Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  The event did a lot to establish Burroughs as the “Godfather of Punk” and place him in the center of the seventies youth movement. Far from being a generation, the original Beats had now managed to take up positions in three different decades: Kerouac was the hard-drinking, loudmouth fifties, Ginsberg the psychedelic, antiwar sixties, and now Burroughs represented all that was cool about the seventies. In so doing, of course, the event lost any claim to academic inquiry and became an exercise in fame and an excuse for the downtown art scene to strut their stuff. Afterward Burroughs felt obliged to write to Gérard-Georges Lemaire thanking him for his participation and saying, “In some respects I regret that the event strayed so far from the original conception of a visit to New York by the French intellectual community who recognize my work. […] Of course, the Colloque de Tanger and the Paris–New York events were the inspiration for the Nova Convention, and I am grateful to you for your many efforts behind these and other matters.”19 This was the new Burroughs who recognized the need to be commercial in order to survive in America. This was the Warhol era: the surface was everything; fame, glamour, and success were what counted, not content.

  4. Cities of the Red Night

  Bill’s personal assistant during the Nova Convention was Victor Bockris, an English public-school boy, educated in the United States, a poet and writer, who moved in Warhol circles. In January 1979, Victor proposed his own form of Burroughs celebration and began work on a book of imaginary dinner parties, each with a theme, collaged together from transcribed tapes of actual dinners with Burroughs. He explained, “In 1979 when I started having dinner with him several nights a week, Burroughs was the worshipped King of the Beats and Godfather of Punk as well as King of the Underground. He was definitely one of the coolest people in the city. I think the fact that he had never sold out, and had come back to seize his throne at the same time that great yahoo Nixon fell from his, was a true and irresistible story.”20 Over the following months Bockris brought over Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood, Joe Strummer, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and a host of others for tape-recorded dinners at the Bunker. The book, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker by Victor Bockris, was published in 1981. Burroughs was ambivalent about it: Victor had tried to show Bill as a normal person, with fears and emotions like everyone else, but by concentrating on celebrity dinner guests he gave the impression that Burroughs spent his whole time hanging out with stars. Burroughs said, “It isn’t my book, although I had to go through and correct it word for word. When people take dictation from conversations they misread words and just get a meaningless mess. So I did a lot of work on correcting it. For another thing, I wrote the end. I have mixed feelings about it. There are some good photographs in it, but I could have lived without it.”21 However, Burroughs was not immune to being feted; he liked the attention, and he enjoyed the razzamatazz that Victor brought to his life. Victor was sharp and provocative, ideas came a mile a minute. Victor was totally on, sometimes exhaustingly so, but always exciting and energetic. Some members of Bill’s circle felt threatened by Victor and attempted to turn Burroughs against him; the court intrigue was amusing to see as they jockeyed for position.

  That summer, after five years of work, Bill finished the first draft of Cities of the Red Night. Some sections had come to him complete in a dream: “Sometimes I get long sequential narrative dreams just like a movie. […] The opening chapter of Cities of the Red Night—The Health Officer—was such a chapter, a dream that I had about a cholera epidemic in Southwest Africa, and I just sat down and wrote it out. I was reading rather than writing.”22 He explained what Cities was about: “It involves time travel. It is a book of retroactively changing history by introducing the possibility of a simple invention—namely the cartridge gun—back in the late eighteenth century. That has been very much my concern recently. I’ve always been very much interested in the whole development of weaponry.”23 It was originally subtitled “A Boys Book.” It was Brion Gysin who gave Burroughs the names of the cities: Ghadis, Naufana, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Tamaghis, magic words that you are supposed to repeat as you fall asleep if you want to find certain information in your dreams. There are no real cities in the Gobi Desert area called this. “They are magic words so I decided to use them for my cities. I used them to get to the bottom of the book. And they did work, they worked in the sense that I managed to finish the book, get the book together.”24

  “I had one version and James did another, and we finally took his version, although in some ways Dick Seaver liked my version better, but I think James’s version was a little bit more comprehensible, much more easy to follow. Differences of juxtaposition, not of content.”25 Burroughs dedicated the book to Brion Gysin, Steven Lowe for his research into pirates, Dick Seaver his publisher, Peter Matson his agent, and to James Grauerholz, “who edited this book into present time.” James worked long and hard to knock the manuscript into shape. Burroughs had always depended upon his friends to assist when it came time for the final draft. Allen Ginsberg played an important role in shaping both Junky and Queer, and worked on the early drafts of The Naked Lunch. The Naked Lunch itself was typed and shaped largely by Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles while Bill stuck photographs of the Peruvian jungle on the wall and shot at them with his air gun. The Soft Machine was assembled and edited entirely by Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin in Paris while Burroughs was in Tangier, and Ian Sommerville had a lot to do with both The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express. This is how Burroughs had always worked. In earlier times, Burroughs would have published both versions as with the original Paris editions and the rewrites of The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded for the American market. All Burroughs’s major books are fugitive. No fixed text seems possible, each version points up different aspects of Burroughs’s vision, and ultimately they have to be seen as one giant multivolume book including all the different versions.

  In 1980, when Burroughs felt he had enough material to complete Cities of the Red Night, he assembled a final draft almost at random. He had two more or less complete narratives, the pirate story and Clem Snide, each in a separate folder, that were supposed to merge so that in the end the two narratives were seen to be one. He took a few manuscript pages from one story, then added one or two pages from the other story, back and forth, without regard for the actual text. It was hard to follow and very “cutty.” Then Burroughs asked James to go through the whole manuscript and take out everything he thought didn’t belong there. He took out one hundred pages. Bill put twenty pages back in, so most of James’s cuts stayed out. With the matter of the two converging narratives James took one look and said, “ ‘Woah Nelly! Let’s just undo this,’ and I uncut—as I so often have done—‘the man who uncut the cut ups’—I reassembled the original folders and I said, ‘Suppose we break the stories into the scenes and movements of the story and let’s suppose we give the reader at least 15 to 20 pages of each story so that he or she can get into that venue and into that setting so that something happens there and it comes to a nice little ending vignette. Then you go to the other one,’ and I slowed the cutting pace and I made it much, much more readable.” James made diagrams showing how different parts could fit together and finally made it gel together as a double narrative. This was the kind of input that Burroughs needed and wanted. A comparison of the two manuscripts shows that the Grauerholz edit improved the book enormously, which is why Burroughs used it, after making a few more changes of his own. It was published in March 1981.

  Burroughs did readings and book signing sessions all over the country to publicize the book and gave a number of interviews in which he discussed the theme of the book:

  Captain Mission was an idealist, like I once was. He believed you could establish Utopia, a place where everyone would be able to live as he wished and express his thoughts freely without fear of censorship or worse, imprisonment. More important, equality reigned. But Mission was either too naïve or not strong enough, so his little colony was ov
erthrown eventually by natives and he was killed. […] I used Mission as a symbol, a catalyst for a small band of contemporaries attempting to repeat the experiment. […] A plague from the old “Cities of the Red Night” wipes out most of civilisation reducing the population to the level of 300 years ago. My principal character Noah Blake feels the moment propitious to take a page from Captain Mission’s book… I wouldn’t take it all too seriously.26

  A lot of it came from my sense of the actual possibilities of those real colonies at the time. I was familiar with the way Science Fiction had used that idea, but certainly I’d say my handling of it comes more from actual materials than from Science Fiction. You can see the appeal of going back and rewriting history from certain crucial junctures. One of the things that interested me in Cities of the Red Night was seeing what would have happened if you could get rid of the Catholic influence. Even after the Spanish were kicked out of South America by the liberal revolutions of 1848, their whole way of doing things—the bureaucracy, the language, the calendar, the Church—was still in effect. What would have happened if that influence had left with the Spanish?27

  Nineteen seventy-nine was another busy year for Burroughs and included a lot of foreign travel. He flew to Zurich to attend the opening of Brion’s Dreamachine show on June 6. He and Brion stayed with Carl Laszlo, the show’s backer, for about a week in his art-filled house at 22 Sonnenweg in Basel. Carl put on a spread for them, including two kilos of beluga caviar in a huge chamber pot and vintage pink champagne. There was so much of it that each morning Bill’s friend and Swiss publisher Udo Breger would go over to Carl Laszlo’s house and join Bill and Brion for caviar on toast, coffee, and a joint for breakfast. Bill recalled happily, “That’s the only time I’ve ever had all the caviar I could eat.”28 Bill saw the lemurs in the Basel zoo and the sights.

  Bill, Brion, Udo, and Carl drove out to see Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, at his house in the Rittimatte, about thirty miles outside of Basel. Hofmann’s property was on beautiful land that crossed the French border, and he told Burroughs that he sometimes saw chamois in the woods. Hofmann was then seventy-three, retired. He made his own liqueurs and had a heated swimming pool. Hofmann’s wife, Anita, was there, and his old friend the American author Robert Gordon Wasson. Wasson was eighty-one, an ethnomycologist who had been vice president of J.P. Morgan, and one of the first westerners to take part in the Mazatec mushroom ritual. Unfortunately in 1957 he published an article about it in Life magazine, and the Mazatec community was overrun by Americans, all wanting to take the magic mushrooms. Wasson had written and published Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1967) and The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1978), coauthored with Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck. Burroughs was particularly interested in Wasson’s research and enjoyed the meeting. Hofmann was just finishing work on his most famous book, LSD My Problem Child (Burroughs thought it was a great title for a book). Both Hofmann and Wasson complained about Leary sensationalizing the whole experience, and Burroughs agreed with them.

  At the end of June, Burroughs was one of the participants in the first World Festival of Poetry, “Beatniks on the Beach,” held on the beach at Castelporziano at Ostia, the Roman beach resort. This was where Pier Paolo Pasolini had been murdered a few years earlier. A big rock ’n’ roll stage had been constructed, there were naked people swimming and wandering in the crowds, and a great party atmosphere most of the time with people camping in the dunes and lots of pot and hash. But by the end of the second day, things began to get out of hand. Burroughs was there with Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, John Giorno, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and dozens more. Ginsberg wrote, “Ostia international gathering—big adventure lotsa anarchists screaming and throwing sand—10 or 20 thousand people the last of three nights on the beach, Burroughs, Yevtushenko, Corso, 13 European poets di Prima, Barker & Gasgoyne there earlier, LeRoi Jones, Gysin, Waldman, Berrigan, Ted Jones half dozen more. Peter ended the evening with banjo & the stage collapsed with autograph seeking congratulators crowding up 5 minutes after the last note of a 4 hour exhausting contest to keep the microphone in sane hands.”29 Allen, Amiri Baraka, and Yevtushenko considered canceling the third day because of the violence and difficulty in keeping the microphone out of the hands of the Italian anarchists who thought it was elitist for these Americans to do all the talking.

  Burroughs spent the summer in Boulder teaching Joseph Conrad, The Great Gatsby, and the work of British author Denton Welch. Welch first makes a named appearance toward the end of Cities of the Red Night when the protagonist buys some light reading: An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad, Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes, and Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch.30 It was through Cabell Hardy that Burroughs became reacquainted with Welch, at that time largely unknown and mostly out of print. Cabell knew someone in Boulder who had a collection of his books and borrowed them for Burroughs to read. He was astonished. “I didn’t realize to what extent I’d been influenced by him […] like ‘my horrible red little pony showing its awful yellow teeth.’ So I used the same phrase, that he hated horses, Audrey and Kim hated horses, he hated their recalcitrantness and their awful yellow teeth. When I reread it, I found that I had really memorized these sections from it. That was more than twenty years later.”31 Bill began to collect Welch’s books: In Youth Is Pleasure; A Voice Through a Cloud; the Journals; a collection of short stories called Brave and Cruel and another called A Last Sheaf. Burroughs loved his exquisite, microscopic observations, his sensitivity, his ability to make a big thing out of just buying a cracked porcelain teacup, and the way his books have no real plot; they are strictly autobiographical and simply unfold.

  At the age of twenty Welch was badly injured in a bicycle accident, which led to his early death at the age of thirty-three in 1948. Only after his accident did he begin writing, using his short life experience up until the accident as his subject matter, which he recalled in extraordinary detail. Bill tried to interest Brion Gysin in Welch’s work, to no avail: “Brion Gysin hated Denton Welch. Didn’t see that it is just the petulant queerness in which he is straightjacketed—‘Little Punky’—that makes his works such a great escape act. Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality, so [the] writer can escape the limits of reality.”32 In the mid-forties Burroughs had given Welch to Kerouac to read, and it is possible that this is where Kerouac got the idea of not fictionalizing his life experiences in his writing but recounting things more or less accurately as they happened.

  It was some time after rereading Denton Welch that Burroughs suddenly realized that all through the years he had used Welch as a model for his Kim Carsons character—that of Burroughs himself—who appeared in The Wild Boys, then in a major role in Port of Saints and Exterminator! “He’s definitely based on Denton Welch. I am Kim Carsons, very much so. I’d just say he was a very important element in my character, sort of an alter ego. I wouldn’t say I was him, because that’s not the way it works. People don’t have any one thing that they are or one character.”33

  The Denton Welch figure was combined with the stereotypical cynical, petulant, flippant young man who occurs often in Burroughs’s prose and who had his origins in Saki’s Comus Bassington and/or Clovis Sangrail (and who bore a strong resemblance to Mikey Portman): the archetypal sulking child in rebellion against parental authority, a Wild Boy, Burroughs himself.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Being under psychic attack, depression, anxiety, fear of some impending danger, when you sift it down is a feeling of a hostile presence. The important thing is to find out where it is coming from. When you do that, the battle is pretty well won, because once identified and clearly seen it disperses.1

  1. New York Days

  Bill returned to New York from Boulder on the last day of August 1979 to spend the winter. He was now the center of a circle that included John Giorno, Victor Bockris, Stewart Meyer, and Howard Brookner. B
rookner had an MA in art history and film from New York University Film School. He had wanted to make a twenty-minute portrait of Burroughs as an NYU project but was persuaded by James Grauerholz to scrap that and film the Nova Convention instead. He filmed many of the stage performances and surrounding social events. Brookner decided that for his senior thesis he would like to make a full-length documentary about Burroughs. Bill agreed, a contract was signed, and Howard started work. Bill liked to have him around: he was gay and a heroin addict, so he fitted right in. Howard kept filming and filming and didn’t know how to complete it. Years went by. Burroughs commented, “You wonder why in hell he didn’t plan it better. I think that Howard does have a lot of silly ideas that cost a lot of money and didn’t go into the film.”2 By 1982 he had sixty hours of film, and Burroughs was getting irritated because Howard had exclusive right to film him, and other more professional people were being prevented from doing so. Howard did not know how to complete the film. The BBC eventually solved the problem.