An Archive of Materials by and about Jacques Stern

Including the Complete Text of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs had known Jacques Loup Stern for little more than a year when he declared the man a “great writer.” Writing from the Beat Hotel in Paris on June 8, 1959, Burroughs reported to Allen Ginsberg that Stern “wrote a novel in nine days.” It was called The Fluke. “As for Jack’s writing,” Burroughs continued, using the Americanization of Stern’s first name, “I think it is better by far than mine or Kerouac’s or your or Gregory’s or anyone I can think of. There is no doubt about it, he is a great writer. I think the greatest writer of our time.”¹ This is high praise from a man about to publish one of the most groundbreaking books of the century. In the next month, Burroughs would spend a frantic ten days pulling together the manuscript of Naked Lunch for publication by the Olympia Press in Paris. In late July 1959, while describing this scramble in another letter to Ginsberg, Burroughs reiterated his judgement: Stern “is a great writer.”²

When Burroughs’ correspondence was published in 1993, a legend began to accrue around the name Jacques Stern. Who was this man? What was his writing like? Had The Fluke never been published? Why had its author eschewed the limelight? Was he living or dead? Before the publication of Naked Lunch, Burroughs had been viewed as a mysterious figure haunting the periphery of the Beats. But as Burroughs became famous, it was Stern who became — and was to remain — an hombre invisible. His name would sometimes appear in interviews or books, where he was described with a stock supply of nouns (Frenchman, mathematician, junky) and adjectives (rich, brilliant, eccentric). Burroughs himself would refer to Stern as “the baron” or “the mad baron.” But no one spoke of him as a writer.

Compounding the mystery was the fact that Stern was an inveterate teller of tall tales. In the heady Beat Hotel days, Stern told Burroughs about surviving a horrific car crash. It wasn’t true. He claimed to have undergone profound mystical experiences in India, but his traveling companion painted their trip in a much less metaphysical light. In the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, there is a cut-up of “Jacques Stern’s Telegram to the Captain Barrie of His Alleged Yacht.” The word “alleged” stands out.³ In later years, Stern would still regale friends with stories — he had been in a concentration camp, he would hint, or he had been the basis for the character of Dr Strangelove in the Stanley Kubrick movie — that they wouldn’t know whether to believe. Often his strangest stories were the truest.

Early Years

Even Stern’s birthdate is difficult to pin down. The Fluke contains a scene in which Stern’s own father has to hunt for the information in a mountain of files: “He was looking for something.. My date of birth..” But then the nameless protagonist, presumably speaking for Stern in the autobiographical novel, dismisses the information as “utterly useless.” This contempt for the facts helped to conceal Stern in a fog of misinformation, legend, and deceit. The 1961 poetry anthology Junge Amerikanische Lyrik, edited by Gregory Corso, includes a two-line biography giving Stern’s birthdate as 1930. A rare book documenting families victimized by the French revolution lists Stern as a descendant and gives the birthdate June 3, 1932.⁴ This date was probably provided by a researcher or some other member of the Stern family, thus bypassing the least reliable source of information: Jacques himself. This is also the date to appear in Social Security records.⁵

Stern’s parents were a union of French nobility and Jewish wealth. His mother, Mathilde Simone de Leusse, was a countess. His father, Jacques Leon Stern, hailed from a prominent family of Jewish bankers. According to a French biography, Stern père commanded one of the largest fortunes in France, owned a hôtel particulier on the Champs Elysées, and was “une des personnalités du Tout-Paris d’avant la guerre.”⁶ Politically ambitious, Stern père used his wealth and connections with the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a series of increasingly important positions in the French government. He spent considerable time in America, wrote articles for the New York Times, and penned a book drawing on his experiences as the French Minister of Colonies.

In 1940 the Sterns emigrated to New York. Their fortunes do not appear to have been hit hard by the war in Europe. They took a Park Avenue apartment around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together with the Comtesse de Leusse, Stern père continued to collect old master paintings and to throw dinner parties that were noted in the society pages. Did the Sterns bring their eight-year-old son Jacques and his older sister Rosita to New York? It would be difficult to believe that, with their financial advantage, political connections, and insider knowledge of world events, the Sterns would have left their children in war-torn Europe. In Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan indicates that Stern “had spent the war years in the States.” Was Jacques Stern ever interned in a concentration camp? It seems unlikely.

In any event, Stern was in America by the late 1940s. Records at Woodberry Forest, a private boarding school in Virginia, list him in 1947 as a Form IV student, a sophomore.⁷ He gave Paris as his home address and won a medal for declamation. The next year he gave New York as his home address. He served as a reporter for the school newspaper and a staff member of the Fir Tree, the yearbook. He participated in the Dramatic Club and won the Form V Public Speaking Award. In 1949, he edited the yearbook, managed the basketball team, and represented the Public Speaking Honor Society in the school’s final oratorical contest. He participated in the Monitor Board (a student government group), Smoke House (a social club), the German Club, the Book Club, the Music Club, and the Dramatic Club. He also played tennis and soccer. The write-up in his senior yearbook, likely authored by a classmate, portrays him as a young man full of potential:

Strap… Ah, gay Paree… a two packs a day man… e-nun-ci-ates for the Colonel… astronomical averages… always in the Fir Tree room or across the hall… our theatre’s thrilling thespian… soccer pro… with a short haircut, impossible!… in all big time operations… Harvard next year.

Reading between the lines, it is possible to make out the lineaments of Stern’s future as a substance abuser, an eloquent speaker, a brilliant thinker, and a thespian prone to blurring the line between drama and reality.

To the young Stern, 1949 must have seemed a year full of promise. In May, his sister Rosita married Jacques Dewez, a businessman and race-car enthusiast who later founded the famous golf course at Sperone in Corsica. In the fall, Stern enrolled in Harvard. There he could study with poets Archibald MacLeish and John Ciardi, who would later write one of the first reviews of Naked Lunch. Other faculty included architect Walter Gropius, logician Willard Quine, and the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. In later years, Stern would assert that he had studied with the mathematician Norbert Wiener, originator of cybernetics. This may have been true — Wiener, a Harvard alumnus, taught at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Certainly Stern had an inclination for mathematics, although he was never a practicing mathematician and should not be confused with the French cryptologist of the same name.

At the end of 1949, however, Stern’s life took a dramatic turn. On December 21, Stern’s 67-year-old father died in what Time magazine described as a “plunge from his ninth-floor Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan.”⁸ It was generally assumed that he committed suicide. Stern never completely accepted this as the cause of his father’s death. There were dark insinuations of homicide — “pushed by a lawyer” — about which he would speak to his psychiatrist years later. It isn’t clear whether this was a suspicion harbored by Stern alone or by other family and friends. Late in life, Stern claimed to his young friend Mark Meyer that he had heard the news about his father’s death on the radio while lying paralyzed in an iron lung — a poignant image, regardless of whether or not it was true.⁹

What was undeniably true was that Stern contracted poliomyelitis around this time. He wasn’t alone. A virulent series of polio epidemics paralyzed or killed half a million people a year in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1955 Jonas Salk would announce the discovery of a polio vaccine, but it was too late for Stern. As a young man, he was obliged to walk with crutches, and he likely regretted that “soccer pro” label bestowed on him by his high school yearbook. The Fluke, though it says nothing about polio specifically, contains numerous references to the constraints forced on Stern by the disease.

Between the death of his father and the struggle with polio, Stern must have had difficulties focussing on his education. Though he had become editor-in-chief of the yearbook at his high school, he does not appear in the Harvard yearbooks of the period.¹⁰ He did not, for example, work alongside John Updike, a year his junior, on the Lampoon. By the time the class of 1953 held its commencement ceremony, Stern must have officially dropped out. He is not listed among the members of the graduating class. He likely inherited a substantial amount of money from his father — whose will designated his wife and two children as his heirs¹¹ — and it is easy to imagine that this windfall, combined with grief and illness, encouraged Stern to turn his attention to matters more worldly than academe.

Among these distractions were women. In spite of his physical disability, Stern was charismatic and rich — a combination that would never leave him wanting for attractive companions. A brief notice in the March 1, 1951 issue of the New York Times announced that Stern was to marry a Radcliffe student named Emily Janeway Marshall.¹² The notice described Stern as a student at Harvard College. Emily, also born in 1932, was the daughter of William Lawrence Marshall, a well-regarded lawyer and author. The marriage ceremony was conducted by the bride’s maternal grandfather, Reverend Charles J. Scudder, on June 14, 1951. Stern would have just turned 19. The marriage cannot have been a happy one. “My experience in marital bliss is somewhat limited,” The Fluke declares. It is not known when the relationship ended, but the dispassionate tone with which the book refers to “unfortunate marital episodes” may indicate why.

Meeting the Beats

In 1953, the year he should have graduated from Harvard, Stern married an attractive American woman with thick red hair. Her name was Dini, and she bore him a son in 1954. Stern installed this ménage in a luxurious residence on the rue du Cirque in Paris sometime before 1958, the year he would meet the Beats. Writing to Jack Kerouac on June 26, 1958, Ginsberg described Stern’s “solid Ava Gardner wife who digs him, loves him, and a 3 year old baby, or 4, boy — never saw kid, in nursery of vast duplex apartment.”¹³ Dini did not take to Corso, Orlovsky, and Ginsberg, who wrote that “his tall sexy lovely wife hates us.” Their Bohemian behavior was at odds with the privileged lifestyle she was trying to maintain with her young child and neurasthenic husband. She liked Burroughs, however, whose upbringing and old-world manners must have been more to her taste. The feeling was mutual. “I am getting along well with Stern’s wife,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on July 24, 1958. “I think she is a really nice person and I have come to like her very much.”¹⁴

Corso had been the first of the group to meet Stern. He had audited courses at Harvard in 1954 and, according to Ginsberg, may have already heard of the wealthy eccentric.¹⁵ Four years later in Paris, Corso was intrigued by rumors about a rich, crippled junky showing up at left bank cafés in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Not far from the Beat Hotel on rue Gît-le-coeur was a place called the Café Monaco (now Le Comptoir du Relais). Together with the nearby Café Tournon, the Monaco anchored a thriving literary scene on the Carrefour de l’Odéon. Richard Wright and Chester Himes had hung out there in the years after the war. By the mid-to-late 1950s, the writers had attracted an expatriate crowd that included Korean War vets “studying” on the G.I. Bill. It was a place Burroughs would check out after arriving in Paris in January 1958. “Bill exploring young hip group from Monaco cafe here,” Ginsberg wrote to Peter Orlovsky, “found some very nice guys, the younger generation.”¹⁶

One day the Bentley pulled up in front of the Monaco. Peering inside, Corso introduced himself to its occupant by asking “Would you like to meet a very wise man?”¹⁷ He was referring to Burroughs, thinking not just that his old friend could impart wisdom but that he could connect on the subject of drugs. Stern, who would claim to have read Howl, On the Road, Gasoline, and even Junkie, agreed. Corso carried him up the stairs of the Beat Hotel and — according to the story in Literary Outlaw — dumped him on Burroughs’ bed.

The meeting had an almost symbolic quality, as though Corso were no more than the vehicle by means of which Stern was to meet Burroughs. In fact, it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the poet and the “baron.” In a letter to Gary Snyder written on August 12, 1958, Corso described Stern as “a polio, smileless young Harvard profound very deep junkie writer Rothschild heir who I love very much, really a very beautiful soul.”¹⁸ For his part, Stern admired his friend’s poetry and always felt great affection for Corso himself. One expression of this was described by Corso in a letter to Ginsberg written around October 8, 1958. Debating whether to hit up Stern for money, Corso admitted that “I need an arrogance to ask, and he’s become a friend, and he even thinks I’m conning him, but knows that it’s a natural part of me, and that it’s inherent in me, and that I don’t mean too [sic].”¹⁹ Stern would let Corso mooch. Years later, Corso would even marry an ex-wife of Stern, Jocelyn or “Joss,” without it undermining the friendship.

With Burroughs the relationship was different — more complicated, maybe deeper. Intellectual interests would unite them and personality differences would drive them apart. The two shared heroin when Stern footed the bill. In October 1958, they went to London together to undertake the apomorphine cure at the clinic of Dr John Yerbury Dent. In Paris they worked with the same analyst, Marc Schlumberger, a Freudian who had known André Gide and other literary types. They made plans to travel to India together and to take a working vacation on Stern’s “alleged” yacht. In 1959, they saw each other as mystics tuning in on a frequency that even excluded the other influence to enter into Burroughs’ life at this time: Brion Gysin. (Stern was truly a mystic, Burroughs wrote Ginsberg, whereas Gysin was more “a catalyst or medium.”²⁰) In many ways, Stern was the anti-Gysin — stormy where Gysin was smooth, difficult where Gysin was suave. He was bored by the same old-guard Surrealists (Cocteau, Dali) whose acquaintanceship would impress Gysin’s friends. Stern’s wealth underwrote his exasperating qualities — he could afford to be a jerk — whereas Gysin had only his charm to open doors. Stern was also straight.

Though there is no indication of any sexual tension between Burroughs and Stern — both, Ginsberg wrote at the time, “gave up sex, indifferent,” probably a side effect of their heroin usage — it is interesting that Corso recalled dumping him on the bed.²¹ The next year Life magazine would take photos of Burroughs sitting dejectedly on that bed. Its plain cast-iron headboard was pushed into a corner of the room beneath Gysin paintings and water stains marring the walls. It is easy to imagine Burroughs sizing up the cripple there and flashing back to his wife, Joan Vollmer, who had been left with a limp after a mild bout of polio in 1948-1949. But then it may not have been in his room that Burroughs first met Stern. Burroughs recalled that the meeting took place in the bar.

I remember Gregory bringing him up to the hotel and sitting him at this little bar — it had four tables, the bar in the original Beat Hotel. Now here comes Gregory and this almost transparent green demon on two crutches. It was Jacques Stern, sinister music in the background. He was very lucid, generous, he’d have some heroin, pot, he’d take you out to dinner, he’d seem very very nice and very sweet and at some point he would start to put the screws on, getting very nasty. He’d just scream at us.²²

Stern left no recollection of the meeting. The Fluke alludes to “three fuzzy friends of mine who once vegetated” on rue Gît-le-coeur, a reference to the Beat Hotel and to Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg. “Fuzzy” may refer less to their appearance than to their mojo — “I think,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on May 18, 1959, “Gysin is afraid of me as notorious carrier of Black Fuzz, bad luck and death.”²³ Years later, in an unpublished interview with Victor Bockris, Stern would describe his encounter with Corso and company in abstract terms:

My take on the Beats was simply a) that I was a mathematician, right, who was extremely interested in art, who happened by sheer chance, due to Gregory Corso, to meet probably the 3 or 4 most influential writers in America at the Beat hotel at the time when it was a fascinating, fascinating study for someone who is an objective that I am [sic], an objective mathematical thinker.²⁴

In hindsight Stern may have portrayed his attitude as “objective” — a curious self-description for a man prone to public rages and epic bouts of substance abuse — but at the time there was a conspicuous rapport between the Beats and him. Stern, Burroughs wrote to Paul Bowles on July 20, 1958, “is far and away the most interesting person I have met in Paris. We have a lot in common. Both graduates of Harvard and junk.”²⁵ In a remarkable letter addressed to Kerouac on June 26, 1958, Ginsberg used the phrase “like Bill” six times to describe Stern: like Bill, Stern studied (or claimed to study) anthropology at Harvard; he came from a background of privilege; he was a junky; he wrote; he advocated psychoanalysis; and he had, at least temporarily, become celibate. “Bill digs Stern,” Ginsberg concluded, “his mind, factual information, on junk and on anthro, and advanced experimental thoughts on brainwashing and evil.”²⁶ In a letter to Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg wrote “he and Bill now good friends & sit and talk junk by the hour.”²⁷

Ironically, one testament to the rapport between the two men was Burroughs’ ability to tolerate Stern’s erratic behavior. In summer 1958, Dini confided to Burroughs that “Jacques is a monster. Being in the same room with him is like being with death itself.”²⁸ Not long after, Stern announced their separation and pressured Burroughs into a criminal mission: since he was on good terms with Dini, he was to visit her, slip into Stern’s library, and steal the valuable Molière first editions he had left behind. Burroughs’ heart wasn’t into it. When he failed — just as he had failed at prior attempts at thievery, such as lush-rolling — Stern blasted him, “You moron, you stupid dope” and so on. It is difficult to imagine that Burroughs had ever been subject to such a tirade, and he resented that Stern had manipulated him into pulling this caper on the likable Dini.

Nevertheless, at the end of October the two took an apartment on Mansfield Street in London to recuperate from their apomorphine cure. Following another harangue in which Stern accused him of being a con man, Burroughs left a dismissive note — “To call me a con man is one of the most grotesque pieces of miscasting since Tyrone Power played Jesse James” — and walked out.²⁹ Once on the street, he noticed newspaper headlines trumpeting the news of Power’s death on November 15, 1958. Burroughs was the same age as the movie star and, if he paused to read the obituaries, would have learned that Power suffered a heart attack while filming a duel. It must have made him feel lucky to escape this skirmish with Stern.

Burroughs returned to the Beat Hotel in Paris but the on-again off-again relationship with Stern continued. In January, Burroughs paid an uneventful visit to Stern in London. On June 19, 1959, Alan Ansen wrote that he was “delighted to hear you and Stern are on good terms again.”³⁰ In late July, with Naked Lunch at the printer, Burroughs told Ginsberg he was “immune to [Stern's] tantrums.”³¹ In September he reversed course: “I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again.”³² The cycle would continue for the next thirty-nine years.

Stern as Writer

Though polio had left him unable to play the piano or to type much, Stern “writes, prose, very good, not totally mad, but amazing,” as Ginsberg informed Kerouac on June 26, 1958.³³ Burroughs’ letters made reference to plays and poetry. In September 1958, Burroughs and Corso co-wrote a letter to Ginsberg announcing their idea for a literary magazine to be called Interpol. “For first issue,” Corso wrote in late September, “Bill has in mind” to include Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and “Stern’s most humiliating” writing.³⁴ Just two days later, Corso would expand the list: “for first issue Michaux, Bowles, Stern, Burroughs, you, me, and more Tzara.”³⁵ To include Stern alongside these literary lions indicated no small enthusiasm for his unpublished writings. (Of course, Burroughs hadn’t published much beside the pseudonymous Junkie at this point.) Ultimately the project came to naught. “Don’t get money for Interpol,” Corso wrote Ginsberg on October 8, 1958, “just Bill’s and mine’s crazy idea, and if it comes thru Stern will probably take care of it, but he’s ill and too much on his mind, too.”³⁶ Doubtless it was derailed by the apomorphine trip to London and subsequent contretemps about Burroughs being a con man.

Though Interpol failed, one publishing project did seem to arise from its aborted energies. In 1958 Corso was invited to co-edit a German anthology of contemporary American poetry. He solicited a contribution from Stern, whose nationality was glossed over in the author’s bio by calling him an “American of French descent.” Evidently Stern had been working on a group of poems titled “Motif.” Two of these — “Motif Selection 1″ and “Motif Selection 2″ — appeared in Junge Amerikanische Lyrik when it was published in 1961. The first seems to portray a drug trip, a vision of wild animals coming to children who rub crystals on their gums and feel “for the first time the liquid blue of chills.” This image cues the second poem, which portrays Europe subject to a new ice age: “everywhere pipes freeze… bridges & dams succumb to the weight of ice…” The poems are dominated by images of coldness and immobility, a theme compelling to Stern for the obvious reason of his disability. “So I can only barely move?” The Fluke avers. “So what? Life drips on in bed, just as well as on a mile run.”

The visionary quality of the poems might be what caused Ginsberg to declare, in a June 26, 1958 letter to Kerouac, that Stern “writes prose like Bill’s anthropological images of Yage City.”³⁷ Ginsberg may have meant to imply that Stern had already absorbed some influence from Burroughs or that both were drawing inspiration from Saint-John Perse, whom Stern mentions by name in The Fluke.³⁸ But what prose was Ginsberg referring to? In that same letter, Ginsberg indicates that Stern’s prose attempts to “explain” the “soul of dead Peter la Nice, fellow 20 yr old junkie with Alan Eager, who died, Stern says he was his saint (Peter).” Neither of Ginsberg’s assertions can pertain to The Fluke. The novel hardly inspires comparison to Burroughs’ yage-inspired “Composite City,” and it is based on Stern himself, not on “Peter la Nice.” (Eager was a jazz musician who appeared under the name Roger Beloit in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, but nothing further is known about his friend “Peter la Nice.” Perhaps he was even an invention of Stern.) Moreover, Burroughs would not announce The Fluke until almost exactly a year later, writing about it to Ginsberg on June 8, 1959.

Stern must have had other prose to share with the Beats in 1958. When Ginsberg returned to the United States later that summer, he did for Stern what he did for so many of his friends — promoted his work. As a result, on September 17, 1958, Irving Rosenthal invited Stern to contribute to the Chicago Review, which was about to publish its second excerpt from Naked Lunch:

I’m writing to you at suggestion of Allen Ginsberg. Would very much like you to submit prose to us. He says novel of yours to be published England. You might also send me selection from that.³⁹

Stern replied from Paris on October 7, 1958:

The novel which Allen Ginsberg mentioned to you has been sent back to me from the publishers upon my request since I felt a change was necessary in its structure. I am working on that right now, and will probably be occupied with it for another two or three months. Hence, I can only send you the original version from which you can select any excerpt if this type of writing interests you. I am also including a piece of a different sort in case it possibly fills the more precise requirements of a review.⁴⁰

Stern had submitted a long work of prose that predated The Fluke along with “a piece of a different sort,” maybe a selection from “Motif.” The only clue to the identity of the novel lies in the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, where a manuscript is identified in Burroughs’ handwriting as “A page of Jack Stern’s book 1959.”⁴¹ A page number — 95 — sits above a text fragment that, though written in a style completely different from The Fluke, contains Sternian imagery such as ice, stalactites, and coldness. The fragment begins by describing an “angular feminine figure with all the thunderous luminosity of an El Greco” and ends with “a whole series of half-hidden gestures, desperate effusions of contempt on the part” of the woman who appears in the scene. None of the text reappears in The Fluke. Was this a page from the novel Stern submitted to Rosenthal at the Chicago Review?

Far from being occupied with revising this novel, Stern and Burroughs spent the end of October 1958 in London undergoing the apomorphine cure. On October 25, the day after Burroughs checked out of the clinic, the Chicago Daily News published an excoriating review of the Naked Lunch excerpts that had just appeared in the Chicago Review. On November 17, Rosenthal quit the journal, and on November 24 he wrote to Burroughs: “Yes I got & returned ms. from Jacques Stern. Very talented, but no breakthrough anywhere.”⁴² Because of the disarray caused by the scandal and Rosenthal’s subsequent departure, Stern did not end up receiving an official rejection letter until the following spring. On May 5, 1959, Ray Roberts, writing for the editor, returned Stern’s work, saying “We liked the longer piece and yet we could not use it all and it did not seem to be organic in part.”⁴³ That Burroughs knew of the rejection before Stern must have caused some awkwardness. Did he inform Stern? Keep the information to himself? Did it contribute to the quarrel between the two while they were living together on Mansfield Street after the apomorphine cure?

The Fluke

After Burroughs returned to Paris, Stern remained in London during the winter of 1958-1959. In January Burroughs paid him what must have been an enjoyable visit and wrote to Gysin to describe the mystic moments they shared. Over the next few months, however, Stern dropped out of touch. “No word from Stern,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on April 21, 1959. “Looks like he is out of my picture. Too bad. Not many like that from mystic stand-point.”⁴⁴ Nothing had changed a month later. “Stern in complete seclusion,” Burroughs added on May 18, 1959. “Answers no letters — at least none of mine.”⁴⁵ There might have been many reasons for Stern’s sudden reclusiveness. Perhaps he was sick or temporarily out of funds or sorting out his divorce from Dini. Or he may simply have wanted to concentrate on a new piece of writing. By June 8, Stern had returned to Paris, invited Burroughs to spend a month with him on his “alleged” yacht, and announced an incredible series of events that resulted in the rapid composition of a novel. Burroughs described what he admitted were the “fantastic details” in a letter to Ginsberg. In London, Burroughs said, Stern broke his leg, took another apomorphine cure (his third in less than a year), and developed a sinus headache whose pain was so extreme that he lapsed into a two-day catatonic state. Doctors

gave him a shock and he came out of the catatonia and began writing. Wrote a novel in nine days — I have seen part of it. It is great, I mean great, not jive talk great. This is not only my opinion. I have talked with the translator of French edition, Faber and Faber in London is publishing it in English.⁴⁶

The story behind the novel’s composition turned out not to be credible, and Stern had also claimed to Ginsberg and Rosenthal that his prior effort was going to be published in England. As for the novel itself, Burroughs did not refer to it by name in his letter. But years later, when he reviewed the annotations added to his correspondence for publication, he approved the note indicating that the “great” novel was The Fluke.⁴⁷

A blend of truth and fiction, like anything out of Stern’s mind, The Fluke is plainly autobiographical. It ruminates on two marriages and expresses heartfelt regret at the end of the second, which had lasted five years (the length of Stern’s marriage to Dini). It describes the birth of a son — a surprise that causes the narrator to avow he will “instantly set about forgetting my son, his name, and his age.” In fact, Stern would remain estranged from his son throughout his life. The Fluke reports a trip to India and an inordinate interest, doubtless inspired in the author by polio, in beds: “I have known many beds, fortunately.. I really have a passion for them.” There is a long excursion on drugs that, like Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict,” catalogues various illegal substances and their subjective effects. As for heroin, The Fluke offers its own “algebra of need” (“You eat it; sleep it; live for, or because, of it..”), alludes to “Pentapon Rose” (a misspelled reference Stern can only have got from Burroughs), and endorses Dr Dent’s cure (“apomorphine treatment is the best”). That Stern may have secluded himself while writing The Fluke becomes comprehensible when he admits that “the hermit’s chosen solitude was perhaps safer.. In any case; less to manage.. Than social behaviour..” He can find no kinship and ultimately accepts his existential condition. “I’m a fluke.”

Aside from the shared interest in drugs, The Fluke contains just a few odd references to Burroughs. Stern had read a manuscript version of Naked Lunch in 1958 — “he lay in bed junksick [...] reading Bill’s manuscript,” Ginsberg wrote Kerouac — but it does not appear to have had an impact on The Fluke.⁴⁸ The obvious influence was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Stern adopted the same episodic, autobiographical vantage point, replacing the bitter misanthropy of Céline’s narrators with a vaguely condescending self-absorption. He copied Céline’s signature use of ellipses between sentences — a device which had also figured in the write-up in Stern’s senior yearbook — and mimicked the ejaculations that became frequent in Céline’s later novels. For example, Guignol’s Band began with “Boom! Zoom! … It’s the big smashup!” The Fluke opens with the same tactic — “There; Crack! Sahk! Swick!! Swath!” Late in life, Stern admitted that he had been fascinated by Céline — the tiny Jewish invalid admiring the tall anti-semitic doctor — and had met him twice. “In London,” Stern said, “I showed Burroughs how he and Céline were like vital.”⁴⁹ So Céline was on Stern’s mind not long before he wrote The Fluke. “The only person that was really close to Burroughs in style was Céline. But he knew that only after I talked to him for like hours and hours and hours about it.” Of course, Burroughs was well aware of Céline’s style. He had gone with Ginsberg to meet the literary pariah on July 8, 1958. Really it was Stern who was close — or tried to be close — in style to Céline.

Stern intended to publish The Fluke. He claimed Faber and Faber would put it out in London. He shared it with someone who considered translating it into French — perhaps Stern, who had been educated in America, felt too alienated from his mother tongue to do the job himself. The Beat Hotel crew must have encouraged him to offer his text to Olympia Press, just then preparing Naked Lunch for publication, and to Big Table, the literary review that Rosenthal founded after resigning from the Chicago Review. Stern refused this last option. “Jack says he is not a member of The Beat Generation,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg, “and does not wish to be so typed, which is why he hesitates to publish in Big Table.”⁵⁰ The refusal is consistent with the vaguely disparaging remarks about Beats in The Fluke, and it may also have been motivated by the knowledge that Rosenthal had previously rejected his work. In any event, Stern’s attitude annoyed Ginsberg. “Give Stern my regards,” Ginsberg replied. “This business of not wanting to be associated with the Beat scene?… You make it sound as if he thinks it’s too sordid.”⁵¹ The bloom had started to come off the rose. By September 1959, Ginsberg admitted to Burroughs that, in spite of promoting his work to Rosenthal, he “dug Stern but felt distance, especially after that argument over economics at table. Dont yet understand him.”⁵²

Why did The Fluke inspire Burroughs to dub Stern a “great writer?” It may have been the text’s similarity to Céline, whose work Burroughs admired, or its long digression on the effects of drugs. The two could “sit and talk junk by the hour,” so to Burroughs The Fluke may well have formed a written extension of conversations he already enjoyed. Like many people, Burroughs also had a tendency to overestimate the talents of his friends. The same praise he gave to Stern for being a great writer was lavished on Gysin for being a great artist. (Burroughs even wrote to his parents about his “friend Brion the Painter, certainly the greatest living apinter [sic] living and I do not make mistatkes [sic] inthe [sic] art world…”⁵³) Though Burroughs always maintained this high estimate of Gysin’s work, history has increasingly made it look like a mistake. Gysin is not considered the most important painter of the 1950s or, for that matter, of any decade since then. As for Stern, Burroughs did come to believe that dubbing him a “great writer” was a mistake. In 1981 he refused permission to publish his letters concerning Stern, declaring that he had been “taken in.”⁵⁴

Stern’s Influence on Naked Lunch

When Olympia Press shipped Naked Lunch in mid-summer 1959, the book contained the undisguised name of only one of Burroughs’ friends — not Ginsberg, who had received chunks of the book in letters; not Kerouac, who had coined the title and whose name appears in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” a text that would preface later editions of Naked Lunch; not Alan Ansen, who had helped with the typing; not Gysin, whose name would appear in the cut-up novels. A note on page 55 of the Olympia edition declared: “The Heavy Fluid concept I owe to Jacques Stern.” The acknowledgement was deleted from subsequent editions of Naked Lunch. In his book on the Beat Hotel, Barry Miles suggests that the deletion was “presumably at Stern’s request,” since Stern’s tendency was to shun the limelight. It is also quite possible that Irving Rosenthal, who edited the book for Grove Press, decided to drop Stern’s name. Rosenthal made numerous thoughtful emendations to the text, and he wasn’t impressed with Stern anyway. In either case, it was Burroughs who signed off on the deletion. It may have been an early indication of his feeling of having been “taken in.” It also had the effect of obscuring the subtle influence of Stern on his masterwork.

In crediting Stern with the Heavy Fluid concept, Burroughs seems to have given him a dubious honor. Heavy Fluid doesn’t amount to much of a concept. It appears twice in Naked Lunch — “drinkers of the Heavy Fluid” and “Heavy Fluid Addicts” — and seems to serve as a metaphor for heroin. In later books the term is also associated with coldness, a motif common in Stern’s writings. For example, in The Soft Machine, “the cold heavy fluid settled in his spine 70 tons per square inch” — which invokes the way heroin causes a “spine like a frozen hydraulic jack” in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness.” The phrase “heavy fluid” does not appear in The Fluke, although Stern describes how heroin brings on an “endless freeze that throws up a fluid a frothy black.” It does not require much conjecture to imagine how this might have become Heavy Fluid in those interminable discussions of junk.

Naked Lunch contains a sort of untitled sketch of Stern and, ironically, it portrays the Heavy Fluid Addict in the process of losing weight. On January 2, 1959, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg that he “saw Stern lose about seven pounds in ten minutes when he took a shot after being off a week.”⁵⁵ Stern was tiny — Ginsberg, no bodybuilder, carried “his 95 pounds” up the four flights to Burroughs’ room at the Beat Hotel — so this physical transformation must have been both dramatic and alarming.⁵⁶ Burroughs transposed this event into Naked Lunch twice. In “The Vigilante,” he resituates it to a hotel in New York: “I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other.” The scene is repeated in “Atrophied Preface”: “I saw it happen… ten pounds lost in ten minutes… standing there with the syringe in one hand… holding his pants up with the other.” This time the sketch was broken up with Célinian dots.

The “concept” and the portrait form circumstantial evidence of Stern’s presence in Naked Lunch. A more profound influence was indicated by Burroughs in a letter he wrote to Ginsberg on September 25, 1959. The summer had been eventful. Naked Lunch had been published, but Burroughs had also been arrested on suspicion of being an international drug trafficker. Worried about his upcoming trial, Burroughs blew part of his advance from Olympia Press on a codeine habit. He also met Ian Sommerville, who became his lover and, at the end of August, helped him kick the new habit. In the midst of all this, a change occurred in the relationship between Burroughs and Stern. In July Burroughs had written letters gushing about his friend. In September he expressed a change of heart:

I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again. Don’t misunderstand. I mean he probably does not want to see me, for reasons will appear in next book and in present book as well. The end of Naked Lunch is addressed to Jack, as he must know.⁵⁷

Chunks of Naked Lunch had been addressed to Ginsberg in the form of letters but the end, according to Burroughs, was addressed to Stern. But what was the end of this “endless novel” (as Ginsberg once described it)?

A few weeks later, Burroughs cited his book in another letter to Ginsberg: “‘The heat is off me from here on out,’ I have written, end Naked Lunch.“⁵⁸ This clearly refers to “Hauser and O’Brien.” There would have been good reason for Burroughs to consider this the end of Naked Lunch: it was the only section that he had deliberately placed in sequence. Years later, in the 1978 foreward to Maynard and Miles’ bibliography of his work, Burroughs reiterated that he had shifted “the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ section from the beginning to the end.” Burroughs had also revised “Hauser and O’Brien” in 1959.⁵⁹ He cut a bit of straight narrative (later to be published as the story “The Conspiracy”) and replaced it with new text including Lee’s realization that “the heat was off me from here on out.” Thus the last few paragraphs of “Hauser and O’Brien” may serve as the end of Naked Lunch in the additional sense that they were among the most recently composed parts of the book. Their freshness likely caused Burroughs, in his letter, to transpose that line into the present tense: “the heat was/is off me.”

Significantly, it is in the closing of “Hauser and O’Brien” that the second reference to Heavy Fluid occurs. In Naked Lunch, Stern’s “concept” terminates the description of Lee disappearing through a tear in the fabric of space and time:

I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso… Locked out… Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection… The Heat was off me from here on out… relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls… Far side of the world’s mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien… clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts.

Heavy Fluid ties this to Stern, but how might it have been addressed to him? The original ending of “Hauser and O’Brien” (aka “The Conspiracy”) had explained discursively that Lee, seeking “some key by which I could gain access to basic knowledge,” came to recognize the search as “sterile and misdirected.” In the revised ending (as published in Naked Lunch), Lee does not renounce the search so much as he seems to have been shut out of it, “locked out.” That this may have been a cryptic reference to Burroughs’ relationship with Stern is signalled by the word “key.” In Naked Lunch, Lee loses “a Key, a Point of Intersection.” Stern, in Burroughs’ view, had possessed such a key. “I continue to see visions and experience strange currents of energy,” he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, “but the Key — the one piece that could make it useable — Stern had part of it.”⁶⁰ In both Naked Lunch and the letter, the word is capitalized, like a proper name. The end of “Hauser and O’Brien” addresses Stern not to seduce, as was the case with the sections addressed to Ginsberg, but to bid farewell.

Of course, it is also possible that “the end of Naked Lunch” referred not to “Hauser and O’Brien” but to “Quick,” which is literally the last text in the Olympia Press edition. “Quick” was distilled from the “WORD” section Burroughs had included in earlier drafts of Naked Lunch. “WORD” cannot have been directed to Stern, since it was written before he and Burroughs met, but was there something about “Quick” — the way it was shaped, the way it embraced fragmentation, the way it survived the parts of “WORD” left out of the Olympia Press publication — that “addressed” Stern? James Grauerholz has suggested (in private communication) that “Quick” may indicate an attempt on Burroughs’ part to compensate for his disappointment in failing to form a mystic collaboration with Stern.

Stern’s abandonment of the notional collaborative masterwork, in whose creation William had expected Stern’s assistance, [may have] created a kind of grief — which William overcame by tasking himself to out-Stern Stern. Much like Neal Cassady (whose effusions are better-documented), Jack [Stern] would speed-rap like hysterically funny brilliant crazy. “WORD” is William trying to speed-rap.⁶¹

In retrospect, it is easy to read “Quick” as pointing forward to Burroughs’ use of the cut-up. But in the summer of 1959, prior to Brion Gysin’s discovery of the technique, it might well have represented something else: an attempt to ad lib like Stern. Or if Burroughs didn’t exactly have Stern in his ear while distilling “Quick” from “WORD,” he might well have been trying to make a literary use of their shared experiences in psychoanalysis, where free association was an accepted method for dredging up psychic truths, and in drugs, where disjointed raving could take on profound meaning.

“Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness”

It is not known exactly why Burroughs decided to dissociate himself from Stern in 1959. Perhaps it was Stern who had readdicted him to codeine. (Speaking of that summer’s habit, Gysin said Burroughs fell “back into bad habits through ‘good friends’ who helped him do so.”⁶²) This would be consistent with the stance Burroughs adopted in that September 25, 1959 letter to Ginsberg. Anxious about his upcoming trial, Burroughs insisted that he would distance himself from the petty criminals who had gotten him in trouble with the French police. “I don’t ever want to see or talk to any of these tiresome underworld jerks again.” In the very next paragraph he disavows Stern too: “I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again.” Stern may not have been an “underworld jerk,” but his unpredictable behavior cannot have been appealing to a man declaring that, from here on out, there would be “no more juvenile delinquency.”

It was with the same determinedly sober spirit that Burroughs wrote “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” that September. Though he was repudiating their relationship at just that time, Burroughs had Stern very much in mind. Impressionistic references in the text seem to echo their endless discussions of junk. “I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India” — possibly a tall tale by Stern. “Junkies always beef about The Cold as they call it” — an echo of The Fluke‘s invocation of “The yen.. The cold.. The twitching and kicking.. The cold..” It is also tempting to attribute the sudden profusion of mathematical and scientific language (“algebra of need,” for example, or references to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Werner Heisenberg) in “Deposition” to Stern. However, by 1959 there had not yet been any indication that Stern styled himself a mathematician. The Beats thought of him as crazy, rich, and literary. The more probable influence was Sommerville, who had genuine credentials in the maths and sciences.

Stern does seep into “Deposition” in another important way. The year before he died, Stern told Victor Bockris: “You know this whole thing about virus is falling in the… I wrote that in The Fluke before [Burroughs] wrote that in Soft Machine as a cut-up example.”⁶³ Stern’s memory might have been fallible, or he may have been referring to an early draft of The Soft Machine. Virus does not figure much in that book. However, it is critical to “Deposition,” where Burroughs elucidates his notion of the “junk virus.” This notion may well have originated in those endless discussions of junk. Viruses are a recurrent theme in The Fluke, and they interested its author for an obvious reason: polio is a virus. Lying in bed, Stern must often have reflected on the way in which the “virus power” had determined his life. The phrase “junk virus” does not appear in The Fluke, but Stern identifies addiction with virus:

Brutal! Man, Brutal! The routine is enough to paralyse your mind.. Slave? Much more than that.. You live IT! The junk lives you! Every little cell of your body burns heroin and is content only in doing that; forcing the whole of you to do likewise.. You eat it; sleep it; live for, or because, of it.. In fact, you are no more! It’s pure undiluted Virus!

As if to reinforce that he had Stern in mind while writing about the “junk virus” in “Deposition,” Burroughs echoed the language of that last paragraph of “Hauser and O’Brien.” There he had written about being “relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past.” In “Deposition,” he wrote that apomorphine “can relegate the junk virus to a land-locked past.”

That virus, like Heavy Fluid, was a concept Burroughs may have owed to Stern is further suggested by an unpublished text in the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library.⁶⁴ Using a green pen, Burroughs wrote “1959 Jack Stern said ‘Nobody will ever understand virus’” across the top of a sheet of typing paper. Beneath is an eight-line permutation that begins “Nobody will ever understand virus” and ends “Virus stand under body will ever know.” The same phrase appears in the compendium of first cut-up texts, Minutes to Go, published in 1960: “No body will ever understand virus… Old takings giving terrible ruled out con — Jack S?”⁶⁵ Given that the cut-ups Burroughs contributed to Minutes to Go concern viruses, polio, and cancer, it is tempting to see them as a symbolic affirmation of his break with Stern. Burroughs cut him off personally and cut him up textually. To be clear, however, Minutes to Go was not the “next book” that would give reasons Stern would no longer want to see Burroughs. When Burroughs wrote that, he had not yet learned about the cut-up method from Gysin.

A hint of the emotional dynamics underneath the shared intellectual interests is provided by an undated letter Stern sent Burroughs, likely at some point in 1959.⁶⁶ It refers to a misunderstanding that Stern attempted to patch up by sending Burroughs a check. For Stern this was an obvious way to make amends. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Corso had all previously allowed themselves to take advantage of his largesse. This time, however, Burroughs returned the check, prompting Stern to mail a self-indictment that recalls the “most humiliating” writing he was to submit to Interpol. In the letter, Stern admits that Burroughs “has achieved what I am incapable of; I envy him this power.” He acknowledges that his actions have caused him to lose “Dini + semblance of love; money + semblance of freedom; you + semblance of contact” — a less metaphorical way to express what Burroughs described as the loss of a key or point of intersection. Stern pleads with Burroughs to accept the check and invites him to stay at “our pad,” which is “missing a little mystic fluid.” “I learned a great deal from you,” Stern tells Burroughs, “probably more than from anyone else.” Burroughs had written Ginsberg the same thing about Stern: “I learned more from Jack than from anyone else I ever knew, except Brion.” The echo may indicate that Stern’s letter was reverberating in Burroughs’ memory by the time he wrote to Ginsberg.

How did Burroughs respond to Stern’s letter? By cutting it up. In the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, there is an unpublished cut-up that stems from this letter.⁶⁷ It begins with “space for the mails,” words from the postscript; recontextualizes “mystic fluid” (“God knows they are you come this way its missing a mystic fluid..”); and ends with “you are power if I might,” a pregnant phrase capturing the envy to which Stern had confessed. In order to cut up the letter, however, Burroughs must have retyped it. The original was not destroyed — a fact suggesting that Burroughs attached significance to it, since he did not hesitate to cut up other incoming letters. This was not the last time Burroughs would cut up Stern either. In 1965 he told the Paris Review that Nova Express contained “Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven’t heard about, someone named Jack Stern.”⁶⁸ Not only did Burroughs continue to call Stern a writer, he included him in the company of the immortal bard and the poète maudit.

The Early 1960s

Burroughs’ 1959 pronouncement that he would no longer see Stern did not prove true. The relationship may have cooled, but the two formed part of what had become a literary jet set. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Corso visited Stern at his house in St Tropez in May 1961 then continued on to Tangier, where they doubtless told Burroughs about Stern’s latest antics. Stern would call Corso a “stupid loudmouth poet,” and Corso would reply with “you stinky cripple.” When the harangues subsided, the group recited poetry and talked about the literary scene. In addition to mutual friends, Burroughs’ work provided an excuse for he and Stern to keep in touch. On May 24, 1962 in Paris, they recorded excerpts from Burroughs’ cut-ups for the Harvard Poetry Room, alternating as they read texts that would ultimately appear in Nova Express.⁶⁹ In 1963, Burroughs sent Stern a copy of The Ticket That Exploded. Stern acknowledged the book with a postcard — “I’ve read it twice.” He also indicated that he was leaving London (“got busted”) for Spain.⁷⁰

In January 1964, while Stern was in Spain, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released. In later years Stern would tell friends that Terry Southern, who had worked on the screenplay, had based Dr Strangelove on him. Stern even claimed to Mark Meyer that he had written a thesis at Harvard about a “doomsday machine.”⁷¹ The idea has an immediate appeal — Dr Strangelove could easily be a caricature of the eccentric Stern, who would also tell friends that Adolf Hitler had survived the war and become a drug dealer in New York. Kubrick didn’t know Stern but Southern had been in and out of Paris in the 1950s, was friendly with Burroughs, and referred to Stern as a “freak” in a June, 1961 letter — demonstrating that he was well aware of the Stern legend before working on the screenplay in 1962.⁷²

Then again, Southern worked on the film for only six weeks. He never publicly claimed credit for the Strangelove character, who had already appeared in earlier drafts of the screenplay. Scholars contend that Dr Strangelove was an amalgam of the era’s prominent nuclear strategists and Dr No from the James Bond film.⁷³ Kubrick himself admitted that Dr Strangelove’s accent was “probably inspired” by the “Hungarian father of the H-bomb,” Edward Teller — more or less implying that the accent was the work of Peter Sellers, a gifted improviser. In any event, Stern was an unlikely source — with his American education, he spoke perfect English. It is also unlikely he inspired Dr Strangelove’s wheelchair for the simple reason that, by the early 1960s, Stern had not yet been confined to one. Ginsberg had referred to him carrying “one crutch aluminum”; Burroughs recalled him “on two crutches”; a photograph of Stern at St Tropez in May 1961 shows a crutch leaning on the wall beside him; and The Fluke contains several references to crutches but none to a wheelchair.⁷⁴ In what way can Stern have contributed to the character of Dr Strangelove? He didn’t have the accent, the wheelchair, or the prosthetic hand. He wasn’t a mathematician, let alone a nuclear strategist. Perhaps Southern went along with Stern’s claim among friends — but Southern was always vague about who did what on the screenplay. Kubrick was infuriated by the amount of credit that Southern allowed others to attribute to him.

Though Dr Strangelove brought no attention to Stern, the literary community continued to think of him as one of their own. In July 1964, Philip Lamantia wrote Burroughs asking for Stern’s address in Spain, mentioning that he wanted to include him in an anthology of “USA prose” he was compiling.⁷⁵ In August, Lamantia informed Burroughs that the anthology wasn’t going to happen. However, he was visiting Stern in Malaga:

Jacques found here quit drinking heavily. His young Spanish wife, intelligent and Jacques is currently planning some kind of writing, read me notes recently (I’ve been going thru Motif and projects a kind of news/report on current “El Cordobes” scandal⁷⁶

Significantly, Stern had not only remarried, he was continuing to write. He remained proud enough of the “Motif” poems to share them with Lamantia. Evidently he was also tempted to venture into Hemingway turf. The Fluke had already contained a passing reference to bullfighting: “Did you hear about Frey? gored by a young bull, too young..” Now Stern was writing about El Cordobes, the flamboyant matador who had been gored and nearly killed on live television that May.

Was all this writing an expression of literary ambition? Or just a dilettante’s way of combatting boredom? It is difficult to say what Stern’s intentions were. By this time, he had published nothing but the two poems in Corso’s anthology. In the contributor’s note, he had eschewed biographical detail, declaring only that he “prefers to remain unknown.” He had submitted two texts to the Chicago Review but had refused to participate in Big Table. Years later he would tell Bockris:

I spent 40 years of my life not publishing, not sending anything to publishers because I did not want to be in that act. I mean if I had really wanted to be in that circle, then let’s face it when I wrote The Fluke, and everyone said Oh what a great masterpiece, then I would have published it, but I did exactly the contrary.⁷⁷

Not quite. On June 21, 1965, The Fluke was published in an edition of 250 copies by Buchet-Chastel in Paris. A stolid firm still in business, Buchet-Chastel knew neither the highs nor the lows of an Olympia Press. Its 1965 catalogue contained minor works by major writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller — but it did not contain The Fluke, of which the publisher disavows any knowledge.⁷⁸ Without doubt, Buchet-Chastel did not publish The Fluke but rather arranged a vanity edition of it. A note on the copyright page indicates that The Fluke was published “aux dépens des amis de l’auteur” — at the expense of the author’s friends. A later friend of Stern thought that his sister Rosita might have arranged the publication.⁷⁹ Burroughs, however, approved the footnote in his correspondence declaring that The Fluke was “privately published by Stern.” The question of agency is important in that it sheds some light on Stern’s attitude toward his own writing. He took it seriously enough to do it and to share it with other writers. At the same time, he had the means to publish as many private editions as he would have liked, yet only this short run of The Fluke ever saw light of day. His psychiatrist in later life offered the explanation that Stern did not publish because he “was above all that.”⁸⁰ He did not need money and sought no more notoriety than that which circulated among his friends. James Grauerholz has suggested that “perhaps Jacques simply lacked the courage to risk real failure in the literary realm.”⁸¹

What is beyond doubt is that Burroughs was asked to write an introduction for The Fluke. In a gesture of support that belied his 1959 declaration not to see Stern, Burroughs provided three pages of text: a lightly cut-up introduction followed by two pages beginning “Recorders fix nature of absolute need” and containing fold-ins from The Fluke. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than Stern soliciting this introduction let alone being motivated to make the significant alterations that occurred between the manuscript and printed versions of Burroughs’ text. Two of these alterations stand out. First, Burroughs had used dashes for punctuation, as he often did in cut-up texts. In the published version of the introduction, however, the dashes were transformed into Célinian dots, thus forcing Burroughs’ text to resemble the style of The Fluke itself. It is a deeply symbolic change, retroactively appropriating the cut-up and causing it to resemble Stern’s own method, which he claimed to call “selective automation.”

Second, only the first page of Burroughs’ introduction was used. Perhaps Stern, recognizing that the two pages of fold-in were repurposed in the chapter “A Bad Move” in the recently published Nova Express, decided that he wasn’t going to use his own book as an advertisement for Burroughs’ signature writing techniques. (The two-page fold-in would also reappear in The Third Mind‘s “Technical Deposition of the Virus Power.”) In place of the fold-in, the published introduction to The Fluke was extended using what appears to be an excerpt from the letter Burroughs sent along with the texts. This may have been more complimentary to Stern — the excerpt references James Joyce, implying a flattering comparison — but it is disorienting to the reader because the letter had included instructions intended for an editor. The new introduction thus announces that it is “to be followed by the enclosed texts.” What enclosed texts? The reader, unaware that this referred to “Recorders fix nature of absolute need,” can only assume it refers to the text that follows — Stern’s novel. Not only did Stern retroactively appropriate the cut-up by transforming it with Célinian dots, he literally usurped its place in the published book.

Though Stern manipulated the texts for his own ends, Burroughs had also submitted a frankly ambivalent introduction. The manuscript shows that Burroughs originally put the entire first page in quote marks, positioning the introduction as something overheard, a quote, and thereby distancing himself from any endorsement. He also started writing “Jacques” and crossed it out for “Jack,” as though unsure whether he was writing of an author or a friend. In the printed edition, the quote marks were deleted and the first name restored to Jacques. The ambivalent message, however, remained. On one hand, Burroughs offered praise — “Jacques Stern is a writer” — that cautiously echoed his 1959 letters and their talk of Stern as a “great writer.” On the other hand, Burroughs asserted that the entire message of the book could be “reduced to two words.. STAY OUT..” Not only does this resonate with Burroughs’ sense of having been occluded from Stern’s space-time, it causes the introduction to warn the reader to stay out of the text that follows.

In the printed book, the introduction is completed by a reproduction of Burroughs’ signature — an unusual move suggesting that the publisher or, more probably, Stern himself was anxious to give The Fluke a seal of approval. On Burroughs’ typescript copy, which he must have received in 1964 or early 1965 in order to prepare his introduction, Stern made handwritten annotations that seem designed to appeal to the author of Naked Lunch.⁸² Two chapter titles were penned on the first pages of the typescript, calling the opening “I (Postface)” and the next part “II The Analysis.” To open the book with a “postface” would serve as an obvious counterpart to the “Atrophied Preface” that concludes Burroughs’ masterwork. “The Analysis” was a title that would have caused Burroughs to recall that he and Stern had shared an analyst as well as a general interest in psychoanalysis. Another annotation indicated that “the end + beginning are reversible.” Stern surely knew that Burroughs had reversed the beginning and ending of Naked Lunch by resituating the “Hauser and O’Brien” section.

At the very end of the typescript, after Stern had written “Finis” in blue ink, he added “Part I of MOTIF” and “Part II: The Quadrupeds.” Did the “Motif” poems form an extension of The Fluke? Was Stern planning an anthology of his texts? Was “The Quadrupeds” the title of the earlier prose that Stern had submitted to the Chicago Review? Or was it some other work? The lack of explanatory context may suggest that Stern assumed Burroughs understood these cryptic instructions. Or it may be that Burroughs understood them only as a maneuver, a way for Stern not to conclude but to occlude his text by showing the reader that, while there was more material, it was being withheld. “Stay out.”

With his large coterie of literary friends and acquaintances, Stern would have found plenty of takers for copies of his privately published book. The Fluke, however, did not make any appreciable impact on its recipients. It was not reviewed or blurbed anywhere. Later friends in possession of xerox copies confessed to being unable to read it. The edition itself seems to have all but disappeared. The first published mention of the book, occurring in a 1980 collection of verse and correspondence by Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, called Stern the “author of unpublished prose The Fluke.” It implies that Ginsberg did not even know about the privately published edition.⁸³ Not a single copy of the privately printed edition of The Fluke currently exists in a public institution. A collector in England has a copy purchased from a rare book dealer who happened to know what it was.⁸⁴ At the time of his death, Stern had no more than his own personal copy. “I wish I had a copy of The Fluke to give you,” Stern told Bockris during their interview the year before he died. The book’s title became a self-fulfilling prophecy: it was a statistical oddity, a rarity, a fluke.

The Late 1960s and Beyond

Though the book made no impact, Stern continued to circulate in the literary jet set. In 1967 Ian Sommerville wrote to Burroughs that he’d heard Stern had been in London for three months.⁸⁵ By 1970 Stern had moved into the Chelsea Hotel in New York. There he met Patti Smith, who would later dedicate her book Ha! Ha! Houdini to Stern, and grew close to the filmmaker and ethnomusicologist Harry Smith. Stern “thought Burroughs and Harry were the great geniuses of the age,” Ginsberg told an interviewer.⁸⁶ “He was making plans to have a magazine feature them, but was also very temperamental when he’d get drunk or high on coke or whatever.” Stern and Smith, a self-styled mystic, engaged in a “magic war,” experimenting with tarot and putting curses on each other. Meanwhile Stern would periodically throw tantrums and smash things in his hotel room. Artist Malcolm Mc Neill, who had been collaborating with Burroughs on Ah Pook Is Here, recalls in a forthcoming memoir that Stern could exact a toll on his environment. He liked to “mark stuff up” — a “kind of thinking aloud while studying books, manuscripts, artworks and the like” that included not just the margins of books but the pictures on hotel walls.⁸⁷

In addition to this “thinking aloud,” Stern continued to write. With Smith he collaborated on a work called Even Songs of Ecstasy, an assemblage in which poems by the two men alternate with tarot imagery. In 1982 Stern’s sister Rosita, who had become an artist, exhibited sketches inspired by one of Stern’s poems at the Gallery Charley Chevalier in Paris. The catalogue contains an illustration called “l’habitant de la chambre jaune,” a portrait of Stern seated in a wheelchair, as well as a poem titled “Disillusion.”⁸⁸ A self-absorbed work in which the usually hyper-articulate Stern meditates on stuttering and lapses of speech, the poem recalls his earlier writings in its continued preoccupation with coldness, “the tempting silence of a winter’s layer covering the bristly mats forgotten in a storm.” Stern may have continued to produce poetry in part because, as his mobility worsened, the compact format was physically more manageable for him to write or type.

In addition to poetry, Stern had become increasingly interested in film. Just as he had claimed to be the basis for the character of Dr Strangelove, he would let acquaintances think that he had been involved in some important way in the production of Chappaqua and Easy Rider. What is undeniable is that he collaborated with Terry Southern in the mid-1970s on two screenplays, neither of which would be filmed. One was for a porn film called Tryin’.⁸⁹ The other was for a film of Burroughs’ first book, Junky. Some sense of the misinformation and myth surrounding Stern can be gleaned from the description of that project in the memoir by Southern’s companion Gail Gerber:

Jacques Stern, a well-known physicist also known as Baron Rothschild, was a longtime friend of Burroughs. He had enough money to option the book and finance a first draft of a script even though they had a tense relationship as Stern blamed Burroughs for his not winning a Nobel Prize. Seems Burroughs used to let people think that Stern was on dope.⁹⁰

A well-known physicist? Nobel Prize? Evidently Stern’s self-portrayal as a mathematician had expanded to include physics. The story about the Nobel Prize had to be an inside joke. Gerber was not the only acquaintance under the impression that Stern had been actually been considered for the honor, in spite of the fact that he never published a single paper in mathematics. As for dope, Stern had long been a “master addict” of the same order as Burroughs. Southern recalled Stern giving himself speedballs through a hypodermic gizmo taped to his wrist. “Trying to sort out truth from fiction was what made being around [Stern] so enjoyable,” Mc Neill has remarked. “In the end the distinction was irrelevant. The telling was all that mattered. The fact that he was often on crystal meth only added to the wonder of it. Like the old speed joke goes: It was a great account but it was all written on one line.”⁹¹

What is true, however, is that the relationship between Burroughs and Stern was full of tension and ambiguity — before, during, and after the Junky film project. To observers it was clear that the two admired each other, yet they often maintained a wary distance. The complications are reflected in the evolution of the Junky screenplay itself.⁹² The title page of a draft dated May 25, 1977 reads “Screenplay by Terry Southern / Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs.” A subsequent draft dated July 28, 1977 reads “Screenplay by Terry Southern / Jacques Stern / and William S. Burroughs / Based on the novel, Junky, by William S. Burroughs and The Creation of Adam by Jacques Stern.” Stern was pushing to combine Junky with a work of his own, as though merging the texts could symbolically patch up the personal relationship. Burroughs objected strenuously:

Problems arising from scripts of Junky and The Creation of Adam can be very simply resolved once we realize that Junky and The Creation of Adam are not the same film and that any attempt to combine the two scripts can only result in confusion.⁹³

Legend has it that the would-be production burned through Stern’s money, much of which was wantonly snorted in the form of cocaine. That may have been true, but the underlying tensions between Stern and Burroughs can’t have helped. “If,” Southern would later tell an interviewer, Stern “had taken it more seriously as a real project instead of as a way to work out his relationship with Bill,” the film might have been realized.⁹⁴

Even the time, effort, and money wasted on the Junky film project did not sever the relationship between Stern and Burroughs. Sometimes Stern would visit the Bunker. He would give the local winos twenty dollars to carry him up the stairs then berate them to caustic but hilarious effect. Once, when he had been thrown out of his apartment during a cash shortage, Stern stayed at the Bunker, driving Burroughs to distraction with the unique way he could practically pace in his wheelchair. In 1983 the two corresponded about the possibility of creating a film out of The Place of Dead Roads.⁹⁵ Stewart Meyer, who was close to Burroughs in the 1970s and 1980s, recalls seeing an astonishing moment between the two old friends.⁹⁶ Burroughs, Southern, and Meyer were to give a reading at the 63rd Street YMCA in New York. Burroughs, already living in Kansas by this time, had flown in for the reading and other business. A leather-clad woman — one of the invariably beautiful “nurses” Stern hired — pushed him in his wheelchair to the reading. Burroughs, visibly moved to see Stern, leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Given that Burroughs was not wont to make public displays of affection, it was a pregnant moment, the kiss resonating both with fondness and with something darker, like a goodbye kiss.

It was Stern’s young friend Mark Meyer who would inform him of Burroughs’ death in 1997. Whereas Stern had taken the news of Southern’s death hard, requesting that Meyer leave him alone to digest it, he was calm when learning of Burroughs’ demise. Evidently he expected the news. Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs — the Beat Hotel crew was gone, and Stern must have constrained himself to look upon their deaths as abstractly as the mathematician he fancied himself to be. He accommodated himself to carrying on, watching films from his tremendous library of video cassettes. He loved Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, and for a while he thought Kurt Cobain might have the mojo to assume Burroughs’ mantle as a junky genius. Meyer even helped Stern get an email account, which he would use in conjunction with a voice transcription device because it was becoming increasingly difficult to type with his hands.

Stern died in a Manhattan hospital on June 15, 2002, less than two weeks after his 70th birthday. He was survived by a companion, by his sister, and by friends who accepted his eccentricities as the price of admission to his brilliance and generosity. Though he had long ago indicated in the contributor’s note to Corso’s anthology that he “prefers to remain unknown,” Stern was legend to a small circle of cognoscenti. His legacy lay in the vivid impression he left in their memories, the background influence he exerted on their creative works, and the mostly unpublished writings he shared with them. In a conversation tape-recorded by Stewart Meyer, Stern once explained what distinguished his writing:

Every motherfucker in the world thinks he’s a writer. There are very few writers, very few, man, that you can count on. I don’t consider myself a writer, but I’m a hell of a lot better than 95% of the writers I know. Cause they’re not writers, they’re basically into what I call typing. I can’t type shit, man. I cannot type with this hand. I can’t play the piano either. Isn’t that a fuckin’ shame? [...] There are many things I cannot do. [...] I literally had to replace living by thinking, and then thinking made me live again.⁹⁷

Stern wrote not to become rich, which he already was, nor to become famous, which he did not desire. It would be easy to say that he wrote to live, but the connection may have been even more profound. His life itself became a sort of writing. What he could not expend or express in physical mobility burst out into another dimension, an intellectual mobility that careened from genius to deceit, from abstraction to abuse. Whereas a novelist puts flights of fancy into his work, Stern put them into his life. With his tall tales and disregard for what Kant called “practical reason,” Stern transformed his very existence into an absurdist fiction — he was, as many remarked, a character straight out of Naked Lunch.

References

Note re Jacques Stern Items in the Burroughs Papers

The finding aid to the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library includes several inaccuracies in items related to Jacques Stern.

Box 13, Folder 25, Item 3 — The typescript of The Fluke is not missing pages 2 and 4, as the finding aid indicates. Page 2 is missing but page 4 is misnumbered 5, and the pagination error carries through the rest of the typescript. Additionally, there are two copies of page 21.

Box 84, Folder 4 — This folder contains “Postcards from Unknown Correspondents” including one from “Jacques, Jan 19, n.y.” The author was Jacques Stern and the postmark indicates the card was mailed in 1963.

Box 87, Folder 3, Item 47 — “Jock Stern. Autograph letter signed, n.d.” This item is from Jock Livingston, the filmmaker, as is clear from internal evidence.

Box 87, Folder 4, Item 79 — “Jaques ? Autograph letter signed, n.d.” This letter is from Jacques Stern and likely dates from 1959. See note below for justification of the date.

Box 88, Folder 3, Item 44 — “Jacques Stern. 23 June 1964.” This letter from Burroughs is addressed to Jock Livingston, not Jacques Stern, as is clear from internal evidence.

Box 88 Folder 7, Item 97 — “Jacques Stern, May 28, 1965.” This letter from Burroughs is addressed to Jock Livingston, not Jacques Stern, as is clear from internal evidence.

Endnotes

1. William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

2. Burroughs to Ginsberg, late July 1959, Letters.

3. Box 7, Folder 64, Item 16. “Cut-Up With Jacques Stern’s Telegram to The Captain Barrie Of His Alleged Yacht.” Papers.

4. Le Mémorial de Lyon en 1793: vie, mort et famille des victimes lyonnaises de la Révolution, Lyon, Editions lyonnaises d’art et d’histoire, 1986.

5. See the Social Security Death Index record for Jacques Loup Stern.

6. Jacques Leon Stern biography at the web site of the Assemblée Nationale. See also the biography at Wikipedia.

7. Information provided by the Woodberry Forest School. Email, July 8, 2010.

8. “Milestones,” Time Magazine, Jan 2, 1950.

9. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

10. Stern does not appear in any of the Harvard yearbooks for 1949-1953. His Harvard student records are not yet available to general researchers.

11. Stern’s will: “Attendu que Jacques Léon Stern de nationalité américaine est décédé à New York, où il était domicilié le 21 décembre 1949, laissant sa veuve née Mathilde Simone de Leusse, séparée de bien, de nationalité française et comme héritiers Rosita-Georgette Marie-Thérèse Stern, epouse de Jacques Georges Dewez et Jacques Loup Stern tous deux enfants légitimes nés de son union, de nationalité française.” Revue critique de droit international privé, Volume 40, 1951.

12. “Emily Marshall to Wed,” New York Times, March 1, 1952.

13. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, reproduced in Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, New York, Da Capo Press, 2008.

14. Burroughs to Ginsberg, July 24, 1958, Letters.

15. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. “Jacques Stern, I haven’t explained, Gregory heard of him at Harvard, a rich young Frenchman — crutches, 95lb, polio — had read On Road, Gasoline, Howl, Junkie (not realizing the latter was Bill).”

16. Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, Feb 24, 1958, reproduced in Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters, 1947 – 1980, Gay Sunshine Press, 1980.

17. LO, p 293.

18. Gregory Corso to Gary Snyder, August 12, 1958, reproduced in Bill Morgan, ed., An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso, New Directions, 2003.

19. Corso to Ginsberg, circa Oct 8, 1958, in Accidental Autobiography: “don’t know how to get money but I may find some way; I’m afraid to ask Stern, I need an arrogance to ask, and he’s become a friend, and he even thinks I’m conning him, but knows that it’s a natural part of me, and that it’s inherent in me, and that I don’t mean too [sic]; nor do I.”

20. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

21. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

22. BH, p 117.

23. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

24. Bockris.

25. Burroughs to Paul Bowles, July 20, 1958, Letters.

26. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

27. Ginsberg to Orlovsky, Feb 24, 1958, in Straight Hearts’ Delight.

28. LO p 294.

29. LO p 295.

30. Box 79, Folder 4, Item 20. Letter from Alan Ansen to Burroughs, June 19, 1959. Papers.

31. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Late July 1959, Letters.

32. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Sept 25, 1959, Letters.

33. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

34. Burroughs and Corso to Ginsberg, Sept 28 1958, Letters.

35. Corso to Ginsberg, Sept 30 1958, in An Accidental Autobiography.

36. Corso to Ginsberg, circa 8 Oct 1958, in An Accidental Autobiography.

37. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

38. Significantly, Stern mentions Perse (aka St. Leger) in the same few sentences in which he refers to the Beat Hotel: “Gît-le-Coeur, I have heard mentioned.. So has St. Leger, for he wrote about it.. So have three fuzzy friends of mine who once vegetated there..”

39. Irving Rosenthal to Jacques Loup Stern, September 17, 1958. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

40. Stern to Rosenthal, October 7, 1958. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

41. Box 62, Folder 11, Item 54. Papers.

42. Rosenthal to Burroughs, November 24, 1958. Box 80, Folder 15, Item 6. Papers.

43. Ray Roberts to Stern, May 5, 1959. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

44. Burroughs to Ginsberg, April 21, 1959, Letters.

45. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

46. Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

47. According to information provided by Oliver Harris (Email, Oct 9, 2010), James Grauerholz reviewed the note with Burroughs and indicated that he “orally re-confirms” it.

48. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

49. Bockris.

50. Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

51. Ginsberg to Burroughs, undated. Box 82, Folder 2, Item 15. Papers. The finding aid dates this letter as “probably from Winter 59/60.” However, it is clearly a response to Burroughs’ letter of June 8, so the letter likely dates from mid-to-late June 1959. Ginsberg’s reply reads in full:

Give Stern my regards. This business of not wanting to be associated with the Beat scene? Unless he has something really beyond it? Meanwhile dispite [sic] all the bullshit, there is something basically very sympathetic & honest, open, in what we all have been doing, that’s become known as beat, so that his disassociation from it seemed unnecessary, unnecessarily a put down. Not that it’s all that much of a formal party line. You make it sound as if he thinks it’s too sordid. or has too sordid a connotation now. but in the long run I think our general good nature will seem, will be seen. But Big Table’s not categorizable as just low Beat except by what gregory calls “wicked Opinion.” Oh, well, I don’t know why, I was depressed by what I paran oiaclally [sic] interpreted was his attitude, from your p.s.

52. Ginsberg to Burroughs, Sept 29, 1959. Box 82, Folder 1, Item 7. Papers.

53. Burroughs to his parents, undated letter, Box 58, Folder 23, Item 23. Papers.

54. William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Box 33, Folder 299.

55. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Jan 2, 1959, Letters.

56. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

57. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Sept 25, 1959, Letters.

58. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Oct 7, 1959, Letters.

59. According to the research of Oliver Harris, “Hauser and O’Brien” was composed in 1955 then revised in 1959. See Oliver Harris, “From Dr Mabuse to Doc Benway: The Myths and Manuscripts of Naked Lunch,” RealityStudio, Oct 26, 2010.

60. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

61. James Grauerholz, Email, March 21, 2011.

62. Brion Gysin, Terry Wilson, Here to Go: Planet R-101, London, Quartet Books, 1985, p 239.

63. Bockris.

64. Box 62, Folder 11, Item 53. Papers.

65. Burroughs, Minutes to Go, Two Cities Editions, 1960, p 59.

66. Jacques Stern to William Burroughs, undated, 2 pages. Box 87, Folder 04, Item 79. Papers. In the finding aid to the Burroughs Papers, the letter is attributed only to “Jacques,” but internal evidence (e.g. the reference to Stern’s wife Dini) indicates the author is Stern. The letter cannot have been written before late October 1958, since it refers to the Mansfield Street apartment that Burroughs and Stern shared in London after their October apomorphine cure. Because Burroughs did not cash the check enclosed with the letter, he may have received it after the publication of Naked Lunch, when he had money in the bank owing to advances from Olympia Press. The echo between the letter and Burroughs’ letter to Ginsberg of September 25, 1959 could indicate that Burroughs had received it around that time. That Burroughs subjected the letter to the cut-up technique, which Gysin showed him on October 1, 1959, suggests it may have been fresh in his mind around that time.

67. Box 07, Folder 63, Item 15. Papers.

68. Conrad Knickerbocker, “The Art of Fiction #36: William S. Burroughs,” Paris Review, 1965.

69. Recorded by Sean Sweeney for the Poetry Room in Paris on May 24, 1962. Reel-to-reel tape held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

70. Stern to Burroughs, Jan 19, 1963. Box 84, Folder 04. Papers.

71. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

72. Terry Southern to Mason Hoffenberg, June 7, 1961: “it looks as if you are setting up a billion dollar staff there in Paris, France (how about Jacques Stern for ‘Freak Shoot-Off Editor’? HAW HAW!)” Reproduced in Nile Southern, The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy, Arcade Publishing, p 164.

73. A lengthy analysis of the sources for the Dr Strangelove character is presented by Peter Daniel Smith in Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, St Martin’s Press, p 422 ff.

74. “One crutch aluminum”: Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. “On two crutches”: BH, p 117. Photograph of Jacques Stern in St Tropez: Allen Ginsberg, “Jacques Stern in St Tropez 1961,” reproduced at allenginsberg.org.

75. Philip Lamantia to Burroughs, July 12, 1964. Box 79, Folder 27, Item 39. Papers.

76. Lamantia to Burroughs, August 10, 1964. Fox 79, Folder 27, Item 40. Papers.

77. Bockris.

78. Email from Paul Guillard, 13 April 2010. “Je suis au regret de vous dire que nous n’avons aucune référence à ce livre dans nos archives. Peut-être y a-t-il erreur sur la maison d’édition?”

79. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

80. Interview with Dr Joseph Gross, July 1, 2010.

81. James Grauerholz, Email, March 18, 2011.

82. Box 13, Folder 25, Item 3, Papers.

83. Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight, footnote.

84. Emails from collector.

85. Ian Sommerville to William S. Burroughs, June 13, 1967. Box 80, Folder 20, Item 89. Papers.

86. Allen Ginsberg, Interview with Paola Igliori, 24 September 1995.

87. Malcolm Mc Neill, Observed while Falling, forthcoming memoir of the artist’s relationship with Burroughs.

88. Rosita Dewez, Poème de Jacques Stern, Galerie Charley Chevalier, Paris, 1982.

89. Tryin’: Manuscript in possession of Mark Meyer. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27 2010.

90. Gail Gerber with Tom Lisanti, Trippin’ with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember, McFarland, 2009.

91. Malcolm Mc Neill, Email, October 4, 2010.

92. Screenplay drafts: Terry Southern Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

93. Report dated May 11, 1977 with ANS from “JAS” to Terry Southern. Terry Southern Papers.

94. “Interview with a Grand Guy,” revised version of an interview with Terry Southern published in Patrick McGilligan, ed., Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, University of California Press, 1966.

95. Film of Place of Dead Roads: William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Box 20, Folder 160.

96. Interview with Stewart Meyer, May 13, 2010.

97. Recording provided by Stewart Meyer.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Rhinozeros #5
Front cover

Rhinozeros #5
“Song” by David Meltzer

Rhinozeros #5
“Song of the Tusk” by Anselm Hollo

Rhinozeros #5
“Attention!” by Gregory Corso

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Michael McClure

Rhinozeros #5
“An Africa Ode” by Edward Dorn

Rhinozeros #5
“Spel 1″ by Robert Kelly

Rhinozeros #5
“Song” by David Meltzer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Larry Eigner

Rhinozeros #5
“Oil” by Gary Snyder

Rhinozeros #5
Poems by Gael Turnbull and Michael Horovitz

Rhinozeros #5
“The End” by Allen Ginsberg

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Peter Orlovsky, “Apples” by Gregory Corso

Rhinozeros #5
“Wind Hand Caught in the Door” by William S. Burroughs

Rhinozeros #5
“To Fidel Castro Somewhere in the Sierra Maestre” by Marc D. Schleifer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by David Ball

Rhinozeros #5
Poems by Theodore Enslin

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Anselm Hollo

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Dell Hymes

Rhinozeros #5
“Pome (for Rhinozeros)” by Jack Kerouac

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Piero Heliczer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Philip Whalen

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have lived and worked in the Washington DC area for over 15 years and have yet to take full advantage of all the opportunities DC’s museums offer. Hell, they’re free and air-conditioned; what more could you want on a stifling day in August when you need a scuba suit to walk around the Mall? Every once in a while something at the National Gallery catches my eye and I head on down: the Dada exhibit, the Jasper Johns exhibit, a talk by Steve Watson on Warhol’s Factory years, for example. I always walk around the gift shop writing down the titles of books I want and I always stop to pour over Pollock’s Lavender Mist. I thoroughly enjoy myself and leave saying I should do this more often.

I went through the same routine this summer to take in the Allen Ginsberg photography exhibit. To be honest, most Beat enthusiasts will have seen these photographs before: in the TwelveTrees Press book of photographs, in numerous books about the Beats, at allenginberg.org, or in other gallery settings. What is new is that Allen Ginsberg the photographer has infiltrated the canon with Allen Ginsberg the poet. Ginsberg is tied to Robert Frank and Berenice Abbott; there is talk of Ginsberg’s changing technique and his increasing sophistication in composition. Personally I find myself drawn just as strongly to the photographs of Jonathan Williams or Ann Charters. Their images of Charles Olson are just as important to me as Ginsberg’s shots of Burroughs and Kerouac in the early 1950s. And let’s face it; Ginsberg’s photographs from the Fall of 1953 are the only photographs in this exhibit that matter. Burroughs by the sphinx, Kerouac on the fire escape, Burroughs lecturing Kerouac on the couch, Burroughs attacking Kerouac with a knife. Call me close-minded but I just do not care about Ginsberg’s late photographs (let’s draw the line at Cherry Valley and beyond) or, in fact, any of the photographs taken of the late Beats, like those by Chris Felver, Mellon Tytell, or Elsa Dorfman. These are publicity stills for the Beat Industry and not compelling photography.  

But those early photographs — I could look at them all day, and I return to them again and again. Viewing them at the National Gallery, it struck me how much I wanted to see the 1953 photographs displayed in the context of the Spy Museum just up the street. In college, I took a course on Communism and Anti-Communism in America taught by Martin Sherwin. Prof. Sherwin wrote a book on the atomic bomb, A World Destroyed, that was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. At the time he was working on a monumental biography of Robert Oppenheimer that would, more than a decade after I graduated, finally win the Pulitzer. I spent the entire semester researching the papers of Darlington Hoopes, Sr., the Socialist candidate for President in 1952 and 1956, who happened to be the grandfather of a friend of mine in high school. For months I read letters discussing whether the Socialist Party should remain a separate entity or fold into the Democratic Party and radicalize it from within. The 1952 Socialist Convention proved to be a classic case study in the pros and cons of a third party, in this case with the added twist of being a Leftist party during the height of the McCarthy Era.

One of my great regrets in college was not taking Prof. Sherwin’s course on “The Camera and the Cold War.” Francis Gary Powers, miniature cameras, surveillance, spies, double agents, microfilm. Whenever I look at Ginsberg’s photographs from the Fall of 1953, I feel that regret even more strongly. What could Prof. Sherwin’s class have told me about these photographs? Because the more I look at them and obsess over them, the more I see them through the lens of the “Camera and the Cold War” and not from the angle of aesthetics and composition. The link between Robert Frank and Ginsberg is not so much the use of the snap shot, but the fact that they were both engaged in “Un-American” activities in the height, and heartland, of the McCarthy 1950s.

In 1953, Ginsberg purchased a portable Retina camera for $13 at a secondhand shop. Shortly thereafter he took the iconic photographs of Burroughs and Kerouac at his East Village apartment. Many articles on the exhibition comment on how portable cameras freed photographers to take pictures on the move. Robert Frank’s The Americans collection is the perfect example of this new form of documentary photography. The portable camera allowed Frank to go on the road. It was only natural that Kerouac wrote the introduction to the Grove Press edition of The Americans. They hit the blacktop with the top down together on a trip to Florida for Life Magazine. Kerouac’s essay, which Life rejected, wasn’t published until Evergreen Review placed it in the January 1970 issue, shortly after Kerouac’s death. The Retina symbolized freedom and movement, the eye and the body in motion. The portable camera dovetailed with an expanding continental highway system and the growing international airline industry to usher in an unprecedented era of tourism. With a robust economy, Americans travelled as never before.

Yet there is a flipside to these liberating aspects of the Retina camera. The Cold War Era saw rapid innovation in the technology of surveillance and spying. The Retina is a more benevolent example of developments that made recording technology small enough to hide (the mini-cameras of the Bond films) or powerful enough to capture images at long distances (the aerial photography undertaken by pilots like Francis Gary Powers). Cold War paranoia coupled with improved technology, like the Retina, made it possible to record and to monitor the entire population. The Orwellian concept of an omniscient Big Brother (and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World before that) began in the 1950s to morph into the Pynchonian world of paranoia, mass consumerism, mass media, and popular culture.  

The American tourist with his Retina camera is a stock figure in Cold War mythology. Burroughs wrote repeatedly of such Ugly Americans who were in fact spies and agents. In the May 1966 special issue of Esquire dedicated to Spying, Science and Sex, which features an interview with Francis Gary Powers, Burroughs appears with just such a story: “They Do Not Always Remember.” Burroughs himself queered this Cold War cliché — the Ugly American as el Hombre Invisible. In 1953 during his trips throughout Central and South America, Burroughs was a counter-agent working, as we will see, in support of a psychedelic revolution.

Ginsberg’s photographs from the Fall of 1953 must be viewed in the context of Cold War technology and history as much as post-WWII art, literature, or photography. That year saw the end of the Korean War, the height of the McCarthy Un-American Activity hearings (in October, McCarthy began investigating Communist infiltration of the military, which infuriated President Eisenhower and began McCarthy’s downfall), and CIA-sponsored revolutions in Iran and Guatemala. Yet the event that provides the backdrop for these photographs is the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in July 1953. The execution shook Ginsberg greatly. The figure of Ethel Rosenberg reminded Ginsberg of his mother, Naomi, who took the young Ginsberg to Communist cell meetings and summer camps. These early experiences would filter their way into Ginsberg’s mature poetry, particularly Howl, America, and Kaddish. Shortly before the executions, Ginsberg wrote a brief letter to President Eisenhower (formerly president of Ginsberg’s alma mater Columbia University):

Rosenbergs are pathetic, government will sordid, execution obscene, America caught in crucifixion machine, only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror.

Looking at these 1953 photographs again, I cannot help but see in them in relation to a clandestine Communist cell, such as that of the Rosenbergs or those of Ginsberg’s youth. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, and to a much smaller degree, Corso, were at this time actively engaged in Un-American activities that would, in the next decade, threaten national security as enjoyed by Middle America. Apartment 16 at 206 E. 7th Street was ground zero for the planning of psychedelic, sexual, racial, and literary revolutions, and Ginsberg’s photos document this counter-culture cell in action.

When Burroughs arrived at Ginsberg’s apartment in September 1953, he had just finished months of exploration in Central and South America searching for the “final fix”: Yage. As Oliver Harris writes in his introduction to The Yage Letters Redux, the Soviets and the CIA were drawn to the same geographic territory in the hope of developing mind-control drugs for the Cold War effort. Burroughs’ letters speak of his brushes with these spooks as much as with brujos. On April 13, 1953 as Burroughs travelled with Richard Evans Schultes, “the father of ‘ethnobotany’ who oversaw the birth of ‘ethnopsychopharmacology’”, CIA director Allen Dulles authorized MK-Ultra, a top-secret program designed to investigate LSD and other hallucinogens as psychological weapons.  

Yet simultaneously with these CIA investigations, counter-intelligence was being gathered, by Burroughs and others, to promote psychedelics as mind-expanding. In 1954, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception was published, and in May 1957, W. Gordon Wasson’s article, “Seeking the Magic Mushrooms,” would appear in the pages of Life. These publications served as the portal into psychedelics for countless astronauts of innerspace in the 1960s, including Timothy Leary. In the Fall of 1953, Ginsberg and Burroughs were pioneers in the upcoming psychedelic revolution. When The Yage Letters was published a decade later, the doors of perception were blown clean off the jambs, as Kesey and the Merry Pranksters began their journey across America as the Johnny Appleseeds of Acid. Global drug tourism to places like the Amazon and Tangier would threaten to become an epidemic.  

Throughout the Cold War Era, homosexuality was considered an Un-American activity, an assault on traditional family values and part of the Communist threat as detailed in books such as David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. In 1953, Allen Ginsberg was an undercover agent in the upcoming sexual revolution and the development of gay rights. Questioning his sexuality, Ginsberg donned a grey flannel suit and worked as a copyboy at the New York World-Telegram and as an analyst with George Fine Market Research. Ginsberg had an on-again, off-again relationship with Dusty Moreland, to whom Ginsberg proposed marriage in 1952. Interestingly in October 1952, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspan wrote an article that Joseph McCarthy himself was a homosexual. Advised against a libel lawsuit, McCarthy soon married his secretary Jeannie Kerr and adopted a baby girl.  

Upon Burroughs’ arrival, he and Ginsberg initiated a sexual relationship that had been developing for years. The key photograph in this context is that of Burroughs lying in bed in Ginsberg’s apartment. The key text is Burroughs’ Queer manuscript, which Burroughs and Ginsberg edited with thoughts of publication. Ginsberg would ultimately reject Burroughs’ “ugly, old cock,” but the experience would send Ginsberg on the road through Mexico on a journey of self-exploration. This journey would end in San Francisco, where Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky and found a degree of peace with his sexuality. From this time forward, Ginsberg was a gay activist. In 1969, gay activism turn militant at The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, just across town from where Ginsberg and Burroughs lived and worked together on the manuscript for Queer.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights activists and groups were linked by their opponents, such as J. Edgar Hoover, to the Communist Party and portrayed as Un-American — Martin Luther King, Jr., who was wire-tapped in 1963 in support of such investigations, being the most famous example. Freedom Riders were called not merely “nigger lovers,” but also “pinkos.” Mississippi Congressman John William Bell stated that the Freedom Riders were “part of a Communist conspiracy to destroy America” in the June 1961 issue of Citizens’ Counsel. The key photograph in this context is that of Alene Lee and William Burroughs on the roof of Ginsberg’s apartment building. Lee helped type up Burroughs’ manuscripts and dated Jack Kerouac. Lee lived down the street at Avenue A and 11th Street: Paradise Alley. The relationship would soon founder over Kerouac’s inability to handle the complexities of an interracial relationship. The failed affair became immortalized in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, with Lee re-written as Mardou Fox.  

I do not want to sugarcoat the racist implications of Kerouac’s concept of the Fellaheen or of the other Beats’ similar infatuation with myths of racial primitivism and sexual potency, but it cannot be denied that the Beat Generation’s love affair with African America culture helped usher in the coming era of civil rights activism. Kerouac’s relationship with Lee highlights the complex and conflicted nature of white society’s fascination with African-American culture. Yet for thousands of white civil rights activists in 1960s, the Beats were their initiation into an atmosphere of racial tolerance and respect for cultural Others. For example, Ed Sanders read Howl while living in the American heartland, and immediately realized he wanted to experience the more diverse urban world described in Ginsberg’s poem. Upon his arrival in New York and following Ginsberg’s example, Sanders became a peace and civil rights activist. 

At the 1960 Republican National Convention, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told the packed house that the three biggest threats to national security were Communists, eggheads and beatniks. In his relentless search for the communist threat, Joseph McCarthy attacked the libraries. In 1953, McCarthy listed 30,000 books by “communists, pro-communists, former communists and anti anti-communists” in the Overseas Library Program. Such was McCarthy’s power that once the list was published the books were pulled.  

The key photograph is that of Burroughs standing in the Egyptian wing of the Museum of Modern Art. In the introduction to The Secret of Fascination, Oliver Harris analyzes the importance of this image. There is another symbolic meaning: the revolutionary casing his target. In 1953, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac took their war on the literary Establishment to a new level, stepped up their efforts to get published, and dreamed of being included in the canon of American Literature. Public awareness of the Beat Generation began around the time of this photograph. A year earlier, John Clellon Holmes wrote an article for New York Times Magazine entitled “This is the Beat Generation.” Early Beat books, such as Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness and Holmes’ Go were published that year. Kerouac matured as a writer a year earlier in 1951 with the completion of the On the Road scroll and his literary experimentalism in Visions of Cody. The Fall of 1953 marks Burroughs’ and Ginsberg’s emergence into their literary maturity. In a matter of months Burroughs would expand on the routine form and hallucinatory writing in The Yage Letters to begin creating Naked Lunch, and Ginsberg would write “Siesta in Xbalba” about his trip through Mexico, which would lead to Howl. Ginsberg’s photographs capture the emergence of a literary revolution. As time passed, the honors and accolades piled up. Ginsberg won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1983, Burroughs entered the Academy. The Modern Library listed On the Road as one of the best books of the century. In 2010, the photograph of Burroughs in the Museum of Modern Art infiltrates the National Gallery. The museum is crawling with agents and the canon has been compromised.

What does it mean for Ginsberg’s photographs, particularly the ones from 1953, to be presented in the National Gallery? It gets right back to the issue I examined in my paper on Darlington Hoopes and the 1952 Socialist Party Convention. The assimilation of Ginsberg’s photography into the collective American memory and the presentation of these images in aesthetic terms of composition and artistic influence, drain them of their oppositional political context. What was in fact documentation of the Beats’ Un-American activity becomes the representation of a triumphant, unifying American art and culture. How can counter-cultural art and literature maintain their oppositional stance? One response is to remain separate from the mainstream institutions of the museum, the corporate publishing industry, and the gallery system. But as Pynchon suggests, in a world of mass media and mass consumerism yoked to a system of global capitalism, there is no outside.

On the other hand, it can be argued that the only way to change the system is from within. Instead of being merely assimilated and absorbed, Ginsberg’s photographs infect and infiltrate the entire museum. As was pointed out in the forum, an image of Burroughs stands watch outside of the National Gallery. The tables have been turned. William Burroughs as Big Brother. In this view it can be argued that the psychedelic, sexual, racial, and literary revolutions that Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac mapped out in the Fall of 1953 increasingly reflect the United States we live in today. Mission accomplished.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Beat Studies Association webpage has made available many of the papers from the Beat Generation Symposium (October 10-11, 2008) at Columbia College in Chicago. Kudos to The Beat Studies Association for putting the papers online. The Association was formed in 2004 to encourage scholarship on the Beat Generation. Scholars, teachers, and student are encouraged to join. Yet there are plenty of interested parties who fall under none of those three categories. In the past, papers like the ones given at the Columbia Symposium would have been distributed to a small circle and would have remained unavailable to those outside the industry (academic scholarship, particularly Beat scholarship is without a doubt an industry). On occasion, such papers might have been collected into book form and published by an academic press. Such was the case with Beat Culture: The 1950s and Beyond. This book contains papers presented at the 1998 Middelburg Beat Conference which are much like those found on the Beat Studies Association website. If you were a scholar, teacher or student, hopefully your institutional library had a copy or could interlibrary loan it and you were good to go. If you were unaffiliated with an institution, getting the book proves to be a pain in the ass and in the pocketbook. The book is not that common (four copies on Abebooks) and it is expensive. Copies on Amazon range from $90-150. Three of the four copies on Abebooks are $135. This is a perfect example of the shortcomings of the academic publishing / distribution system.

Here is another. I recently read Mark Scroggins’ biography of Louis Zukofsky. Once I finished the book I wanted to get a copy of the complete A, which was last published by Wesleyan University in 1993. Well, it is out of print and copies are now $100-150 online. Therefore the key text by one of the major poets of the 20th century, a poet whose reputation and readership is on the rise, remains essentially unavailable. There has to be a better way of disseminating scholarly material, as well as experimental poems and novels, than the academic press.

Yet it is not all the fault of an out-of-date publishing apparatus. The rare book market is a major problem as well. Years ago literary criticism was considered the equivalent of a loss leader by book dealers and book scouts. This section of a bookstore was largely unexplored and unmanaged. It was a good place to find titles that were prohibitively expensive from an academic publisher. Literary criticism, particularly if published by a university press, is an area that has been radically changed by internet bookselling. Books once found on the shelves of brick and mortar stores for cheaper than the published price are now being priced like collectibles. The Zukofsky is a case in point. The Wesleyan edition of A is over $100 but for a few dollars more you could buy a signed copy of Zukofsky’s self-published collection Barely and Widely (1958). This is completely out of whack and says something about the expensive after-market for academic titles. Search William Burroughs on Abebooks for books over $30 and see how many of the daily updates are of an academic or critical nature. As I have stated elsewhere, most brick and mortar bookstores price their books based on Abebook listings so the price of these titles are on the rise everywhere. The availability and affordability of academic titles becomes more problematic than ever before.

Therefore, despite whatever you think of the readability of the papers on the Beat Studies Association’s website, the mere fact that they are there and that anyone can read them is a big deal. It marks an ideological shift by the academic industry in regards to publication and distribution. I want to single out two of the papers in particular because they involve what I have been touching on thus far.

Kerouac and His Critics

I took a class on the Beat Generation with Prof. Ronna Johnson when I was in college, and it was an eye-opener for me. I had been reading the Beats for two to three years by then, and I knew the major texts and the general Beat history. What was great about Prof. Johnson’s class was that it got me off of the beaten path. Prof. Johnson specializes in the women of the Beat Generation, and she is one of the pioneers in expanding the Beat canon and making the creative work of forgotten figures like Elise Cowen available as well as developing the critical approaches to neglected Beat work. I was introduced to Diane Di Prima, Anne Waldman, Elise Cowen, Janine Pommy Vega, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Cohen, Brenda Frazer and others by Prof. Johnson. Her class also centered on Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, and Bob Kaufman. In addressing the major Beat figures (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs), she focused on secondary texts like The Yage Letters and The Subterraneans. She did what, in my experience, all great teachers do — she put me in contact with books and ideas I knew nothing about. In addition, her office was often open if you chose to wander in. It was all about availability and access. Prof. Johnson made herself and her knowledge available.

Given that availability and access are the keys to scholarship and teaching, Prof. Johnson’s paper on Kerouac criticism in the 1980s seems misguided to me. The paper opens with Johnson recounting her optimism for a renaissance in Beat criticism in the early 1980s on the heels of work by Tim Hunt and others. Unfortunately the glass turned half empty as the 1980s wore on, and Beat criticism, in Johnson’s view, was taken over by mythographers, hagiographers, cronies, and fans. Johnson concludes her essay, “This raises issues of reception that anticipate by 25 years Wikipedia and wiki communities, which are ruled by the democratizing view that anyone — read: including rank amateurs or fans — is fit to collect, present, and edit materials said to constitute ‘knowledge.’ My study of Kerouac’s reception is titled ‘Inventing Jack Kerouac,’ and it is this sort of amateur construction of Kerouac erected in the 1980s by the pre-wiki community that encourages my impression that Kerouac’s reception in this period had been, overall, a matter not of evaluation but of pure wishful projective invention — an invention of the Everyman’s Kerouac, literally.” This paper is part of a larger project so I do not know how her argument develops but the paper’s closing words capture the insularity and isolation that dogs the academic community. Academics with this mentality would rather talk and listen to themselves than come in contact with the larger public. This is the academy of jargon, theory for the sake of theory, and tenure track posturing. In such a world, the academic press is used to pad resumes not circulate information. Hopefully this is a world in decline. The recent action of The Beat Studies Association, of which Prof. Johnson is a founding member, provides optimism for a more open future.

Prof. Johnson surely knows the valuable role that collectors and academic outsiders have played in the development of Beat scholarship. First of all, collectors sponsored many of the small presses and little magazines that published the Beats, and their collections formed the basis for many bibliographies and institutional holdings (like Robert Jackson’s gathering of the Burroughs archive, although his policy of providing access to the archive while in his possession was far from ideal). In many cases, collectors are in fact fans and rank amateurs. Secondly, publications like The Beat Road (and all of Kit and Arthur Knight’s publications), The Moody Street Irregulars, The Kerouac Connection, and Beat Scene, which were / are considered outside of the academic arena, did critical legwork in establishing the foundations of Beat criticism. They gathered interviews, researched bibliographies, published unavailable letters and forgotten works, and printed little-seen photographs. Historically, Beat criticism is outsider criticism from the pioneering work of Warren Tallman and Eric Mottram onwards. These men utilized both academic and non-academic venues to further their research.

But even the value of the collector, fan, and amateur is beside the point. In fact the main reason there was no renaissance in Kerouac and other Beat criticism in the 1980s has little to do with the hijacking of the industry by hangers-on and outsiders. The fault lies squarely with the insiders, that is the controllers of the estates and archives. This is particularly true in the case of Kerouac. The reason hagiography and memoir dominated Kerouac criticism was largely because nobody could get access to key manuscripts and letters and if a scholar did, his work was closely monitored and controlled. There was a closed door policy, a door protected by a velvet rope and a doorman that led to a smoky backroom in which decisions regarding Kerouac’s legacy were made in secrecy. Information did not flow openly. Therefore those with personal recollections filled a void in providing information even if the information provided was largely mythic in nature. Unlike the Kerouac Estate, the fans and rank amateurs were accessible and available.
Prof. Johnson does not focus on the conduct of the Kerouac Estate in her paper (maybe she does in her book), but clearly the Estate got the type of criticism that it encouraged and deserved. The hiring of official biographers, the restricting of access to archives, the mismanaging of those archives with a mind to immediate monetary gain and not intellectual gain (in my opinion intellectual / informational capital in the long run generates financial capital, and it seems those handling the Kerouac Archive are just now realizing this basic fact even though we are decades into the Information Age) leads to a criticism that generates myth and the academic equivalent of barroom storytelling.

The Beats deserve better. They kept meticulous archives, and hoards of material are there for willing and able researchers (professional and non-professional). The Beats, particularly Ginsberg and Kerouac, encouraged scholars to utilize their archives in their lifetime. Kerouac’s participation and openness was crucial to Ann Charters’ landmark studies. Ginsberg more than anyone knew that restricting access to information (and thus encouraging misinformation) was crucial to furthering the United States’ repressive policies, paranoia politics, and abuse of power. Similarly Burroughs warned that such practices assisted the agents of control. As Prof. Johnson knows, the stunted state of Beat scholarship is the result of stunted availability and access. A host of post-WWII writers suffer / suffered a similar fate (Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky come to mind).

The second essay of note on the Beat Studies Association website suggests the future of Beat criticism in an era of more open access and availability. John Bryant’s paper, “Visions of Jack/Versions of Jack: Toward a Digital Fluid Text Edition of Kerouac,” can be read as a manifesto for Beat scholarship. Bryant’s view of a digital On the Road is the translation of the concepts of legendary scholars like Jerome McGann to Beat criticism. Interestingly Bryant is a textual scholar of Herman Melville; McGann also specializes in 19th Century material. Other 19th Century writers like Emily Dickinson have benefitted from scholarship of this type. The requirement for this level of academic rigor is access and availability. Bryant closes his paper, “Kerouac scholarship is on the threshold of its own Revival. With the Kerouac archive now available, scholars must work to make these documents accessible to everyone, but in ways that will allow them to witness Kerouac’s vast book. Textual scholars, digital scholars, students of revision, lovers Kerouac, and lovers of language: it is time, you angels, to cross the threshold and get on the road.” There is a spirit of openness and inclusion here that is missing from Prof. Johnson’s paper. Hopefully the future of scholarship is with Bryant’s angels, professional and non-professional.

The Madame Bovary Project provides a model for similar Beat projects. Drafts of Flaubert’s masterpiece have found their way online due to the combined effort of 650 volunteers, including a teenager, an oil worker and a cleaning lady. All interested parties, professional or not, have a role to play in the furtherance of such scholarship. Something similar could be developed for On the Road. The main goal of scholarship should not be tenure and promotions obtained through navigating the traditional academic venues. This is merely another form of the corporate ladder. Beat scholars need to generate intellectual capital through all the available venues, high and low, popular and academic. This will engender profit (intellectually, occupationally, and hopefully financially) for the scholars, the general readers and more importantly for the writers themselves (or their Estates).

Another model of open access is the creation of a journal dedicated to Beat archives. Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives which ran for 10 issues under the guidance of George F. Butterick with the support of the University of Connecticut is one prominent example of such a publication. Important works, like Maud’s study of Olson’s reading, were cultivated in Olson and eventually developed into fuller works of criticism. Olson Studies borders on the fanatical. Personally I would like to see some of that obsessiveness, particularly to textual details, carried over to Beat scholarship. Oliver Harris possesses this level of fanaticism, er, fascination. Not surprisingly, he is at the cutting edge of Beat criticism. So what is the possibility of the publication of Word Hoard: A Journal of the Archives under the editorial eye of Harris and with the full cooperation of the New York Public Library under Isaac Gewirtz? This could be a print or online publication. There is clearly enough unpublished material for such a project. The rare book market for detailed literary studies and texts like A coupled with the demand for collected works of poets ranging from Joanne Kyger to Philip Whalen to Jack Spicer (I hear the Spicer has already been reprinted) suggests there is an audience. Burroughs’ unpublished letters and cut-up manuscripts alone would fill several issues of Word Hoard. I would love to see a reprint of an unpublished cut-up accompanied by an essay describing its genesis and significance to Burroughs and the larger literary scene.

Devotional Criticism

In any case who is to say that professional academics are the best qualified to broker the critical reputations of the authors and poets they write about? Robert Duncan clearly did not think so, and he said as much in his much talked about but little read work of scholarship, The HD Book. The most enlightening and most informed books of criticism that I have read lately have been written by poets, like Duncan. Such works provide insight into the subject under analysis while also serving as a passionate statement of personal poetics. Literary criticism as creative work. There are few peers to D.H. Lawrence’s Classic Studies in American Literature, William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. I have yet to read the Finnegan’s Wake of creative criticism, Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare.

Creative or devotional criticism seems to be a dying art nowadays. This is probably because in recent decades poets are merely the flip side of the traditional university-based academic, who is in turn the flip side of the corporate employee. Like today’s children who have all their activities planned and organized, today’s workshop poets largely find their mentors and influences within an academic classroom / institutional setting, not the salon, print shop, bookstore, art gallery, barroom, or non-academically affiliated reading. What happened to gathering a bunch of kids from the neighborhood and playing ball for the fun of it (and without coaches and umpires)? What happened to getting dirty and using your imagination? What happened to making your own games and toys? Today’s poets and writers prefer to stay inside and do the equivalent of playing video games.

I just finished reading Duncan’s The HD Book, and I just bought a copy of Zukofsky’s Bottom’ On Shakespeare (thankfully still in print from Wesleyan). This got me thinking about Burroughs and creative criticism. I have never felt that Burroughs had much of a critical mind. His collection of essays, The Adding Machine, is far from his best writing and is rather undistinguished. Burroughs’ essays are for the most part undeveloped and shallow. His lectures, as recorded by Naropa, are similarly lacking in depth and complexity. They are interesting because they are by Burroughs, but they do not stand on their own merits. I don’t think Burroughs’ heart was in it.

Charles Olson on the other hand seems to me to possess a fascinating (if scattered) critical mind. Maybe this strikes me because Olson wore his learning on his sleeve and was so ostentatious about his scholarship. Olson was a talker. Burroughs never was. Burroughs played his learning much closer to the vest. Did Burroughs have it in him, could he have written (or maybe more importantly would have wanted to write) a work like Call Me Ishmael? Clearly Brion Gysin would be the subject. Well, in fact, Burroughs on a small scale did just that. Burroughs wrote an essay on Gysin entitled “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” which was published in Yugen 8. The essay closes with a fold-in cut-up that enacts the very techniques that Burroughs attributes to and discusses in regard to Gysin. This is very much in keeping with the style of creative criticism as practiced by writers like Olson and Howe. As such, Burroughs’ essay is a piece of creative writing that elucidates its subject while simultaneously shedding light on Burroughs’ own literary obsessions and techniques.

Personally I would have liked to see Burroughs complete a work like Time or APO-33 dedicated to examining the work of Gysin: a merging of text and image that critically addressed Gysin’s painting, his novels, and the cut-up and then in turn provided insight into Burroughs’ own work and how Gysin’s output influenced Burroughs. Burroughs sought to write just this book: the aborted The Third Mind project as proposed to Grove Press in the late 1960s. I have discussed this project elsewhere, but never before considered it as a work of creative criticism on par with Call Me Ishmael or The HD Book. In fact as planned it would have been one step beyond those studies as Burroughs and Gysin hoped the book would be an art book as much as a critical work. The failure of the full Third Mind project is one of the great losses to Burroughs’ legacy. The completion of the project would have radically altered Burroughs’ reputation and reception.

The itinerary for the New York festivities surrounding Naked Lunch states that there will be a talk discussing Burroughs’ heirs. This got me to thinking about who could have written a work of creative criticism about Burroughs. I brush aside those writers who are heirs in terms of subject matter, like Irvine Welsh or Dennis Cooper. It is more interesting to me to consider those writers who incorporated Burroughs’ literary techniques, particularly the cut-up. The question is then not who writes about the Burroughsian but who writes in a Burroughsian manner. Who carries on Burroughs’ exploration of language? Who similarly challenges the tradition of the novel and the concept of the book? This is a short list indeed and gets to the heart of question about the extent of Burroughs’ literary influence. He might in fact be more influential in cinema or music than in literature.

In any case, the artist that jumps to my mind is little known to many: Tom Phillips. Phillips is a visual artist who created an ongoing project entitled A Humument. A Humument is a treated book based on the Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Phillips began the project in 1966, and it is a matter of public record that he got his idea for A Humument after he encountered the cut-ups of Burroughs. The idea of Phillips considering a work of creative criticism on Burroughs appeals to me since I see so much of Burroughs’ achievement as not just textual but also visual. So in a sense Phillips would not merely write a book on Burroughs he would create an art object that comments critically on Burroughs. Creative criticism as artist’s book. The simplest idea in this line would be a work like A Humument enacted on one of Burroughs’ own novels. It is interesting to think just which book Phillips would choose to use as a canvas and to consider just what themes and images would develop from a treated Burroughs novel.

There is also the work of Crispin Glover. Glover, the actor who starred in Charlie’s Angels and Back to the Future, creates books, such as Rat Catching, that are similar to those of Phillips. Glover merges the Burroughsian in subject matter and technique. In fact, Glover reminds me much of Burroughs physically. Is it a stretch to see the Creepy Thin Man from Charlie’s Angels as El Hombre Invisible as superhero? In addition to being an actor and an author, Glover has directed experimental films and released various concept albums. The wide range of his abilities parallels Burroughs’. Possibly these interests, many of which contain Burroughsian elements, would give him unique insight into Burroughs. It is interesting to consider what would result if Glover attempted a work of creative criticism as experimental art film/documentary.

Could Ted Berrigan have written a devotional book on Burroughs had he the inclination? It is a personal belief of mine that Berrigan’s The Sonnets owes much of its inspiration to Burroughs’ cut-up technique. The inspiration would not have come from the cut-up novels so much as the cut-up poetry. The key texts are Minutes to Go, The Exterminator and particularly collaborations in Locus Solus II (brief as they are). Throughout the 1960s Burroughs was as much a poet as a novelist, and Berrigan was uniquely qualified to comment on Burroughs in this light. I suspect that Berrigan, like Burroughs, lacked the inclination to produce a critical work on the level of Olson or Duncan, but Berrigan’s approach to the poem in terms of collage, recycling, and serial composition are very similar to Burroughs’. I would read with great interest Berrigan discussing Burroughs’ poetics which dovetail so well with his own. What could Berrigan have done with a serial poem that utilized source material from Burroughs’ work while at the same time commenting on key Burroughsian issues like originality, plagiarism, or repetition?

No discussion of Burroughs’ influence would be complete without mention of Carl Weissner. The more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that Weissner would be the ideal man to write a work of creative criticism on Burroughs. First of all, nobody knows Burroughs’ work more completely and from more perspectives than Weissner. Weissner acted as Burroughs’ editor such as when he published Burroughs in Klactoveedsedsteen, and he was Burroughs’ primary German translator for decades. Weissner has whole passages at his fingertips. He knows not only the words but also how Burroughs constructed and structured his novels. Weissner also knows and shares Burroughs’ obsessions and sources. To be a translator requires not just great skill on a creative level but also a keen critical mind. Weissner is one of the foremost practitioners of the cut-up, and when Burroughs scaled back the technique Weissner pushed it forward. This goes beyond the level of text. Weissner made audio and video experiments as well. I can think of nobody more uniquely suited to the task of revealing Burroughs’ work while simultaneously telling about his own creative process than Weissner. And that is the essence of creative criticism.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

On the flipside of the men’s magazine is the fashion magazine. The porno industry represents the seedy underbelly of the seemingly glamorous fashion industry. Both worlds expressed an interest in the Beats in the 1950s and 1960s. In her landmark memoir, Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend when On the Road was published, describes how she first came into contact with the image of Kerouac through the pages of Mademoiselle. The magazine printed a picture of Kerouac that was then used in several print advertisements for On the Road. The ad is reprinted in Matt Theado’s The Beats: A Literary Reference. If you are going to get Johnson’s book, go get Theado’s as well. It is a treasure trove of source material on the Beats: reprints of manuscripts, letters, magazine articles and book reviews.

Mademoiselle separated itself from the competition by marketing itself to a collegiate audience. Until November 2001, scores of young women learned about what was new in fashion, art, and culture in the pages of Mademoiselle. On reading about Kerouac and the Beats in its pages, Johnson writes, “Thus several thousand young women between fourteen and twenty-five were given a map to a revolution.” This played into the deepest fears of Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. Surely some of those girls who flocked to North Beach and the Village clutching their Mademoiselles and On the Roads later found themselves in the pages of Swank. There are lots of casualties in a revolution, sexual or otherwise. Minor Characters makes this clear as does Hettie Jones’ How I Became Hettie Jones and Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life As A Woman.

Mademoiselle jumped on the Beat bandwagon early. In the mid-1950s, the magazine was publishing poems by Gregory Corso from The Vestal Lady of the Brattle, before City Lights published Gasoline. The Beats continued to be regular fodder for Mademoiselle once the Beats became mainstream news. Mademoiselle‘s early discovery of Corso is not as surprising as it seems. There is a long tradition of fashion magazines latching on to avant-garde / countercultural movements, particularly in the realm of art. This partnership became very public when the Surrealists hit American shores in the 1930s and 1940s. Dali and his art appeared in fashion magazines. Dali even designed a shop window for Bonwit Teller department store. A Dada-cum-Surrealist like Man Ray blurred the lines between high art and high fashion. Clearly this cross-pollination had been an aspect of modern art long before photographer Cecil Beaton famously posed models in front of Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm for Vogue in 1951. Pop Art made such distinctions a joke. In a fashion shoot for Life, a Warhol screen test of Ivy Nicholson was projected on her as she modeled the latest “Underground Clothes.”

The world of fashion (and later the world of art) is / was driven by the shock of the new. In the 1950s, the Beats were new. A literary avant-garde to be exploited. Yet the Beats gave as good as they got. A fashion mag, like Mademoiselle, was a source of income. Ginsberg, the publicist for the Beats, played all the angles to milk the squares for cash. Gregory Corso was a master of the practice. In letters from the mid-1950s, Corso expresses his amazement that he conned Mademoiselle for $25 for his poems. In a letter from late 1959, Burroughs writes Ginsberg about just how welcome the check for his contribution to Mademoiselle was. In the 1950s, twenty-five dollars was easily a month’s rent.

Ginsberg got Burroughs into the pages of the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle. The theme of the article and the magazine as a whole was a compendium of the young stars of tomorrow commenting on the dawning of a new decade. The symposium in which Burroughs appears is entitled “Quo Vadis” and was billed as “7 Young Voices Speak Up to the 60s.” The presentation of Burroughs’ as a young voice representative of his generation is therefore an example of Ginsberg successfully putting one over on the mainstream media. Burroughs was far from young (he was 45 at the time), but he was new. I would guess that Ginsberg sold him to Mademoiselle on the basis of his appearance in the November 30, 1959 issue of Life. In “The Only Rebellion in Town,” Paul O’Neil lambasts the Beats, but Burroughs comes out of it rather well. His talent as an author is grudgingly acknowledged. It is a case of hedging your bets about that in which you have absolutely no understanding. You do not want to look the fool later on. It probably helped that Burroughs was in Paris and that Naked Lunch was published there. At the time, Paris was the center of fashion. One of the shifts of the Sixties would be the displacement of Paris from that pedestal.

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lorraine Hainsberry, Christopher Logue, Norman Podhoretz, Francois Truffaut and John Wain comprised the panel of young voices. Logue, Podhoretz, and Wain all had ties to the Beats. Logue was a member of the Merlin Group who discovered Samuel Beckett and worked with Olympia Press to print Beckett, Genet, and others as well as original dirty books written by Merlin members. Podhoretz wrote one of the most famous attacks on the Beats, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” for Partisan Review in the Spring of 1958. Podhoretz was a classmate of Ginsberg at Columbia and, no doubt, his conclusions in that article stem from his intimate knowledge of the events surrounding Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs from 1944 to 1949 at the University. Wain was a key member of the Angry Young Men in England. Wain appeared in a joint anthology of the Beats and the Angries published by Citadel Press in 1958 in which Burroughs appeared under the name William Lee.

It is a remarkable collection of individuals, but Burroughs stands out. Given that in January 1960 few people in the United States could actually get a hold of anything by Burroughs in print, this piece in Mademoiselle might have been many readers’ first encounter with Burroughs’ writing. Mademoiselle printed a picture of Burroughs in the page providing biographies of the panel. He is the only one so pictured. This highlights what a man of mystery he was at the time. He was notorious as the picture makes clear. The word “danger” — printed on a fence — looms ominously behind him. Life provided the back story and the first photographs; Mademoiselle provided a text.

And what a text (posted here in its entirety). Burroughs’ contribution leads off the symposium. Although Gysin had discovered the cut-up by January 1960, Burroughs does not utilize it here. This is Burroughs in pure carny mode a la the Atrophied Preface and the Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness. Young female readers, like Joyce Johnson, must have been left scratching their heads. The piece is full of drug references, such as China Boy and yen pox. The trope of horse racing taps into drug slang for heroin. Ginsberg’s piece builds off all this hip drug jargon. When asked about the Sixties, he opens by writing, “Everybody should get high for the next ten years.” Burroughs predicted a decade of mass consumerism and drug use, which was not far off the mark. Add to this Ginsberg’s call to “let’s blow up America — a false America’s been getting in the way of realization of Beauty — let’s all get high on the Soul” and you have a pretty good idea of what to expect in the decade ahead.

So the future of the 1960s was clearly laid out in the dying embers of the 1950s. The Silent Decade was far from it, and the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit was wearing Day-Glo underwear. Peace and love. Sex and drugs. Youth and Revolution. And where was this all this going to take place. A reader of Mademoiselle knew that, too. The University of California at Berkeley. What became Ground Zero for student revolt was the featured University in the Colleges and Careers section. Things may have been a little sleepy there in January 1960, but change was in the air. How did Mademoiselle know? Joan Didion told them. She wrote the article on Berkeley. She oughta know. She went on to write the book on the Sixties twice: The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Not much better has been written on the subject. Pick up a copy if you can. 

Birmingham University, 12-13 December 2008

by Oliver Harris

The Birmingham conference came a year too late for the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road‘s first American publication, but arrived conveniently on time for its fitieth British publication — a handy delay, because it allowed discussion to focus on the appearance of last year’s highly controversial On the Road: the Original Scroll, while the “scroll” manuscript itself was on display at the nearby Barber Institute. In Kerouac circles, this is the hot issue.

Only one panel out of the eight specifically dealt with manuscript issues, but all four plenary addresses did. This was not surprising given that the established Kerouac field of scholars were all bypassed when the “scroll” edition was commissioned, edited, and assembled for publication. What happened begs the question of ownership — from John Sampas who inherited the Kerouac Estate to Jim Irsay who paid $2.4 million for the “scroll,” from the library archivists who control access to his manuscripts to the academic experts who build their careers on Kerouac, and the thousands of readers and fans. Everyone thinks they own a piece of Jack. Not surprisingly my sympathies are with the scholars. Driven by the force of our private obsessions, trapped by professional obligations, and beholden to the institutions that hold all the cards, we’re always in danger of replaying the scenario of Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, whose unnamed narrator loses himself utterly in the vain search for a dead writer’s lost secrets. 

Matt Theado has been doing the most important scholarship lately, and seems happily to have escaped the fate of James’ literary detective. In an easygoing and engaging opening address, he gave a clear account of the complex history of Kerouac’s Road manuscripts as a useful context to the editing of the “scroll.” The second plenary speaker, Jim Canary, told the inside story on how the famous manuscript has been preserved and displayed. I was intrigued to learn how useful the inner bark of a mulberry tree is for gluing in the mends he has to make, and how he takes the scroll through airport security contained in a metal box stamped with the logo of the fast food chain, Jack in the Box. There were less jokes in the third plenary, delivered by Tim Hunt, but it was the most intellectually stimulating, combining close comparative analysis of the “scroll” and Viking editions of On the Road with a compelling argument for how Kerouac used the typewriter as a recording technology. 

The fourth and final plenary gave me the last word at the conference, but by this point I’d come to feel that Burroughs’ presence was not a marginal afterthought but absolutely right, and not just from the point of view of critical leverage. For Burroughs seemed to have left signs for me all over Birmingham. That the table marker in the local pub was number 23 came as no surprise. But how would you feel to find flyers and banners posted on every phone box and street corner advertising the end-of-term student Christmas party called, with perfect synchronicity, . . . NAKED LUNCH. 

Birmingham, 5 December 2008

by Oliver Harris

Carolyn Cassady shudders and says the same thing she did the last time we met, “Burroughs? That degenerate…” Actually, it’s an effort to disguise my satisfaction at this put down. After all, I’m here at the Barber Institute as the Burroughsian outsider to the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s “scroll” manuscript of On the Road, party-pooper for the inevitable Kerouac love-in. Except that it doesn’t quite work out this way because everybody is too nice to diss as, uh, too nice… and Carolyn Cassady is no exception. She is soon dragging me outside to share a cigarette and gossip about the fame that destroyed Jack’s life and the film that “ruined” the story of hers (Heartbeat), all carried off with her trademark cool grace and style. As the private view’s guest of honour, her presence anchors the manuscripts and memorabilia on display and puts in context all the media hype and academic fuss.

The “scroll” itself is upstairs, about twenty feet of it unrolled in a specially constructed display case, at a height that invites the crowd around it to reverentially stoop or bend low. It’s a ritual that’s been repeated, thanks to the generosity of its owner, Jim Irsay, in dozens of locations around the US and now Europe. But it’s a strange experience: I’m well used to poring over manuscripts, scrutinizing the tiniest trackmarks of pencil or ink, squinting to read through cancelled lines of type — but always in silent and solitary concentration. In a public space, my self-consciousness is awkward and I find myself looking instead at the posters and maps on the walls and the first editions and small collection of jazz records (Artie Shaw, Glen Miller, George Shearing) in glass display cases. I inspect the Underwood Portable (4B) typewriter, the same model used by Kerouac, and cast a last glance back at the “scroll.” Through the throng of onlookers, it seems to gaze back at me, less holy relic than big cat or great ape in a zoo cage…

Among the guests downstairs is Jim Canary, the “scrollmeister” conservator from the Lilly Library, Indiana, who goes wherever the “scroll” manuscript goes. I warm to him immediately, his delightful smile radiating above a full white beard. Imagine Robin Williams playing Santa. And then there’s Kerouac scholar and aficionado supreme, Dave Moore, who contributed important editions and objects from his own collection to the exhibit. In among the crowds I start up a conversation with a striking young woman from Denver who turns out to be Stefanie Posavec. Her extraordinary visualisations of On the Road are on the walls upstairs, and we discuss her work as an in-house designer at Penguin UK, where she was responsible for the hardcover of the Burroughs-Kerouac collaboration, And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, published the previous month. Meanwhile, Professor Dick Ellis — the mastermind behind the whole project — is introducing Michael Horovitz, veteran of the British poetry scene, whose particular interest for me is that he published sections of Naked Lunch in the debut issue of his New Departures magazine when still a student at Oxford in 1959. Horovitz gives a charming reading from various short Kerouac texts, then Carolyn Cassady gives her blessing to proceedings, and the evening closes with four Kerouac songs composed by Steven Taylor and performed by a choir of university students. As a finale, it’s eerily beautiful but somehow bizarre, as if, here in the midlands of England, I’ve stumbled across a cargo cult worship of Saint Jack — which in a way I have…

Plenary Address given by Oliver Harris to the Conference ”Kerouac’s On the Road: The Beats and the Post-Beats”

Birmingham University, 13th December 2008

I took it for granted that I was invited here to cause trouble … not that I have a reputation for being difficult or dangerous, but William Burroughs certainly does, and in a tight spot, Burroughs will always hold the upper hand over Kerouac, because he’s got a knife in his.

Still, it could be worse, because Burroughs was wont to use the rope as well as a blade — a routine he famously pulled on Alan Ansen in 1957, bringing to life a scene from Naked Lunch.

Actually, for what follows — which is more focused on the writing than on the writers and is as much to do with collaboration as conflict — the definitive statement of the role Burroughs plays can be summed up in this image:

No prizes for recognising the left side of this diptych; the right half shows a jar of epoxy resin. In it is my punch line. So I will save to the very end revealing its contents.

In the meantime, and by way of an introduction, I want to prepare the ground by highlighting the relation between Kerouac and Burroughs through four key moments in time, three of which belong to a familiar narrative of Beat biography and self-mythologisation.

For the first scene, we have to go back to 1945, when the two men collaborated on the book that was published last month after a wait of over sixty years — And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. This is the period when Burroughs and Kerouac were truly a double act. 

Here we see them acting out in the grounds of Columbia University a scene from Dashiell Hammett, which confirms both their taste for self-dramatisation and the hardboiled detective style in which they wrote about those boiling hippos. Of course, there’s more to it than that — even just in terms of stylistic debts, since I would suggest that the prose rhythm is also informed by a modernist tradition that includes Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil and Joseph March Moncur’s The Wild Party. But I want to make two points of a different kind.

First, if we look through one end of the telescope, Hippos is a fascinating primary document, a major foundational text for the Beat movement and the record of a crucial event in the formation of the Beat circle — well worth the wait. If we look through the other end, however, it’s a minor bit of undistinguished juvenilia that’s only seeing the light of day at all as a cash cow for the Burroughs and Kerouac estates, keen to exploit the endlessly recycled narrative of Beat mythmaking and hagiography. The point is not that we have to choose between these extremes of reverence and cynicism; just that we should recognise both are possible.

And second, Hippos is an important instance of authorial collaboration — important because rare in its own right and because it occurs right at the start of these two writers’ literary careers. In practice, the extent of the collaboration here — writing alternate chapters — is pretty limited; but, as a principle, it’s a significant opening up of the author’s presumed autonomy, the singularly private and solitary act of writing.

Our next scene is prompted by the image of Burroughs besting Kerouac in a fight, which appears on the jacket of the U.S. edition of Hippos. This is historically confusing, however, since the scene takes place not in the mid-1940s, when they wrote Hippos together, but in autumn 1953 in Ginsberg’s lower East Side apartment. 

The image holds a double significance. To start with, the photograph itself is one of a famous series Ginsberg took with his Kodak Retina, an important visual record of the three men and their circle (other important images from this sequence include those of Alene Lee and Gregory Corso). According to Ginsberg, his motive for taking what he called “sacramental” snapshots of his friends was as a means of “recording certain moments in eternity” — a vital element in his commitment to finding the holiness of the mundane — a point I will return to later. 

Second, insofar as literary history is concerned, it was at precisely this time that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs collaborated accidentally to come up with the title “naked lunch.” Now you’ll recall that in the “introduction” to Naked Lunch Burroughs states that the title of his novel wasn’t his: “the title,” he says, “was suggested by Jack Kerouac.” 

Kerouac biographer Ellis Amburn claimed that the title came about in the mid-1940s because Ginsberg “had difficulty deciphering Bill’s hurried handwriting” in the manuscript of And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, and misread the phrase “naked lust” as “naked lunch” — which Kerouac then promptly suggested as a good title for Burroughs to use one day. 

However, Amburn was wrong: the phrase doesn’t turn up in Hippos — or in any of the other manuscript versions I’ve seen — and what Ginsberg misread came from another manuscript — or rather typescript — that Kerouac had also given Burroughs the title for. This was his second novel, Queer, which in fall 1953 Burroughs had just brought back with him to New York, together with the manuscript of what became the first part of The Yage Letters.

Although Amburn’s mistake is misleading — for both the timing and the role of Queer are vital in the genesis of Burroughs’ title — it fortuitously redoubles the significance of collaboration. Ginsberg’s photograph of Burroughs and Kerouac staging a fight marks the origins of Naked Lunch as a collaborative venture between the three writers, prompted by the mistake of Burroughs’ typing and Ginsberg misreading — an accident that Kerouac seized upon as wholly fitting. And indeed it was, since the origins of the title point towards the vital roles that both Kerouac and Ginsberg would play in the complex genesis of the manuscript Burroughs would spend the next six years writing. 

How the title came about is therefore a symbol and prophecy of the decisive role played by chance and the participation of others in the authorship of Burroughs’ great work.

Which brings us to the third scene. This takes place in early Spring 1957, when Kerouac — soon followed by Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Alan Ansen — visits Burroughs in Tangier to help him turn the manuscript of what he then called “Interzone” into what would become Naked Lunch. Like so many Beat stories, this one has been often repeated rather then ever reconsidered.

Although Ginsberg and Ansen concentrated on the organisation of the material — the most urgent task in hand — Kerouac’s involvement in typing up Burroughs’ mess of notes and turning them into a clean manuscript should not be underestimated. He brought something special to this collective effort by way of the same epic typing speed and stamina that had made his scroll Road possible. Famously, typing up Burroughs’ material gave Kerouac the horrors, but his physical labours at the typewriter in the Villa Muniria produced a manuscript that followed the co-authored Hippos (co-authored, but typed up solely by Kerouac) as a precursor to Burroughs’ future engagements with creative collaboration (the cut-up project, the third mind concept, etc.), firmly rooted in the most practical of matters: Burroughs needed the help of others to complete his work. 

Near the end of Desolation Angels, Kerouac has Burroughs explain the origins and purpose of this writing: “I’m shitting out my educated Middlewest background for once and all [...] By the time I finish this book I’ll be pure as an angel, my dear.” (315). These terms — “shitting out” to become “pure as an angel” — are especially relevant to my interests here, but more narrowly the key point is the collaborative act between writers. It’s especially important and deeply poignant too, because this would turn out to be the last time Burroughs and Kerouac had any truly meaningful contact — their intimacy as friends and writers all but over little more than a decade after their co-writing of Hippos.

Many years later, the manuscript Kerouac helped type out, under the title “Interzone,” ended up filed away in the Ginsberg papers at Columbia University. There it had been stored — unrecognized — until it resurfaced in 1984 when Barry Miles discovered it, coincidentally, just weeks before I myself came across it there, as a fresh-faced doctoral student in the Rare Books and Manuscript reading room of the Butler Library. I mention this because it brings us full circle, back to forty years earlier when Burroughs and Kerouac were posing for Ginsberg’s camera on the Columbia campus, and also because for me it was the beginning of my work as a Burroughs scholar, so that next year will be my twenty-fifth anniversary, a very strange kind of sliver wedding… 

And finally, as an epilogue, we fast-forward almost fifty years to 2006, which saw Kerouac and Burroughs now reunited one last time beyond the grave, housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

The Berg had acquired the Kerouac papers in 2001 and in January 2006 bought Burroughs’ major archive, which had been in private hands since the mid-1970s. Had the Ginsberg papers on deposit at Columbia not gone to Stanford in 1994, they would — many have argued should — have also found a home at the Berg, conveniently keeping the three major Beat writers together, their literary remains stored next to one another in cartons, waiting for us to pay our respects …

This quick sketch ends up in the archives not just because this is where I do most of my research but because the archival preservation of the past will play an increasingly important part in the future of Beat scholarship. And in what follows I want to develop two lines of enquiry based on the literary archive: one is the key role it plays in the back-story, the typically untold story, that underpins the production of new editions of Beat texts; the other is the role it plays as a subset of a far broader cultural phenomenon, involving how we relate to and value the past.

And the first stop in this journey comes under the banner: Anniversary Culture.

1956 saw the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg’s “Howl”; 1957 the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On the Road; 1958 the 50th anniversary of On the Road‘s first UK publication; 1959 will see the 50th anniversary of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. It’s hard to miss the fact that we are riding a great wave of big Five-O anniversaries for the three key Beat publications. And the media attention focused on the primary texts has been matched in scholarly circles by the appearance of anniversary books about the original books — from The Poem That Changed America: Howl Fifty Years Later and Howl for Now to What’s Your Road Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Jack Kerouac: Back on the Road exhibition catalogue, and, coming next year, Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays. And then of course, there are the conferences, from the Boulder Celebration of On the Road to the anniversary events in Paris next July for Naked Lunch.

This tidal wave of recent activity has clearly been driven by the anniversary landmark. And in terms of anniversaries, fifty is the ideal, optimum number, better than the century especially for landmarks of literature — why? Because reaching a hundred makes it almost certain there’s no longer a living connection back to the author; after a century, only people who knew the people who knew the author will be alive. In another fifty years time, most of us won’t even be here … So, carpe diem: because, clearly enough, that is the point. The fiftieth anniversary registers our place in history, our relation to the past and the passage of time; fifty is the optimum number for us.

The big Five-O situates us in-between mythmaking and marketing, as we find ourselves caught up in both our culture industry’s drive to recycle the past as nostalgic memorabilia and our business culture’s sales campaigns that only need a peg to hang it on. And for us, the fiftieth anniversaries of “Howl,” On the Road, and Naked Lunch are the perfect pegs — ideal opportunities for exhibits like the one at the Barber Institute, showing the Scroll, and for a conference like this. We’re here to seize the moment, to make it productive, to bring people with ideas and knowledge together, to speak to one another and share our interest — all conveniently focused and promoted by the magic round number.

Anniversary culture creates possibilities, then, but it also risks confusing real history with self-interested hype — especially in an age that has great trouble telling apart the authentic and the artificial. So if the series of Beat fiftieth anniversaries give us a peg to hang it on, the question is how to avoid hanging ourselves.

I’m going to come back to the sense of history, of what’s lost or needs to be preserved later on. First, though, I want to turn from the general to the specific: 

2003 saw both publication of the 50th anniversary edition of Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, and the release of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. And then in 2007 we had of course the Scroll On the Road.

The Scroll Road was always going to be an important and high profile publication, whenever it happened — but what extra expectations does the perfect anniversary edition bring or make explicit, and what extra problems? One way to answer that is by way of the two Burroughs publications.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of Junky — as we can see from its cover — was promoted as “definitive.” The point about this use of the term, is not just that the marketing department at Viking Penguin wanted it, but that I wanted it too — even though in editorial circles definitive is verbum non grata, because it represents a false ideal rather than simply an impracticality. Why did I want the term on the cover? Precisely to insist that this was not just a reprinting to cash in on the half-century anniversary — which is the case, for example, with Viking’s fiftieth anniversary edition of On the Road, a hardback reprint of the same old text (actually, a direct reprint of the fortieth anniversary edition).

No, I wanted to make it plain that this was an authentically new Junky, a different edition. But of course, what that also meant was that it necessarily became the edition, the last word on the subject. It upped the ante — all the way up; from the point of view of textual theory, too far up…

Or consider the Restored Naked Lunch. The text has proved very popular and is clearly on course to become the standard edition. I’d venture to say that it’s had a pretty easy ride, however, because in many ways it’s a quite problematic edition. There are many important and valuable elements, but from a scholarly point of view there’s no clear or detailed description of methodology, no apparatus of notes, and no real explanation of what is being “restored.” 

Textually, there are questions that could be asked of the editing — but my point is that few have asked, and while one reason for that might be that Naked Lunch does not attract many scholarly pedants, another is that the edition benefited from not being hung on a peg of anniversary hype. Although “restored” promises a return to some lost past, it’s a vague enough term so that it doesn’t claim to be the edition, like the anniversary Junky.

But paradoxically, the reverse is also true. The very fact that it wasn’t published to coincide with a marketing opportunity date might have helped the Restored Naked Lunch appear the real thing, the genuine article, rather than a ploy to cash in on the calendar. 

So, to come back to the Scroll Road: the anniversary timing made great sense, but also ran a risk. Instead of killing two birds with one stone — celebrating the old text while revealing another — it doubled the stake on what the edition promised to deliver, raising expectations in regard to both the long-published novel and the newly published manuscript. 

And on a strictly material level there’s also a serious practical danger with publications driven by the calendar. An immovable publication date imposes constraints from which there is no escaping. Deadlines are bad enough under normal circumstances in determining the work we do and how well it gets done. For a scholarly edition of a famous text based on original manuscripts, it’s doubly so. In the case of the fiftieth anniversary peg, the very thing guaranteed to maximise the audience for the work might also be the decisive factor in determining the limits of that work. 

So far as I understand, the Scroll Road was commissioned only about two years ahead of publication. If so, that’s less time than I set myself for Junky, a much shorter and simpler novel, and a text with an interesting but nowhere near as complex manuscript and publication history. The tighter the deadline, the less time to complete the research, the smaller the margin for error, the less opportunity for reflection. Without any leeway, you’re at the mercy of circumstance or the desires and decisions of others — dealing with the other parties involved in such a project, you’ve got no bargaining position, if you ever had any at all.

This is a simple but important truth that needs to be told more often, for no matter how hard we try to minimise the mistakes we make on our own terms, the fact is that many of the key terms are dictated to us and entirely outside our control. 

This is to introduce the proverbial elephant in the living room — the uncomfortable truth that a textual scholar is granted authority over a very limited part of any publication. Having been around that block four times over the past 15 years, I know I’ve been lucky, but each project has been decisively shaped by factors I couldn’t control. To give the most directly relevant example, The Yage Letters Redux.

After three years of working from archival sources, my manuscript was due to be delivered to City Lights at the start of 2006. The work was all done — I think we were about ready to go to proof stage — when I heard the New York Public Library announce it had bought, from the uncooperative hands of a private collector, the world’s largest Burroughs archive.

I knew there was a “Yage” manuscript in there, possibly one I already had but just as possibly an important missing piece in the jigsaw. I didn’t know for sure because I’d tried for the previous two years to take a look at it, even going all the way to Ohio in a vain effort — but the private hands had stayed uncooperative… In my Introduction to Yage Redux, I had called finding the lost manuscript “my own Grail quest” — and now, with my text ready for publication, it had turned up. 

However, City Lights were understandably reluctant right at the last minute to delay publication by what might be months — I couldn’t tell. That was one problem. The other was that just because the Burroughs archive was now out of private hands and safely in the Berg Collection, didn’t mean they would let anybody in to look at any part of it, however specific and for whatever good and urgent purpose, until the archive had been processed and catalogued: privileged access would, as they rightly told me, contravene both the Code of Ethics of the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the American Library Association and the Joint Statement on Access to Original Research Materials issued by ALA and the Society of American Archivists.

So … there were the publishers with their deadline, the private collector able to exercise arbitrary power, and the public body curator with bureaucratic protocols to police. In the end — by another entirely unexpected twist of the hand of chance — it has all worked out for the best. I was out at Stanford last May, collecting materials for a new edition of Queer, when I stumbled across a misfiled “Yage” manuscript, whose existence I had never suspected and which turns out to be far more interesting and significant than the one in the Berg. In retrospect, it was just as well that in the Introduction to my edition I’d claimed it “won’t have the last word”: look out for The Yage Letters Redux Redux (This Time It’s Definitive), coming soon…

Moral of the story? Simply that textual editors find themselves inevitably caught up in the material contingencies of publication — precisely the same conditions that resulted in unsatisfactory previous editions, such as Viking’s 1957 On the Road, which of course is where the editor comes in, to carry out the work to “restore” or “recover” what was lost or damaged the first time around. In the very course of trying to free the text from the contingencies of the past and to assert the integrity of authorship in the face of other agents and factors, the textual scholar discovers the ineluctable power of those forces… 

Publicly, however, the restored or recovered edition promises it can indeed put history into reverse, can bring back what has been lost — so that its results risk being taken as not within history, not another part of the messy historical process, but somehow safely outside of it. This illusion, I think, frames the reception of the Scroll On the Road.

We can see why this is significant in symbolic form through the contrasting cover designs of the original Viking edition and the edition of the original manuscript.

On the cover of the Viking first edition of 1957 we have a small red, blue, and black abstract cityscape, designed by Bill English, set against a plain black background. Symbolically, this miniature modernist image says: this is a novel, a serious work of art. 

Malcolm Cowley, writing to Kerouac less than two months before publication, in July 1957, called the design “handsome” and “chaste,” adding: “I don’t know whether it looks more like a devotional work or a handbook in applied sociology. But that’s just the appearance it ought to have if it is to receive the sort of serious attention it deserves and we want to get for it” (Charters, vol. 2, 49).

Now of course we know that Kerouac was intensely interested in the visual presentation of his work, and made his own cover designs. But what’s interesting here is that Cowley’s attention to the cover substituted for a reply to Kerouac’s previous letter, dated July 4, which reflected his specifically textual concerns about the impending publication of his manuscript. 

Kerouac begins his letter by referring to the piece of “untouched” prose recently published (“Neal and the Three Stooges,” a section from Visions of Cody, which had appeared in the small press magazine New Editions), putting the key term, with its connotations of virginal purity, in quotation marks to make his point. Next, Kerouac asks Cowley of On the Road the pressing question: “when do I get to see the final gallies?” Then in a postscript, he closes his letter by citing the Bible — Mark 13.11 — which enables him to equate the “spontaneous language” of his novel with the speech of the Holy Ghost. To this point, Cowley did respond directly:

“If the Holy Ghost is speaking through you, fine, fine, let him speak. Sometimes he turns out to be the devil masquerading as the Holy Ghost, and that’s alright too. Sometimes he turns out to be Simple Simon, and then you have to cut what he says.”

Or, to read between the lines: Cowley responds to Kerouac’s request to see the gallies of On the Road, by countering the idea of “untouched” — that’s to say, un-edited — writing, insisting that cuts are necessary because not everything is holy.

Now look at the cover of the Scroll edition: the background manuscript facsimile says symbolically what the title states literally: this is the original, the authentic, material writing of Jack Kerouac. This is — by inference measured against the Viking edition — the untouched Real Thing.

In which case, how should we read the internal organisation of the Scroll edition? For while the front cover promises us at long last the unmediated authenticity of the original, the reader doesn’t reach Kerouac’s text until page 109, by way of not only the editor’s fifty-page introduction but also by another fifty pages of critical essays. This has nothing to do with how useful that material is; it’s a structural issue of symbolic importance, and it’s significant that in this regard the Restored Naked Lunch did precisely the opposite.

The Restored edition delivers on its title most literally by restoring the way in which the first Olympia Press edition of 1959 began, with maximum impact, bang, with line one: “I can feel the heat closing in…” It did so by removing the so-called introduction that mediated the text in all other editions after 1959, and by placing the editors’ own introduction at the back of the book. Moving the introduction was especially significant since Burroughs’ text — which, to cut a long story short, was put there by his publishers — is the single most influential source of myths about the origins of his novel, most famously the misleading claim that he had no “memory of writing the notes that have now been published under the title Naked Lunch.”

However, in each case the structural organisation of these texts could be read in contrary ways: it may be correct, but it might also be considered naïve to present Naked Lunch as though we can ever read Burroughs’ book as if for the first time, as if unmediated by all the mythology that has built up over the past fifty years. Equally, in mediating the text of Kerouac’s scroll, it could be argued that the edition’s introductory material merely represented the situation as it stands, simply admits that this is where we all come in…

Given the hype and presentation of the Scroll Road, however, it was inevitable that the editor’s introduction should beg the key question quite explicitly: “Is the scroll the real On the Road?” The difficulty here is that if the scroll is identified as the original — the original, a single, true source — then it must indeed be the “real thing.” And if the goal of the edition is to “displace mythology and recover Kerouac as a writer,” then “recovery” amounts to curing the text of the debilitating and corrupting editing it suffered at the hands of its publishers. In other words, to recover the original is to counter the contingencies and contaminations of publication. 

But the upshot is an untenable dichotomy: on one side, the Viking edition that falsified Kerouac’s manuscript; on the other, the Scroll edition that escapes and puts an end to history, turning back time to restore the lost true original. But of course, the scroll On the Road is itself an edited work and subject to the choices and contingencies of any published text.

Leaving aside those factors beyond the editor’s control, the stated rationale for editing the scroll runs the risk of accepting this false dichotomy. In his brief “Note on the Text,” Howard Cunnell explains that he has “stripped away” all handwritten corrections and revisions made on the manuscript by Kerouac and restored lined-through typed text. This serves his goal of “presenting a text that is as close as possible to the one Kerouac produced between April 2 and April 22, 1951″ (101). In other words, we’re invited to accept the three-week period of composition as completely inviolate, in keeping with Kerouac’s famous claim — which is at the back of his exchange with Malcolm Cowley — that it was dictated by the Holy Ghost and therefore could not be altered: you don’t edit a sacred text. Holy words are not subject to the forces of time, the processes of history; they just are…

However, as Cunnell himself very ably demonstrates, the scroll both had a long pre-history — in the various false starts Kerouac made on his road book in the previous three years — and was reworked by Kerouac almost immediately he had finished typing it, long before Viking’s editors stuck their blue pencil to it. And he almost certainly made some corrections during the privileged three-week period itself. 

These and other criticisms are a valid part of any dialogue about editing practice and Kerouac’s novel, but the simple truth is that the original scroll cannot be made into a published book. The extraordinary physical, aesthetic, and semiotic attributes of Kerouac’s manuscript insist on this impossibility. 

Now, some scholars who have critiqued the Scroll edition have called for a facsimile publication that would visually reproduce the whole scroll. While that may be highly desirable and valuable, it doesn’t so much answer the issue as try to sidestep it. For even a facsimile would still be an unmistakably edited text — the continuous scroll cut up into separate pages — and would still be subject to all sorts of internal and external design decisions, often made by in-house editors who place scholarly concerns below the bottom line of commercial demands, or who simply don’t understand them. Having only recently edited precisely such a facsimile text — Everything Lost: the Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs — I speak from experience.

Equally, while any original manuscript loses an essential quality in reproduction, in the case of such a remarkable object as Kerouac’s scroll, a facsimile edition would only make all the more tantalising the sense of missing out on the physical properties that make the scroll so unique a material presence.

Interestingly, when Joyce Johnson reviewed the Scroll Road, she claimed that Kerouac had “defiantly kept the myth of the scroll alive — thus distancing himself from the book he had such mixed feelings about.” In other words, the Real Thing was itself a myth sponsored by the author in order to reaffirm the integrity of his work in the face of compromises enforced by publication. (In itself, blaming the publishers was surely a convenient displacement of the doubts Kerouac must have had about his own voluntary revisions, since they inevitably resulted in a “mixed” text, a composite of his choices over a six year period, dividing and multiplying his own act of authorship.)

In this light, I’m struck by something very peculiar about the history of the scroll manuscript. Consider these quotations:

Kerouac to Cassady, 22 May 1951: “Went fast because road is fast . . . wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra.) — just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road” (Charters, vol. 1, 315-6).

Kerouac to Ginsberg, 1 October, 1957:  “Unbelievable number of events almost impossible to remember, including earlier big Viking Press hotel room with thousands of screaming interviewers and Road roll original 100 miles ms. rolled out on carpet” (Charters, vol. 2, 66).

Kerouac to Philip Whalen, 7 January, 1958: “[On the Road] was published as is off my ms. from the 120-foot roll” (Charters, vol. 2, 97).

Ginsberg, reviewing The Dharma Bums in the Village Voice, 12 November, 1958: “The result was a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the Road itself, the length of an entire onionskin teletype roll.”

Kerouac to Keith Jennison [his previous editor at Viking], 3 December, 1968: “I require the return of my original manuscript of ON THE ROAD” (Charters, 461). 

What’s striking is that the “scroll” is described again and again as a roll. This isn’t to suggest that the term scroll was never used in the 1950s, it plainly was. It features in at least one contemporary review, by John G Fuller in the Saturday Review, who described the manuscript in October 1957 as a “continuous scroll” that he had himself seen. But the fact remains that most reviews referred to Kerouac’s manuscript as a roll. In later accounts, various people in the Beat circle would use the term “scroll,” but what they said in retrospect often contradicts what they said at the time. John Clellon Holmes, for example, one of the first to see it hot off Kerouac’s typewriter, merely described it in his diary as a “long strip.” Robert Giroux, describing the moment Kerouac unrolled the manuscript in his office, recalled no scroll either; “he had a big roll of paper, like a paper towel like you use in the kitchen, big roll of paper under his left arm.”

Kerouac’s own first reference to his manuscript of On the Road (May 1951) and his very last (December 1968) are, against all expectations, fully representative in their not describing it as a “scroll.” 

Why does this matter? I’d suggest that media and critical preference for “scroll” over “roll” exploits, whether unconsciously or cynically, the mythic and the marketing value of Kerouac’s manuscript. As many have observed, the scroll, especially when it’s displayed wrapped around glass spools at both ends, evokes a religious text — most obviously the Dead Sea Scrolls, a resemblance already reported by Fuller in his 1957 review, (it “looks a little as if it was one of the originals from the Dead Sea”). The image on the spine of the Scroll edition clearly plays on its resemblance to a Torah as displayed in a synagogue.

There are other grounds for objecting to the rise of the scroll at the expense of the roll: standard definition. Historically, papyrus or parchment scrolls are distinguished from rolls because they unrolled from side to side, so that the text ran from top to bottom of the page, and the pages were discrete, not continuous. Scroll has an evocative, superior ring to it, but Kerouac’s manuscript might properly be defined as a roll — a form that, as Wikipedia brightly informs us, “survives today in retail cash register use and as toilet paper rolls.”

It would be hypocritical to pretend that the mystical connotations of the scroll, like its monetary value — as the world’s most expensive modern literary manuscript — do not underwrite the attention we, as scholars and critics, give to it. Without the cash and the cachet, there’d be less media hype, less sales, and a smaller budget for exhibitions and conferences. 

But we shouldn’t only consider our motives in preferring scroll to roll, we should also reckon with its interpretative consequences. For to go along with the conceit that this manuscript is The Word of Kerouac is to affirm the unproblematic integrity, unity, and authority of authorship. This is fully consistent with privileging the writing of it as an act of solitary, unbroken composition — embodied materially in the continuous roll of paper — and with privileging the text purified of all post-facto changes — including those made by Kerouac himself. The upshot is to falsely sanctify this text, to take it out of historical time, out of the social processes and institutional dimensions to authorship, and to promote the authorial fallacy in a most retrograde and Romantic form.

At this point, finally, we should step back to consider the bigger picture — which is the place of the literary manuscript within the broader culture. (See Dana Gioia’s Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture [2004] for some interesting and relevant analysis.)

The reverence for an author’s original writing is historically quite recent, and can be traced back through the Victorians to the Romantics. The main reason for this development in making the medium seem as important as the message was the rise of print culture. The author’s manuscript — initially, the handwritten manuscript — stood out against the mass produced book in retaining a unique personal aura. There’s no need here to rehearse Walter Benjamin’s well-known case, because it’s clear enough that the sudden omnipresence of mechanical print identified in the manuscript that which could not be fully reproduced. And this in turn confirmed the sense that the original, unique physical object embodied a direct and unmediated link back to the author.

Here we should recognise the irony in our position: at the same time as we have come to fetishise Kerouac’s original, we actually need the publication of the scroll to fall short, to fail to measure up against the real, magical, unique object that bears the impress of Kerouac’s heroic typing. And that’s why, despite the obvious value of it, we would never be satisfied with even a full facsimile of this manuscript. 

In our age of electronic reproduction, the holy relic that resists being reproduced takes us back into the vanished past every bit as much as the elegiac nostalgia of Kerouac’s mournful prose.

And this is surely the main reason why — to come towards my conclusion — the last fifty years have seen such an extraordinary expansion in the archive. So long as scholars go in and out of them for what seem entirely practical purposes of research, the unprecedented and illogical scale of the archive eludes us. I mean, the archival holdings of the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas are insured for over a billion dollars. Archives have become a sign of our times, the pyramids of our culture, in both their massive scale and the reverence with which they are approached.

Anyone who has worked in the Manuscript Reading room of a major library knows the rituals: donning the white gloves for delicate papers, and having to use those funny cushion things to rest really old books on; then the little pencils they hand out because pens are prohibited; and of course the rigid rules about collecting items one at a time, causing those long, long waits that make scholars feel like supplicants, granted the strictest of access to the holiest of materials. 

So what is the archive that it warrants so much investment of time and money and is protected by such elaborate and restrictive rituals? D.T. Max, writing in the New Yorker (“Final Destination,” 11, June 2007) quotes Tom Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Center, on the role of the archive: “There will be these bastions, whether the ruins of Athens or these archives, and they will be all the more valuable.” In short, archives are fragments shored against our ruin. In preserving the past they seek to deny the passage of time, to disavow our looming individual and cultural death — to which we can now add our impending global death.

In a symbolic gesture rather more meaningful than the rest of the movie, in that recent epic of environmental doom, The Day After Tomorrow we should remember that the main setting is none other than the New York Public Library, home to the Berg Collection and the papers of Kerouac and Burroughs… 

When the waters that engulf the library freeze over, its books are tossed into the fire to keep the survivors warm, but an exception is made for a Gutenberg Bible. “If Western civilization is finished,” says the character who protects the book — the book of all time — “I’m going to save at least one little piece of it.” From the Gutenberg Bible to the Bible of the Beat Generation, it’s not such a long step, and by a nice coincidence the $2.4 million that the scroll manuscript sold for in 2001 was exactly the same figure that the Harry Ransom paid to acquire its Gutenberg back in 1978. 

So, do we turn back to the past, to preserving it against loss, because we no longer have any sense of a future? Are we making more and more relics out of old yellowing pieces of paper because the whole planet is going to hell in a hand-basket? Is that what this is all about? Certainly, since we all wind up in boxes, it’s fitting that the writer’s remains are preserved in cartons containing acid-free manila folders to create a sort of after-life, in which the physical body can be sustained indefinitely by carefully controlled air pressure, humidity, and light, so that, under strictly controlled circumstances, it can be resurrected. Is that what we mean when we say we can feel the presence of the living author embodied in the material he once touched? Is that contact what really matters?

Perhaps this is also why archives combine self-evidently significant manuscripts with what writers themselves would regard as their detritus. When the Harry Ransom Center paid Tom Stoppard $225,000 for 62 linear feet of materials, Stoppard told the director: “Most of what you want is what I want to throw out.”

Even more revealingly, archives increasingly feature collections of realia: the Harry Ransom has Arthur Conan Doyle’s undershirts, Anne Sexton’s glasses, and a pair of beaded moccasins worn by D.H. Lawrence. And when you work on the Burroughs or Kerouac papers in the Berg Collection, you sit opposite Dickens’ mahogany writing desk, with its little brass reading lamp and a crystal inkwell in which the great Boz once dipped the nib of his pen. Elsewhere, they have a pair of Mrs Browning’s slippers and not one but two locks of Whitman’s grey hair. 

Is that so different from Johnny Depp paying $15,000 for Kerouac’s raincoat? Or whoever it was went to Christie’s Popular Culture auction in June this year and bought a stapler that supposedly once belonged to Kerouac? Where will it all end?

Conveniently, this brings me to the end — with the deliciously Burroughsian thought that one day this jar of epoxy resin

will end up on a little plinth in the Berg Collection. And that’s because what it embalms is one of William Burroughs’ turds. In other words: holy shit.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For the obsessed, the pursuit of the subject of fascination inevitably ends in minutiae. If that subject is an author, it means that the entire bibliography has been analyzed and devoured. The secondary sources have been exhausted. The pursuit has bled over into related and tangential areas. For Burroughs that means one might have dug deeply into Scientology, Mayan history, language theory, lemurs, or pirates. Slowly but surely nothing remains to be examined. But for those truly under Burroughs’ spell, there always remains more to explore. As Eric Shoaf has shown, new items can be uncovered for the bibliography. These scraps must be obtained and processed.

For the obsessed, there is great significance placed in detritus. Pieces of bone, scraps of cloth, shards of wood, a yellowed sheet of paper. These fragments contain the truth. Juvenilia are a prime example of minutiae. They sit among letters, photographs, and aborted drafts of master works awaiting their time to see the light of day. As Burroughs fans know, letters and the like hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of the man’s creative process. So it is with great anticipation that the faithful awaited publication of And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks.

It is strange to think of the writing of a thirty year old man as juvenilia but that is how I view Hippos. It is the work of a writer in an early stage of development — in writing terms, a work of adolescence. For Kerouac, Hippos sits on the same shelf with Atop an Underwood, Orpheus Emerging as well as the other 1,000,000 words he wrote by his early twenties. Hippos belongs with Burroughs’ early efforts “Autobiography of a Wolf” or “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.” Like Charles Bukowski, Burroughs reached his maturity as a writer later in life. Junkie, published when Burroughs was nearly forty, is his first mature work and contains many of the major themes of his oeuvre.

The fact that Hippos is a collaboration is key. The partnership with Kerouac began a method of composition that would fuel Burroughs’ creative fire for the rest of his life. Kerouac deserves to be placed next to Ginsberg and Brion Gysin in terms of importance as an influence for Burroughs. This goes far beyond the fact that Kerouac titled Naked Lunch. Kerouac provided a model of the writer at work. The struggling writer facing the typewriter day after day replaced boyhood dreams of an opium addicted pretender lounging in luxury. Burroughs acknowledged as much in the essay “Remembering Kerouac.” Burroughs stressed that the most admirable thing about Kerouac was that he was a writer, i.e., he wrote. Kerouac also provided encouragement and criticism, but most important was his model of discipline. Hippos in its structure and method of composition highlights Kerouac’s influence and importance in Burroughs’ development as a writer, not so much on the level of style but on the level of providing an example of the writer at work.

Hippos should put to rest (if Oliver Harris has not done so already) the myth that Burroughs felt compelled to become a writer as a result of the death of Joan Vollmer. Long before that tragic night in Mexico, Burroughs was possessed by the Ugly Spirit, i.e., the compulsion to write and express himself. Like Kerouac, Burroughs was a born writer, and Hippos shows his obsession with and deep knowledge of literature and the writing life. The comments on the forum mention Dennison’s interest in Rimbaud as poet and persona, and all the male characters in Hippos are overcome with the fantasy of living the life of the artist. The murder of Kammerer destroyed Lucien Carr’s dreams of becoming a poet as it gave birth to three other writers. Citing the Surrealist, Dada, and proto-Surrealist texts that formed the philosophy of the early Beats, it could be argued that killing Kammerer was Carr’s most inspired and most terrible poetic act.

Readers will no doubt see connections in Hippos to Burroughs’ later works. The RealityStudio forum has a thread that does just that. A review in the Observer pointed out the scene where Dennison shoots up as a precursor to Junkie. More interesting to me is how we leave Dennison. He is waiting to hear about a shipment of stolen goods obtained from a shipyard. It was just such a shipment that introduced Burroughs to the world of drugs when he obtained some cartons of morphine along with some hot weapons. This led to Burroughs’ meeting with Herbert Huncke and his initiation into the drug underworld. In his afterword, Grauerholz suggested that Burroughs was introduced to the needle after the events depicted in Hippos. If that is the case, Burroughs wrote his experiences with Huncke and heroin back into the Carr-Kammerer story.

The genesis of Queer resides in Hippos as well. Burroughs must have seen how the relationship of Carr and Kammerer mirrored his relationship with Lewis Marker. Nearly a decade later, Burroughs would replay the events in Hippos for himself complete with a murder that provided a shocking twist a la Law and Order. Burroughs was no stranger to sexual obsession. In the late 1930s, his feelings for Jack Anderson lead to a Van Gogh trip resulting in the cutting off of a finger. This early experience made Burroughs uniquely qualified to understand and to humanize a figure like Kammerer.

Other reviewers have categorized Hippos as a period piece, arguing that the book provides a unique perspective on the world of the post-WWII hipster at the time and place of his birth — the rain-washed streets, the seedy bars, the cramped apartments, the corner restaurants. More than Junkie, Hippos reads like a noir novel. Dennison works as a private eye. The cover of Kulchur 4 features a picture of Burroughs and Kerouac from the time of their collaboration in Hippos. They are dressed the part of the noir detective and the caption for the photo names them as Inspector Maiget and Sam Spade.  

I am tempted to see Hippos less as a noir novel than as a memoir like Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage or Edie Parker-Kerouac’s You’ll Be Okay. If these books explored the same geography years later, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s novel The Young and Evil (1933 by Obelisk Press) provided Kerouac and Burroughs with a model in terms of subject matter, method of composition (a collaboration), and atmosphere a full decade earlier. These books also capture the New York hipster scene described in Hippos. Although an act of misreading, I first approached Hippos as memoir more than novel because so much of the material from Hippos had been cannibalized for the biographical record. You finish Hippos with a sense of déjà vu since in a way you have read it all before in the Literary Outlaw and elsewhere. I see Kerouac’s Vanity of Dulouz in a similar manner.

As a result, reviewers of Hippos have treated the book as a straight telling of the Carr-Kammerer story, more period memoir than novel. This is a dangerous practice. If we think of Hippos in terms of memoir, we have to be acutely aware of what is missing. Hippos purports to be a factual accounting of the murder but it is in effect a cover-up. What is missing is the star witness in the case: Allen Ginsberg.  

In the afterword, Grauerholz states that reader will have a good time trying to place the characters with real people. Besides the main quartet, side players include Edie Parker, Celine Young, and John Kingsland. But where is Ginsberg? As Ginsberg’s journal of the period, The Journal of Martyrdom and Artifice, makes clear he was an intimate on the scene. Included in that journal was Ginsberg’s own novel based on the Kammerer-Carr murder entitled The Bloodsong. This passionate proto-novel was suppressed by Columbia University to prevent any additional bad publicity from infecting the college. Ginsberg was bad press.

Kerouac and Burroughs erased Ginsberg from Hippos for exactly the same reason. As Grauerholz mentions in the afterword, Ginsberg had a sexual relationship with both Kammerer and Carr. Ginsberg was exhibit A for the homosexual obsession that bound the entire New Vision circle. If Ginsberg’s story as told in his journal and The Bloodsong would have gotten out, Ginsberg would have been the star witness for the prosecution, and Carr might have gotten the electric chair. We can understand Ginsberg’s terror in 1948 when his notebooks were seized by police. The hot goods in the car were not the stolen furs and coats but the details of sexual obsession, murder and madness recorded in the journals.

A close reading of Chapter 17 proves very interesting in light of Hippos’ complex relationship with and treatment of homosexual obsession. Kerouac wrote this chapter, and it is full of the literary flourishes and symbolism that would weigh down his first published novel: The Town and the City. There are references to Saroyan and T.S Eliot as well as to foreign movies and popular music of the time. Kerouac and Carr talk repeatedly of writing poetry. No other chapter in the novel reveals so clearly the literary aspirations of the early Beat circle.  

Among the movies playing as Philip Tourian and Mike Ryko walk through the city is Port of Shadows. This French classic about a deserter from the French Army references the recent trials and travails of the pair getting a ship. Kerouac later writes that Philip reminds him of Boldieu and his white gloves in La Grande Illusion. Both these movies reflect the realism and sense of impeding tragedy that Burroughs and Kerouac attempt to capture in Hippos. Yet the movie references can also be read as comment on homosexual obsession. Tourian and Ryko see Korda’s Four Feathers on their way to the Museum of Modern Art. Kerouac writes, “There was an ambush scene where you saw British soldiers and Fuzzy Wuzzies hacking away at each other with sabers and knives and much blood. Most of the picture kept reminding us of Al lying in the yard in a pool of blood, so we couldn’t enjoy it that much. And one of the characters in the story was named Dennison.” This movie depicting combat with a threatening racial Other draws parallels with Tourian’s sacrifice of the dangerous sexual Other in the form of Al. The taint of homosexuality must be exorcised.  

After seeing this disturbing film, the pair retreats to the Museum of Modern Art. Tourian and Ryko seek solace in culture in order to get away from the anarchy of barrooms and darkened alleyways of the City. What they see at the Museum instead are examples of the culture that was the seeds of their destruction. They stop to examine a portrait of Jean Cocteau by Modigliani. The decadence, bisexuality, effeminacy and drug use that fascinated the early Beats is represented by the figure of Cocteau. The portrait was painted in 1916 and two years later Cocteau would meet the 15-year old poet Raymond Radiguet. Cocteau denied there was a sexual aspect to this relationship but rumors hounded the pair. The relationship of Cocteau / Radiguet mirrors that of Verlaine / Rimbaud and of course Kammerer / Carr. Radiguet died young leaving Cocteau distraught. Cocteau turned to opium. Of course, Verlaine shot Rimbaud. Carr provided an ironic twist to this tragic history of literary obsession, by killing his pursuer. 

European culture, particularly French culture as represented by Cocteau, filtered through Rimbaud, Gide, the surrealists and others would prove irresistible to the early Beats. Ryko and Tourian study Peter (?) Blume’s analyses of the decline and fall of the West as well. The reference suggests to the reader Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, a key philosophical text of Tourian / Carr’s New Vision. Given the existential and surrealist underpinnings of the early Beats, the murder of Al / Kammerer can be viewed as less of an honor killing and more of a violent act gratuite. Ur-surrealist Vache’s fantasy of shooting into a crowd would be the precedent. Tourian’s murder of Al can also be viewed as an assisted suicide/sacrifice of a tortured soul.

Ryko and Tourian finish their tour of the Museum by viewing Tchelitchew’s Cache-Cache (Hide and Seek). At that moment, Kerouac writes, “There was a tall blond fag, wearing a striped polo shirt and tan slacks, who kept looking at Phil out of the corner of his eye. Even when we went downstairs to see the one-hour movie, the fag was sitting behind us.” Obviously the fag plays hide and seek with Ryko and Tourian as he tails and shadows the pair. But the blond man also symbolizes the ghost of homosexual obsession that haunts and follows Ryko and Tourian threatening to queer the honor killing defense. Clearly, this doppelganger is on one level Al / Kammerer, but I would suggest that it is more appropriate to view the blond fag as the specter of Ginsberg that hangs at the edges of the entire text and demands to be acknowledged. Ginsberg’s membership in Carr circle and his sexual relationship with Carr and Kammerer endangered Carr’s defense and threatened his life. Kerouac performs a game of hide and seek with Ginsberg by suggesting his presence all the while excluding him as a character in Hippos.

The women in the story were meant to serve as key witnesses for the defense. These heterosexual relationships protect the early Beats against the charge of homosexuality. In the actual Carr investigation, Celine Young testified that Carr was straight and offered their sexual relationship as proof. Yet in Hippos, the female characters are aware of their outsider status in the boys’ club and realize they are in some ways being used as beards. Barbara and Janie repeatedly accuse Ryko and Tourian of being fags throughout the novel. Given Carr’s intended defense, being accused of homosexuality was a matter of life and death.

Homosexuality and homosexual obsession in Hippos are centered on the character of Kammerer and deflected from the other characters. This is most striking in the depiction of Dennison. Dennison is portrayed as straight. He has a wife and has sexual relationships with women in New York. In a scene that shocked me, Dennison feels up a woman’s thigh in an apartment. In order for the honor-slaying defense to be believed, the bisexuality of the New Vision circle had to be suppressed. Yet Burroughs’ true feelings on the subject of women slip out. Dennison’s wife is strategically placed in Colorado. She is a shadowy figure at best. One wonders if she exists or is a cover story. In a statement similar to Burroughs at his most misogynistic in The Job, Dennison punningly states, “Al’s right, my boy… Women, Philip, are the route of all evil.” This line reminded me powerfully of Naked Lunch. It is an act of ventriloquism. Dennison distances himself from homosexuality by speaking through Al. In addition, Dennison speaks Al’s words in a “Lionel Barrymore tone of voice.” Barrymore was famous for his booming voice as well as being a womanizer and ladies’ man. More ventriloquism; more deferral.  

Just before Dennison echoes Al’s thoughts on women, Burroughs as Dennison writes, “Yeah, I said to myself, why can’t we do away with women altogether.” The emphasis is Burroughs’, and it is the key question of the entire novel. The answer is simple: to do so would mean to admit to and make obvious the presence of homosexual obsession within the entire group including Carr. This could result in persecution by society leading ultimately to the death penalty for Carr. Interestingly, Burroughs poses this question in silence to himself. In an age of extreme discrimination against homosexuals, silence was a key defense against prosecution. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Silence coupled with invisibility. As a result, the key witness and chronicler of homosexual obsession in the group, Ginsberg, is gagged and hidden safely away in the margins and afterwords of the text. Not just Carr’s but all the early Beats’ survival depended on it.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

On entering the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, the first thing you see is Jack Kerouac’s name lit up in neon. Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the headlining exhibit at the library, is clearly a big deal. Given the 50th Anniversary of On the Road, there has been a tremendous amount of hoopla over Kerouac in the past year. The media attention has been nice. The increased and increasingly thorough scholarly attention has been appreciated. The published version of the scroll has been devoured and enjoyed. But when you get down to it, nothing prepares you and nothing compares to the garden of literary delights that are housed in the NYPL’s Berg collection and documented in Issac Gewirtz’s monograph on the exhibit. Both are quite frankly breathtaking and serve as the icing on the cake for the 50th Anniversary. But icing is too insubstantial; the exhibit is a Beat smorgasbord, a naked lunch, monumental in its presentation and contents.

Paul LeClerc, President of the New York Public Library states in the foreword to Gewirtz’s book, “Clearly, the New York Public Library may now proclaim itself the center for Beat research in the world.” I was aware that the Berg possessed extensive holdings on Kerouac but nothing can prepare you for the experience of seeing all the letters, journals, manuscripts, photographs, and books in one place and all spread out before you. If you have read Ann Charter’s accounts of visiting Kerouac in 1966 for her pioneering bibliography on the King of the Beats, you know that Kerouac kept meticulous records of his literary output. Everything was filed and accounted for. Kerouac may have lived a helter skelter, disorganized life, but that did not extend to his literary existence. He kept records and accounts of everything. I was amazed at how fresh the manuscripts and letters looked. The condition of these incredibly fragile items is impeccable. Collectible first editions of On the Road are in far worse condition that Kerouac’s manuscripts of the novel. One of the many impressions that come from the show is that Kerouac probably lived with obsessive compulsive disorder.

The Gutenberg Bible is currently on view at the NYPL, and so is the Bible of the Beat Generation. As you enter the Kerouac room in the center of the main lobby of the Library, the scroll version of On the Road centers the exhibit. I expected to see a few feet of the 120 foot scroll rolled out for viewing. In fact, a full 60 feet are available for study in a long glass case. There is an annotated sheet to help readers out. The scroll is footnoted at the margins so you can go to a number and start reading your favorite section. Kerouac’s visit with Burroughs in New Orleans is section 12 and 13, towards the end of the 60 feet on view. If taking in the entire scroll gives you chills, seeing Bill Burroughs’ name typed out on the manuscript instead of Old Bull Lee provides its own tingle.

I would have loved to see the end of the scroll where Lucien Carr’s dog famously chewed the manuscript, but that said, seeing just half of the scroll rolled out is a powerful experience. It is a remarkable object. On one level it stands out in its tangibility, its physicality, its size and expanse, but at the same time it is so fragile, delicate and ephemeral. It threatens to crumble and blow away under your inquiring eyes. As the exhibit makes clear, the scroll as an object immediately bring to mind the concept of the road, the path, the journey that lies at the heart of On the Road. For me, this merging of form and content in the physical object coupled with the physical act of creating it (not just the typing but the act of taping together the paper as well) makes the manuscript a work of art on par with any major work of the 20th Century. The scroll is in some sense ahead of its time, predicting the artists’ book, conceptual art and performance art boom of the 1960s and beyond. The scroll got me thinking of book artists like Dieter Roth or Jim Dine (interviewed in the Bunker). It was just that impressive to me on my first viewing.

There is no way to take in the Kerouac exhibit in one swoop. The Gewirtz book will help you digest what you have seen although the book only deals with half of the objects on display. I decided to take the exhibition in pieces and have a focus. As I checked my bag, I looked at my coat check. It was number 23. This seemed like a sign that I should look through the exhibit with an eye out for Burroughs. In fact, the words and ghostly figure of Burroughs run throughout the exhibit. Just to the right of the scroll and at the beginning of the exhibit, the first object that captures the viewer’s gaze is the Ace edition of Junkie (1953). There is a small collection of Burroughs items including a manuscript page of Naked Lunch with Burroughs’ hand edits. This is a page from the “Original material for Naked Lunch and Soft Machine, and earlier” that begins “Panama: Paregoric gags you.” The Gewirtz book reprints the page so you can read and study it after the exhibit. In addition there are a couple of photos including one by Charles Gatewood of Burroughs sitting in front of an E-Meter taken in 1962 also from the Burroughs archive.

Kerouac is the headliner at the NYPL at the moment, but Burroughs waits in the wings for his chance in the spotlight. Hopefully, the position of Burroughs at the entrance of the exhibit foreshadows a Burroughs show in 2009 — the 50th Anniversary of Naked Lunch — on the level of the Kerouac show. I would expect that the Burroughs Archive at the Berg rivals the Kerouac Archive in its depth and breadth. It should make for a remarkable exhibition. According Gewirtz’s book, the Burroughs Archive is ready for researchers. The foreword reads, “To facilitate such research, both the Kerouac and the Burroughs archives were organized, and electronic finding aids created for them, with the financial assistance of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.” Correct me if I am wrong but I do not think the Burroughs archive is available yet on the NYPL’s webpage of finding aids.

The Kerouac exhibit is organized roughly chronologically and it becomes clear just how influential a figure Burroughs was on Kerouac early on and vice versa. The exhibit includes a draft manuscript for the legendary And the Hippos Boiled in their Tanks, Kerouac and Burroughs’ collaborative account of the Kammerer murder. The manuscript (in impeccable condition) bears the original title “I Wish I Were You: The Philip Tourian Story” with Kerouac and Burroughs’ names as authors written in Kerouac’s hand. The upper right corner reads “45 Ryko Tourian.”

In this same section, there is a Kerouac journal from November 10-Dec 26, 1944 opened to a page that gives a clue into the power of Burroughs’ influence as an intellectual mentor. The journal reads, “Write about Burroughs’ Gideanism — the acte gratuite, he so indiscriminately champions” He continues later on the same page, “Morality is a word [Burroughs] as frankly disavows as Nietzsche does idealism.” The central role of Burroughs in the concept of the New Vision that held together the early Columbia circle could not be clearer. Another journal from the fall of 1946 contains a section entitled “On Bill Burroughs.” In this journal, Kerouac declares his independence from Burroughs’ influence. Yet there follows a description of Burroughs in his apartment attempting to get high from smoking birdseed. I immediately thought of Oliver Harris’ book The Secret of Fascination. For years after their initial meeting, Kerouac would attempt, like Oliver Harris decades later, to get to the heart of Burroughs and explore Burroughs as an object of fascination.

Burroughs was no less influenced by Kerouac. The Burroughs archive contains a folder dedicated “to Kells Elvins and Jack Kerouac.” These two men early on encouraged Burroughs to become a writer. Burroughs in essays and in interviews has credited Kerouac with being instrumental in this regard. Gewirtz’ book contains a quote from Burroughs’ essay “Jack Kerouac” to that effect.

Another possible but tenuous link to Burroughs appears in Kerouac’s juvenilia. At an early age and continuing on to adulthood, Kerouac constructed an elaborate fantasy life revolving around role playing games of baseball and horseracing. In 1936 (Kerouac was 14), Kerouac created handmade newspapers (Tuft Authority, Romper’s Sheet, Daily Owl, Stake Special, The Sportsman are a few of them) recounting these fantasy contests. In 1950, Kerouac created a draft of On the Road in a newspaper format entitled American Times. These works reminded me of Burroughs’ three column cut-ups of the 1960s, like Moving Times. I wonder if Burroughs saw Kerouac’s newspapers. If so, somewhere in the back of Burroughs’ mind, these works of Kerouac might have influenced Burroughs’ in taking up this format.

In addition, Kerouac, again in 1936, kept scrapbooks dedicated to his fantasy games. These scrapbooks continued later in Kerouac’s life. The Book of Dreams manuscript contains a collage with a linkage to numerology. Kerouac fixates on the number 69 (Burroughs was fascinated with 23). Another scrapbook work entitled By Memere also contains sexual references revealing an oedipal component to Kerouac’s relationship with his mother. Collage and scrapbooks were early expressions of creativity for Kerouac that continued throughout his career.

Kerouac’s mother figures prominently in another item that features Burroughs. In 1958, Memere wrote Allen Ginsberg a nasty letter telling Ginsberg and Burroughs to stay away from her son. The letter focuses on all the worst aspects of Burroughs and derides him as a pernicious influence on Kerouac. Nearby is a less threatening letter with a maternal theme from Ginsberg to Burroughs from 1959. Few of Ginsberg’s letters to Burroughs from the 1950s survive. In this letter, Ginsberg mentions his poem in progress, Kaddish, that was dedicated to his mother, Naomi.

Photographs are a big part of the exhibit and several of them feature Burroughs. There is a photo of Burroughs birthplace taken in 1912/1913 when Mortimer and Laura Lee bought the home on 4664 Berlin Avenue. Burroughs was born in 1914. The street was renamed Pershing Avenue after WWI. Several photos from 1953 are sprinkled throughout. Burroughs visited New York City in late 1953 in an effort to reconnect with Ginsberg after years in Mexico. Ginsberg famously rejected Burroughs sending the dejected lover to Tangier. Many of these photos have become iconic shots. The pics of Burroughs without a shirt at a desk at 206 East 7th St as well as the pic of Burroughs lecturing Kerouac on a couch in this same apartment are included. There is also a photo of Burroughs with Alene Lee. Lee was Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans, and she typed up the manuscript for The Yage Letters. There is another interesting photo of Burroughs outside the San Remo with Alan Ansen from the same period. As a group, these photos document a pivotal moment in Burroughs’ life and capture a slice of New York City in the 1950s, when the city was the world’s center for art and literature.

There are a few photos from Tangier as well, including the famous shot of Burroughs in a business suit lying on the beach. This is from the period in which the Naked Lunch manuscript was constructed with Kerouac typing large chunks of it at lightning speed. Later in the exhibit, there are four snapshots of Big Zoco (Big Market) and Zoco Chico (Little Market) in Tangier from 1954. Taken shortly after Burroughs’ arrival in Tangier, the blurry pics give the briefest of glimpses of the marketplace that in part provided the backdrop for the Market Section of Naked Lunch. “The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.”

One of the odder pieces in the exhibit also possesses a link to Burroughs. As I mentioned before, Kerouac compulsively kept lists and statistics. In his writing, he meticulously monitored his daily progress in terms of words and pages produced. He also detailed his sexual conquests. Remarkably, in a list of over fifty names, Joan Adams (Vollmer) is listed as number 23. The number is coincidental but still I was amazed by this sexual link to Burroughs. Kerouac notes that they slept together 175 times. This is more frequently then he slept with Edie Parker or Joan Haverty and second only to Alene Lee, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time of Burroughs’ visit in 1953. Clearly, the early Columbia Circle was incestuous (Kerouac also slept with Celine Young, Lucien Carr’s girlfriend), but I was unaware of the extent of Vollmer and Kerouac’s relationship. Vollmer remains a shadowy figure in Burroughs’ life and in Beat history in general. She was an intimate member of that early circle on many levels. By all accounts (scanty as they are), she was a remarkable woman who captivated Burroughs and clearly possessed some hold on Kerouac as well.

Another exhibit on display at the NYPL got me thinking about Burroughs. Graphic Modernism in the Baltic and Balkans conjured up images of Burroughs’ small press output of the 1960s. Works by El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others link, in terms of design, to the newspaper and scrapbook works. Certain pages of Moholy Nagy’s Malerei, Photographie, Film (1925) got me thinking of Time and Apo-33. The Polish Journal, Zdroj (Source), looks exactly like a Lower East Side mimeo. In fact, Modernist little magazines and the samizdat tradition in Eastern Europe foreshadow the mimeo revolution of the post-WWII era. You cannot look at Fuck You, a magazine of the arts or C: A Journal of Poetry without thinking of these earlier predecessors. The Expressionist innovations in layout, design, production and use of printing materials were something for the mimeos of the post WWII era to build on and react against.

I exited the New York Public Library and was greeted by a January thunderstorm. The bad weather brought to mind the Ghost of the Susquehanna section in On the Road. The exhibit included manuscript and journal versions of that section including pages with drawings of the Ghost. The exhibit also had several drawings of Dr. Sax. Of course, Dr. Sax features an epic storm as well. Dr. Sax was in part modeled on William Burroughs, and Kerouac wrote much of the novel while living in Mexico with him. The exhibit contained a photo of 212 Orizaba Street where Joan and Burroughs lived in 1950 and Kerouac and Bill Garver later resided in 1956. Dr. Sax is in many ways Kerouac’s much planned Visions of Bill. Like Visions of Cody written for and about Neal Cassady, Visions of Bill would have captured the essence of Burroughs that fascinated Kerouac from their first meeting. In some ways, Dr. Sax serves that purpose. Walking away from 5th Avenue in the rain, I kept looking over my shoulder. I felt somebody was following me. Call him el hombre invisible, Dr. Sax, Old Bull Lee, or William Burroughs. From the Beatific Soul exhibit, it is clear that Burroughs haunted Kerouac. He haunts me too.

Note: Columbia University has a companion exhibit dedicated to the art work of Kerouac and his friends. I was unable to attend this exhibit. In addition, in my single-minded quest to see the scroll I forgot about the book fair at the 25th Street Armory. If anybody attended these two events, please send an account to the comments section. The University of Texas at Austin will have a Beat exhibit starting in February. The scroll will be on hand as will examples of the stellar holdings of the library at Austin, one of the finest in the world. For example, the library houses Kerouac’s On the Road journals, included in the paperback version of Windblown World. Again, if a RealityStudio reader attends that exhibit please send along an account of it.