Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have a theory that if you dig deep enough, take the time to ask the right questions, and do diligent research, everybody is interesting. It is my spin on Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes. I guess I see the silver lining in the gray flannel suit. Take David Solomon. Solomon was an editor at Esquire, Metronome, and Playboy in the 1950s and 1960s, and I recently bought a very small archive of his papers relating to William Burroughs. The documents deal with Burroughs’ projects for those magazines and for some related anthologies. Given my obsession with magazine appearances, they were interesting enough for me to shell out the cash. A little more digging and a bit more research into Solomon make the papers even more valuable to me and I hope to others. I planned on writing a completely different essay utilizing this material, but that will have to wait. In researching Solomon, I took a trip and got sidetracked into the weird and that is always a fun place to go. Hop on the bus if you care to.

Born in 1925 in California, Solomon came of age at the same time as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady. Unlike the Beats, Solomon served in World War II and suffered tremendous loss. His two brothers were killed in bombing runs over Germany, and like Private Ryan, Solomon was pulled from the front lines as the only surviving son in his family. Solomon was discharged in 1946 and took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college. He received a BA from Washington Square College of New York University, but his real education was earned in combat in Europe, in the jazz clubs of New York, in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, and in the drug culture of Washington Square. Attempting to come to terms with the Bomb, traumatized by their war experience, and fascinated with African-American and drug culture, young men like Solomon became the hipsters and White Negroes represented by the early Beats and belatedly described by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay in Dissent.

Solomon married and had two children, but he remained in the Village, refusing to move out to the Levittowns that sprang up like mushrooms around New York City. By the mid-1950s, Solomon was an assistant editor at Esquire. His tenure there lasted until 1960, and he left just before the magazine’s renaissance under the editorial leadership of Harold Hayes who beat out such young lions as Clay Felker and Ralph Ginzburg for the position. Hayes, Felker, and Ginzburg would change mainstream magazine publishing and challenge the rules of the game in the 1960s. Solomon lacked their editorial genius but, in his own way, he would make his mark on the profession by incorporating his hipster sensibility into the mainstream press. Solomon was the White Negro as editor.

While at Esquire, Solomon contacted Aldous Huxley about revising Huxley’s “The History of Tension” article in light of another piece, “Drugs that Shape Men’s Minds,” which Huxley had published in The Saturday Evening Post. The Esquire essay was to have been titled “The Coming Defeat of Tension” and would have reflected Huxley’s belief that “present and yet to be developed pharmacological agents will bring about a religious and ethical revolution.” Huxley’s writings on drugs, notably The Doors of Perception, were read as sacred texts for psychedelic adventurers of the 1960s. It was while researching Huxley that Solomon became an early psychedelic enthusiast. The revised article never appeared in Esquire, but Solomon took Huxley as his guru and soldiered on in a hands-on exploration of psychedelics and their history. In time, Solomon’s knowledge of drugs and drug culture became legendary.

In 1960, Solomon became editor of Metronome, a mainstream jazz magazine. Solomon was a friend of Dizzy Gillespie, a regular at jazz clubs, and, of course, was well-versed in jazz’s druggy elements, particularly marijuana and heroin. Under Solomon’s direction, Metronome made a play to be hip, and his interest in drugs filtered into the magazine. Here is where William Burroughs comes in. It always struck me as odd that in May and August of 1961, Burroughs appeared in Metronome. Learning about Solomon, it all became clear. Naturally, Solomon was a big fan of Burroughs’ writing, and throughout the 1960s, Solomon attempted to get Burroughs published in his mainstream ventures. In May of 1961, Burroughs contributed “No Bueno,” a selection from the just published Soft Machine, to Metronome. Burroughs received $50. The selection was presented as an anti-drug piece showing the horrors of heroin use — which, in jazz circles, had become a plague that destroyed the lives of Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, and numerous others. Miles Davis and John Coltrane temporarily kicked heroin habits in the late 1950s and entered into a period of incredible creativity. In August 1961, Burroughs contributed “This Is the Time of the Assassins,” a Hassan I Sabbah inspired piece. No doubt, Solomon was well-versed in the hashish cult of Sabbah.

While Burroughs was featured in a 1959 issue of Life (including a photograph) and appeared in the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle, Metronome provided the first appearance of Burroughs’ fiction in a mainstream publication. Thus, in the summer of 1961, Burroughs’ fiction hit the newsstand. This was the Burroughs of Soft Machine and the cut-up (even if the selections were less jarring than usual), not Naked Lunch or Junkie. I suspect that readers of Metronome would have been left shaking their heads and muttering “No Bueno.” Burroughs’ writing clearly stands out in the magazine.

This was the height of the Cold War, and the psychedelic 1960s had yet to emerge from the decade of Miltown. Solomon’s editorial on The Jazz Gap in the May 1961 issue makes this clear. The editorial refers to the alleged missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States that placed the world on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Solomon assured his readers that the United States was the leader of the jazz world. However, with the USSR entering the field, the gap was threatening to narrow. As a result, Metronome assigned a Soviet correspondent to cover this new jazz scene. Solomon did not last long as editor of Metronome. Printing Burroughs probably had a role in his departure. Burroughs wrote to Solomon on January 27, 1962, “When I was in New York I tried to reach you through Metronome — Long purged pause — Mr. Solomon isn’t with us anymore — ”

In the mid-1960s, Solomon latched on as literary editor for Playboy, and he thought of William Burroughs as a potential contributor. Burroughs and Solomon traded various ideas for contributing to the magazine. Burroughs suggested his old stand-bys: words of advice to young writers or his experiences as a drug addict. The fee would be $250 “turn-down guarantee” with $1500 payable if the article was accepted. The proposal was rejected by A.C. Spectorsky, Playboy‘s publisher. It was back to the drawing board. In late 1964, Burroughs planned on returning to the United States after a decade of exile. Burroughs hoped to travel to St. Louis, his place of birth; why not, Burroughs suggested, write a piece about his impressions on his return home? Solomon pitched the idea as follows: “I strongly advise that we assign Burroughs. The return of the outcast, the reformed junky lately turned literary genius, to lay down a ‘smog of nostalgia’ on his grimy hometown is enough to make me want to meet him in St. Louis.” Burroughs’ proposed title: “Meet Me in St. Louis.” The idea was accepted by Playboy and Burroughs got to work.

I suppose Solomon had less control over the content in Playboy than in Metronome. Playboy received Burroughs’ article, later entitled “St. Louis Return,” and could not make heads or tails of it. As advertised the article contains much nostalgia but little of the hip, yet safely consumerist, take on sex, politics, or lifestyle endorsed by Hugh Hefner. Instead the piece was largely a statement of the cut-up technique in the cut-up style. The piece was mostly veiled literary discussion, not about lifestyle or life story. Burroughs’ contribution was rejected and never appeared in Playboy.

Yet Playboy‘s loss was the Paris Review‘s gain. “St. Louis Return” appeared in 1965 in Issue 35 of the Paris Review along with an interview of Burroughs by Conrad Knickerbocker for the Art of Fiction section. In my opinion it is not an exaggeration to consider this magazine appearance one of the most important of Burroughs’ career. To this day, the interview remains one of Burroughs’ most detailed and thoughtful statements on his personal history and literary techniques. In addition, the inclusion of images from Burroughs’ St. Louis Journals gave a rare glimpse into the kind of visual-textual work Burroughs was doing at the time. The Paris Review presented Burroughs as a major writer and theorist, not a popular culture figure. For a piece such as “St. Louis Return,” the Paris Review proved the ideal venue.

This treatment of Burroughs was a masterpiece of editorship. This is indicative of the work published during Tom Clark’s tenure as poetry editor. The Burroughs material benefitted from a strong editorial hand and vision coupled with the right venue — both of which Solomon lacked. As we will see, Solomon would soon find his niche and succeed as a salesman of drug culture on multiple levels. On the other hand, Clark was a young poet, who became poetry editor in the mid-1960s, and completely revitalized the Review, making it a major outlet for new poetry. He did this by including his friends — Ted Berrigan and other New York poets — as well as incorporating these poets’ heroes: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Issue 35 includes Robin Blaser, Ed Dorn, Ron Padgett, Tom Pickard, and Aram Saroyan — cutting-edge choices to be sure. The issue also features an interview with Dizzy Gillespie. It is as if Solomon edited a little mag. For me, the period of Clark’s editorship was the high-water mark of the Paris Review.

While Solomon was largely unsuccessful in magazine publishing, his serious and evangelical take on drugs proved perfect for mainstream book publishers. From 1964 to 1975, Solomon edited a series of anthologies that provided intellectual, philosophical, medical, and historical takes on various drugs from LSD to marijuana to cocaine. The titles include LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (1964), The Marijuana Papers (1966), Drugs and Sexuality (1973) and The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers (1975). He created a forum of educated and academic discussion for much mythologized subjects. For a public fascinated but largely uneducated about drugs, these anthologies proved irresistible and became best sellers. The books were available, in some cases, in both hardcover and paperback. They highlight Solomon’s skill in marketing psychedelics and drug culture to mainstream audiences.

Burroughs no doubt appreciated the cash. In a February 5, 1962 letter on Avon stationery, Solomon writes Burroughs proposing an anthology in order to get Burroughs some money. Quite possibly the resulting anthology was the one on LSD. Burroughs got paid $100 for reprint rights to “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness Expanding Drugs” for the LSD anthology eventually published by Putnam. Avon was part of the book division of The Hearst Corporation, acquired by Hearst in 1959. Avon made its name publishing comic books and pulp paperbacks. The imprint was far from literary and dealt strictly with topics with mass appeal. Solomon was something of a hipster spy. Solomon writes, “Working for Hearst a morbid kick…unless I learn to turn on with formaldehyde, I’m cooked.” The letter is redacted, and I like to think the “informal postal exchange” referred to a drug exchange with Allen Ginsberg undertaken in the belly of the publishing beast.

Huxley was the guiding light of the LSD anthology and the book is dedicated to him: “guru extraordinaire, whose words first beckoned me through the doors of perception.” Timothy Leary wrote the introduction. It is a serious treatment of LSD with the table of contents loaded with MDs and PhDs. Burroughs stands out with his lack of an advanced degree, but he belongs. He was a Master Addict of Dangerous Drugs, after all. The anthology was aimed to introduce philosophical and medical evidence in support of the benefits of LSD at a time when the drug was coming under fire by the police, government, and mainstream media. The last paragraph to Solomon’s editor’s note could have served as a Bill of Rights for a psychedelic nation: “Moreover, I believe that the astonishing human brain is man’s most inalienable possession, his intellectual birthright. No person or institution has the moral right to muffle or inhibit its development. No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the right to dictate and fix the levels of consciousness to which men aspire, whether those states are induced pharmacologically or otherwise. Die gedanken sind frei.”

In 1966, Solomon and his family moved to Mallorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean that was dominated by the presence of Robert Graves. Graves’s literary career roughly paralleled that of Aldous Huxley. Both were British modernists who later in life transformed into psychedelic pioneers. Graves became particularly fascinated with mushroom cults, and such interests filtered into his increasingly mystical worldview, developed in Food For Centaurs (1960) and elsewhere. Solomon insinuated himself into the literary and drug culture of Mallorca but just as quickly found himself on the wrong end of the law. Forced to leave the island, Solomon moved to England and settled in the intellectual confines of Cambridge, which was in throes of the psychedelic revolution. Given his vast knowledge of drugs and England’s cultural climate at the time, Solomon, like Huxley and Graves, found himself considered a guru, a position he came to relish.

At this point, Solomon’s interest in drugs reached a new, and ultimately disastrous, level. Like many proponents of psychedelics, Solomon was well situated to become involved in drug manufacturing and trafficking. Timothy Leary followed a similar path. For example, Leary’s International Foundation for Internal Freedom became aligned with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Billy Hitchcock, a young heir to a vast fortune and a believer in Leary’s philosophies, financed Leary’s LSD headquarters in Millbrook, a place of introspection and self-discovery. But the potential for profit was too great for Hitchcock and others to ignore and what started as a spiritual exploration mutated into a money-making enterprise and a criminal organization. Eventually, Hitchcock became the financier for much of the LSD underground.

Solomon, along with two refugees from Millbrook, came up with the idea of liquefying the active ingredient of marijuana, THC, in order to allow mass distribution and easier transportation. At the time (1968), THC was legal in Great Britain. Perhaps Solomon’s ambition was to spread the drug in order to advance the psychedelic revolution, but his associates were less idealistic. Eventually, Solomon’s utopian vision would prove susceptible to corruption as well.

In Cambridge, a circle developed around Solomon and drugs that had wide-ranging influence on intellectuals’ reception of psychedelics and on the illicit LSD trade. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Francis Crick was briefly involved with Solomon’s social scene. Crick, who developed the concept of the DNA double helix, came up with his revolutionary idea after an LSD trip. Solomon searched around Cambridge for a chemist with the scientific knowledge he required for the THC project and met Dick Kemp through Crick. Kemp was drawn to Solomon’s circle because of Crick’s presence. Crick convinced Kemp of LSD’s value to society.

Like Augustus Owsley and Tim Scully before him, Kemp bought into the idea of a psychedelic revolution and became a drug chemist on an international scale. The ability to liquefy THC eluded Solomon and Kemp, but Solomon with his drug connections was able to acquire large quantities of Ergotamine Tartrate, which is the base material for the manufacture of LSD. Thus Solomon was no longer just a drug enthusiast; he was a major player in an international drug enterprise.

Yet Solomon remained something of a schlemiel. As in his career as a magazine editor, his ideas and his ambition overreached his abilities. Solomon may have been well-versed in drug knowledge and culture, he may have talked the talk, but he could not walk the walk. He was clearly out of his league in the area of drug manufacture. The LSD whose production he oversaw was usually of poor quality and often cut into diluted doses. In one case, Solomon attempted to create his own LSD capsules and succeeded in dosing himself with 1000 mics of acid, which left him with the trip of his life and bedridden for nearly a week. Solomon was far from a criminal mastermind.

Solomon’s drug partners realized his incompetence and attempted to distance themselves from him. In addition, Solomon bragged of his involvement in the ring to anyone who would listen. The path to eventual disaster was well paved and Solomon raced downhill to his fate. Despite Solomon’s lack of street smarts, he was well connected with drug suppliers. Unfortunately for his drug associates, Solomon was a necessary evil.

For the full story of the development and unraveling of this drug ring, see the book by Stewart Tendler and David May. To make a long story short, the dominoes began to fall as members of the ring were arrested on unrelated drug and smuggling charges and the extent of its activities became clear. Gerry Thomas, a partner of Solomon’s in the THC scheme, was arrested in Canada and due to a feud with Solomon supplied the information that led to the investigation of The Micro Dot Gang, which included the British LSD group co-founded by Solomon and The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Once again, Solomon proved the weak link in the drug ring.

Inspector Dick Lee, a figure straight out of a William Burroughs novel, spearheaded Operation Julie to take down the LSD empire. Lee’s organization was the culmination of over a decade of harassment and demonization of the LSD counterculture. Operation Julie demonstrated the possibilities of international police cooperation, adequate funding, fully developed informant and undercover networks, and hi-tech surveillance. Narcs and wire/phone tapping were standard courses of business for this beefed up, and increasingly, well-funded police bureaucracy. The blueprint for the War on Drugs in the 1980s was set into action. The policies of fear, misinformation, and intolerance pursued by the government and police created a poisonous atmosphere ripe for generating a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a great example of the importance of set and setting. In part, such policies changed what began as an exploration of freedom, peace, and love into a culture of paranoia and violence. The Weathermen, Charles Manson, and Altamont also demonstrate this shift. On another level, the LSD trade mutated from a loose community of psychedelic idealists to an international network of psychedelic capitalists. This is indicative of a similar evolution in the counterculture generally, both in the 1960s where the counterculture quickly became co-opted by the consumer culture, and in the neoconservative revolution of the 1980s, where yesteryear’s hippies became the Me Decade’s Gordon Geckos. To a certain extent, David Solomon can be viewed as a case study in such trends.

Eventually Solomon was arrested and sentenced to ten years in jail. In 1980 in the International Times, Allen Ginsberg wrote an article on Solomon. This was the Frivolous Summer Issue that also featured articles on American Indian genocide, Baader Meinhof, and the Cannabis Conference. IT appeared in fits and starts over the coming years, but the Frivolous Summer tabloid was effectively the swan song for this long-running underground paper that began during the Summer of Love in 1966. The incarceration of Solomon and his LSD cohorts likewise signaled the end of an era. Reagan and Thatcher were soon in office and the idealism and accomplishments of the 1960s, already disillusioned and crumbling, were demonized and dismantled even further. Solomon served a partial sentence until 1983 when he returned to New York City and the jazz clubs where he had received his first tastes of the drug culture that would eventually consume and destroy him.

Solomon died in April 2007 at the age of 81. His obituary in The Villager passed over his role in Operation Julie and instead focused on his editorial work with Esquire, Metronome. and Playboy. Yet Solomon’s role in the British LSD Group proves more interesting and important than his editorial work. Like the rise and fall of Timothy Leary, the story of David Solomon shows how the seductive power of the psychedelic revolution and the intrusive fear tactics of governmental and police bureaucracies can corrupt an idealistic vision of a better, freer world into a nightmare of criminal activity fueled by paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and blind ambition. Solomon, like Leary, traded his dreams of a new society for power and wealth. At their cores, both men were feckless squares who just wanted to be accepted by a community and culture they were fascinated with but were really outside of. The desire to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out was mainly a need to Fit In. In this effort, they got wrapped up in forces beyond their imagination and control.

The psychedelic revolution was, and is, an inspired act of hubris. Even gurus such as Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and David Solomon had trouble harnessing their power. Ultimately such drugs are stronger than humans, and a society based on psychedelic exploration and widespread permissiveness seems to me doomed to failure. We are a Faustian species, but we cannot handle psychedelics’ truths. Possibly the weak link is more than an atmosphere of misconceptions and mishandled policy but is instead actually written into our DNA. We are not gods; we cannot feed on ambrosia. In his exploration of such drugs, David Solomon, like many of the true believers of the psychedelic era, bit off much more than he could chew.

Texts by William Burroughs in Metronome

William Burroughs, “No Bueno”
Metronome, May 1961

William Burroughs, “No Bueno”
Metronome, May 1961

William Burroughs, “Time of the Assassins”
Metronome, August 1961

William Burroughs, “Time of the Assassins”
Metronome, August 1961

David Solomon and William Burroughs: Correspondence, Contracts, and Ephemera

Letter from William Burroughs to David Solomon
27 Jan 1961

Letter from David Solomon to William Burroughs
19 April 1961

Letter from Timothy Leary to David Solomon
15 Jan 1962

Letter from David Solomon to William Burroughs
5 Feb 1962

Letter from William Burroughs to David Solomon
12 August 1964

Letter from David Solomon to Jack Kessie
21 Aug 1964

Letter from David Solomon to William Burroughs
1 Sept 1964

Letter from William Burroughs to David Solomon
9 Nov 1964

Letter from David Solomon to A.C. Spectorsky
13 Nov 1964

Contract for William Burroughs’ contribution to LSD anthology
7 April 1964

Check from David Solomon to William Burroughs for his contribution to LSD anthology
23 Oct 1964

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Olson’s Maximus, To Himself could very well be my favorite poem. I find myself returning to it again and again. For all the poetry I read, I actually know very few lines from memory, but these two lines by Olson I have taken to heart. They speak central truths to me, and since everything relates to William Burroughs, they speak them of Burroughs as well. Even those only casually aware of Burroughs and his work know three things about him. He wrote Naked Lunch; he was a drug addict; he shot his wife William-Tell-style and killed her. These are the three simple facts of Burroughs; these are the most familiar aspects of his biography. But are they also the areas from which we stand estranged?

Take the shooting of Joan Vollmer in Mexico City on September 5, 1951. Thanks to James Grauerholz’s meticulously researched essay on the shooting, we know who did it; we know how he did it; we know where he did it. And yet, quite frankly, despite all the factual details, we do not have a clue as to motive in this central event of Burroughs’ life. Can we really be satisfied with the police report description as an accidental shooting? As the introduction to Queer makes clear, Burroughs was not. There had to be a reason, a purpose for Joan’s death. For Burroughs there were no accidents, no coincidences; everything was related; like Pynchon, Burroughs is the great writer of paranoia.

As for the writing and publication of Naked Lunch, the one novel of Burroughs’ that the Average Joe knows about, so much of what we know is really myth, misinformation, and misinterpretation. Carol Loranger and Oliver Harris have begun the process of disentangling the threads of this narrative about the narrative, but like Jan Potocki’s novel, A Manuscript Found in Saragossa, one story begets another until we run out of thread and stand lost in the labyrinth. Harris is about to step into the maze again and map his journey through the Burroughs Archives as they relate to Naked Lunch. It remains to be seen whether he will ever get out of the library in any condition to tell us, precisely and definitively, the tale of his adventures.

That leaves us with the one simple fact about Burroughs. He was a drug addict. The deceptive term here is “was.” The past tense is crucial. “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” suggests that the author of Naked Lunch got straight, clean off heroin. Many people believe that Burroughs kicked heroin around 1957 under the care of Dr. Dent and the apomorphine cure. But the dirty little secret, the open secret, of Burroughs’ biography is that he was twisted on heroin for much of his adult life and was, in fact, on methadone until the day he died. The central tenet of drug addiction is “once an addict, always an addict.” You never kick; instead you are continually kicking, until you kick the bucket. The critical book that takes into consideration all the realities of Burroughs as a user and how they relate to his biography and his work remains to be tackled, despite tentative steps in that direction like John Long’s Drugs and the Beats.

I just finished reading Eric. C. Schneider’s, Smack: Heroin and the American City. It is a fascinating book that explores the urban space that engenders the heroin market and its users. The book covers the era from 1914 to the early 1990s, roughly the span of Burroughs’ life. As Oliver Harris states in his introduction to Junky, Burroughs lived through the entire era of illicit heroin use in America starting with the Harrison Act of 1914. As a reading of Burroughs’ addiction that takes into consideration the historical facts of the heroin trade and heroin use, Harris’ introduction is the most interesting that I know of. Using Schneider’s book as a factual source on the history of heroin, I am going to attempt to build on Harris’ foundations and suggest how such a reading can shed light on Burroughs’ life and work in what I hope are fruitful ways.

New York 1944-1945

“My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945.” — Junkie

The fact that Burroughs began experimenting with heroin around 1944 is unusual. Heroin addiction was at an ebb during the war years with most potential users in the military and with supply lines disrupted by the conflict. One of the values of Junkie is that it provides an accurate, personal account of this neglected period in drug history. Given the scarcity of heroin and new users, it is hardly surprising that Herbert Huncke (Herman) thought Burroughs (William Lee) was heat when he showed up with morphine syrettes. The drugs and the machine gun in Burroughs’ possession were military contraband smuggled off a boat in New York harbor. Increasingly difficult to obtain after the war, legally produced drugs of this type were almost completely replaced by illegally produced drugs cultivated and manufactured abroad.

The face of drug addiction was about to change as well. The Ace Junkie published in 1953 contains a prologue by Burroughs that mentions his fascination with You Can’t Win, the autobiography of a career criminal named Jack Black. Much has been made of the substantial influence this book had on Burroughs’ life and work. Black describes “an underworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool parlors, cat houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat-burglars and hobo jungles.” So summarizes Burroughs in his introduction to the 1988 reprint of Black’s book. Reading through Naked Lunch, Nova Express, and elsewhere highlights the extent of Black’s seductive power over Burroughs.

In fact, Burroughs’ interest in heroin is rooted even further in the past, both in his personal history and, although he downplays it, in literature’s. Burroughs’ prologue to Junkie makes this clear. Burroughs writes, “I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how opium smoking brings sweet dreams, and I said: ‘I will smoke opium when I grow up.’” Interestingly, this is probably the same maid who introduced Burroughs to sex, which Burroughs hazily remembered as some type of molestation. The central role of this maid in Burroughs’ personal mythology remains to be fully explored. Burroughs also wrote of his fantasies of becoming an opium-addicted writer lounging languidly with his pipe and pen. These childhood fantasies of opium are rooted in a literary culture of the 1800s, both Romantic and Decadent. Coleridge, de Quincey, and Oscar Wilde become key influences here. Kubla Khan remains the foremost “sweet dream” of English Literature.

By 1944, Black’s underworld had almost disappeared, and the opium smoke of Coleridge and Wilde had the musty smell of the library about it. After the war, heroin addicts were more likely to be young black or Latino males from urban centers, particularly New York and Los Angeles. It is no coincidence that these two cities were ground zero for jazz culture. The shift in ethnicity in heroin use reflects the growing cultural influence of black musicians who birthed the Hip and the hipster. I have written about this sociological phenomenon in my piece on Burroughs and Norman Mailer. Many assume that Burroughs’ interest in heroin came from a fascination with the hipster and black culture. Yet Burroughs is far from the White Negro that many assume him to be. Jack Kerouac was strongly influenced by be-bop and its environment, but Burroughs, although he listened to the music with Kerouac and hung out on the fringes of the scene, was interested in older drug cultures. Burroughs’ interest in heroin was largely an exercise in nostalgia.

So also were his day-to-day activities as a practicing addict. Burroughs repeatedly writes of Chinese laundries and opium dens as home base for Chinese heroin dealers and scoring. The Asian heroin trade would explode in the 1960s with the Vietnam War, which flooded the market with demand as American soldiers used heroin in large numbers to cope with the stress of combat. Yet in the 1940s, this aspect of the drug trade did not exist on an international level, and the Asian heroin trade in the United States was restricted to Asian-American and Asian immigrant clientele in segregated sections of major cities such as New York and San Francisco. Fears about their pre-WWII drug culture helped give rise to the Yellow Peril and in return made the Asian drug dealers cautious about white clients. The phrase “No glot… C’lom Fliday” highlights the linguistic and cultural barriers that resulted in mistrust, miscommunication, and missed connections.

If Burroughs’ status as an upper class white male prevented him from scoring in Chinatown, it was an asset in Middle America. Here lies a central paradox in Burroughs’ life as an addict. The prologue to Junkie makes clear that Burroughs / Lee became an addict to shed his conventional upbringing, and yet he often utilized his race and class in the service of his addiction.

Italian and Jewish gangsters quickly became the major suppliers of heroin in most other urban neighborhoods. Burroughs writes occasionally of such ethnic aspects of the drug trade in Junkie. “They were of various nationalities and physical types, but they all looked like junk. There was Irish, George the Greek, Pantopon Rose, Louie the Bellhop, Eric the Fag, the Beagle, the Sailor, and Joe the Mex.” There are many nationalities but no ethnicities. Joe the Mex is the exception that proves the rule. The junk neighborhoods are white immigrant neighborhoods gone to seed and threatened with invasion by blacks and Hispanics. They look like junk; they are white trash, yet the immigrant addict is not Burroughs’ peer either. From Bill Garver to Phil White, Burroughs’ junkie counterparts were often prodigal sons, like him, from good blue blood stock that, like the blue-chip stock market, had fallen from grace. In Junkie, Bill Gains is the addict to whom William Lee looks up. Naturally, Bill Gains “came from a ‘good family.’”

Burroughs did not score in jazz clubs, on 52nd Street, or in Harlem. This would continue into the 1970s when he lived at The Bunker. Drugs were bought in Alphabet City and brought to Burroughs; Burroughs rarely if ever went there himself. In any case, street drugs were not his preferred kick anyway. Ideally, Burroughs would score pharmaceutical grade narcotics such as Dilaudid (which is closer to morphine than heroin). In Drugstore Cowboy, Burroughs’ character, Tom the Priest, skims the cream of the drugs Bob makes available to him choosing only the Dilaudid for himself: “This should earn you an indulgence.” To score such high-grade drugs, you have to rob the drugstore — a line Burroughs was reluctant to cross — or con the croakers. Junkie and Naked Lunch portray Bill Lee putting the make on croakers and rural drugstores for forged prescriptions. This was a route less available to Black and Hispanic hipsters for obvious reasons of race and class prejudice.

Burroughs’ education was also important. Most drug addicts graduate from the school of hard knocks, but Burroughs backed up his street smarts with university degrees. He was more than a junkie; he was a “Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs.” He attended Harvard and medical school in Vienna in the 1930s. He was well read and knowledgeable about literature, medicine, psychology, and anthropology. Oliver Harris has pointed out how Burroughs suppressed the literary basis of his addiction in Junkie. Yet Burroughs, like Dr Benway or Dr Mabuse, was out to con his former peers. Scoring implies a game, and for Burroughs, it was not a physical conquest but a test of intelligence. Burroughs with his aristocratic, educated air could pass in rural Middle America, gain doctors’ confidence, and, thereby, gain access to the medicine cabinet.

Despite wanting to cast off his Grey Flannel Suit and university tie, Burroughs had to wear them in order to score. So on one level Burroughs’ addiction is rather conservative; yet what is transgressive is that, as with his cut-ups, particularly Time or APO-33, Burroughs detourns the message and mores of the dominant order for his own aims. In this case, Burroughs manipulates Middle America’s prejudices regarding race, class, and education for his own immoral ends. These prejudices themselves are a form of addiction. In his Paris Review interview from 1965, Burroughs states, “The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it — rightness; they’re right, right, right — and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms.” Burroughs reinforces Middle American stereotypes while subverting them. When Burroughs enters a drugstore to fill a script, he reads off his own, dealing “white junk” to squares. Burroughs is both addict and pusher.

Mexico City 1949-1952

As soon as I hit Mexico City, I started looking for junk. –Junkie

The arrival in Mexico is the climax of Kerouac’s On the Road. Sal Paradise crosses the border in search of his birthright. Kerouac writes of Mexico as part of the “equatorial belly of the world” where “[t]hey had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were giant, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it.” Mexico is a confused mix of birth and death, blood and semen, motherhood and fatherhood, sexual experience and innocence, wisdom and wonder, miscegenation and purity. Many critics have pointed out the stereotyping of the Third World and the racial Other at play in Kerouac’s work. What I want to point out is that for Kerouac, Mexico is the place of origins — the Source.

The same holds true for Burroughs. Once in Mexico City, Burroughs enrolled in college in order to study anthropology and archeology. These are studies of the beginnings, the morning, the dawn of civilizations. In addition, Burroughs’ concept of Mexico contains many of the contradictions of Kerouac’s, yet most important for this discussion is the fact that Mexico in 1949 had newly become a primary source for heroin. After World War II, there was a shortage in heroin on the American market. Mexico stepped in, increasing its cultivation of poppies and production of heroin. Burroughs was a part of this trade. While living in East Texas and Louisiana, he grew marijuana, which he planned to sell in New York City. The trip from Texas / Louisiana to New York was a major route in the drug trade. Southern marijuana would come up from Texas and be exchanged for New York City heroin. Burroughs was well aware of this, as were Texan authorities. In quick order, Burroughs ran afoul of the law. Clearly, Burroughs went to Mexico to escape the drug laws in the United States, but he also went there — to put a twist on the famous statement attributed to Willie Sutton — because that’s where the drugs were.

Junkie provides some very good information on the drug scene in Mexico City as it entered the international market. True to form, Burroughs refrained from scoring on the street level in Mexico City. Burroughs’ junkie peers would acquire the drugs for Burroughs, or Burroughs would hit up the local doctors. Corruption was rampant; so as long as Burroughs had the money, Mexican doctors would write the scripts. In addition, these doctors were more likely to cater to white American clients than Mexican ones. Once again, Burroughs relied on his class and race in his drug use.

There is a suggestion of race and class in his choice of heroin as well. Burroughs makes clear that Mexican heroin was of much poorer quality than the heroin distributed in New York City. Mexican heroin was brown in color, reflecting the levels of impurity and the lower levels of sophistication in the refining process. Pure heroin is white. Mexican heroin is cut, adulterated, impure. There is racial stereotyping here tying miscegenation, incest, and tainted bloodlines to Mexican heroin and Mexicans. This fascination with racial mixing and its link to drug use is clear from Burroughs’ yage vision of the Composite City: “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian — new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized passes through your body.” Yage has a racial component; in one yage vision Burroughs believes himself transformed into a black woman.

There is also a sexual component to this. From Junkie to Queer, addiction shifts to obsession. At the end of Junkie, Burroughs writes, “My wife and I are separated. I am ready to move on south and look for the uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk.” To the extent that Queer picks up the narrative from Junkie, the “uncut” kick refers less to drugs than to men and to the likely uncircumcised “boys” Burroughs may have picked up in Mexico City.

Unlike Kerouac and Cassady who indulged in Mexican prostitutes, Burroughs prefers the “white boy,” slang for pure heroin, to the “brown sugar,” slang for Mexican heroin. Young men from the Third World are acceptable in a pinch. Like Mexican heroin they are readily available and cheap, but they do not give the same kick as pure white boys. Burroughs had casual sex with young men of various ethnicities, but became obsessed only with white boys like Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Marker, and Ian Sommerville. It was to them, not Mexican or Arab boys, that Burroughs was emotionally addicted. In his letters from the 1950s, Burroughs often presents his feelings for Ginsberg and Marker in terms of addiction, for example, writing to Ginsberg of his “Marker habit.”

Paris 1958-1959

The article is supposed to be what it is and not a cover really. — Letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 7, 1959

In the early spring of 1959, Burroughs was accused of participating in an opium smuggling ring. French police believed Burroughs was the “Paris O outlet.” This is not as far-fetched as it seems. In a letter to Ginsberg from April 2nd, Burroughs admits that he considered “pushing a little Moroccan tea in Paris” with the help of Paul Lund. Lund was an English gangster living in Tangier who had much experience with smuggling. Burroughs never acted on the idea but he ran in drug and smuggling circles in Tangier and Paris, such that his travels to and fro were bound to attract attention. After World War II, the United States heroin supply from the Middle East was largely shipped from Marseilles, France to New York City. This was the famous French Connection with Mediterranean gangsters overseeing mainly Turkish poppy production, heroin production, and drug distribution. This was a major international news story and aspects of it found its way onto the big screen in 1971 in The French Connection. The drug dealers did not benefit from the publicity. In 1972, three major busts of processing plants in Marseilles severed the connection, which resulted in a free-for-all in re-establishing supply lines to the American market. Once again, as after World War II, Mexico stepped into the breach.

Interestingly, Oliver Harris suggests that the apartment building that serves as the setting of the Hauser and O’Brien episode that ends Naked Lunch could have been modeled on the Hotel Marseille on 103rd Street in New York City. Symbolically the hotel is the hub of the drug trade of Interzone, Lee’s home base. Harris points out that what Lee is producing and pushing, and what concerns Hauser and O’Brien are, in fact, not drugs, but literature. They are instructed to “Just pick [Lee] up. Don’t take time to shake the place down. Except bring in all books, letters, manuscripts. Anything printed, typed or written.”

Fiction mirrored reality for Burroughs. In the April 2nd letter, Burroughs continues, “They shake Paul’s trap down and find some old manuscripts I left behind, and wade through a suitcase full of my vilest pornography looking for ‘evidence.’” In addition, the police found some incriminating letters that suggested drug involvement. Burroughs writes, “Oh, and the fuzz has a letter I sent to Shell [Mack Thomas author of Gumbo] from London in which I say something to effect: ‘Pooling our knowledge could be of great benefit to both parties.’ I can see myself taking shape in their 12-year [old] minds as ‘the evil, perverted brain behind international narcotics ring, the agents of which pretend to be poets and painters to cover their sinister operations.” At the end of Naked Lunch, Lee worries about the detective seeing the contents of his suitcase. The suitcase contains not drugs, but manuscripts. Lee sweeps notebooks into his briefcase along with his works and junk. As Harris points out, the key to the end of Naked Lunch is more that Lee is a writer than a drug addict.

Yet in April of 1959, Burroughs was a sort of criminal mastermind. Just weeks before he came to the attention of French authorities as a smuggler, he came to the attention of American authorities. In March of 1959, sections of Naked Lunch were published in Big Table #1. The Chicago Post Office promptly seized the magazine as obscene and made moves to put the book on trial. Once again Burroughs’ “vilest pornography” was “evidence.” Soon after the Big Table hype, Maurice Girodias offered to publish Naked Lunch in France. Girodias and Olympia Press were the French Connection for pornography in the United Kingdom and the United States. Like smugglers hiding packets of heroin in false-bottomed suitcases and hollowed-out cars, those curious about Naked Lunch would have to smuggle the book through customs. Burroughs was not a drug smuggler; he was the Source of obscene literature: “The evil, perverted brain behind an international” pornography ring.

Immediately after the publication of Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959, Burroughs was busted — not for obscenity, but for drug possession. The police “had an order for [Burroughs'] arrest issued April 9th,” no doubt stemming from the smuggling accusations a year earlier. The key piece of evidence in the case against Burroughs was “a doctored letter allegedly written by [Burroughs] to [Lund].” A letter-writing campaign was organized by Girodias to aid Burroughs in court. More importantly, in a letter to Ginsberg from September 11th, Burroughs notes that he began “writing a short deposition with regard to Naked Lunch. This is essential for my own safety at this point.” “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” was written for his drug possession trial in Paris, not his obscenity trial in the United States. The Deposition is the source of the myth that Burroughs kicked drugs. “I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five.” Burroughs states his drug use in the past tense because he was seeking leniency in his upcoming trial. In addition, Burroughs distanced himself from his role as author of the novel and highlighted the moral aspects of its content. Again these were added less to help Grove Press with an obscenity trial than to help Burroughs beat a drug possession rap.

Ironically, it would be Naked Lunch itself that would get Burroughs off the hook. The French courts were impressed with the fact that Burroughs was a published author and overlooked his indiscretions. In Queer, Burroughs suggested that he had to write his way out of guilt caused by Joan Vollmer’s death. Similarly, Burroughs wrote his way out of a drug charge in Paris.

New York 1974-1981

If you can score for sex and drugs in a place, then you know you really made contact with the place.” –Burroughs to Steve Mass, owner of The Mudd Club

Returning to the United States after decades in exile — his last stop being an extended stay in London that left him bored and broke — Burroughs really connected with New York City in the 1970s. Fortunately or unfortunately for Burroughs, the Big Apple was rotten to its core. For anybody only familiar with New York City in the last decade, it might be impossible to imagine just how dysfunctional the city was through much of the 1970s and 1980s. Sex, drugs, and violence were rampant. In areas like Alphabet City and Harlem, drugs were a cancer.

In his vision of Interzone, The Market, and The Composite City from the 1950s, Burroughs expresses his vision of New York City. On July 10, 1953, Burroughs wrote a letter to Allen Ginsberg envisioning the Composite City as viewed under the influence of yage. “All houses in the City are joined… great rusty iron racks rising 200 feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multilevel platforms and hammocks swinging over the void.” The Composite City passage was also written under the influence of Allen Ginsberg and with the anticipation of seeing Ginsberg in the coming months. Ginsberg was living on the Lower East Side in New York City. Burroughs’ vision of the city is in part a fantasy of inhibiting the same space as Ginsberg. In late 1953, Burroughs arrived at Ginsberg’s apartment and began work on the yage letters’ material, including the Composite City section. Pictures taken by Ginsberg of Burroughs and Kerouac show how the view out Ginsberg’s window mirrors the yage vision. Fire escapes, clotheslines, and telephone wires connected decaying tenement housing that appeared to lean into one another.

The July 10th letter also envisions New York City’s future. “The City is visited by epidemics of violence and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the street. Funerals and cemeteries are not permitted. Albinos blink in the sun, boys sit in trees languidly masturbating, people eaten by unknown diseases spit at passersby and bite them and throw pus and scabs and assorted vectors (insects suspected of carrying disease) hoping to infect somebody.” This is not just a yage vision; Lee sees a similar scene during junk withdrawal in Junkie. Burroughs writes, “One afternoon, I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of empty bars and cafeterias and drugstores on Forty-Second Street. Weeds were growing up through cracks and holes in the pavement. There was no one in sight.” This resembles New York City in the early 1970s, a city devastated by drug abuse and yet struggling with a heroin shortage. For junkies it was Panic in Needle Park. A dead city. A New York newspaper headline concerning President Ford’s failure to bail out a bankrupt New York read: Ford to City: Drop Dead. Blocks and blocks, like Alphabet City, were already dead, inhabited by drug addicted zombies preying on the living. The disease was spreading building by building.

New York was a city of death, and Burroughs fell in with the culture of death that was punk. Wearing Nazi insignia, a deadly pallor, and living beyond hope and too bored to despair, punk found escape in drugs, particularly heroin. The drug released all pain and anxiety. Punks found Burroughs to be a father figure, yet Burroughs, now in his sixties, was, with the help of James Grauerholz, finally outgrowing and growing weary of his children. New York City with its streets clogged with garbage, its architecture and infrastructure crumbling, and its bank account depleted was the City as aging junkie. Burroughs was stuck in a prison he created: the junkie’s body and environment. The punks raged that there was no way out, but self-destruction and death. Once again “at the end of the junk line” trapped in the “fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction,” Burroughs decided to do the impossible — he decided to return home.

Lawrence 1981-1997

I was born in 1914 in a solid, three-story, brick house in a large Midwest city. — Junkie

Burroughs’ arrival in Lawrence in 1981 signaled a new beginning, and nothing symbolizes this fresh start more than his entrance into the methadone program. Burroughs, like Herbert Huncke, was on methadone until the end of his life. The use of methadone to treat drug addiction was spearheaded by Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander in the mid-1960s. This was around the time that Burroughs was aggressively extolling the virtues of apomorphine in little magazines and mimeos. Both drugs work in a similar manner as metabolic regulators. Dole, Nyswander, and Burroughs all believed that heroin addiction altered the user on a cellular level and that the only way to a cure was at that level. Methadone gained the support of urban policy makers after a sensational early success in lowering crime rates related to drug use. By the 1970s methadone symbolized progressive drug treatment in a country that favored a Drug War of prohibition, harsh penalties, and crackdowns on users rather than producers and suppliers.

One criticism of methadone was that the user was merely trading one addiction for another. In addition, many did not like the manner in which the methadone program was structured. Participants were required to take their daily dose at a center, which made treatment seem like probation, leading many to label the program as “orange handcuffs.”

For Burroughs, he was trading one addiction for another. Methadone was, like heroin, not a kick; it was a way of life. But unlike the death-in-life of the New York City drug scene, the methadone program allowed Burroughs to establish a new domesticity in his life. Grauerholz managed Burroughs’ daily affairs; methadone managed his drug addiction; and that left Burroughs free to create, which was always his most powerful compulsion. In terms of his writing, Burroughs likewise became conventional. In his later work, Burroughs’ fictional characters reside in the “solid, three story, brick house” of basic genre structures like the adventure story or the western. Plot and narrative serve as the foundation for these familiar surroundings as Burroughs’ writing style became more mainstream, more reader-friendly, or at as close as Burroughs could get to the norm.

In the prologue to Junkie, Burroughs as William Lee writes that his boyhood home “had a lawn in front, a back yard with a garden, a fish pond and a high wooden fence all around it.” He continued that “all the props of a safe, comfortable way of life that is now gone forever.” Heroin took it away, but methadone gave it back. The key to methadone is that, in allowing the addict to manage his addiction and to carry on with activities such as working and socializing, it allows him to participate in the American way of life. It regulates the metabolism so the addict can organize his life, which paves the way to punching a time-clock and putting the kids to bed. Methadone not only handcuffed the addict to the Methadone Center, it encouraged the straightjacket of the business suit. If heroin and opium brought “sweet dreams” and stately pleasure domes, methadone offered a chance at the American Dream: the wife, the dog, the two cars, and a three-story house with the white picket fence. In 1944, Burroughs wanted to leave all that behind, but late in life, after years of traveling the junk road, he realized he wanted, in some respects, to come back home. Opium Jones became one of the Joneses. Methadone made that possible. For Burroughs, the junk road was not a straight shot to nowhere; it was a circular journey beginning and ending at the doorstep of a “solid, three-story brick house in a . . . Midwest city.”

Timothy Leary interview, Pataphysics, October 17, 1989

From INTO-GAL, 2006, Editors: Leo Edelstein, Judith Elliston

We heard this tape of you with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Anton Wilson.

Oh yeah, that was a recording from the Nova Convention. I’m a great admirer of William Burroughs, who’s one of my real heroes.

When did you first meet him?

I met him in June of 1961, in Tangier, Morocco. And we became friends and we’ve been friends ever since. 

What brought you to Morocco?

I came there to meet William Burroughs.

And you were interested in the experiments Burroughs was doing?

Yes, I was very interested in the experiments he was doing with Brion Gysin. You’ve read Burroughs?

Yeah, The Soft Machine and the earlier work. I’m also interested in the later work — Cities of the Red Night —

Oh, I love Cities of the Red Night, that’s his last trilogy — Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. I think that’s his finest work.

It’s interesting how his technique has developed — the cut-up style has now become almost polished. 

Yeah, well, he’s mellowed out.

Have you spoken with him recently?

Yeah, he just wrote the introduction to a reissue of my book, Flashbacks.

He’s painting now.

Yeah, he doesn’t even want to write anymore — he likes to paint.

Do you think that’s the influence of Gysin?

Well, he and Gysin were very close friends. Gysin was a very strong personality and I think he influenced Burroughs tremendously, Burroughs says that too. Gysin was a very profound thinker and a prophetic guy. It was Brion Gysin who said that writing is fifty years behind modern painting — because modern painting, from expressionism and cubism and surrealism, smashed through all of the representational structures, whereas writers were still trapped in the grammatical form. That was a very profound statement that Gysin made. He was one of these very seminal figures. Gysin’s Dream Machine is a very early, wonderfully creative and primitive psychedelic machine. 

Gysin spoke of the Dream Machine making immaterial artworks inside the viewer’s mind. And with the cut-ups there was the idea of escaping this time-frame by breaking up the conscious flow of language. Did you have any interest in that at the time?

During my research at Harvard we were running psychedelic sessions, and we were interested in describing them. We were experimenting with various forms of video, and cellular movement and overlaps and sensory overload and multiple energy interactions to try to duplicate in a rather feeble way the experiences that you have in a visionary trance. Burroughs was actually in exile from America in the late ’50s. As a matter of fact, I was the one who brought Burroughs back to America after maybe six or eight years out of the country. I invited him to come to Harvard, and he is a Harvard graduate, so he was very glad to accept the chance to come back into the country.

Was he interested in what you were doing at Harvard when he came back?

He thought we were a bunch of dumb bozos running around and trying to save the world with these drugs and he was very uh, rightfully cynical about what we were doing. He’s a very scientific person. The only psychedelic he likes is marijuana. He never really liked other psychedelic drugs. Burroughs has forgotten more about drugs in his life than I’ve learned. Burroughs is in charge of his life, he knows what he’s doing. I think heroin is probably the best anesthetic there is. I’ve taken heroin maybe ten or fifteen times in my life, just for curiosity. It’s not a social drug at all. You take it to go within. The same thing’s true of ketamine. Ketamine is another anesthetic that gives you very powerful inner experiences, but you’re not very social, you can’t even carry out a conversation so it’s not my kind of drug. But Burroughs, he’s not the guy that goes around with a grin on his face saying peace and love. He’s a very crusty, introverted guy with a very deep sense of humor. He’s one of the funniest persons alive — it’s a very laid-back kind of humor, and that’s the way he is, and he’s magnificent [pause] yah.

Did you ever meet Genet?

I was supposed to meet Genet — I was supposed to meet him at Amman, Jordan, in September of 1970. I was in exile in Algeria and I’d been running around about people who said I should go to Amman to meet Jean Genet. But on the way there I was intercepted — the Americans located me in Beirut, and there was such a big stink that the people who were protecting me at the time, the Arabs, said you better get your ass back to Algeria because there’s too much heat. I was also traveling on a false passport, so I went back from Beirut to Egypt and then to Algeria. I never did get to meet him — my appointment with Genet in Jordan fell through, which I regretted.

Were you taking psychedelics at that time?

Well, I had a lot of, yeah, a lot Afghani hash around — it didn’t help! Eat a little of that and I’d get very paranoid, and all my paranoias were right, unfortunately. I did go take psychedelics in Algeria, went out into the desert with my wife and had some very powerful experiences in the Sahara Desert, which is of course the kind of place to get into other levels.

There’s the book by Aleister Crowley out there in the desert –

As a matter of fact, yes, I’m glad you brought that up. There’s a place outside Algeria — you go up the Rif Mountains and you come down to the desert, there’s a place called Bou Saada, which is known as the City of Happiness, and that’s where Aleister Crowley had one of his great mystical experiences, wandering around there — freaking out or getting some vision, I don’t know what it was. It’s a very sacred city. I didn’t realize that at the time. It’s a very logical place, if you’re in Algiers, and you go over the mountain, the first town of Bou Saada was an oasis town, and all the caravans for thousands of years have come, winding their way up through the Sahara, and that would be the first populated place. It’s a big center of interacting cultures — a very magical place. And there were oases outside of Bou Saada which had been used in many movies. I also met some good magicians there. I had a guide, and I kept telling the guide what I wanted. I wanted a place — I wanted to find someone that knew a place where I could go into the desert and meditate — amazing, cab drivers all over the world want to hustle girls and boys or whatever, but this guy finally got on to what I was saying and he put me in touch with some old Arab guy, who went out with me and showed me where to go. That’s kind of interesting, because you couldn’t find a cab driver in the city, like saying yeah, I want to find a place where I can go out and meditate. But that’s part of the special quality of Bou Saada…

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.

When the topic of Burroughs and apomorphine arises in drug histories and biographies, it most commonly deals with the fact that in 1956 Burroughs took the apomorphine cure under the supervision of Dr. John Yerbury Dent and emerged a man reborn. The story goes that only after Burroughs overcame his addiction could he begin in earnest the work of transforming his Word Horde into Naked Lunch. The accepted tale about Burroughs and apomorphine ignores the fact that Naked Lunch had a form before the cure (“The real novel is the letters to [Ginsberg]“) and that major sections of Naked Lunch like The Talking Asshole routine were written a full year before the cure. After 1956 the apomorphine experience provided Burroughs with an overarching framework for Naked Lunch, but this would be a road not taken. In addition the road to recovery, if Burroughs truly ever walked that path, was a long and winding road. In fact, as the Deposition makes clear but as critics have ignored, Burroughs took the cure more than once between 1956 and July 1959, the date of Naked Lunch‘s publication. By 1958, he was nearly, if not completely, hooked on paregoric and shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch he would be implicated in a drug ring. The actual cure was a difficult experience (“The cure itself was awful” Letter to Ginsberg May 8, 1956) with side effects that lingered over a year later despite Burroughs’ assurances in retrospect that the apomorphine cure was quick and non-invasive. Yet the myth that the apomorphine cure effectively ended Burroughs’ struggle with drugs and jumpstarted Naked Lunch persists. Burroughs encouraged the development of just such a cover story in interviews and elsewhere, most famously in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” published as a preface to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch.

So what role did apomorphine play in this crucial period of development for Burroughs as a writer and individual? Why did Burroughs distort the facts regarding his experience with apomorphine, and why has that story remained unexamined for decades? Why has the “cure” in 1956 become the pivot on which Burroughs turned his life around? Why, however falsely, does the story of Naked Lunch begin at this point?

On one level, the development of this myth begins with Burroughs’ 1959 arrest on drug trafficking charges. Shortly after his arrest, Burroughs began work on the Deposition essay. In his letters of the period, Burroughs assured Ginsberg that the Deposition was sincere and represented his current beliefs on drugs and drug addiction.

“I am writing a short deposition with regard to Naked Lunch. This is essential for my own safety at this point: Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus, the manner in which it operates, and in the manner in which it can be brought under control. This is no act. I mean it all the way. Get off that junk wagon, boys, it’s going down a three mile grade for the junk heap. I am off junk in sickness or in health so long as we both shall live.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 11, 1959)

The Deposition contains an account of the cure and describes the role of apomorphine as an antidote to the “Sickness.” Ginsberg felt the Deposition went too far and wrapped up Naked Lunch too neatly. He also doubted the Deposition’s sincerity. Reading the letters of the period, one gets the sense that Burroughs protested too much in defending the Deposition as an accurate, honest account of his true feelings. By 1991, Burroughs retracted his statement that he did not remember writing the notes that became Naked Lunch. The con appears to be on, but as Oliver Harris demonstrates in The Secret of Fascination, generations of critics have been willing marks parroting the Deposition into the critical record verbatim. In some cases, they have even misrepresented the Deposition, in which Burroughs admits to backsliding into addiction after the cure. Apomorphine was far from the miracle drug that Burroughs made it out to be — and, as we will see, he also left out a key component of the history of its use. It all suggests that Burroughs’ championing of apomorphine as an effective cure may have stemmed, at least on one level, from a desire to portray himself as drug-free and thereby stay out of jail.

But there is more to the story of apomorphine and to Burroughs’ insistence of being clean than simple legal expedience. Burroughs felt the need to be drug-free before his trouble with the law in late 1959. As the letters demonstrate, Burroughs realized he was on the road to terminal addiction by late 1955. The depths of Burroughs’ despair and desperation were no con. The trip to London to seek treatment with Dr. Dent was necessary on the level of survival.

Yet the need to be clean was also closely tied to Burroughs’ strong desire to be a successful author published by the Establishment, i.e. corporate publishers. The letters from the mid-1950s are full of references to Burroughs’ desire to gain mainstream acceptance as a writer. At this time, Burroughs associated writing with respectability and social acceptance. By becoming a writer, Burroughs could redeem himself (for the death of Joan, for being a poor father, for not supporting himself financially) and give himself a place in society. Writing was a means to conform, and Burroughs felt the need to fit in strongly. The image of the opium-addicted writer held an allure for Burroughs from an early age. As he struggled with the form and content of Naked Lunch, however, Burroughs’ drug addiction not only hampered his ability to write, it also symbolized his sick creativity and his inability to write straight narrative and commercially viable material. Apomorphine, as a means of curing his drug addiction, was thus a way for Burroughs to free himself to write. In a sense, kicking drugs was a way of going mainstream and being respectable. First, the cure would facilitate the act of writing and then possibly open the door to writing of a less sick and more popular nature.

Apomorphine tied into getting straight in another, less obvious manner. In the early days of the 20th century, apomorphine was used by doctors as part of a treatment to cure patients of their homosexuality. In Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell mentions this fact in passing and suggests that Burroughs would have been aware of this aspect of apomorphine’s history. Burroughs never discussed it. In the Deposition, Burroughs states that historically the only use for apomorphine was as an emetic for poisoning. Not true, and given the fact that Burroughs was briefly a medical student and that he was intensely interested in medical history, the assumption that Burroughs knew apomorphine’s full history is not far-fetched. Currently, apomorphine is being used to combat erectile dysfunction (Uprima). Clearly, there is a strong sexual aspect to apomorphine’s history and its side effects. Apomorphine’s sexual component coupled with withdrawal symptoms must be an intense shock to the system. Burroughs ignored these elements of apomorphine in his published writing on the subject, but not in his letters.

Immediately following the apomorphine cure in London in 1956, there are several references in Burroughs’ letters to changes in his sex drive. In his first letter after the cure, Burroughs writes, “The thought of sex with anyone gives me the horrors… Last night went to a ghastly queer party where I was pawed and propositioned by a 50-year-old Liberal MP. I told him, ‘I couldn’t sleep with Ganymede now, let alone you.’” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 8, 1956) A week later Burroughs reports to Ginsberg, “Still no interest in sex.” I am unaware if apomorphine was used by doctors as an aversion technique to combat homosexual impulses, but in Burroughs’ case the apomorphine experience did lead to a type of sexual conditioning. In the months after the cure, Burroughs’ sex drive returned as did his sexual activities with “boys.” However, as the letters show, a heterosexual element in his sexual make-up surfaced at this point. Burroughs writes, “Still no interest in sex. I am physically able you dig, just not innarested. When I look at a boy nothing happens. Ratty lot of boys they got here anyhoo. Maybe when I come around to it, I want women.” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 15, 1956)

Over the next year, Burroughs underwent a period of intense sexual questioning. For example:

So suddenly a wave of sex come over me and I have a spontaneous orgasm strap my vitals. Now a spontaneous, walking orgasm is a rare occurrence even in adolescence. Only one I ever experienced before was in the orgone accumulator I made in Texas. And another thing. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It”s the new frisson, dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old character find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make the switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young cunt’s little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. He stumbled out in the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say, “who you think you’re kidding with the queer act. I know you, baby.” What it is as Allah wills… (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 15, 1956).

One might assume that this quote is another Burroughsian routine full of irony and black humor, but the references to heterosexual impulses in the letters are too numerous to discount as mere joking. Clearly just after his apomorphine experience, Burroughs experienced a crisis of sexual identity. It may not be possible to say whether this can be directly attributed to apomorphine, but apomorphine, sexual identity, and the form of Naked Lunch will all be interrelated by late 1957. Burroughs’ sexual questioning strikes me as very similar to the crisis Ginsberg experienced just before the breakthrough of Howl in 1955. Famously, Ginsberg met with his analyst and openly discussed his desire to live as a poet and more importantly as a gay poet despite his attempts to play it straight. Ginsberg’s analyst stated that nothing was stopping him. This advice encouraged Ginsberg on the path to sexual freedom and the poetic vision of Howl occurred shortly thereafter.

Similarly the feverish development of Naked Lunch occurred during a period of uncertainty regarding sexual identity. As Burroughs questioned his sexuality, Naked Lunch poured forth “like dictation.” In addition the desire to go straight sexually paralleled a desire to once and for all straitjacket Naked Lunch into the form and themes of the conventional novel. In early 1957, Burroughs was seriously examining his homosexuality. Burroughs writes,

All the etiology of my homosex and practically everything spill right out of me. Quotes from last night majoun high: “So what’s holding him up? — homosex orientation — Some old tired synapse pattern won’t go to its home like it’s supposed. There must be an answer, I need the answering device. I think I can arrange but it will be expensive. Modern Oedipus.” This give me an out already, I can put down the old whore and hump some young Crete gash heat my toga like the dry goods of Nexus, you might say Nexus had the rag on.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Jan. 31, 1957)

In late 1957, Burroughs examined Naked Lunch‘s form and determined to make yet another effort to conform and contain Naked Lunch. As a result, Burroughs developed The General Theory of Addiction. He writes, “At present I am working on Benway and Scandinavia angles, also developing a theory of morphine addiction… Incidentally, this theory resulted from necessities of the novel. That is scientific theories and novel are inseparable. What I am evolving is a general theory of addiction which expands into a world picture with concepts of good and evil.” (Letter to Ginsberg Sept. 20, 1957). The answer to Burroughs’ sexual and literary questioning was the General Theory of Addiction. This theory was tied to Burroughs’ sexual crisis and the form of Naked Lunch. Burroughs writes, “Briefly, the novel concerns addiction and an addicting virus that is passed from one person to another in sexual contacts. The virus only passes from man to man or woman to woman, which is why Benway is turning out homosexuals on an assembly-line basis.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Aug. 27, 1957)

The General Theory of Addiction derived directly from Burroughs’ apomorphine experience and related to the pioneering work of Dr. Dent, Anxiety and Its Treatment. “The Theory of Addiction is, incidentally, correct, in essentials. I received a letter from Wolberg, quote… ‘Particularly interesting is your theory about cancer and schizophrenia. I have made no study of this, but telephoned a friend who works for a large mental institution. He said the incidence of cancer among schizophrenics is appreciably lower than among non-schizophrenics.’ The importance of this one fact is immeasurable. My theory contains the key to addiction, cancer, and schizophrenia. I have not yet heard from Doctor Dent.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 19, 1957) Keep in mind this theory developed from “the necessities of the novel.” Even at this late date, Burroughs strongly felt the need to subject Naked Lunch to the restraints of the novel. The desire for literary form was also related to his desire to conform sexually.

In a key letter written on October 8, 1957, Burroughs sent along a copy of his General Theory of Addiction to Ginsberg. Burroughs writes:

I feel myself closer and closer to resolution of my queerness which would involve a solution of that illness. For such it is, a horrible sickness. At least in my case. I have just experienced emergence of my non-queer persona as a separate personality. This started in London where in a dream I came into room to see myself not a child but adolescent, looking at me with hate. So I said, ‘I don’t seem to be exactly welcome,’ and he say. ‘Not welcome!!! I hate you!’ And with good reason too. Suppose you had kept a non-queer young boy in a strait-jacket of flesh twenty five years subject to continual queer acts and talk? Would he love you? I think not. Anyhoo, I’m getting to know the kid, and we get on better. I tell him he can take over anytime, but there is somebody else in this deal not yet fully accounted for and the kid’s not up to deal with him, so I hafta stay around for the present. Actually, of course the kid and all the rest of us have to arrange a merger. A ver.

The concept and linking together of sickness and queerness related directly to Burroughs’ apomorphine experience. As this letter demonstrates, the emergence of his heterosexual personality started just after the cure in London. Soon after Burroughs felt himself cured of the Sickness, i.e. drug addiction, he sought to cure himself of his queerness. The time was ripe for Burroughs to conform, to get his life together, and to play it straight. Sickness and illness also refer to the sick, obscene nature of Naked Lunch and its failure to conform to the traditional novel form as well as Naked Lunch‘s troubling (for Burroughs) link to homosexual desire and obsession. The phrase “strait-jacket of flesh” creates a wealth of associations between madness, sickness, homosexuality / heterosexuality, and literary form. As Harris demonstrates, Naked Lunch germinated in Queer (Burroughs’ account of his obsession with Lewis Marker) and his letters to Ginsberg. Burroughs strongly felt the need to cover up those personal elements in Naked Lunch. According to Harris, the junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction did just that. It not only provided a form to the novel, it shifted the focus from homosexual obsession to drug addiction. In a sense, apomorphine provided a means to cure Naked Lunch of its queerness.

By April 1958, Burroughs instructed Ginsberg to include the Benway section and to exclude the theoretical material. In final publication, Burroughs abandoned the General Theory of Addiction framework for Naked Lunch but traces remain in the Benway section. As Harris demonstrates, the General Theory and the related “The Conspiracy” were Burroughs’ last attempts to straitjacket Naked Lunch into the traditional form of the novel. By late 1958, Burroughs realized that his desire to be a writer did not depend on toning down his radical experimentation in literary style and drug use. In fact, those elements were what made Naked Lunch a profoundly obscene masterpiece. Burroughs’ change of heart cannot be separated from his tentative success in getting selections of Naked Lunch published to wide acclaim in little magazines beginning in 1957 and onwards into early 1959. Yet the decision to tone down the elements of homosexual desire remained. On one level, this was achieved by eliminating references to the epistolatory origins of the novel. That said, the novel as published by Burroughs in 1959 was a radical one, as much anti-novel as novel.

Yet Burroughs’ troubles with obscenity laws in 1959, in addition to his problems with drug laws (discussed above), would lead to a reassessment of Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ re-insertion of apomorphine into the text. Burroughs strongly desired the publication of the complete Naked Lunch in the United States. Concessions had to be made to render Naked Lunch palatable to American courts and the reading public. The Deposition and to a lesser extent the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” serve this purpose. In a sense, Burroughs reintroduced the General Theory of Addiction into the novel. According to Harris, this paradigm completely overshadows the other more transgressive aspects of Naked Lunch, in essence de-radicalizing it, de-sexualizing it, and de-toxifying it. First, the Deposition de-radicalizes the text by providing a means to analyze and to interpret the book. Burroughs provides a blueprint (whether con or not) for critics and readers to approach the novel. In addition, the Deposition de-sexualizes the book by taking the focus off of the homosexual obsession that formed the basis for the novel. A framework based on drug addiction replaces the sexuality of the letter economy. In the various obscenity trials surrounding Naked Lunch, doctors testified that the novel presented an accurate portrayal of the junk / drug problem. With the introduction of apomorphine, Burroughs could not be accused of immorality since he provided a solution to the problem he presented. The book was no longer obscene but instead was a public service message on a major problem facing contemporary society. The account of apomorphine effectively cures the novel of its Sickness (queerness, obscurity, immorality, and drug abuse). In essence the novel itself undergoes Dr. Dent’s cure and emerges reborn.

As the opening pages of APO-33 Bulletin: a Metabolic Regulator make clear, the Deposition and other writings on apomorphine of the Naked Lunch era left a bad taste in Burroughs’ mouth. The accepted reason is that Burroughs did not make the case for apomorphine strongly enough, since he did not implicate law enforcement and the medical community in the blackballing of his miracle drug. That may be true, but I cannot help sensing that Burroughs also felt that these writings came on much too strong and revealed too much. In APO-33, Burroughs explains his failure regarding apomorphine as an overestimation of his popularity potential. In essence, Burroughs tried to be respectable and mainstream. He played to the audience, so he watered down his beliefs about apomorphine. Yet he also pandered to “popularity” in another manner. Burroughs altered and molded the popular perception of himself and his troublesome novel for the benefit of the legal system in drug and obscenity trials. Burroughs may have realized that these pieces discussing apomorphine attached to Naked Lunch diminished the diabolical power of his novel.

By 1965, the time to kow-tow to popular and legal opinion was over. By being the most notorious author in the world, Burroughs had paradoxically achieved an element of respectability. He was a financial and critical success. The legal battles were basically over. Maybe Burroughs felt apomorphine had to be rescued from the squares and injected with the radical spirit. In the work of the 1960s, apomorphine no longer just embodied and played a role in a junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction. It represented a new theory, but a theory grounded in process: the cut-up technique. As I demonstrated in my earlier column on apomorphine, the drug became symbolic of this experimental technique. Works like APO-33 returned to the radical nature of Naked Lunch. Radical in form and in process of composition. The apomorphine experience was no longer utilized as a straitjacket. Given its non-commercial and disorienting nature, Burroughs’ work of this period was once again considered unreadable and beyond the forces of readerly control. And for Burroughs, apomorphine once again became a cure, this time for the sickness of Language and the Word.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

There are times in your reading life when you dabble in a book, dip into it periodically, put it down, and come back to it. Your experience with the book is leisurely, casual. You are chipping. The book does not have a strong hold on you. Then one day you turn to the book again, and next thing you know, you are hooked. The book has become essential, an obsession, a part of your daily thoughts and life.

This series of events just occurred to me with William Burroughs’ neglected cut-up APO-33 Bulletin, A Metabolic Regulator. I wrote about APO-33 before, but I focused on its printing history, especially the aborted Fuck You Press edition (entitled Health Bulletin: APO-33, a Metabolic Regulator). I see the book in a different light now, and I see why Ed Sanders and Fuck You Press had to have a crack at it. I have read it much more closely and examined it in light of Burroughs’ publishing activity in the mid-1960s, the period of his most sustained relationship with the mimeo revolution. As a result, APO-33 and the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period are now key Burroughs texts for me. I believe they are pivotal for understanding Burroughs as a writer.

So what changed? Why did APO-33 suddenly rush into my head with all the force of a crashing wave? In a word: speed. Yup, amphetamine. Not taking it, but reading about the history of it. A few months ago I picked up two books on drug history. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher and On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine by Nicolas Rasmussen. Shroom is the more reader-friendly book. It is written for the casual reader in an engaging, welcoming style. Timothy Leary is in there. Allen Ginsberg is featured. Aldous Huxley plays a role, as does Robert Graves who wrote The White Goddess. There are a few minor mentions of Burroughs.

Letcher briefly discusses Yage as another example of a natural psychedelic, but no Burroughs, Ginsberg, or The Yage Letters in this context. Letcher talks of the influence of Carlos Castaneda, Graves, and Huxley in bringing natural psychedelics to the masses. But surely the 1963 City Lights edition of The Yage Letters was another bible for the burgeoning psychedelic generation. Not to mention the fact that Burroughs was exploring this terrain, geographic and psycho-pharmacological, in the early 1950s along with, and in some cases alongside, the pioneers in the field: Richard Evans Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson. Ginsberg and Leary captured a lot of the headlines in the 1960s and dominate much of the cultural history of the psychedelic era, but Burroughs, despite his dismissal and distrust of drugs like LSD, and maybe because of his critical eye on hallucinogens, must be at least the equal of Leary and Ginsberg in cultural importance. No doubt he was their superior in theorizing about the significance of psychedelics.

On Speed also mentions Burroughs only in passing, but reading this book helped further my appreciation of Burroughs and turned APO-33 into a key text for me. Most people do not associate Burroughs with speed. His son Billy Jr. wrote the book on amphetamine, but, as with psychedelics, Burroughs was at the beginning of speed culture in the United States. The proto-Beat group of Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker, and Herbert Huncke were early users and abusers of speed in the mid-1940s. Vollmer was the first woman with a reported case of speed psychosis in New York State in 1945. Much has been written on the importance of speed in Kerouac’s writing in terms of style and process, but it was Huncke who played a key role in speed culture in New York City during the late 1950s and early 1960s that involved writers such as Alex Trocchi, Peter Orlovsky, and Janine Pommy Vega. This circle probably helped spawn more creatively productive scenes, like Warhol’s Factory and the Second Generation New York writers who gathered around Ted Berrigan.

I have always found these amphetamine scenes to be extremely important, and the key role of speed on the creative output and thinking of these groups ought to be examined. Can the writing that we know as distinctly Kerouacian be separated from Kerouac’s use of speed? The same goes for Warhol. For example, the movie Sleep becomes much more complex when viewed in light of amphetamine use. These topics are treated in Rasmussen’s book, but his focus is really on speed’s relationship to the history of the pharmaceutical and medical industry. It was this discussion that seemed truly Burroughsian.

Amphetamine was one of the first drugs developed and marketed by the modern pharmaceutical industry. At its beginnings, speed had no true medical value. Early on, companies tried to market it as an anti-asthma drug (Benzedrine inhalers). Speed never really worked in that capacity, however, and the inhalers were abused to get high. For decades the drug companies and doctors knew of amphetamine’s addicting qualities and its dangers for abuse. But the drug was patented, and the patent was purchased cheaply. As a result, speed was very profitable for the manufacturers, who colluded with the medical industry to champion speed’s benefits and to downplay its dark side. Speed became the first anti-depressant, a weight-loss drug, and a potential cure for addiction.

From Speed to Apomorphine

Clearly, this is right in Burroughs’ wheelhouse, and Rasmussen’s discussion of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical profession applies directly to apomorphine. In The Job, a series of interviews with Burroughs conducted by Daniel Odier, Burroughs bluntly states why he believes apomorphine is not being used as an anti-addiction medication.

Q: What is the opinion of pharmaceutical researchers on the merits of apomorphine?

A: Pharmaceutical researchers are told what research to pursue by vested interest, which gives orders to the American Narcotics Department. Billions for variations on the Benzedrine formula, for tranquilizers of dubious value, not ten cents for a drug that has unlimited potentials not only in treating addiction but in handling the whole problem of anxiety.

Burroughs also states why the companies that produce apomorphine fail to promote and market it on a large scale: “They can sell all the products they produce in any case. Remember, these pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in illness. Drugs that strike at the very root of illness are dangerous.” These two statements get to the heart of the history described in Rasmussen’s book. After finishing the book, I returned to APO-33 in earnest and started to dig into the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period.

Burroughs contributed two cut-ups to Aram Saroyan’s mimeo mag, Lines, in 1965. Issue 5 features “Chlorhydrate d’apomorphine chabre” and “Rex Morgan M.D.” The latter presents two scrapbook pages that contain the fragment of a short story. (This prose piece does not appear in Maynard & Miles or Shoaf.) In the scrapbook Burroughs includes a single frame from a Rex Morgan comic that deals with the topic of addiction, namely alcoholism. Not coincidentally, Dr. John Yerbury Dent, who treated Burroughs with apomorphine in 1956, first used the drug to treat alcoholics. Burroughs portrays Morgan as forward-thinking and searching for better drug solutions. When he receives a new tranquilizer, Dr. Morgan dismisses it as not treating the problem and as having “doubtful value.” Along with a sample of apomorphine comes a “circular… in blue print with some passages in red for emphasis.” The packaging for the apomorphine describes its uses and its benefits as an anti-anxiety medication and a metabolic regulator. As Dr. Morgan settles in his office, he becomes aware that a beatnik suffered a bad trip on LSD. Dr. Morgan gathers his things and leaves to treat the patient. He takes the apomorphine with him. The story abruptly ends there but one suspects that Dr. Morgan used the apomorphine to successfully regulate the beatnik metabolism. Burroughs provides a feel-good story here, but Rasmussen describes how the pharmaceutical industry flooded doctors with drugs samples of “doubtful value” and encouraged doctors to push them on patients. Similarly, the literature that accompanied the samples was often inaccurate and hyperbolic. APO-33 combats what Burroughs saw as the false information spread by the pharmaceutical companies.

A progressive doctor such as Rex Morgan is opposed by the most famous fictional character in the Burroughsian universe, Dr. Benway. In Naked Lunch Dr. Benway pontificates on drugs, addiction, and anxiety. Also interesting in light of apomorphine is Dr. “Fingers” Schafer the Lobotomy Kid. In Naked Lunch, Dr. Schafer creates the “All-American De-Anxietized Man” with disastrous results. Dr. Dent, the model doctor, wrote a book on the use of apomorphine to combat anxiety: Anxiety and its Treatment. As the promotional literature received by Dr. Morgan makes clear, Burroughs (and Dent) felt apomorphine was a more progressive cure for anxiety-related illnesses than other treatments such as tranquilizers or lobotomy. The promotional literature recommended apomorphine for “grief, anguish, anxiety states, acute drug intoxications and chronic addiction.”

On one level, APO-33 is Burroughs’ enlightened rewriting of the promotional literature of the pharmaceutical companies. In addition, APO-33 provides what Burroughs felt was the real story that the medical industry would publish if it did not need to perpetuate addiction, illness, and anxiety. The back cover and first page of text features the name Chabre, a French pharmaceutical company that produced apomorphine. The front cover posits APO-33 as a report (“A Report on the Synthesis of the Apomorphine Formula”) and a bulletin. Like Time, published by C Press in 1965, the covers of APO-33 reproduce the look and feel of a “circular” that Burroughs believed would be issued by enlightened pharmaceutical companies.

With its incorporation of handwriting and its illegibility, APO-33 also serves as a prescription pad of sorts, prescribing apomorphine as a cure for society’s ills. The various meanings of script would not have been lost on Burroughs. He realized that doctors were pressured to overprescribe dubious medications and in a sense were legal pushers. In addition, he was aware of the power of written language to perpetuate order and rationality — Control.

A Treatment That Cancels Addiction

The opening of APO-33 as published by Beach Books refers to a lost text that served as an appendix to the Italian edition of Junkie published in 1962 (the edition was translated as La scimmia sulla schiena or Monkey on the Back). According to Maynard and Miles, the text was the original version of an essay titled “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.” Burroughs declares in APO-33 that the manuscript was lost and that the text can only be found in La scimmia sulla schiena. Ultimately Burroughs rewrote the essay to publish it in the Fuck You version of APO-33. The entire APO-33 Health Bulletin section of the Fuck You edition was reprinted in the Beach Books version. However, the Beach Books edition excluded “Locked Out of Time” and “Apomorphine Statement 2″, both of which had appeared in the Fuck You edition. (For a complete discussion of the differences between the various editions of APO-33 see Maynard & Miles.) The final version of “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” appeared in the New Statesman (March 4, 1966) and was eventually reprinted in the British edition of The Soft Machine published by Calder in 1968.

Burroughs felt this article was a compromise and a failure. In APO-33 he writes, “I geared [the Italian appendix] to popular appeal being younger you understand I over estimated my ‘popularity potential.’ I did not criticize the American Narcotics Department officials nor the Public Health center at Lexington.” Burroughs laments the fact that his beliefs regarding the corruption of the medical profession were not stated more forcefully and aggressively. Burroughs writes, “My attempt to attribute good will where it patently does not exist proved ill-advised. I see no reason at this point to pull punches in the expectation of popularity.”

Few readers of the various editions of APO-33 would be aware of the original “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” essay. Yet readers of APO-33 might be aware of some other appendices that discuss apomorphine: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” and “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” both of which appeared in the 1962 Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs believed these articles also failed to present the case for apomorphine strongly enough. Burroughs writes, “Feeling that the articles I had written on apomorphine treatment (British Journal of Addiction January 1957 vol. 53 no. 2 page 119, Evergreen Review 1959 reprinted in the American edition of Naked Lunch) were not adequate… ” These failures prompted him to write “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.”

In all these pieces, Burroughs toned down his views and presented his arguments straight. He played nice — nowhere more so than in the British Journal of Addiction. In that venue Burroughs did not expose what he saw as the conspiracy — in which academic journals played a role — against apomorphine. In addition, deliberately or not, the British Journal of Addiction effectively pigeonholed Burroughs as an addict and outsider and thus not truly trustworthy. The requirements of academic writing made Burroughs water down his views and his style, although as Carol Loranger points out, Burroughs’ hip and radical attitude towards drugs and literature comes out.

In spite of the fact that the British Journal had published his views, Burroughs felt that academic journals continued to censor the facts about apomorphine. As On Speed makes clear, articles on amphetamine were in many cases written by doctors and researchers sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies. Those companies only released reports that supported their agenda. By the mid-1960s, Burroughs understood that the medical industry was not going to share his and Dr. Dent’s optimistic view of apomorphine. A drug-free, anxiety-free society was unthinkable in the present system. According to Burroughs, the financial and political stakes were too high.

For Burroughs, the academic medical journal was just one more weapon in the hands of the drug establishment. As such, the power of these publications had to be subverted and diminished. Critics have mentioned that Burroughs cut-up his letter from the British Journal of Addiction and incorporated it into APO-33. Burroughs more likely incorporated “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” to greater effect than the letter, but the medical journal, as represented by the British Journal, was very much on Burroughs’ mind in APO-33. This becomes even clearer in the fifth issue of Lines. “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” contains the citation for the issue of the British Journal of Addiction in which Burroughs appeared: Volume 53, No. 2, along with the date of its publication, January 1957. The manuscript page of “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” was printed by offset, so in a sense the text in Lines served as an alternative to the fifty offprints of the “Letter from a Master Addict” that Burroughs received in 1957.

The Dream Police of Poetry

Given the debacle that ensued with the aborted publication of APO-33 by Fuck You Press in 1965, one wonders why Burroughs entrusted Ed Sanders with such a difficult project that tested the capabilities of mimeo as a medium. Clearly the mimeograph was poorly suited to recreate the intricate scrapbook nature of the APO-33 manuscript. Burroughs published another scrapbook piece, Time, with C Press, also in 1965. Ted Berrigan was more successful in pulling off Time by resorting to offset printing, but again Burroughs submitted the manuscript to a mimeo press. Interestingly, much of Burroughs’ writing on apomorphine also appeared as mimeo (usually offprinted copies of original mansucripts). His texts were printed by Fuck You Press, My Own Mag, and Lines. Fellow travelers in the mimeo revolution, like Beach Books run by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, also published apomorphine-related texts. Burroughs’ understanding of the importance of apomorphine cannot be separated from the publications, culture, and spirit of the mimeo revolution in several key respects.

For Burroughs, the suppression of apomorphine was not just the fault of censorship and corruption in pharmaceutical literature and academic journals. He believed the mainstream press was in collusion with the government and medical community in censoring information on apomorphine. In The Job Burroughs states, “The press is working with the Narcotics Department to publicize and spread the drug problem. It is not in their interest to stop this source of copy and circulation by advocating measures that would control addiction and reduce it to a minor health problem. What is the press selling? Violence, sex, and drugs. These items are sure copy. That is to say, effective measures to eliminate criminality or drug-taking are not good copy.” I have discussed elsewhere how the C Press Time represents Burroughs’ attack on the Time-Life media empire and how it was his rewrite of Time magazine, particularly the November 30, 1962 issue that savagely reviewed Naked Lunch. Burroughs saw the suppression of apomorphine as another of the evils perpetuated by corporate media.

The mimeo revolution arose in the post-WWII era in opposition to the consolidation and bureaucratization of print media. Large, corporate, mainstream publishers stifled innovation and radical thought in creative writing in much the same way the medical establishment controlled information about addiction and apomorphine. The mimeograph, as well as the letterpress and cheaper offset printing, allowed writers to take control of their own work and its distribution. Clearly, Burroughs saw the mimeograph and the publications of the mimeo revolution as ideally suited to present the anti-authority and anti-establishment message of APO-33. According to Maynard & Miles, the Fuck You edition features, “a drawing by Sanders built on the Egyptian hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus; at the top is an ankh, the hieroglyph for life, at the bottom a mimeo machine, a hookah, and an ejaculating movie camera.” This was Sanders’ “TOTAL ASSAULT ON THE CULTURE.” The mimeo press subverted and provided an end-around the corporate media that Burroughs felt was suppressing apomorphine.

Yet the relationship between apomorphine and the mimeo revolution goes deeper than that. In Burroughs’ mind, apomorphine was ideologically similar to mimeo. In The Apomorphine Times, a newspaper supplement edited by Burroughs and included in My Own Mag Issue Twelve, Burroughs writes of apomorphine: “Like a good policeman, apo-morphine does its work and goes.” APO-33 contains a picture of Burroughs with the caption “in a policeman’s bed sitter.” The “Rex Morgan, M.D.” cut-up also contains a reference to the good policeman as well as the phrase “So he takes over newsmagazine… The way we like to see.” The concept of the good policeman deserves a little explanation. To those familiar with Burroughs’ distaste for the law, his belief in a good policeman can be confusing. On one level, the phrase refers to an effective policeman. In that sense, like a policeman, apomorphine would rid society of addicts and pushers and help wipe out the junk paradigm. But Burroughs realized that the police (as force of control, as bureaucracy) were also part of the problem. In this light, the good policeman refers to the ideal or beneficial policeman in the Burroughsian universe. The ideal policeman is not intrusive; he does what business he has to do and goes. He does not attempt to increase or perpetuate the power of an established entity. Ideally, society and its members would mind their own business and tend to it without a bureaucratic police force. That Burroughsian ideal may be impossible. “The police are a necessary evil,” as Gregory Corso writes in his poem “Police.”

Apomorphine was a drug that steadied the system and then left no trace. It was not addictive. Burroughs went to great pains to state that apomorphine was not an aversion therapy and was non-invasive. The key term is metabolic regulator. Like the ideal policeman, apomorphine regulated without attempting to exert control or to extend its power or influence. Methadone was addictive and thus not a good policeman. Likewise, LSD altered the consciousness and thus left a trace on the system. Burroughs makes clear apomorphine’s role as ideal regulator in APO-33. He writes, “Like a good policeman apomorphine does its work and goes. Yes we of the Nova Police do our work and go.”

Burroughs links the “policeman” concept to mimeo productions. This becomes clear in a magazine like The Apomorphine Times. Burroughs edited this magazine-within-a-magazine that appeared in issue 12 of My Own Mag. The Apomorphine Times includes a four-square fold-in text. Burroughs writes, “(sexless providence supported by the rich. Policemen jumped out on them.) From Afternoon Ticker Tape My Magazine published by J. Nuttall of London Not even the generous injections of the green and ready could keep it afloat for more than two issues after which it sank under the dead grey sludge of its own prose. The cadaver was has been however resuscitated in New York under the name I believe of The National Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Buckley…”

Therefore a close reading of The Apomorphine Times reveals that Burroughs viewed the products of the mimeo revolution, be it a little magazine or a scrapbook like Time, as “good policemen,” a print version of apomorphine. Like apomorphine, mimeo mags did their job and disappeared. Mimeo is generally a guerilla strike on the literary, social and political landscape. They only last a handful of issues (two in the case of “The Burrough”) and they fade away. In addition their ephemeral, fragile nature ensures that they will not last although their effect lingers on. For Burroughs, the alternative press of the mimeo revolution was a good policeman that combats the Time-Life machine.

For quite some time Burroughs had seen a strange relationship between law and the little magazine. In 1958, Burroughs dreamed of starting his own little magazine with Gregory Corso. They were going to call it Interpol after the international police organization. In a letter of September 28, 1958 cowritten by Corso and Burroughs, Corso writes that “‘the poet is becoming a policeman.’” This idea is clearly Burroughs’ own as Corso places this phrase in quotes and attributes the policeman / poet idea to Burroughs later on (“like Bill says we’re policemen”). Burroughs writes, “When the Human Image is threatened, The Poet dictates the forms of survival. Dream police of poetry protect us from The Human Virus. The human virus can now be isolated and treated. This is the work of The New POLICE-POET.”

What we see here is Burroughs and Corso subverting and complicating terms and organizations like the police and Interpol through a creation of and takeover of media. This is a process known as détournement. This idea was the most used weapon of the Situationists. In the mid-1960s Burroughs was on the fringes of this group with his work with Alexander Trocchi and The Sigma Project. Works like Time and APO-33 are textbook examples of détournement.

This technique was particularly productive for Gregory Corso at the time. This is the period of poems like “Power,” “Army,” “Marriage,” “Hair,” “Bomb” and, particularly interesting for this discussion, “Police.” Corso explored the fascination / repulsion of these charged concepts and attempted to turn them to his advantage and make them hip. In APO-33, Burroughs similarly examined the word fix. Burroughs was clearly ambivalent about the police. He attempted to join the OSS and he was intrigued / repulsed by agents and operatives. He wrote in a private eye style in Junkie. In addition he examined the role of the police as part of the junk paradigm and as agent of control throughout his writing life. Possibly like Corso, Burroughs realized that the “police are a necessary evil.” But an enlightened / ideal / hip police, i.e. a good policeman. Thus the concept “Police-Poet. Given Corso’s reverence for Shelley, we can see links to Shelley’s concept of the poet as the Legislator of the World which itself is an old concept that dates back to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry. Interpol as magazine would be the publishing outlet for “Police-Poets”, i.e. hip policemen.

In “Police” Corso writes, “My father’s indifference, Rosalind Russell’s stardom / the great, big circulation of the News, the Mirror / I praised the police their backing, their fame —” Corso here acknowledges that the police derive their power and authority from patriarchy, apathy, and the mass media. Poems like “Police” and a projected magazine such as Interpol would explore and “detourne” those relationships. Burroughs took the idea of Interpol into the 1960s. He titled his newspaper supplement to My Own Mag, “The Burrough.” The title suggests the FBI or the Bureau, another reference to a policing organization. Little magazines enacted the concept of the good policeman, an ideal regulator that monitored the cultural, political, and spiritual aspects of society as a whole from a position outside the existing system. Mimeo and the little mag helped keep society honest and straight. Burroughs saw that the little mag and apomorphine served the same function.

Cut-Ups: The Complete Picture

It seems obvious to me that a full understanding of Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique is in the infant stage. With almost all the focus on the cut-up trilogy as published by Grove Press and with nearly a blind eye to any cut-up published in little mags, the picture of Burroughs’ experiments cannot be completed. Oliver Harris has started to dig into Minutes to Go (as well as some of the little mags), but The Exterminator, Time, APO-33, and the material in the more obscure little mags, particularly the mimeos (ones not included in White Subway, The Burroughs File, or Ports of Entry) are largely unexplored territory. Even a collector runs into seemingly insurmountable obstacles in attempting to tell the cut-up story. The Fuck You edition of APO-33 apparently differs substantially from the Beach Books version. But copies of the Fuck You edition are so rare that they are as good as lost. The Burroughs scholar must be an archeologist of sorts. Library holdings need to be opened up and utilized. The completely untouched manuscripts of and letters on the cut-up in the New York Public Library and elsewhere must be made available to interested readers.

Previous scholarship, such as that by Christopher Land and Timothy Murphy, would greatly benefit from taking these under-studied cut-ups into account. In “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control,” Christopher Land outlines Burroughs’ theory of language and the role of the cut-up in subverting the control of the Word. Other critics, such as Timothy Murphy, have done the same. For Burroughs, the cut-up subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened up the potential of space. The cut-up was an attempt to break down the apparent coherence of language. The experiments published in little mags best represent this aspect of the cut-up and best demonstrate the cut-up in practice. The cut-up trilogy straightjackets the cut-up into the form of the novel. The block paragraphs force the reader to approach the cut-up from left to right onward down the page and forward through the codex. This is precisely “the trap of linear, narrative time” that Burroughs hoped to explode with the cut-up. APO-33 provides much more freedom for the reader. The three-column format can be read across columns or from top to bottom. In addition, columns on a page connect within the page or across to other pages thus introducing several options of approaching the text. “Rex Morgan, MD” can be read like a painting or a projective verse poem. APO-33 and the Apomorphine Times present cut-ups in a grid format. The reader can process these texts “any which way” or even take the scissors to them and reenact the process of the cut-up. Such texts challenge the format of the book in ways the cut-up trilogy does not. It can be argued whether the cut-up as practiced by Burroughs successfully enacted his theories (as Oliver Harris does in “Cutting Up Politics,” published in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization). Yet the final judgment on the cut-ups cannot be handed down without moving away from the novels and digging into the magazines and, even more importantly, the manuscripts and letters.

I want to closely examine a single page of the Beach Books edition of APO-33 to highlight the critical potential of this unexplored material. The back cover of APO-33 contains the phrase “pellets sublinguaux chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine.” This refers to a tablet of apomorphine to be taken orally, dissolved under the tongue. The suggestion of dropping APO-33 highlights a link to LSD. In Lines 5, Burroughs also draws parallels between LSD and apomorphine. Like LSD-25, APO-33 is a consciousness-expanding drug of sorts, but according to Burroughs, apomorphine is the more beneficial drug and does not contain LSD’s baggage. Burroughs distrusted psychedelics. As demonstrated in The Job, Burroughs viewed LSD as physically dangerous. It was engulfed in vague theorization and lulled users into a sense of peace, love, and complacency. In contrast, apomorphine is to Burroughs a “good policeman” and a metabolic regulator. It reduces anxiety, clears the mind, induces sanity, and is non-addictive. It does its job and goes. No flashbacks.

More importantly the word “sublinguaux” suggests Burroughs’ theories of the sub-vocal and sub-language. Land writes, “At one level, Burroughs focuses on our everyday subvocalizations, the internal monologue that provides a narrative sense of personal, subjective continuity which we think of as ‘our self.’ These subvocalizations simultaneously come from outside, hence the notion that they are a viral infection and constitute an inside: the subject ‘I’.” The French word allows Burroughs to get across these ideas in a creative manner. In addition “sublinguaux” conjures up the idea of subverting language. Burroughs viewed the apomorphine as the cut-up in drug form. In “Rex Morgan M.D.” in Lines 5, there is a picture of Burroughs with the caption Dr. Zeit. Zeit is German for Time. The picture and caption in a cut-up about apomorphine highlights Burroughs’ belief that the drug subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened the potential of space. For Burroughs, apomorphine regulated the human body just as the cut-up regulated the power of the word. Land writes, “[A]pomorphine was the perfect way of regulating the addict’s metabolism and silencing the screams of his inner demons. Within the context of Burroughs’ concerns with control and language, the idea of ‘apomorphine silence’ seems suggestive of a balanced state of self-governance without a governed self that is itself the product of control.” The miracle drug cured the addiction to subvocalization. Apomorphine provided silence. Therefore Burroughs felt apomorphine acted in a similar manner to that of the cut-up technique. It was the cut-up in the form of a pill.

According to Burroughs, mimeo was another metabolic regulator. APO-33, as radical anti-establishment text, was ideologically compatible with mimeo. The back cover of APO-33 by Beach Books captures this dynamic. The page triangulates Chabre, Beach Books, and City Lights Books. Chabre is a French pharmaceutical company that manufactured and distributed apomorphine (in pellets sublinguaux) for the European market. It should be noted that “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine chabre” in Lines 5 has been mistitled “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine cham bre” in Maynard & Miles. The mistake is crucial and covers up some of the associations that can be made from this valuable and unstudied cut-up. The reference to Chabre provides Burroughs with a realistic touch to make APO-33 look like establishment medical literature. It functions like the cover of Time that takes the image of the November 30, 1962 edition and cuts it up. The presence of Beach Books and City Lights as distributors of APO-33 twists and subverts the corporate associations of Chabre. APO-33 is truly anti-establishment, a product of the alternative press. For Burroughs, the presses of the mimeo revolution serve as alternative sources of information and correctives to the establishment.

I hope both casual readers and critics will come around to experiencing the power of Burroughs’ cut-ups outside of the cut-up trilogy. In my opinion, much of the negative reception of the cut-up is due to the fact that most readers have only experienced the technique in the form of a novel. The cut-up is used to best effect in short pieces, particularly the offprints of scrapbook pages, like those published in the presses of the mimeo revolution. In addition, the ideology of the cut-up as Burroughs saw it is more in line with the ideology and spirit of the mimeo revolution than that of corporate publishing and the form of the novel that it promotes. Readers need to explore beyond the cut-up novels published by Grove. In support of that goal, APO-33, as published by Beach Books in 1968, is reproduced here in its entirety. I also encourage readers to go to digital archive run by Craig Dworkin, Eclipse, to view the apomorphine texts in Lines. (Lines 5 | Rex Morgan | Chlorhydrate d’Apormphine Chabre) Of course, the complete My Own Mag is available on RealityStudio. These resources will provide enjoyment for the casual reader, valuable information for the scholar, and encouragement for libraries and institutions.

Postscript: Wouldn’t You

Just after finishing this piece, I stopped by the Baltimore Book Fair. You never know what might turn up. By and large it was a wash for Burroughs material but I talked to Tom Congalton of Between the Covers for a bit and browsed through his booth. As usual he had the best books in the finest condition. He had a signed Grove Naked Lunch, but a lesser known Burroughs item caught my attention. Tom had a slightly beat up copy of LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug. The book was edited by David Solomon and published by G.P. Putnam in 1964. Timothy Leary wrote the introduction. Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Humphry Osmond contributed essays. Clearly, the book had some problems: some rubbing, a large chip, some creasing — but the timing was dead on. This anthology contains Burroughs’ text “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs.” The essay was later reprinted in Evergreen Review 34. In this article, Burroughs mentions apomorphine as a means to increase the psychedelic experience and decrease anxiety. It was Burroughs in “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” mode. Yet another go-around with the straight press before Burroughs turned to the mimeo press in 1965 for his apomorphine crusade. For me, it was the perfect book at the perfect moment.

One of the benefits of a book fair or a bookstore is that you can see the book for yourself. You are not dependent on the bookseller’s descriptions. In this case, handling the book was key. The book had an ownership inscription by Jack Ward, MD. That sold the book for me. The signature captured the culture that I was describing in my apomorphine piece. A doctor’s copy of an anthology of academic articles by progressive medical researchers and literary explorers — it was Rex Morgan, MD in real life. The idea that practicing doctors were aware of Burroughs’ work on drugs (be it Naked Lunch or more academic pieces), and particularly apomorphine, was fascinating to me.

And then it got better. I googled Dr. Ward and LSD, and lo and behold, it turns out Dr. Ward was the American equivalent of Dr. John Yerbery Dent. Dr. Ward practiced at the Carrier Clinic in New Jersey. Founded in 1910, this clinic treated mental disorders and drug addiction in a private setting. While I found no connection between Dr. Ward and apomorphine, he was at the forefront of experimenting with LSD for medical uses such as curing alcoholism. Dr. Ward personally met with Humphry Osmond, a pioneer in LSD research in a medical setting (Osmond contributed the article “Psychopharmacology: The Manipulation of the Mind” to the anthology). Ward himself contributed “A Case of Change and Partial Regression Following One LSD 25 Treatment” to The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, an anthology like Solomon’s published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1967.

So the book was chipped and creased. On that level it was far from the ideal collector’s copy, but like all great collectibles, this book captured a moment and told a story beyond its pages and dust jacket. I could not have had a better ending to my research into Burroughs, apomorphine and APO-33. I had to buy it despite the condition. Wouldn’t you?

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have not read all twenty issues of Kulchur cover to cover, but of the issues I have sampled, I enjoy Kulchur 3 the most. Issue 3 presents Kulchur at its most Beat. William Burroughs (“In Search of Yage”), Jack Kerouac (“Dave”), Gary Snyder (“The Ship in Yokohama”), Herbert Huncke (“Elsie,” possibly his first published work), Gregory Corso (reviewing Kerouac’s Doctor Sax), Allen Ginsberg (“Breughal — Triumph of Death”). The issue is heavy on fiction and poetry. The focus on criticism is less apparent here. Yet John Fles’s review of the first seven issues of Yugen provides a bit of cold water on the Beat party with its ambivalent look at Leroi and Hettie Jones’s magazine.

Kulchur 3 also functions as a drug issue. Paul Bowles writes on Kif. Burroughs’ “In Search of Yage” is one of the foundations of the psychedelic era. Kerouac’s piece “transcribes” the monologue of a junkie in Mexico City. Writing of this nature supports the theory that the spirit of the 1960s began in the supposedly silent 1950s. Arthur Marwick in his book The Sixties presents the idea of a long decade from 1958-1974. These pieces, like Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict,” provide a multifaceted view of the drug culture depicting a cornucopia of drugs from opiates to hallucinogens in a variety of exotic settings. By the 1960s, these locales would be swarmed by drug tourists.

Oliver Harris’ writing on The Yage Letters makes this issue even more interesting to me. I have written on how his introductions and critical essays forced me to return and re-read the literary magazines I associated with Naked Lunch. As Harris shows, Kulchur 3 and “In Search of Yage” play a crucial role in the development of the final form and publication of that work by City Lights in 1963 and beyond.

Returning yet again to this favorite issue, I was struck by what was missing from its pages. Harris makes brief mention of a footnote in Kulchur regarding “In Search of Yage.” The Kulchur footnote reads, “‘The Routine’ appears in Floating Bear (#9) distributed solely by mailing list. 25c to The Floating Bear, 309 E. Houston St., New York 2, NY.” Not mentioned by Harris, the publication by Floating Bear came about after a rejection by Kulchur. The story of the publication of “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in the Floating Bear and its subsequent seizure for obscenity has been written about at the Bibliographic Bunker and elsewhere. Fuck You Press published “The Routine” as well, and the piece finally appeared in the third edition of the City Lights edition of The Yage Letters.

This is only part of the story as I found out reading Lita Hornick’s memoir The Green Fuse. Hornick became associated with Kulchur after reading Issue 1. She became president of Kulchur Press, Inc after Issue 2. She had no input in the magazine until that point. It was Marc Schleifer and the contributing editors’ project. Schleifer gathered the material for issue 3. Given the new arrangement, this material needed approval from Hornick. Hornick writes, “Little did I know that [Schleifer] only wanted backing for #3, which was to be an inflammatory issue, before disappearing into the Cuban Revolution.”

What was so controversial about this issue? I quote Hornick in full:

When I finally saw the galleys of Kulchur 3, I was worried about going to jail, because it was on me, as publisher, that the legal responsibility rested. One would not raise an eyebrow at this material today, but it was a different story in 1961. I told my husband about it, and he was not worried at all. He could not believe that little wifey could get into trouble with the law. He didn’t bother to read the galleys himself, but he told me if I was really worried I should take them down to our lawyers. And so I took the galleys to Eugene Klein…. As Eugene leafed through them, he turned pale. He said, “I’ll show them to our pornography expert. Come back tomorrow.” The next day he told me, “Our pornography expert says, if you publish these galleys, you will definitely be arrested by the New York Vice Squad. You will have to spend at least one night in the Women’s House of Detention until we can bail you out. You will lose in the lower court, but we will win in the Supreme Court!” I was agaga; but I took the galleys from Eugene and, after eliminating the two items that were really dangerous for that time, I went ahead with publication. Eugene notwithstanding, nothing ever happened to me. The two things I eliminated were Burroughs’ now famous routine about Roosevelt, for which Leroi Jones was arrested at gun point when he published it in The Floating Bear, and a story by Paul Goodman drooling over a sailor.

Kulchur 3 with its depiction of homosexuality, drug use, and pornographic political satire was to be a bombshell statement on obscenity, pornography and censorship. Donald Phelps’ essay, “A Second Look at Pornography,” that appeared in the issue provides the critical thrust for an enlightened look at these issues. Phelps’ essay does not address the work included in Kulchur 3 directly. In addition, his treatment of pornography tends more to the high art traditions of erotica like Asian art and the art film, but in a footnote, he mentions an essay of Goodman’s on pornography in a favorable light. Clearly, Kulchur 3 was an issue with a purpose and a message.

The issue was meant to deal a blow in the fight against censorship. The legal battles surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Tropic of Cancer and Lenny Bruce are all in the mix. Of course, so are Naked Lunch and William Burroughs. Burroughs’ work is not mentioned directly in Phelps’ essay, but some of Phelps’ comments on an expanded role and definition for pornography are relevant. Phelps writes,

The best medium of pornography is probably the hard, metallic daylight of satire, allegory, the lyric poem or the critical essay. Before American criticism began to take on the aspect of an extended slumber party, writers… availed themselves of pornography’s intensity, raffishness and occasionally, sexuality… Like the pyrotechnic blasts of these critics, the pornography of Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques, or the Decameron, specializes in flare-lighting the incongruities of any and all pretensions, or relationships. The methods of such pornography are the methods of comedy: undercutting relationships with the common denominator of sexual desire, and deploying the chief weapons of comedy, action and time, to show absurdity in motion.

These comments could apply specifically to “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” a brilliant mix of the obscene, comic and satiric. The Talking Asshole Routine and many of the extended pieces in Naked Lunch provide other “pyrotechnic blasts.” The criticism surrounding Naked Lunch and Burroughs in the late 1950s and 1960s draws from the same pool of thought expressed here by Phelps.

Hornick mentioned in her memoir that issue 3 was not to her taste. The selections in the next issue and thereafter were more to her liking. Without a doubt, the editorial vision expressed in the first three issues differed from all that follow. Schleifer possessed a political bent as evidenced by his decision to go to Cuba shortly after Issue 3. The material gathered by Schleifer in Issue 3 was “inflammatory” ammunition for his revolutionary ideals. Censorship and obscenity laws were on one level about protecting children from sexual images or four-letter words. In addition, they calmed adults’ base sexual desires. Yet as Phelps’ essay makes clear such laws protect the capitalist system and mass consumerism by discouraging masturbation, symbolic of self-sufficient and wasteful activity. Therefore, a blow against censorship of pornogrpahy was a blow against an oppressive capitalist, materialist system. These obscenity laws also condemn alternative lifestyles and political opposition. It could be argued that Hornick’s editing of Goodman and Burroughs’ pieces from the pages of Kulchur played into the hands of the dominant culture that sought to excise these oppositional elements from view.

Yet Hornick was not against fighting these battles. Hornick embraced gay culture and Kulchur provides an insight into the gay New York avant garde. So I would bet she was not shocked by the homosexual content of Burroughs and Goodman’s pieces. Possibly, her fear was more about class and social standing. In issue 8, she published an essay by Michael McClure originally titled “Fuck.” In the Green Fuse, she writes,

It wasn’t really about fucking but about the importance of bringing the Anglo Saxon words back into the language. I was anxious to publish it but wrote to Michael that the postal inspectors would never read it but, when they saw the word FUCK in bold type, would simply impound the magazine. I expected him to write back, “Bourgeois dog! Censorship! Censorship! Censorship!” However, Michael, quite reasonably, suggested that we spell the title in Greek..

Schleifer was not so reasonable and objected to Hornick’s editing of issue three poisoning the relationship between them. It is interesting how the threat of jail, even a single night in Women’s Detention, deterred Hornick from pursuing publication of Burroughs and Goodman’s work. Hornick fears a sense of shock and embarrassment in the court of public opinion. At the same time, the “shock of the new” in the arts appeals very strongly to her. She is very aware and ambivalent about her class status as evidenced by the quote above. Hornick wrestles with these contradictory feelings in her memoir. Diane Di Prima possessed fewer qualms about jail when Floating Bear later published “The Routine.” Di Prima depicts her experience with the authorities in her memoir. Di Prima was pregnant at the time, a fact she used to her advantage.

A more detailed examination of the role of upper class (either by birth or wealth) women in the challenging of obscenity and censorship laws would be interesting reading. In Hornick’s case, her desire to provide a forum for the latest in the avant garde assisted and yet conflicted with her desire for social standing. As The Green Fuse makes clear, she, from an early age, sought to marry up the social ladder. On one level, acquiring a great contemporary art collection assists in that process. It is also a good investment. Yet championing “sick” and “obscene” literature of disputed value is not only socially embarrassing, but also extremely expensive. While Kulchur ran in the red, Hornick refused to let things run out of control financially. She was not about to jeopardize her lifestyle in the fight against censorship. Barney Rosset and Grove Press faced a similar dilemma in financing the legal battles for Lawrence, Miller, and Burroughs. All these conflicts must have faced women (and men) such as Margret Anderson, Jean Heap, and Harriet Monroe, in publishing Joyce and other Modernists. If anybody knows a book or article on the subject of the upper class role in the revolt against established manners as expressed in publishing (and the inner conflicts that created) I would be interested.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The first edition of Yage Letters published by City Lights in 1963 is a slim and seemingly unassuming book. The cover has become famous and the book sells well, but it remains largely undiscovered territory to scholars. Only 18,000 words long and struggling to reach 68 pages, it was originally issued without an introduction or notes. In college, Yage Letters was presented as something of a curiosity; a playground upon which a few isolated professors interested in queer, racial, or political theory could tinker with ideas on tourism, colonialism, imperialism and the Other. The Sheltering Sky and The Heart of Darkness share similar themes. Later, I viewed the book as an ur-text in the psychedelic revolution published around the time of Stranger in a Strange Land, The Island, and the Psychedelic Review. (For an archive of the Review, see maps.org.) As a collectible, this collaboration between Burroughs and Ginsberg stood out as an essential Burroughs text, but not a prized possession that I often looked at or sought to learn more about.

Yage Redux and Oliver Harris’ upcoming essay for Postmodern Culture, “Not Burroughs’ final fix: materializing The Yage Letters,” revolutionize my views on nearly every level. Redux roughly triples the size of the first edition, and I spent much of my time in the new introduction, notes, and appendices. As the review on RealityStudio makes clear, Harris researches and clarifies the scientific, cultural, and political history surrounding Burroughs and Ginsberg’s explorations into South America. Harris also demonstrates that a tremendous amount of editing and drafting went into creating the epistolary novel. The immediacy was carefully constructed. On that score, particularly interesting was Burroughs’ drafts for a Yage article that he hoped to publish in a mainstream magazine.

Yet for me, the highpoint of Harris’ work is his exploration into the role of the little magazine in the publication of Yage Letters. His research completely alters the manner in which I view the early Burroughs magazine appearances. As my columns to RealityStudio attest, I saw the magazine appearances of the late 1950s and early 1960s as divided into two camps: Naked Lunch related and cut-ups. The brilliance of Naked Lunch tends to blind readers and scholars to other aspects of Burroughs’ work, particularly in the early period. Harris makes this perfectly clear when he discusses “From Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” that appeared in Black Mountain Review 7. I always focused on the Naked Lunch part of that title and neglected the fact that the piece was part of the earlier written (but later published) Yage Letters. The July 10, 1953 letter which describes the Composite City is the twelfth letter of the “In Search of Yage” section in the second and third editions of Yage Letters. This letter is missing from the first edition. Burroughs cannibalized Yage Letters for use in Naked Lunch. Harris provides much information on the textual relationship between Naked Lunch and Yage Letters.

From the Naked Lunch related material, I tended to jump to Burroughs’ cut-up experiments culminating in the cut-up art books of Time and APO-33 of 1965/1966. As Harris points out in detail in his Postmodern Culture article and more briefly in Redux, I jumped over the important bridge between the Naked Lunch magazines and the cut-up appearances. That bridge in more ways than one was Yage Letters. Much of my time was spent studying Big Table 1, the Chicago Review, Kulchur 1, Semina 4 and Yugen 3. As stated previously, I considered Black Mountain Review as only a part of Naked Lunch. I viewed these magazines as keys to getting Naked Lunch into print and proof of the magazines’ importance in Burroughs’ publication history. This was a gross oversight causing me to minimize their importance. My focus on Naked Lunch ignored Big Table 2 and Kulchur 3 entirely, which printed eleven of the twelve letters comprising the “In Search of Yage” section in all editions of Yage Letters. In addition, I never concentrated on what was actually in Floating Bear issues 5 and 9 (the letter dated June 21, 1960 and “Roosevelt after Inauguration,” respectively) narrowing in on the cut-up aspects of issue 5 and the obscenity trial surrounding issue 9. City Lights Journal 1 (“Am I Dying, Meester?”) represented yet another cut-up. In essence, I overlooked the entire contents of Yage Letters that was published in little magazines before the first City Lights edition. If anything demonstrates the importance of the little magazine in the publication history of William Burroughs, it is Yage Letters.

Harris’ research takes this fact much further. By 1963, no manuscript of Yage Letters existed. Ferlinghetti relied on the little magazines in order to create the City Lights edition. In his Postmodern Culture article, Harris shows how each little magazine left its imprint on the Yage Letters text. Especially interesting is a close reading of the use of colons and commas in the opening addresses of the letters and their implications for a postmodern concept of editing and the text. Harris also shows how the format and editing process of Floating Bear resulted in a remarkably accurate presentation of the June 21, 1960 letter in Issue 5.

Just as Yage Letters bridges the gap between Naked Lunch and cut-up appearances in little magazines, the book demonstrates a shift in Burroughs’ writing technique. The “In Search of Yage” section shows Burroughs developing the routine style that would culminate in Naked Lunch. Letter writing is key to this process. “Roosevelt after Inauguration” leads to the Talking Asshole. The later sections of Yage Letters (the letter from June 21, 1960 and “Am I Dying, Meester?”) utilize and develop the theory of the cut-up. Gysin replaced Ginsberg as mentor and collaborator.

In between the routine and the cut-up lies the Composite City letter of July 10, 1953. In this letter that appeared in Black Mountain Review 7, Burroughs predicted the cut-up before Gysin sliced into the newspapers at the Beat Hotel. While not a true cut-up, the Composite City section reveals an interest in surrealist/Dadaist collage and montage techniques that along with the routine would shape Naked Lunch.

Harris’ work left me wanting more information on a couple of other early periodical appearances: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” in the British Journal of Addiction and the excerpt from Junkie in Man’s Wildcat Adventures. A discussion on Man’s Wildcat Adventures is not really relevant here, but Harris’ research into the mainstream aspirations of Burroughs in the 1950s leaves me puzzled as to how Junkie appeared in a fringe men’s magazine in June 1959. Possibly, Burroughs was so desperate for publication after the rejection of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press that he considered publishing anywhere, including starting his own (eventually aborted) magazine. Perhaps he needed money or maybe Ace sold the rights and it was out of his control. What are the implications of Junkie being published in a men’s magazine? For example, how did this marginalized appearance coupled with the pulping of the Digit edition of Junkie in 1957 affect Burroughs’ view of himself as an author and Junkie in particular? In any case, this forgotten magazine appearance demands further study.

The “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” (“Master Letter”) is more on point. A section of the “Master Letter” deals with Yage. Harris has painstakingly annotated this section showing where the material came from (the aborted Yage article in many cases) and where it went (Naked Lunch in some cases). This work and all mention of the British Journal of Addiction (except for a brief note to the appendices) fell to the editor’s pen. I think this is unfortunate. Given Burroughs’ desperation to see publication (as demonstrated by Harris), the Journal appearance (Burroughs’ second appearance in print) proves of major importance. The “Master Letter” addresses pertinent issues of Burroughs’ authorship (he signed his own name not William Lee or Willy Lee) and scholarship (Burroughs’s views on Yage and other drugs did in fact find publication in scholarly circles as early as 1957). Burroughs’ thoughts and feelings on the British Journal appearance as well as the “Master Letter”‘s reception by the medical community would be interesting. How does the “Master Letter” fit in with Burroughs’ reliance on letter writing in his creative process? How is the “Master Letter” related to Yage Letters and Naked Lunch? How does the “Master Letter”‘s eventual appearance in later editions of Naked Lunch as an appendix change critical and public perception of the Naked Lunch and the “Master Letter?” Many might be unaware of the circumstances and format of its original appearance. This inclusion in later editions dovetails with the editing and textual issues Harris explores in Yage Letters Redux and his article. Clearly, the “Master Letter” deserves further study.

Yage Redux and the Postmodern Culture article answer a multitude of questions, but like any great scholarship they generate a host of new ones. This work provides a ton of information on little magazines and changed my view of my collection. The introductions, appendices and notes give Yage Letters an added weight not merely in terms of size, but also in terms of significance to Burroughs and literature at large. But that significance, like the drug Yage, was always out there; somebody just had to search for it.

RealityStudio notes: Jed mentions Oliver Harris’ annotated version of the “Master Letter.” Professor Harris was kind enough to share one of his working manuscripts, a complex Microsoft Word document that he used to prepare the “In Search of Yage” section of Yage Redux. Copyrights prevent RealityStudio from publishing the entire document here. However, if you want some real insight into the sort of rigor and analysis that Professor Harris put into his work, here are a few images: 1, 2, 3.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

According to Beat legend, the shooting death of Joan Vollmer gave birth to William Burroughs, the writer. Grief and guilt forced Burroughs to the typewriter. The work of recent Beat historians, like Oliver Harris’ William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, separates the truth from the fiction concerning this issue. As early as the summer of 1950, Burroughs worked on drafts of Junkie. Yet without a doubt, the writing bug caught Burroughs in full force in the two years after Joan’s death in 1951. Burroughs finished Junkie, began work on Queer, and wrote the letters that would become The Yage Letters. By 1952-1953, Burroughs completed Junkie and Allen Ginsberg scoured his address book and New York for a publisher.

From 1953 to 1957, Burroughs’ published output, meager as it was, hovered between high and low culture. The only publisher willing to put out the shocking drug material of Junkie was the pulp fiction house of A.A. Wyn, Ace Publishing. Junkie with its matter-of-fact, non-judgmental and possibly even celebratory treatment of the drug culture and drug addiction, was almost too hot for Wyn to handle. He published it as a favor to his cousin, Carl Solomon, Allen Ginsberg’s friend from their joint stay in a mental hospital, and only with the book paired with a staunchly anti-drug, pro-law enforcement title, Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotics Agent. By 1957, Junky appeared solo in Great Britain but was again marketed as a pulp fiction. This time the book appeared as a paperback from Digit. Burroughs acts as the square’s Virgil in the Hell of the United States drug underworld.

An early magazine appearance, not mentioned in the well researched William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography 1953-1973 compiled by Joe Maynard and Barry Miles, highlights Burroughs’ early roots in men’s magazines. The first issue of Man’s Wildcat Adventures from June 1959 featured excerpts from Junkie alongside sensationalistic material such as “I Saw the Djiek Women Eat Their Mates” and “I Raided the Bored Wives Bordello.” The magazine also ran racy photo pieces of scantily clad women. While Junkie contains little to no sexual material, the honest portrayal of the drug underworld was salacious enough to appeal to the baser appetites of male readers prowling the drugstores and magazine racks for cheap thrills. In the 1950′s, Burroughs’ drug narrative was viewed as part horror story, part pornography.

Although he left the pulps behind, throughout his literary career, Burroughs would periodically find himself in men’s magazines, such as Swank, Cavilier, Jaguar, Penthouse and Playboy. In magazines such as these, the high quality of Burroughs’ writing would add literary weight while still delivering a good bang for the buck to more low-minded readers. This is especially noticeable in magazines like Olympia Magazine or the later issues of Evergreen Review which dealt in controversial literature struggling with the censors as well as tasteful nude pictorials. Burroughs’s relationship with Mayfair, a British men’s magazine, deserves special mention. In the late sixties, Burroughs wrote “The Burroughs Academy Bulletin” column for several issues. This forum allowed Burroughs to speak out on current issues important to him. More on this aspect of Burroughs’ literary career later. Jack Kerouac wrote a similar column, “The Last Word,” for the men’s magazine Escapade in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s.

Burroughs’ only published effort from the 1953-early 1957 period beside the pulp publication of Junkie lies at the other end of the literary spectrum. In January 1957, Burroughs appeared in Volume 53, No 2 of the British Journal of Addiction. The journal printed Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs,” written in August 1956. The letter resulted from Burroughs’ relationship with Dr. John Yerbury Dent as Burroughs attempted to kick his drug habit which completely debilitated him. By 1956, Burroughs’ life reached a standstill. He shot heroin several times a day and spent his remaining hours staring at his shoes watching life pass him by. Dr. Dent’s Apomorphine cure allowed Burroughs to kick opiates and begin in earnest the next stage of his writing career.

In the Journal, Burroughs’ no-nonsense, man-on-the-street approach to drugs found a more academic audience. Burroughs tells the same story he told in Junkie, but in an even more authoritative and academic manner. In 1944 in a New York apartment, Herbert Huncke initiated Burroughs into a whole new world. The student became the teacher/writer. Burroughs presented himself as an expert on a little known section of the United States that captured the public’s imagination. Huncke taught class at Bickford’s or under streetlights on 103rd Street; Burroughs talked hip in the pulps and men’s magazines or lectured in academic journals.

Junkie appeared under the name William Lee in order to protect his family from the embarrassment of their son’s drug addiction and lifestyle. Yet Burroughs published his letter in the British Journal under his own name. Carol Loranger argues that “Letter from a Master Addict” is “one of Burroughs’s most subversive pieces of comic writing.” The “Letter” is full of comic asides and odd anecdotes that disrupt the academic tone of the article. Burroughs can be seen as parodying the academic article in much the same way he will later utilize parody in Naked Lunch. The solemn reporter of Junkie transforms into the sardonic hipster with the deadpan delivery of Naked Lunch. In a doctor’s journal, Dr. Benway is born.

Clearly, the British Journal was more prestigious than a pulp paperback. The name change shows not so much shame in his past experiences but the extent of his literary ambition. Burroughs felt he was a master writer as well as a master addict. His writing deserved mainstream publication and recognition. Teenagers in drugstores could not appreciate the complexities of great drug literature. By 1957, Burroughs’ creative output would begin to appear in a more literary arena: the little magazine. William Lee had become William Burroughs. William Burroughs was ready to unleash his word horde.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

By the late 1950s, literary magazines were much on Burroughs’ mind. He was no longer satisfied with publishing his numerous routines in letters to Allen Ginsberg. Naked Lunch began to take shape as a novel and Burroughs sought a larger audience. Mainstream publishing houses were out of the question. Even Olympia Press rejected the initial manuscript. The literary magazine remained Burroughs’ only outlet. In fact, they carried his hopes and dreams as an author. Black Mountain Review and Yugen saw Burroughs through a period of almost complete despair. The controversy surrounding Naked Lunch‘s appearance in Chicago Review and Big Table finally caught the attention of Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press who agreed to print Naked Lunch as a paperback. After more than five years shouting in the literary wilderness, Burroughs was once again a published writer. In the foreword to his bibliography, he wrote, “So it was publication in a little magazine that led to the publication of Naked Lunch at a time when I had almost given up. For many years I sent out pieces to all little magazines that asked me for a contribution, as this bibliography attests.”

Just how important was the literary magazine to Burroughs in the late 1950s? So important that he considered, no matter how briefly and how jokingly, of starting his own outlet. While living at the Beat Hotel in Paris with Gregory Corso, Burroughs toyed with the idea of starting Interpol: “the poet is becoming a policeman.” Corso and Burroughs fleshed out the scheme in a letter sent to Allen Ginsberg on September 28, 1958. Burroughs wrote, “When the Human Image is threatened, The Poet dictates forms of survival. Dream police of poetry protect us from The Human Virus. The human virus can now be isolated and treated. This is the work of The POLICE-POET.” Allen Ginsberg was to serve as the magazine’s coeditor. What would the magazine include? “[O]ur content will be of the most sordid, vile, vulgar, oozing, seeping slime imaginable. We only want the most disgusting far-outness,” wrote Corso. This provides interesting insight into how Naked Lunch was viewed at the time even by Burroughs’ peers. Clearly, Burroughs believed he had written an unpublishable novel. Contributions to Interpol would include “Bowles (his most disgusting); Tennessee Williams (his most); and your [Ginsberg] bubbling, gooey cocaine writing; and [Jacques] Stern’s most humiliating, and Kerouac’s most maudlin, etc.” Corso continued, “I will tell you what we plan for our format: first an editorial, by either Bill or me or both. In it we will inform our readers that the thing this week is Palfium, or that one needs a prescription now for Diosan in Spain — kind of junk news, etc. Also we will review books, books written by junkies, fiends, cross-eyed imbeciles, huge-footed oafs, etc. We will praise and hail and laud all kinds of bile, and put down, pan, condemn all kinds of respectability and whiteness.”

It all sounds very tongue-in-cheek, but it was crazy enough to work. In The Beat Hotel, Barry Miles describes Interpol as a “forerunner of the underground press.” The time and, possibly, the drug were just not right. By 1965, just such a magazine was demanded by the counterculture. Fuck You Press published two issues of The Marijuana Newsletter. The Newsletter was “published by New York City LEMAR as a public service, to disseminate information toward the legalization of marijuana. The Marijuana Newsletter will print position papers, medical testimonies, and general information about the campaign to legalize marijuana. We shall agitate! We shall print the data. We have the facts about marijuana, the gentle benevolent herb.” The Newsletter contained editorials including two pieces by William Burroughs: “William Burroughs Speaks!” and “William Burroughs answers Jim Bishop.” Bishop wrote an article on the Newsletter entitled “Dope on Marijuana — By Mail.” In the editorial, he supported the enforcement of drug laws. “Cassidy’s Corner: pot market report” provided up-to-the-minute news on drug prices. “The Connoiseur’s Corner” was a “continuing column on grass grades of special interest.” Possibly, the editors (Randolfe Wicker, Ed Sanders, Peter Orlovsky, and C.T. Smith) heard of Burroughs and Corso’s Parisian pipe dream. Probably not, but Burroughs lived in New York City in 1965. He involved himself in the underground located on the Lower East Side.

Interpol reminds me of another cult writer operating on the literary margins who made a foray into editing a literary magazine: Charles Bukowski. Many think of Bukowski as anti-literary, but throughout the 1960s he was quite the literary scenester. He was a fixture in the little magazine world and even active in the Los Angeles counterculture. His regular column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” appeared in the underground paper Open City in the late 1960s. In February or March of 1969, Bukowski and Neeli Cherry (Cherkovski), later one of Bukowski’s biographers, edited Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. It ran for three issues. In his biography, Barry Miles wrote, “It was his chance to rail against Creeley, Olson, and the Black Mountain School and sound off about anything he damn well pleased: he wrote rude remarks on people’s manuscripts before returning them, sometimes mutilating them in the process by smearing jam or wine on them.” Cherkovski’s biography contains quite a bit of information on the magazine for those interested. Laugh Literary proved irreverent and funny as well as publishing some quality writing by Bukowski and others. Copies turn up from time to time on the rare book market and they are worth a look for anybody interested in exploring a relatively unknown side of Buk. One can only imagine what the editorials of Burroughs would have been for Interpol. That is one magazine that I would love to own.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I received an email from Oliver Harris, author of William Burroughs: The Secret of Fascination and editor of The Letters of William Burroughs. According to his research and the research of others, much of the information on my web site concerning photographs of Burroughs in New York and Peru is inaccurate. The information Harris provides is wonderful stuff. It is an insight into the type of scholarship we can expect from The Yage Letters Redux and The Latin American Notebook due out soon. See RealityStudio for an interview with Harris on these topics. Hopefully, other readers out there can add their opinions and knowledge to current or future posts. Please check out the link for the Ginsberg Trust. Possibly, Burroughs will get similar treatment in the near future.

Dear Jed,

Just looking at your very interesting site via its link to RealityStudio, and really enjoyed your caption to the photograph illustrating “William Lee.”

However… you’re mistaken about the date. This photograph, taken on Ginsberg’s camera (and presumably by Ginsy himself) dates from autumn 1953; it’s on the same roll and sequence as my favourite picture, the one of WSB in the Met with his Sphinx… Although the exact date is unknown — anywhere between September and December is possible — it’s definitely not ’45, and unlikely to be the Fag in the background… Equally, I think you may be mistaken about the subway station. Like you, I think it ought to be 103rd St and B-way, but Bill Morgan thinks otherwise (and he is pretty reliable). If you check out the Ginsberg Trust site, you’ll see the details they give for this image.

I hope this is useful — I get the impression you care as much about detail as I do, and therefore would prefer to be corrected rather than mistaken, even about little things. Then again, it does rather spoil a nice caption…

One other small query for you – on your page about The Yage Letters, you say that the photographs make you think of “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” but you don’t say why; so what is it about these poses that makes the link?? (By the way, I think you may be mistaken in saying that the picture of WSB with his gun was taken in Pucallpa in July; and with the other picture, I can say with confidence that it wasn’t — I did a lot of research into this one, and worked out that it was taken outside Mocoa in March, and taken by none other than Richard Evans Scultes…)

Oliver

P.S. RealityStudio notes: That doesn’t look like the 8th Avenue and 14th Street subway station to me. The signs there say 14th Street, not 8th Avenue, and the sign in the picture clearly says “Ave.” And it’s definitely not 103rd and Broadway, a location you might pick only because Burroughs mentions it in Junky. To me it looks like the 2nd Avenue station on the F line. The sign looks like it says “2nd Ave.” And compare these pictures of it: 1 and 2. The signs are obviously different but the station is similar. (Then again, many NY subway stations look like that.) This also would have been the nearest station to Burroughs when he lived on East 7th Street with Ginsberg.