Call Me Burroughs
Page 87
12. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
13. Jack Kerouac, “Secret Mullings About Bill (Burroughs)” (from agency’s manuscript copy).
14. Morgan, tape 22.
15. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 22.
16. Jack Kerouac to Caroline Blake (née Kerouac), March 14, 1945.
17. Morgan, tape 10.
18. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 1.
19. Description by Huncke in Don McNeill, “Huncke the Junkie: Godfather to Naked Lunch,” Village Voice, September 21, 1967.
20. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 4.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 5.
24. Herbert Huncke’s various accounts of watching Burroughs take his first shot are, like many of Huncke’s stories, fabricated. Burroughs was alone and he did not have the syrettes with him at the first visit to Henry Street. He undoubtedly witnessed Burroughs shoot up later.
25. Herbert Huncke, quoted in Barry Gifford and Lee Lawrence, Jack’s Book, 52.
26. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 6.
27. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 9, 1977.
28. Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 364.
29. Morgan, tape 10.
30. Kerouac, The Town and the City, 364.
31. Allen Ginsberg, lecture at Brooklyn College, February 9, 1987.
32. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 11.
33. Ibid., 13.
Chapter Twelve
1. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 16, 1977.
2. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 14, 1977.
3. Morgan, tape 10.
4. Ibid.
5. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1987.
6. Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, September 6, 1945.
7. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1987.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, June 8, 1945.
10. Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 292–93; confirmed by Allen Ginsberg in conversation.
11. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 16, 1977.
12. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1987.
13. Ibid.; see also Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, 175.
14. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 14, 1977.
15. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
16. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 16, 1977.
17. Jeffrey Scott Dunn, “A Conversation: Ginsberg on Burroughs,” Pennsylvania Review (Fall/Winter 1987): 48.
18. Herbert Huncke interviewed by Stewart Meyer and Mel Bernstine, Newave vol. 1, no. 5 (April 1981).
19. Jack Kerouac to Al Aronowitz, New York Post.
20. Huncke interviewed in Newave.
21. Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders/Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1948).
22. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
23. Told to the author by Allen Ginsberg, standing in front of 419 West 115th Street, on February 21, 1984.
24. Morgan, tape 16.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. WSB, Last Words, 57.
28. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
29. Herbert Huncke, The Evening Sun Turned Crimson, 95.
30. WSB to Bockris-Wylie, 1975 (from ms. transcript).
31. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 34.
32. Ibid., 35.
33. Reported by Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs.
34. WSB, The Soft Machine (Olympia edition), 158–59.
35. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
36. Morgan, tape 10.
37. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 19, 1952.
38. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 1951.
39. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
40. Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (Flamingo, 1995), 223–24.
41. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
Chapter Thirteen
1. WSB to Billy Burroughs Jr., October 30, 1972.
2. Marianne Woofe to Ted Morgan, March 7, 1985.
3. WSB to Joan Vollmer, September 3, 1946.
4. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 88.
5. Burroughs remembers Elvins’s girlfriend being called Golden: “In Pharr that was Golden. I remember she was a beautiful girl, she looked like a model. Sort of long hair, I think she was not blonde but dark.” This was probably Elvins’s girlfriend in Huntsville, Texas.
6. Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, 30.
7. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 91.
8. Ibid., 92.
9. Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 24.
10. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 91.
11. Ibid., 59.
12. WSB, Interzone, 137.
13. WSB, The Western Lands, 105.
14. Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 36.
15. Ibid., 49.
16. WSB, Interzone, 152.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 10, 1955.
18. Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 88.
19. Ibid.
Chapter Fourteen
1. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, January 9, 1947.
2. WSB, The Naked Lunch, 147.
3. This would be about 2,000–2,500 plants, roughly two hundred pounds of pot, still an enormous crop.
4. Herbert Huncke to Allen Ginsberg, March 1947.
5. Herbert Huncke interviewed by Steven Watson, Chelsea Hotel, March 12, 1995.
6. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads (Paladin edition), 183.
7. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 223.
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 11, 1947.
9. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, March 23, 1947.
10. Herbert Huncke, Guilty of Everything, 90–91.
11. Morgan, tape 12.
12. Ibid.
13. Morgan, tape 14.
14. Morgan, tape 12.
15. Ibid.
16. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1947.
17. Quoted in James Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, 7.
18. Herbert Huncke, The Evening Sky Turned Crimson.
19. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
20. Morgan, tape 25.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 20, 1948.
22. Morgan, tape 71 (labeled tape 70).
Chapter Fifteen
1. Morgan, tape 13.
2. WSB to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, June 5, 1948.
3. WSB to Jack Kerouac, November 30, 1948.
4. WSB to Jack Kerouac, March 15, 1949.
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 18, 1949.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, November 9, 1948.
7. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 133.
8. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 60.
9. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book, 131.
10. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 10, 1949.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 16, 1949.
12. Gifford and Lee, Jack’s Book, 132.
13. Kerouac, On the Road, 129.
14. WSB, The Cat Inside, 47.
15. Gifford and Lee, Jack’s Book, 134.
16. Lu Anne Henderson quoted in Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos, One and Only: The Untold Story of “On the Road,” 64–65.
17. Kerouac, On the Road, 135.
18. Gifford and Lee, Jack’s Book, 136.<
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19. Kerouac calls Burroughs “Bull” and Joan is “Jane.”
20. Kerouac, On the Road, 132.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 18, 1949.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 30, 1949.
23. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 7, 1949.
24. WSB in conversation with the author, London, 1972.
25. WSB, “A Thanksgiving Prayer,” in Tornado Alley, 1989.
26. The financial information is all taken from James Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, 13–14.
27. Morgan, tape 10.
28. Ibid.
29. Morgan, tape 44.
30. Morgan, tape 53.
31. Ibid.
32. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 38.
33. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, April 13, 1949.
Chapter Sixteen
1. Morgan, tape 28 (labeled tape 27).
2. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 90.
3. Ibid., 89.
4. Burroughs had Allen Ginsberg’s copy, mailed to him by Allen’s father, Louis Ginsberg, after he himself had read it.
5. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 289.
6. WSB interviewed by James Grauerholz, 1974, quoted in Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, 145.
7. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 135.
8. WSB to Jack Kerouac, June 24, 1949.
9. Morgan, tape 10.
10. Morgan, tape 47 (labeled tape 44–46).
11. WSB to Jack Kerouac, September 26, 1949.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1949.
13. WSB to Jack Kerouac, November 2, 1949.
Chapter Seventeen
1. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 59th Chorus.
2. Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio (London: Collins, 1960) (originally titled The Sudden View, 1953), 66–67.
3. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, October 31, 1949.
4. Ibid.
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 23, 1949.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 1, 1949.
7. WSB to Jack Kerouac, January 22, 1950.
8. James Grauerholz writes in The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, “Burroughs and Kerouac both misunderstood this man’s name as ‘Tercerero’—‘the third one’—but no such family name exists in Mexico, whereas ‘Tesorero’—‘treasurer’—is not uncommon.”
9. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 115.
10. Ibid.
11. Jorge García-Robles (with the collaboration of James Grauerholz), The Wild Shot: William S. Burroughs in Mexico (1949–1952), 34.
12. María was finally arrested on April 4, 1957, and given four years in jail. She died five months later on September 4, 1957, from cardiac arrest.
13. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 116.
14. Ibid., 118.
15. Morgan, tape 55.
16. Ibid.
17. Now called calle José Alvarado.
18. WSB to Jack Kerouac, September 18, 1950.
19. García-Robles, The Wild Shot, 38.
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 1, 1951.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 11, 1951.
22. Ibid.
23. WSB to Jack Kerouac, December 26, 1950.
24. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 11, 1951.
25. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 5, 1951.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 130.
29. Ibid.
30. Hal Chase interview transcription, Ted Morgan papers, Arizona State University, Tempe.
31. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 127.
32. Morgan, tape 17.
33. Morgan, tape 51 (labeled 49).
34. WSB, Queer, 77, and in conversation with the author, London, 1972.
35. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 24, 1951.
36. Ibid.; the first sentence was crossed out in the original.
37. Allen Ginsberg, As Ever: The Collected Correspondence, 64. See The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945 to 1959, Oliver Harris’s footnote, 85.
38. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, n.d. (May 1951).
39. Interview with Doña Marina Sotelo by Jorge García-Robles, July 25, 1991. Burroughs Archives, English translation, 13 and 9.
40. WSB, My Education, 31.
41. The name is possibly a combination of Eugene Brooks, Allen Ginsberg’s lawyer brother, whom Burroughs knew well as he sometimes stayed at 115th Street, and the Allerton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, Chicago, a 1923, twenty-five-story landmark whose sign towers over downtown and would have been well known to Burroughs.
42. Morgan, tape 20.
43. Ibid.
44. WSB, Queer, 96.
45. Ibid., 109.
46. Ibid., 109–10.
47. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
Chapter Eighteen
1. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 46.
2. For this and much of the other information in this section, I am grateful for James Grauerholz’s The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, which covers the subject in exhaustive detail.
3. Morgan, tape 47.
4. Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Interview with Healy, September 12, 1991.
5. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, New York, 1974 (from ms.).
6. WSB interviewed in Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
7. As reported by June Woods Overgaard, as told to her immediately after the shooting by Eddie Woods. Interviewed by Ted Morgan in 1985 and published in James Grauerholz’s The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
8. Eddie Woods’s recollection of Burroughs’s words as reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
9. Ibid.
10. Manuel Mejía interviewed by Jorge García-Robles, December 22, 1991.
11. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
12. Excelsior, September 7, 1951. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
13. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
14. La Prensa, September 7, 1951. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
15. Morgan, tape 40.
16. The final charges against Burroughs, as issued on November 15, 1951, by Judge Fernández, were as follows, as reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: “The complainant himself agrees that the legal exigencies are fulfilled insofar as the objective facts that refer to the death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, even if not to the subjective elements of the crime of murder, and in that which relates to the first assessment it is quite certain that the legal extremities of the crime of murder are proved, in terms of Articles 94, 96, 105, 106–121 and other relevant parts of the Code of Penal Proceedings, applicable in D.F. and the Territories. […]
“Basically, the facts that caused the arrest of William Seward Burroughs and the ruling of formal prisión consist of this: on […] September 7 [sic], the complainant was in the building 122 Monterrey, apartment 10, where his friend John Healy lived, and where— in company with the wife of the same complainant and other persons— they were ingesting alcoholic beverages; and that at a given moment, the complainant took out of his holster a pistol, pulling back the slide, and producing a shot that caused the death of the now-deceased lady.
“Basically, this is the version of the witnesses Edwin John Woods [and] Louis [sic] Marker, but the petitioner cannot hold himself out as proving the exclusion of responsibility which is referred to in Fraction X of Article 15 of the Penal Code; that is to say, that if an injury was caused, that it was by mere accident, with neither intention nor any imprudence, carrying out a legal deed with a
ll due precautions.
“So in a way, those extremities can be shown, even accepting the version given by the aggrieved and the witnesses, for even though the test offered would be in the nature of discarding the intentionality in the commission of the punishable deed, there exists the possibility and probability that the death of the victim would have been due to an imprudencia, for the complainant ought to have recognized the state of inebriation in which he found himself— he, who took no precaution to [determine] if the weapon was loaded, nor pointed the barrel in a direction in which no damage could be caused.”
17. Ibid.
18. WSB to Jack Kerouac, December 20, 1951.
19. Diario Oficial de México, August 29, 1990.
20. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
21. Morgan, tape 12.
22. Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
26. Lucien Carr interviewed by James Grauerholz, October 11, 1999, in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
27. Morgan, tape 18.
28. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, New York, 1974 (from ms.).
29. Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and William Burroughs, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, Thalia Theater, Hamburg, program for performance opening March 31, 1990.
Chapter Nineteen
1. Morgan, tape 40.
2. Morgan, tape 47.
3. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 5, 1952.
4. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 3, 1952.
5. See Oliver Harris’s introduction to Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” published by Penguin in 2003.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 22, 1952.
7. WSB to Jack Kerouac [April 1952].
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 26, 1952.
9. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 114.
10. Ibid.
11. Morgan, tape 31.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, June 4, 1952.
13. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 15, 1952.
14. Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, May 10, 1952.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 23, 1952.
16. Ibid.
17. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 252.
18. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 13, 1952.
19. Ibid.
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 20, 1952.
21. A publisher’s royalty statement shows that 113,170 copies were sold before December 30, 1953. See Maynard and Miles, William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953–1973, 2f.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, early July 1952.