Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Panna had long let it be known that she was in love with Burroughs; it was something that Allen Ginsberg kidded Bill about. She was attracted to brilliant men, and it was an unfortunate fact that so many of them were gay. She did manage to get John Wieners into bed and so regarded Burroughs as a possibility. With Charles Olson gone, she once again turned her attention to Bill, but he was not having any of it. He made sure that there were always other people around when they met. Unable to get Bill, she turned her attention to Ian Sommerville and managed to maneuver him into bed. Bill was shocked but said nothing to Ian or Panna. Bill enjoyed her company and her great generosity. Thanks to Panna he became familiar with the meat trolley at Rules—always remembering to tip the carver—and the saddle of lamb at the Connaught Grill. Panna hosted a memorable Christmas meal at the Connaught for Bill and Ian, Alex Trocchi, Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, Robert Fraser, and assorted wives and boyfriends.23 Panna sometimes visited Dalmeny Court, where the situation with Ian, Alan, and Bill seemed to have stabilized: Bill wrote Brion, “Alan Watson continues to cook excellent meals and I have become quite fond of him.”24 That August, 1967, they all took karate lessons together—something Bill had started in Palm Beach—and took to “camping around in those marvellous judo outfits.”25 This interest was terminated when Bill badly bruised his wrist attempting to chop an ironing board in half with the side of his hand.

  That summer Allen Ginsberg came to London to read poetry with Auden, Neruda, Empson, and other luminaries at Queen Elizabeth Hall and to participate in the Congress of Liberation, a conference held at the Roundhouse from July 15 to 30, 1967, organized by radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing and others seeking to “demystify human violence in all its forms.” It brought together Stokely Carmichael (who first coined the term “Black Power”), Gregory Bateson (who warned of global warming), Herbert Marcuse, Paul Sweezy, John Gerassi, David Cooper, and others. Burroughs refused to speak, but Ginsberg quoted extensively from his texts and Bill attended some of the evening get-togethers at “Dialectics House,” often getting roaring drunk with Laing, but also exchanging ideas with Stokely Carmichael, whose company he preferred to that of the Marxist intellectuals.

  Panna was having a marvelous time—London was at the height of the “summer of love”; Olson was appearing with Allen at the Arts Council reading and had returned to his old room; the weather was perfect—so she decided to hold a party on July 16 for everyone involved with the Dialectics of Liberation Congress and also the Arts Council reading. To Ginsberg’s delight Mick Jagger was there, and they sat out on the balcony talking; Bill had already met him a few times at Robert Fraser’s flat. Robert wasn’t there because he had been sentenced to nine months in Wormwood Scrubs after being busted for heroin at the famous police raid on Keith Richards’s house in February of that year. Michael X, the local Black Power leader, made the rounds, cashing in on white guilt to collect checks for one of his many money-raising schemes (raising money for himself). It was at this party that Burroughs met Tom Driberg, MP, who had been a friend of Aleister Crowley’s, but most of the time Bill spent holding court in an upstairs room with Ian Sommerville. William Empson and many of the other poets were there and a fight erupted among them, resulting in someone foolishly calling the police. For some reason it was Burroughs who answered the door. The police stood politely to attention, helmets in hand, respectful of the address. “There is nothing going on,” Burroughs assured them, pulling a grimace, meant as a smile. “I can assure you that nothing ever happens at Panna’s house. Nothing at all. Good evening,”26 and he shut the door abruptly in their faces. Six of them returned later, having had second thoughts, and were dealt with by William Empson, who was completely drunk.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The material involved in this sector is so vicious that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it. […] I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.

  —L. RON HUBBARD1

  1. Operating Thetan

  Burroughs had been involved with Scientology ever since 1959 when he was first introduced to it by Brion Gysin, but it was not until the mid-sixties that he devoted much time to it, initially because he was being paid to investigate it. In February 1964, when he was living in the Loteria Building in Tangier, Bill had received a letter from an eighteen-year-old trainee newspaper reporter from Crawley New Town, in Sussex, asking him about cut-ups and intersections. Graham Masterton had written a text called Rules of Duel, which he sent Burroughs that same month. In June Burroughs wrote a foreword to it and also cut up a portion of the text, which he called “Over the last skyscrapers a silent kite.” The book was self-published later that year. They continued to exchange letters and postcards over the next two years and finally met when Bill moved into Dalmeny Court. Graham Masterton was a Mod, sporting a handmade suit with a boxy jacket, button-down shirt, narrow tie, shades, and chisel-toed Italian shoes. He and Bill often dined together or met for a drink.

  Masterton had just been appointed deputy editor of Mayfair, a men’s magazine designed to compete in Britain with Penthouse and Playboy, and asked if he had anything they could publish. Bill had always wanted a platform for his ideas on social control and big business, and together they came up with the idea of the Burroughs Academy. Bill also spoke at length about Scientology, so Masterton commissioned him to write an investigative article about it for Mayfair. In August 1967, using false names—William Lee and Graham Thomas—accompanied by Antony Balch and his 8-millimeter camera, Masterton drove them to Scientology headquarters, Saint Hill, a huge faux-medieval castle in East Grinstead, Sussex, about thirty miles from London, to check them out. They were shown around by the assistant chaplain, Mrs. Bess Jensen, a Scientologist for twelve years. They saw large rooms filled with people listening to lectures by L. Ron Hubbard on tape recorders, talked to students, bought some postcards, and returned to London. Back at Dalmeny Court, Bill set up a postcard of L. Ron Hubbard and took aim at it with his Webley .22 air pistol. As he pulled back the hammer to cock it, it snapped back on his thumb, almost breaking it. Bill carried the scar for life: “Boy, he was really spitting back a curse there!” Normally Bill shot at small printed bull’s-eye targets.

  Bill’s first piece on Scientology, the first major article on the subject in the British press, “The Engram Theory,” appeared in the eleventh issue of Mayfair in November 1967 as Bulletin 2 from the Burroughs Academy. There were to be twenty-one bulletins from the Burroughs Academy, as well as five subsequent appearances in Mayfair, the last appearing in December 1970, more appearances by Burroughs than in any other magazine. They covered all Bill’s major interests at the time, Scientology paramount among them as this was before he became disillusioned with the organization, but also the Mayan calendar, thought control, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulators, low-frequency whistles as weapons, and so on.

  Every few weeks Masterton would visit and they would discuss ideas for pieces and have a few drinks or a meal, often accompanied by Bill’s friends. Masterton recalled one occasion when Ian and Alan Watson broke up and Ian was in tears, and another when Alex Trocchi came to visit and brought Bill a swordstick as a present. Bill danced drunkenly around the apartment, swinging it dangerously, shouting, “Ho there, you ruffians!”

  Bill believed firmly in the use of the E-meter to clear unconscious blockages that are controlling the individual, so much so that he thought that Hubbard’s findings and its use should be opened up to panels of scientists and specialists in biofeedback to potentiate its use. He wrote, “Some of the techniques are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation.” He first toyed with Hubbard’s ideas back in October 1959 in Paris, when he wrote to Allen Ginsberg, “The method of directed recall is the method of Scientology. You will recall I wrote urging you to contact local chapter and find an auditor. They do the job without hypnosis or drugs, simply run the tape back and forth until the trauma is wiped off. It work
s. I have used the method—partially responsible for recent changes.” A few days later he wrote again, “I have a new method of writing and do not want to publish anything that has not been inspected and processed. I cannot explain this method to you until you have necessary training. So once again and most urgently (believe me there is not much time)—I tell you: ‘Find a Scientology Auditor and have yourself run.’ ”

  Scientology began to show up in Burroughs’s texts. It was called Logos in The Ticket That Exploded, an organization that had “a system of therapy they call ‘clearing.’ You ‘run’ traumatic material which they call ‘engrams’ until it loses emotional connotation through repetitions and is then refilled as neutral memory. When all the ‘engrams’ have been run and deactivated the subject becomes a ‘Clear.’ ” It is first named in Nova Express when a character reports, “The Scientologists believe sir that words recorded during a period of unconsciousness […] store pain and that this pain store can be plugged in with key words.”2

  L. Ron Hubbard claimed that much behavior is determined by unconscious memories of events that he called “engrams,” words recorded in pain and unconsciousness. For instance, everything that the surgical staff says during an operation is heard and stored by the patient, and because the person is unconscious he has no judgment about this input. These words have an emotional charge and to repeat them can cause an anxiety attack. Rather like traditional psychoanalysis, Hubbard claimed that by repeatedly returning these words or events to consciousness they lose their charge and the person is “cleared” of that particular anxious blockage and it is filed as neutral memory. The “science” part comes in the use of the E-meter, a polygraph that shows the person’s reaction to a series of questions by measuring people’s galvanic skin response. A small electrical charge is introduced by the subject holding a pair of empty soup cans. It is a primitive form of the lie detector, which uses the same system. A scientology “auditor” asks a series of questions, and when the needle jumps, that means a blockage has been detected. These are gone over from every possible angle until they no longer give a reading. When you get a floating needle to all the questions that particular session is complete. There are very many questionnaires.

  In the mid-sixties, a number of Australian states, beginning with Victoria in 1965, banned the Church of Scientology based on the Anderson Report, which found that the auditing process involved “command” hypnosis, in which the hypnotist assumes “positive authoritative control” over the patient. The report stated, “Most scientology and dianetic techniques are those of authoritative hypnosis and as such are dangerous […] the scientific evidence […] leads to the inescapable conclusion that it is only in name that there is any difference between authoritative hypnosis and most of the techniques of scientology. Many scientology techniques are in fact hypnotic techniques, and Hubbard has not changed their nature by changing their names.” In other words, Scientology was guilty of brainwashing.

  Between late January and April 1968, Bill took courses at the London Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street and a “clearing course” at Saint Hill in East Grinstead, staying first at the Brambletye Hotel in Forest Row, and then with some fellow Scientologists. The hotel showed up not long afterward in “Ali’s Smile”: “authentic cottages with moss on the roofs. There is ‘Ye Olde Bramble Tyme Motel,’ high prices, thin walls.”3 Bill was convinced that his room was haunted and started a short story about it. The investigative nature of Burroughs’s visit was underlined by the fact that the Brambletye is where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson stay while carrying out their investigations in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of Black Peter.” The first draft of the “Dead Child” section of The Wild Boys was written here. “A writer always gets his pound of flesh even out of old Mother Hubbard with her bare cupboard,” he wrote. Burroughs snooped around the grounds of L. Ron Hubbard’s quarters dressed as a gardener, tape recorder in hand, hoping to surreptitiously record him through a window, but Hubbard, alas, was not in residence.

  After more courses, he went to Edinburgh for a week to finish his clearing course. This consisted of a whole batch of very strange convoluted sentences that he had to run himself, keeping a written record, reading the sentences, repeating them until they were flat on the needle. “To have much, to have little, to have much, to have everything…”; “To stay here, to stay there, to stay out, to stay in…”; endless contradictory commands: “Creating to destroy the energy, destroying to create the energy.” The Scottish Scientology Centre was operated by the Sea Org, the only people allowed to deliver the “Operating Thetan” levels of Scientology teaching. Burroughs spent about £1,500 on the Scientology clearing course and graduated as a Grade 5, “power” release. He was Clear number 1163. He said, “It feels marvellous! Things you’ve had all your life, things you think nothing can be done about—suddenly they’re not there any more! And you know these disabilities cannot return.”4 On a visit to Tangier in late July 1968 he spoke to Bowles about Scientology, who reported to Harold Norse, “Bill is very happy to have been cleared; he claims he owes as much to scientology as to apomorphine. I asked what scientology had cured him of. Old thought patterns, he said. Anyway, he seemed in excellent form.”

  Ian Sommerville accused Bill of just trying to get power over other people. Burroughs agreed: “Ian wasn’t standing still for it. Resisted it, sure did.” It was while Bill was in Edinburgh that Ian finally moved out of Dalmeny Court. The organization was already having doubts about Burroughs’s commitment to Scientology, so they had him take the Jo’burg test at East Grinstead HQ. This was a series of 215 questions about criminal activity. He was asked, “Have you ever hidden a body?” He said no and got a reading. Then Bill had a clear picture of himself hiding a body somewhere. Then the auditor asked, “In this life have you ever hidden a body?” That was clear. It must have been a past life. Next came, “Have you ever committed forgery?” Bill said no but got a reading. Then he remembered he had forged a narcotic prescription. “So the machine knows things that you don’t know, or that you don’t remember. On a conscious level I didn’t think I had at all, I was thinking of forging a check.” The questions reminded Bill of the Moscow purge trials: “Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?” But by now Bill had learned the techniques. “I can’t help resenting his perfection,” he replied. There were agents provocateurs, Jo’burg people waiting outside the room who would sidle up to him and say, “What do you think about this latest bulletin from L. Ron Hubbard?” and he’d say, “Well, I’m sure Mister Hubbard knows what he’s doing.” As ever, Bill was on the lookout for a likely lad, but was forced to conclude, “By and large they were one of the most unattractive bunch of people I’ve ever laid eyes on. I was at Saint Hill and there must have been 300 people and I saw two, out of 300, that I thought looked even reasonable.” Despite Hubbard’s hostile attitude toward homosexuality in his writings, no one at Saint Hill seems to have been concerned by Burroughs’s open admission of his sexual preference. Scientology’s position on homosexuality was that it was a false identity, a “valence” in Scientology metalanguage, and that homosexual urges would disappear when the adept reached OT level III, where the “body Thetans” that cause the problem would be audited away.

  Bill took a course to become a Scientology auditor and was required to get pupils to practice on. He put up a notice in the Indica Bookshop asking for volunteers and got a few such as Harold Norse, from the Beat Hotel, who moved to London in 1969. Despite his reservations that Scientology was a mind-control cult, Norse had previously been involved with Dianetics in New York, and agreed to let Bill “run” him. Norse described it in his autobiography: “I told Bill about my illness and that my Dutch boyfriend had stopped sleeping with me. […] Following the principles of Scientology, Bill believed the liver disorder was linked to the emotional one, caused by an engram—a mental picture in the reactive mind of an unconscious incident in the past that contained pain. ‘This is the compulsive re-experiencing o
f emotions not appropriate to the present time situation,’ he explained.”5 Norse would go to Duke Street Saint James’s and they would sit at Bill’s desk, Norse holding the cans attached to electrodes while Bill studied the actions of the needle. Burroughs spoke about it later: “I said, ‘What is the problem?’ He said, ‘My loneliness.’ It was not his loneliness, the problem is his boyfriend won’t sleep with him anymore. That’s the problem. In other words, the problem has to involve another will. Another person. Loneliness and depression are always cover ups, the problem is not depression or loneliness. So then you’re getting somewhere. These are preliminary processes. This isn’t the clearing process. Once he realises that this is his problem, well then he’s got to deal with it, one way or another.”

  Bill took Harold to Scientology HQ to meet the head man and offered to pay for Harold to be cleared at the Centre. “I’ll take care of it, Harold, so go ahead.” Harold took the course, but when Bill forgot to pay a few pounds, Harold was inundated with threatening messages: “You are now a non-person required to report to the castle for correction […] pack your bags immediately. You are to fly to Valencia and report to Sea Org for extreme liability.” At least Norse saw the humor of it. What was extraordinary was that Burroughs seemed sufficiently convinced of the efficacy of the E-meter that he was able to suspend belief in the other areas of Scientology doctrine, despite the belief in “Thetans” required to become an “Operating Thetan,” the next level up from “Clear.”