An In-Depth Account Drawing on Interviews, Correspondence, and Unpublished Documents

“I got a Christmas card from Burroughs,” J.G. Ballard told an interviewer in 1986.¹ It should not have been much of a surprise: he had known William S. Burroughs for about twenty years; he had recently published an enthusiastic review of Burroughs’ essay collection, The Adding Machine; and Burroughs, contrary to expectation, tended to be meticulous about sending out holiday cards. Still, Ballard added that it was “rather nice” to receive a card, implying that he had not always been on the mailing list. In fact, the two writers were never close. Ballard was extremely generous with his praise, calling Burroughs the “Great Man” and “the most important writer in the English language” since World War II. Burroughs was respectful but less effusive, allowing that Ballard was “good” as a writer.² “I like his work very much,” Burroughs told a Naropa workshop, “and I’ve met him.”³ Theirs was the sort of relationship, based on regard but not camaraderie, which is marked by the exchange of formalities. “I would never call myself a friend,” said Ballard, “more a long-term acquaintance.”⁴

Before he became an acquaintance, Ballard was an admirer. His first encounter with Burroughs’ writing was significant enough for him to recall it in print more than once. He read The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded all in a bunch. The place for this encounter remained clear in his memory — he devoured the three Olympia Press volumes at his home in Shepperton — but the year grew hazy. Ballard gave various dates for his initial engagement with Burroughs’ books: 1959, “about 1960″ and “something like 1960″, 1963.⁵ Given that the last of the Olympia Press tomes, The Ticket That Exploded, was not released until December 1962, Ballard must have first read Burroughs in 1963. The books were given to him by Michael Moorcock, who had discovered Naked Lunch at Le Mistral bookshop in Paris. By 1963, Moorcock and Ballard were meeting regularly for lunch at a pub called The Swan. Perhaps they noted that Burroughs, who had yet to publish a book in England, was being interviewed by the BBC and the Guardian. Eventually Moorcock asked a young friend, Maxim Jakubowski, to bring Ballard a set of the Olympia Press volumes from Paris. According to a chronology worked out by Jakubowski and Ballard expert David Pringle, it was during the first week of September 1963 that Jakubowski delivered the books to Moorcock, who passed them to Ballard.⁶

Naked Lunch was a “breath of fresh air” and “a tremendous high,” Moorcock recalled. “It was joyous absurdism which somehow spoke directly to me.”⁷ For Ballard, the book arrived at a critical moment. “It was a rather low time for me,” he remembered.

I had just started out as a writer. I hadn’t written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called “Hampstead novels” seemed to dominate everything. Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us.⁸

By September 1963 Ballard had in fact written more than just a first novel. In 1961, in a desperate attempt to create a salable book, he had spent a two-week vacation cranking out 6000 words per day to produce The Wind from Nowhere. By early 1962 he had completed his next novel, The Drowned World. If Ballard misremembered the sequence of events, however, he did not forget the impact of Burroughs’ work. In 1963, he was still supporting his young family by publishing formally conventional short stories and working as an editor at a scientific journal. To encounter those little green books at this “rather low time” was electrifying. “Naked Lunch,” Ballard wrote later, “was a grenade tossed into the sherry party of English fiction.”⁹ He would remember being struck by the “sheer originality, humour, the unique eye, the coherence of the apocalyptic vision.”¹⁰ The uncompromising example of Burroughs may have been in the back of his mind when, at the end of 1963 or beginning of 1964, Ballard quit his editorship to focus on his own work.

Ballard was not alone in discovering Burroughs’ novels during this period. In March 1962, Naked Lunch overcame an obscenity trial to be published in America. In August 1962, Burroughs stole the headlines at the Edinburgh Writers Conference with his statements on censorship and nonlinear writing techniques. John Calder, anxious to catch the momentum but wary of legal censure in the United Kingdom, arranged to publish a hybrid book that combined cut-ups with the less obscene parts of Naked Lunch. This book, Dead Fingers Talk, was released on November 15, 1963 to immediate controversy. A savage review in the Times Literary Supplement inspired a torrid exchange of letters from literary figures including Calder, publisher Victor Gollancz, critic Eric Mottram, and Dame Edith Sitwell, who proclaimed that she did not wish to have her “nose nailed to other people’s lavatories.” Moorcock contributed to the dialogue with a letter published in the TLS on November 21. Citing a passage in Naked Lunch (“‘So what you want off me?’ ‘Time…’”), Moorcock hailed Burroughs as “one of the first real writers of SF”:

I suppose a moral message can be read into Burroughs’ work, but this is not its prime concern. Just as modern physics approaches the metaphysical with each new advancement, so is Burroughs concerned with Space and Time, its nature, its philosophical implications, the place of the individual in the total universe.¹¹

Moorcock’s letter also mentioned The Drowned World — the first public, or at least prominent, comparison of Burroughs and Ballard. Ironically, The Drowned World might well have been the reason Ballard did not offer his own defense of Burroughs. Victor Gollancz, vituperative in his criticism of Dead Fingers Talk, had published what Ballard called his “first serious novel” and taken him to a celebratory lunch. For practical reasons, Ballard would not have wanted to sour this promising relationship with an important publisher. Once the ruckus subsided, however, he did offer a wry comment on Sitwell’s disgust: “Some lavatory, some nose.”¹²

An Exchange of Letters

The UGH! affair, as the epistolary skirmish in the TLS came to be known, put Burroughs in contact with a range of admirers. On December 18, 1963 Burroughs wrote a thank-you note to Moorcock, adding “I do not know exactly what is meant by a moral message but I certainly do intend to sound an urgent word of warning relative to rather obvious pre-nova conditions.”¹³ Around January 1964 Burroughs made his first contribution to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. In February, he received a letter from a writer who would soon become important in Ballard’s life. Martin Bax, whom Ballard would not meet until 1965, invited Burroughs to contribute to his literary magazine Ambit. Burroughs responded with a three-column cut-up titled, perhaps with Nuttall in mind, “Martin’s Mag.” He described his intentions in an accompanying letter which he encouraged Bax to publish “as a note of explanation.”

I enclose an unpublished page representative of recent experiments in which I extend the newspaper format to fictional material as if I were reporting news. Presentation in columns enables the writer to run three or more streams of narrative concurrently with possibilities of counterpoint contrast and change of temp not offered by the book page. [...] I hope that writers may be led to experiment with format and the effects of format on the reading process beyond the limitations of a book page left to right down and over. (What a salutary shock to see words running from right to left on an English page). It is time for writers to break up an unsanitary relationship with a dead typewriter in an empty room.¹⁴

The text was published later that year in issue 20 of Ambit. That Bax’s magazine was already publishing Burroughs was likely one of the incentives for Ballard to join the masthead as prose editor a few years later.

The week after Burroughs replied to Bax, Moorcock became the editor of New Worlds magazine, an established but flagging franchise that would be revitalized under his stewardship. As Moorcock scrambled to prepare his first issue, Eric Mottram discovered that the BBC possessed tapes of Burroughs reading and discussing his work. Mottram took these tapes and rebroadcast them with his own commentary on March 9, 1964.¹⁵ Moorcock and Ballard must have heard Burroughs declare on the radio that he was “writing for cosmonauts of inner space” and “attempting to create a new mythology for the space age.” That month, both of them wrote letters to Burroughs in Tangiers. For his first issue of New Worlds, May/June 1964, Moorcock penned an editorial referencing the “recent BBC broadcast” and touting Burroughs as “the first SF writer” to invent “a new literature for the Space Age.” He also asked Ballard to prepare an essay. Ballard took advantage of the opportunity to introduce himself with a letter which can be partly reconstructed from Burroughs’ reply.¹⁶

March 23, 1964
4 Calle Larachi Marshan
Tangier, Morocco

Dear Mr. Ballard:

Thank you for your letter. I was interested to learn that J. Conrad and J. Joyce received unfavorable notice in the TLS. I have always felt that Conrad is vastly underestimated dismissed with the classification ‘old fashioned’ and Joyce of course receives the ‘great writer nobody can read’ treatment. Have you ever read Conrad’s ‘Romance’ which he wrote in collaboration with Ford Maddox Ford? I think it is one of the greatest science fiction stories ever written and now out of print.

I have been in correspondence with Mr. Moorcock who has told me something of your science fiction writing — ‘The Drowned World’ (‘The Four Dimensional Nightmare’). I will order these books with the English book store here if you can let me know the publisher. Your concept of a lost sacral brain is a most interesting one that should provide excellent material for a work of science fiction.

I am planning a trip to London in September and hope that we can arrange to meet at that time.

Best Wishes
William Burroughs

Ballard had consoled Burroughs about the UGH! scandal with flattering comparisons to James Joyce, whom he had emulated in his early experimental work, and Joseph Conrad — an author very much on Ballard’s mind since, at lunch, Gollancz had stunned him with the allegation that The Drowned World had been derived from Conrad, whom Ballard had not yet read.

In addition to offering his consolations about the TLS, Ballard must have felt the need to engage Burroughs with a more striking idea or observation. Years later he would admit to an interviewer that, when speaking with Burroughs, “I steer the conversation towards those things that I know interest him.”¹⁷ The notion of a “lost sacral brain” was the first such effort. Perhaps Ballard had noticed the frequency with which The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded refer to the spine, a phrase such as “memory hit spine outside 1920 movie theater” causing him to recall the hypothesis that dinosaurs possessed a “sacral brain.” The nineteenth century paleontologist Wilhelm von Branca had even suggested that “in man there appear still to be traces of this” cerebral matter in the spinal column.¹⁸ Had Ballard stumbled across the notion while researching The Drowned World? In a 1968 interview, he used the sacral brain as a model to describe the entire novel:

In The Drowned World I describe the return of the entire planet to the era of the great Triassic forests, which covered the earth some 200 million years ago. I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are amphibious reptiles. I use this portrait of the spinal column as a vessel containing a reflection of the memory of the past [...] as a literary device.¹⁹

That Burroughs, always intrigued by offbeat ideas, responded positively to the notion and to the correspondence must have gratified Ballard immensely. A note from his wife Mary to his sister Margaret registered, on April 2, 1964, that Ballard had received “a letter from the writer William Burroughs from Tangier[s].”²⁰ The fact that this was newsworthy gives a good indication of the increasing renown of Burroughs and the esteem Ballard must have expressed for him even en famille. It also hints at the asymmetry that was to remain in the writers’ relationship, in which Burroughs was clearly the senior partner. Ian Sommerville, living with Burroughs in Morocco, did not write to his family about receiving mail from Ballard.

Burroughs’ letter gave impetus to “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century,” the essay Ballard submitted to Moorcock for the May/June 1964 issue of New Worlds. In his first published statement about Burroughs, Ballard focused on Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. To choose these three books was not self-evident. Nova Express had not yet been published, and Ballard may not have realized that Junkie, published pseudonymously, had been written by Burroughs. But what about Dead Fingers Talk? New Worlds presented “Myth Maker” as a review of the book that stirred up the UGH! scandal, but Ballard said nothing of it except that the earlier novels had been “re-worked to form the basis of Dead Fingers Talk.” Perhaps he felt the scandal had already been overplayed, or he hesitated to defend a book which his publisher found repugnant. Ballard may also have been offering a subtle judgement on Dead Fingers Talk, as though to say that it was a compromised presentation of texts whose real and pungent versions were to be found in the little green tomes of Olympia Press. Putting the nail in the coffin, Ballard deleted any mention of Dead Fingers Talk when he collected this “review” years later in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.

Like Ballard’s lost letter, “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century” invokes Joyce and Conrad, contending that Burroughs takes up where Finnegans Wake left off. It echoes the idea, offered by Burroughs and repeated by both Mottram and Moorcock, that the cut-up novels constitute “the authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen.” But the real goal of Ballard’s essay was to characterize Burroughs as a writer of “inner space,” a notion Ballard practically trademarked by promoting it so eloquently. Burroughs’ writing, Ballard argued, furnishes “the first portrait of the inner landscape of the post-war world, using its own language and manipulative techniques, its own fantasies and nightmares.” Burroughs himself attributed the concept of “inner space” to Alex Trocchi, who used the term at the Edinburgh Writers Conference in August 1962.²¹ Ballard, however, had already published his essay “Which Way to Inner Space” in the May 1962 issue of New Worlds. Did Trocchi get the idea from Ballard? Did Ballard, as biographer John Baxter alleges, get the idea from J.B. Priestley’s 1953 essay “They Come from Inner Space?”²² Or was it simply in the air, an obvious counterpoint to the headlines about outer space? In any event, “inner space” was a point of intersection between the writers, and Ballard must have been pleased to hear Burroughs advocating a position he had already staked out.

Burroughs was enthusiastic about this new writer who had sent him the letter and the flattering essay. On May 1, 1964, he sent Jeff Nuttall a list of names that should receive review copies of My Own Mag.²³ Topping the list were Moorcock, Ballard, and Anthony Burgess. Later that summer, on August 15, Burroughs replied to a few interview questions mailed to him by Ramsey Campbell, whose first story collection was put out that year by Arkham House, the publisher long associated with H.P. Lovecraft.

the science fiction writers who have most influenced me are H.G. Wells still one of the best C.S. Lewis interesting that in his obituaries no mention is made of his science fiction work. Recently I have been in touch with J.G. Ballard and Mike Moorcock who sent me New Worlds SF May June Vol 48 no 142. I enjoyed Ballard’s Equinox and the Star Virus by B.J. Bayley I thought Bayley was really first rate. Do you know this Bayley? I understand Bayley is a pen name.²⁴

“Equinox,” the cover story for the same issue of New Worlds containing “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century,” was an early version of Ballard’s fourth novel, The Crystal World. However, it made less of an impression than Barrington J. Bayley’s story. Burroughs borrowed the concept of “deadliners” from “Star Virus” for the revised edition of The Ticket That Exploded (which, while crediting him, mangled the title of New Worlds and the spelling of Bayley’s name). And it was deadliners, not Ballard’s story or essay, that would stand out in Burroughs’ memory. On September 10, 1964, Burroughs wrote to Antony Balch to recommend potential reviewers for an early cut of the film Towers Open Fire. “I nominate J.G. Ballard editor of the magasine in which the deadliners appear or was Mike Moorcock the editor they would both be interested and such a gathering might well lead to scene.”²⁵

The scene was not yet destined to take place. Though he had offered in his March letter to meet Ballard in London in September 1964, Burroughs remained in Tangiers. Ballard, meanwhile, was vacationing in Spain with his family. His wife Mary, perhaps not fully recovered from an earlier bout of appendicitis, contracted a severe pneumonia. Just three days after Burroughs advised Balch to send rushes of Towers Open Fire to Ballard and Moorcock, Mary passed away. By the time a grieving Ballard returned to Shepperton with his children, it is doubtful he would have been in the frame of mind for a meeting. The death “unhinged” Ballard, as colleague Brain Aldiss observed. Then again, was Ballard aware that Burroughs was also a widower? When Burroughs appeared on a BBC television broadcast in January 1964, he discussed the shooting death of his wife Joan, blaming it on alcohol. Perhaps some part of Ballard would have been interested to commune with Burroughs on this morbid level. In a sense, The Atrocity Exhibition undertakes this conversation with Naked Lunch — one widower to another in the fragmented language of experimentalism. Both writers would numb their grief with substance abuse — heroin for one, whiskey for the other — though Ballard would determine to become the model single parent of which Burroughs was the antithesis.

First Meeting

At the end of 1964 Burroughs returned to America for an eventful visit that included the death of his father in Florida, a homecoming in St Louis (where, on assignment for Playboy, he composed an autobiographical cut-up that the magazine rejected), and encounters with the “underground” literary scene burgeoning in New York. He did not forget Ballard during this time. An interviewer from S.F. Horizons asked which science fiction writers interested him. Bringing out a copy of New Worlds, Burroughs listed “Mr. Ballard and Mr. Moorcock in England, Mr. Arthur C. Clarke. Mr Sturgeon, of course.”²⁶ By summer, however, Burroughs was bored in America. “Nothing here really,” he wrote to Sommerville, “I just stay in my loft and work.”²⁷ Leaving New York in September 1965, Burroughs traveled to London. Visa difficulties made it impossible for him to remain in England past December. It was not a particularly productive autumn. Burroughs attempted to patch up his relationship with Sommerville, complained about the weather (“London rather grey”), and gave a reading at the St Martin School of Art, where Trocchi was teaching.²⁸ But it was during this visit that Burroughs may have met Ballard in person for the first time.

Though Ballard gave numerous public accounts of his relationship with Burroughs, only once did he specify the time and place they were introduced. “I met WSB in about 1965 — in London, through Bill Butler, an American poet, now sadly dead, who ran a little publishing house in Brighton.”²⁹ It is not a given that Ballard’s recollection is accurate. In interviews he gave slightly different dates for his interactions with Burroughs, and friends of Ballard offer alternative possibilities. Bax suggests that it was Anselm Hollo who brokered a meeting.³⁰ Moorcock believes the two writers met at one of his parties: “I am pretty sure that JGB met WB at a party of mine which I gave so that some of these people could meet but it could also have been in John Calder’s office. I’m certain Bill Butler wasn’t there and I’m pretty sure he didn’t introduce Bill to Jimmy.”³¹ Memories may vary in their reliability, but the names that crop up — Butler, Calder, Moorcock, Bax, Hollo — do chart the “social graph” or, as Burroughs had put it, the scene connecting the very different milieus of the fantasist in Shepperton and the nomad inventor of Interzone.

According to David Pringle, Ballard met Bill Butler in September 1965 — right as Burroughs was getting to London.³² A year after his wife’s death, Ballard was establishing connections with writers such as Bax and trying to figure out his place in what would come to be called Swinging London. Butler did not yet know Burroughs but had recently befriended Allen Ginsberg, who visited London in summer 1965. In November, using Ginsberg’s name as a reference, Butler requested an interview with Burroughs.³³ Perhaps he bumped into Burroughs on November 18 at Better Books, where Jeff Nuttall had called for a meeting to bring together “people who hold the basic belief that human consciousness must change or humanity will destroy itself.”³⁴ Nuttall had circulated a group invite that included Burroughs, Butler, Alex Trocchi, Harry Fainlight, Jim Haynes, and B.S. Johnson, but not Ballard (in spite of the fact that Burroughs had already recommended adding him to My Own Mag‘s mailing list). The interview was conducted around this time and published in the Guardian newspaper on November 27. Consequently, if Butler brokered a meeting between Burroughs and Ballard in 1965, it had to occur after mid-November. Because Butler occupied a managerial role at Better Books, which was as much a meeting place for the growing underground as it was a bookstore, it is not difficult to imagine an unplanned introduction in the aisles. “Oh, Bill, this is Jim Ballard…” Bax met Burroughs in person in a similar setting at Indica Books.

Because of his visa difficulties, Burroughs decamped to Tangiers for Christmas 1965. By January, however, he returned to London, where something of a scene was coming together. In March 1966, New Worlds published poetry by Butler. In April, Nuttall’s My Own Mag included Burroughs, Butler, and Moorcock — but not Ballard — on a list of contacts. That same month, New Worlds featured Ballard’s story “The Assassination Weapon” and an essay by Butler about Burroughs. Occasioned by the English publication of The Soft Machine and Nova Express, Butler’s essay reworked the November interview with Burroughs that had been printed in the Guardian. The revision begins by acknowledging the “sensitive appreciation” Ballard had offered in “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century.” It then reveals that Ballard’s admiration for Burroughs was at least partly mutual.

William Burroughs reads science fiction and uses fragments from science fiction… He mentioned Ballard’s collection, Terminal Beach, published by Gollancz, saying that he had enjoyed several of the stories very much.³⁵

As if to leave no doubt about the nodes in the developing social network, Butler’s essay also describes the regular column Burroughs was composing for My Own Mag, “Jeff Nuttall’s mimeographed magazine from Barnet, Hertfordshire.”

While Burroughs was reading Ballard’s short stories, Ballard was trying to process Burroughs’ novels. If that processing was latent in the nonlinear narratives Ballard was composing, it was manifest in another critique. The spring 1966 issue of Ambit featured “Terminal Documents,” a reworking of Ballard’s earlier essay on Burroughs. This revised text, which labels him the “first mythographer of the mid-20th century” and the “lineal successor to James Joyce,” continued to position Burroughs as a writer of inner space. However, “Terminal Documents” differed from “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century” in that it was not wholly laudatory. For the first time, Ballard interspersed his praise with negative judgements. “Certain conclusions” that Burroughs draws about “society at large” and “our notions of reality,” Ballard commented, “seem to me to be questionable.” Burroughs’ “view of the sexual act” is subject to a Freudian interpretation, with Ballard calling it “regressive,” “infantile,” and “excessively dominated by the functions of urination and defecation” — a verdict that, ironically, echoes Sitwell’s barb about not wanting her nose nailed to anyone’s lavatory.

Uncharacteristically, Ballard’s language in “Terminal Documents” is torturous. His judgements are not phrased in the lucid, almost epigrammatic style for which he became known. Instead, they are offered in looping run-on sentences, the divagations of a person struggling to criticize without criticizing. If “Terminal Documents” marked the first time Ballard publicly found fault with Burroughs, it also marked the introduction of an ambivalence that would persist in Ballard’s future comments on the author of Naked Lunch. On one hand, Ballard was frank in his admiration. On the other hand, he was insistent that he had been inspired but not influenced by Burroughs. Ballard may have especially wanted to make this point in “Terminal Documents” because this same issue of Ambit featured “You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe,” another of his new “condensed novels.” Was it necessary to criticize Burroughs in order to disavow any influence on the nonlinear writing technique with which Ballard was experimenting? Or was Ballard disappointed with the man after meeting Burroughs for the first time?

Dinner at Duke Street

The view from 8 Duke Street, St James (photo by William Burroughs)

In July 1966, Burroughs signed a lease for an apartment on Duke Street, St James, beginning a residency in London that would last until 1974. On July 15, Moorcock threw a party at his Notting Hill flat with the intention of introducing the burgeoning scene to the writer Judith Merril. Burroughs and Ballard both attended Moorcock’s Friday get-together, but it was scarcely a meeting of the minds. Ballard likely spent the evening chatting with Merril, with whom he had commenced an affair the previous September. Burroughs preferred to spend the evening with Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for travel, technology, and young men. The two had previously met in December 1964 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.³⁶ At the July party, Moorcock recalled, Burroughs and Clarke “spent the entire evening deep in animated conversation, pausing only to sip their OJ and complain about the rock’n'roll music on the hifi.”³⁷ Not long after, Merril would include both Burroughs (“They Do Not Always Remember”) and Ballard (“The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D” and “You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe”) in the twelfth installment in her respected line of science fiction anthologies.

After Burroughs moved into his Duke Street flat in August 1966, Ballard came for supper. Duke Street was not far from Piccadilly Circus, which interested Burroughs because, Ballard recalled, “that’s where all the boys used to congregate, in the lavatory of the big Piccadilly Circus Underground station.”³⁸ The flat “was very neat and tidy and clean” — the legendary chaos of Burroughs’ Tangiers digs had given way to the orderly rooms whose upkeep he would describe in “The Discipline of DE.”³⁹ (“Cleaning the flat is a problem of logistics…”) In his obituary of Burroughs, Ballard gave his standard account of the evening:

Esquire had asked me to write a profile of him, but Burroughs, though courteous, was very suspicious. The baleful power of media empires already obsessed him. While his young boyfriend, “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, carved a roast chicken, Burroughs described the most effective way to stab a man to death. All the while he kept an eye on the doors and windows. “The CIA are watching me,” he confided. “They park their laundry vans in the street outside.”⁴⁰

The account, repeated with slight variations in a handful of interviews, raises a number of questions. Exactly when did this dinner take place? How did Esquire get involved? Who was the boyfriend with the tattooed knuckles? Why did Ballard not complete a profile of Burroughs for the magazine?

Ballard gave a range of dates for the dinner. The obit situated it in the “early 1960s,” impossible since Burroughs only took possession of the flat in 1966. One interview rightly placed the dinner in the “late sixties.”⁴¹ But what is “late” — 1966? 1969? Esquire cannot furnish a date. Scandalously, the magazine has not retained its correspondence from the period.⁴² Burroughs was in frequent contact with Esquire during the 1960s, not only submitting texts but answering queries for random features such as “if your life were being played by a movie star, whom would you choose?” (Burroughs’ reply: “I would cast myself in a biographical film since I write my own biography.”⁴³) Burroughs’ archives, however, contain no mention of a profile. Ballard never did contribute to the magazine, though Esquire would have been aware of him. The U.S. publication of The Crystal World earned a review from the New York Times in May 1966, and Alice Glaser, an associate editor at Esquire, was cognizant of the science-fiction scene.⁴⁴ In March 1968 editor-in-chief Harold Hayes visited London and Paris to ask Burroughs — as well as Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett — to cover the upcoming Democratic convention. Did Hayes, aware of Ballard’s rising star, give him a call or suggest the profile? The Hayes archive at Wake Forest university contains no letters to or from Ballard.

If the Esquire assignment cannot date the encounter, there remains the boyfriend. Shortly after Burroughs moved into the Duke Street apartment, Ian Sommerville and his lover Alan Watson moved in. Sommerville did not have the tattoos. Watson, who worked in the canteen at Scotland Yard and was capable of producing the roast chicken that Ballard thought “tasty,” did not have the tattoos either. Barry Miles, who knew Watson, says he would have been “shocked at the very suggestion.”⁴⁵ Ending the complicated ménage with Burroughs, Sommerville and Watson moved out in August 1968. Subsequently, in October, John Culverwell moved in and remained for about eighteen months. Did he have “love” and “hate” on his knuckles? A snapshot of Culverwell in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library reveals no ink on his knuckles.⁴⁶ His hands are not prominent enough in the picture to rule it out, though. It is also possible that the boyfriend with the tattooed knuckles was a passing bit of street trade from Piccadilly Circus. “The love-hate thing,” Miles suggests, “was mostly confined to ‘rockers’ or manual labourers and in fact I’m inclined to doubt that Bill ever had a long-term boyfriend with such a tattoo, wrong sort of person for him.”⁴⁷

Alternatively, it may have been the tattoos that were temporary. They were perfectly attuned, with their contrast of “love” and “hate,” to the Scientology techniques Burroughs was exploring at the time. The training required to become a “clear,” Burroughs wrote, “consists of a series of contradictory propositions and running this material does give a certain immunity to contradictory commands.”⁴⁸ In Nova Express, this training is transformed into the “signal switch” — “what they call the ‘yes no’ sir… ‘I love you I hate you’ at supersonic alternating speed…” It is easy to imagine Burroughs picking up a hustler because the tattoos on his knuckles played into his preoccupation with Scientology processing techniques. Or to imagine Burroughs suggesting the tattoos as an intimate way of continuing his Scientology exercises and inuring himself to contradictory commands. Or to imagine one of his steady boyfriends inking himself as a way to tease Burroughs about his obsessions. Intimidating as Burroughs could be, lovers often had him at psychological disadvantage.

Another possibility for dating the Duke Street supper lies in Burroughs’ seemingly paranoid fantasies about the CIA. In interviews, Ballard consistently repeated the anecdote about Burroughs worrying that agents surveilled him from a disguised laundry van. “I don’t think he was having me on,” Ballard said. “His imagination was filled with bizarre lore culled from Believe It Or Not features, police pulps and — in the case, I assume, of the laundry vans — Hollywood spy movies of the cold war years.”⁴⁹ Ballard was almost right about the origin of the laundry vans. Oddly enough, “paranoia about laundry vans” is a theme that can be traced in Burroughs’ writings and interviews. It appears for the first time in an interview Burroughs granted underground newspaper The Rat in September 1968.

A recent article in Esquire Magazine written by a former CIA agent contains this anecdote. A man with photos of the Bay of Pigs was on his way to a newspaper office when the agent who was tailing him called a special number in Washington. “On the way to the newspaper he was run over by a laundry truck.” Not so easy to be sure of nailing someone in a walk across town, after all people do look before crossing streets. I would venture the guess that he was pushed in front of the truck by a laser.⁵⁰

The anecdote derived not from a “recent” Esquire but from the April 1967 issue of muckraking magazine Ramparts, then publishing a series of sensationalistic exposés of the CIA.⁵¹ Burroughs took up the story and repeated it in The Job, finished in October 1968, and in an article published in Mayfair Magazine in January 1969.⁵² If Ramparts was the origin of the laundry van in his ravings, it follows that Ballard cannot have visited Burroughs at the Duke Street flat prior to April 1967. Even more likely is that Ballard visited soon after Burroughs returned from the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Burroughs had been on assignment for Esquire, who had treated him generously. When he returned to London in September 1968, was it with a suggestion from the editors that Ballard should profile him for the magazine? Supper might have been served by John Culverwell, who had just moved in, and Ballard would have been exposed to the “paranoia” inspired in Burroughs by the riots and police brutality he had witnessed in Chicago.

Ultimately the supper left Ballard disinclined to profile Burroughs. “I turned down the Esquire assignment, realising that nothing I wrote could remotely do justice to Burroughs’ magnificently paranoid imagination.”⁵³ Although “paranoid” was not exactly a reproach — Ballard deeply admired Salvador Dali, who described his aesthetics in terms of “critical paranoia” — he appears to have been genuinely unnerved to discover that Burroughs thought like he wrote. In addition, Ballard was unable to find a comfort zone with two major aspects of Burroughs’ lifestyle. Burroughs, Ballard told an interviewer, “was a complete original but difficult to get to know if you weren’t (a) homosexual, which I wasn’t, and (b) a drug user, which again I wasn’t.”⁵⁴ A drinker, Ballard had done no more than dabble with the cornucopia of drugs offered up by the counterculture. And while it would be presumptuous to declare Ballard a homophobe, his recollections indicate that he felt awkward about Burroughs’ sexual orientation. When a female interviewer said she found Burroughs difficult, Ballard — then promoting The Kindness of Women — replied, “Well, he’s so anti-woman, isn’t he? It’s a masculine world. It’s more than that; it’s very hardcore… and a homosexual world which I find very weird.”⁵⁵

If he found homosexuality “weird,” what did it mean for Ballard to include it in the fiction he was composing at the time? In Crash, the narrator “Ballard” wonders whether a “latent homo-erotic element had been brought to the surface of my mind by [Vaughan's] photographs of violence and sexuality.” Did the real Ballard experience something similar in his confrontation with Burroughs’ images? The title alone of the story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” shows Ballard toying with an aggressive public stance that, in private, might well have made him uncomfortable. In interviews he was sure to contrast his orientation with that of Burroughs.

I admire Burroughs more than any other living writer, and most of those who are dead. It’s nothing to do with his homosexual bent, by the way. I’m no member of the “homintern,” but a lifelong straight who prefers the company of women to most men. The few homosexual elements in Crash and Atrocity Exhibition, fucking Reagan, et cetera, are there for reasons other than the sexual — in fact, to show a world beyond sexuality, or, at least beyond clear sexual gender.⁵⁶

It’s an ambiguous position. On one hand, Ballard’s use of homosexuality is as progressive as Swinging London. It points to a liberality so extreme that, like the novel fetish of Crash, it exceeds sexuality itself. On the other hand, by dissolving homosexuality in a “world beyond sexuality” and using it for “reasons other than the sexual,” Ballard neutralizes the very thing in it that discomfits. It’s not gay. It’s just outlandish.

J.G. Ballard, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, Unicorn Books, 1968

These issues were at play in January 1968 when Bill Butler published a limited, standalone edition of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” According to biographer John Baxter, Butler “regarded publishing Jim’s text in part as a gesture of homosexual activism.”⁵⁷ It was a daring move. Burroughs had already noted, in an April 23, 1967 letter to French writer Claude Pélieu, that “There had been a lot of trouble here book shops raided heat on the drug scene.”⁵⁸ The heat caused John Calder to delay the UK publication of The Soft Machine. Butler’s bookshop, Unicorn Books, was raided the same month it put out Ballard’s text. Over seventy titles were seized — in addition to underground magazines and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” there were books by Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, and John Giorno. Butler was charged with selling obscene material. A trial was scheduled for August 1968 — precisely when Burroughs was in Chicago covering the Democratic convention — and Ballard was asked to testify on Butler’s half.⁵⁹ “Preparing me,” Ballard recounted,

the defence lawyer asked me why I believed “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” was not obscene, to which I had to reply that of course it was obscene, and intended to be so. Why, then, was its subject matter not Reagan’s sexuality? Again I had to affirm that it was. At last the lawyer said: “Mr Ballard, you will make a very good witness for the prosecution. We will not be calling you.”⁶⁰

Ballard’s refusal to apologize for his text was laudable from a literary standpoint. Perhaps he was even gunning for an obscenity trial as a way to put his work on the same plane as Naked Lunch. But this defiant stance helped neither the legal case nor Ballard’s relationship with the man who had introduced him to Burroughs. “Sadly,” Ballard admitted, “all this led to a coolness between Bill [Butler] and myself.” Butler was judged guilty, and friends attempted to defray his legal expenses by compiling an anthology of poetry and prose. Published in 1970, For Bill Butler contained a stellar list of contributors drawn from the bookseller’s sizable social network.⁶¹ Ballard was not among them. Neither was Burroughs, though he had agreed to contribute.⁶² Likely Burroughs’ submission metamorphosed into Ali’s Smile, published separately by Unicorn Books in 1971.

The London Scene

By the time of Butler’s trial, Ballard had become a figure not just in the science-fiction scene but in the literary vanguard. In August 1969, his name appeared in the printed program for the Harrogate Festival of Arts & Sciences, where he was to appear at the Third International Literary Conference alongside Burroughs, Moorcock, Nuttall, B.S. Johnson, his friend Christopher Evans, and others. Deciding instead to vacation in Italy with his children, Ballard withdrew from the event, as did Moorcock. Burroughs, Nuttall, and Martin Bax attended, along with a range of luminaries including Marshall McLuhan, Arthur Koestler, and Herbert Marcuse. Burroughs, according to a review in the Guardian, spoke about “worldwide reaction.”⁶³ Afterward Christopher Priest and Norman Spinrad, who took the place of Ballard and Moorcock, accompanied Burroughs back to London on the train. They were amazed to see the lurid tabloids he purchased at a newsstand. “Look at this stuff,” Spinrad recalled Burroughs chortling. “Juicy.”⁶⁴ John Calder, who organized the literary panel, subsequently wrote a letter apologizing to Burroughs for the way the event had been “dogged by last-minute cancellations.”⁶⁵ It is difficult not to agree. The festival would have been much more noteworthy had Ballard not withdrawn. It would have been the only time Burroughs and Ballard engaged in a public discussion.

As though to make up for missing the Harrogate Festival, Ballard allowed himself to be talked into reading at the Phun City rock festival in July 1970. An advertisement in the July 17 issue of International Times touted the presence of the usual suspects — Burroughs, Ballard, Nuttall, Butler, Trocchi, and others. Burroughs looked forward to the festival as a place to perform experiments with tape recorders. “Scrambles,” a text he contributed to that same issue of International Times (later collected in Electronic Revolution), envisioned planting enough recorders “to lay down a grid of sound over the whole festival.” Ballard fictionalized the event in The Kindness of Women, portraying himself as reluctant to attend except for the opportunity to appear alongside Burroughs:

“You’ll enjoy it — Burroughs will be there.”

“The great man. But what do I read?”

“Anything. One of your sado-masochistic romps should go down a treat. The audiences are very conventional.”

“So am I. Sally…”

The romps were those of The Atrocity Exhibition, published in book form by Jonathan Cape that same month. But however radical his writing may have been, Ballard was reminded of his conventionality from the moment of his arrival on Saturday, July 25. “I was doing a reading, so was William Burroughs,” he recalled, “and when I arrived the Hell’s Angels security guards said to me, ‘Dad, you’re in the wrong place…’”⁶⁶ With his children in tow, he cannot have seen Burroughs much. The Kindness of Women only indicates that “Burroughs hovered briefly into view, as formal as an undertaker in his natty suit.” Ballard described reading — “My dreams of Mrs Kennedy’s sexuality had boomed across the placid downs, unsettling the grazing cattle a dozen fields away” — but it is unclear he even took the stage. According to Maxim Jakubowski,

all the writers present were utterly bewildered as to why they should be there and never made it to the stage although the deejay kept on saying through the sound system that all these fab groovy people were there.

The readings were to be held in an inflatable dome which failed to inflate, obliging the writers to relocate to a makeshift “tent used for collective acts of worship by a Christian group, from which the poets were quickly evicted (by Hells Angels!) due to their continual swearing.”⁶⁷ Meantime Burroughs made less of an impression with words than with drugs. Overdosing, he was carried to the medical tent.⁶⁸ Afterward he wrote to Brion Gysin, “The Phun City festival was rather fun but no chance to do anything with recorders.”⁶⁹ No chance for Burroughs and Ballard to engage in meaningful discourse either.

The Atrocity Exhibition

Their relationship, however, was about to reach the moment that served as its climax. Just six or eight weeks before Phun City, an executive at the New York publisher Doubleday was scandalized by “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and ordered an entire print run of The Atrocity Exhibition, due on June 12, 1970, to be pulped. Subsequently E.P. Dutton purchased the book and scheduled its American publication for April 1971. Lawyers sent Ballard a letter requesting him to remove three entire texts as well as “sexual fantasies about public figures.”⁷⁰ Ballard refused and the book made its way to Grove Press, which had successfully defended Naked Lunch from obscenity charges in 1962. As though to underscore that legal victory, Burroughs contributed a brief foreword to the book. It was his first and only text about J.G. Ballard.

“Grove Press arranged his superb introduction,” Ballard told an interviewer.⁷¹ It is unclear who actually asked Burroughs — Ballard? Barney Rosset? someone else at Grove? — but the publisher would have been alert to the strategic significance of having Burroughs’ name attached to the book. Editor Fred Jordan, who joined Grove in 1956 and began to work more closely with Burroughs after the departure of Richard Seaver in late 1971, wrote Burroughs on June 13, 1972:

Herewith a copy of ATROCITY EXHIBITION which J.G. Ballard has agreed will be titled in the U.S. edition as LOVE AND NAPALM: EXPORT U.S.A. We are delighted that you have agreed to write a short introduction for the book, and we are allowing two pages for it. Since the book is now in production, I would be grateful if you could get it to me as soon as possible.⁷²

That Jordan sent the British edition from New York back to London suggests that Burroughs agreed to pen an introduction without having read the book yet. Likely, though, he had seen some of the stories as they appeared in small magazines. Ballard had also sent him an invitation to the April 3, 1970 private view of his Crashed Cars exhibit at the London New Arts Laboratory, though there is no evidence Burroughs attended.⁷³ (Jo Stanley’s cheeky account of the vernissage does not mention him, although it appeared in the same May 29, 1970 issue of Friends that contained a review of The Job.⁷⁴) In any event, Burroughs tended to be generous about furnishing prefaces, forewords, letters, and “counterscripts” to books produced by writers who were exploring and extending his nonlinear writing techniques. From 1965 to 1972, he contributed to works by Jacques Stern, Jeff Nuttall, Claude Pélieu, Carl Weissner, Jan Herman, Graham Masterton, and others. When it came to The Atrocity Exhibition, he may also have wanted to reciprocate for the support that Ballard had steadily offered.

Renaming the Grove edition of The Atrocity Exhibition after one of its stories, “Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.,” was Jordan’s decision. Carl Weissner, who translated the book into German using a proof copy provided by Cape, had wanted to retitle the book Liebe und Napalm in order to use a Warholesque cover illustration of a screen queen, clad in bikini and American flag, holding a machine gun.⁷⁵ Ballard, writing to Weissner on July 17, 1969, readily assented: “By all means use Love & Napalm.”⁷⁶ Jordan, who was born in Vienna and educated in England, must have encountered Weissner’s translation and thought the new name a good idea. But while Ballard was agreeable about the German title, he disliked it for the U.S. edition:

I remember sitting in a London hotel with Fred Jordan, the intelligent and likeable editor at Grove, and arguing against the title on the grounds (a) that the Vietnam war was over (this was 1971), and (b) that it would give an apparently anti-American slant to the whole book. Jordan maintained that the war was not over and would continue to rouse violent passions for years to come. I felt that he was wrong, and that though the tragedy would cast its shadow for decades across America, the era of street protests and marches was over.⁷⁷

Ballard, who had been insistent on the obscenity of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” ceased to insist on the title. He was being practical — the book was already on its third American publisher. It must also have appealed to him to place the book with the firm that had championed Burroughs’ greatest work. “It gave the book,” Moorcock recalled, “a sort of entrée into American lit circles so he was pleased with that.”⁷⁸

On Wednesday, June 21, 1972, Jordan followed up with a telegram to Burroughs. “CAN I EXPECT INTRODUCTION FOR BALLARD BY END OF THIS WEEK OR MONDAY AT THE LATEST PLEASE KEEP IT WITHIN 500 WORDS.”⁷⁹ The length was critical because Grove was using the layout from Cape and making space for the foreword by removing a chapter heading. Burroughs was already having a productive week: he was drafting an essay about the use of cut-ups (“I was waiting there in someone else’s writing”), recording dreams (“Long dream about the family a rich family called the Macormick family somewhere in South America”), experimenting with a color polaroid camera borrowed from filmmaker Antony Balch, and working with Barry Miles to create a salable archive of his papers.⁸⁰ The day before receiving Jordan’s telegram, he indicated that work on the foreword was under way:

I will now ask the reader to place himself in present time. The day is Tuesday June 20 1972. I have been invited to go to The Glostenbury Tower for the summer solstice. It looks like rain so I probably won’t go. I have a foreword for J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibit under preparation. I am in flat 18 at 8 Duke Street St James.⁸¹

Using black ink, Burroughs drew vertical lines beside eight passages in the copy of The Atrocity Exhibition that Grove had sent.⁸² The passages contain nothing of obvious appeal to Burroughs, though he happened to mark two of the three paragraphs referring to the “suburbs of Hell.” There are no other marginalia in the book and the vertical marks disappear after page 88, suggesting that Burroughs may have read no further. Perhaps he was only half way through when Jordan’s telegram prompted him to stop reading and finish what he had started writing.

An unpublished draft of his foreword shows that Burroughs began in straightforward, even pedestrian style (and continued to mangle the title, shortening “exhibition” to “exhibit”):

I am not surprised that The Atrocity Exhibit by J.G. Ballard has encountered publication difficulties and that two publishers having brought [sic] the book and paid the advance subsequently refused to publish. It is an extremely profound and disquieting book.⁸³

Burroughs approached the text as an exercise in free association or what he called “intersection reading,” alternating quotes from the book with his own responses. For example, he had marked a passage about news magazines littered “around the bedroom of the shabby hotel in Earls Court.” Burroughs noted that it was “just such a shabby hotel as I used to live in” and typed in a line from The Wild Boys referring to a pub in the same neighborhood. Subsequently Burroughs drew quadrants atop a draft of his foreword and cut it into quarters, which he rearranged and retyped. With a pen he underlined compelling phrases such as “a disquieting illustrated hard core news week” and “immense Jane Mansfield Albert Camus wrecked the planet of films.” Finally Burroughs distilled this collection of reactions, recollections, quotes, and cut-ups into 478 words.

The resulting foreword focuses on two points — the “nonsexual roots of sexuality” and the observation that “the line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down” — but it fails to say much about either. Possibly Burroughs was hampered by the word count. In discussing the breakdown between inner and outer landscapes, the published text offers the inscrutable assertion that “earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind.” In draft, Burroughs had added that “I have a whole file on earthquakes and in some cases these were preceded by some upheaval within my own mind.” The addition clarifies his point by showing a correlation between objective and subjective, something along the lines of Charles Baudelaire’s notion of poetic “correspondences.” But even granting that the word count might have posed a challenge, Burroughs’ foreword retains a haphazard, even lackadaisical air. It gives no evidence of enthusiasm for The Atrocity Exhibition. It does not call Ballard a genius or a friend. In public Ballard called Burroughs’ foreword “superb,” but it cannot have been what he hoped for. “I think Jimmy was a little disappointed by Bill’s intro,” Moorcock recalls. “I remember him chuckling about it.”⁸⁴

Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. appeared in November 1972 without inspiring obscenity trials or libel suits. Asking Burroughs to preface the book might have seemed savvy to Grove, but it also posed a danger evident in Paul Theroux’s review in the New York Times.⁸⁵ Ballard’s name did not appear in the review until after Burroughs’, subtly placing the work under his aegis. Calling Love and Napalm “horrible… a boring and pointless book,” Theroux portrayed Ballard’s Dr Nathan as a “less crazed and more ponderous version of Burroughs’ own Doctor Benway.” Ballard must not have appreciated the comparison. He replied to it in a later interview, declaring that “I don’t want to say he’s my Dr Benway, because Benway is Burroughs’ most powerful character. Nathan is a minor character in this book.”⁸⁶ Reviewers of Ballard’s “condensed novels” consistently invoked Burroughs, and Ballard just as consistently took pains to refute the influence. The Guardian’s 1970 review of The Atrocity Exhibition had accused him of “borrowing Burroughs’ techniques and preoccupations.”⁸⁷ The next year, Ballard repudiated the charge:

People have said it’s derived from Burroughs — well, they’ve never read any Burroughs. The thing about this narrative technique is that I’m able to move rapidly from public events to the most intimate private events, in the space of a few lines. Not only that, I can annex an enormous amount of material into the narrative, which one wouldn’t be able to do in a conventional form.⁸⁸

This disavowal was not quite sincere. In 1967, while still writing the nonlinear tales of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard offered to perform his technique on stories sent to him by Michael Butterworth. In two detailed letters describing his procedure, he explicitly acknowledged that it resembled Burroughs’ approach.⁸⁹ “I know that Burroughs uses a similar method,” he wrote Butterworth on January 29, 1967, “condensing out his images and narrative from a much greater body of original material.” He also cautioned Butterworth in these and other letters about emulating Burroughs. “Why not invent your own mythology of time & space, vocabulary of images and the technique necessary to express them?”⁹⁰ Was this a question Ballard was posing to himself as well? To warn Butterworth against Burroughs’ influence reveals that Ballard held a deeper belief about what a writer should be — original, unique, sui generis. It may have been disingenuous for Ballard to deny that Burroughs had affected his condensed novels, but perhaps he mostly stopped writing them — and completely stopped touting the technique to other writers — to ensure that he remained true to that belief.

Later Years

If Ballard wrote a thank-you note to Burroughs for the foreword, it has been lost. The scene connecting the writers dissipated in the years following the publication of Love and Napalm. In 1974 Burroughs moved back to America without Ballard quite realizing he had left. The next year Ballard wrote to Butterworth, “I think [Burroughs is] still living in London — to be honest I’ve rather moved out of underground circles.”⁹¹ In the years to come, Ballard would review Burroughs’ books. He blurbed Cities of the Red Night for the Guardian: “Burroughs may look at life through the wrong end of the proctoscope, but his scatological humour and strange surgeon’s eye are as sharp as ever.” He also reviewed The Place of Dead Roads, though he seemed to prefer publications of a retrospective or biographical nature, such as The Adding Machine, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959, and Ted Morgan’s biography Literary Outlaw. Burroughs did not keep quite as current with Ballard’s work. On April 22, 1979, Burroughs replied to a correspondent who asked him about Ballard:

J.G. Ballard is an old friend of mine who used to write science fiction and is now doing work that is difficult to classify. He wrote a book called The Atrocity Exhibit and more recently Car Crash which is the book you refer to. Grove Press is the publisher.⁹²

Burroughs continued to mangle the title of The Atrocity Exhibition, misremembered the title of Crash, and erred in attributing the latter publication to Grove Press. (The American edition of Crash was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1973.) He also ignored more recent books by Ballard, such as Concrete Island and High Rise. But the respect he maintained for Ballard is clear in the appellation “old friend.”

“I haven’t seen Burroughs in the flesh for a long time,” Ballard told an interviewer in 1985.⁹³ He did describe how he had only met Brion Gysin — “A very nice guy!” — for the first time the year before. On May 31, 1988 Ballard attended the opening of Burroughs’ exhibit of paintings at the October Gallery in London. Burroughs was photographed with Francis Bacon, whom he had known since the 1950s in Tangier, and at one point withdrew to a corner of the gallery with both Bacon and Ballard.⁹⁴ While it may be tempting to imagine what these three luminaries discussed, likely it was nothing more than standard party chat. “In some 20 meetings,” Ballard recalled, “we never discussed anything literary.”⁹⁵ Burroughs, as Ballard was aware, had once caricatured the conversation of writers who don’t discuss writing.

“Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed writing.” This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk about anything so long as it isn’t important.⁹⁶

But why would the two have discussed literature? By the time Ballard was championing nonlinear writing techniques, Burroughs had begun a slow return to more traditional narrative forms. In later years Burroughs remained an avid reader of the brand of sci-fi available at airport bookstores — a genre from which Ballard had separated himself. Burroughs also became enthusiastic about the work of Denton Welch, an English writer who would have seemed parochial to Ballard. Meantime Ballard’s public accolades might well have made Burroughs uncomfortable discussing his own work. “He didn’t seem,” Ballard recalled, “aware of the, sort of, compliments I paid him, because he was completely locked into a really, rather paranoid world.”⁹⁷ Yet the two writers respected and appreciated each other. On December 24, 1993 the Guardian asked Ballard what he would give his “heroes and villains” for Christmas. Ballard replied that “I would like to give something to William Burroughs, but I don’t know what.”⁹⁸ Perhaps it was symbolic that this inability to conceive of a gift sounded almost like a form of writer’s block. For Burroughs and Ballard, to exchange formalities such as greeting cards was a way of not writing — a way of not engaging on literature or art or anything of substance — and also a way of rewriting, of making a preprinted “happy holidays” say something about esteem and the affection that arises after decades of mutual regard.

Especial thanks to David Pringle, who contributed invaluable insight and research from the Ballard perspective, and to Anne Garner of the New York Public Library, who expanded and nurtured the research in this essay with her generous knowledge of the Burroughs archive.

Thanks as well to James Grauerholz, Barry Miles, Michael Moorcock, Michael Butterworth, Charles Platt, Martin Bax, Carl Weissner, Jan Herman, Graham Rae, and the October Gallery of London.

References

Endnotes

1. “JGB Interviewed by Mark Pauline” (circa 1986), Conversations, pp 156-157.

2. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs, New York, Seaver Books, 1981.

3. Johnny Strike (aka John Bassett), “The Burroughs Workshops,” Ambit 95, December 1983, p 42.

4. Rae.

5. 1959: Ballard in “The Author’s Author,” The Guardian, Oct 26, 1998, p 49; “about 1960″: Rae; “something like 1960″: Kadrey & Stefanac; 1963: Jon Savage, Interview with J.G. Ballard, Search and Destroy 10, 1978.

6. David Pringle email, Oct 22, 2011. Jakubowski believes he brought the Olympia Press editions of Burroughs to London in early September 1963. Pringle speculates that Jakubowski may have passed them off to Moorcock on Thursday, Sept 5, 1963, at a pub called The Globe, and that Moorcock may have passed them off to Ballard the next day at lunch.

7. Mark P. Williams, “Michael Moorcock on William S. Burroughs.”

8. Kadrey & Stefanac

9. Ballard in “The Author’s Author,” The Guardian, Oct 26, 1998, p 49.

10. Rae.

11. Times Literary Supplement, Nov 21, 1963.

12. J.G. Ballard, “Terminal Documents,” Ambit 27, 1966.

13. Burroughs to Moorcock, Dec 18, 1963, Papers, Box 88, Folder 1, Item 4.

14. Burroughs to Bax, Feb 18, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 1, Item 14.

15. Eric Mottram BBC Broadcast, March 9, 1964, reprinted as “The Algebra of Need,” in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, New York, Semiotext(e), 2001.

16. Burroughs to Ballard, Mar 23, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 2, Item 25.

17. Interview with Ballard in Will Self, Junk Mail, New York, Grove Press, 2006, p 26.

18. Wilhelm von Branca, quoted and translated in Richard Swan Lull, “On the Functions of the ‘Sacral Brain’ in Dinosaurs,” The American Journal of Science, July 1917.

19. “Interview with J. G. Ballard,” Munich Round Up, 100 (1968), 104-6.

20. Quoted in Chris Beckett, “The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library,” Electronic British Library Journal, 2011, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/article12.html.

21. William S. Burroughs, Naked Scientology, Bonn, Expanded Media Editions, 1978.

22. John Baxter, The Inner Man: The Life of J.G. Ballard, London, W&N, 2011.

23. Burroughs to Jeff Nuttall, May 1, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 08, Item 20.

24. Burroughs to Ramsey Campbell, August 15, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 4, Item 61.

25. Burroughs to Antony Balch, Sept 10, 1964, Papers, Box 79, Folder 5, Item 33.

26. “The Hallucinatory Operators Are Real” (New York 1965), interview by “staff reporters” in S.F Horizons 2, Oxford, Winter 1965.

27. Burroughs to Ian Sommerville, July 28, 1965, Papers, Box 80, Folder 20, Item 82.

28. “London rather grey” — Burroughs to David Prentice, October 11, 1965, Papers, Box 80, Folder 11, Item 69.

29. Rae.

30. Martin Bax, Email, August 9, 2011.

31. Michael Moorcock, Email, May 15, 2011.

32. David Pringle to J.G. Ballard Yahoo group, Sept 16, 2011. “I get the impression that Moorcock and the New Worlds crew really only got to know Butler at the Worldcon, in late August 1965. Ballard, as I’ve said, wasn’t there — he was probably still away in Greece with his kids (see Miracles of Life) — but he must have got back to England by the end of August if he was in attendance at Bon’s place in Oxford in early September (as he definitely was). I suspect what happened is that Moorcock called a party, or a get-together of some kind, soon (but not immediately) after the Worldcon, and that Ballard first met their new friend, Bill Butler, there.”

33. Barry Miles attests that Butler only met Burroughs in November 1965 and provided helpful background information about Butler. Miles, Email, Jan 10, 2012.

34. Jeff Nuttall to Burroughs, Nov 5, 1965, Papers, Box 80, Folder 8, Item 27

35. Bill Butler, “William Burroughs,” New Worlds, April 1966, pp 147 – 153.

36. Arthur C. Clarke, Lost Worlds of 2001, New York, New American Library, 1972. An excerpt online describes meeting with Burroughs.

37. Michael Moorcock, “Brave New Worlds,” The Guardian, March 21, 2008

38. Kadrey & Stefanac

39. “JGB Interviewed by Mark Pauline” (circa 1986), Conversations, pp 156-157.

40. Obit.

41. Interview with Ballard in Will Self, Junk Mail, p 26.

42. An Esquire editorial assistant confirmed in an email of June 27, 2011: “We do not have an archive of such materials: the magazine changed hands and offices several times over the years.”

43. Burroughs to John Berendt, September 8, 1965, Papers, Box 77, Folder 3, Item 12.

44. Alice Glaser, who would commit suicide around 1970 or 1971, published a story “The Tunnel Ahead” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 21, 1961.

45. Barry Miles, Email, Jan 10, 2012.

46. Papers, Box 22, Folder 48, Item 62.

47. Barry Miles, Email, Jan 10, 2012.

48. Burroughs, Naked Scientology (originally a piece appearing in Rolling Stone, November 9, 1972).

49. Obit.

50. Jeff Shero, “Revolt!” (Interview with WSB, New York 1968), originally printed in RAT 18, October 4, 1968, in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, New York, Semiotext(e), 2001.

51. “3 Tales of the CIA. (1) How I got in, and why I came out of the Cold,” Ramparts, April 1967. The story, “as told to the editors,” describes a CIA instructor speaking to the narrator’s fellow recruits. “A man photographed one of the staging areas on Nicaragua for the Bay of Pigs invasion; his photos included the numbers and markings on American planes which had not yet been removed. Hitchhiking from Florida to New York, he talked about it to a man who picked him up. The man chanced to be a CIA man returning from one of the Agency’s numerous staging areas in Florida; he notified ‘the company.’ The hitchhiker was intercepted and interrogated. He could not be bought off — he was an idealist who was going to divulge the whole thing to the newspapers. ‘Well,’ the instructor who told the story stressed, ‘that man was on his way to the newspapers when he was struck by a laundry truck and killed. And those photos just plain disappeared.’”

52. Burroughs, The Job, London, John Calder, 1968, p 66. Burroughs, “Rally Round the Secret, Boys,” Burroughs Academy Bulletin 15, Mayfair Magazine, January 1969, p 53.

53. Obit.

54. Philip Dodd, “The Meaningless Universe Demands Meaningless Acts,” Night Waves, BBC Radio 3, October, 2003.

55. Ballard, “Interview with Lynne Fox” (1991), Conversations p 195.

56. Thomas Frick, “J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85,” Paris Review, Winter 1984.

57. John Baxter, The Inner Man, p 182.

58. Burroughs to Claude Pélieu, Apr 23, 1967, Papers, Box 77, Folder 8, Item 61.

59. The Unicorn Books Trial has been explored in depth by Mike Holliday in “A Dirty and Diseased Mind”: The Unicorn Bookshop Trial” and in a post to the J.G. Ballard Yahoo group on Sept 16, 2011.

60. Ballard, annotations in the Re/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

61. Larry Wallrich and Eric Mottram, eds., For Bill Butler, London, Wallrich Brooks, 1970.

62. Eric Mottram to Burroughs, July 31, 1968: “At the Soft Machine reception you very kindly suggested that you would like to contribute to the fund for Bill Butler and his Unicorn Bookshop trial (hearing August 20, Brighton).” Papers, Box 80, Folder 1, Item 1.

63. Oliver Pritchett, “The Writer Tomorrow,” The Guardian, August 11, 1969.

64. Norman Spinrad, An Experiment in Autobiography, p 28.

65. John Calder to Burroughs, October 9, 1969, Papers, Box 47, Folder 21, Item 6.

66. Andy Darling, “Another Girl: Fourteen Star Punters Select Their All-Time Greatest Gig,” Q magazine 106, July 1995, p 36.

67. Simon Matthews, “I Helped Carry William Burroughs to the Medical Tent: More on the ‘Pirate’ Radio Stations of the 1960s” in Lobster 59, Summer 2010.

68. Mick Davis, in “The view from the Mud. Recollections of those who attended Phun City.”

69. Burroughs to Brion Gysin, August 9, 1970, Papers, Box 86, Folder 13.

70. Jerome Tarshis, “Krafft-Ebing Visits Dealey Plaza: The Recent Fiction of J.G. Ballard,” Evergreen Review, 17:96, Spring 1973.

71. Rae.

72. Fred Jordan to Burroughs, June 13, 1972, Papers, Box 3, Folder 7, Item 3.

73. Papers, Box 3, Folder 7, Item 5.

74. Jo Stanley, “Ballard Crashes,” Friends, 29 May 1970, pp 4-5.

75. Personal communication from Carl Weissner.

76. Ballard to Weissner, July 17, 1969, Carl Weissner archive at Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections Northwestern University Library, Box 1, Folder 3.

77. Ballard, annotation in Re/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

78. Michael Moorcock, Email, May 15, 2011.

79. Telegram, Fred Jordan to Burroughs, June 21, 1972, Papers, Box 3, Folder 7, Item 4.

80. “I was waiting there in someone else’s writing”: Burroughs, “The Use of…,” Papers, Box 16, Folder 34, Item 1. Dream: Burroughs, “June 18, 1972,” Box 16, Folder 35, Item 2. Polaroid camera: Burroughs, “Five Photos Taken,” Box 44, Folder 07, Item 01.

81. Burroughs, draft of introduction to archive catalogue reproduced online in Stephen J. Gertz, “Living with Burroughs.”

82. Papers possesses Burroughs’ copy of The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as two unannotated author copies of Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

83. Drafts in Papers, Box 3, Folder 6, Items 1 & 2, and Box 3, Folder 8, Item 6.

84. Michael Moorcock, Email, May 15, 2011.

85. Paul Theroux, “The Auto Crash as Sexual Stimulation,” New York Times, October 29, 1972.

86. Alan Burns, “The Imagination On Trial: J.G. Ballard,” circa 1973-74 interview with Ballard reproduced in Burns, The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, London, Allison & Busby, 1981.

87. Robert Nye, “Gerhardie Revisited,” The Guardian, July 9, 1970.

88. Brendan Hennessy, “J.G. Ballard,” Transatlantic Review 39, 1971.

89. Ballard to Michael Butterworth, January 21 & 29, 1967, letters held in Michael Butterworth and J G Ballard Correspondence: 1965-1975, British Library.

90. Ballard to Michael Butterworth, January 2, 1966, British Library.

91. Ballard to Michael Butterworth, dated by MB as “probably late 1975,” British Library.

92. Burroughs to Michael Gentile, April 22, 1979, William S. Burroughs Papers Spec.Cms.40, Ohio State University, Box 7, Folder 35.

93. “Interview with Graham Revell” (spring 1985), Conversations p 318.

94. See especially Author Q&A with Tim Adler on bloomsbury.com.

95. Rae.

96. Burroughs, “Hemingway,” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York, Arcade Publishing, 1993, p 65. Ballard reviewed this book for The Guardian.

97. Philip Dodd, “The Meaningless Universe Demands Meaningless Acts,” Night Waves, BBC Radio 3, October, 2003.

98. “Just What They’ve Always Wanted…,” The Guardian, December 24, 1993, p 12.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Last Times was an underground newspaper published in San Francisco in 1967 by poet and printer Charles Plymell. It contained works by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Antonin Artaud, and others. Issue one has become collectible for the contribution by Crumb, printed just a few months before Zap Comix #1. At least two variants of the second issue were published.

Charles Plymell Holding The Last Times
Photograph by Guy B. Taken at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on 26 May 2011.

The Last Times I

The Last Times I
Collage by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“Day the Records Went Up” by William S. Burroughs, photograph of Herbert Huncke

The Last Times I
“Do It Yourself & Dig It” by Claude Pélieu, interview with Buckminster Fuller, photo and text by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“The Orion Dream Stuff” by Carl Weissner, “Introduction” by D.A. Levy, texts by Carl Solomon and Bob Kaufman

The Last Times I
Text by Dennis Williams, drawing by Jeff Nuttall, poem by Roxie Powell, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” by Charles Bukowski

The Last Times I
“Television Baby Crawling toward that Death Chamber” by Allen Ginsberg

The Last Times I
Conclusion of poem by Allen Ginsberg, text by Dave Harris

The Last Times I
“Head Comix” by R. Crumb, collage by Jean-Jacques Lebel

The Last Times I
Found photo

The Last Times II (variant a)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall

The Last Times II
Poems by Charles Plymell and Philip Whalen

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Poems by Yvonne Bond and Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Mini-poster

The Last Times II (variant b)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall, “Dominion” by Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Poem by Philip Whalen

The Last Times II
Centerfold by Bob Branaman

The Last Times II
Poem by Yvonne Bond

The Last Times II
Poem by Charles Plymell

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

Letter from William Burroughs to Carl Weissner
30 April 1965

Correspondence with Charles Bukowski

Letter from Charles Bukowski to Carl Weissner
16 October 1976
This letter appeared at auction on ebay in August 2009.

Letter from Charles Bukowski to Carl Weissner
15 Jan 1979
This letter appeared at auction on ebay.

Letter from Charles Bukowski to Carl Weissner
15 Jan 1979
This letter appeared at auction on ebay.

Letter from Charles Bukowski to Carl Weissner
6 Feb 1979
This letter appeared at auction on ebay.

Letter from Charles Bukowski to Carl Weissner
6 Feb 1979
This letter appeared at auction on ebay.

Letter from Charles Bukowski to Carl Weissner
6 July 1988
This letter appeared at auction on ebay in July 2009.

Letter from Carl Weissner to Charles Bukowski
16 August 1988
This letter appeared at auction on ebay in July 2009.

Carl Weissner-Jeff Nuttall Corresondence

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
19 October 1965

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
19 October 1965

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
26 January 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
14 February 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
20 March 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
1 July 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
3 October 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
3 October 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
14 October 1966

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
2 January 1967

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
15 March 1967

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
28 March 1967

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
9 April 1967

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
19 May 1967

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
27 September 1967

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
19 June 1969

Letter from Carl Weissner to Jeff Nuttall
19 June 1969

Miscellaneous Correspondence

Letter from Carl Weissner to Roy Pennington
26 February 1973

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Harold Norse passed away in June 2009 in San Francisco at the age of 92. For certain “lucky” artists or writers, one of the quirks of old age is that the longer you live the more relevant you become. The critical establishment can no longer ignore you because you slowly become one of the few remaining links to a bygone age and a valuable source of information. Norse was a living library and, it should be remembered, a talented poet. As Memoirs of a Bastard Angel attests, Norse seemingly rubbed shoulders (and more) with everybody who was anybody in 20th century art and letters, particularly in gay circles.

Norse got his start in the literary world as a part of W.H. Auden’s coterie in the late 1930s. At the time, Auden was the premier poet in the post-Eliot universe. By the 1950s, Norse switched teams, poetically, and came under the influence of William Carlos Williams, who called Norse one of the finest poets of his generation. At this time, Williams attracted young poets like moths to the flame. Ginsberg came under Williams’ influence in a similar manner. Norse met Ginsberg at the Beat Hotel in the late 1950s. At the Hotel, Norse came under the influence of Burroughs and, for a brief time, experimented with the cut-up. Beat Hotel is the major example of Norse’s toying with the technique. Norse continued to wander and eventually landed in San Francisco. Norse met and corresponded with Charles Bukowski, eventually settling into the Left Coast literary scene for good.

Given the fact that you could play Six Degrees of Harold Norse, it should have been no surprise that Norse corresponded with Jeff Nuttall. Like Norse, Nuttall was an underappreciated artist and poet who knew everybody in the international underground. Robert Bank, RealityStudio.org European correspondent, passed along a few letters from Norse to Nuttall from the late 1960s. These letters capture a moment in time and give some sense of Norse as an individual and of his interests as a writer.

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
20 Oct 1966

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
20 Oct 1966

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
23 Dec 1967

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
23 Dec 1967

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
20 Jan 1968

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall 20 Jan 1968

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
20 Jan 1968

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
26 Apr 1968

Harold Norse to Jeff Nuttall
26 Apr 1968

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Front Endpaper

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Front Endpaper

Bulletin from Nothing 2
William Burroughs

Bulletin from Nothing 2
William Burroughs

Bulletin from Nothing 2
William Burroughs

Bulletin from Nothing 2
William Burroughs

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Roxie Powell and Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Jeff Nuttall

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Jeff Nuttall

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Chano Pozo

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Jean-Jacques Lebel

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Bob Kaufman

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Charles Plymell

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Norman O Mustill

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Norman O Mustill

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Ed Sanders and Peter Orlovsky

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Claude Pélieu

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Charles Plymell

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Mary Beach

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Mary Beach

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Back Cover

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Endpaper

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Claude Pelieu

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Claude Pelieu

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Claude Pelieu

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Mary Beach

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Claude Pelieu

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Claude Pelieu

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Jeff Nuttall

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Antonin Artaud

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Antonin Artaud

Bulletin from Nothing 1
William S. Burroughs

Bulletin from Nothing 1
William S. Burroughs

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Charles Plymell

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Roxie Powell

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Benjamin Peret

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Benjamin Peret

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Ed Sanders

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Bob Kaufman

Bulletin from Nothing 1
David Omer Bearden

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Leland S. Meyerzove

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Claude Pelieu

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Charles Plymell

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Mary Beach

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Norman O Mustill

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Norman O Mustill

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Norman O Mustill

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Back Cover

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

None of us obsessed with William Burroughs are fascinated by the same writer. Like the agent / addict’s face in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, our impressions of Burroughs are constantly in flux. When I first fell under Burroughs’ spell, I wanted to learn everything I could about the events surrounding the composition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs was Naked Lunch. The key period was 1954-1959. Tangier, Dr. Dent, the Beat Hotel, Chicago Review and Big Table, the letters to Ginsberg. It was there that I focused my attention.  

As time goes on, I find myself re-reading the “Burroughs at Large” chapter in Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw. I want to learn more about Burroughs’ time in the Beat Hotel during the writing of Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. The years that matter are now 1962-1966. Increasingly, it seems to me that this is Burroughs at the height of his powers. The creative output is considerable: The Ticket That Exploded, Dead Fingers Talk, Nova Express, APO-33, Time, the My Own Mag collaboration, the sound collages collected in Real English Tea Made Here, experimental films, the Third Mind project, countless little magazine appearances.  

It could be argued that this was also Burroughs at the height of his influence. For example, he helped launch a revival in science fiction. With Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs was understood to be at the forefront of experimental writing. He was featured in the Donald Allen and Robert Creeley New American Story anthology, which attempted to map the landscape of new fiction just as the New American Poetry anthology did for verse. In Tangier, Paris, and New York, literary scenes revolved around Burroughs. For example, during his time in New York City in 1964/1965, the New York avant-garde celebrated Burroughs for almost a year with parties, readings, and little magazine attention. Key Lower East Side players like Ted Berrigan and Ed Sanders incorporated Burroughs into their creative operations. Avant-garde film may have been the most vibrant art form of the 1960s, and films, like Towers Open Fire, placed Burroughs’ name and work in discussions on the topic. From 1962-1966, Burroughs’ presence was felt throughout the Western world in the realms of literature, art, and film.  

Maybe that is why I am so drawn to Burroughs’ little magazine appearances of this period. If I had to list my Mount Rushmore of little magazines, it would include: Semina (1957-1964), My Own Mag (1963-1966), Fuck You, a magazine of the arts (1962-1965), and Floating Bear (1962-1969). Semina is widely understood to be a work of art, but I consider the three mimeos on that level. They should be approached in the same manner as other artists’ books of the period. To me, My Own Mag is the most interesting thing Burroughs did in the 1960s. But I have lost all objectivity. I can no longer look at these magazines with a clear head and a steady eye. Handling them, my palms sweat, my head spins.

Take Bulletin from Nothing. How do I explain my strong feelings for something as seemingly irrelevant as a publication that maybe only a few hundred people read and that ran for two only issues? Let me try to explain myself.

Burroughs appears in both issues of Bulletin from Nothing. In the first issue, Burroughs contributes “Composite Text.” Issue two features “Palm Sunday Tape.” To be honest, these are not my favorite cut-ups from the period. The Dead Star, APO-33, and Time are not only longer and more complex but I think ultimately more successful. Maybe it is the merging of text and image in these cut-ups that appeal so strongly to me. I also like that Dead Star, APO-33 and Time have a central theme that Burroughs works on multiple levels. In all three cases, Burroughs detourns the very texts from which he is getting his material while challenging various forms of commercial and corporate media. “Composite Text” and “Palm Sunday Tape” are much more modest in form and content.

So my love of Bulletin from Nothing does not stem from Burroughs’ contributions to the magazine. Instead, its power comes from the company Burroughs keeps and the associations I make from the grouping. It is interesting to me that Burroughs appears with Charley Plymell, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Norman O. Mustill, Jeff Nuttall, J.J. Lebel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bob Kaufman. Bulletin from Nothing is a time capsule from San Francisco circa 1965. I cannot help but think of that famous shot of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Welch, McClure, Brautigan, and others in front of City Lights taken by Larry Keenan (see the cover of City Lights Journal 3). Like that iconic photo, Bulletin from Nothing provides a snapshot of the scene around City Lights. Beach and Pélieu distributed many of their publications with the assistance of City Lights and were associated with the bookstore. Jan Herman, who was Ferlinghetti’s assistant in the late 1960s, told me that City Lights used a large Midwest offset printer (Edwards Bros.) for City Lights publications. Previously, City Lights sent their books, like Howl, to Villiers in England. The Edwards’ printing rep offered to produce all of Herman’s side projects through an industrial printer in Richmond,CA. That is how Herman got his Nova Broadcasts published. City Lights distributed the Nova Broadcast books. In the mid to the late 1960s, City Lights was one of the home bases for the San Francisco little magazine scene.

Plymell did the actual printing of Bulletin from Nothing on a large press at Ralph Ackerman’s shop on Mission Street in San Francisco. APO-33 (Beach Books) and So Who Owns Death TV (the first printing with the silver ink on black stock) were printed by Plymell. Plymell also printed Herman’s San Francisco Earthquake No. 1 on an offset machine. I have written about Plymell as a publisher before in discussing NOW, another incredible artifact of the San Francisco Scene of the mid-1960 and very similar to Bulletin from Nothing in content. By no means was Plymell a fine printer like Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press who came out of Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press, but he does have a definite sense of graphic design that I find very appealling. NOW NOW NOW defintely stands out among SF little mags. Bulletin was not a mimeo job. Reproducing the collages was beyond the capability of mimeo. In fact, Plymell never printed on a mimeograph although he was a key publisher in the rather nebulous and ill-defined Mimeo Revolution.  

Bulletin from Nothing appeals to me as an object. I like that it is oversize, yet short and to the point. In contrast, I love the content of Black Mountain Review, but it is presented in a boring academic journal fashion. Most of my favorite magazines are 8 1/2 by 11 or larger (A-4 or legal). I dislike the professional look of perfect-bound magazines and prefer staples. The “bindings” of Fuck You, My Own Mag, or C are my favorite, even if they are completely impractical and unstable. Three quick hits on the left hand side with an industrial stapler. Stacks of sheets strewn all over an apartment or bookstore filled with cigarette and pot smoke. The community of collating parties. The staple binding of Bulletin from Nothing is more practical and creates a panorama effect. This is typical of Plymell’s magazine work. He has an affinity for offset and the fold. The page really opens out and spreads before you. Lots of space. This is great for open form poetry. I like big margins and blank space. Is anything more beautiful than the big pages of The Jargon Society’s Maximus Poems? Such pages give the feel of a canvas or a gallery wall which works for the collages featured in Bulletin from Nothing. Plus they are easy to scan.

Flipping through Bulletin from Nothing, the Chicago Review from the Spring of 1958 immediately comes to mind. In that issue, Burroughs was listed as a San Francisco Poet. At the time, Burroughs had never been to San Francisco and his work had nothing in common with Renaissance poets like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, or William Everson. Like that game on Sesame Street, Burroughs was not like the others and he did not belong. He stood apart. Nobody was doing what he was doing. He was a freak. Yet in the pages of Bulletin from Nothing, Burroughs fits in. In less than a decade Burroughs had become a writer of reputation and influence. He was at the forefront of a style of writing and he had followers. Even if he was not there in person, Burroughs had made himself a home in the experimental literary scene in San Francisco.  

Yet the Bulletin from Nothing also takes me further back in time to Paris, New York and Berlin / Cologne immediately after World War I. Bulletin from Nothing wears its love of Dada on its sleeve and in its title. Dada is a nonsense word that in German means anything from hobbyhorse to nothing at all. Francis Picabia stated in 1915, “Dada signifies nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing.” Over the years there have been several publications called “bulletin” such as the International Bulletin of Surrealism published in 1935, as well as the obscure, and close to my heart, Birmingham Bulletin that featured Burroughs’ “Unfinished Cigarette” in 1963. Yet the “bulletin” in question here might refer to two specific Dada publications. Bulletin D, an exhibition catalog as magazine was edited by Max Ernst. Bulletin from Nothing functions in a similar manner. Issue six of Dada was entitled Bulletin Dada. Pélieu and Beach’s magazine plays with that title. The collage cover provides a further reference to Bulletin from Nothing‘s Dada roots. The ransom note look comes from Dada collage and the roulette wheel references Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond from 1924, which was reprinted in the Christmas issue of Xxe Siècle in 1938.

I like Bulletin from Nothing because it provides material documentation of Burroughs’ ties to Dada. Cut-up practitioners like Pélieu were inspired by Burroughs but they were also cognizant of the cut-up’s origins in Dada. Burroughs and Gysin make these origins clear in their various manifestos and interviews on the cut-up. In fact, much of Burroughs’ work in the mid-1960s links back to Dada. Sound collages, scrapbooks, cut-up poems and texts all formed a major part of Dada art production. In 1958, Ginsberg and Corso met Tristan Tzara at the Deux Magots. Throughout his life, Ginsberg made an effort to meet his literary idols. He famously sat at Ezra Pound’s feet in Italy in the late 1960s thrusting the work of younger poets under the silent Pound’s nose and forcing him to listen to Dylan and the Beatles. Meeting Tzara at Deux Magots conjures up a host of literary allusions and connections. Dada, Lost Generation, Existentialists. Ginsberg would have been relished all of them. Burroughs and Ginsberg met up with Céline. Around the same time, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso met Duchamp and Man Ray. Lebel set up the meeting which was also attended by André Breton’s wife (Breton himself was sick). For Ginsberg, Duchamp was an legendary figure, like a movie star. Burroughs no doubt knew of Duchamp. Ian Sommerville had a homage (consciously or not is open for debate) to The Bicycle Wheel in his room at the Beat Hotel and the sculpture is featured in several photographs of the period. So the figure of Duchamp in a small sense was a ghost in the Hotel. At Lebel’s party, Ginsberg kissed Duchamp’s feet in a camp show of admiration and respect. In an act of Dada, Corso cut off Duchamp’s tie. Ginsberg encouraged Duchamp to bless Burroughs with a kiss. Duchamp obliged. It was a passing of the torch. Duchamp could be considered el hombre invisible of the Dada scene. Burroughs was the Beats’ Duchamp. Mysterious, fascinating, aloof, cerebral, scientific. Artist as chess master. Art Buchwald wrote up the event for the Herald Tribune. Unlike some people I consider the label Beat to be important. Burroughs is a Beat, but that does not mean I do not also consider him a member of other groupings. Burroughs’ presence in Bulletin from Nothing reminds me that Burroughs was a Neo-Dadaist as well.  

A crazed Burt Lancaster graces the cover of Bulletin from Nothing 2. This cover has a Pop Art feel. Taking the cover of issue one into consideration this is not surprising. In the early 1960s when coming to terms with the beginnings of Pop and struggling with how to place and define it, art critics called Pop, Neo-Dada. Artists like Warhol were viewed as warmed-over Duchamp. Interestingly Duchamp exploded back on the art scene in 1963 with his first retrospective showcased at the Pasadena Art Museum. Curated by Walter Hopps, this is one of the most famous and influential retrospectives of the twentieth century and a key moment in modern museum history. For a brief period in the early 1960s, Los Angeles made a play to become the center of American art. So it makes sense that Warhol’s big break came in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962. A one-man show at the Ferus Gallery, also put together by Hopps, featured a room full of Campbell’s Soup Cans. The show closed shortly after the death of Marilyn Monroe, which inspired the Pop Marilyns. Warhol’s transition from commercial artist to artistic genius was assured. He never looked back. The Hollywood glitz and glamour, the seediness of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, the sense of superficiality and the unreal. Los Angeles was tailor-made and ready for Warhol. Pélieu was interested in Pop so that influence is there in Bulletin.

If LA had the Ferus, SF had The Batman Gallery. Charles Plymell had a show of collages at the Batman in 1963. Wallace Berman was a key figure. He famously fled LA, that City of Degenerate Angels, to set up shop in San Francisco. Bulletin from Nothing has that junk art, mail art, assemblage feel to it, but whether it is there or not, I always see Fluxus when I turn its pages. Let me be clear, Fluxus had not arrived in SF by 1965, but like Pop, Fluxus was recycled Dada. Fluxus merged Man Ray with Marshall McLuhan. It took Dada into the electronic age and got it wired up. Unlike many people I love leftovers. In my artistic and literary tastes, I often find myself picking through the cultural refrigerator gnawing on last night’s turkey leg. Fluxus is much to my taste. I like its belatedness, its warmed-over quality. Stripped of the wide-eyed innocence that accompanies a new artistic or literary discovery, they are decadent movements, full of irony and self-knowledge. Yet in an effort to appear new, Fluxus artists have a frenetic energy and humor, which I find contagious. Like a gumbo that has been sitting around for a while, the flavors and themes get more pronounced. I would like to say more complex, but on the flipside, maybe they just get more obvious. More Cagean than Cage. More Duchampian than Duchamp. I cannot help but “get” Fluxus because it is so in-your-face. Fluxus has no shame.

Maybe that is not exactly true. For example, the cut-up has this same sense of belatedness. Gysin made a re-discovery, not a leap forward in artistic creation. Yet I have found Burroughs’ cut-up texts not just tough to read but tough to get my mind around. While most people highlight the cut-up’s ties to Dada, I have recently been interested in linking Burroughs and the cut-up to Fluxus and related groupings. In the pages of Bulletin from Nothing, Norman O. Mustill, Claude Pélieu, J.J. Lebel, and Mary Beach were all on the fringes of Fluxus, if not fellow travelers.

Burroughs’ connections to Fluxus, if you dig around, are definitely there. Paris in the mid-1960s is a good place to look. Emmett Williams provided the liner notes for Burroughs’ first spoken word LP, Call Me Burroughs. The album was produced at and recorded in the English Bookshop run by Gaît Frogé. Williams, a concrete poet, was a major force in Fluxus. Call Me Burroughs is pretty straightforward spoken word, but the sound collages Burroughs was creating at that time (1965) and that are collected in Real English Tea Made Here and elsewhere are truly Fluxus in spirit.  

Briefly in Paris, Burroughs was on the fringes of Fluxus. The link is clearly Brion Gysin. Gysin was a founding member of Domaine Poétique along with Williams, Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin. This group paralleled and overlapped with Fluxus. As Barry Miles make clear, both groups were interested in “concrete poetry, electronic music, poésie sonore, machine poetry, happenings and performance art.” George Maciunas, the leading voice of Fluxus, was familiar with Gysin’s work and attended Gysin’s performances. Gysin and Ian Sommerville put on Happenings of their own that included sound recordings, slide projections, and readings. For a period in the 1960s the readings of Burroughs were in fact Happenings. His St. Valentine’s Day Reading of 1965 with its mixture of props, spoken word, and tape recordings is a good example. Burroughs’ artistic concerns of the 1960s were the same as Domaine Poétique and Fluxus and on occasion he entered their circle. On May 18, 21, and 22 at the Centre Americain des Artistes at 261 Blvd Raspail, the largest Domaine Poétique event occurred. Gysin, Francois Dufrene, Robert Filliou, Emmitt Williams, Bernard Heidsieck and others participated. Burroughs’ work was included in the performance. In 1965, Burroughs performed in a multimedia experiment with Brion Gysin at the ICA. Domain Poétique, the Lettrists, Fluxus. In the 1960s Burroughs was actively engaged in exploring the same creative terrain as these groups and in some cases he actively participated with them.

About a year ago I was able to buy the two-volume set of Colloque de Tanger published by Christian Bourgois in 1976. These volumes collected the texts from the conference held in September 1975 in Geneva. Unfortunately they are published in French so I cannot read them. There is precious little information in English on the Colloque de Tanger. It is not mentioned in the index of the two Burroughs biographies. It is briefly mentioned in Ports of Entry, but by and large it has been overlooked. The conference was a celebration of the collaboration of Burroughs and Gysin, and to me, it is far more interesting and important than the Nova Convention of 1978. On one level, I bought the collection because one volume is inscribed by Burroughs to bookseller Burt Britton. Yet the other is inscribed by Bernard Heidsieck to Dick Higgins and has proven over time to be far more interesting to me. Heidsieck, like Burroughs, was a man with familial links to wealth and privilege. You have probably had a sip of Piper Heidsieck champagne. Heidsieck was intoxicated by experimental art and literature and became an important figure in the European avant-garde, particularly in the area of sound poetry. Higgins was a major Fluxus figure who operated Something Else Press. The output of Something Else is impressive and his press is one of the finest of the Mimeo Revolution period from 1945-1980. Something Else published Brion Gysin in 1973, which featured texts by Burroughs. Jan Herman edited the volume. He was SEP’s chief editor at the time, having succeeded Emmett Williams. The presence of Burroughs in the Something Else backlist demonstrates Burroughs’ overlapping interests with Fluxus.

The publishing career of Jan Herman performs a similar service. San Francisco Earthquake and the Nova Broadcasts join Burroughs’ work with Fluxus directly. Wolf Vostell (Miss Vietnam) and Dick Higgins (A Book about Love and War and Death) appear in the Nova Broadcast Series, which also featured Burroughs’ The Dead Star. The Nova Broadcast imprint also published Alison Knowles’ The Journal of the Identical Lunch and Ferdinand Kriwet’s Publit. Nowhere is the Fluxus spirit of Burroughs’ work more clear than in the scarce Fifth Volume of SF Earthquake: VDRSVP. Burroughs appears alongside Fluxus artists’ Alison Knowles and Wolf Vostell. Yet more importantly this issue of the magazine epitomizes Fluxus’ interest in experimenting with mass media forms and turning them to creatively and politically radical ends. VDRSVP is a magazine in a poster format and thus does away with the codex. Burroughs contributed “The Moving Times.” Burroughs’ Third Mind experiments and his more advanced cut-up scrapbooks and newspaper pieces similarly challenged and detourned mass media material. The Dead Star is a case in point.  

The Colloque de Tanger celebrated these aspects of Burroughs’ creative career. Work that involved close collaboration with Gysin. Heidsieck signed my copy of Volume Two on page 161 in the middle of his recollection. On that page, Heidsieck circled a passage that mentions the Domaine Poétique events at the Centre Americain des Artistes at 261 Blvd Raspail from 1962. This is the very venue that Burroughs was a part of with Gysin. Higgins and Heidsieck shared an interest in sound poetry. Burroughs’ reading at this venue fits in here as well. The CD Real English Tea Made Here (recorded in the 1965-1966 timeframe) and Burroughs’ readings / Happenings highlight his interest in sound poetry and sound experiments. So even though I cannot read the volume or the inscription, both highlight for me Burroughs’ personal and creative relationship to Fluxus and related movements. An artistic involvement that gets lost in the shuffle, but is in fact a key aspect of what I find the most interesting and influential period of Burroughs’ career. 

 Bulletin from Nothing does the same thing. The two issues whisk you away to Paris, San Francisco, New York and Berlin ranging in time from just after World War I to the dawn of the Summer of Love. All the great little magazines are paper time machines that transport the reader backwards (and in some cases forwards) in time, throughout space, and across geographies. They function as very ports of entry and points of intersection that Burroughs sought to document and to create with his cut-ups. In each little magazine there is a different William Burroughs and maybe that is why I find him so fascinating. He is like a drop of mercury that refuses to be pinned down. Always one step beyond you, Burroughs eludes your attempts to grasp him. The quest to completely understand Burroughs and his work is doomed to failure but the resulting infinite possibilities, meanings, and applications reward you for the effort.  

Come explore Bulletin from Nothing for yourself. The complete run is now on RealityStudio including the elusive Bulletin from Nothing flyer sometimes described as Issue 3.  

Bulletin from Nothing Archive

Bulletin from Nothing 1 (view complete issue)
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing 2 (view complete issue)
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing Flyer (view complete issue)
Front Cover

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In 1963, the Times Literary Supplement announced the arrival of Dead Fingers Talk with a cry of Ugh! Later that year, Burroughs received the first issue of My Own Mag and responded with a resounding, Yes! In Jeff Nuttall, Burroughs found a fellow traveler who delighted in tweaking the noses of the establishment. For the next two years, they created some of the most interesting work of the mimeo revolution.

Here on RealityStudio, I have attempted to cobble together a history of My Own Mag with bibliographies, chronologies, essays, personal histories and, of course, images. The first issue of Mimeo Mimeo featured a 2500 word essay on My Own Mag that was distilled from a larger 8000+ word mishmash of notes and commentary delving deep into Burroughs’ work in My Own Mag. I have hammered this material into readable shape and offer it here as a supplement to the material already available on RealityStudio.

Some of the material will be familiar to those who have read the various essays on RealityStudio or Mimeo Mimeo, but there is also lots of new information as well. The new sections include close examinations of mimeography as a process and how it shaped and influenced the work of Burroughs and Nuttall. As far as I know, linkages of this type are in the early stages. Stenciling, inking, cross-hatching, paper size, printing techniques, and typography are all put under the microscope, particularly in The Dutch Schultz Issue in My Own Mag No. 13. In addition, links have been made beginning the process of connecting My Own Mag to underground comix and graphic novels, particularly the collaborations with Malcolm Mc Neill.

This is by no means a final statement on My Own Mag. It is in fact a request for information. If any readers have further insights or corrections, please past them along. I would be particularly interested in hearing from anybody with a working knowledge of the mimeograph process. Any details on other mimeos, like TISH, C: A Journal of Poetry, Fuck You, a magazine of the arts, Floating Bear, particularly on how they were created and how that process influenced the content would be appreciated. My knowledge of mimeo is second hand and far from fully developed, and I would love to build on it. Please forward any articles, manuals, or other material on mimeo that you might have.

Desperate Times

Jeff Nuttall published the first issue of My Own Mag in a time of desperation. Despite the excitement generated by the Beatles and the development of an active youth culture, England in 1963 had yet to awaken into the full bloom of the Swinging London of 1966. Occupationally, Nuttall was stuck in a rut teaching at an English art school. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), in which Nuttall staked his political hopes, had stalled. The marches and speeches of CND seemed like dull pantomimes forcing Nuttall to frustration over their lack of relevance and effectiveness. Artistically, Nuttall’s plans for an art installation were stillborn, and the participating artists could only twiddle their thumbs until the logistics of what Nuttall suspected would be a dull show could be resolved.

Nuttall decided to start a mimeo literary magazine. Nuttall commandeered the art school’s mimeo machine. Bob Cobbing, a fellow poet and publisher, taught French at the school. He provided technical know-how and encouragement. The first issue was a mere three pages, but it packed a wallop. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall’s memoir / study of the underground, he writes, “The magazine, even those first three pages, used nausea and flagrant scatology as a violent means of presentation. I wanted to make the fundamental condition of living unavoidable by nausea. You can’t pretend it’s not there if you are throwing up as a result.” Nuttall mailed the first issue to roughly twenty people he thought might be interested, including Anselm Hollo, Ray Gosling, and William Burroughs. The inclusion of Burroughs testifies to his legendary status in the underground. In the 1960s, he was hardly “el hombre invisible” — he appeared seemingly everywhere on the little magazine circuit. Like Charles Bukowski, Burroughs first gained an audience from the alternative publishing scene, and he remained extremely active there even as his reputation grew in the 1960s.

In 1963-1964, William Burroughs stood at a crossroads as well. In the foreword to his bibliography, Burroughs writes, “1964… No. 4 Calle Larachi, Tangier. My Own Mag… smell of kerosene heaters, hostile neighbors, stones thudding against the door. Jeff Nuttall sent me a copy of My Own Mag and asked me to contribute. I recall the delivery of the first copies to which I had contributed was heralded by a wooden top crashing through the skylight.” The activities at No. 4 Calle Larachi (drug use, homosexuality, the constant comings and goings of British and American expats) raised the ire of Burroughs’ Arab neighbors who proceeded to harass him on a daily basis. Burroughs wanted to escape from this desperate and potentially dangerous situation. In addition, Burroughs’ attempt to connect with his son Billy failed in late 1963. Burroughs sent his son back to the States to live with his grandparents, so he was exhausted and upset by the experience. The first issue of My Own Mag provided some much needed comic relief. Burroughs inscribed the first issue of My Own Mag from collector Nelson Lyon’s complete set that was put on the block by Pacific Book Auctions in 1999, “this rare item My Own Mag cheered me when I was under siege in Tangier.”

Creatively, Burroughs also needed cheering. Grove Press planned to publish the final cut-up novel, Nova Express, in hardcover, in the summer of 1964. Burroughs realized that the cut-up novel was something of a dead end, but maybe more distressing was the fact that he had run out of usable source material. The seemingly endless Word Horde of notes, manuscripts, and drafts that resulted from the writing and editing of Naked Lunch was exhausted with the upcoming publication of Nova Express. The Yage Letters was published by City Lights in 1963, so Burroughs had mined his correspondence. Most of the letters to Ginsberg were too painful and too personal to publish. Similarly, Queer, Burroughs’ other manuscript from the 1950s, still cut too close to the bone for Burroughs to think of bringing it before the public eye. Burroughs needed a new direction.

On a more positive note, Burroughs for the first time in his life was in a secure financial position of his own creation. He received a sizable advance from Grove Press for Nova Express. In addition, Grove Press, unlike Olympia Press, provided royalty checks on a regular basis. These revenue streams provided him with the freedom to pursue the non-commercial cut-up to the fullest. Creatively, the cut-up provided a much needed outlet. As Burroughs realized, he just skimmed the surface of the technique’s possibilities in the cut-up novels.

What cheered Burroughs in that first issue of My Own Mag? In an editorial note on the cover, Nuttall writes, tongue firmly in cheek, My Own Mag “will appear every now and then… will be devoted to creations of unparalleled nobility… morals of unquestionable soundness high literary standards of traditional finesse. No dirty pitchers.” Nuttall’s flaunting of good taste, his sense of humor, and his willingness to toy with obscenity laws appealed to Burroughs. Burroughs saw in Nuttall a kindred spirit, and more importantly, a kindred spirit with a literary outlet.

Possibly, Burroughs was also drawn to the fact that My Own Mag was a mimeo production. The idea of taking the means of production into one’s own hands and out of the clutches of the established publishing industry went in line with Burroughs’ feelings towards the mainstream media. Burroughs understood the power of the corporate press, represented by the Time-Life Empire, to manipulate word and images. In the essay “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” Burroughs writes, “Journalism is closer to the magical origin of writing than most fiction. That is, at least a few operators in this area — people like the late Hearst and Henry Luce — certainly quite clearly and consciously saw journalism as a magical operation designed to bring about certain effect. And the technology is the technology of magic; in the case of newspapers and magazines, mostly black magic.” Yet as Burroughs wrote in the Talking Asshole section of Naked Lunch, “there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade-B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness.” The mimeograph revolution served as a “space between” or “technology of magic” that could foster oppositional sentiment. In a letter to Nuttall reprinted in My Own Mag 9, Burroughs writes, “Well I hope pamphlet publication gets going have always yearned nostalgically for the old pamphlet days when writers fought in the streets.” Alternative publishing dovetailed with Burroughs’ ideas of smashing control.

Nuttall understood the creative and ideological possibilities of the mimeograph, and he drew attention to the mimeo process from the earliest issues of My Own Mag. Issue 1 is subtitled “a Super Absorbant (sic) periodical.” Images of Kleenex and toilet paper come to mind. The link to a tampon is especially strong given the cover illustration of a woman’s vagina and the text referencing childbirth. The idea of My Own Mag as a disposable, inconsequential “rag” is foregrounded. Yet “super absorbant” (sic) also refers to the process of transferring ink to paper that was such a delicate art with the mimeograph.

The foregrounding of the mimeo process continues in issue two subtitled “an odour-fill periodical.” The reference to toilet paper dovetails with the scatological impulse of Nuttall. The title conveys the impression that the contents of the magazine are “shit.” But My Own Mag is good shit, as in a powerful drug. The subtitle plays on the distinctive odor of mimeo and ditto machines. In his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson writes, “Of all the tragic losses since the 1960s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating. Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system’s willing slave for up to seven hours.” Bryson’s memory is a little fuzzy as he is probably confusing the spirit duplicator or the rexograph with the mimeograph. Nuttall used a Roneo or Gestetner mimeograph machine that utilized stencils. Like the urban legend of smoking banana peels, the myth of the intoxicating smell of the mimeograph is strong. A Google search of “smell of mimeograph” highlights its power of association. For many, the mimeograph triggers trips back to childhood and school. Nuttall working and printing in an art school would be well aware of the odors surrounding various primitive print technologies as well as the myths surrounding them.

The idea of printing cut-ups in a mimeo must have appealed to Burroughs. Burroughs frequently suggests that the cut-up causes a derangement of the senses and possesses intoxicating qualities. Interestingly, Burroughs cut up the writings of Rimbaud in the early experiments included in Minutes to Go. In The Third Mind, Brion Gysin links reading cut-ups with getting high. In “Cut-ups: A Project for Disastrous Success,” Gysin writes, “I hope you may discover this unusual pleasure for yourselves — this short-lived but unique intoxication.” In the same essay, he equates the permutation poems with an ether experience. These examples show that Burroughs would be receptive to the druggy in-jokes presented in My Own Mag and may have seen mimeo as uniquely suited for publishing cut-ups.

There is a tenuous link between the mimeograph and Burroughs’ family history. Any business machine, such as a mimeograph, computer, or typewriter, conjures up images of Burroughs’ grandfather William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the adding machine. In The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriter, Darren Wershler-Henry writes of the importance of the typewriter to Burroughs as a writer. Wershler-Henry writes, “With a family tree entwined so explicitly with the history of the technology of typewriting, it’s not surprising that William S. Burroughs uses the typewriter as a metaphor for God.” Burroughs realized that he could use the typewriter as a weapon against the corporate system and against his family legacy. Both were represented by Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Although Burroughs Corporation did not manufacture mimeograph machines, the adding machine resides in the same family of machines as the mimeograph: a combination of typewriter and printing technologies. The mimeograph is another business machine that Burroughs could use as a force for rebellion. 

My Own Mag Issues 1-4: The Cut-up Method as Feeling Out Process

Burroughs’ first appearance in My Own Mag gives little indication of just how far Nuttall and he would explore the boundaries of mimeo and cut-up in the later issues. In issue two, Burroughs contributes a short cut-up letter expressing his interest in My Own Mag. The cut-up in the form of a letter appears in Burroughs’ correspondence soon after the method’s rediscovery by Gysin in the late summer of 1959. The publication of the Yage Letters by City Lights in 1963 brought the epistolatory cut-up before the eyes of the public. Prior to 1963, bits and pieces of the Yage Letters appeared in little magazines, like Floating Bear. Like the cut-up novels, the cut-up letter did not radically experiment with the page as a field. The format was limited to the standard block of the paragraph.

Around the publication of the second issue, Nuttall and Burroughs met each other. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall writes, “Burroughs sent his first testing letters from Tangier. In the bitter winter of 1964, he came to London.” Nuttall downplays this meeting and highlights the awkwardness of it. As Nuttall describes it, he got drunk at the local pub with Burroughs and Tony Balch. Conversation faltered with Nuttall feeling left out. Nuttall stumbled home somewhat embarrassed and disappointed.

The meeting between Nuttall and Burroughs must have made more of an impression on both men than Nuttall lets on. It served as a feeling-out session for further collaborations. The face-to-face solidified the meeting of the minds that had occurred through the mail. The Special Tangier issue of My Own Mag followed in May 1964. As discussed below, only in issue 5 does My Own Mag hit its stride and does the Burroughs / Nuttall collaboration hit the ground running. The Special Tangiers Issue features Burroughs on the cover thus announcing the fact that Burroughs was a focus of and major contributor to the magazine. Likewise, Burroughs becomes a character in the “Perfume Jack” comic strip that runs through many issues of My Own Mag. Clearly, Burroughs made an impression on Nuttall.

The feeling was mutual as Burroughs saw in Nuttall a new source of inspiration for the cut-up other than Brion Gysin. Issue four of My Own Mag contains a grid experiment. Burroughs took the idea of the grid from Brion Gysin. Gysin’s permutation poems and his calligraphy paintings explored the grid in detail. Burroughs incorporates visual elements by drawing lines and inscribing the piece. In creating the skin for the mimeo machine, Nuttall probably forged Burroughs’ handwriting. Nuttall responded to Burroughs’ grid experiment in issue 6 with the cut-up issue. The format of Issue 6, like “Warning Warning Warning Warning,” is a grid. Ports of Entry, Robert Sobieszek’s book on William Burroughs and his achievement as an artist, mentions “Warning Warning Warning Warning” and My Own Mag in its opening chapter. This chapter situates the cut-up in a poetic tradition including Mallarmé, the surrealists and Dadaists, Fluxus and concrete poetry. The book provides a picture of Burroughs’ grid cut-up that was a manuscript page from The Third Mind that Burroughs and Gysin began work on in New York City in 1965. Jackson MacLow and composer John Cage worked with grids in the mid-1960s. The grid allowed the element of chance into composition and created complex guidelines for reading or writing a poem that decreased authorial control. The appeal to Burroughs is obvious. 

Like the letter, the grid format represents an early phase of Burroughs’ experimentation with the cut-up. Since his discovery of the method in the Beat Hotel, Gysin had been the major influence in Burroughs’ pursuit of the cut-up. However given Gysin’s artistic background it is strange that the early cut-ups highlighted textuality and ignored the visual aspects that could be achieved via collage and assemblege. So it could be argued that the cut-up experiment had reached an impasse as it had been published up to January 1964. The presentation of the cut-up stagnated in rigid formats like blocks of text. Burroughs’ invitation to cut-up and read the grid “any which way” suggested an escape that needed further exploration. Nuttall and My Own Mag provided another way out.

My Own Mag Issues 5-10: The Third Mind of Nuttall and Burroughs and the three-column and newspaper formats

While much has been made of Gysin’s creative impact on Burroughs, particularly regarding the cut-up method, little has been written on the relationship between Nuttall and Burroughs. Nuttall provided the publishing outlet, the encouragement and the collaboration Burroughs needed for the next phase of the cut-up. Like Gysin, Nuttall helped stir up the creative impulse in Burroughs. In the winter of 1964, around the time Nuttall and Burroughs met, the cut-up entered a new stage of development. As Barry Miles discusses in the final chapter of El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs began experimenting with the three-column format in February 1964. Miles writes, “At the same time as working on the photographic collages, Bill began to develop the three-column technique he had begun to experiment with in New York in the sixties. He began to produce texts which explored this fact and, as usual, did a great number of them. He started to keep a diary in February 1964 which exploited the three-column technique. If he were to take a trip to Gibraltar, which he did frequently, he would write an account of the trip in one column, just like a normal diary: what was said by the officials, what he overheard on the airplane. The next column would present his memories… The third column would be his reading column, quoting from the books he had with him.” Scarcely three months later in May, Nuttall published the first of these efforts.

It should be noted that the three column layout did not appear first in My Own Mag. In 1961 in Outsider 1, a section of the Soft Machine was structured in three columns but this may have been the work of the editor, Jon Edgar Webb. The format was used again in Floating Bear 24. Again this could have been Leroi Jones and Diane Di Prima’s decision, not Burroughs’. The work featured in the Outsider and Floating Bear is, in essence, poetry. The work is in line with the poetic cut-ups presented in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator.  

In Issue 2 of My Own Mag, Nuttall presented a text of his own in three-column format. This may have inspired Burroughs to explore the format in earnest. In The Special Tangier Issue (issue 5), Burroughs’ first three column piece, The Moving Times, appears. In its simplest form, this format, as used in The Outsider and Floating Bear, is another form of the grid. In The Moving Times, Burroughs gives directions on how to read the piece, guiding readers from column to column. The piece could also be read across the three columns. This crisscross and crossover effect represents a derivation of the “read any which way” of “Warning Warning Warning Warning.” The similarities to the grid in issue 4 are quite noticeable.  

Yet The Moving Times provides a twist that Burroughs would explore for over a year. Burroughs links the three-column cut-up to the format, content, and culture of the newspaper as well as to the act of reading a newspaper. In The Moving Times in issue 5, the mock newspaper is simple in layout. There are no images and the format mimics the front page of a daily paper like the New York Times. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall spends a few pages describing this new phase in Burroughs’ development. Clearly, Nuttall realized that the material Burroughs sent for the Tangier Issue marked an exciting new path creatively for Burroughs. Other readers noted the importance of this issue as well. Burroughs and Nuttall received responses from Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach after this issue. This correspondence and the resulting collaborations would form the closest thing to a movement or school relating to the cut-up. 

The development of the three-column technique and its link to the newspaper cannot be separated from Burroughs’ evolving relationship with My Own Mag and Nuttall. Seeing the possibilities of the mimeograph and Nuttall’s obvious talent with mimeo layout may have encouraged Burroughs to explore this avenue further. In addition, My Own Mag radicalizes and parodies the form and content of the long tradition of boy’s magazines in Great Britain. Periodicals, like Gem and Magnet, provided easily digested fantasies about public and private school adventures of a cast of easily recognizable stock figures. The falsity of these fantasies and their repressive nature must have been on Nuttall’s mind as he taught in art school. In 1939, George Orwell wrote an essay analyzing these magazines. He mentions that they were stuck in a fantasy vision of England in 1910 oblivious to the changes in the world order. At the end of the essay, Orwell wonders why a left leaning boy’s weekly never developed. Nuttall provides that weekly. Nuttall’s title, My Own Mag, refers to actual titles of boy’s weeklies. Boy’s Own Paper and Boy’s Own Magazine are two examples. In the two copies of issue 12 that I have studied, Nuttall attaches two pages of Our Own Magazine, a moralistic “penny dreadful” from the Victorian Era. Burroughs may have seen this connection and was encouraged to create a cut-up newspaper. In pieces like The Moving Times, Burroughs radicalized and parodied the mainstream newspapers particularly the New York Times.  

Burroughs linked the three-column format with the act of reading a newspaper. In an interview published in Paris Review in 1965, Burroughs states, “[C]ut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.” Experimenting with the newspaper as form and reading activity refers back to the discovery of the cut-up technique. Tristan Tzara, the surrealist who first discovered the cut-up, writes, “To make a dadaist poem. Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors.” In the late summer of 1959, Gysin rediscovered the technique by slicing into some newspapers that were behind a canvas he was working on. So in a sense, the next stage of the cut-up as a form was always present, but Burroughs relationship with Nuttall and My Own Mag may have helped encourage this development.

Burroughs also incorporated the text of newspapers into his My Own Mag cut-ups. As Davis Schneiderman explores in a draft research paper, the three-column experiments (for example, The Coldspring News, Moving Times) featured in My Own Mag and other places, like The Spero, all utilized the same front page of the New York Times from September 17, 1899. Numerous postcards mailed to Nuttall may reveal why. The postcards are postmarked from Gibraltar and feature scenes from the area. As Miles points out, Gibraltar was an area of fascination for Burroughs and a key source for the new direction the cut-ups were taking. One postcard in particular makes reference to the Southport Gates inscribed with the date 1899 and the cut-up experiment The Coldspring News (Nov 21, 1964: “Old arch there with The Coldspring News. [Date on the arch is 1899]“). Burroughs viewed Gibraltar as a magical place, a portal allowing travel in time and space. The Southport Gates symbolized this point of intersection. The cut-up recreated such points repeatedly. Possibly, Burroughs chose an edition of the New York Times from 1899 due to the date inscription on the Southport Gates in Gibraltar. 

No matter how the idea of the newspaper format first developed, Burroughs and Nuttall understood that they were providing an underground newspaper even if such periodical had yet to become commonplace in 1964. One of the Burroughs supplements was called The Burrough. The reference to a burrow or burrowing highlights the underground nature of the magazine as well as the ability of the cut-up to uncover or dig up the hidden messages within the word and image of the mainstream media. The Burrough also conjures up the idea of an intelligence bureau. Burroughs often viewed himself as an agent operating against the forces of control. 

For quite some time, Burroughs flirted with the idea of editing an alternative publication. In 1958, he and Gregory Corso considered a magazine called Interpol. The editorial policy of Interpol and My Own Mag (as demonstrated by Nuttall’s commentary in the first two issues and Burroughs / Corso’s letter of 1958) share a concern with the irreverent and the obscene as well as providing an alternative regulator to the dominant power structure and media. The Burrough supplement in My Own Mag with its link to policing organizations (The Bureau) is Burroughs’ resurrection of the dormant Interpol concept. (See my pieces on Apomorphine and Mimeo and on Interpol for a fuller discussion of these ideas.) By 1964, the cut-up was the new drug that fascinated Burroughs, and My Own Mag provided the forum to explore this antidote to word addiction.  

Nuttall’s choice of paper also creates associations with newspapers that tie into Burroughs’concepts of the mainstream media. For example, Nuttall utilized colored construction paper for most issues of My Own Mag. Take the Tangier Issue with Burroughs on the cover. The cover is green with Burroughs mimeo’d wearing a fez and smoking a cigarette. The green cover conjures up images of marijuana which plays in perfectly with Tangiers and Burroughs. Yet Burroughs’ cut-ups, particularly the mock newspaper ones, are usually printed on off-white or yellowed paper. In the choice of paper, Nuttall attempts to recreate the look and feel of a newspaper. The suggestion of old and freshly printed newsprint is strong given the choice of colored paper elsewhere. Given Burroughs’ preoccupation with the Hearst Empire and his control of word and image, the paper allows Burroughs and Nuttall to present a counter version of “yellow journalism” in their underground paper. The idea of a Burroughs “edited” supplement developed more fully as My Own Mag pushed on. Burroughs and Nuttall fully explore the possibilities of the newspaper as a form to be complicated and parodied. Articles, comic strips, editorial pages, letters to the editor, Dear Abby style advice columns are all utilized by Burroughs and Nuttall.  

In 1965, Burroughs lent the name The Moving Times to a poster for Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma Project. This project represented Trocchi’s take on the philosophies and politics of the Situationists. Sigma and the Situationists had strong ties to the community around Nuttall. The Sigma Project members and their addresses appear in the magazine. In addition, My Own Mag and the supplements edited by Burroughs can be viewed as examples of detournment, the primary weapon of the Situationists. Sigma is also referred to in the Perfume Jack comic strip where it is linked to the kite in Burroughs’ cut-up “Over the Last Skyscrapers a Silent Kite.” The Moving Times poster was designed to be hung in the London subway and serve as a sounding board for the Project. This use of the broadside goes back to its early roots as a means to disseminate information on the side of barns and the like. On the broadside, there is a small blurb for My Own Mag that states, “Read realnews in My Own Mag…” This highlights the fact that My Own Mag was viewed as an alternative newspaper and an underground news source. Clearly, Burroughs developed and expanded the three-column format at a rapid rate from issue Five. The progression of “The Moving Times” from a simple three column cut-up to a My Own Mag supplement to a broadside disseminating information for a proposed international underground movement testifies to Burroughs’ increasing ambition for the cut-up technique as well as his belief in the cut-up’s revolutionary nature.

A My Own Mag Supplement: A Digression on Nuttall as Editor and Mimeographer

The editorial relationship between Burroughs and Nuttall deserves some exploration. As the scant correspondence I have reviewed shows, Burroughs was allowed free reign and basically submitted to Nuttall his latest cut-up works straight from the typewriter. Nuttall was open to anything. Burroughs’ editorial comments were short and not very detailed so Nuttall had a lot of leeway in how he wanted to present the manuscript. Nuttall retyped Burroughs’ manuscripts onto the mimeo skins. In some cases, Burroughs encouraged Nuttall to insert images as he saw fit. (April 6, 1964: “By all means, put your drawings in ‘any picture’ spaces.”) In issue 7, Nuttall drew the images that accompany Burroughs’ cut-up. In addition, Nuttall stenciled the format for the grid / scrapbook / three-column experiment of issue 11. This highlights the collaborative nature of Burroughs’ working method as well as his desire to subvert authorial control. 

According to Carl Weissner, Burroughs trusted Nuttall completely and allowed Nuttall to copy his signature and handwriting (see issue 11 and issue 4). These “forgeries” are uncredited. I hesitate to describe this as forgery as it does not get to the heart of the collaborative nature of the Nuttall / Burroughs relationship and has a negative connotation. Yet the idea of forgery must have appealed to Burroughs familiar as he was to forging the signature of croakers on phony scripts in drugstores.

For example, in issue 15, we can see the transformation of a Burroughs’ manuscript to the pages of My Own Mag. “WB Talking” and “Gas Girls” show that Nuttall possessed a very light editorial hand. I have not done a word-by-word analysis but the basic format of the piece is unaltered and I would suspect the text to be unchanged as well. Yet as these manuscript pages show, Burroughs incorporated color into his manuscripts. The New York Times archives have a page from the “Dutch Schultz” cut-up that appeared in Issue 13. Burroughs painted on the manuscript pages. The color and the brushwork on these pieces remind me of the later artwork painted on manila folders. These later works appear every so often on eBay. In any case, the manuscripts for the later My Own Mags merge the three-column cut-up with abstract painting. Burroughs’ scrapbooks of the period are full of these experiments joining the visual and the textual. Given the limits of mimeo, Nuttall could not faithfully reproduce the full visual nature of Burroughs’ work of this period, yet the effort to recreate all the elements of the manuscript is admirable. The later issues of My Own Mag provide as detailed a look into Burroughs’ exploration of the visual implications of the cut-up as was available for years until Burroughs’ artwork was revisited in exhibitions and catalogs, like Ports of Entry. 

Nuttall’s manipulation of stencils and the mimeograph deserve special mention here. One of the pleasures of My Own Mag is its physical appearance. Nuttall is wholly responsible for that. His artwork is intricate, funny, and extremely skillful given the limitations of the technology. In a recent book entitled, da levy and the mimeograph revolution, mimeograph techniques are studied in detail. levy’s work with its blobs, its acknowledgement of the physical nature of ink, its superimpositions, and its fading brings to the fore the inking process in mimeo. This is described as “dirty” mimeo. Such work reminds me of Abstract Expressionist and Pop techniques. I am thinking of levy’s Scarab Poems and “AGAIn? Yur primer cord is showing.” The solid band of ink of “AGAIn?” reminds me of a mimeo Rothko, if Rothko incorporated text in his painting. There are splashes of ink and blots like in the work of Jackson Pollock. The superimpositions, fading of text and image, and the failure to re-ink calls to mind Warhol’s Marilyns of the early 1960s where such affects bring to mind mortality, impermanence, transitoriness.

Nuttall stained his magazine (Issue 9) but I do not get the same flashes from his work. Nuttall’s staining is not done with black ink. The yellow / green stain suggests vomit or urine, not paint. The stain also suggests apomorphine as apomorphine stains green. Therefore the cover of issue 9 highlights Burroughs’ view of mimeo as regulator. (See my article on apomorphine and mimeo for a fuller discussion of this idea.) In The Apomorphine Times of issue 12 of My Own Mag, Burroughs lamented that The Burrough only lasted for two issues. He writes that “not even the generous injections of the green and ready could keep it afloat for more than two issues…” For years, I assumed that the green and ready referred to the influx of young writers, like Carl Weissner and Claude Pélieu, drawn to the cut-ups. It does on one level but it also refers to apomorphine. In issue 9, Nuttall cut-out the bottom corner revealing a green page underneath. The green stain and the cut-out could represent the injection of the “green and ready” that Burroughs talks about in The Apomorphine Times. Burroughs’ quote suggests that not even his apomorphine texts of the period could prevent the eventual demise of his mags and My Own Mag itself. This highlights Burroughs’ awareness of the fleeting nature of mimeo. The cover of issue 9 aptly demonstrates the playful interplay between Burroughs and Nuttall as well as the serious ideologies behind such touches. Everything had a purpose in the construction of My Own Mag.

The general fading and illegibility of the text in My Own Mag I take to be “the standard limitations of mimeo” and not an intended and manipulated affect. Nuttall appears less concerned with making his typography illegible. This is not to say that he does not explore the possibilities of typography, script and the technologies of writing (for example an examination of Nuttall’s use of handwriting or his forging of Burroughs’ hand proves that). Instead, Nuttall does not explore creative inking. Unlike levy, Nuttall does not treat printer’s ink like paint. Instead he chooses to add the element of disruption with the use of scissors, the razor, fire or collage. Nuttall attacks the mimeo page like the surface of a canvas. The use of the scissors or razor by Nuttall parallels and comments on the cut-up method that so interested him. The visuals in My Own Mag must have been difficult to create with a stencil. The visuals, like the comic strips and covers in My Own Mag, are meant to come through clearly, maybe an example of what is called “clean” mimeo. Nuttall strives for clarity in his inking. The draftsman, not the painter, in Nuttall comes to the fore.

Nuttall’s concern with the act of stenciling is not surprising given his creative preoccupations. Unlike levy, Nuttall ignores many possibilities inherent in inking, but he explores in great and painstaking detail the act of stenciling. The layouts of his pages are amazing. Clearly Nuttall took care and satisfaction in the cutting of stencils. The fascination with the cut and the creative power of the act of cutting fascinates Nuttall. The act of creating mimeo with stencil or typewriter allowed Nuttall another means to explore the cut-up. Like the scrapbooks Burroughs experimented with at the time, the mimeograph merges word and image in a single creative process.

I would say that Burroughs preferred clean mimeo. Compare Burroughs more visual cut-ups to levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope. Both writers utilize elements of typewritten text and collage, but levy as we have seen deliberately makes his text illegible. Burroughs did not manipulate illegibility in his manuscripts in order to further his creative ideas. Burroughs painted his manuscripts and used colored paper but the text remains of primary importance and always shows through. Enjambment, a form of cutting, distorts text and meaning, but typography remains clear and sacred. Proof of this is his reaction to Ed Sanders work on APO-33. Burroughs objected to the imperfections of this production and felt they were not appropriate. This says much about Burroughs as an established and commercial writer. Imperfect mimeo and poor layout reflected poorly on Burroughs’ reputation as a professional. levy on the other hand embraced this seeming lack of skill in order to challenge the reader’s expectations and to suggest elements of censorship and miscommunication. Burroughs desired an audience and always stressed the communicative aspects of the cut-up. They were never intended to be unreadable.

For an author so intimately concerned with and aware of control, Burroughs greatly valued order. He consistently goes back to the authorial control he exercises over the cut-up even as he sees its disruptive potential. He craved order as he feared it. Interestingly in interviews and essays, Burroughs always stresses the role of the author in editing and selecting the results of cut-ups. The primacy of the author remains. In Issue 11, Burroughs writes, “For God’s Sake, J.N. date your issues.” Despite the time travel aspects of the cut up he championed, Burroughs also liked to be locked in time and space.

My Own Mag Issues 11-13: From the three-column format to the third dimension of the scrapbook

In Issue 11, Nuttall and Burroughs goes even further in their exploration of the cut-up. Burroughs’ frenzied experimentation added another layer to the three-column format. Miles writes, “It was in March 1964, when Bill and Ian were living at the rue Delacroix, that Bill began work on the scrapbooks. As usual, this was yet another extension of the cut-up technique.” In his developing article, Schneiderman writes about the practice of Grangerization or extra-illustration that was a British fad at the turn of the 20th Century. In issue 11, Nuttall begins stapling old magazine articles and illustrations to My Own Mag. These tip-ins are not reprinted using offset or mimeo. They are sliced out of old magazines and journals. The tip-ins differed from magazine to magazine. The issue in my possession contains an article on the abdomen. The issue on RealityStudio features a piece on astigmatism. Again issues regarding the original and the copy abound. As early as Issue 4, Nuttall tipped in additions to the magazine, but only in the later issues does this scrapbook element develop more fully.

Interestingly, Nutall grangerizes with old medical journals and articles. Again this refers to Burroughs’ creative endeavors. Some of Burroughs’ contributions to My Own Mag at this time are letters to the editor of London newspapers defending Dr. Yerbury Dent. Dr. Dent “cured” Burroughs of heroin addiction using apomorphine in the 1950s. The inclusion of medical journals in My Own Mag mirrors Burroughs’ near obsession with the representation of drugs and drug addiction by the medical community. In fact, Burroughs’ first “magazine” appearance was in a medical journal, The British Journal of Addiction, edited by Dr. Dent. APO-33, a cut-up scrapbook Burroughs created at the same time as much of the material in My Own Mag, is in essence an alternative version of a medical journal or article. The act of complicating and parodying an established, authoritative form is familiar to Burroughs as we have seen. In the choice of the source material he selects for grangerizing, Nuttall brings into play Burroughs’ creative life from its beginnings to the most up to the minute cut-up experiments.

This new wrinkle introduced by Nuttall dovetails with the development of the cut-up by Burroughs in March 1964. Throughout the 1950s, Burroughs created scrapbooks that verged on book art. Ports of Entry provides some pictures and commentary on this aspect of Burroughs’ art career. Like the Gibraltar scrapbook mentioned above, this new direction merged the notebook / scrapbook format of the 1950s with the new three-column format. “The Dutch Schultz Special’ (Issue 13) is a prime example of this new work. Time and APO-33 are others. The three-column format now includes photographic images, sometimes taken by Burroughs himself, that comment on the text and provide points of intersection of time and space. The feel is more of a magazine than a newspaper.

Back in Issue 6 of My Own Mag, Burroughs traced the format of page 40 of the September 13, 1963 issue of Time in order to create the layout for a cut-up. This issue of Time features a cover story on Communist China. Page 40 contains an article on humanizing Communism that focuses on Hungary. Communist China is something of an obsession for Burroughs. The single page in issue 6 would develop into an entire scrapbook. In Time published by C Press, Burroughs cuts-up and parodies the September 21, 1962 issue of Time Magazine that features a picture of Mao on the cover. By recreating these issues of Time, Burroughs draws attention to the media’s role in creating the Communist menace. Given Burroughs’ critical view of bureaucracy and the influence of the State in personal and political life, Communism must have been an interesting case study for his libertarian ideas. Burroughs’ creative and intellectual response to Commumism remains to be studied in full.

In response to Burroughs’ creation of a framework using Time in issue 6, Nuttall razors in frames allowing text from other pages to show through. This suggests the cut-up’s ability to alter one’s frame of reference or perception. Burroughs and Nuttall are very concerned with one’s ability to see clearly and cleansing the doors of perception. The inclusion of advertisments on Filtering in Time suggests a similar concept. Like drugs, the cut-up is a means to this end. This is brought home by Nuttall when he grangerizes an article on astigmatism to Issue 11 of My Own Mag on view at RealityStudio. Again it must be remembered that the tip-in differed in each copy of the magazine so other associations are possible and probable. In creating the magazine, Nuttall hammers home the idea of linking the cut-up with clarity of vision with clear inking, with cutting by slicing the page, razoring frames, or clipping articles, and with the act of stenciling.

The Dutch Schultz Special (Issue 13) includes one of the finest reproductions of a Burroughs scrapbook until the color images in Port of Entry. Most people focus on Burroughs’ The Dead Star, but Issue 13 is a tour de force of mimeo by Nuttall. Take for instance the cover. The whole of this layout is immaculately designed. All the line drawing has all been done before the stencil is inserted into the typewriter. Another limitation was that it was impossible to draw cross-hatching — that is why all Nuttall’s shading is in sloping lines. There are two reasons for no cross-hatching:

1. There was every chance of tearing the skin and ruining the stencil.

2. If successful, there was every chance you’d get the black blobs as in striking letters like “o” or “b” too hard.

The image comments on Burroughs’ text. The headshot of Dutch Schultz is the most obvious instance of this, but the more interesting figure is the shadowy man beside Dutch. The figure represents “the third that walks beside you” that so fascinated Burroughs and frequently appeared in his writings. Typed into the image are the key numbers of the Burroughs mythology, like 23.

“The Dying Words of Perfume Jack” in issue 13 is another example of Nuttall’s consummate skill with the typewriter, stylus, and mimeograph. Nuttall’s text incorporates Burroughs’ writing by recycling his words, numbers and characters. This is more noticeable in “The Last Words of Dutch Schultz” in issue 12. Nutall suggests the three-column format. Here, the comic strip meets the newspaper. Nuttall’s presentation is as remarkable as Burroughs’ text. These late issues are some of the finest examples of the mimeo art ever published in a little magazine.

Interestingly, issue 13 also draws attention to the limitation of mimeo. One of the most noticeable aspects of the issue is its size. It is the only one of 17 issues not foolscap. Why not? Nuttall was a very scrupulous editor, but he was confined by the foolscap size of the duplicator. He re-typed every article with the most scrupulous care, but it had to fit within the format. So if you compare what’s in Issue 17 — the last — with the Pélieu and Weissner manuscripts this becomes clear. The manuscripts were extended out to foolscap by attaching extra paper to the bottom. In issue 13, the Burroughs contribution is on a strange size which is just less than A4 290mm x 208mm — A4 is 297mm x 210mm. Nuttall’s parts on duplicator stock are 290mm x 202mm. The pages besides The Dead Star are probably cut down foolscap paper. This means that Nuttall designed the whole issue to Burroughs’ size. The reason The Dead Star is a different size was because Nuttall did not create it himself using the mimeograph. The piece was probably published professionally using offset lithography. Given the fact that the paper used for The Dead Star was not commonly used in Great Britain at the time, Burroughs may have commissioned the printing himself during his stay in New York City. The C Press version of Time looks and feels very similar to The Dead Star. According to Ron Padgett, Time was published professionally by offset at Fleetwood Printing Services. The Dead Star could have been done by the same printer and then mailed by Burroughs to Nuttall in Great Britain.

Why offset? Mimeo could not fully capture the visual complexity of Burroughs’ scrapbooks. Small touches like the grid of the balance sheets on which Burroughs composed The Dead Star were difficult to reproduce on mimeo. Nuttall used every technique at his disposal to comment on and reproduce the scrapbook and the ideology behind it. The meticulous reproduction of a scrapbook page in issue 11 is but one example of this. But in the introductory note to that cut-up, Burroughs demanded that Nuttall date his issues. Clearly, Burroughs was bothered with the lack of order in Nuttall’s editing even though Nuttall stressed clarity in his use of mimeo. Possibly given the problems with the Fuck You version of APO-33, Burroughs demanded an exact reproduction of The Dead Star.

Burroughs realized that his scrapbook experiments needed the resources of a larger, more connected publisher. Through his stay in NYC in 1965, Burroughs with Brion Gysin worked on the manuscript for The Third Mind. As Burroughs and Gysin envisioned it this treatise / art book on the cut-up method would test the boundaries of traditional publishing in much the same way Nuttall challenged and extended mimeo. In 1970, Grove Press intended to issue a lavish production for the art market retailing at $10. Publication stalled as the book proved too expensive. In addition the book proved too difficult for Grove even in a high-end format. The Third Mind was finally published in 1978, but it was a shadow of the project envisioned in the 1960s.

My Own Mag Issues 14-17 and beyond: Where do we go from here?

Paradoxically the most famous, most collectible issue of My Own Mag, The Dutch Schultz Special, published in August 1965 signaled the beginning of the end of the Nuttall / Burroughs partnership. In September 1965 Burroughs arrived at Gatwick Airport for what would prove to be an extended stay in London. Maybe the close proximity to Nuttall dulled the keen edge of their correspondence. The magazine began to appear less frequently and the cohesiveness of the magazine began to unravel. The interplay between Burroughs and Nuttall that made the magazine so special had played out. Burroughs did not appear in the last two issues and only briefly in issues 14 and 15. In the later issues, the Moving Times begins to function like a magazine within the magazine. Material comes not just from Burroughs. This is the Third Mind in action as Burroughs’ work diminishes in the magazine and the cut-up work of his collaborators takes over. Burroughs incorporates his correspondence into Moving Times. Likewise, Weissner cuts up Burroughs’ work and letters to form new material. A handwritten note by Burroughs to Nuttall provides evidence of his excitement over this new correspondence. In the note which is part of the 60s archive in Robert Bank’s possession, Burroughs encouraged Nuttall to contact Weissner and publish him. Nuttall followed Burroughs’ advice, and My Own Mag published Weissner in the late issues. See Robert Bank’s index of contributors. Nuttall felt the pull of other projects, such as Bomb Culture, his pioneering study of the international underground. My Own Mag ended with Issue 17 in September 1966.

With the Dutch Schultz Special, Burroughs reached the height of his achievement in the little magazine published cut-ups, but in doing so he exhausted the possibilities of mimeo as a medium. There was a need for a machine beyond the mimeograph and the typewriter. Issue 15 demonstrates another direction in Burroughs’ thought: the tape recorder. The “Subliminal Kid” piece, like the longer “Invisible Generation,” shows Burroughs’ high hopes for the latest in recording technology to again subvert control and authority. Burroughs’ movement in this direction probably had something to do with the feedback and correspondence he was having with Carl Weissner as well as the difficulty in reproducing his manuscripts. As I mentioned earlier after the Tangier Issue, Burroughs began to get some response from around the world in the persons of Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach. This had the makings of a cut-up movement. Weissner would publish Burroughs’ tape experiments in Klacto. Burroughs explored film in this period as well with Tony Balch.

The direction of Burroughs’ work for the rest of the 1960s was foreshadowed in the pages of My Own Mag. Burroughs’ most sustained work during his London period was a monthly column in the men’s magazine Mayfair. The idea of Burroughs as a talking head with regular column starts with his work in My Own Mag. Increasingly, Burroughs appears in underground newspapers commenting on the issues of the day. His work floated over the Underground Press Syndicate wire with the same pieces running in more than one paper. He sat in on roundtables for Playboy and worked as a reporter for Esquire. Burroughs as guru and cultural expert mirrors his work as an advice columnist and reporter in My Own Mag. In My Own Mag, Burroughs edited his own underground newspaper. Now he sold his services to the underground industry.

Not surprisingly, Burroughs got intensely involved with underground comix and the beginnings of the graphic novel. In 1970, Burroughs collaborated with Malcolm Mc Neill on a comix, the “Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” in four issues of Cyclops. Nuttall was there first with Perfume Jack and the Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Last Words is surely one of the earliest examples of the underground comix, yet Nuttall and My Own Mag are not mentioned in the comprehensive study of the art: Rebel Visions. The character of Mr. Hart was based on William Randolph Hearst and Burroughs’ obsession with the controlling aspects of a multimedia conglomerate are very much in evidence. The concern with the power of the newspaper expressed in My Own Mag carried over into Cyclops. Throughout the 1970s, Burroughs worked with Mc Neill on the never completed Ah Puch Is Here. As envisioned by Burroughs and Mc Neill, Ah Puch, like The Third Mind, would have challenged the concept of the book and would have been truly an artist’s book as described by Johanna Drucker. In an unpublished manuscript, Observed While Falling, Mc Neill details this process. The give and take of artist and author as well as the merging of format, form, and content described in the memoir draws parallels with Burroughs’ experience with My Own Mag.

It could be argued that Burroughs’ perceived “return to narrative” in the Wild Boys was a direct result of his time working with Nuttall and My Own Mag. Maybe he sensed he had taking the method as far as it could go given the limitations of alternative and mainstream publishing. As Observed While Falling and Ports of Entry makes clear, Burroughs still worked on scrapbooks and other ambitious cut-up projects into the 1970s. The radical use of the cut-up never left his bag of tricks, but — with The Wild Boys and the novels and short stories that followed — it was more and more relegated to one tool in the toolbox and one to be used with discretion. As time wore on, the cut-up technique settled back into the novel form Burroughs abandoned in the mid-1960s. The three-columns were abandoned for the traditional paragraph even though he toyed with and threatened to break its confines. Maybe he tired of the limited audience of the mimeo scene. During his entire career as a writer, Burroughs felt spurred on by a receptive listener, a willing receiver. The time had come for a mainstream audience. The youth culture theme of The Wild Boys seems exploitative to me, like a play for relevance. The work of Norman Mailer comes to mind. Burroughs was the old man of Hip. The more traditional narrative elements made his writing more accessible to critics and the more adventurous of general readers.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A Secret Location on the Lower East Side is one of my bibles, but the failure to document the Cleveland mimeo scene in any detail seems a major hole. Granted Clay and Phillips’ book could not cover everything, and Cleveland was briefly mentioned in the introduction, but levy would have been a nice corrective to the book’s largely coastal vision. By building on the framework of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology many diverse voices get silenced. The Marrahwannah Quarterly or the Third Class Buddhist Oracle by levy or even Douglas Blazek’s Ole provide a much more vibrant view of Midwest little mags than that most discussed of little magazines, the Chicago-based, Big Table. A look at the mimeo tradition in the Midwest supports the idea that Main Street was much less sleepy and complacent artistically and politically than commonly believed.

This snub got me thinking about what I consider an interesting omission in levy’s publishing efforts. Given William Burroughs’ willingness to publish anywhere in the 1960s, why did he not appear in Cleveland? Burroughs and levy would seem to be a natural fit. In late 1964, levy journeyed to New York City and immersed himself in the poetry reading scene of the Lower East Side. The chronology complied by Smith and Swanberg states that levy went to readings at Le Metro, The Cellar, and The Paradox. Burroughs read at Les Deux Megots Coffeehouse in 1963 / 1964 as recounted by Daniel Kane in All Poets Welcome, and levy attended the reading. levy stayed in New York for a month performing and immersing himself in the New York scene. This experience was instrumental in levy’s decision to initiate a coffeehouse scene and reading series in Cleveland.

levy met Ed Sanders in 1965 and received copies of The Marijuana Newsletter issued by Fuck You Press. levy may also have received Roosevelt After Inauguration or even the aborted APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator. Burroughs appeared in both issues of The Marijuana Newsletter. Soon after his correspondence with Sanders, levy began The Marrahwannah Quarterly. Burroughs’ stance on drugs would have fit right in with that mimeo, but as we will see later on levy was critical of Burroughs’ drug-induced philosophy and writing (“rug scribbles”). Like levy, Burroughs was personally familiar with censorship and obscenity trials. In addition, Burroughs’ cut-up experiments paralleled levy’s concerns with concrete and visual poetry. Both writers also experimented in a visual manner with collages and incorporated textual and typographical elements from the typewriter and newspaper unlike many other collagists of the time. levy and Burroughs would seem to be two peas in a pod.

I always assumed that Burroughs’ absence was based on his social class and established literary reputation. My cue for this assumption was Charles Bukowski and his supporters. Reading through Bukowski’s letters of the 1960s (a fun and worthwhile exercise by the way), it is clear that Buk resented the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, as fakes and poseurs. In a questionnaire complied by Anthony Linick for a dissertation, Bukowski listed Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley as his least favorite poets. Corso would represent the dislike of the Beats. Creeley stands for the established and successful avant poet, particularly of the Black Mountain variety. Before he was 40, Creeley had made it as a poet and was a leading light to succeeding generations of poets. Bukowski regularly blasted all manner of counterculture and established poets in his letters, Dirty Old Man columns, poems, and in his little mag, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.

Given his outsider / underdog status, it seems natural that levy would harbor a similar resentment to established avant-garde figures. In a letter to dr wagner from 1966, levy describes Burroughs as “the adding machine addict.” The reference to the Burroughs Corporation suggests levy’s awareness of the corporate and privileged status of Burroughs. Granted Burroughs clearly benefited from his family connections (nowhere more so than in Mexico after the shooting of Joan), but the myth of his wealth was greatly exaggerated. Kerouac perpetuated the rumor that Burroughs was a millionaire. He was not. Yet he was connected to wealth and privilege. More important and probably more grating on younger writers, Burroughs was connected to the international avant-garde, including major avant publishers like John Calder and Grove Press. By the mid-1960s, “the adding machine addict” had rise from drug-addled obscurity to become a Delphic oracle of sorts who prophesized on all topics of the day. Burroughs was something to measure up to and react against.

This levy clearly did and he is conflicted on Burroughs as an influence. Take Allen Ginsberg for example. I would suspect a bit of jealousy and resentment against the Beat guru who so ruffled Bukowski’s feathers. levy hosted Ginsberg in 1966 at a benefit reading in Cleveland. Ginsberg was in the process of crossing the United States for his Fall of America collection. This was the “Wichita Vortex Sutra” period, a poem that has aged well given today’s current events with its look at war, the media, and Middle America. Reading over Ginsberg’s biography and Smith and Swanberg’s book, it appears to be that the two poets used each other for their own purposes, rather than there being mutual admiration and cross pollination. At least that is the sense I get. Ginsberg kind of blew into town, created a fuss, raised some money, and annoyed the police and the squares. Did he help or hurt levy’s cause? Connections with levy definitely added a feather to Ginsberg’s cap given what levy had come to represent in the counterculture. Clearly, levy has a complicated and conflicted relationship to the Beats.

In August 1968, levy wrote “Suburban Monastery Death Poem.” Written near the end of his life and at the end of his rope, this is a devastating poem that shows the potential and power of levy. levy died at 26, an accomplished poet, but still learning and developing. As mentioned in d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution, Ginsberg did not write Howl until the age of 30. Who knows what heights levy could have attained? In this poem, levy cries for help: “I don’t want to die in Ohio anymore.” Burroughs is one to whom levy reaches out. levy writes, “William Burroughs — rescue me! / forget that!” The line highlights the attraction / repulsion levy felt for Burroughs. As mentioned before by 1968, Burroughs was viewed as a prophet and a savior to many in the counterculture. With his appearances on album covers, underground newspapers, men’s magazines, and other alternative outlets, Burroughs transformed from a voice in the wildness to a talking head. levy’s line reminds me of “The Seeker” by The Who with the lyric: “I asked Timothy Leary and he couldn’t help me either. They call me the Seeker.” levy and the Who yearn for answers and a guru but at the same time fail to find the guidance they so desperately desire. levy and The Who are also cynical regarding the ability of the counterculture’s leading figures, like the Beatles, to provide answers at all. Timothy Leary and the Beatles are merely media projections and creations. There are no answers. There is only hype. Burroughs represents another media creation of the avant-garde.

Given levy’s interest in concrete and visual poetry, his experimentation with collage, his familiarity with the little mag community, his relationship with the Beat Generation, and his interest in drug and alternative cultures, I believe wholeheartedly that the figure of Burroughs had to be confronted and overcome by levy. levy viewed Burroughs as an important yet ultimately oppressive and, as we will see, inadequate influence. Clearly, levy wrestled with Burroughs.

In a remarkable passage included in a packet of ephemera sent by levy to Marvin Malone of Wormwood Review in the days leading up to his suicide, levy discusses Burroughs as a writer and his relation to his own poetics. The letters and other artifacts he mailed to intimates around the country represent levy’s legacy. They form part of the picture of how levy wanted to be remembered. Michael Basinski in his introduction to the letters mentions that some of the letters discuss the modern poetics of Creeley, Ginsberg and Olson. What is revealed is an intellectual poet deeply involved with the poetics of his time.

In a letter to dr wagner from 1966, levy writes:

I sit down 10-20 times a day and glans equinox dropping thru may STONE hinges sighted on syrian frontier the eglyphian stroboscope study course & its been occuring to me that the STROBE is; when assembled a form less jumble & a master piece of chaos that should even jolt ole Budge out of his gravey TRAINing center — the strobe codex cannot be broken — we have discovered an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication that may surpass burroughsian lucidity — or the Rug scribble of the adding machine addict is to easily ascribed to rug scribble — while the strobe is primarily a non-rug scribble — perhaps anti-acid? Rug scene — if you stare at the strobe long enough the obvious patterns vanish — the problem is how can we get passed the censors & get the thing on ToVo (TOVO) as in demi-tovo-western version of TASS which is another version of Ouspenskian political mysticism

In this brief passage, it is clear that levy held many of the same obsessions and concerns as Burroughs. levy’s excitement over discovering “an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication” echoes Burroughs’ fervor over the cut-up and yage expressed in various letters and interviews. In The Yage Letters, Burroughs writes, “Yage is space time travel.” In The Job, Burroughs states, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event… Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”

The concern with passing the censor reminds me of a similar line from Naked Lunch in the Talking Asshole routine. Burroughs writes, “That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness…” Both levy and Burroughs sought a literary form merging high and popular culture techniques that would allow them to explore and maneuver in those spaces in between, the little gaps of freedom in the monolith of the dominant culture and in the controlling aspects of language. levy also expresses his knowledge of Western media control of information and its close ties to Soviet oppression. Both realized the United States and the Soviet Union are heavily invested in stifling freedom of speech and free thought. The manipulation of media outlets is a key element in that process.

levy’s letter to wagner suggests that Burroughs did not appear in levy’s publications because levy was critical of Burroughs’ work. levy writes, “we have discovered an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication that may surpass burroughsian lucidity — or the Rug scribble of the adding machine addict is to easily ascribed to rug scribble — while the strobe is primarily a non-rug scribble — perhaps anti-acid? Rug scene…” Burroughs in levy’s opinion was too lucid. levy describes Burroughs’ work as “rug scribbles.” This refers to “drug scribbles” with the “D” removed. Similarly, I also misread this as “rag scribbles” thinking of the British slang for heroin and a prostitute, an “oily rag.” The use of British slang in my mind refers to the fact that in 1966 Burroughs was living in London. In this light, levy felt Burroughs writing was merely drug centered and drug induced rambling whereas his work “anti-acid” and a breakthrough beyond drug-speak. By the mid-1960s, drug jargon and philosophy were becoming old hat, cliché and a straitjacket to open expression. Burroughs, and even Ginsberg and Kesey, were talking of going beyond drugs as a means toward heightened perception.

levy is using “rug” in this manner, but “rug” is also British slang for trite, tired, cliché, obvious. This would tie in with Burroughs’ lucidity. As I have written above, levy prized obscurity and noise in communication. levy states, “Why concrete? What can be more obscene than refusing to communicate.” levy felt quite rightly that his problem with the censor had less to do with four-letter words than his failure to express himself clearly and directly in a manner the common reader could understand. Obscurity equals obscenity. I have pointed out this element of pornography in connection with Burroughs in a previous Bunker column, but levy felt Burroughs did not go far enough with his cut-up and maintained ties to open communication, narrative, and discernable pattern.

levy writes, “if you stare at the strobe long enough the obvious patterns vanish.” Compare the stroboscope to the Dream Machine. levy lays down the problem with Burroughs’ cut-up experiments; they do not abandon “obvious patterns” despite his desire to obliterate word lines, destroy the tyranny of the sentence, and topple the blocks of meaning conveyed by syllabic language. In short they are too lucid. Brion Gysin, the guru to Burroughs, saw Jungian archetypes and visual patterns in the Dream Machine. In an essay on the Dream Machine published in Olympia Magazine, the Olympia Press’ response to Grove’s Evergreen Review (republished in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, Something Else Press as well as in the Brion Gysin Reader), Gysin writes quoting Ian Sommerville…. “After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me.” He writes about “patterns of color” and “elements seen in endless repetition.” On the other hand, the stroboscope as envisioned by levy wants to break and complicate patterns. In an essay on the Tibetan Stroboscope, Karl Young writes, “Technically a stroboscope is an instrument used for industrial and scientific procedures that call for the intermittent flashing of beams of light… Strobe light can seem like a mild means of questioning the nature of perception. Still the strobe light can make what people usually take for granted as perception seem much less certain. Under a strobe, light and darkness constantly alternate, which can be seen in terms of existence and nothingness, or in the dualism of many occult traditions…The news is changes in perception.” Burroughs and Gysin claim to pursue a similar interest in deranging and challenging perception but they continually return to pattern and endless repetition. Take for example Gysin’s permutation poems or his artwork. Pattern and repetition are privileged over plurality of meanings and multiplicity of perception. Karl Young in connection with the stroboscope as envisioned by levy: “The images abound in contradictions, paradoxes, oppositions, and kinds of flipping polarities that at times attract and repel each other.” The Dream Machine moves away from this frantic motion and “flipping” to “limitless patterns” and “endless repetition.” The Dream Machine quickly becomes boring and too lucid.

Perhaps, levy’s literary form of the strobe is a reaction to Burroughs’ writing. Before reading the letter quoted above, I viewed Ed Sander’s Egyptian influenced poems as a major influence on levy’s work in this line and they were, but Burroughs might also play an important role. I think the focus here is in part on the cut-up experiments of the 1960s that appeared in seemingly every major little magazine of the time. Yet I want to narrow down to one magazine in particular and suggest that levy’s comments and his development of the stroboscope provide an interesting critique to a particular experiment of Burroughs’. The magazine in question is C: A Journal of Poetry and Burroughs contribution to Issue 9: “Giver of Winds is My Name.” Here, Burroughs experiments with glyphs accompanying a cut-up. Burroughs also contributes “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch.” These works are Burroughs at his most poetic. In 1966, Ginsberg stated in a Paris Review interview that Burroughs was really a poet. It is easy to think that Ginsberg had the work from C Journal in mind. I believe levy must have seen Burroughs’ piece in C as well. Given his intimate knowledge of the little magazine scene, particularly in the Lower East Side due to a friendship with Ed Sanders, it is likely levy saw a copy of this issue. C 9 was published in the Summer of 1964 before levy’s stroboscope poem and his letter to dr wagner. As I have mentioned earlier, levy travelled to New York City in late 1964 where he saw Burroughs reading and just as likely read a copy of C 9.

Like in the Egyptian Stroboscope, Burroughs utilizes hieroglyphics in his cut-up in C 9. In The Job, Burroughs states, “The study of hieroglyphic languages shows us that word is an image… the written word is an image. However, there is an important difference between a hieroglyphic and syllabic language. If I hold up a sign with the word ‘ROSE’ written on it, and you read that sign, you will be forced to repeat the word ‘ROSE’ to yourself. If I show you a picture of a rose you do not have to repeat the word. You can register the image in silence. A syllabic language forces you to verbalize in auditory patterns. A hieroglyphic language does not. I think that anyone who is interested to find out the precise relationship between word and image show study a simplified hieroglyphic script. Such a study would tend to break down automatic verbal reaction to a word. It is precisely these automatic reactions to words themselves that enable those who manipulate words to control thought on a mass scale.” Burroughs talks the talk here but his cut-up work fails to satisfactorily break the urge to “repeat the word” or “verbalize in auditory patterns.” The hieroglyphics are mere window dressing. levy realizes that the cut-up experiment, like the Dream Machine, is built on repetition of words and images that construct a pattern despite the desire to break free into silence such as the figure of Lady Sutton Smith appears in My Own Mag and other publications of the period. On one level this goes down to the source material of the cut-ups. Burroughs utilizes the same basic material for many of his cut-ups: recycled bits and pieces from the word horde of Naked Lunch. As Davis Schneiderman demonstrates in an unpublished essay, Burroughs repeatedly cuts-up the same front page of the September 17, 1899 New York Times. In addition, levy feels that Burroughs lays down the same old con. He writes like he speaks, in a monotone, due to his recycling of old material that relies on chance and the scissors for a fresh perception. levy sees that Burroughs is addicted to a static word and image bank and thus condemned to parrot the same old phrases despite the cut-up. Burroughs cannot cut his ties to the forces of control imbedded in “obvious patterns” and word lines. He cannot keep out the echoes of his recycled writing out of his “new” material and thus never truly risks obscurity, silence, or miscommunication. As quoted earlier, Burroughs stated on the cut-up: “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something…” The most interesting aspect of the cut-up to Burroughs is their “lucidity,” their clarity of meaning. Burroughs shys away from “simply random juxtapositions of words.” levy embraces this aspect in the stroboscope at the textual and visual level.

This analysis is at a textual level and says nothing of the visual elements that deeply interested both authors. In this case I would say that Burroughs preferred clean mimeo. Compare his Time and APO-33 to levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope. Both writers utilize elements of typewritten text and collage, but levy deliberately makes his text illegible. I suggest that Burroughs did not manipulate dirty mimeo in order to further his creative ideas. Proof of this is his reaction to Ed Sanders’ work on APO-33. Burroughs objected to the imperfections of this production and felt they were not appropriate. This says much about Burroughs as an established and commercial writer. Imperfect mimeo and poor layout reflected poorly on Burroughs’ reputation as a professional. levy on the other hand embraced this seeming lack of skill in order to challenge reader’s expectations and to suggest elements of censorship and miscommunication. This is another example of the lucidity that levy saw as a failing in Burroughs’ work.

As I have written before, Burroughs always remained aware of the reader and sought clear communication above all. levy sought to challenge that relationship more confrontationally through “destructive writing.” The strobe as literary form is a “master-piece of chaos.” Burroughs made gestures in this direction but by the late 1960s he would come “back now to write purely conventional straightforward narrative” as he would state in The Job. Burroughs found that purely experimental writing was something of a trap. Perhaps had he lived levy would have felt a similar pull away from the more experimental concrete work of his late career.

d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution is a revelation for anybody interested in the Cleveland scene, the little magazine, and the alternative poetics of the 1960s. The book centers levy in Cleveland yet succeeds in showing how he searched beyond the city limits for inspiration and how his influence rippled outward from Euclid Avenue. For years, there has been a valuable base of raw material, original and reprint publications, letters, and artwork, on which to build the critical reputation of this misunderstood poet. Smith, Swanberg, and their contributors provide several bricks to that structure. Hopefully critics and writers will seek out levy’s work as there is much to learn from and about him. levy is an inspiration as a poet, a publisher and as a community builder. The project he began in Cleveland has yet to be completed in that city and beyond. The positive benefits of such an effort were sorely needed then and maybe even more so today.