Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Though he was a late addition to the pantheon, Bill got his money’s worth and John appeared as private eye Clem Snide’s assistant in Cities of the Red Night: “Jim Brady… 135 pounds, black Irish,”7 and also in the role of a deckhand in Boston in 1702: “Sean Brady: black Irish with curly black hair and a quick wide smile.”8 With the extra cost of John weighing on his finances, Burroughs needed to raise some money. Brion Gysin was in the same situation and they decided to act on the idea of combining their archives to sell them. They hired Barry Miles, the cofounder of International Times and co-owner of the Indica Bookshop and Gallery in the sixties (and the author of this book), to describe their papers for them. He flew to New York to discuss the possibility of selling the archive to Columbia University’s Butler Rare Book Library and they explained how they would like the material described in order to assess it and decide on a price. The actual description took many months, as Burroughs’s papers were in a complete mess with one large bundle of several thousand pages tied up in thick string and labeled on the top page in thick black magic marker, “Bottom of the Barrel.” It was from this bundle that Miles was able to compile the more or less complete run of numbered pages that made up the only manuscript of Queer. Miles sorted the papers by page size—American, French, and British paper sizes all differing—then by typeface, then with Burroughs’s help began to identify the year and location that each run of pages belonged to. Often they were numbered and so sequences began to emerge. It was a long process because much of the material had been cut up, so complete runs of pages were rare; also Burroughs would often be excited by the long-unseen pages and remove them from their new files to work with the material again.

  On September 6, 1972, Brion Gysin arrived from Paris to help with the cataloging, bringing with him his contribution to the archive: his letters from Alice B. Toklas and Paul Bowles, as well as Burroughs’s manuscripts and his own collages and collaborations with Burroughs. Brion moved into flat 22 and Bill and John moved to flat 18, a small two-room flat in the eaves of the building. (In March 1973 Burroughs managed to reassign the lease on flat 22 for a year’s rent.) In the event, while Miles was in New York delivering the completed description to Columbia and collecting more archive material that Burroughs had left scattered across town with various friends, Brion stepped in and involved rare book dealer Richard Aaron, an American living in Switzerland, who sold the archive out from under Columbia’s nose to Roberto Altman. This had all the fantasy elements that Gysin so loved: secret Swiss numbered accounts, the air of intrigue, and lack of tax on the income. The intention was to realize money on the archive quickly, but in the end it took just as long as it would have done to sell the archive to Columbia, and what is more, it tied the archive up for more than thirty-five years so that no one could get access to it, even Burroughs.

  Roberto Altman, who bought the archive, wanted to create a cultural center where the archive, and others like it, could be studied. Burroughs thought him to be “a very pleasant young man” but “kind of nutty, been in sanatoriums and mental institutions a number of times.” He also could not speak English so he would not be able to read the archive materials himself. However, in August 1973, Bill, Brion, and Richard Aaron traveled to Vaduz in Liechtenstein, taking the archives with them. Roberto Altman’s father had a house in Vaduz, built deep into the hillside so that it looked deceptively small. Brion was astonished to see an original Rembrandt and other incredibly valuable art on the walls. They checked the archives against Miles’s inventory, then Roberto snapped his fingers, “Igor,” and out came a man carrying the cash. He piled it on the table and counted it out: $60,000 in Swiss francs. Brion was in ecstasy. The money was put in a briefcase in the correct thriller movie manner, and the next day they drove back through blinding rain to Richard Aaron’s house outside Geneva. Bill kept his hand on the handle of the briefcase the whole way, even when they stopped to eat. Ideally he would have liked to have been handcuffed to it. On Monday they took the money to a Swiss bank and sat in a little private room and received their secret account numbers. When asked if they could withdraw the money if they needed it, the banker shrugged: “Il n’y a pas de problème!” It was small change to them; they were used to African politicians depositing millions. Unfortunately, although Altman’s father was a very wealthy man with a private bank in Paris, he got into financial difficulties when the circular building to house the cultural center was only half built, and the archive remained in storage for the next decade before being sold to an American book collector. It remained inaccessible until the New York Public Library finally bought it in 2010.

  Before the archive was sold, some of its key elements had to be retrieved. Years earlier, Bill had left all his correspondence with Allen Ginsberg used in the assembling of The Naked Lunch in safekeeping with Alan Ansen, and this group of letters was needed for the archive although technically they belonged to Ginsberg. On August 15, Bill and John Brady went to Athens to collect them from Ansen. They spent the first night with him at 19 Dimocharous before moving to the Hilton. Alan showed them the town and it was a perfect holiday. Afterward Bill rented a villa for two weeks on the small island of Spetses, on the east coast of the Peloponnese, through some friends of Ansen’s at the American Center for Creative Arts. It was six hours from Athens by boat and two hours by hovercraft. For a dollar a day they had a bare room with a couple of pegs on which to hang clothes, a dresser and two camp beds, a bathroom, and a kitchen down the hall with a fridge for their evening ouzo. The ocean was only a hundred feet away, just across the street, and Bill swam twice a day. The beach was sharp pebbles so they had to wear slippers to avoid being cut. John couldn’t swim so Bill found a large rubber ring for him and always swam close to him. The villa was on the harbor. After evening drinks, they would go down to the restaurants: good cheap mullet, Greek salads with feta cheese and olives, plenty of retsina.

  The owner of the villa, Takis, lent Bill a copy of John Fowles’s The Magus, which is set in Spetses, and Bill found that the only way to see the Villa Bourani, the house of the Magus, was on horseback. Bill rented a horse but had forgotten how many years it had been since he was last on horseback, and the going was difficult. On the way back they were coming down a steep slope, almost in the town, when the horse saw a fallen fig, stopped abruptly, and bent to eat it, throwing Bill right over its head into the rocks. He remembered his judo courses and knew how to fall and so did not hurt himself. In the correct manner, he got straight back on the horse and rode into town. The next day he had bruises up and down his body.9 Other than the horse, the whole visit was a great success. All the details of their trip, right down to the copy of The Magus and Bill’s fall from the horse, were later faithfully reproduced in Cities of the Red Night.10

  While he was there, Burroughs had one of his recurring terror dreams involving his mother: “I have a recurring nightmare where some very large poison centipede, or scorpion, suddenly rushes on me while I’m looking about for something to kill it. Then I wake up screaming and kicking the bedclothes off. I was with my mother in a rather incestuous context. I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous. So this is a slightly incestuous connection with my mother and I said, ‘Mother, I am going to kill the scorpion.’ At this point the scorpion suddenly rushed at me.”11

  This was around the same time that he was making his latest attempt at a bestseller, a book about “an incestuous family, father, mother, two brothers, two sisters—completely interchangeable sexual combinations. And they succeed because they are incestuous, liberated from all their inhibitions.” They sell short during the Depression: “they are able to fill a swimming pool with gold dollars. […] What they do, in a sense, is make capitalism work. That is, they buy up the dust bowl, so they keep people there on the land and turn them all into incestuous family groups in completely interchangeable sexual combinations. So not only are they happier, but they’re also more efficient, and nobody could compete with these families. […] I thought
it might have more popular appeal… And that of course brings them into conflict with Big Money; they’re subverting the whole meaning of money.”12

  Disappointed by the collapse of the archive study center scheme, Burroughs considered starting one of his own. Although he later claimed that he escaped from Britain to New York, when he interviewed David Bowie for Rolling Stone magazine in November 1973, Bill told him, “At the moment I’m trying to set up an institute of advanced studies somewhere in Scotland. Its aim will be to extend awareness and alter consciousness in the direction of greater range, flexibility and effectiveness at a time when traditional disciplines have failed to come up with viable solutions. You see, the advent of the space age and the possibility of exploring galaxies and contacting alien life forms poses an urgent necessity for radically new solutions. […] No drug experiments are planned and no drugs other than alcohol, tobacco and personal medications obtained on prescription will be permitted in the center. Basically, the experiments we propose are inexpensive and easy to carry out. Things such as yoga-style meditation and exercises, communication, sound, light and film experiments, experiments with sensory deprivation chambers, pyramids, psychotronic generators and Reich’s orgone accumulators, experiments with infrasound, experiments with dream and sleep. […] Expansion of awareness, eventually leading to mutations.”13 The idea of using the archive’s money to buy a property in Scotland did not last very long, but he did send away to real estate agents for details of anything that might be suitable.

  With the archive dealt with, Bill settled into his new apartment. The top three floors of Dalmeny Court all had dormer windows projecting through the steeply sloped roof, and Bill’s new flat was as high as the elevator reached. Bill used the front room, overlooking Ryder Street and the Economist Building, as his combined living room, study, and bedroom. He sat between his desk and the window, the sunset over the rooftops filling the room with golden light. A large hole had been crudely cut in the desk to accommodate the power cord of his electric typewriter. Either side the window were speakers mounted on top of shallow-drawer manuscript file cabinets. To Bill’s right was a double-shelved bookcase with sliding glass doors, filled with foreign editions of his own work and a collection of his favorite books. On top were Bill’s reel-to-reel and cassette tape recorders arranged next to a Johnnie Walker Red Label whiskey bottle and mixers. A coffee table stood in the center of the room, and the far side was dominated by a double bed with a low headboard and a bright red counterpane. A large Brion Gysin oil painting of the Sahara hung on the wall above. There was a small back bedroom and a storage room with a four-drawer file cabinet.

  This was a time when Britain was beset with almost intractable labor problems. After a six-week strike in 1972 by coal miners over pay, Britain’s stocks of fuel were getting so low that the government had to impose a three-day week on industry and begin selective cuts in electricity supply, with some power cuts lasting as long as nine hours. Burroughs described the situation to his son: “England is a gloomy cold unlighted sinking ship that will disappear with a spectral cough.”14 On this occasion the miners won, but in a subsequent dispute in February 1974 the country was once again in periodic darkness. The BBC went off the air at 10:30 p.m. to conserve power, and a three-day workweek was once again imposed on industry. Bill had had enough of the inconvenience, and not being able to watch television finally tipped the balance and made him decide to leave. He was dependent upon electricity for heat; his flat, like most in Britain at that time, did not have central heating. He used so-called night storage heaters, which warmed up with cheap-rate power at night and released their heat in the day. But Bill wanted heat in the evenings and at night when they were cooling down, so he replaced them with bar heaters, a very expensive and inadequate method of heating a room. He was always cold. And when power cuts came, they would not work at all. More than a decade later it still rankled, and in a scene in The Western Lands he wrote, “A group of languid Bras have gathered in a Cheney Walk flat that attempts to capture the effect of an Egyptian garden in the drowsy noon heat. Unfortunately the storage heaters aren’t working. The man from London Electric, who alone is authorized to repair a storage heater, muttered something about ‘the element’ three weeks ago, and hasn’t been seen since.”15 This is a typical example of how Burroughs processed even the most mundane information in order to use it as a future subject for his writing.

  Life was miserable. Burroughs had been in London too long; he had not lived in the same city for this long since he was a child. In June 1973 he began seriously researching the possibility of moving to Costa Rica. He told Shell Thomas, “I am absolutely fed up with London and cannot afford to live here any longer, prices have doubled and the whole island is slowly foundering.” He said he had considered a move to southern Ireland, where there was no tax for artists and writers, and that another possibility was Costa Rica. “I would like to see some sun and water other than rain.”16 The island in Scotland was another possibility he reconsidered, and he wrote to John Calder to ask about prices and living conditions there.

  One of the biggest problems in his life was the situation with John Brady, which had now turned hopeless. John would sleep through the mornings and then go out. In the evening he would lurk about the place disturbing Bill’s work. Burroughs complained, “It came down to the fact of my giving him some money to get out of the way. So I could have some peace. Which is a terrible situation when you’re paying somebody to go away for a while.”17 John began stealing from him. Bill would say, “Well, Johnny, I was going to give you five pounds out of my wallet, but I seem to be short five pounds,” and John would just stare back at him insolently. He didn’t deny it. He just said, “Well, put yourself in my shoes.”

  Burroughs kept Alan Ansen abreast of his plans to move, but Ansen was shocked when he found that Bill did not like London. He had assumed the planned move was for tax purposes. Ansen said, “He had the cream of the crop when it came to boys, and Sonia Orwell I know said she found him a delightful companion.”18 When Allen Ginsberg visited London in 1973 for a poetry reading with W. H. Auden he was shocked by Bill’s low spirits. On his return to the States, Ginsberg approached the City College of New York and suggested that they invite Burroughs to teach one of their three-month courses by distinguished writers. They were delighted by the idea and offered Burroughs the February-to-May 1974 course: two hours a week at a fee of $7,000. He accepted at once. He was sixty.

  John Brady was not at all pleased by this turn of events, and Bill mollified him with promises of trying to find him a job in New York, explaining that the New York police were traditionally Irish and that he might find employment there. They both knew that Bill had no intention of ever seeing Johnny again. While Bill was in New York teaching, John had a series of parties that drew complaints from the neighbors, and he also pestered Antony Balch for money until Bill had to write and tell Antony, “Listen, you just have to cut him off.” He sent money to John and told him to lay off Antony, but it was no use. In June, after his teaching stint, Bill returned to sort out his belongings. He put most of them in storage at Harrod’s for future shipment to the States once he had found a fixed address and asked Barry Miles to sell the rest of the books, magazines, and other artifacts. He sold the lease on the apartment to Mrs. Le Brock who lived next door, and then returned to New York, ready for his new life. John Brady bowed to the inevitable and was calm and reasonable about losing his home and income. He disappeared back into the Piccadilly underworld and Burroughs never heard from him again.

  Wind in the chilly heavens over London a dead boy on the ghostly pillow lips chapped broken sunlight a flicker of Jermyn Street pale half moon of ghostly dandies behind his head a cool dark windy evening sky washed by wind and rain broken dreams in the air.19

  BOOK EIGHT

  The Prodigal Son Returns

  Chapter Forty-Five

  I’ve had periods of complete writer’s block where I can’t look at a typewriter. Well, the only th
ing to do is write it out. What you do is routine work like answering letters and writing prefaces and all that routine work. Best thing for writer’s block is a little exercise, get out and row. Of course, someone may be out to get you, you may be under psychic attack.1

  1. James Winston Grauerholz

  In 1974 New York was notorious worldwide for its high crime rate: Central Park was unsafe to walk in, even in the day, with a high incidence of rape and mugging; the subway was underfunded, covered in graffiti, and prone to break down; homeless persons, beggars, prostitutes, and pimps roamed the streets, often aggressively accosting passersby. By October 1975 the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but President Ford refused to allow federal aid, resulting in the famous New York Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”2 That year there were 1,919 murders.3

  Burroughs arrived in New York in February to take up his post as a teacher. He sublet a loft at 452 Broadway between Grand and Howard, from the painter Michael Balog, a friend of Robert Rauschenberg’s. It was in a compact five-story cast-iron warehouse building just north of Canal Street, an area filled with writers and artists. He was teaching at the City College of New York at 160 Convent Avenue, in Hamilton Heights in Harlem.

  Teaching drained all his energy: he got nothing back from his students. They were not even listening; they sat around reading comic books and chewing gum. He would ask if there were any questions and be met by a wall of blank faces. They were just taking the course for credits, and Bill looked like an easy mark who would not flunk them. Out of the thirty students there were only three who had a glimmer of talent. “So I passed everybody on anything they wanted to do: fiction, short story. I passed ’em all. None of the stuff was worth a shit, except about three papers that were interesting. I decided then that I didn’t ever want to teach again.”4 The problem was that it took Burroughs between six and eight hours to prepare each lecture, and he was doing two lectures a week and two hours in his office for student consultation. Evenings were taken up by reading student papers. It was a full-time job. “I realized that it had been impossible for me to write one line over the course of four months. I was mentally drained by the end of the day, and I found that others around me felt the same way.”5 Bill agreed with Auden, who said, “For an Englishman coming over here to teach, the rudeness of the students is quite shocking. […] They begin with the idea that they are the most important ones to be pleased—not taught—and that their untutored reactions should be the final judgement on their instructor.”6