Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  The Western Lands is like a summation: a great roll call of his characters, his sets, and his ideas, juxtaposed and rearranged in a final literary collage. “His only link with the living Earth is now the cats, as scenes from his past life explode like soap bubbles, little random flashes glimpsed through the cat door. It leads out and it leads back in again. Touch the controls gently for serene magic moments, the little green reindeer in Forest Park, the little gray men who played in my blockhouse and whisked away through a disappearing cat door.”55 Throughout the book, people and places from his past flicker through the pages, a kaleidoscope of moving images, like an animated version of his photographic collages from 1963 Tangier, or a speeded-up film of his scrapbooks with newspaper clips, photographs, images torn from magazines, shooting past like a crazy Keystone Cops film. The piranha fish tank at Wips club in 1963 London is used as a set;56 in a reference to his son’s liver transplant he makes Joe the Dead a transplant surgeon;57 Wilhelm Reich gets a mention in the “Medical Riots” section, written as a result of reading so many doctor books.58 Bufotenine, which he helped Dennis Evans to extract back in 1960, makes a comeback: “Dandies in eighteenth century garb have reverted to snuff boxes. Bufotenine extracted from a poisonous toad brings one out in a strawberry rash, so becoming with pink lace.”59 Hassan-i-Sabbah plays a role, as do Brion Gysin’s cook Targuisti, Bill’s parents, and Ian Sommerville; it is truly a Book of the Dead. He can do anything: he sets a door dog on Anatole Broyard, his fiercest critic, using the dog described in Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington, a whole page of which Burroughs appropriates for the purpose (incidentally revealing how similar his prose style is to that of Saki, Hector Hugh Munro).60 He even threw in a fragment from Minutes to Go from 1960: “Professor killed, accident in U.S.,” a line waiting all these years for its place in the Big Picture jigsaw puzzle of Burroughs’s one long book where it would precisely fit. There are a few timid paragraphs of conventional early-sixties-style cut-ups in the early part of the book, but Burroughs appears to lose interest and they are not repeated. They were from a period long ago; he was no longer exhorting his readers to revolution. It is almost as if they were included as part of the process of “ticking off” all the periods of his life that constituted part of the process of the final trilogy.

  When the book appeared, Burroughs’s critics seized upon the ending, where it appears that Burroughs is signing off as a writer. He writes as if he were already dying, with his past flashing before his eyes: “The Big House at Los Alamos. God it was cold on those sleeping porches.” He signs off resignedly; the book ends on a note of despair, and with a quote from one of his favorite writers, T. S. Eliot, who was himself quoting the throwing-out line of all British public-house landlords.

  I want to reach the Western Lands—right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It’s a frozen sewer. It’s known as the Duad, remember? All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. […]

  How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he “wants”?…

  The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then? […]

  In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the Mountain.

  “Hurry up, please. It’s time.”61

  Chapter Fifty-One

  His thoughts were becoming uncontrollable. To stop their unbearable flow he told himself stories in pictures.

  —DENTON WELCH1

  Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy.

  —PICASSO, LES LETTRES FRANÇAISES, 1943

  1. Painting

  In Lawrence, Kansas, Mayor Mike Amyx proclaimed the week of September 7–13, 1987, to be “River City Reunion Week,” a celebration of the work of the myriad creative people who have intersected with the City of Lawrence, organized by James Grauerholz, Bill Rich, and George Wedge from the university English department. It was a major event, featuring Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Edie Kerouac Parker, Michael McClure, Keith Haring, Ed Dorn, Jello Biafra, Andrei Codrescu, John Giorno, Jim Carroll, and Ed Sanders. Local poets Ken Irby, George Kimball, David Ohle, Jim McCrary, and Wayne Propst read, among a cast of dozens. Towers Open Fire, Chappaqua, Pull My Daisy, and This Song for Jack were screened; Marianne Faithfull performed on Thursday night and Hüsker Dü on Sunday evening. The actual daytime sessions concluded with Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl.” As James Grauerholz wrote, “For a week, Lawrence was the national headquarters of the counter culture.”2

  After completing The Western Lands, Burroughs concentrated more on painting than on writing. At the end of 1986 he rented a studio housed in a dilapidated barbed-wire factory on the Kaw River waterfront to paint in and to write. Diego Cortez contacted Burroughs and arranged to visit him with the artist Philip Taaffe, in order to work on a catalog text for Taaffe’s show at the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York. They arrived on January 31, 1987, and James made appropriate arrangements for Burroughs and Taaffe to work together: ropes and ladders, sheets of plywood, half-filled gallon cans of colored house paint, and old tubes of acrylic. They piled everything into a pickup and headed to an empty cornfield outside the city limits where they could shoot. In the distance there were passing freight trains. They hung the plywood from the ladder by ropes and hung the cans of paint from another ladder, using hemp twine. They stapled tubes of paint to the plywood and experimented with shooting at them from various distances—too close and the painting would be destroyed, too far and the shot would be ineffective in exploding the paint. Taaffe brought with him some cans of spray paint, something Bill had not previously encountered. “We strung this can—red paint—in front of a piece of wood and shot it up. It exploded beautifully. Perfect. I didn’t have to do anything to it.”3 He called the result The Red Skull. Spray cans worked in a more satisfactory manner than the paint cans.

  The next day the two of them did a drawing collaboration in Bill’s factory studio in Lawrence after buying a quantity of oak tag paper, paints, inks, and brushes.4 Their discussion was taped and was published as “Drawing Dialogue” in the catalog to Taaffe’s show. Taaffe liked Bill’s work sufficiently to suggest that he should exhibit it, and back in New York, Diego Cortez contacted the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, which expressed interest. Burroughs did not start to do work on paper until after Brion’s death. “It would have been unthinkable for me to compete with him. I’ve done a lot better than he did, financially, on painting. Yes, that’s one thing, collaborating was one thing [on writing], but as soon as I started painting that would be a matter of competition.”5 Brion would certainly have seen it that way, without question.

  Burroughs had no formal art training, but felt that maybe that was a good thing given his way of approaching his art. “There might be something on my mind, I try to just let the hand do it, to see with my hand. And then look at it, see what has happened. I may see quite clearly in there something that I’ve seen recently in a magazine or a newspaper, whatever, emerging. I can’t consciously draw anything. I can’t draw a recognizable chair—it looks like a four-year-old’s.” The initial “killing of the canvas,” making random marks to overcome the tyranny of the white rectangle, provided the subject matter; in among the whorls of paint, a subject emerged. “I don’t know what I’m painting until I see it. In fact I’ve done a lot with my eyes closed.” This is similar to de Kooning’s letter paintings where he would scrawl a series of letters on the canvas, just to give himself something to work with. The point was to get started. He soon began to use stencils, at first commercial design forms, then ones that he cut himself from cardboard, which he combined with collage elements.

  It was the “surprised recognition” that Burroughs was after. “It applies to any art form. That’s what I try to do in painting. Klee said a painter stri
ves to create something that has an existence apart from him and which could endanger him. Now the most clear proof of something being separate is if it can harm you. […] I do think all writers, many other writers and painters are trying to create something that has an existence apart from themselves. It would literally step out of the picture or the book. So all artists are trying to achieve what some people would say is impossible, that is to create life. Of course, impossible is a meaningless word to me.”6 This fits in with cut-up theory: the recognition of connections between phrases suggested by random process; with his occult experiments with crystal balls; with the random cut-ins on his tape experiments; and now the emerging images from random visual events. “That what it’s all about. The way that clear representational objects will emerge from what would seem to be a random procedure. I once took a small notebook and put some red gouache on here and on there—it’s an inkblot technique. I looked and there was a perfectly clear red pig, a wild pig, tusks, bristles, and everything.”7

  His first one-man show opened at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery at 163 Mercer Street in New York on December 19, 1987. In the catalog Burroughs wrote:

  I am trying to get pictures to move.

  It almost happens: a face comes into almost-miraculously close focus, almost smiles, snarls, speaks… Then back to the picture, there on the paper, the wood.

  Well, I think, look outside at the trees and leaves in front of the bedroom window. They move in the wind. The same thing is happening. I see faces, scenes. […]

  “Well,” says the critic, “so you can see faces and scenes in the clouds. This is infantile.”

  Perhaps. And as often the child sees more clearly than the adult, who has already decided what he will see and what he will not see.8

  Burroughs began painting or spray-painting around cut-out shapes, using commercial stencils of trees, dinosaurs, cats, and faces to “randomize” his canvases, “a randomized selection of objects which however are quite recognizable. Start with your stencils then randomize them, gives you a number of different possibilities.”9 He used found objects like metal grilles or perforated metal sheeting as masks, to create a depth of picture plane, then sometimes cut into it with a collage element. His concern was to see what the painting had revealed; he saw the paintings as a gateway to the realm of the unconscious and the imagination. He was looking for figurative elements; he was able to identify faces and people in the paint, “some absolutely recognizable as portraits of certain people.” If he particularly liked one of the faces that emerged, he sometimes had it photographed so he could use it again. The photographer would have to see the face before they could photograph it, because Burroughs was very specific about which bits of the painting he wanted. He might use a face from a red picture in another red picture, or make collages of a number of pictures, or all possible combinations. There was a big failure rate; very often nothing emerged. Whereas Picasso was using art as a form of negotiation between the real world and himself as an individual, Burroughs was using it to penetrate deeper into himself.10

  Burroughs was essentially producing abstract paintings, but they were not cut off from recognizable objects: collage elements, photographs, stencils of animals all referred back to the real world, even the abstract shapes themselves. As Picasso pointed out in 1934, a common term for abstract work used to be “nonfiguration,” but there can be no such thing as nonfiguration. “All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.”11 Burroughs’s work is a meditation on the state of his mind; like the photo collages of 1963–65, they are a cubist assemblage of memories, personal references, and ideas suggested by random gestures and events, and are a snapshot of that moment of time.

  Though there was no direct influence of Niki de Saint Phalle’s work on Burroughs’s art, it is nonetheless the Nouveaux Réalistes with whom he has the most affinity: Arman, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, César, Daniel Spoerri, and others, as well as the Ultra-Lettrists, including François Dufrêne. Burroughs shared with them notions of appropriation, collage, and particularly décollage techniques: the Nouveaux Réalistes slashed or lacerated billboards, revealing deeper layers from the posters beneath, much in the same way that the blast from Burroughs’s weapons exposed the deeper layers of his plywood panels. Burroughs had rarely visited art galleries and was not familiar with contemporary art theory, which did not interest him, but he recognized that he and Yves Klein had much in common, in particular Klein’s use of random events to create the image. On October 21, 1988, Burroughs had a show at the Paul Klein Gallery in Chicago, an event that gave rise to one of his synchronous experiences. “I had an odd thing happen. I’d just written down on the typewriter or in pencil, ‘Yves Klein set his pictures on fire’ (and put them out at some point. I did quite a lot of experiments like that, and also tracing outlines with gunpowder, so on and so forth). And James came here to tell me that the Paul Klein gallery had burned down in Chicago.”12 A whole block of galleries and stored pictures burned down. All of Burroughs’s pictures from the show were destroyed. He collected the insurance, but it was a real disaster. “That’s an interesting little juxtaposition.”13

  Many of the early paintings were executed in India ink on card, which dried in a few minutes. He had some interesting results using what he called Rorschach monoprints—taking impressions of an image by painting one piece of slick coated card and pressing another one against it and rotating it a little. “I try my best to make my mind a blank. […] The whole idea is that I try to let my hands go and paint whatever my so-called unconscious mind is aware of.”14 He also used watercolors, the medium he used in 1959 when he was first under the influence of Gysin. He began to see pictures in his dreams and sometimes dreamed that he was painting. “I’ll dream about it and then I’ll see things in the pictures from dreams. You’ve got a feedback. It’s the same way with life. There’s a feedback between dreams and writing in dreams and painting.” In this way, his painting helped his writing. “To some extent I stopped [writing] when I completed my trilogy. I find I paint a while and then I get ideas for writing. […] Sometimes they turn out quite differently to what I have in mind. I paint intuitively. I can’t draw, but it’s probably quite simple. I’m carrying on the same ideas in writing and painting.”15

  At first, Bill and James took virtually every exhibition opportunity that was offered. They wanted to show the work, and to sell it. In 1988, after the Shafrazi show, came shows at the Suzanne Biederberg gallery in Amsterdam and a show at the October Gallery in London—both shows shared a catalog. There were shows at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver, the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, the Gallery Casa Sin Nombre in Santa Fe, the Paul Klein Gallery in Chicago, and a group show in New York. In 1989 there were shows in Cologne, Montreal—where Galerie Oboro issued two limited-edition prints—Toronto, Basel, Rome, Lisbon, and St. Louis. Few modern artists could keep up such a pace, but Burroughs had produced a lot of work and there was enough good material to go around. The art boom was still going and Burroughs began to make good money as an artist. All along, in interviews, he was anxious to express his enormous debt to Brion Gysin, who showed him how to paint. “I didn’t show my work until Brion died because he was touchy and I didn’t want to intrude on him in that way. He was a neglected painter, and understandably that was a sensitive point with him. He was a very great painter, though, and while I’ve been more financially successful, I could never compete with him in terms of the quality of my work.”16

  Burroughs also continued his film career. He was in Robert Frank’s 1981 Energy and How to Get It, a documentary about inventor Robert “Lightning Bob” Golka, who received money from the Carter administration to develop cold fusion energy. Bill plays the villainous Energy Czar, wandering around smoking a joint, muttering lines like, “He knows too much, we be
tter shut him down.” In Twister, the 1989 comedy about a Kansas family after a tornado strike, he played an unnamed old geezer doing target practice in his barn. The family are looking for “Jim,” but Bill tells them, “Jim got kicked in the head by a horse last year. [He] went around killing horses for a while, until he ate the insides of a clock and he died” (a line remembered from John Millington Synge’s 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World). That same year he had his best role of all, as the old junkie priest in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy.

  Bill and James had known Gus Van Sant ever since he made an award-winning nine-minute 16-millimeter student film called The Discipline of D.E. (1977), based on Burroughs’s eponymous text. Van Sant had recently left the Rhode Island School of Design and was writing, painting, filmmaking, and making music. “Burroughs has been one of my literary influences. I’m pretty sure that you would never be able to tell this. But at one time I was very much under his influence, sometime when I was in college in the early seventies. […] Partly because of his experimental take on literature, and his faith in the written word’s ability to infect or take over the reader when he isn’t aware of it.”17 After that he made a record called William S. Burroughs: The Elvis of Letters, consisting of four songs that Gus wrote and played on guitar. One of them, “Millions of Images,” a collage of sound bites of Burroughs reading, was taken up by various fans and turned into short films posted on the Web.