Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  “International Zone” was apparently sent to Ginsberg in the summer of 1955, perhaps nine months after it was first composed. In the original manuscript there is a postscript (not included in the piece as presented here), which exemplifies a typically Burroughsian shift of viewpoint on a new locale:

  “Since I wrote this article, conditions in Tangier have changed. There is a strong feeling of tension and hostility. Children shout insults as you walk by. The streets are no longer safe. A Canadian acquaintance of mine, coming home at 3 A.M., was stabbed in the back…. The Nationalists have already demanded the integration of Tangier into an independent Morocco. They may resort to terrorism if the occupying powers refuse to relinquish the International Zone…. Business has hit a new low. The tourist trade is falling off. Many of the residents are talking about leaving.” This shift echoes the transformation of Mexico City, from being “one of the few places left where a man can really live like a Prince,” in Burroughs’ 1949 letters to Ginsberg, to “this cold ass town,” in a letter from late 1952, again to Ginsberg: “I am so fed up with these chiseling bastards I don’t ever want to see Mexico again.”

  In late 1954, when “International Zone” was composed, Burroughs was changing his view of Tangier as a superlatively liberal culture where boys and drugs were concerned, to a vision of the City as a great world crossroads for losers and lamsters, an “interzone” between failed and abandoned old lives (like Burroughs’ own) and the dream of a new life ahead—the sort of “waiting room” that is a recurrent image in Burroughs’ fiction. In the article, he writes that “Tangier is a vast penal colony,” which again recalls the dream he had in Quito in 1951. Especially interesting is Burroughs’ self-portrait as “Brinton, who writes unpublishably obscene novels and exists on a small income. He undoubtedly has talent, but his work is hopelessly unsalable.”

  This same passage is echoed in the first pages of “Lee’s Journals,” which were assembled from sections of letters to Ginsberg and pages written in Burroughs’ attempt to find his own voice and to record his experiences in Tangier. Also included here are several short untitled fictional and autobiographical sketches, many written during his series of heroin “cures” at Benchimal Hospital. The fag scene of Tangier is bitingly depicted, and it is interesting to observe that Burroughs’ first encounters with the late Brion Gysin (“Algren”) were ambivalent, giving no hint of the almost symbiotic friendship the two men would later evolve.

  The sketch (in “Lee’s Journals”) of “Martin” revisiting the Römanischer Baden in postwar Vienna surely draws on Burroughs’ own experiences in that city in 1937. And “Mark Bradford,” the playwright visiting Tangier who snubs Lee, may well be Tennessee Williams, with whom Burroughs did not become friends until the 1970s. Similarly, at his 1954 meeting with Paul Bowles, the latter “evinced no cordiality,” but within two years not only was their friendship forged but Bowles had also brought Burroughs back together with Brion Gysin.

  Increasingly, the journals record Burroughs’ attempts to define himself as a writer, and the frantic routines continue to pour out of him. His extended sketch of Antonio, the Portuguese mooch mentioned in “International Zone,” is hilarious and ghastly. The vision of Antonio’s mother’s kidney-dialysis machine being unhooked leads to a wise-guy cops routine about the “displaced fuzz” paying a disconnection visit. There follows an account of a bust by “dream cops,” which is the forerunner of the “Hauser and O’Brien” section of Naked Lunch: two imaginary cops burst in on “the Agent” and demand to inspect first his arm, then his penis. After a surreal dialogue, they depart, but one of them laughs and leaves behind a gold filling, which the Agent finds next morning, calling the irreality of the dream into question.

  Some filling in is necessary for the next section, “The Conspiracy,” to make narrative sense. In the “Hauser and O’Brien” episode, the Agent or “Lee” shoots the two cops dead and escapes from the hotel. He finds his pusher, Nick, and explains that he is leaving town and must stock up on junk. Nick makes small talk about the connection’s frequent delays, and then shrugs: “What can I say to him? He knows I’ll wait.” At this point “The Conspiracy” picks up: “Yes, they know we’ll wait,” and Lee muses over the identity of the stoolie who has fingered him. The pages that follow were taken from the original 1958 Interzone manuscript.

  “Iron Wrack Dream,” so named by Ginsberg, records a vision of “the City” as “a vast network of levels … connected by gangways and cars that run on wires and single tracks.” This futuristic dream was to be seminal to Burroughs’ image of the City in Interzone. The nightclubs that are “built on perilous balconies a thousand feet over the rubbish and rusty metal of the City” are reminiscent of Lee’s experiences in the “Mexico City Return” section of Queer: “I walked around with my camera and saw a wood and corrugated-iron shack on a limestone cliff in Old Panama, like a penthouse.” They also call to mind the collapsing Mexican balconies of “Tío Mate Smiles” in The Wild Boys. Here we can see how Burroughs refines and poetically cross-associates his observations and dream images.

  Incomplete fragments of unpublished letters to Ginsberg around 1955, or retyped versions of them, are found in the Arizona State collection and fittingly conclude “Lee’s Journals,” since they furnish an explicit statement of the literary direction Burroughs was moving in. As he wrote to Ginsberg on October 21, 1955: “The selection chapters [of Interzone] form a sort of mosaic, with the cryptic significance of juxtaposition, like objects abandoned in a hotel drawer, a form of still life.” It is clear from these early thematic propositions that Burroughs’ first encounter in 1959 with the “cut-up” method of writing, as developed by Brion Gysin from the Dada movement’s existing aleatory and collage techniques, would exert an inescapable attraction for him and revolutionize his work.

  The original Interzone manuscript is located in the Ginsberg Deposit at Butler Library, Columbia University, and consists of 175 pages, comprising twelve sections: “WORD”; “Panorama (Andrew Kief and the K.Y. Scandal)”; “Voices”; “County Clerk”; “Interzone University”; “Islam, Inc.”; “Hassan’s Rumpus Room”; “Benway”; “A.J.’s Annual Ball”; “Hospital” (including the “detective story” later divided into “Hauser and O’Brien” and “The Conspiracy”); “The Technical Psychiatry Conference”; and “The Market.” This first sequence was decided upon with the help of Ginsberg and Ansen in Paris, in early 1958.

  In the course of assembling the final Naked Lunch manuscript, the majority of these pages were used—but the longest and most unusual section, “WORD,” was the source of only a few short lines and paragraphs, which were sprinkled mostly into the novel’s final chapter, “An Atrophied Preface … Wouldn’t You?” Wherever possible, these passages have been deleted from the otherwise intact “WORD” section, but the acute reader will find a handful of them retained, for the sake of the sense of surrounding lines. And a few short sections that remained unused from “Voices,” “Interzone University,” “Benway” and “A.J.’s Annual Ball” have been inserted at an appropriate place toward the end of “WORD,” so that the text may end as it was originally written.

  This manuscript lay forgotten for twenty-five years, until Bill Morgan, who was cataloging Allen Ginsberg’s Columbia deposit, came across it in 1984. At Ginsberg’s suggestion, a copy was sent to Burroughs in Kansas, where he was able to oversee the editing of the thematically and historically linked materials gathered together in this volume, which represents the first publication of “WORD,” essentially in its entirety. This chapter was apparently typed by Kerouac, and in certain instances words that were clearly misread have been changed, but it is otherwise faithful to the 1958 text.

  What is the significance of “WORD” to Burroughs’ career as a writer? It shows the complete transformation of the straightforward style of the two early novels into a manic, surreal, willfully disgusting and violently purgative regurgitation of seemingly random images. “WORD” is a text written at the white h
eat of Burroughs’ first command of this later style. Although it is the direct precursor of Naked Lunch, very little of this text was used in that novel, and as far as can be readily determined, none of it was utilized in the composition of his next three books: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express (Olympia Press, 1961, 1962 and 1964). Ansen described it as: “WORD, in which the author, all masks thrown aside, delivers a long tirade, a blend of confession, routine and fantasy, ending in ‘a vast Moslem muttering.’ ”

  In his letters to Ginsberg throughout 1955–57, Burroughs wrote often of his progress with the writing of Interzone. December 20, 1956: “I will send along about 100 pages of Interzone, it is coming so fast I can hardly get it down, and shakes me like a great black wind through the bones.” January 23, 1957: “Interzone is coming like dictation, I can’t keep up with it. I will send along what is done so far. Read in any order. It makes no difference.” There exist many other references in these letters; clearly, he was conscious of a climactic moment in his life, a turning point past which he would never be the same. But curiously, the tone and style of “WORD” are unique in Burroughs’ work; he never returned to the same kind of profane, first-person sibylline word salad, although it marked the breakthrough into his own characteristic voice.

  This book is meant to portray the development of Burroughs’ mature writing style, and to present a selection of vintage Burroughs from the mid-1950s—a kind of writing he can no more repeat than he can once again be forty-four years old in Tangier. The willfully outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of his four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning, and his closely-observed experience of mankind’s inexhaustible ugliness and ignorance. Only by dispensing with any concept of “bad taste” or self-repression could he liberate his writing instrument to explore the landscapes of Earth and Space in his work written over the following thirty years. Reading Interzone, you are present at the beginning.

  —James Grauerholz

  I. STORIES

  Twilight’s Last Gleamings

  PLEASE IMAGINE AN EXPLOSION ON A SHIP

  A paretic named Perkins sat askew on his broken wheelchair. He arranged his lips.

  “You pithyathed thon of a bidth!” he shouted.

  Barbara Cannon, a second-class passenger, lay naked in a first-class bridal suite with Stewart Lindy Adams. Lindy got out of bed and walked over to a window and looked out.

  “Put on your clothes, honey,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

  A first-class passenger named Mrs. Norris was thrown out of bed by the explosion. She lay there shrieking until her maid came and helped her up.

  “Bring me my wig and my kimono,” she told the maid. “I’m going to see the captain.”

  Dr. Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel.

  “There was a little scar, Doctor,” said the nurse, who was peering over his shoulder. “Perhaps the appendix is already out.”

  “The appendix out!” the doctor shouted. “I’m taking the appendix out! What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Perhaps the appendix is on the left side,” said the nurse. “That happens sometimes, you know.”

  “Can’t you be quiet?” said the doctor. “I’m coming to that!” He threw back his elbows in a movement of exasperation. “Stop breathing down my neck!” he yelled. He thrust a red fist at her. “And get me another scalpel. This one has no edge to it.”

  He lifted the abdominal wall and searched along the incision. “I know where an appendix is. I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard.”

  The floor tilted from the force of the explosion. The doctor reeled back and hit the wall.

  “Sew her up!” he said, peeling off his gloves. “I can’t be expected to work under such conditions!”

  At a table in the bar sat Christopher Hitch, a rich liberal; Colonel Merrick, retired; Billy Hines of Newport; and Joe Bane, writer.

  “In all my experience as a traveler,” the Colonel was saying, “I have never encountered such service.”

  Billy Hines twisted his glass, watching the ice cubes. “Frightful service,” he said, his face contorted by a suppressed yawn.

  “Do you think the captain controls this ship?” said the Colonel, fixing Christopher Hitch with a bloodshot blue eye. “Unions!” shouted the Colonel. “Unions control this ship!”

  Hitch gave out with a laugh that was supposed to be placating but ended up oily. “Things aren’t so bad, really,” he said, patting at the Colonel’s arm. He didn’t land the pat, because the Colonel drew his arm out of reach. “Things will adjust themselves.”

  Joe Bane looked up from his drink of straight rye. “It’s like I say, Colonel,” he said. “A man—”

  The table left the floor and the glasses crashed. Billy Hines remained seated, looking blankly at the spot where his glass had been. Christopher Hitch rose uncertainly. Joe Bane jumped up and ran away.

  “By God!” said the Colonel. “I’m not surprised!”

  Also at a table in the bar sat Philip Bradshinkel, investment banker; his wife, Joan Bradshinkel; Branch Morton, a St. Louis politician; and Morton’s wife, Mary Morton. The explosion knocked their table over.

  Joan raised her eyebrows in an expression of sour annoyance. She looked at her husband and sighed.

  “I’m sorry this happened, dear,” said her husband. “Whatever it is, I mean.”

  Mary Morton said, “Well, I declare!”

  Branch Morton stood up, pushing back his chair with a large red hand. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

  Mrs. Norris pushed through a crowd on C Deck. She rang the elevator bell and waited. She rang again and waited. After five minutes she walked up to A Deck.

  The Negro orchestra, high on marijuana, remained seated after the explosion. Branch Morton walked over to the orchestra leader.

  “Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” he ordered.

  The orchestra leader looked at him.

  “What you say?” he asked.

  “You black baboon, play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on your horn!”

  “Contract don’t say nothing ’bout no Star-Spangled Banner,” said a thin Negro in spectacles.

  “This old boat am swinging on down!” someone in the orchestra yelled, and the musicians jumped down off the platform and scattered among the passengers.

  Branch Morton walked over to a jukebox in a corner of the saloon. He saw “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Fats Waller. He put in a handful of quarters. The machine clicked and buzzed and began to play:

  “OH SAY CAN YOU? YES YES”

  Joe Bane fell against the door of his stateroom and plunged in. He threw himself on the bed and drew his knees up to his chin. He began to sob.

  His wife sat on the bed and talked to him in a gentle hypnotic voice. “You can’t stay here, Joey. This bed is going underwater. You can’t stay here.”

  Gradually the sobbing stopped and Bane sat up. She helped him put on a life belt. “Come along,” she said.

  “Yes, honey face,” he said, and followed her out the door.

  “AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE”

  Mrs. Norris found the door to the captain’s cabin ajar. She pushed it open and stepped in, knocking on the open door. A tall, thin, red-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses was sitting at a desk littered with maps. He glanced up without speaking.

  “Oh Captain, is the ship sinking? Someone set off a bomb, they said. I’m Mrs. Norris—you know, Mr. Norris, shipping business. Oh the ship is sinking! I know, or you’d say something. Captain, you will take care of us? My maid and me?” She put out a hand to touch the captain’s arm. The ship listed suddenly, throwing her heavily against the desk. Her wig slipped.

  The captain stood up. He snatched the wig off her head and put it on.

  “Give me that kimono!” he ordered.

  Mrs. Norris screamed. She started for the door. The captain took three long, s
pringy strides and blocked her way. Mrs. Norris rushed for a window, screaming. The captain took a revolver from his side pocket. He aimed at her bald pate outlined in the window, and fired.

  “You Goddamned old fool,” he said. “Give me that kimono!”

  Philip Bradshinkel walked up to a sailor with his affable smile.

  “Room for the ladies on this one?” he asked, indicating a lifeboat.

  The sailor looked at him sourly.

  “No!” said the sailor. He turned away and went on working on the launching davit.

  “Now wait a minute,” said Bradshinkel. “You can’t mean that. Women and children first, you know.”

  “Nobody goes on this lifeboat but the crew,” said the sailor.

  “Oh, I understand,” said Bradshinkel, pulling out a wad of bills.

  The sailor snatched the money.

  “I thought so,” said Bradshinkel. He took his wife by the arm and started to help her into the lifeboat.

  “Get that old meat outa here!” screamed the sailor.

  “But you made a bargain! You took my money!”

  “Oh for Chrissakes,” said the sailor. “I just took your dough so it wouldn’t get wet!”

  “But my wife is a woman!”

  Suddenly the sailor became very gentle.

  “All my life,” he said, “all my life I been a sucker for a classy dame. I seen ’em in the Sunday papers laying on the beach. Soft messy tits. They just lay there and smile dirty. Jesus they heat my pants!”

  Bradshinkel nudged his wife. “Smile at him.” He winked at the sailor. “What do you say?”

  “Naw,” said the sailor, “I ain’t got time to lay her now.”

  “Later,” said Bradshinkel.

  “Later’s no good. Besides she’s special built for you. She can’t give me no kids and she drinks alla time. Like I say, I just seen her in the Sunday papers and wanted her like a dog wants rotten meat.”