by Barry Miles
Thursday was spent recovering and they all flew back to New York on Friday at 9:30 a.m. Esquire had booked both Burroughs and Genet into the Delmonico for a week to write their stories, and wondered just what they were getting when Bill cryptically asked them to supply research material on purple-assed baboons. For a cover photo shoot they posed a male model lying down, as if clubbed by police, with Burroughs, Southern, and Genet standing around. Genet made a scene with the editor, objecting that he was a “faux mort,” and demanded more money. At this the editor Harold Hayes called him a thief, and Genet replied, “Naturellement. Je suis un voleur.” To Burroughs the best thing about the trip was getting to know Genet: “One of the greatest, most sincere people, and there he was, bamn, Genet!” In Burroughs’s opinion the two twentieth-century writers destined to last were Beckett and Genet. “I thought he was a great person. Incredible person. I never saw him again.” Ginsberg was also impressed. He wrote to British MP Tom Driberg, “I wandered around with Jean Genet. Wound up necking in bed with him—and Wm Burroughs, all week listening to them and teargassed thrice in their company.”
It was at the Delmonico that Burroughs saw Jack Kerouac for the last time. There had been no contact between them for a decade. Now Kerouac was in New York overnight to appear on the September 3, 1968, edition of Firing Line, William F. Buckley’s television show, chaperoned by a pair of his Greek brothers-in-law. Kerouac was drinking heavily, slurring his words, and was clearly in no shape to appear on the show. He wanted Burroughs to accompany him to the TV studio, but Bill had no intention of watching Buckley make a fool of Kerouac, telling him, “Jack, don’t go! You’re in no condition. You’re drunk out of your mind.” It was a disaster. Kerouac tried to ingratiate himself with Buckley by telling him how he, his sister, and mother had voted Republican all their lives. He stumbled over words and interrupted the other speakers. He insulted Lewis Yablonsky, made several vicious remarks about Ginsberg, who did accompany him to the show and was in the audience, and tried to belittle Ed Sanders. The producer of the show finally called Jack a drunken moron and ordered him off the set. Burroughs wasn’t surprised at the outcome; Jack had always been heading in that direction. When Lou Reed asked Burroughs why Kerouac had finished up in such bad shape, Bill said he hadn’t changed much. “He was always like that. First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a tee-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a tee-shirt drinking beer with his mother.”2
After he filed his story, Burroughs stayed on in New York, first at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was pestered by the residents, then at Terry Southern’s triplex apartment at 163 East 36th Street for two weeks, flat-sitting while Terry was away filming. Bill loved the color television and enjoyed the security of a loaded Luger in a drawer in his bed table. He spent his time investigating the 42nd Street sex shops and was delighted by the availability of gay peep shows, the photographs of boys with hard-ons, and battery-powered vibrators: “the complete breakdown of censorship,” he told Brion.3 He said he was on his way back to London to liquidate the apartment.
He had another reason for returning: Antony Balch had written offering five hundred dollars plus airfare for two days’ work reading a voice-over to a 1922 silent movie by Benjamin Christensen called Häxen, now retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages. Burroughs flew back in early October and recorded his commentary on October 11. There was plenty of opportunity for Bill to ad-lib, and some of his commentary is typically Burrovian. In the scene where Maria the Weaver is interrogated by two of the witchfinders, Burroughs comments, “Here we see an example of ‘good cop/bad cop,’ which is still being practiced in police stations all over the world.”4 New York film critics like Jonas Mekas screamed with rage at the idea of tampering with the original, but most people thought the film held together better with Burroughs’s commentary. The eventual DVD release had both versions.
2. Back in Blighty
Bill did not close up the apartment. He told Brion, “I have given up the idea of moving to the States. This apartment is so quiet and conducive to work for one thing and I seem to be able to get twice as much done here.”5 There was also another reason: “new boy fantastic sex who is a cook. Name John Lee.”6 His accountant, Michael Henshaw, had also pointed out the tax advantages of residing outside the United States. By October, he was deeply into The Wild Boys. Ian was doing well as a computer programmer and was in excellent spirits; Alan Watson was back from Monte Carlo and decided to return to Darlington and run the family business; Antony Balch and Bill still spent their time running Scientology routines. Bill still believed implicitly in the efficacy of the E-meter. He told Dr. Joe Gross, “It is amazingly accurate in gauging mental reactions,”7 and wondered how the needle action on the E-meter corresponded to encephalographic action. He thought the “floating needle” might represent alpha waves. A month later he was still content, the apartment was quiet and comfortable, he had a “superlative English boy friend,” and he was turning out a “phenomenal” amount of work. He finished his book of essays, then called Academy 23 but published as The Job, and The Wild Boys was going well. He told Brion, “The essay book is quite outspoken and uncompromising on the women question. (What do you think about women? They are a perfect curse.) The wild boy book is even more anti-female by total omission. The wild boys have nothing to do with women or junk.”8
August 1969 was a busy month. On the eighth and ninth Burroughs was a delegate at the International Literary Conference of the Harrogate Festival of Arts and Sciences alongside Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Jeff Nuttall, B. S. Johnson, Nigel Calder, Chris Evans, and others. J. G. Ballard unfortunately pulled out, but there were plenty of like minds to spend the days and evenings with.
That same month Bill wrote to John Hopkins in Tangier accusing him of having damaged Brion’s literary career due to the freak motorcycling accident they had in the countryside outside Tangier in which Brion lost a toe to a glancing blow from a passing truck. Bill suggested that John should pay a substantial amount of damages, saying Brion’s means of livelihood had been removed. Ingeniously Bill claimed that Brion was a “peripatetic” writer and needed to get up and walk around in order for the ideas to come. He was now incapable of walking, and therefore of writing. Who knows what fantasies Brion had written to Bill. However, it turned out that Morocco, surprisingly, had a formal list of compensation for injuries, ranging from a million dollars for loss of both arms and legs right down to the loss of a middle toe: 7,500 dirhams, or $1,500. This Brion accepted (Hopkins had already paid his medical fees). After days of red-faced raging by Brion, attempts to pummel Hopkins with his crutches in an elevator, and late-night hysterical phone calls, their friendship was able to resume. Afterward Brion blamed Princess Martha Ruspoli for putting the evil eye on him.
On August 17, after a flurry of intensive work, Burroughs completed work on The Wild Boys and handed in the manuscript. There was a huge amount of wild boys material. In addition to the book itself, it overflowed into The Revised Boy Scout Manual, later published in RE/Search magazine; an illustrated book with Malcolm McNeill called Ah Puch Is Here (published as Ah Pook Is Here without its illustrations); and Port of Saints, which is really Wild Boys II, which Burroughs published in the original and in a revised edition. He often said that the first section of The Wild Boys should not have been included as it had no relation to the rest of the book, and it should be combined with Port of Saints to make a true Wild Boy book. He went to New York in September to work with his editors, staying at the Chelsea Hotel, but was back in London by October 12. He explained how he approached the book: “In the Wild Boys I was really quite deliberately returning to older styles of writing. Quite a bit of it is really 19th century. I used cut-ups but very sparingly. There are literary situations where they are useful, and others where they are not. Now, in recreating a delirium, they’re very good because that is what is happening. In high fever the images cut in quite arbitrarily
. So I used that in the dream section where the Boy is dying in the jungle.”9 The book stands by itself; there is no carryover of characters from previous books. “It’s all simply a personal projection. A prediction? I hope so. Would I consider events similar to the Wild Boys scenario desirable? Yes, desirable to me.”10 He recognized it as fantasy. “The Wild Boys was pretty removed from any sequences occurring in reality. It was more like a children’s story. Peter Pan or something like that.”11
During the two-year period he worked on The Wild Boys, Burroughs made a number of scrapbook layouts relative to the book, selecting pictures from magazines and newspapers of boys who could play wild boy roles, also including photographs of boys he knew who appeared as characters in the book. His characters were composites of old boyfriends, friends, and projections of boys known only from photographs and books: “Your own photos or photos in newspapers and magazines may suggest a narrative. I got the ‘Frisco Kid’ section in The Wild Boys from an 1882 photo which has been lost of Front Street Nome Alaska. And of course various models can represent the same character. Audrey, Kiki, Ali, Jerry, Pinkie, Ginger, Old Sarge are composites of dreams, photos, films… pieces of an old movie.”
Burroughs had originally planned a book called Academy 23, intended to combine the wild boy material with the more technical subjects he had been writing about in the Burroughs Academy. His idea had been to include his voluminous writing on cut-ups, and other literary techniques. It soon became obvious that the material was too disparate to put into one book. Burroughs had considered linking it by using some of the interview material produced by French literary journalist Daniel Odier, who was preparing a book of interviews with Burroughs for Editions Pierre Belfond in Paris. The two of them discussed the idea in the spring of 1968, but the sheer volume of wild boys material caused Burroughs to abandon this plan. Odier’s book appeared as Entretiens avec William Burroughs in January 1969, and after parts of it were published in Evergreen Review it became obvious that the book should be issued in English. Burroughs revised the text of the interviews, adding some new material and occasionally illustrating his answers with quotes from his texts. Sometimes he had already answered the questions in his books and so he inserted the already published material in place of his original reply. Burroughs: “The result is interview form presented as a film with fade-outs and flash-back illustrating the answers.” He called the book The Job, published in 1970.
“I’ve written an actual treatise on revolutionary tactics and weapons. That is, a treatise on the actual methods and various revolutionary techniques. A great deal of revolutionary tactics I see now are really nineteenth century tactics. People think in terms of small arms and barricades, in terms of bombing police stations and post offices like the IRA of 1916. What I’m talking about in The Job is bringing the revolution into the 20th century which includes, above all, the use of mass media. That’s where the real battle will be fought.
“The last frontier is being closed to youth. However there are many roads to space. To achieve complete freedom from past conditioning is to be in space. Techniques exist for achieving such freedom. These techniques are being concealed and withheld. In The Job I consider techniques of discovery.”12 Subjects discussed varied from details of the work and persecution of Wilhelm Reich, a very laudatory survey of Scientology, a description of the Mayan Control Calendar, the 7-hertz killer whistle, capital punishment, censorship, and the vested interests of power and money. As usual, Burroughs revised the book after publication to bring it up to date, so the 1973 paperback edition included several new texts, including “Playback from Eden to Watergate.”
Virtually all of Burroughs’s theoretical texts were included and it is the best guide possible to Burroughs’s books and his ideas, his investigation of systems of control, and the development of methods of resisting and breaking control systems. For him it was quite straightforward: “The control machine is simply the machinery—police, education, etc.—used by a group in power to keep itself in power and extend its power.” As a writer he was particularly concerned about his own chosen tool. He wrote, “My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host, though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down. […] Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis, will any human creature survive? Taking the virus-eye view, the ideal situation would appear to be one in which the virus replicates in cells without in any way disturbing their normal metabolism. This has been suggested as the ideal biological situation toward which all viruses are slowly evolving.”
For one year Burroughs even exempted himself from the Western calendar, an obvious control system accepted unthinkingly by everyone. He created his own, which rather resembled that imposed during the French Revolution. The Dream Calendar, as he called it, was started on December 23, 1969, and each month consisted of twenty-three days, based on the Mayan calendar system. There were supposed to be ten months in his year, but the system began with only eight separate months, and they came around in a slightly different order the second time, with a new month, Wiener Wald, added. Burroughs used the system for a year, dating all manuscripts and letters that way. Unfortunately, the days somehow got miscounted in several of the months, making the dating of letters from that period a little difficult since the Dream Calendar date is sometimes as much as five days off.
Burroughs called the months Terre Haute, Marie Celeste, Bellevue, Seal Point, Harbor Beach, Niño Perdido, Sweet Meadows, and Land’s End. Wiener Wald was added after Seal Point on the second pass. Knowing the starting date enables one to calculate any Burroughs date against the regular calendar. For instance Bellevue 3 would be January 19, 1970. Burroughs: “The starting date used is December 23, 1969 which is Terre Haute 23 in this calendar. Calculations from this date can be made into the past or the future. We could for example calculate on what date Terre Haute 23 fell on 77,000,000,000 years ago… nodding listlessly in doorways on a mild gray day they died of an overdose of time.” Books from the period, such as Port of Saints, sometimes refer to the calendar but without an explanation to the reader. Only in the subsequent collection of short stories, Exterminator!, is there an explanation of the system, as created by one of Burroughs’s many multiple personalities:
“The Colonel decides to make his own time. He opens a school notebook and constructs a simple calendar consisting of ten months with 26 days in each month to begin on this day February 21, 1970, Raton Pass 14 in the new calendar. The months have names like old Pullman cars in America where the Colonel had lived until his 18th year.” Needless to say, Raton Pass is not one of the months used in Burroughs’s own dream calendars, which in any case had twenty-three-day months.13
By now Bill had found a safe way of using pot without fear of being busted. His London physician, Dr. Dunbar, began prescribing tincture of cannabis in mid-1969. He prescribed it to regular patients as a treatment for paranoia: pot was illegal so users felt paranoid. By prescribing pot, the paranoia was cured. The cannabis cost one pound five shillings and came in a bright green alcohol solution. A bottle lasted a week (“Or maybe less,” as Bill’s later boyfriend John Brady once commented). Bill used to soak his Senior Service cigarettes in the liquid, convinced that no one in restaurants or bars would notice that he was smoking a bright green cigarette that smelled somewhat different from ordinary ones.
In September, Burroughs made another trip to New York to do the rewrite on the screenplay of The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. He was put up in a superb apartment owned by Harrison Starr on West 11th Street in the Village with a living room, bedroom, kitchenette, and a separate study. Bill mused, “Jesus, wouldn’t I rather have that apartment and be living here instead of being in London? Anytime I go out day and night there’s a place to eat,
the food is good.” He began to wonder, “What the hell am I doing in London?” Nothing came of the film, but Cape Goliard published the screenplay in London the next year. Even film scripts were subjected to Burroughs’s new literary techniques: “Now this is perfectly straight writing. Nonetheless, I cut up every page and suddenly got a lot of new ideas that were then incorporated into the structure of the narrative. This is perfectly straight film treatment, quite intelligible to the average reader, in no sense experimental writing.”14
Back in London, on the early evening of October 21, 1969, some friends of John Cooke’s, who was then living in Cuernavaca, came to visit, but as Bill poured drinks and played the host he was conscious of a great depression growing on him. He felt terrible, what he described as “a terrible fear of death.” Suddenly there was a loud bang, which later turned out to be the sound of a shotgun. A rejected suitor had shot his girlfriend in a bank just off nearby St. James’s Square, but it was not her death that he had an intimation of. He later learned that Kerouac had died in Florida on that day, at the same time (11:00 a.m. Florida time). “Listen, it’s better to see a little forward than not. That’s the way it goes.”
Chapter Forty-Three
The novel is a nineteenth century form. The plot, the beginning, the middle and the end, this is quite as arbitrary as the formula of the sonnet. We’re getting away from it now.1
