Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  After a few days at the Three Pelicans Hotel he was able to move into the Muniria, where he made plans for his new flat. He told Ian, “What I want is to make it into the ideal flat that everyone will want one like it with Brion’s pictures and tape recorders that I can program in such a way as to amuse the guests.”3 He returned to London and moved into 8 Duke Street Saint James’s on the first of October.

  Bill’s flat, 22 Dalmeny Court, was reached by a rickety elevator with sliding metal grille doors. He wrote Brion that the flat was very quiet, with wall-to-wall carpeting, and that he was having an orgone accumulator large enough to accommodate two people built in the small back room, which could be comparatively well soundproofed. “This is to be my permanent headquarters,” he wrote. “Now I can give your pictures a home.”4 The back windows looked out over Mason’s Yard and the rear elevation of the London Library, which owned Dalmeny Court, and Bill and Antony Balch sometimes projected slides and films on the London Library’s wall at night. There was a kitchen unit hidden behind a roller screen used only for making tea. A large sofa stood against one wall beneath a large Gysin landscape. Bill bought a coffee table and standard lamp. It was very comfortable.

  In keeping with his new respectability, Burroughs had a visiting card printed. While he was at it, he had one made for Ian Sommerville, whom he expected to move in with him, the recording studio project clearly not being a long-term arrangement. He was right, and in mid-November Ian arrived with all the tape recorders. This would have been fine except that Ian insisted on bringing Alan Watson with him, even though the apartment was really too small for three people. He brought him in by stages, just for a few days, then for another few days, until he was living there. Bill described it as a typical triangle situation where the younger person brings in someone whom he’s attracted to and the older man can’t protest and it is very painful. Bill was extremely jealous but there was nothing he could do. He found it a very humiliating, awful position to be in. He knew that he could not bring the subject out into the open because to do so would mean that he would have to be prepared for them both to leave. He knew that if he said, “You’ve gotta get him out of here,” then Ian would have gone with him. He complained to Brion, who told him, “Well, if you’re going to let someone walk all over you…”—which was exactly what Ian was doing. But Bill didn’t have what it took to confront Ian. He said, “I was too hung up on Ian sexually to do that and if you are hung up on someone sexually, you’ve lost it. You’ve lost the upper hand. You lose it, you lose it.” Ian and Alan remained with him for two years.

  Bill never liked to be around effeminate gays; they drew attention and were particularly conspicuous in an area like St. James’s. He found Alan’s voice grating, and worst of all, Alan played opera constantly, Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet in particular, which Burroughs hated. On the plus side, Alan was a good cook. His parents were both pastry cooks, and Alan himself could make traditional English food including excellent chops. Bill saved a lot of money by eating in. He tried hard to make the best of it and succeeded, to a degree. In December he wrote to Brion to say that “Alan Watson is living here now with Ian and I am very well pleased with the arrangement.” He said that Alan was an excellent cook, kept the place clean, and made breakfast for him every morning. That night they were to have wild duck. “In short, his behavior has been exemplary. The flat is really too big for one person to keep up.”5 This may have just been a face-saving exercise. Bill didn’t really want Alan there and was barely cordial toward him.

  Antony Balch, however, adored Alan and took to spending a lot of time in flat 22, which ameliorated the situation somewhat. There was a difficult episode where Bill had imitated Alan’s voice on a tape and Alan had taken the tape on a trip to Hampton Court, thinking it was an opera cassette, and was convinced that Bill was trying to put a curse on him. Ian himself was well aware of the tension and recognized that they were being unfair to Bill, but they didn’t have any money and they needed somewhere to stay. Eventually things seemed to be coming to a head, with Ian prickly and Bill aloof and standoffish, so Ian told Alan to leave. But Ian would not commit himself to stay with Bill; he was simply asking Alan to leave because the situation had become so impossible. Bill’s raised hopes were yet again dashed. Eventually, in August 1968, Ian left as well. “There wasn’t much I could do,” said Bill. “Sad and discreditable.”

  While Burroughs was in Tangier, before moving into Dalmeny Court, Allen Ginsberg had been frantically trying to contact him there by telegram and telephone but with no response. Billy Jr. had been arrested for possession of speed in New York during a raid. Allen had bailed him out but wanted to know if he should get him a lawyer.6 Bill cabled Allen to say he would meet all expenses and hoped that Laura Lee had not heard about it. The charges were dropped and it cost Bill three hundred dollars for a lawyer. Just as he was writing to Billy to tell him to get out of New York before it happened again, it did happen again, and Bill had to come up with a further three hundred dollars. He asked Allen to put Billy on the next train to Palm Beach. Bill wanted him to pack up his things in Florida and join him in the new flat in London.7

  Bill continued to move in the upper reaches of London’s literary circles. He became friendly with Sonia Orwell, and visited her a number of times at her house at 18 Percy Street, in Fitzrovia. On a typical evening there he might meet Kenneth Tynan, Mary McCarthy, Wayland Young (Lord Kennet), and on one occasion, in April 1967, he encountered Stephen Spender looking very depressed and “hangdog” because the scandal of the Congress for Cultural Freedom being a CIA front had just come to light. Spender, who was editor of Encounter magazine, published by the Congress, turned out to have been working for a clandestine spying agency all those years, promoting a non-left alternative to communism but never really questioning America’s foreign policies. Spender claimed, very unconvincingly, not to have known. Spender invited Burroughs for dinner at his house in Hampstead. It was interesting for Bill to meet someone with a gay background, who had been part of the prewar modernist scene along with Auden, Isherwood, and Eliot. Now Spender was married to Natasha Litvin, and had been appointed the consultant poet for the Library of Congress, the only non-American ever to hold the post. “For services to the CIA,” Bill commented wryly. Through Spender he met Frank Kermode, coeditor of Encounter, memorably described by Philip Larkin as a “jumped up book drunk ponce.” Kermode visited Dalmeny Court and taped an interview with Bill for a radio program. Afterward Bill tried to remember a single thing that Kermode had said, but nothing memorable remained. Bill was convinced he was CIA.

  Much has been made of Burroughs’s connections with the Situationist International, but it was not until July 1967 that he became aware of their existence. He wrote to Mary Beach, his French translator, “Do you know of a French group called Situationist International. […] Seemingly a sophisticated anarchist group. I think they would be an excellent outlet for the short pieces I am writing now. Just read a very intelligent analysis of the Watts race riots by this group.”8 This was Guy Debord’s The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy about the Watts riots of August 1965 in Los Angeles, published in Internationale Situationiste number 10 in March 1966.9 In 1967 the entire British section of the SI was expelled by Debord, which might have drawn Burroughs’s attention to the group.

  Through December 1966 Ian Sommerville and Burroughs carefully checked the proofs for the second revised edition of The Soft Machine. Many people had found the original Olympia edition hard to read, and Burroughs had revised it extensively for the Grove Press edition in the States. He told Gysin, “The original edition was ‘a collection of essays’ rather than a book, and there was not enough narrative material to carry such a load of cut ups and unrelated descriptive passages.”10 The most obvious change was to open the book with straight narrative instead of the “Gongs of Violence” section, and everyone Burroughs spoke to about it found the new text much more readable.

  Burroughs told an inte
rviewer, “With The Soft Machine I had many complaints. It was difficult to read and going through it again, I thought this was true so I rewrote it completely introducing about 65 pages of straight narrative. What I’m really trying to do now is to get started on a line of straight narrative. I have a stack of paper already, a stack of tentative beginnings, but I have not yet decided which one of these to follow up.”11 The American edition was much more readable, but in going through the text for the publication of the book in England, Burroughs decided that perhaps too much of the original had been deleted, and that additional material that he had not had time to put into shape when the Grove edition came out could now be used. Using both the Olympia and Grove editions, plus new material, Bill assembled the final, third version of the text, which was published by Calder and Boyars on July 25, 1968. Publication was delayed because police had recently raided the Indica Bookshop and seized Naked Lunch. The book was subsequently returned covered in grubby fingerprints, but no charges were brought, and Calder finally had the courage to publish. Ian had an important role in assembling The Soft Machine: “Technical Tillie moaning about the equipment the way he always does.”12

  Burroughs had begun work on The Wild Boys in the middle of March 1967, but his flat was so crowded, and he found Alan to be such a nuisance with his shrieking and his opera records, that in May he took off for Tangier, where he checked into the Atlas Hotel with his typewriter, his clippings folders, and a plentiful supply of majoun. The “Gran Luxe” section of the book was begun there and developed in Marrakech in June and July of that year, where he joined Bill Willis in a house owned by John Shepherd. These were all friends of Christopher Gibbs’s, and provided him with much of the material for the new book. Bill Willis was from Memphis, Tennessee. He had a wealthy upbringing and burned through $200,000 before becoming an interior decorator. He had always lived a very grand, self-indulgent, hedonistic lifestyle. Christopher Gibbs described the scene: “He rose about one, lunch around three, over at five, then if there were any workmen still on site there would be a flurry of phone calls asking them to stay another ten minutes for him to inspect their work. Then a cinq-a-sept until about ten, when dinner was served. Then a succession of Moroccan boys would be summoned into the bedroom, accompanied by increasingly noisy opera records, and the consumption of huge quantities of Jack Daniel’s. Willis screamed at his servants. Bill was astonished and intrigued by these capers, which gave him great enjoyment to watch.” Bill described it as “La grande luxe!” “That was what I was writing about in The Wild Boys, was la grande luxe.” Bill Willis became Reggie in the book:

  So after breakfast I set out for the Djemalfna to meet Reggie. We are going to plan our route to A.J.’s annual party which is tomorrow it will be the do of the season. […] I find Reggie on the square sipping a pink gin shaded by a screen of beggars. An old spastic woman twitches and spatters Reggie’s delicate skin with sunlight. “Uncontrolled slut!” he screams. He turns to his henchman. “Give this worthless hag a crust of stale bread and find me a sturdy shade beggar.”

  Bill liked Marrakech, and enjoyed exploring it—“there are some beautiful sets there”—but he thought the amenities were inferior to Tangier’s. There were only a few good restaurants around the Djemaa el Fna, and he found poverty and the begging more intrusive than in Tangier. There was a man paralyzed from the waist down who moved around on blocks with leather pads on his knees who would suddenly pop up under your table, which Bill didn’t appreciate. There was Mister Very Good, who had very good hashish cookies, but there were few boys. According to Bill they had all been snapped up by Christopher Wanklyn and John Shepherd: “They’d already got the pick.” Bill was there in mid-June and it was getting hotter by the day. They closed the shutters to keep the cool air in until the evening, but no one wanted to go out in the daytime. Bill Willis tried to send his old Fatima out to buy a potato at 1:30 and she refused to go. Burroughs took her side and from then on she came and cried on Bill’s shoulder when Willis was being unreasonable. “She would come to me for comfort. Old and frail.”13 It was a very hermetic social scene; everyone in the foreign colony—Willis, John Shepherd, Christopher Wanklyn, and John Paul Getty Jr., who was having a house built there—saw each other every day for reciprocal lunch or dinner engagements. Bill found it very confining and could never have lived there, but enjoyed his visit, photographing sets and taking notes, and only returning to London in mid-July.

  Bill’s mother had again been writing to Bill asking him to try and do something about Billy, who was now taking ephedrine. Bill pointed out again that he had a room ready in the apartment waiting for him; that if hospital treatment was necessary it could certainly be provided in London; that he had “arranged for a program of activities and studies designed to lead him into constructive channels”; and that he would make every effort to try and arouse Billy’s interest in something that might lead to a career. But Bill despaired that Billy would ever take an interest in anything.14

  Billy himself was resisting all of Bill’s efforts to get him to come to London, remembering the stressful time he had in Tangier with Bill and his boys and not wanting to repeat it. Laura suggested that Bill come to Palm Beach, but Bill was convinced that the Bureau of Narcotics was out to get him and had no intention of returning to the United States if he could possibly avoid doing so. He stressed that he wanted to get Billy on a plane to London just as soon as it was feasible and said that he had been putting money aside for the purpose. But eventually he relented and bought a ticket to Miami, leaving on December 27.

  2. Palm Beach and Lexington

  The situation in Palm Beach was appalling. Burroughs was strung out on tincture of opium at the time. “I thought the habit was small and brought nothing with me to Florida. […] The habit turned out to be not so small and a period of excruciating withdrawal lasted for a month.”15 He had swelling of the groin and neck glands, a high fever, pain, and tension. Bill slept in a small back room with sliding windows that had been corroded shut by the salt air. Billy was surly and uncooperative and had left paregoric bottles and syringes all over the house, which was in complete disarray. “Mother comes into my room with a bag full of empty paregoric bottles from Billy’s room, just lying around for the narcs to find. I take the bag down to Lake Worth and throw it out with a stone for ballast.”16 At 4:00 p.m. each day Bill started mixing old-fashioneds, and after three or four each they became quite tipsy. Laura loved old-fashioneds but was not a big drinker. Every day Bill walked to the end of the block, where Sanford Avenue became a sandy track leading to the beach, to wait for 4:00 p.m. Once a police car stopped and drove partway out on the road to look at him. But he looked innocent enough. Laura was already suffering from dementia, asking the same questions over and over and immediately forgetting the answers. Her continuous fretting drove Burroughs crazy. There were no servants and no car and the house appeared to be haunted with strange knockings and bangings. Then on New Year’s Day Laura broke her arm, which made life even more difficult.

  Billy was up on three felony charges and the case came before Judge Russell Macintosh, a tough judge who automatically handed out the maximum sentence. Bill talked with the DA’s office and managed to finagle a deal so they would drop charges and place Billy on probation on condition he dry out at Lexington Narcotic Farm. Macintosh imposed a four-year probation with almost impossible terms, but at least Billy was out. Bill made arrangements to sell the house and put his mother in a small apartment back in St. Louis where his brother could keep an eye on her.17

  Bill accompanied Billy Jr. to Lexington, “sad sadder than I can tell you,”18 he told Gysin. Billy had a fear of flying. Bill got him onto the first plane by telling him how great the first shot was going to be when he got there, “probably knock you on your ass,” but nothing would get him onto the second flight in an old propeller plane. Bill put him on a fast train and took the flight himself. There was heavy snow and Billy was late. Bill waited for him all night in their hotel room. He wrote,
“I remember being overcome by grief, and I was convinced he had suffered a fatal accident.”19 The train was delayed and Billy didn’t show up until the following morning. They took a cab to the hospital: “Got two for Narco.” In reception an old man asked them, “Which one of you is checking in here?” Bill quickly pushed his son forward, memories of his own time there flickering in his head.

  When he was clean, Billy was sent to the Green Valley School in Orange City, Florida, where he was to be rehabilitated. The Palm Beach house was sold and Laura was put into Chateins, a nursing home in St. Louis.20 She hated it. When Billy Jr. visited her she was strapped to her chair because “she removes her clothing.” Billy visited her on occasion, and once stole her painkillers. He wrote that she spent the next three years sitting in the same chair, staring vacantly out of the window.21 Mort wrote Burroughs, “Sometimes she recognizes me. Sometimes she doesn’t.” During the four years she remained alive, Burroughs never once went to see her. From time to time when he was traveling he would send postcards, and six months before she died he sent a Mother’s Day card. He remembered, “There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling ‘vaguely guilty.’ ”22

  Late in the summer of 1966, Panna Grady, the New York society hostess, began an affair with Charles Olson, and in October they sailed for London, largely because Charles could not stand the constant pressure from all the freeloaders. She rented one of the most magnificent houses in central London at 2 Chester Terrace, overlooking the boating lake at Regent’s Park. It was the end house in an 1822 Nash terrace, a huge mansion with a portico of four giant Roman Doric columns supporting a pediment topped with a row of heroic statues. No sooner had she shaken off one load of parasites than others appeared, Alexander Trocchi to the fore, closely followed by Black Power leader Michael X, the poet Harry Fainlight, who had known her in New York, and the rest of the London poor. Soon Chester Terrace was indistinguishable from the Dakota. Olson got fed up with the endless stream of people. He worked at night so he was still having his breakfast at eight in the evening when the visitors began to arrive. But Panna liked to socialize and ultimately this was what broke up their relationship. Characteristically, Charles went into hiding. In March 1967, after spending six months at Chester Terrace, he moved into the Mayfair Hotel on Berkeley Square, where he remained incommunicado for several weeks while his friends frantically telephoned all over Britain and the States, not knowing if he was alive or dead.