Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  That summer at Naropa, Bill was asked by Allen Ginsberg to provide a reading list for his students. He listed more than one hundred books plus “the complete works” of Kafka, Genet, and Fitzgerald. He handed the pages to Allen. Allen was outraged and stamped his feet, accusing Burroughs of simply listing everything he had on his bookshelf. “What’s this?” he demanded, pointing at Intern by Doctor X.

  “That, Allen, is a doctor book. I assure you it’s a very good one.” Bill spoke quietly, as if talking to a recalcitrant pupil.

  “But they can’t read all these,” fumed Allen.

  “They are the books I like,” said Bill, pursing his lips.

  “Where’s Kerouac?” demanded Allen. William did not reply, just placed his fingers together and pursed his lips some more, biding his time. Allen knew better than to argue and the list was duly photocopied and distributed for Bill’s August 1983 class.9

  Burroughs had never thought much of Kerouac’s actual writing, and had always been irritated by Kerouac’s various portrayals of him as well as the way that he was lumped together with him by the critics, Allen Ginsberg included, who often assumed that Kerouac was an influence on his work. “I said that he had an influence in encouraging me to write, not an influence on what I wrote. […] So far as our style of work and content, we couldn’t be more opposite. He always said that the first draft was the best. I said, ‘Well, that may work for you, Jack, but it doesn’t work for me.’ I’m used to writing and rewriting things at least three times. It’s just a completely different way of working.”10

  As with the Naked Lunch group of manuscripts that were used in the cut-up trilogy, the years of research and work on Cities of the Red Night had given Burroughs six hundred pages of material to use as a starter for The Place of Dead Roads. In April 1984 he told the East Village Eye that the new book was well under way. “The overflow from Dead Roads was about 7–800 pages. I always had material to draw on for the next one. So in a sense the next one is well underway by the time I finish the one that I’m doing. […] I never know what’s going to happen. I don’t plan the novel out. I don’t even have any idea how this novel I’m writing now is going to end or where it’s going from where it is now, or how much of that material will be useable.”11

  In May of that year, thanks to prolonged and intense efforts on the part of Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, much to the fury of some its more conservative members, and to the disapproval of some of his friends, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who commented that his inclusion in the establishment proved Herbert Marcuse’s point that capitalist society has a great ability to incorporate its onetime outsiders. His inclusion perhaps said more about Ginsberg’s desire for the Beats to dominate American literary society than any great desire by Burroughs to hobnob with the very establishment that he had been so virulently criticizing all his life. Still, he was proud of the award and wore its insignia to official events alongside the emblem of his designation as a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, given to him a year later by Jack Lang, the French minister of culture at Jean-Jacques Lebel’s instigation, which is awarded for making a “significant contribution to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance” (a higher distinction than that given to Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin, who were “Chevaliers”).

  There were further accolades when Burroughs turned seventy on February 5, 1984, when, in addition to a series of private dinner parties, there was an enormous birthday party held at Limelight, a New York nightclub converted from a church. All Burroughs’s old friends were there, including Joan Vollmer’s original flatmate Edie Parker, who called Burroughs “Billy.” It was the hot ticket for that night: Frank Zappa sent two dozen long-stemmed red roses; Lou Reed, Madonna, Philip Glass, Jim Carroll, Lydia Lunch, and the whole downtown art and music scene were in attendance, including Sting and his Police cohort Andy Summers. Burroughs had never heard of them and at one point told one of his friends, “I don’t know if you are holding, but someone told me that those two guys over there are cops.”12 He posed uncomfortably with them for the photographers. Among the hundreds of people who pressed forward to offer their congratulations was David Cronenberg, who managed to find time to propose the idea of filming Naked Lunch.

  Cronenberg visited Burroughs a few times in Kansas and finally wrote a script in 1989. “I sent it [to Burroughs] to see what his reaction would be. He hated it and threatened to sue.”13 A Japanese backer pulled out after reading a translation of the screenplay, but it might have been caused by something as innocuous as the talking asshole. A script was eventually agreed upon, but nothing happened for about six years.

  There were more parties and more accolades when Burroughs arrived in San Francisco, where V. Vale from RE/Search magazine and performance artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs put on a gala birthday event at SRL’s huge workshop in San Francisco. James Grauerholz noted, “William especially enjoyed playing with the hand-held flame-thrower that Mark had developed—a dangerous toy, William’s favorite kind.”14 They were touring with Howard Brookner’s documentary film Burroughs and doing readings along with the screenings to promote The Place of Dead Roads, which was published in April 1983. Seventy is a major milestone, and despite his now quite considerable fame, Burroughs was still hard pressed for cash. He confided in his journals, “So now at age 70 I have to read in nightclubs to eke out a living,” an admission of how broke he was and written with a tinge of disappointment at how his life and career had gone. However, that summer, there was a dramatic change in his fortune.

  He was approached by a new literary agent, Andrew Wylie, who was convinced that he could get a multibook deal with a large advance for Burroughs; it would solve his financial problems but it would mean ditching his old agent, Peter Matson, and quite possibly Richard Seaver, his editor for the past twenty-five years. Burroughs was initially reluctant, because the key to the deal was Queer, a book that Seaver had been trying unsuccessfully to persuade Burroughs to publish for years and which Burroughs had always sworn he would never publish; he had on occasion even denied its existence. Also, he felt a certain loyalty to Seaver: he had gone with him from Grove Press to Viking, they had been at the Chicago Convention together with Genet, and over the years they had become good friends. On the other hand, Burroughs was seventy years old and broke: Grove had never been generous with their advances, and his dealings with Viking had always been strictly business. In 1979, Seaver had moved to Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and Burroughs had followed him there, where he published Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads. Bill had been loyal, but this was strictly business.

  Wylie had just secured a six-book deal for Allen Ginsberg, beginning with his Collected Poems, and Allen felt that for Bill to have an aggressive, active young agent who was just starting out in the world would both solve his financial uncertainty and guarantee that the books would be promoted: Wylie always felt that the bigger the financial commitment, the better the publishers promoted the books. Wylie spent three days in Lawrence discussing the potential deal. He would offer Queer,15 Interzone,16 two volumes of letters, The Western Lands (not yet completed), and two future titles as a seven-book deal at an auction. Burroughs agreed. On November 23, 1984, the New York Times reported a deal. After an acrimonious exchange with Seaver at Holt, Wylie finally signed with Viking for $200,000 for seven books plus a further £45,000 (about $55,300) from Pan in the UK. Wylie took his commission, and Bill paid off his debts and was financially solvent. It did mean, however, that he had to prepare Queer for publication.

  The manuscript had been found in 1972 when Barry Miles was organizing Burroughs’s papers in order to catalog them for sale; all previous copies of it were thought to be lost or destroyed. The manuscripts came from a variety of periods and were sorted by paper sizes and by typefaces. Any pages with numbering were set to one side in the hope of getting a sequence. During the initial sort, one group of numbered pages grew quite large,
and by the end of the process, a virtually complete manuscript was present in a collection of top copies, carbon copies, and faded brown Thermofax copies. When it was offered to Burroughs for identification, he glanced at it and blanched slightly. “That’s Queer,” he said, and turned away.

  Burroughs told a local Boulder paper, “My first reaction was: it’s absolutely appalling. I couldn’t bear to read it. How could I have acted in such a ridiculous manner? Going round sticking a gun into some cop’s guts—if that’s not a silly way to act. I thought: My God, how did I get out of this alive? It made me feel absolutely like I was in immediate danger. […] I’ve written a commentary almost as long as the novel, and I decided it was worthwhile.”17 In February 1985, faced with the task of actually writing the introduction to accompany the text, Burroughs was very reluctant. He had a writer’s block “like a straightjacket” and every time he even glanced at the manuscript he felt that he simply could not read it. “The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951. […] A smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one’s teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind.”18 In his appendix he wrote what must be his most-quoted paragraph. After describing the events that led up to the killing he wrote, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” It was the first time he had ever mentioned it in print and it was naturally seized upon by reviewers.

  Queer was published in November 1985 and celebrated with a dinner for twenty-three at a Provençal restaurant in Greenwich Village. The back cover preempted any comments from critics by running a forceful blurb by Allen Ginsberg in his best PR mode stating, “Queer is a major work. Burroughs’ heart laid bare, the origin of his writing genius, honest, embarrassing, humorously brilliant, naked—the secret of the Invisible Man. Swift, easy-reading narrative.”

  For the previous two years, filmmaker David Cronenberg had been working up his idea to film Naked Lunch and looking for backing. At the 1984 Toronto Film Festival he met the English producer Jeremy Thomas from the Recorded Picture Company and remembered that Thomas had once said in an interview that he would like to film Naked Lunch. Thomas was interested, but little happened because Cronenberg got distracted by Hollywood. That winter, James Grauerholz and Jeremy Thomas came up with the idea of all going to Tangier “location scouting.” In January 1985, long before a proper script was agreed, Burroughs and James met David Cronenberg, Jeremy Thomas, and his associate Hercules Bellville in Tangier where Thomas congratulated Bill and James on their success in finally getting Cronenberg out of Canada to focus on the project. They put up at the El Minzah. Bill had not been in Tangier since 1972 and hardly recognized the place. The Parade was closed, Dean’s Bar was still there, but Bill had rarely drunk there in the past. All his old friends were gone, with the exception of Paul Bowles, whom they ran into at the airport just as they were leaving. Bill found the town “a bit sad.”19 Cronenberg had not previously been there and received enough lasting impressions to want to use Tangier as a set. Unfortunately the three-week Tangier shoot had to be cancelled when the Gulf War—the American-led Operation Desert Storm, to remove Saddam Hussein’s invasion force from Kuwait, which began on August 2, 1990—erupted five days before filming was scheduled to begin. In fact Morocco was nowhere near the war and filming could easily have continued, but it was decided instead to recreate the Medina in a Toronto film studio at enormous extra cost.

  As the book has no narrative, Cronenberg had to write one. Burroughs had always regarded it as an impossible book to film: Conrad Rooks had proposed a drug-vision version back in 1963, and in 1970 Brion Gysin and Antony Balch produced a Broadway burlesque musical screenplay that Burroughs had disliked and that had gone nowhere. Zappa wanted to make it into a musical, and now Cronenberg, a man with considerably more experience in the field, wanted to make a horror film of it. Perhaps inevitably, he positioned Joan as a major character, even though she does not appear in the book, and her death became the film’s main theme. The story is of how William Lee, played by Peter Weller, came to kill his wife, Joan Lee/Joan Frost, played by Judy Davis, and write The Naked Lunch. Cronenberg told the Guardian, “It’s Joan’s death that first drives him to create his own environment, his own interzone. And that keeps driving him. So in a sense, that death is occurring over and over again.”20 The film bears hardly any relationship to the book, but draws heavily on Burroughs’s own life. Burroughs had no part in writing the script. “I was […] relieved that David did not ask me to write or co-write the screenplay, as I am sure I would have no idea how to do so. Writers are prone to think they can write a film script, not realising that film scripts are not meant to be read, but acted and photographed. After fighting my way through The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, I had at least learned that lesson.”21

  2. Brion

  At Learnard Avenue Burroughs became more and more attached to his cats. He postulated that the reason cats were first tamed in Egypt was not because they were good mousers—dogs, weasels, and snakes are all better—but as psychic companions, as Familiars. He treated his own cats as such. In August 1984 James was at 7th and Massachusetts, Lawrence’s downtown area, when he heard a cat mewling as if in pain. A little black cat with green eyes leapt into his arms, so he brought it over to Bill. It knew what cat food cans were all about, because when Bill started to open one it jumped on the sideboard and rushed toward it. Bill called him Fletch. A fletcher attaches the guidance feathers or fins to an arrow. It is an unusual word that Burroughs probably took from Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis: “the plumage is given, not sold, for fletching.”22 Fletch became one of the stars of The Cat Inside.

  I’ve learned so much from my cats. They reflect you in a very deep way. It just opened up in me a whole area of compassion that I can’t tell you was so important. I remember laying on my bed and weeping and weeping and weeping to think that a nuclear catastrophe would destroy my cats. […] I spent literally hours just crying with grief. […] Then also the feeling that constantly there could be some relationship between me and the cats, some special relationship and that I might have missed it. Some of this is in The Cat Inside. Some of it was so extreme that I couldn’t write it. […] I am so emotional that sometimes I can’t stand the intensity. […] I’m very subject to these violent fits of weeping, for very good reasons. Yes.23

  Burroughs said that the book used cats to represent people. “The point of the book is animal contact, not communication. Communication and contact are two very different things. Contact is identification and can be very painful. Communication can be forced, contact cannot. You cannot force someone to feel.”24 Naturally, cats entered his creative life, and as well as The Cat Inside he produced a short story called Ruski, named after his first cat, released as a limited-edition book in 1984. They naturally get a mention in The Western Lands: “So here I am in Kansas with my cats, like the honorary agent for a planet that went out light-years ago. Maybe I am.”25

  Bill had a cage in the garden to trap raccoons. If he caught one it would be collected by the Animal Protection League and taken to a halfway house where it would be weaned off garbage and trained to fend for itself in the wild before being taken far away from the city and released. One reason not to have raccoons around was that they might attack Bill’s six cats. Much of his time was spent preparing cat food in individual throw-away tinfoil dishes. The cats
were all overweight, though one was supposedly being kept on a diet to reduce its excessive size.

  Tom Peschio, who was known as TP, Bill’s assistant late in life, described how the cats dominated Burroughs’s life. “As far as his daily routine, it can’t be overstated how central the kitties were. He had all kinds of voodoo with the kitties. […] It was mayhem, there were kittens and fleas and cat fights. He would bait animals; we’d take the leftovers and put ’em out in the yard every night for the OAs, the outside animals. There were outside animals and inside animals. There’d be possums and racoons gathered around the backyard and you’d hear screeching fights back there after you’d put the stuff out. He loved it, man, he loved it. They’d come in all the time, and he’d say, ‘I had a coon in the kitchen last night,’ and what he’d do, he had a bamboo cane, and he’d poke ’em through the cat door. ‘Outta here!’ ” One day, when Bill was out of town, Bill’s friend Gabby Holcomb took all the kittens and had them fixed. TP thought Bill would be angry but he took it with equanimity.

  Brion’s health worsened, and, knowing how much he needed money, Burroughs suggested a final collaboration with him. He wanted Brion to illustrate The Cat Inside for a signed limited edition. He told him, “I feel you are the only one who could do it […] the little people, the little gray dawn cats.”26 Brion was astonished, and possibly a little insulted. He wrote back from Paris, “I don’t draw cats.” Like Burroughs, Brion had assembled a family of friends around him, and one of them, a young American named David Wells, went to the Centre Pompidou and made some poor photocopies of illustrations of cats. These he cut up and rearranged, producing what Gysin said were “better illustrations than I feel I can do.” Burroughs was not moved and continued to write and telephone, asking him to collaborate, and ten months later even resorted to baby language: “Brion: PLEASE! Ruski says please! Fletch says please! Ginger on the lap of Pantopon Rose in a Peoria cat house says please. All my cats say please. Draw us! Paint us!”27 Brion thought that Bill was losing his reason but eventually asked his friend James Johnson to go out and buy every book and postcard of cats he could find.