A New Book-Length Text by Carl Weissner
And an Archive Celebrating Weissner’s Publications in the Avant-Garde

Introduction

After going to see the Villa Seurat, where Henry Miller lived when he wrote Tropic of Cancer, we stopped at the Café Zeyer for drinks. The Zeyer, which he described as “a gaudy place with red plush and mirrors and polished brass,” was where Miller often took a fine à l’eau and argued metaphysics with friends. It was a burning hot day in Paris. Carl Weissner ordered beer. His close friend Jan Herman, publisher of San Francisco Earthquake and the Nova Broadcast Press, ordered a kir, as did his wife Janet. “Tell Carl the story about Buk,” I urged.

The previous night Janet had told me about the time Jan took her to meet Charles Bukowski in Los Angeles. They brought a bottle, on Carl’s advice, and ended up finishing it. When they were taking their leave, Buk moved to kiss the young and fetching Janet — and promptly shoved his alcoholic old tongue down her throat. She was disgusted, but it made for a great story a few decades later. “You should have challenged him to a duel on the beach — with sabers,” Carl growled, rubbing his hands together with a glee suggesting that he was really visualizing this oceanside face-off.

Carl, born in Germany during World War II, once joked to me that his greatest ambition was to become an American writer. In a way, he has fulfilled that ambition vicariously. His definitive translations of Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, and others have sold literally millions of copies in Germany. “It was Carl,” Jan once told me, “who really turned Bukowski into something. It was Carl who got him major notice in Der Spiegel. That set off the craze in Germany and boomeranged back here. Bukowski never became a mainstream success till that happened.”

Bukowski made no secret of his gratitude to Carl, not just for his translations but for something much more important — understanding, support, friendship. Buk told one interviewer:

[Weissner's] letters were quite incisive, entertaining (lively as hell), and he bucked up my struggle in the darkness, no end. A letter from Carl always was and still is an infusion of life and hope and easy wisdom. I was in the post office at the time and living with a crazy and alcoholic woman and writing anyhow. All our money went for booze. We lived in rags and a rage of despair. I remember I didn’t even have money for shoes. The nails from my old shoes dug into my feet as I walked my routes hungover and mad. We drank all night and I had to get up at 5 a.m. When I wrote, the poems came out of this and the letters from Carl were the only good magic about.

Presumably William Burroughs must have felt the same. In 1966 Burroughs traveled from Paris to Heidelberg to meet Carl. They had been corresponding and publishing cut-ups in the same little mags. “I opened the door,” Carl wrote in a letter later published by Victor Bockris in With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, “and for a fraction of a second before the hall light went out I caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, about 52 years of age, black suit black tie white shirt w/ black needle stripes black phosphorescent eyes black hat. He looked like Opium Jones.” If Carl thought Burroughs’ apparition was dreamlike, perhaps the feeling was mutual. Years later, after Carl had translated some dozen of his books, Burroughs recorded a dream in My Education that may have harked back to that first meeting: “With Carl Weissner in Germany. I ask him: ‘Just where are we? Germany? Belgium?’”

In the five years after their initial meeting, the writers would intersect in a number of book projects and little mags, including Weissner’s own Klacto. In 1967, Beach Books in San Francisco published So Who Owns Death TV?, a pamphlet containing cut-ups by Burroughs, Weissner, and Claude Pélieu. Herman’s Nova Broadcast Press would publish Burroughs’ The Dead Star in 1969; The Louis Project, containing texts by Weissner and Herman, in 1970; and Weissner’s book of cut-ups, The Braille Film, which contained a “counterscript” by Burroughs, in 1970. In 1972 Agentzia in Paris would publish Cut Up or Shut Up, a compilation of cut-ups by Weissner, Herman, and Jürgen Ploog, with a “tickertape” by Burroughs running across the top of the pages.

Braille Film is the most significant of these books. The title hinted at either a synesthesia (touch compounded with sight) or an absurdity (touch compounded with sight?) that has since become less inconceivable owing to the invention of touchscreens. Doubtless Weissner also intended an assault on every sense possible. The density of the imagery in Braille Film is a key component of the book’s impact. “Weissner,” Jed Birmingham has written, “is one of the foremost practitioners of the cut-up, and when Burroughs scaled back the technique Weissner pushed it forward.” Just as Burroughs was turning to more narrative texts such as The Wild Boys (1971), Weissner emitted this bombshell of relentless images and standout lines. “Dead tissue fades in the searchlights” … “The white labyrinth of silence has no emergency exits” … “I watched him masturbate in the halflight. (Looks like he’s counting money.).” … “The thoughtographs went up in silver dust.”

Though the cut-up technique gradually made its way into popular culture — most notably when David Bowie used the method to produce song lyrics — it was not for experimentation but for translation that Weissner won acclaim in the 1970s. He once explained to me that, of all the books he’d translated, Nova Express was the most difficult. Consider a random phrase, “so the Venusian Gook Rot flashed round the world.” Venusian gook rot? It takes a unique sensibility to translate that. In an essay included in Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, Ploog describes how Weissner achieved that sensibility. “Weissner,” Ploog writes, “had hung out in jazz joints in Heidelberg frequented by GIs, and he’d spent considerable time in the States. He was the man to get the rude and loose intonation across. Where the Behrens [previous translators of Naked Lunch] had to say ‘opiates,’ Weissner was able to go straight to ‘junk.’” In his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, old friend Harold Norse pronounced Weissner “the best German translator of the Beats and raw-meat writers.”

Although the renown from his translations enabled Weissner to write for mainstream magazines such as Rolling Stone, literary experimentation never ceased to form an important part of his repertoire. From 1973 to 1986 he co-edited, with Ploog and Jörg Fauser, the little mag Gasolin 23, which published his own work alongside that of Burroughs, Bukowski, et al. In more recent times, Weissner has been working on two novels and further experiments. The latest of these is Death in Paris.

This new text clearly references its namesake, Death in Venice: Thomas Mann’s narrative moves from Munich to Venice, Weissner’s non-narrative from San Francisco to Paris; the cholera plague in Venice becomes a spree of random violence in Paris; Mann’s protagonist, a world-weary writer, becomes Weissner’s cynical but sharp-eyed littérateur; etc. Each text is the story of a man, a city, and a love interest — except that Mann’s hero obsesses over a young man, while Weissner’s anti-hero prefers death, particularly its homicidal forms.

Death in Paris, however, is no simple rewrite of Death in Venice. Weissner does not do the Hollywood remake, “updating the story for today” or some such. What he does to Death in Venice is what a terrorist does when tossing an improvised explosive device into a crowd. He sews chaos, inflicts violence, and, most important, makes a statement. In that sense, the m.o. is creation through destruction — except that to say as much of Death in Paris runs the risk of diminishing the text’s real creativity, its black humor, wisdom, and vitality. Is there a bad metaphor in the thing? I read it (for the sixth time now) and think to myself, “How can a foreigner write like this in English?” Or more simply: how can anyone write like this? Jesus.

RealityStudio is truly thrilled to be able to present this previously unpublished text by Carl Weissner. Death in Paris is available in its entirety to read online or to print. Doubtless it will help to put La Louisiane, the Paris hotel which figures so prominently in the text and where much of it may have been written, alongside the Villa Seurat and so many other places on the literary map of Paris.

Death in Paris

Death in Paris
Read Online or Print

An Archive Celebrating Carl Weissner’s Publications in the Avant-Garde

• In Memory of Carl Weissner
• Carl Weissner in Books and Pamphlets
• Klactoveedsedsteen
• Gasolin 23
• UFO
• Weissneriana
• Weissner in My Own Mag
• Correspondence
• Dripping Wet in Reykjavik: An Airmail Interview with Carl Weissner, by Victor Bockris
• Translations
• A Bibliography of Carl Weissner Translations by Matthias Penzel
• Nothing Here Now But the Lost Recordings by Ed Robinson
• Audio: The Poetry of Equal Time
• Jan Herman & Carl Weissner, Mayor Daley: “i press my lips / to my toetips” (1971)
• Jan Herman & Carl Weissner, President Nixon: “that is the way to make progress” (1971)

by Ian MacFadyen

RealityStudio sent the text of Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview to a few friends and scholars for input. While everyone made helpful comments, Ian MacFadyen — currently working on the introduction to the volume of essays that will comemmorate the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch — replied with a spirited, insightful letter. RealityStudio thought that it formed a perfect complement to the overview, particularly since it adds further evidence documenting the Miller-Burroughs relationship and interprets RealityStudio’s evidence in a different way. Mr. MacFadyen kindly agreed to allow RealityStudio to post his letter.

Your essay on Miller and Burroughs is very good, and a model of clarity and precision. A comparison of the two writers and an examination of the possible influence of Miller on Burroughs is long overdue. This is an area which has interested me for a long time and I hope the following comments and suggestions are useful.

Although, as you show, Burroughs always denied any influence, and even though there is the question of the (non) availability of Miller’s work in the U.S., I have always believed that Burroughs did indeed know Tropic of Cancer — certainly in Tangier if not before. We know that Miller sent a first edition copy of Tropic of Cancer personally to William Carlos Williams (who was among many other writers in Britain, France and the States to get a copy inscribed by the author — an attempt to promote the book and raise its pedigree. Williams was the translator of Philippe Soupault and had met Miller in Paris). That’s only one of a number of possible, tantalising connections (Williams-Ginsberg-Burroughs) — but what are the chances that Burroughs did not read it? Those are truly impossible odds.

Although we cannot know where and when (or how closely) Burroughs read Tropic of Cancer (and/or other writing by Miller), there is, as you put it so beautifully, a felt connection between Miller’s text and Naked Lunch: “If you place Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch side by side, the books do seem to exhibit a secret rapport, like the telepathy of twins…” This rapport, as you say, is structural and thematic: “‘pornographic’, non-linear, autobiographical and bristling with black humour.” But I also think it is a linguistic and, crucially, a methodological rapport. Parts of Tropic of Cancer were cut and filleted from previous manuscripts and inserted and woven “into the fabric of his book” (George Wickes, Henry Miller: Down and Out in Paris, 1969) just as Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg in 1957: “But I never know whether something will fit or not until it fits into the narrative as an organic part of the structure.” The following, for example, is one of a number of passages cannibalised from Miller’s ‘Bistre and Pigeon Dung’ for the opening of Tropic of Cancer:

The rails fall away into the canal, the long caterpillar with sides lacquered in Chinese red dips like a roller-coaster. It is not Paris, it is not Coney Island — it is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. Railroad yards spread out below me, the tracks looking black, webby, not ordered by engineers but cataclysmic in design, like those giant fissures in the Polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.

This brings to mind Burroughs to Ginsberg from the same letter quoted above (October 28, 1957):

In a sense the action occurs in a superimposed place which is South America, U.S.A., Tanger and Scandinavia, and the characters wander back and forth from one place to another. That is a Turkish Bath in Sweden may open into a South American jungle…

“A crepuscular melange of all cities” and the Interzone’s “superimposed place” are related in generic and visionary terms — (if not geographically exploding in the same directions) — and were assembled by both writers from earlier manuscript materials and, importantly, from letters. (See Oliver’s Secret of Fascination and his edition of the Letters for Burroughs’ own use of same ). George Wickes: “Although somewhat self-conscious as literary compositions, the Paris letters marked an important stage in Miller’s writing. They were good exercises, and they provided him with plenty of material that he was soon to use in his own way… He hoped his impressions might amount to ‘something popular, saleable, palatable.’ Unwittingly, he was already at work on Tropic of Cancer. The letters contain the earliest writing that was to go into that book.” The evident correspondences (forgive the pun — no, please, approve it) here between Burroughs’ desire to write “saleable product” and Miller’s pitch, between their shared methods of “unwittingly” and consciously utilising the writing of letters in processes which would be instrumental in generating later ‘literary’ material — well, it is quite extraordinary, and, I believe, unparalleled. In the two years before it was published, Miller revised the Tropic of Cancer ‘manuscript’ many times (it was always, already, multiform and absolutely unstable as an entity), cutting about two-thirds of the material, a process of cutting and addition which he described as “Weeding out the useless shit. Putting in new shit.” But the new shit was very often the old shit re-digested and redirected. Merde! We are imagining real material fingers-on stuff. Messy. Very. The manuscript of Cancer, like Naked Lunch, was an octopus in osmosis throughout this period, and the physical elements and their manipulation or random merging were instrumental in the final creation and structure of the book ‘itself’ — the books themselves: pages and draft sections, letters and notations, phrases and variations burned and stained and shuffled and shuttled back and forth, rewritten, abandoned, spilled, trodden on, forgotten, rediscovered, congealed, chopped up, continually shifted and sifted and thrown away and recovered and overwritten and manipulated and allowed to blow out from the ceiling fan to arrive like manna in the typewriter’s roll — Hey, Presto! — and it was all good. (But some of it had to go). Both books were materially created — constructed — through a “crepuscular melange”. It is something which I will be drawing attention to in the Introduction to NakedLunch@50. Its importance cannot be stressed enough in regard to the comparable effects (textual and structural) which resulted.

Miller’s letters include both those to Emil Schnellock and others which are really articles-in-disguise — again, the differences between these and the letters from Burroughs to Ginsberg are as important as their resemblance in terms of the purpose to which they were put. Breathtakingly, Miller even wrote of his belief in the mainstream commercial and popular success of Tropic of Cancer in Hollywood and on Broadway, just as Burroughs would work with Brion Gysin and Tony Balch (‘Friendly Films Limited’) for several years on a film version of Naked Lunch and would later discuss the possibility of a Broadway production with Frank Zappa. In both cases one is left both bemused and moved by the two writers’ apparent blindness to the feasibility — not to mention the crazed delusion — of such dreams being realised at the time. Again, this is something which will be considered in an essay in the NakedLunch@50 book as a result of access to the archives of Terry Wilson. This material — including a number of important screenplays, drafts and outlines, as well as legal documents and personal and business correspondence — reveals Burroughs’ desire and commitment to bring Naked Lunch to the screen. So they can SEE it, on the end of that fork…? But there were, indisputably, other reasons… Read all about this in 2009. A doomed film is nothing new, but the doomed project of Naked Lunch — that is quite something else. Remember where you heard it last.

Wickes, in his delightfully written little book, refers to Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit as “another episodic autobiographical novel that dwells on all that is vicious, treacherous, sadistic, obscene, diseased, and repulsive in human nature.” In fact, Miller didn’t read Céline’s book until he’d finished the first version/draft of Tropic of Cancer, but he subsequently revised the m.s. (several times) which must have been influenced by his determined reading of Voyage (slow work, alone in a hotel room with a dictionary and a little opium and vin ordinaire to ward off the dawn chill). Wickes also refers to Céline’s “gallows humour” — which Burroughs provides so literally in Naked Lunch, but as well as Céline, Miller and Burroughs are linked through the carnivalesque tradition and through the work of Spengler. Frances Wilson writes in her excellent Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (1999):

Henry Miller’s is a grotesque body, open at both ends, and his aesthetic is carnivaleque, as the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtian would describe it . . . in Henry Miller we find a writing that ‘celebrates the anarchic, body-based and grotesque elements of popular culture, and seeks to mobilise them against the humourless seriousness of official culture.’ (Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought, 1994).

Wilson quotes Miller from Black Spring, where he wrote that the sound of the name Swift “was like a clear, hard pissing against the tin-plate lid of the world.” Miller is in fact Rabelaisian rather than Swiftian, and his humour and earthiness and vagabondage, his “unquenchable appetite for the fundamental realities” (Robert Nye) are essentially Whitmanesque as well as deriving from Villon’s celebrations of lowlife and Pierre Mac Orlan’s Villes. Literary influence is, of course, a board game without possibility of a winner, but any reader worth his or her salt can still really feel it — without Miller, who is Charles Bukowski? And that is how Miller’s ethos and style became beat and cool again. It’s an intriguing question: “Why was Bukowski ‘acceptable’ in the ’70s when Miller was derided, in fact, beyond the pale? Write on both sides of the paper. You have 45 minutes”. But, really, why? Actually, Bukowski is more ‘sexist’ (yes, it’s possible) and yet… These are the issues no one will engage with because you are going to get it in the horse’s neck, absolutely.

But a comparison between Miller and Burroughs is very productive in terms of their shared relish for the ‘grotesque body’, the carnivalesque and the burlesque and the crudely satiric, and also because they utilise these disgraceful modes in quite different ways. Interestingly, both Miller (as you note) and a number of critics have denied that his work was in any way ‘perverse’, whereas Burroughs, I would maintain, is both wilfully and strategically so, in all senses. Bataille comes to mind, though Burroughs was never philosophical and intellectual in that way, Bataille’s speculations on amputated fingers and the ‘Solar Anus’ notwithstanding. Burroughs is excoriating, emotionally damaged, psychologically fractured, psychopathological from the fucking bone, and he is “open at both ends” in ways which more than ‘radically challenge’ Miller’s deceptive but omnipresent humanism — his writing despises and derides it and completely fucks it over. Despite Miller’s confession to Michael Fraenkel that Tropic of Cancer was written out of “hatred and vengeance”, and despite his passion for Dostoevskian soul-searching, Miller’s delighted irreverence and sheer indefatigability always contradict his attempts at a doomed philosophy. But Burroughs is the very last word from the “windy, bodiless rock”. Miller’s shroud is a covering cloth: beneath it, it’s an orgy, boys. But the boys aren’t there. The ‘Ovarian Trolley’ is on the night-shift – despite protests from one particular male participant, actively engaged…

Another comparison between the two writers would be in regard to charges of misogyny (especially in relation to Sexus in Miller’s case), which is an area worth exploring from their very different heterosexual and queer perspectives. (Interestingly, when I dealt in books — a lovely phrase — in the 1970s, I visited a Gay Women’s bookshop where I was provided with a free list of authors whose works they would not stock under any circumstances — Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and William Burroughs topped the list. I guess there is nothing so different that it isn’t the same when looked at from the right angle.). Miller’s commercial pornography, which includes male homosexuality, raises some very interesting questions. (By the way, Brion Gysin always maintained that Miller was at the very least bisexual and that this was… understood at the time). Burroughs blurbed the 1984 Opus Pistorum, the $1 per page written-to-order 1941 pornographic novel by Miller: “Miller at his buoyant bawdy rollicking best — a spicy whiff from the 1920s.” This quote is useful actually because it does indeed show Burroughs actually appreciating Miller’s writing and very carefully picking exactly the key words to show what he thought was “best” about Miller’s writing. The use of “buoyant” is particularly telling. The quote — admittedly a blurb — goes some way towards mitigating Burroughs’ previous reluctance on the subject. But note that Opus Pistorum is a work of apparently hack commercial pornography, albeit pornography written for an educated elite of Hollywood Directors such as Wilder, Mankiewicz, and Julian Johnson — connoisseurs of limited edition erotica, “by hand”. But in the 1984 publication there is absolutely no differentiation readily apparent between this work and Miller’s ‘real’, ‘literary’ writing — we are told he wrote it for a dollar a page at the beginning of this ‘official’ ‘recognised’ version, but ‘pornography’ is not mentioned until one reaches Luboviski’s little Epilogue on page 287. And neither does Burroughs’ blurb recognise or suggest a distinction. There is a case to be made for looking at this work in detail and comparing it with Miller’s contemporary ‘literature’ — we get the sex and the humour and the vicious pen portraits, but melancholy and Spengler are totally out of the mix. How do we place this ‘production’ in Miller’s oeuvre? There is certainly more to it than meets the eye of the beholder, or the holder of the organ itself.

Above all, few would charge Miller with misanthropy — despite his Spenglerian world-view and his suffering, despite the cruelty of his ‘portraits’, his literal hunger and his rhetorical lambasting, he is inescapably a writer of appetite and relish who loves life and people — despite everything. (This can be shown, for example, by looking in detail at passages from the Tropics in which there is an extraordinary contradiction between the linguistic appetite (adjectival and adverbial) and the apparent squalor and the professed nihilism at work.) “Always Happy and Bright.” Well, not always, but more than most. Despite the melancholia in Cancer, there is little resembling Burroughs’ haunted isolation, driven repugnance, and visceral terrors. Something crucial happens in the few years between the publication of Cancer and Lunch, between these writers’ Paris lives, between a kind of Dostoevskian pre-existentialism and an unremitting psychotic fury… Despite the similarity of their methods, and their shared loathing of bureaucratic collectivism, an enormous chasm opens up — and leaves Miller as an almost apologist for the medieval. The unimaginable BEGINS HERE. “A word to the Wise Guy…”

“– long before he met [Michael] Fraenkel, Miller was steeped in the thinking of Oswald Spengler, whose apocalyptic view he had taken as his own. Miller had in fact reread the first volume of The Decline of the West since coming to Paris and in doing so had concluded that Spengler was the greatest of contemporary writers…” (Wickes). Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were readers and admirers of Spengler over many years and identified themselves as the fellaheen of disintegrating Western civilisation, waiting for the Apocalypse. As Kerouac wrote in 1950 in The Town And The City: “All the neurosis and the restrictive reality and the scatological repressions and the suppressed aggressiveness has finally gained the upper hand on humanity — everyone is becoming a geek!” I believe that it was their shared readings and discussions of, and their enthusiasm for The Decline of the West which connects Cancer and Lunch — both books are clearly indebted to Spengler and I hope to make this clear in the Introduction to NakedLunch@50. The Miller-Fraenkel ‘Hamlet’ correspondence is extraordinary, by the way. Do you know it? The breadth of reference and philosophic, psychological and social analysis certainly validate Miller’s serious intellectual concerns, even though these ideas are regularly eclipsed in Cancer and his other literary works by his exuberant style and sensuality. (The 1962 third printing of the Correspondence Called Hamlet by Edition du Laurier/Carrefour is an unusual production, bound with red ribbons which pass through holes drilled in the thick, uncut pages. I looked for this edition for a long time — pre-Internet — and finally found it in a junkshop in South London which disappeared the following week. It was an exemplary and fortuitous conjunction absolutely in accord with my extension of Iain Sinclair’s cosmic theory of book dealing, which runs as follows: a). you spend twenty years looking for ‘it’; b). you find ‘it’ and ‘it’ costs 10 pence; c) the ‘bookshop’ is bulldozed into a crater of ash as you depart the premises; d). you now REFUSE TO SELL IT, under any circumstances, including starvation, death, and eternal torture. Congratulations, you just got a real Beat Bargain.

Again, I really like your essay and hope the above is of interest. By the way, it may still be the case that Burroughs did not wish the comparison with Miller and especially Tropic of Cancer to be made and so he disclaimed (too silently). The writer Terry Wilson (who knew Burroughs well) believes that Burroughs was very influenced by Charles Hoy Fort, but when the subject came up, Burroughs would always show annoyance or indifference. Burroughs didn’t want the link to be made, Terry felt, because he feared being perceived as some eccentric as portrayed by the academic intelligentsia, a weirdo with boxes of data and piles of scrapbooks in a city attic… As well as that might be, I still think it inconceivable that Burroughs — and Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bowles, Ansen, Gysin, Girodias, Sinclair Beiles, etc, etc (and so, by extension, Burroughs himself) — did not know Tropic of Cancer BEFORE Burroughs went to Paris. I think you have captured a degree of dissimulation in the record — and of course this is an important question in itself: Why Deny? One thinks of Burroughs and Gysin at the time of the cut-ups, refusing all comparisons with Tzara, the Surrealists, the Lettrists, indeed all ‘literature’. (Though they did refer to all the latter). Why Deny? Because it was necessary to do so, just as Miller protested, “This is not a book . . .” — in his own book. Miller projects “a gob of spit in the face of Art” in Tropic of Cancer while hoodlums throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face in Naked Lunch… perhaps that’s both the resemblance and the difference: from spit to acid.

Very Best Wishes,

Ian XXXXXX

And please use or follow up any of the above if it’s useful.

PS. Always something else and another place to go. One important connection between Miller and Burroughs is in their use of cancer as a metaphor — this is present both in their letters and in their great books (indeed it is punned in Miller’s title of course). Curiously, when Gerard Malanga asked Burroughs about his “theory of cancer” (which Robert Creeley had mentioned to him) Burroughs couldn’t remember what it was. But there is a generalised, ad hoc and yet sometimes telling employment of the metaphor which connects them. Entropy of course is also there in both (it was reading Miller that generated Pynchon’s story of the same name and related work) but there is more to be said about the history of this Cancer with a really big ‘C’ — and it is not to be found in Sontag’s otherwise excellent essay, ‘Illness As Metaphor’.

PPS. And there is Miller’s The Time of the Assassins — 1946, New Directions. This was a crucial book of its time, with Rimbaud — “the wandering spirit in revolt” — praised as apocalyptic prophet of the Atomic Age. And significantly, Miller is entranced by… Rimbaud’s early Letters. But of course. (If memory serves, this work by Miller was used in a cut-up by Brion Gysin… I will have to check on that).

PPPS. And then there is exile, expatriation, the remittance man — Miller in Paris, and Burroughs in Paris. And of course Burroughs was aware of all that and didn’t wish to be cast in that light — or in that shadow. But both writers, returning to the U.S. at the end of their lives, shared a nostalgia for the Paris which each had known — different, but in crucial ways the same. Burroughs’ essay ‘Paris Please Stay The Same’ is an elegy for a vanished place and time and a love letter to the City of Light which is unashamedly lyrical and evocative of loss and brings to mind Miller’s 1927 trip to Paris and the view of the city from the dirty window of a shabby hotel’s pitch-black third floor toilet — a view which was “so sweepingly soft and intoxicating it brought tears to my eyes.” Robert Ferguson in his engaging biography of Miller (A Life, 1991) comments on this epiphany: “This experience of his, mingling the smells of the toilet with a sensation of ecstatic reverence for his ancient and grimy surroundings, sounded the keynote of the long love-affair with Paris on which he was about to embark. Indeed, it may have been the moment at which he actually fell in love with the city.” When Miller was “putting… new shit” in the manuscript(s) of Tropic of Cancer, it was truly the shit of Paris — the old, human, intimate and intoxicating odour and raw stuff of streets, sex and sewers. And that’s where Burroughs’ “spicy whiff” comes from. Little wonder that Miller expressed his loathing of U.S. ‘civilisation’ through the term air-conditioned nightmare. “Me, I can’t even smell that I’m alive.”

PPPPS. The works of both Miller and Burroughs must now suffer the rectitude and prudery of political correctness — but really, this is fine, it is absolutely as it should be – Miller and Burroughs’ provocations and delirious humour are still finding their appropriate targets. Disgust and outrage and heart attacks lie in wait for the moral arbiters of p.c. — their hypocritical prurience will be generously rewarded. AS INTENDED. That is the litmus test of these books’ longevity — “The Mark Inside was coming up fast…” Fast, furious, and forever. HIT THEM WHERE IT HURTS — the solar plexus, the Sexus, the Very Seat of Laughter. “Darling, I nearly died. Could hardly toddle home…” That was always the kill in view: give those suckers exactly what they deserve. Miller and Burroughs had that, at least, as their shared ‘programme’. Give them what they (don’t) want… it will (in any case) destroy them. So: CHOOSE.

How do we locate misogyny and how do we resist the dangers of explaining it away through “that was then, this is now”? And how can we avoid censoring its history without ‘correcting’ a masterpiece? Is it truly hatred that we encounter in the words of a writer like Miller from so many decades ago, and if so, what to do about it? The ‘debate’ about Miller’s misogyny is not going away, ever, even though his ‘case’ has been superseded by an industry of oppression. We should look and think but above all read again — because it is not necessarily so. But if it is so, then we must recognise and address it. Because: Calla Otorga (see below). This is still an area which should trouble us when it comes to Beat Studies and related histories. Those writers, straight or gay or every which way, who so delight us but whose writing, as it is said, demeans and degrades women — if that is the case, do we merely acknowledge the ‘fault’ and then continue to read with relish or with detachment, ‘correctly’ or critically or otherwise, warily or regardless? And doesn’t this note itself assume at some level that the readers of ‘problematic’ texts such as Miller’s are always necessarily men?

There is a lot more still to be discussed in this fascinating area, but what you have written is excellent and we should definitely CORRESPOND about this. Sometimes one just knows that it’s going to be… interesting.

MAL ANDA MAL ACABA
As you live so must you die

DA PRIMERO DA VOS VECES
He who hits first hits twice

CALLA OTORGA
Silence gives consent

HACE UN CESTO HACE CIENTO
He who does something once can do it a hundred times

Ciao — Ian XXXXX

After finishing with the summer job his father had negotiated for him at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, William S. Burroughs returned to Harvard in September 1935. It was his senior year. An English major, Burroughs had studied with the Shakespeare scholar George Kittredge and would retain throughout his life an ability to quote the bard from memory. However, he had been a diffident student. Biographer Ted Morgan describes Burroughs’ attitude toward this final year of college: “Back at Harvard it was more of the same — sexual blockage, a sense of isolation, classes.” The following June, Burroughs would skip his own commencement ceremony.

Given that Burroughs was an English major and would ultimately become an important member of what he called the “Shakespeare squadron,” it is difficult to imagine that he would have failed to note a major literary scandal that occurred as he was returning to school that year. His classmate James Laughlin — a steel heir who would go on to found New Directions, the modernist publishing house — managed to convince the estimable Harvard Advocate to print a story by a shocking new writer whose books could not yet be published in America. The writer was Henry Miller, who described the scandal in a 1935 letter to Lawrence Durrell:

Laughlin is the chap who tried to reprint my Aller Retour New York (under the title “Glittering Pie”). He had the first ten pages published in the Harvard Advocate, and then the Boston police descended upon the paper, destroyed the existent copies and locked the editorial staff up overnight, threatening them with a severe jail sentence.¹

Local papers ran headlines such as “Pornography at Harvard!” and the Advocate‘s editors were compelled to resign. “I do not recall,” observed historian Arthur Schlesinger in his memoirs, “that the Harvard authorities protested this miserable assault on the freedom of expression.”²

Was this the moment that Burroughs first became aware of Henry Miller, the writer to whom he would so often be yoked in later years? Or did Burroughs, who supposedly viewed literary matters askance until Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac convinced him of his own genius, consider this scandal a tempest in a teapot, in-fighting at a college newspaper that never interested him anyway?

Ironically, though Burroughs may or may not have known the name of Miller in 1935, Miller certainly knew the name Burroughs. In 1936 Obelisk Press in Paris issued his second book, Black Spring. In the chapter titled “Burlesk,” Miller wrote impressionistically about the crowds outside the “fastest, cleanest show in the world”: “Outside it’s exactly like the Place des Vosges or the Haymarket or Covent Garden, except that these people have faith — in the Burroughs Adding Machine.” For Miller, the company founded by Burroughs’ grandfather had become symbolic of a modern malaise: “faith” in the calculator, finance, technology, materialism — precisely the things that the author of Naked Lunch would come to satirize in his creepy tycoons.

This thematic connection between the two writers was apparent even before Burroughs could be considered a writer. In a 1949 letter in which he railed against conformism, Kerouac clearly viewed Miller and Burroughs as exemplary non-conformists:

Wanting money is wanting the dishonesty of a servant. Money hates us, like a servant; because it is false. Henry Miller was right; Burroughs was right. Roll your own, I say.³

At the time Kerouac was writing, Burroughs had yet to publish anything. In 1945 he and Kerouac had collaborated on the mediocre And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, and only in the fall of 1949 did he begin writing what came to be known as Junky. Kerouac did not learn about Burroughs’ renewed efforts at writing until 1950, and yet he was already associating his friend with a writer acclaimed as one of the century’s most important. This ought to astonish, and yet Burroughs and Miller have been conjoined so frequently that it has come to seem natural to separate them by nothing more than a semi-colon.

If you place Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch side by side, the books do seem to exhibit a secret rapport, like the telepathy of twins. Both are “pornographic,” non-linear, autobiographical, and bristling with black humor. The hunger that is the driving force in Tropic of Cancer parallels the addiction in Naked Lunch: Miller is always looking for a meal, Burroughs is always desperate for a shot. Tropic of Cancer even anticipates Burroughs in some of his obsessions. For example, Miller toys with a technique that Burroughs would dub the cut-up: “These beautiful paragraphs we sometimes lifted from the encyclopaedia or an old guide book. Some of them Carl did put into his book — they had a surrealistic character.” And Miller recites a French limerick whose subject is that most Burroughsian of images, the erotic hanging.

L’autre soir l’idée m’est venue
Cré nom de Zeus d’enculer un pendu

(The other night — Zeus be damned! –
I thought to sodomize a hanged man)

The publication history of the two books adds to the illusion of literary ancestry. Tropic of Cancer was published by Obelisk Press, which had been founded in Paris by Jack Kahane. Naked Lunch was published by Olympia Press, which was founded in Paris by Kahane’s son, Maurice Girodias. It sets up a neat analogy. Girodias was the spawn of Kahane. Was Naked Lunch not the bastard child of Tropic of Cancer? “To me,” Barney Rosset told an interviewer in 2001, “the direct line of descent was — you know, like a lineup in baseball — Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs.”⁴

In a 1974 interview, John Tytell asked Burroughs if Henry Miller had ever been an influence. “No,” Burroughs replied without further elucidation.⁵ Similarly, Victor Bockris reported: “I also found out that Bill has never been particularly interested in the writings of Henry Miller.”⁶ Given the resonance between their respective masterpieces, it would be tempting to think that Burroughs, suffering from anxiety of influence, disavowed the importance of Miller to his work. However, this was not his modus operandi. Burroughs tended to be very forthright about his interests and influences, to the point of often incorporating Brion Gysin’s name into his own texts. If Burroughs did not consider Miller an influence, it is logical to take him at his word.

After all, Burroughs’ word is not betrayed by his work. There are surprisingly few references to Miller in Burroughs’ published texts, letters, and interviews. Sometimes he mentions Miller in discussions of obscenity and censorship. In The Job and in a 1990 interview, Burroughs cited Miller’s argument that potentially scandalous works can become acceptable by virtue of age.

As Henry Miller pointed out, if it is old, then it is all right. Something that is perfectly acceptable in a museum may meet with opposition when it appears in new work.⁷

And in a 1986 interview, Burroughs approved of a remark by Miller on the subject of authorship. “Henry Miller says, ‘Who writes the great books? Not we who have our names on the covers.’” Burroughs slightly misremembered the line, which had come from Miller’s 1962 “Art of Fiction” interview with the Paris Review. “Who writes the great books? It isn’t we who sign our names.”⁸

If these citations seem paltry, that is precisely the point. Burroughs does not quote Miller’s work but rather Miller himself. There may have been a practical reason for this in that Miller’s signature books were largely unavailable during Burroughs’ formative years as a writer. In his book on the Beat Hotel, Barry Miles notes that Ginsberg had been unable to buy Miller’s books before arriving in Paris, where he searched bookstalls for “all the Olympia Press editions of Henry Miller and Genet that were banned in the United States.”⁹ Brion Gysin went so far as to prostitute himself in order to buy a Miller book in Paris.¹⁰ And in a letter dated January 12 1960, Kerouac emphasized how unavailable Miller’s books had been in America:

Don’t say that I read Henry Miller all my life, it just isn’t true, I did read Louis Ferdinand Céline, from whom Miller obtained his style. I could never find a copy of the Tropics anyway. I think Miller is a great man but Céline, his master, is a giant.¹¹

If Burroughs was not enthusiastic for Miller’s work, it may simply have been that he had little access to it. This must have been especially true during the years he spent making his home in literary backwaters such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico. Like Ginsberg, Burroughs may not have been able to buy any of Miller’s works until his 1959 arrival in Paris, by which point he had already written Naked Lunch. Subsequently his deep involvement in the cut-up might well have made Miller aesthetically irrelevant to him.

Of course, there may have been a thousand other factors that discouraged Burroughs from seeking inspiration in the work of Miller. The two were half a generation apart in age. Miller’s he-man heterosexuality would have failed to strike a chord with the homosexual Burroughs. Perhaps there were even class differences, as a 1984 interview with Burroughs suggests. Asked about Cyril Connolly’s notion that readers should “tip” writers, Burroughs replied:

I don’t like the idea at all. Miller did a lot of that. He was very poor for years and years and years. So when people wrote him admiring letters he’d write back, Well, send me some money. He was in actual want, you see. But otherwise, I just don’t see it; it doesn’t seem to me a dignified procedure.¹²

It is difficult not to perceive the silver spoon in Burroughs’ upbringing when he implies that a writer must not betray his dignity. Evidently the “algebra of need” pertained to heroin, a recreational drug, but not to staples such as food and housing.

The disconnect between Burroughs and Miller was evident when they met at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference in 1962. By most accounts Miller was reticent to attend, agreeing only when Lawrence Durrell convinced him that there would be ample time for self-indulgence. Once there, Miller is reported to have been unforthcoming in public. Jim Haynes, co-organizer of the conference, said Miller “was modest, polite, curious about everyone there, did not say much.”¹³ To Victor Bockris Burroughs described how he finally encountered Miller:

I met him at the Edinburgh Literary Conference in 1962 at a large party full of literary people all drinking sherry in the middle of the floor and he said, “So you’re Burroughs.” I didn’t feel quite up to “Yes, maître,” and to say “So you’re Miller” didn’t seem quite right, so I said, “A long-time admirer” and we smiled. The next time I met him he did not remember who I was but finally said, “So you’re Burroughs.”¹⁴

The awkwardness of the moment is palpable. Burroughs had been the star of the conference but was still a relative nobody. He was aware of Miller’s reputation, and he may have respected the freedoms that Miller stood for.¹⁵ However, at this point in time, there is no indication that he had read a single one of Miller’s books. “Yes, maître” would have been too reverent. They were peers at the conference. “So you’re Miller” would have been too familiar. What should Burroughs have said? “A longtime admirer” was the diplomatic thing. It might also have been a bit of a lie. Depending on how you view Burroughs, you could consider it either courteous, le mot juste, or obsequious.

Unfortunately, there is no record of any further conversation. Nor is there any record of where they might have met a second time. At the conference, however, Burroughs did mention Miller in the remarks he made against censorship. “I can’t think,” Burroughs told the audience, how children “would be harmed by reading the work of Rabelais, Plutonius, Henry Miller, and my own work for that matter.”¹⁶ Superficially the remark seems to outline a genealogy extending from Rabelais via Miller to Burroughs, but it is doubtful Burroughs intended that. Rather, in his view, the four writers were equally satirists. (By “Plutonius” Burroughs likely meant — or said, if the conference transcript is incorrect — Petronius, whose Satyricon he sometimes mentioned as a precursor to his own work.) Consequently, anything obscene in their literature is merely a distorted mirror of obscenities in the world. This makes for a stronger argument against censorship, since it ties obscene literature to social critique, than the mere suggestion that, if older writers such as Rabelais and Petronius are accepted, then contemporary writers ought to be too.

The moment the Edinburgh conference ended, the association of Miller with Burroughs was no longer confined to the minds of friends such as Kerouac. In a review of the conference, the New York Times opined that Burroughs “now occupies a position roughly comparable to that of Henry Miller before the war.” In an article titled “Unshockable Edinburgh,” published in the October 1962 edition of Books and Bookmen, Anthony Blond quipped that “If Henry Miller was the hero of the week, William Burroughs was the heroin.” Rebecca West was even less kind in her comments, denouncing “that old fraud Henry Miller” and “an unutterably disgusting creature called William Burroughs, an heir to the wealth of IBM and the author of a filthy book called The Naked Lunch, who was much publicised as another drug addict.”¹⁷

If Burroughs had little to say about Miller, Miller had plenty to say about Burroughs. Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, sent a copy of Naked Lunch to Miller in January 1961 in an effort to drum up support for the book. Miller admitted:

I’ve tried now for the third time to read it, but I can’t stick it. The truth is, it bores me. The Marquis de Sade bores me too, perhaps in a different way, or for different reasons. There’s no question in my mind, however, as to the author’s abilities. There’s a ferocity in his writing which is equaled, in my opinion, only by Céline. No writer I know of has made more daring use of the language. I wish I might read him on some other subject than sex and drugs — read him on St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, or on eschatology. Or better yet… a disquisition on the Grand Inquisitor.¹⁸

Burroughs on St. Thomas Aquinas? Miller may have had a peculiar affinity for the theologian, but the notion of Burroughs expounding on the Doctor Universalis sounds preposterous today. Clearly Miller was looking for something — a humanism, empathy, or compassion — that Burroughs never displayed until, in old age, he began to write about lemurs and cats. It makes you wonder what Miller would have thought of the comparison made by Burroughs himself, in an October 1957 letter to Ginsberg, between his and Dostoievski’s best known characters: “Benway is emerging as a figure comparable to the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov.” ¹⁹

Evidently Miller was unable to see the parallel between Dr. Benway and the Grand Inquisitor. He continued to see not Dostoievski but Sade in the younger writer. In 1964, Miller told Playboy:

The only forthrightness [about sex] I’ve seen is devoted to all these perverse and sadistic books and films and plays. They’re being fairly straightforward in what they’re doing, these more abnormal people. But what are they doing? They’re dealing with a very limited area, you know, perversions and dope and all the rest of it. I’m not condemning them. I was just never interested in perversion or sadism of any kind. We’re just different types, myself I mean, and someone like Burroughs or Genet.²⁰

Obviously you could take issue with Miller’s claim that he was “never interested in perversion or sadism.” His early books in particular describe all sorts of deviant sexual behavior. Probably this is where the half a generation that separates the two authors becomes significant. By 1964, Miller had matured and mellowed. If he did not feel much spiritual affinity for Naked Lunch, he might well have appreciated the fact that eventually Burroughs also arrived at a mellower vantage point. “Love,” noted Burroughs in his last written words, “What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.” By the end of his life, Burroughs had imbued his “limited” subject, narcotics, with precisely the compassion that Miller thought he lacked.

In spite of their differences in outlook, Miller did not fail to recognize Burroughs’ genius. To Rosset he had spoken of Burroughs’ “ferocity” and “daring use of the language.” To Playboy he continued to temper his distaste for Burroughs’ subject matter with his admiration for Burroughs’ prose.

Burroughs, whom I recognize as a man of talent, great talent, can turn my stomach. It strikes me, however, that he’s faithful to the Emersonian idea of autobiography, that he’s concerned with putting down only what he has experienced and felt. He’s a literary man whose style is unliterary.²¹

Burroughs would doubtless have agreed with this perception. It accords with his assertion in the “Atrophied Preface” to Naked Lunch that “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument…” More broadly, Burroughs — like Miller — thought that his entire oeuvre constituted one great autobiography.

Probably because of his disinterest, Burroughs never said anything so perceptive about the work of Miller. However, he did lend his public support when in 1978 Miller actively campaigned for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Miller had asked friends, fellow writers, and other acquaintances from his long career to compose letters of support to the Nobel Committee. Burroughs obliged and forwarded a copy to Girodias, who had perhaps solicited the letter on Miller’s behalf. The hitherto unpublished letter, dated 12 September 1978, addresses the Secretary:²²

Dear Sir,

Henry Miller is a uniquely qualified candidate for the Nobel Prize, as a writer whose work — over a period of forty years — possesses not only great intrinsic merit, but has also contributed immeasurably to freedom of expression.

Very sincerely,

William S. Burroughs
(Novelist)

Burroughs did not sign the copy, though his amanuensis James Grauerholz appended a handwritten note to Girodias stating that Burroughs would write at greater length after a trip to Amsterdam. Burroughs may have been willing to support Miller, but the endorsement was hardly inspired. The lone sentence had the virtue of concision, but it did not exactly strive to make a convincing case. It’s a purely pro forma declaration of support, less a plea on Miller’s behalf than a signature on a petition.

When you inspect this map showing the points of intersection between Miller and Burroughs, it is surprising to learn that the map is not more dense — that the intersections are not more frequent or more meaningful. Given the resonances between their work, their stature as figureheads in the fight against literary censorship, and the fact that Miller had more involved relationships with the other Beats (particularly Kerouac, whose Dharma Bums so impressed him that he wrote a preface for The Subterraneans), Miller and Burroughs seem to form an obvious pair. Yet the evidence shows no influence, zero camaraderie, little interest, and a qualified amount of mutual respect.

Partly this is due to the simple fact that, historically speaking, the two were not really peers in the Shakespeare Squadron. Only twenty-five years or so separated their most fertile periods of creativity, and yet those few decades were chopped down the middle by World War II. The Depression that forms the background of Miller’s Tropics remained, like a troop formation, on one side, and the Cold War that subtends Burroughs’ work took root on the other. There was a veritable sea change that reverberated back into the arts. In her diary, Anaïs Nin saw its reflection in the change of management at one of Paris’ most famous literary bookstores:

So it is no longer Silvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company visited by André Gide, François Mauriac, Pierre Jean Jouve, Léon-Paul Fargue, Caresse Crosby, James Joyce, and Henry Miller. It is The Mistral, visited by James Jones, Styron, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the beatniks and the new bohemians. The difference is that where there was a warm, hospitable, friendly, demonstrative affectionate fraternity between writers and artists now there was often a sullen silence, a disinterested attitude, and the young bohemian lying on the couch reading a book would not stop reading when another writer came in. I marveled at their insulation. Unlike Miller, when they had cadged a meal, they did not rush to their room to write twenty pages in exultation. They sought drugs to help them dream, they had no appetite for life, no lust for women. They read like people waiting for a train. They are spectators, Xerox artists, perhaps obsolete in a world of science.²³

The entry was dated “Fall 1954″ — an obvious bit of retrospective editing, since Burroughs did not arrive in Paris until 1959 and, in a curious bit of synchronicity, Xerox did not become a household name until it introduced the first plain-paper copier in the same year. Plainly Nin was biased toward Miller and his aesthetic, and yet she correctly perceived something new in literature. Drugs, technology, “no lust for women” — these were precisely the things that would come to be hallmarks of Burroughs’ writing, just as drink, inspiration, and lust for women would be hallmarks of Miller’s.

On another level, the lack of personal connection between Miller and Burroughs may point to a more fundamental truth about writers as such. When you go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore, each one is outfitted with a great big mural showing the geniuses of literature hobnobbing at some imaginary café des arts. “Look! There’s Joyce and Kafka hanging out with Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde!” It’s a fantasy vision of the canon that almost never matches up to reality. How often do great writers really forge friendships? If Burroughs and Miller didn’t click when they met, neither did Burroughs and Beckett, who denounced the cut-up as “plumbing.” (For the record, Miller and Beckett disliked each other when they met in the 1930s, though in later life they found each other congenial enough. They did not become friends, though.²⁴)

To be truly great is to be, relatively speaking, without peer. On the odd occasions that great writers end up encountering each other, they often seem not to know what to do with each other. If you’ve ever heard the forced insights that can occur when writers of note are brought together for a radio program, you’ll understand that sometimes a conversation can conceal a complete lack of connection.²⁵ Conversely, it may also be possible that the most astonishing connections can occur in the ostensible absence of any communication whatsoever. Burroughs may have parodied the comportment of writers who wouldn’t talk about writing —

[Graham Greene] is frankly horrified at the thought of formulating a technology of writing. “Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed writing.” This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk about anything so long as it isn’t important.²⁶

– but perhaps important things transpired in those conversations about trivialities. One spoke about a clear blue sky and the other understood that prose should be lucid and limpid.

Miller and Burroughs did not forge a personal rapport. Miller did not understand Burroughs’ work, and Burroughs expressed little interest in Miller’s. But does this surface disconnect not conceal the greatest connections? You can only imagine what the two talked about in the middle of a sherry party at Edinburgh — likely nothing. But the work of the one speaks very strongly to the work of the other, and this conversation — probably the more important — is there for the hearing.

Notes

1. Quoted in Lee Bartlett, Editor, Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991, p 31.

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, New York: Mariner Books, 2002, p 119.

3. Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters, Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956, New York: Penguin, 1996, p 194.

4. Win McCormack, “The Literary Fly Catcher,” Tin House Magazine 8, Summer 2001.

5. John Tytell, “Interrogation,” in William Burroughs and Sylvère Lotringer, Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of Wiliam S. Burroughs, 1960-1997, New York: Semiotext(e), p 252.

6. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, New York: St Martins, p 132.

7. See Daniel Odier and William Burroughs, The Job, New York: Penguin, 1989, p 112. Simone Ellis, “A Conversation with William S. Burroughs,” originally published in Contemporanea, 1990.

8. Peter Von Ziegesar, “Mapping the Cosmic Currents,” in William S. Burroughs and Allen Hibbard, Conversations with William Burroughs, Mississippi: University Press, 2000, p 162. George Wickes, “Art of Fiction No. 28: Henry Miller,” Paris Review 28, Summer-Fall 1962.

9. Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs & Corso in Paris, 1957-1963, New York: Grove Press, 2001, p 58.

10. “Gysin had no money to speak of, and wanted a book by Henry Miller which cost exactly what he had to live on for a month. ‘The only way I could get hold of a copy was to prostitute myself. I was too timid to steal books so I went to the Café Select in Montparnasse and hung out until I found a Sir Roger… British naval term for sugar-daddy.’” John Geiger, Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, New York: Disinformation Company, 2005, p 42.

11. Quoted in Kevin J. Hayes, Conversations With Jack Kerouac, Mississippi: University Press, 2005, p 24.

12. T.X. Erbe, “Still Get a Thrill When I See You, Bill,” in Burroughs Live, p 599.

13. Jim Haynes, email communication, 20 June 2007.

14. Bockris, op. cit., p 126.

15. Burroughs aware of Miller’s reputation: “Maybe a year after Naked Lunch had been published here in Paris,” Brion Gysin told an interviewer, “William and I had sat down saying Well, yeah yeah, we’ll never see this printed in America now will we? No, well, we never will, no no no… and then we read in Time magazine I think it was that Barney Rosset had paid what seemed to be the colossal sum of $75,000 for the rights to all of the Henry Miller books.” Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson, Here to Go: Planet R-101, London: Quartet Books, 1982, pp 189-190.

16. Quoted in Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, New York: Henry Holt, 1988, p 335.

17. The New York Times cited in Literary Outlaw, p 341. Anthony Blond, “Unshockable Edinburgh,” Books and Bookmen, October 1962, pp 26-27. Rebecca West quoted in Gillian Glover, “Where It All Began,” The Scotsman, 24 Jan 2003.

18. Literary Outlaw, p 328.

19. Letter to Allen Ginsberg, Oct. 19 1957, in William S. Burroughs and Oliver Harris (ed.), The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume I: 1945-1959, New York: Penguin, 1994, p 374.

20. David Dury, “Sex Goes Public: A Talk with Henry Miller,” in Frank L. Kersnowski, Alice Hughes, and Henry Miller, Conversations with Henry Miller, Mississippi: University Press, 1994, p 114.

21. Idem., p 87.

22. Unpublished letter, Burroughs to Maurice Girodias, 12 September 1978, provided by the Manhattan Rare Book Company.

23. Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 5 (1947-1955), New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1975, p 203.

24. In an interview, Barney Rosset described setting up a meeting between Miller and Beckett: “I took [Beckett] to lunch with Henry Miller after we won the Tropic of Cancer verdict in Chicago. They had known each other from the thirties; they did not like each other. Everything that you read about these two would tell you that they were not easy people to get along with. But when I brought them together, each of them told me afterwards, ‘Boy, has he changed! He’s so nice now.’” “The Art of Publishing Interview No. 2,” Paris Review 145, Winter 1997.

25. Consider philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s disparagement of conversation: “Most of the time, when someone asks me a question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I don’t have anything to say. Questions are invented, like anything else. If you aren’t allowed to invent your questions, with elements from all over the place, from never mind where, if people “pose” them to you, you haven’t much to say. The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. None of this happens in an interview, a conversation, a discussion.” Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, New York: Columbia UP, 1997, p 1.

26. Burroughs, “Hemingway,” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993, p 65. Perhaps perversely, J.G. Ballard told a recent interviewer that “in some 20 meetings [Burroughs and I] never discussed anything literary.” Graham Rae, “Can’t Rub Out the Word Hoard,” laurahird.com, 2007.

Read Ian MacFadyen’s insightful response to RealityStudio’s overview: Henry Miller and William Burroughs: A Letter.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It seems everything I come across of late ties into the saga I’ve been documenting in the Bunker.

The terminology involved in book collecting can be quite slippery. Even terms as basic as first edition prove hard to get a firm grasp on. The category of ephemera is another one. I feel that I know it when I see it (like on ebay). Ephemera are generally outside the core categories of my William Burroughs collection; that is books, magazines, and vinyl. Ephemera are the paper stuff that falls between the cracks of many book collections. In an article for AB Bookman’s Weekly, John Dann wrote, “There is no exact catalogue of ephemera’s subject matter, but included under the broad umbrella are trade cards, letterheads, die cuts, postcards, broadsides, tickets, menus, timetables, posters, advertising materials of all sorts, rewards of merit, labels, political buttons, and programs. Much of ‘ephemera’ was originally a by-product of exuberant capitalism-largely advertising material made possible by advances in printing technology.” Yet thousands of collectors scour the nooks and crannies for just this “stuff.” Not surprisingly, they have formed several organizations. The Ephemera Society of America is one.

I have touched on the joys of ephemera in the Bunker. Broadsides are major pieces of collectible paper. Over the years, I have come in contact with the more disposable elements of paper culture. In acquiring my Fuck You Archive, the bookseller threw in a few pieces of ephemera to sweeten the deal. That they were throw-ins highlights the fact that many booksellers and collectors think of ephemera as a collecting third world. Yet this material is often very interesting, very informative, and a pleasure to own. The checks from the Phoenix Bookshop and the Herbert Huncke 80th birthday card are just plain cool. These items tell a story. The News Flash printed on the Fuck You Press mimeo is another great example. This handbill provides a look into the events of the Lower East Side scene announcing the opening of Peace Eye Bookstore and the first gig of the Fugs. These addresses, dates and descriptions are valuable primary material.

After some confusion with addresses and billing, I received a copy of the 1960 Olympia Press Catalog. It is disposable and published for commercial / advertising purposes: the epitome of ephemera. Pieces like this fall through the cracks. I had never seen an Olympia Press Catalog before, let alone one with such a relation to William Burroughs and Naked Lunch. The Catalog features several photographs of Burroughs and reprints the dust jacket blurb to the Olympia Press version of Naked Lunch.

The catalog blurb straddles the fence between high art and pornography in describing its contents. On one level, the text makes clear that Naked Lunch is different from the normal fare of Olympia Press. The catalog quotes extensively from John Ciardi, a noted critic and poet of the 1950s who wrote on Naked Lunch in the Saturday Review in an essay titled “The Book Burners and Sweet Sixteen.” Quoting Ciardi, the catalog states, “As in Kerouac’s blurb, the writing does, to be sure, contain a number of four-letter words, but the simple fact is that such obscenities — if obscenities they are — are inseparable from the total fabric and effect of the moral message. No less a writer than Dante made it a principle of harmonious style deliberately to coarsen the writing when dealing with debased characters as his subject matter.” The book is described as “a masterpiece of its own genre” and continues that “Burroughs is not only serious in his intent, but he is a writer of great power and artistic integrity engaged in a profoundly meaningful search for true values.” Dante? Artistic integrity? Moral message? True values? Clearly, such descriptions would not appeal to the core audience of Olympia Press.

Instead, Girodias was banking on the hype surrounding the Big Table trial to sell the book to a crossover audience of readers interested in daring, frank, and explicit literature, like Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer. In fact, Ciardi’s article was occasioned by the Big Table trial. Ciardi would be one of the primary witnesses for the defense in the Boston Naked Lunch trial. The catalog refers to the Chicago controversy highlighting the obscenity issues surrounding the book as well as its forbidden nature. The blurb states, “The Naked Lunch generally considered to be the great ‘secret’ novel of the self-styled Beat Generation, has not been published as a whole until now: some extracts which were to appear in The Chicago Review have caused the University of Chicago to suppress this quarterly. These same extracts, reprinted in the first issue of Big Table, have resulted in the U.S. Post Office Department banning the new Chicago quarterly.” Even at the beginning when Burroughs was a largely unknown author, there was a buzz around Naked Lunch. The Olympia Press edition was desirable from the start to a whole group of readers who did not normally purchase the press’s more fleshy wares.

Girodias did not want to alienate his hardcore audience as well as other less literary thrill seekers. The dust jacket quotes a particularly sensationalistic section of Naked Lunch that Ciardi felt compelled to explain: “She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound.” The jacket also mentions “the lust for drugs,” “sixteen year old girls,” and “green ooze.” These lines conjure up appropriate images of sex and drugs. This scene appeared in the Autumn 1958 Chicago Review and was reprinted as “Episode 5″ in the first issue of Big Table. Clearly, this scene struck a chord with readers, publishers and critics. The young girl in trouble was a theme familiar to Olympia Press readers and drug addiction always fascinated the square public with its scenes of lawlessness and squalor. Girodias knew that many readers would seek out Naked Lunch looking for more descriptions of women, sex, and drugs.

As I have shown elsewhere, this mixture of high and low art pervaded Burroughs’ publication history throughout the 1950s and continued to a lesser degree throughout his career. The description of the women and the safety pin in the catalog relates directly to the marketing of Burroughs’s previous novel Junkie. The cover of the Ace Junkie featured a young woman wrestling with a man over a loaded hypodermic needle. The 1957 Digit edition of Junkie displayed a young woman in a short skirt about to inject into her exposed thigh.

Clearly, Burroughs was the new, hot property of Olympia Press in 1960. His photograph is on the front and back cover. The back cover refers again to the “great secret novel of the Beat Generation.” The photograph of Burroughs proves very interesting as it depicts his obsession with cut-ups that began after the publication of Naked Lunch. I think the image of Burroughs peering at scraps of newsprint is an iconic picture for the 1960s trajectory of his literary career: the cut-up novels, like the soon-to-be-published Soft Machine; the three-column format; Time; APO-33; the little magazine experiments.

Norman Rubington’s Fuzz Against Junk has ties to Burroughs and Naked Lunch. Many people believed that Burroughs was Akbar del Piombo, the pseudonymous writer of the collage novel. In fact, William Reese Booksellers felt compelled to dispel this rumor in their 1993 catalog that featured a library of Olympia Press titles for sale. The book is a parody of 1950s Beat and Drug literature, particularly of the Beatnik phenomenon. The drug culture of Burroughs becomes the fodder for laughs. The book’s use of photomontage harkens back to the Dadaists and Surrealists, particularly the work of Max Ernst, but Fuzz also conjures up images of Burroughs’s textual / visual work in his 1950s notebooks and onward into the 1960s.

On the whole, the catalog presents the more literary, high-minded side of Olympia Press. The catalog features literary giants like Nabokov, Sade, Beckett, Apollinaire, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Lawrence Durrell. The catalog states, “The Olympia Press, recognized throughout the world as pioneer publishers of outlaw writers, have pleasure in presenting their 1960s catalogue, another move forward in their battle against literary censorship.” The censorship laws of France were not the only target. The United Kingdom and the United States were also under assault. This battle is illustrated by the “fragments from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the invasion of England by William the Conqueror” that appear throughout the catalog. Like the Normans in 1066, Maurice Girodias invaded England’s borders from Parisian bookshops, as thousands of his dirty books slipped through customs in the suitcases of British tourists.

See also part 2: Naked Lunch Prospectus.

Olympia Press Catalog 1960

	Cover Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Francis Pollini Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Phillip O’Connor and Jean Genet Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Lawrence Durrell and Raymond Queneau Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	William S. Burroughs Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Fuzz Against Junk Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Henri Ford, and Parker Tyler Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Reading List Olympia Press Catalog 1960

Olympia Press Catalog 1959

	Cover Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Lawrence Durrell Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Raymond Queneau Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	William S. Burroughs Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	The Black Diaries Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	The Black Diaries 2 Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Aubrey Beardsley Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Jean Genet Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Jean Cocteau, Frank Harris, et al Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Marquis de Sade Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Henry Miller Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Henry Miller 2 Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Wu Wu Meng Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Samuel Beckett Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Price List Olympia Press Catalog 1959