by Barry Miles
2. WSB interviewed by Jim McMenamin and Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
3. WSB interviewed by Gregory Corso and Tom H. at the Naropa Institute, July 1984.
4. Morgan, tape 75 (labeled tape 74).
5. WSB on telephone to Michael Horovitz, Good Friday, 1992, in “Legend in His Own Lunchtime,” in Rupert Loydell, ed., my kind of angel: i.m. william burroughs, 62–63.
Chapter One
1. “Trip to Hell and Back,” WSB interviewed by Jerry Bauer in Trax (London), no. 6 (March 18, 1981).
2. T. S. Eliot to Marquis Childs, quoted in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 15, 1930, and in the address “American Literature and the American Language” delivered at Washington University, June 9, 1953, published in Washington University Studies, New Series: Literature and Language 23 (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953), 6.
3. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 42.
4. It appears that the street has subsequently been renamed, with the two private blocks, including where WSB was born, now called Pershing Place, and only the remaining public block called Pershing Avenue.
5. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 19.
6. Morgan, tape 1.
7. Abstracted from the psychiatrist’s report, Payne Whitney Clinic, New York, April 25, 1940, based on an interview with WSB’s mother. This entire section draws heavily upon James Grauerholz’s research in his paper, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood: The Untold Story,” also upon Morgan, tape 1.
8. James Wideman Lee, Henry W. Grady: The Editor, the Orator, the Man (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1896).
9. Morgan, tape 16.
10. Ibid.
11. This figure comes only from William Burroughs’s memory of family conversations and has not so far been substantiated.
12. “Morphia Victim, Son of Adding Machine Inventor, Is Suicide,” Detroit Free Press, March 8, 1915.
13. Morgan, tape 1.
Chapter Two
1. WSB, Naked Lunch, 89
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 15, 1953.
3. James Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood: The Untold Story” (ms.).
4. Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. From conversation with WSB.
5. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 276.
6. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time vol. 1, Swann’s Way (London: Vintage, 1996), 222.
7. Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood.
8. Morgan, tape 1.
9. WSB, The Cat Inside, 17.
10. Morgan, tape 2.
11. WSB, The Cat Inside, 18.
12. WSB, Last Words, 69.
13. WSB, My Education, 167.
14. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 107.
15. British slang later imported into the United States, usually as “shanks mare.” The shank is the part of leg extending from ankle to knee, thus walking.
16. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 19.
17. Morgan, tape 65 (labeled tape 64).
18. Interzone, 166.
19. Morgan, tape 2.
20. Ibid.
21. Vincent Price was born in 1911 and was in Mort’s year at school.
22. Morgan, tape 65 (labeled tape 64).
23. WSB, “The Name Is Burroughs,” in The Adding Machine.
24. Ibid.
25. WSB, “Prose on a distant wall,” unpublished ms., ca. 1972.
26. Ibid.
27. Morgan, tape 2.
28. Ann Russe Eaton (née Prewitt) to Ted Morgan, May 7, 1985.
29. Prynne Hoxie died in a car accident when he was eighteen in his freshman year at Princeton.
30. WSB, Cobble Stone Gardens, 9–10.
31. Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood.”
32. WSB, The Western Lands, 158.
33. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 46–74, 130–58.
34. Ibid., xiv–xv.
35. Ibid., 74.
36. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 227.
37. The Evangelische St. Paul Kirche in Defiance, built in 1906, was demolished in the twenties to be replaced by a new church.
38. WSB, unpublished journals, entry for November 15, 1991.
39. WSB, Port of Saints (Calder edition), 139.
40. Ibid., 142.
41. WSB, Interzone, 71.
42. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
43. T. S. Eliot, “Preludes 1.”
44. WSB, Last Words, 34.
45. The Woolworth Building was the world’s tallest building from 1913 to 1930.
46. WSB interviewed by Legs McNeil, Spin, October 1991.
Chapter Three
1. James Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood: The Untold Story” (ms.).
2. Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible.
3. WSB, unpublished journals, early eighties. Lon Chaney’s famous line.
4. WSB, My Education, 191–92.
5. WSB interviewed by the author, November 29, 1991, Lawrence, Kansas.
6. WSB, Last Words, 151.
7. WSB, “Do You Remember Tomorrow?,” Mayfair vol. 3, no. 8 (August 1968).
8. WSB, “St. Louis Return,” in The Burroughs File, 88.
9. Morgan, tape 2.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.; the cemetery was the Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Cemetery on Ladue Road.
13. Morgan, tape 6.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood.”
17. WSB, “The Fall of Art,” in The Adding Machine, 62.
18. Morgan, tape 3.
19. Technically it is a char. The name comes from Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.
Chapter Four
1. Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography, 101.
2. Morgan, tape 3.
3. Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution, 1998, 65 (quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal).
4. WSB interviewed by Bill Rich, 1991. Burroughs Archives.
5. All factual details about Los Alamos in this section are taken from Vidal, via Kaplan, Gore Vidal.
6. Morgan, tape 3.
7. WSB, Last Words, 90.
8. WSB, “Literary Biography,” in Barry Miles, A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 75.
9. Ibid., 74.
10. Morgan, tape 2.
11. WSB, “Literary Biography,” 75.
12. Morgan, tape 16.
13. WSB, “Literary Biography,” 75.
14. Ibid., 74.
15. Max Putzel, letter, “Burroughs and guns,” Times Literary Supplement, July 24, 1992.
16. Morgan, tape 4.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 7, 1954.
18. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 15, 1956, in The Yage Letters.
19. James Grauerholz, “Research summary—SWG—8/16/105 re ‘Billy Bradshinkel’ and Prynne Hoxie.” Unpublished document.
20. Morgan, tape 3.
Chapter Five
1. Morgan, tape 3.
2. A range was opened beneath the stadium in 1933.
3. Morgan, tape 62 (labeled tape 61).
4. Morgan, tape 25.
5. Morgan, tape 2.
6. Morgan, tape 88.
7. Morgan, tape 39.
8. Ibid.
9. Morgan, tape 16.
10. Upon the death of his father in 1969 he became the Second Viscount Monsell. His sister Joan married the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
11. Morgan, tape 2.
12. WSB, introduction to Robert Walker, New York Inside Out (New York: Skyline, 1984).
13. Morgan, tape 16.
14. Locke-Ober, 3 Winter Place; Parker House, 60 School Street; Union Oyster House, 41 Union Street; Durgin-Park, 340 Faneuil Hall, all in Boston.
15. Morgan, tape 6.
16. Morgan, tape 35. Ric
hard Stern remembers the name of the ferret being Jean des Esseintes, named after the hero of Huysmans’s À rebours because of its scent. Robert Miller supports this name. Burroughs remembers the ferret living in Adams House. Possibly there were two ferrets.
17. WSB and Allen Ginsberg in conversation, filmed by Obie Benz in December 1986 for his film Heavy Petting, in Judy Bloomfield, Mary McGrail, and Lauren Sanders, eds., Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey (New York: Persea Books, 1998).
18. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, NYC, 1974. From ms. transcript.
19. Morgan, tape 5.
20. Morgan, tape 38.
Chapter Six
1. WSB, Interzone, 77.
2. Morgan, tape 71.
3. Morgan, tape 6.
4. WSB interviewed by John Giorno in Gay Sunshine Interviews (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1978), 32.
5. Ibid.; the Dianabad was destroyed in the fighting between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazis during the liberation of Vienna on April 11–13, 1945.
6. WSB, Interzone, 124.
7. Sanatorium Hera, Löblichgasse 14. Burroughs was in room 78.
8. The Nuremberg Laws were announced at the annual Nazi Party rally held at Nuremberg in September 1935. In addition the law of March 7, 1936, deprived Jews of the vote and that of July 2, 1937, removed Jews from German schools and universities.
9. Morgan, tape 6.
10. Reik’s Masochism in Modern Man was not published until 1941, so Burroughs must have read Reik’s articles on the subject, as he was sure that he read Reik at this time. (Wilhelm Reich was not yet published in English nor easily available in German.)
11. Morgan, tape 22.
12. WSB in conversation with the author, London, ca. 1972.
13. Incorporated in Nova Express as “Gave Proof Through the Night.” The original draft was finally printed in Interzone in 1989.
14. WSB, “Literary Autobiography,” in Barry Miles, A Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 75–76.
15. Morgan, tape 7.
16. WSB, “Literary Autobiography,” 76.
17. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, New York, 1974. From ms. transcript.
18. Ibid.
19. Morgan, tape 70 (labeled tape 69).
Chapter Seven
1. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 21.
2. The Revised Oxford translation.
3. WSB interviewed by San Fleischer and Dan Turèll, Copenhagen, October 29, 1983.
4. They met on April 3, 1939, when Auden still lived with Christopher Isherwood in Manhattan.
5. The other two were with Ian Sommerville.
6. Morgan, tape 26.
7. WSB, “The Finger,” in Interzone, 15.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. Burroughs forgot to change his name to Lee in the story, leaving his own name in place. Burroughs has said that the facts in “The Finger” are accurate.
10. Morgan, tape 70 (labeled tape 69).
11. Burroughs entered and left Payne Whitney on the twenty-third, a number that was to have symbolic significance to him.
12. WSB, My Education, 146. Burroughs gives his age as twenty-four in the book.
13. Ibid., 147.
14. Morgan, tape 2.
15. Morgan, tape 7.
16. Marcel Proust’s description of Robert de Saint-Loup in In Search of Lost Time vol. 2, Within a Budding Grove (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 356.
17. Ibid.
18. Here I am taking a version of events told to me by Allen Ginsberg in 1985 and other times, as he understood them from his conversations with Lucien Carr over the years. There are other, differing accounts.
19. Morgan, tape 7.
20. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
21. Morgan, tape 24.
22. A young editor at Alfred A. Knopf recalling stories told by her grandmother.
23. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book, 37–38.
24. James Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago (1939–40; 1942–43; 1968)”, delivered on April 27, 2004, at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois, 7.
25. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, xvii.
26. Ibid.
27. Quoted in Dr. David Rioch to Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie, Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, May 27, 1942. Burroughs enrolled but later said he was drafted.
28. Morgan, tape 41.
29. Ibid.
30. WSB, Last Words, November 1996, 9.
31. Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago”, 10.
Chapter Eight
1. From abandoned early draft of The Naked Lunch.
2. I am indebted to James Grauerholz’s paper “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago (1939–40; 1942–43; 1968)”, delivered on April 27, 2004, at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois. The author had the pleasure of accompanying Grauerholz on his initial exploration of 1940s Chicago phone books and his journeys to the sites of Mrs. Murphy’s Rooming House and the Nueva Exterminating Company.
3. WSB, “Prose on a distant wall,” unpublished ms., ca. 1972.
4. Morgan, tape 7.
5. Ibid.
6. First-draft notes in Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, 258.
7. WSB, “The Fish Poison Con,” in Nova Express, 25; and as cut-up, 21.
8. WSB, Exterminator!, 9.
9. Ibid.
10. Barry Miles, In the Seventies, 131.
11. WSB, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, 172.
12. WSB, The Wild Boys, 76.
13. WSB, Exterminator!, 10.
14. Morgan, tape 7.
15. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 136.
16. Morgan, tape 2.
17. According to Chad Heap, professor of American studies and gay historian at George Washington University, in a letter to James Grauerholz, 2000, quoted in Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago (1939–40; 1942–43; 1968)”, 23.
18. Ibid, 23; Grauerholz proposes that this may be the source of the “Frisco Kid” chapter in The Wild Boys.
19. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 20, 1955.
20. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads (Paladin edition), 150.
Chapter Nine
1. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
2. Allen Ginsberg in conversation with the author, New York, 1969.
3. Morgan, tape 10.
4. WSB, Last Words, 119.
5. Edie Kerouac-Parker, You’ll Be Okay, 122.
6. Ibid., 122–23.
7. WSB says pale blue, Edie Parker says brown.
8. Morgan, tape 10.
9. There were nine daily newspapers in New York at that time.
10. Edie Kerouac-Parker, You’ll Be Okay, 95.
11. Allen Ginsberg in conversation with the author, while touring all the apartment buildings with Beat connections in New York, 1985. Ginsberg may be mixing Joan up with Geraldine Lust, with whom Duncan Purcell did have an affair, according to Edie Parker.
12. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
13. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
14. Ibid., quoting Yeats’s “Among School Children,” IV.
15. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
16. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 1 (Troilus speaking).
17. The Royal Ballet was then called the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
18. Arthur Rimbaud to George Izambard, May 13, 1871: “Maintenant, je m’encrapule le plus possible. Pourquoi? Je veux être poète, et je travaille à me rendre Voyant: vous ne comprendrez pas du tout, et je ne saurais presque vous expliquer. Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens. Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu poète. Ce n’est pas du tout ma faute.”
19. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
20. Jack Kerouac, Vanity of
Duluoz, 221.
21. Ibid.
22. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
23. Morgan, tape 10.
24. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 225.
25. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, “The better part of valour is discretion.”
26. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 237.
27. It entered the charts on June 22, 1944, and reached number 1.
28. They were reading the second, completely revised, edition of A Vision, 1937.
29. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 237.
30. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
Chapter Ten
1. “Pages from a Diary in 1930. III. Subject for a poem, April 30th,” in W. B. Yeats, A Vision and Related Writings (London: Arena, 1990).
2. Edie Kerouac-Parker, You’ll Be Okay, 130.
3. Ibid., 131–32.
4. The Henry Hudson Parkway, built by Robert Moses in 1934–37, only has entrances to the riverside at 72nd and 125th Streets. The traffic at 4:00 a.m. must have been quiet enough to climb the barriers and cross it.
5. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 249.
6. Morgan, tape 8.
7. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 248.
8. “Student Admits Killing Teacher,” New York World-Telegram, August 16, 1944.
9. “Student Is Held Without Bail on Slaying of Man,” New York Herald Tribune, August 18, 1944.
10. Celine Young to Jack Kerouac, October 1, 1944.
11. See my Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats for a complete bibliography of newspaper reports on the case.
12. Morgan, tape 10.
Chapter Eleven
1. Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, August 28, 1930, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, 1929–1931 (London: Hogarth, 1978), 205.
2. Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 59.
3. Morgan, tape 13.
4. Ibid.
5. “The Art of Fiction: Jack Kerouac Interviewed by Ted Berrigan,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 4th Series (New York: Viking, 1976).
6. Journal entry for November 16, 1944, quoted in Ann Charters, Kerouac (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973), 1974.
7. Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 289.
8. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
9. Said while giving Kerouac a copy of the Charles Francis Atkinson translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
10. Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (New York: Dover, 1935).
11. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
