edition of My Own Mag.

  Burroughs used his Tangier air ticket to stop off in Paris in order to try and extract money from Girodias. Girodias had sold the rights to Henry Miller’s Sexus to two different people, and one of them, a Chinese publisher named Chou, threatened to cause real trouble and put him in jail where he belonged. In order to extricate himself Girodias used the $5,000 he owed Burroughs to pay him off, thinking Burroughs would be the easier of the two to placate. When Bill demanded his money Girodias just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, you can put me in jail.” There was nothing Bill could do. Girodias was a cheap crook and there was no money. Bill never forgave him for it. The $5,000 would have enabled them to move out of calle Larachi, and Bill could have helped Ian and set him up in some sort of situation to save his sanity and their future relationship. Instead, he had to return empty-handed to Tangier and hang on to the house for several more months until he could get more money from Grove, directly this time. Burroughs told Ted Morgan, “I really blame that jerk Girodias for that. Ian’s paranoia was getting worse, naturally, during all this period. […] It had really upset him and he couldn’t take it, so he was in a very bad state […] not a breakdown in the complete sense but he was just in very bad shape and very unhappy and upset.”28 Burroughs wrote, “By early spring, February and March 1964, life in that house was Hell.”29

  Bill’s friends had no idea of the seriousness of the situation. John Hopkins joked, “Wild children have taken over Calla Larache where Bill Burroughs now lives. ‘Every year there seem to be more of them,’ Brion says, ‘Every day!’ It is difficult and even dangerous to visit Bill’s house. The children grow angry if their games are interrupted. Paul thinks Bill eggs them on. He pays those kids to throw stones at strangers so he can get on with his writing.”30

  5. The Loteria Building

  Money finally came through and on May, 6, 1964, the exhausted couple were at last able to move back to the center of Tangier. Number 16 rue Delacroix was on the corner of calle Dominico, across the street from the Tanger Hotel. This used to be the Pasadena Hotel and the buses still used that as their destination sign. Their building had originally been the Tangier Bourse, but when all the banks moved out following independence it became the Lottery Building, which was the name most people knew it by. They had the top-floor apartment, which was all windows with a wonderful view out to the east and north. Bill and John Hopkins walked out onto the balcony and Bill told him, “This is the bridge of my battleship. From here I can see everything. See the Comisaría down the street? Fire one! Boom it’s gone! Haw haw haw.”31

  Wide shelves held scrapbooks, and secondhand tables were piled high with folders and clippings files. There was a huge collection of old issues of the Tangier Gazette and the Moroccan Courier given to him by Dave Woolman, the origin of the cut-up text published in Esquire that September. The tape recorder seemed to only have one tape, of radio static. Bill’s Remington typewriter looked like an antique from another age, but this was soon replaced with an up-to-date Lettera 22. John Hopkins thought it felt more like a writer’s factory than an author’s study.32 A large table, about five feet square, had a large orange-and-brown map of Tangier under a glass cover. This map of Tangier was to provide the background for a new, exhaustive series of collage photographs. Shelves running the length of one wall provided the support for a series of scrapbooks, into which Burroughs pasted photographs and news clippings. These “layout books,” as he called them, were basically his ideas workbooks, primarily visual, and contained handwriting in various colored inks, as well as typescripts stuck in. Pages were often tinted with a color wash or given a title in thick magic marker. As usual with Burroughs, he did dozens of these books, filling hundreds and hundreds of pages. There exist many loose leaves, and though some show signs of coming from dismantled scrapbooks, others were clearly stand-alone collages.

  In addition to this activity, Burroughs continued to write, and in the three months he lived in the Lottery Building he simultaneously worked on Nova Express and produced thousands of pages of cut-ups: three-column texts, usually with the column divides in different colors; grids, with the squares often numbered so that he could read off a number sequence; and texts using other methods such as a brick-wall division of the text. Another series had circles drawn with a compass to isolate sections of text. In every case, the superimposition of a column or a grid was to create arbitrary divisions of the text, to cut it up, producing new word combinations, most of which went into Nova Express. A large number of the three-column pages were given newspaper titles: The Last Post; The Silent Sunday News; The Tangier Survey; The Silver Star; The Coldspring News; and Moving Times, his main outlet, published in Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. During this period he cut up Graham Greene’s The Man Within and John Rechy’s City of Night among hundreds of other magazine and news clips.

  Bill and Ian were finally free from harassment, so it came as a surprise when a scruffy-looking shoeshine boy, a young man in his twenties, came up and yelled “Fucking pervert” at Bill outside the Loteria Building. Bill hit him with the heel of his hand and knocked him down, then chased him to a vacant lot where the man hit Bill with his shoeshine box. Bill “gave him some elbows” and he ran off. He threw one stone, which hit Bill on the leg. Bill saw him the next day and his face looked badly messed up.

  Ian was relieved to leave the Marshan, but was still very depressed and disturbed by the experience. He and
Bill had always had an open relationship, with no requirement of fidelity. Their ground rules were no jealousy, you do what you want to do and I’ll do what I want to do. Ian began an affair with a deaf-mute albino Moroccan who apparently told him a lot about Arab beliefs and ideas; precisely because he was a deaf-mute he knew sign language. Ian was fascinated by the Arab way of life: he learned to speak a little Arabic and had a great respect for the culture, regarding it as superior to his own. But the affair was filled with friction and difficulties and there was one unpleasant incident when Ian was forced to suck the cock of a boyfriend of the deaf-mute when he didn’t want to. The Arabs called him “the Mad Woman”; they thought he was insane. Ian took to wandering in the countryside around the city, getting fucked by anyone he met. He was clearly going through some sort of breakdown. Burroughs later used the incident in the “End of the Line” section of Exterminator!: “The Arabs called I.S. the ‘Mad Woman.’ He was jeered at in the streets and very near such a complete breakdown as westerners in contact with Arabs habitually undergo in the novels of Mr. P.”33

  Early that summer Ian began an affair with Alan Ansen. Ansen said, “He really was in a sort of bad mood, for a lot of the time. Feeling very depressed. Bill took it nicely but I don’t know what he felt. Bill did not seem jealous or resentful. Perhaps he felt with Ian so depressed it was nice for him to have something. This whole thing of wandering out into the wilds and being fucked by all and sundry is usually a sign of some kind of disorientation. Ian was always very jealous of Mikey.”34 Bill for his part thought it was Ian’s business and didn’t say anything about it to him. Ansen was very sympathetic toward Ian. He recognized that Ian needed a father figure and that, for the time being, he was it instead of Bill. Ian was a young man, fresh from university, highly cultivated and fun to be around, but who had no life for himself aside from being with Burroughs. He was insecure and worried. Ansen admired his adventurous spirit, “a kind of abandonment with boys that can be very attractive but at the same time rather dangerous,” but he did worry about him. Ian appreciated his concern and began eating his meals with Alan. Bill would sometimes join them, and there were many social events as the summer got under way, such as July Fourth, when the Americans all attended an Independence Day celebration at the Park Brooks Hotel.

  Even at calle Larachi, Ian had often been absent for long periods, wandering about the hills and city, and Burroughs was often seen alone at the Paname or the Parade. John Hopkins reported in April 1964, before the move to the Loteria Building, that many nights Bill sat alone having dinner in the Parade Bar at 7:30 before the regulars arrived. “He likes good food. A lonely ascetic figure in a dark business suit, he generally eats by himself staring poker-faced at the wall. (He doesn’t bring a book or a newspaper). When I bring my drink to his table he always asks me to sit down. The undertaker look puts people off, but like all writers he works alone all day and enjoys socializing in the evening.”35

  6. Return to Villa Delirium

  The lease on the rue Delacroix ran out on July 15 and Bill and Ian moved into room 9 at the Hotel Muniria. A week later, on July 21, 1964, Burroughs completed Nova Express, the third of the novels composed from his great “word hoard” left over from The Naked Lunch. The three books are really one long, three-volume novel and the first versions are best read as such: The Soft Machine (Olympia, 1961), The Ticket That Exploded (Olympia, 1962), and Nova Express (Grove, 1964), the latter being the only volume that Burroughs did not rewrite. It is his most political novel, though his polemical texts often go much further. Nova Express voices opinions that finally reached mass acceptance years later in the ecology movement and the protests against the excesses of the banks and big global corporations. It opens with an angry attack on the establishment: “Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever—”36 And he meant it. He told Conrad Knickerbocker, “I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable. […] I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy Coca Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness.”37

  The summer of 1964 was filled with incident and fun. Brion Gysin arrived from Paris, having been one of the last holdouts at the Beat Hotel. He was still in room 25 at the end of June when as early as February many of the other rooms had been demolished as part of the renovation of the building. Ian cheered up considerably on Brion’s arrival and became very involved with the marketing of the Dreamachine after the travel writer Leila Hadley offered to put money into it. He and Ansen drifted apart,38 though they remained good friends. Many of Ian’s friends, including Ansen, felt that Brion gave himself far too much credit for the Dreamachine, which was, after all, entirely Ian Sommerville’s invention. “The impresario took over,” commented Ansen.39 Brion had suggested to Hadley that Ian should possibly be cut in for 10 percent of the vast profits that they were hoping to make in the United States with the device.

  In addition to Gysin, that summer Tennessee Williams, Antony Balch, and Bill’s Harvard friend James Le Baron Boyle were all in town and the evenings were filled with long dinners and much carousing, often at the Parade, which had become their main meeting place. Burroughs and Boyle renewed their friendship by going to bed together. Ansen gave a huge party for him. Antony Balch brought his camera with him and, rare for him, filmed in color. On August 24, 1964, Bill, carrying a copy of the Financial Times, and Antony Balch, carrying a camera loaded with color film, knocked on the door of the Villa Gazebo, at 282 Monte Viejo, that John Hopkins was renting from the painter Marguerite McBey. Hopkins had a large white cockatoo named Coco, and they wanted a shot of Bill talking to it. Afterward they walked in the gardens and woods that sloped down to the strait. There was a wonderful view of the coast of Spain. The film was used, in black and white, in The Cut-Ups, but was also circulated in color as a (very) short called William Buys a Parrot. Balch also shot much of the other black-and-white footage that finished up in The Cut-Ups while he was there.

  Despite their sexual problems, Burroughs and Sommerville remained very close, as they would until Ian died. It was on the steps below the Hotel Muniria, leading down to the beach, that the poet Ira Cohen was witness to the powerful psychic connection between them. Cohen and Ian were talking, with Ian looking away from the hotel, out to sea, when Burroughs appeared at the top of the track. According to Cohen there is no way that Ian could have been aware of his presence, yet Ian began walking backward up the hill, as if being reeled in like a fish.40

  Ian returned to London at the beginning of October, leaving Burroughs in Gibraltar at the Mediterranean Hotel on East Beach near the stadium lighting towers that inspired Towers Open Fire. “The hotel was surrounded by signal towers… Outside the wind whistled through the towers and rattled the white plastic blinds.”41 Ian saw no future for himself in Tangier, which was clearly an unsuitable environment for him. Bill returned to the Muniria to plan a trip to the States where he had a writing assignment about St. Louis. He didn’t want to stay on in Tangier after Ian had left and didn’t really know where else to go; neither London or Paris had any appeal. He invited Ian to accompany him to the States, but Ian was unsure about this. He knew he would not have a work permit and he would find himself in the same situation in New York as he had been in Tangier: totally dependent on Bill. Burroughs spent his last month in Tangier working on “developments from your parting suggestions.” It is unclear what these suggestions were, but Burroughs told him, “I have been cutting out bits of text old letters etcetera pasting photos and blocks of text in copies of my books (Nova Express now out) a photo for every page of diary always using when possible original materials rather th
an retyped matter and so finding a use for all the old texts and photos.” He said he had completed three scrapbooks and filled many of his own books with photos.

  He traveled to London to see Ian before setting off on an open-ended trip to the States. We catch a glimpse of him, just prior to departure when he was interviewed over lunch at her house by Susan Barnes, the Sun’s “interviewer with a penetrating pen.” She described him as “looking, as he usually does, very much the middle-aged bank-clerk—short hair neatly parted, sober suit neatly pressed, feet neatly encased in conventional black shoes. […] His manners are fastidious.”42 She also mentioned his soft felt hat and rolled umbrella. Hardly the look of a beatnik. He assured her, “Even in the 12 years I was a morphine addict I never presented a beatnik appearance, only a shabby one.” He returned to Tangier on November 21, to pack his scrapbooks and manuscripts, intending to settle for a while in New York.

  BOOK SEVEN

  Burlington Billy

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.1

  1. “St. Louis Return”

  In September, Playboy magazine had invited Burroughs to revisit St. Louis and write about it. He had been considering the idea of returning to the States, so this came at an opportune time. On November 30 he sailed on SS Independence from Algeciras. Also on board was Larbi Layachi (Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi), whose Life Full of Holes had been taped and translated by Paul Bowles. Burroughs had read the book in manuscript and written an enthusiastic letter to his editor, Richard Seaver, recommending it. Bowles sent Seaver the manuscript and Grove Press published it on May 25, 1964. It was the first of Bowles’s translations to be published commercially in the States. Larbi was on his way to find his fortune in America, where he stayed.