Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Call me old school but I am a Maynard & Miles Man. I love to get lost in the bibliographic details, particularly in Section A. The publication dates, the measurements, the information on print runs, the points of issue. This gold standard bibliography is a goldmine of information, and one that has yet to be fully excavated. In order to obtain fuller understanding of Burroughs’ work, these bibliographic details matter. Yet too often Burroughs criticism has ignored or misinterpreted them.

Take A1 in the bibliography: the Ace Junkie from 1953. It is common knowledge that Burroughs’ first book was published along with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent in an edition that Ace advertises as “TWO BOOKS IN ONE.” Everybody notes that Junkie was published dos-à-dos with Narcotic Agent. Book dealers do it; I do it; even the library of Columbia University does it in their online exhibit on Naked Lunch. If you say a lie a thousand times, it becomes a truth.

Well, I was shocked to learn that the Ace D-15 is not published dos-à-dos at all. From Wikipedia: a dos-à-dos binding “is a binding structure in which two separate books are bound together such that the fore edge of one is adjacent to the spine of the other, with a shared lower board between them serving as the back cover of both. When shelved, the spine of the book to the right faces outward, while the spine of the book to the left faces the back of the shelf; the text of both works runs head-to-tail.” The binding creates a look like that of an accordion.

In fact, the Ace Doubles are published tête-bêche. Again Wikipedia: tête-bêche is “a single volume in which two texts are bound together, with one text rotated 180° relative to the other, such that when one text runs head-to-tail, the other runs tail-to-head . . . Books bound in this way have no back cover, but instead have two front covers and a single spine with two titles. When a reader reaches the end of the text of one of the works, the next page is the (upside-down) final page of the other work. These volumes are also referred to as ‘upside-down books’ or ‘reversible books.’” It has become common in the book industry to label such a binding as dos-à-dos.

Like much of the seemingly minute details brought up in the Bunker, the question becomes Who Gives a Fuck? Well, those interested in Burroughs should. Clearly, dos-à-dos and tête-bêche bindings suggest a relationship between the bound texts. In French, dos-à-dos means “back-to-back.” This suggests opposition and conflict. The image of a duel comes to mind with the junkie and the narcotics agent stepping off their forty paces in a fight to the death. Clearly this is the relationship promoted by Ace Books. The Helbrant publication provided a counterbalance to the seemingly pro-drug Junkie. They are like oil and vinegar. They do not mix, but they make a delicious combination that makes even junk taste good. On one level, the Ace Books are all about mass consumption and providing an easily digested product.

But that is not the most interesting way to look at the relationship between Junkie and Narcotic Agent. In French, tête-bêche means “head-to-toe.” Unlike back-to-back, this implies a sexual relationship, a 69 position. This is entirely appropriate when one takes into consideration Burroughs’ theories of addiction and his belief in the symbiotic relationship between the police bureaucracy and the drug underworld. They feed off each other; they are parasites that suck each other off. Nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of Bradley the Buyer.

Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. “It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty,” a cop says.

The Ace Junkie is the schlup in book form — Junkie and Narcotic Agent making each other all soft like a blob of jelly and surrounding each other so nasty.

I just finished reading Jerome McGann’s monumental book Black Riders: The Visual Language of Modernism. McGann is a textual scholar, and he has been at the forefront arguing for the importance of graphic and typographic design for investigating literature and for how crucial the book as a material object is for interpreting its meaning. Black Rider is one of the key texts I encountered during my brief time at the University of Iowa, and, over the course of time, I have always associated the book with Burroughs due to the collaboration withwith Robert Wilson and Tom Waits on The Black Rider. This may seem to be only name association but is there anything McGann can say about the work of Burroughs? The entire purpose of the Bibliographic Bunker is to emphatically state, “Yes!!” Burroughs at his best, his most innovative, most influential, and most creative was intimately concerned with graphic and typographic design. This is why the cut-up works are, to my mind, his most interesting work. Time, APO-33, My Own Mag, The Dead Star, the aborted The Third Mind, the aborted Ah Pook Is Here, the countless unpublished scrapbooks and cut-up manuscripts. Burroughs was involved with and thought about the design and production of all these works. Their design and production are inseparable from the text. Burroughs at his worst and least important lets such details be handled by commercial publishers and designers.

Clearly Burroughs had no hand in the design of the Ace Junkie. Yet chance and coincidence are crucial to Burroughs’ writing, particularly in cut-up practice and its effects. For example, Google tête-bêche and the first hit is a Wikipedia page on the term as it relates to stamps. The page features an image of a 1910 Swiss stamp of William Tell’s son with the heading Helvetia. This creates a web of associations involving the William Tell act, Joan Vollmer, Billy Burroughs, and typography (Helvetica), such as how the death of Joan stamped itself on the son’s memory and impressed itself upon his entire life, literally turning his life upside down. Helvetica is the typeface for governments and corporate trademarks. Interestingly, the William Tell incident, of which there are numerous conflicting accounts, has no official version, yet it has become the trademark, defining moment of Burroughs’ writing life, as presented in the introduction to Queer and elsewhere.  

By chance the Ace Double as issued could not have expressed Burroughs’ theories on law enforcement and junk culture any better. The binding reveals the big lie of the narcotics industry, so how about getting real and telling the truth about the binding of the Ace Junkie? In the immortal words of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, “Who would have thought that we would become lovers / As friends, we were so, so tight / Can’t help myself, you make me feel so right / I got to, got to, got to tell you, darlin’ / Ooh, baby, I think I love you from head to toe.”  

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For those of you interested in exploring the history of men’s magazines further, let me recommend (if I have not already), Dian Hanson’s six volume set The History of Men’s Magazines published by Taschen. On the related topic of Men’s Adventure Magazines, check out Men’s Adventure Magazines: In Postwar America and It’s a Man’s World. I hear Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties is worth checking out as well. Stephen J. Gertz, who wrote a great article on Joseph Zinnato’s Burroughs collection, provides an essay entitled West Coast Blue on porn publishers in California during the 1960s. I am sure there are other titles worth reading but these are the ones I am most familiar with.

Well, Gertz has done it again and added another must-have title for those interested in pulp fiction, men’s magazines, and sleaze paperbacks. Feral House just published Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975. Gertz’s book should be of interest to Burroughs fans, since he wrote, arguably, the most famous drug paperback of them all: Junkie. As Gertz states, the story of Junkie is well-documented and for the most part he directs his attentions elsewhere. Even so I gleaned some interesting tidbits about Burroughs’ first published novel from Gertz’s informative introduction. For example, I have always considered Junkie something of a best seller. It sold over 113,000 copies soon after publication by Ace in 1953. In fact as Gertz makes clear, the sales for Junkie were slightly below average. This gives you some idea of the massive popularity of drug paperbacks. Hundreds of millions of copies of paperbacks (not all drug-related) were in print on a yearly basis. This blew me away.  

In addition I had always considered the Digit Junkie the holy grail of drug paperbacks. Not true. It is highly desirable and extremely rare. Gertz states that the last copy he was aware of sold in 2002 for $5000. I am personally aware of two copies since that date, but clearly the book is far from common. According to Gertz, however, the “black tulip” of drug literature is David “Bunny” Garnett’s Dope Darling: A Study of Cocaine. There are only five known copies in libraries around the world. Aside from its rarity, why is this copy so prized? Well, Garnett had ties to the Bloomsbury Group and British Modernism. He would go on to write some critically acclaimed novels. But Dope Darling was his first novel. The book also just happens to have some remarkable cover art. Sound familiar? Similar circumstances make Junkie highly collectible.

Dope Menace also has an interesting insight into Junkie‘s cover art. First of all, I had mistakenly believed that the cover art was drawn by Norman Saunders. Wrong!! Al Rossi did the covers for the Ace and Digit Junkies. Turns out that the image of a woman injecting into her thigh is iconic in drug paperbacks. Rossi’s rendering is one of the best known, but it is far from original. Paging though Dope Menace, you see this scene again and again. Who did it first? Gertz writes that this image “harkens back to French Le Belle Époque illustrator Eugene Grasset’s 1897 lithograph La Morphinomane.” Who knew? Dope Menace is full of information of this type.

Yet the interest of Dope Menace goes beyond a litany of interesting factoids. Gertz’s book makes clear just how important drug paperbacks are in providing “the richest, most direct record of American Pop Culture’s fascination, repulsion, fears, realities, perceptions, fantasies, paranoia, facts, hopes, follies and fallacies regarding psychoactive drugs during the beginning, rise and crest of what has been characterized as ‘America’s Second Drug Epidemic.’” These paperbacks were not just sources of sensationalism and misinformation. There was much factual reporting within all the hype. And some of this information was highly classified. For example, The Splintered Man, which has the first mention of LSD in a drug paperback, had in its storyline the broad outlines of the CIA’s Project MKULTRA (mind control experiments with LSD) down pat. Similarly, Burroughs’ Junkie is a valuable historical resource since it arguably provides the best, most accurate account of drug culture in the period during and after World War II that we have.  

Given drug paperbacks’ pervasiveness and their admittedly lurid appeal to baser appetites, it is no wonder the U.S Government sought to control them through legislation and censorship. There was a House Select Committee on the topic in 1952, just one year before Junkie was published. This scrutiny on paperbacks makes clear why Junkie was published dos-à-dos with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent. Yet moral guardians’ interest in drug paperbacks is not just about protecting children from and policing adults’ indulgence in drug pornography. Into the 1960s and beyond, authors of drug paperbacks increasingly had actual drug experience, so their accounts of drug use in some cases had a more factual, more authentic tone. Some drug literature of the 1960s ceased being cautionary tales about the danger of drugs and became celebratory manifestos of the wonders of drugs à la the philosophies of Timothy Leary. Such books questioned the company line on drugs and drug culture. Some writers, such as Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, spoke out on the hypocrisy and hysteria that surrounded the United States drug policy. As The Splintered Man and Junkie prove, drug paperbacks sometimes revealed truths that the powers that be wanted kept under wraps. This is another unspoken reason for the push for censorship and regulation of drug paperbacks as well as the governmental interference that surrounded Burroughs’ fiction from its drug paperback beginnings.

For some, Gertz’s essay will be like medicine with the reproduced cover art being the honey that makes it palatable. To mix metaphors, Gertz’s essay is the steak with the cover art providing the sizzle that sells copies. For fans of the Beat Generation, there is a whole section dedicated to the theme of drug crazed Beatniks and stoned jazzmen. Images of “Good Girl Art” and of plain old bad eggs, of raised skirts and bared breasts, of the down and dirty and the far out are the reason generations of readers bought drug paperbacks in the first place. They remain the major reason to buy Dope Menace. So enjoy the guilty pleasure of drug paperback cover art, but do not forget about the importance of the pages in between. As Gertz demonstrates, the text of drug paperbacks have, for good or bad, shaped and reflected the United States’ attitudes toward drugs for nearly century. So get a copy of Dope Menace. The cover art is amazing, and Gertz’s essay is essential reading and, besides, it is good for you.

by Oliver Harris

This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007.

I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured I am to be in present company. However, at the immediate risk of testing your hospitality, I want to read you a review of my latest publication — this new edition of The Yage Letters by William Burroughs — that begs the question as to whether it’s an honour I deserve.

“It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that Oliver Harris, a professor at a respectable British university, can devote his scholarly endeavour to the study of the life and works of William Burroughs, not as a case history of psychopathology, or as an example of how bad writing can sustain a large reputation among weak-minded intellectuals, but as if his literary output were worthy of serious consideration. A third of this volume is devoted to the professor’s minute and scholarly reconstruction of how The Yage Letters came to be published in its present form (we learn, for example, that one part of it was first published by the no doubt aptly named Fuck You Press), which is as if all the resources of biblical scholarship were utilized to explicate the provenance and deeper meaning of The Wind in the Willows. In an age of academic hyper-inflation, there is, it seems, no subject that does not find its scholar.”

(Antony Daniels, “All Bark, No Bite,” The New Criterion, November 2006, p. 77)

If this is funny, what exactly is the joke? Is it the reviewer’s blindness to the unarguable truth that William Burroughs is “worthy of serious consideration”? Or is it the assumption that textual scholarship is self-evidently the highest measure of taking a writer seriously, and so must be reserved for only those truly worthy of a place in the academy?

The question of status is a paradox. On the one hand, at this Symposium, William Burroughs is allowed to rub shoulders with the likes of Shakespeare, Malory, Jonson, and Jane Austen. On the other hand, within the Burroughs community, there is in fact a definite residue of ambivalence about bringing into such a respectable and venerable fold as textual studies a writer valued precisely for his status as an iconoclastic outsider, a black sheep in the literary flock. So, paradoxically, it’s some of his friends, as well as Burroughs’ enemies, who worry about the institutional respectability conferred by scholarly editing.

This paradox brings me to another, which is to do with that other key imprimatur of literary value — a place in the archive. Here, I’m thinking specifically of the acquisition, just over a year ago by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, of what is by far the largest and most important collection of Burroughs’ manuscripts, papers, and assorted material. The Berg’s acquisition would seem to contradict quite flatly the derisory tone of my reviewing nemesis, and of course, given the choice, I’m inclined to defer to the authority of the former. But the custodians of the archive exercise an interesting kind of authority, since it is necessarily driven by professional and economic self-interest. That’s to say, prestige in this context is always a conveniently two-way street.

For the housing of Burroughs’ archive in the Berg confers value on his literary worth, but at the same time the Berg claims an increase in its own value as a consequence. This at least is the opinion of Dr. Paul LeClerc, President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Public Library, who claimed that: “Burroughs’ archive is a fantastic addition to the Berg Collection and solidifies the New York Public Library’s position as the world’s leading center for the study of Beat literature”. And yet, in the very same press release, the Curator of the Berg, Isaac Gewirtz, hails the acquisition of Burroughs as a “fiercely sinister and corrosive” figure. Now, since he presumably doesn’t anticipate that Burroughs’ papers will corrode the other manuscripts he curates, there is an inescapable contradiction here in one of the guardians of the academy’s holy relics championing a toxic heretic — notorious not only for being a homosexual heroin addict who shot his wife playing a drunken game of William Tell, but also for making his books by cutting up his writing with a pair of scissors.

Unsurprisingly, my interest in the Berg’s acquisition of Burroughs’ papers is directly related to my past and, I hope, future, as a Burroughs scholar — and in the second half of this talk I am going to focus on the relationship between Burroughs’ manuscript history and the papers now held in the Berg. But before that I want to do two things: firstly, to sketch the outlines of a forthcoming project which is to explore what I call “the politics of the archive” — and, secondly, to return to the specifics of the Berg Collection by discussing the catalogue of Burroughs literary archive produced by the agent for its sale.

The politics of the archive sounds, and is meant to be, a very broad umbrella term, and it came to me when my thoughts began to shift from producing the next new edition to thinking about the very processes by which such editions become — or indeed do not become — possible in the first place.

So naturally, one of the key issues is ownership — the ways in which manuscript collections pass between various hands, from the author’s to agents to private collectors to those of university or public body curators.

Ownership in turn has clear implications for access — what constraints and limits are placed, whether by private collectors or institutions, under what conditions materials can be viewed, when and by whom. So access also includes the construction of collections, their housing, their cataloguing, and policies for managing the archive, whether local ones peculiar to a specific institution or those laid down by professional bodies.

Then there’s the issue of use — of what materials can be cited or published, and so on.

And finally, there are a whole series of issues related to how the constraints placed on access to and use of archival material impact on scholarship and, thereby, on a writer’s reception. This concerns not only the production of specific scholarly editions, but the interpretation of a writer’s entire literary history, which is necessarily determined by what texts are actually available at any given time. So the stakes are potentially very high for both those who house archives and those who want access to them.

And in this context, there arises what might be called a “diplomatics of the archive” — by which I mean the extreme tact with which we have to work — and speak about our work — in order to keep the archival doors open to us. Being even more necessary in print than in speech, this diplomacy entails, for example, the editing of the present paper for publication…

My sense — and here I am genuinely interested to hear from others — is that any scholar engaged in textual studies must be familiar with these issues, but that there’s been no broad study of the ways in which the archive operates. In the absence of such a study, it’s hard to contextualise one’s own experience, and I for one have no clear idea if the problems I’ve encountered are particular to me, or if the relationship between Burroughs’ archives and textual scholarship is not a special case but a commonplace.

Literary Status and Archival Ownership

Well, before turning to Burroughs’ textual history, I want to highlight two related issues arising from this — the sale catalogue of the Burroughs literary archive — a beautiful production put together and written by Ken Lopez, a noted rare book and manuscript dealer.

The two issues concern the relationship of literary status to archival ownership. As Lopez observes, up until twenty to thirty years ago the Beat writers — loosely including Burroughs — were “viewed with disdain by the literary and academic establishment”: “They were outsiders, and deliberately so, and the literary establishment returned the favor by treating them as such. As so often happens, private collectors became the repository for these works.” (Ken Lopez, William S. Burroughs Literary Archive, 2005, p. 6)

In recent years, all that has changed, however, and the archives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and now William Burroughs are, as Lopez notes, “among the most highly valued (in both dollar figures and sheer prestige)” by the very same academy that once shunned their work (19).

The other half of the story, which Lopez goes on to discuss, is the access — or rather, denial of access — during the time the Burroughs archive remained in private hands. In this case, since the archive was assembled in 1973, sold first to the Swiss-based dealer, Richard Aaron, and then in the early 1980s to an American owner, that means a thirty-three year period up until the sale last March. So that has been the situation for the whole of my professional life.

As Lopez puts it, “because the Burroughs archive has been in private hands all these years and not in a research institution, that access has been extremely limited. Various scholars have vilified Aaron and the others in print, labelling them as ‘uncooperative’. In reality, a private home is not a good place for conducting scholarly research [...] and these complaints have been essentially misguided, confusing an awareness of an archive with an innate right of access to it.” (6)

I’ve quoted Lopez at length to show two things going on at once. Most obviously, there’s this claim that us scholars, just because we want to put the materials to use, delude ourselves if we think we have any rights to access — the other side of which is that millionaire collectors have a perfect right to prevent access solely by virtue of their bank accounts. Reading between the lines, you might realize that what’s going on here is actually a coded defence of the then-owner of the Burroughs archive, whose sale Lopez was negotiating. Now, if this cat could talk, what tales he could tell — but, for reasons of professional self-interest, I simply can’t. This is what I mean by the diplomatics of the archive…

The second issue raised by Lopez is, in a material sense, the most intriguing and, quite possibly, unique to William Burroughs as a writer. He says:

“As rich as Burroughs’ novels are [...] they pale beside the archive, which is his actual work. As spinoffs or byproducts of that work, the books themselves seem almost desiccated in comparison to the main body of his work — this archive — like tree branches broken off of the main living, growing trunk.” (4)

Lopez could hardly up the ante any further: the archive not only as a vital secondary resource, a mother lode of raw materials that can be picked over to underpin the production of new texts and new understandings, but itself, as a totality, the Real Thing, the true creative product and therefore the true object of study and interpretation.

This is by no means snake oil or just sales talk, since Lopez bases his claim on a statement made by Burroughs that has been often quoted by his critics:

“In a sense,” Burroughs once said, “all my books are one book. It’s just a continuous book” (cited in Lopez, 3).

In claiming that the literary archive is this “one book,” Lopez builds on a central understanding about Burroughs’ working methods — namely, the constant overlap and interrelation of his manuscripts — that in turn accounts for the extraordinarily dense intertextuality of his writing. And equally important is the remarkable way in which, as a product of his working methods, the material history of Burroughs’ texts provides precise analogues for his central thematics.

Since this is the point I’m going to end on, I’ll briefly clarify what I mean. The most visible formal feature of Burroughs’ writing from Naked Lunch onwards is his version of a collage aesthetic, in which all the text’s units — whether narrative episodes or brief verbal fragments — coexist in dynamic and mobile juxtaposition. The result is a kind of haphazard montage that replaces the linear unities of realist, narrative temporality with a kaleidoscopic geography in which past and future, identities and places, dissolve and run together. To Burroughs, his texts were literally experiments in a kind of time travel and exploration of unmapped realities generated through textual recombinations.

If this striking formal feature embodies the central thematic of Burroughs’ writing — disrupting fixed and stable notions of reality — then both are determined by the way in which he embraced random factors to assemble his texts from manuscript fragments. Lopez’s claim for the archive plausibly identifies individual books as partial materializations of this larger ongoing project. As I say, I’ll come back to this idea in my conclusion.

“Definitive” Editions

Now, as a way into a brief account of my exploration of Burroughs’ early literary history, I want to pick up on another, related claim made by Lopez, concerning textual scholarship. Discussing Burroughs’ most famous novel, he writes:

“No one has seen the ‘definitive’ Naked Lunch — despite the recent publication of something called Naked Lunch: The Restored Text — because no one has had access to the complete Burroughs papers that were sealed over 30 years ago.” (3)

Putting these two claims together forms a natural bridge to my own work as a textual scholar, in which I have focused on the three novels that Burroughs wrote before Naked Lunch — a title that, for several years, he actually applied to this early trilogy. In what follows, I want to go into the broad outlines of the textual and publishing history of these three novels in order to think about both the “definitive” edition and its relation to the archive.

I begin with the term “definitive” in order to make a very simple point concerning the first and third of these early novels. The first of my re-edited editions had “definitive” in its subtitle — Junky: the Definitive Text of ‘Junk’ — while the second — The Yage Letters Redux — is trumpeted as such on the publisher’s web site. Since I was unhappy about Viking Penguin’s use of the term first time around, for the second book, I directly requested that it be avoided — especially since my introduction explicitly denied that “the re-edited text is now final and definitive”: “This is because the paradox true of all texts — that they are both fixed and flexible, defined in one form and context only to be redefined in another — is exactly what the historical record reveals so powerfully. Redux is part of that historical process, not its perfect conclusion” (xliv).

Needless to say, if you visit the web site of City Lights Books, you will find the “D” word is still up there today. And that’s because commercial publishers aren’t interested in editing theory; they’re interested in selling books. (Likewise, for their edition of Naked Lunch, Grauerholz and Miles were careful to avoid the term — although you might say that “restored” begs other questions — while the jacket blurb insisted on identifying the text as “the definitive version”.) The active agency of publishers is an important issue so far as William Burroughs is concerned, especially early on in his career — and is a story written in miniature in the very title of his first novel.

In 1950, he titled his manuscript “Junk”; in 1953 it was published as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict; in 1977 the “unexpurgated and complete” edition was published under the title Junky. Although the only title Burroughs ever wanted was the first — “Junk” — I lost the argument with Penguin’s marketing department, and the best I could do was to smuggle this into its subtitle. Unhappily, the “D” word rather undercut the point I wanted to make, which is why for The Yage Letters Redux, a text whose history is even more chequered and contingent, I laboured the point in the Editor’s Introduction.

My larger case is twofold. Firstly, that while Lopez’s claim about Burroughs’ “one book” oeuvre has some truth to it, on the one hand, it risks dehistoricizing his work, and on the other, the opposite is equally true — namely that each of Burroughs’ texts is radically plural, a cut-up of manuscripts, a composite of several distinct material histories, in which contingent factors, including the decisions of publishers, played a decisive role in determining content as well as title. And secondly, I want to argue for the importance of recognising this history because, as I’ve already suggested, it had a direct impact on both the thematics and methods of Burroughs’ writing.

The Textual History of Burroughs’ Early Novels

Now to clarify all this, I want to run through the manuscript and publishing history of this trilogy of short novels — whose re-editing I’m hoping to complete next year, now with the benefit of access to the Berg Collection.

To begin at the beginning, whereas the fact of Naked Lunch‘s complex genetic history is well known — albeit most often in the form of inaccurate myths — the first three novels Burroughs wrote have long been seen as straightforward, conventional autobiographical narratives.

Certainly, the compositional history seems to suggest a simple, linear sequence, as each text fictionalised a period of Burroughs’ recent experience one after another, during a four year period in which he lived in Mexico City:

The apparent tight linearity of this trilogy is, however, destabilized by the publication history, which scrambled the chronological order of its writing across four decades:

But there’s more to it than that, as we’ll see if we go through the manuscripts individually.

When it was published in 1953, Junkie looked, crudely, like this —

– where I’ve used dark blue to represent the narrative set in America, and purple for the narrative set in Mexico.

But the manuscript of “Junk” he finished in 1950 had almost none of this second narrative:

Since Burroughs scholars believed his original manuscript was lost, what happened wasn’t clear. My research established that this manuscript was in fact held at Columbia, while the missing material turned up among the Ginsberg papers at Stanford. Why it was added and where it came from tell us a good deal about the decisive part played by Burroughs’ publishers in determining the integrity of his texts.

For the reason Burroughs added a new final quarter to “Junk” — about 14,000 words, all set in Mexico — was because, in summer 1952, his publishers, Ace Books, told him to make it longer. And most of this material he cannibalized from the opening chapters of the new novel he had started writing, but which Ace did not want to publish, namely, Queer. Since this was written in the 3rd person, whereas “Junk” used the 1st, this required a good deal of rewriting but, since he was working to order and in haste, all sorts of small but significant contradictions crept in.

Although I was quite confident I had all I needed, to complete the editing of Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” properly required access to the only complete manuscript of “Queer” — but in 2003 that remained in private hands, so the new edition was published without it.

Now, if we turn to “Queer”: with its first two chapters removed to make up the last sections of Junkie, when a manuscript surfaced in 1984 — having been presumed lost for 30 years — its publishers, Viking, were faced with an even worse problem than Ace Books, since Burroughs never finished the manuscript and all that was left was a fragment too short to even call a novella. What to do? Well, same problem, same solution. So they raided an unused manuscript to make a new ending, which was duly added on for the publication of Queer in 1985 as an Epilogue. This, combined with a long Introduction Burroughs was required to write, added up to a full quarter of the whole book:

“Queer” (1952)

Queer (1985)

Even though this material is in the 1st person, not the 3rd, the new ending, entitled “Mexico City Return,” seemed to follow on perfectly from the end of “Queer”. Where that had Burroughs’ fictional alter-ego travelling from Mexico to South America, this has him travelling back from South America to Mexico. Since both are set in late summer, the gap in time between them seems a few weeks at most.

However, if we go back to the chronology of composition, there’s a striking parallel between summer 1951 and summer 1953. Sure enough, it turns out that the actual time gap was not two weeks but two years, because this material was written in 1953 to describe not Burroughs’ first trip to South America and back, but his second.

Which brings us to the next issue: where this epilogue came from. It turns out that it came from the third manuscript in Burroughs’ trilogy, “Yage,” which narrated his 1953 trip to South America. In fact, this was the ending of that original manuscript, but seems to have become separated from it when the rest of the manuscript was lost in the mid-’50s.

This in turn meant that, when “Yage” was published in 1963, the 1953 material was now so short it had to be combined with miscellaneous other letters and texts written in the 1960s.

“Yage” Ms. (1953)

The Yage Letters (1963)

Needless to say, as I was working on the new edition of The Yage Letters, I was aware that the Burroughs archive contained a manuscript that might possibly have been this long lost original from 1953. But, since access was not forthcoming — and couldn’t have been anticipated in the near future — the edition went ahead without it.

Now, to end with two final points. Firstly, back in late 1953, with Junkie published but no prospects for either “Queer” or “Yage,” Burroughs sketched in his notebook — due to be published later this year — a completely different arrangement of all the material he had written over the past two years. He thought of making a composite text out of six sections of material (including two short pieces which would have been written from scratch) that overlapped the end of Junky, all of “Queer,” and all of “Yage.”

Mexican Composite Manuscript

The result would have been to make one book based on Burroughs’ two journeys from Mexico to South America and back. If this had been published as the sequel to Junkie, then neither Queer nor The Yage Letters would have ever appeared.

But if this one book had come about, the result would have been a single, entirely coherent, linear narrative. It would therefore have contradicted the evolving thematic focus of these manuscripts and so undone Burroughs’ early steps towards his trademark collage aesthetic in which times, places, and identities escape their fixed location. The thematic direction of Burroughs’ writing at this point is summed up by his visionary, yagé-fuelled account of the “Composite City” that concluded “Yage” as published — a topographic fantasy space where “the unknown past and the emergent future meet” (Yage, 53) — and by the description of Mexico City that concluded Queer as published, in which the city is envisioned as “a terminal of space-time travel” (Queer, 131).

And this is why I think it’s hard to see Burroughs’ books as broken branches fallen from the tree of his archive.

For as actually published, Queer and The Yage Letters are radically composite works, each a mix of manuscripts put together only by a series of contingent histories: the end of Burroughs’ first novel had been lifted from the beginning of his second, while the ending of his second novel was taken from the end of his third, and of course since these cannibalizations took place over four decades and the novels were published out of sequence, the chronology of Burroughs’ potentially straightforward autobiographical narrative was, in effect, cut up.

The material contingencies of publication therefore modelled the very disruption of temporality that would inspire Burroughs to methodically cut up his manuscripts to make composite texts, and to speak of moving out of Time and into Space. He came to recognise this only in retrospect, at the time of assembling Naked Lunch — another haphazard, piecemeal composite production — but it confirmed the direction of his work, and his attitude towards publication, from then onwards.

Therefore, the one thing that the archive, as a work in itself, necessarily lacks, is the determining effect on Burroughs’ writing of the simple but material fact of publication. Hence the importance of representing, rather than repressing, the contingent manuscript histories of Burroughs’ novels through scholarly editions — always assuming that his literary output is indeed worthy of serious consideration…

New York: Ace Double Books D-15, published 1953 and bound with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent, attributed to William “Lee” as Burroughs used his mother’s maiden name so as not to discredit his family. Maynard & Miles A1a, in which they note that as many as 100,000 copies may have been printed. Certainly this title is not hard to find, but it was printed on poor quality paper and excellent copies carry a high price premium as they are scarce. It is particularly interesting that even for Burroughs’ first published work, there was concern by the publisher about the subject and contents which was only overcome by the inclusion of the Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent. This was a title originally published in 1941 and one assumes that acquiring the softcover rights was done cheaply since Narcotic Agent was apparently not a big seller. But legal and moral concerns about Burroughs’ writings would follow him well into the 1960s.

London: Digit Books 1957, Maynard & Miles A1b. One of the most difficult of all Burroughs books to locate, especially in collectible condition.

New York: Ace Star (K-202) 1964, first separate publication under the name Burroughs and first issue with price of 50¢. Somewhat lurid cover art shows a drug user (?) crouched and leaning against a wall. The publisher’s note was expanded for this edition, and a foreword by Carl Solomon added. Ace Books surely felt they were sitting on top of a goldmine as they trumpeted the blurb “By the Author of Naked Lunch” on the front cover. And they were right as a quarter million copies of this title were sold over the next decade. Maynard & Miles A1c.

_____ 1964, re-numbered (41841) reprint of the above with a 60¢ price, bound in wraps.

London: Olympia Press / New English Library 1966, bound in stiff olive-green wraps, one of 5,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A1d.

London: New English Library 1969, second British printing in wraps. Curiously, Maynard & Miles do not provide separate entries for the New English Library editions (all under A1c), ostensibly because the 1966 Olympia Press edition was distributed by New English Library. At any rate, both the 1969 and 1972 (see below) editions feature different artwork on the covers. Both had print runs of approximately 5,000 copies each.

New York: Ace Books 1972, new cover design, still rather lurid, with blue-jeaned addict nodding out on a doorstep.

London: New English Library 1972, third British printing in wraps.

London: Bruce and Watson 1973, first thus British printing and rare (for this title) in hardcover, with pictorial dust jacket, one of 1,500 copies. Maynard & Miles A1e.

New York: Penguin 1977, first printing in pictorial wraps. Includes material not found in the original Junkie. The first unexpurgated edition thus, and first to use Burroughs’ preferred spelling of the title with a ‘y.’ Introduction by Allen Ginsberg.

_____ later printing (25th printing ,1987?) in pictorial wraps with a different cover design.

London: Penguin-UK 1999, first thus British printing in newly decorated wraps.

London: Penguin 2002, new British edition with a new Introduction by Will Self, bound in wraps.

New York: Penguin USA 2003, so-called “50th Anniversary Edition” contains a new Introduction by Oliver Harris as well as Burroughs’ own unpublished Introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many “lost” passages and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others. Bound in wraps, no hardcover edition issued.

_____ Advance Uncorrected Proof copy, bound in wraps.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, has been dropped by Riverhead Books. (See the article on CNN.) The success and scandal surrounding the memoir immediately got me thinking about William Burroughs. Obviously, I am not alone. Erica Jong wrote an article in USA Today on the James Frey scandal mentioning William Burroughs. The most conspicuous blurb for the book references William Burroughs: “The most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs’ Junky.”

My first thought was that Junky was far more ambitious than A Million Little Pieces. It seemed to me that James Frey was content to merely tell a story, true or not. Even in his first novel, Burroughs sought to do much more than merely tell a drug tale. For too long, Junky has been treated as a straightforward, simple drug narrative. For me, Junky was Burroughs’ first attempt to empty out the Word. Junky challenges traditional ideas of the content of the novel in its blurring of fact and fiction and its subject matter. Burroughs parodies the literary history of the drug narrative, the hard-boiled detective novel, pulp fiction, and the academic journal. The Fiftieth Anniversary issue of the definitive Junky with its introduction as well as Oliver Harris’ William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination tell the complex story of Junky‘s creation and content.

As Burroughs’ literary career progressed, this interest in challenging the conventions of narrative heightened. Burroughs continued his blurring of fact and fiction in Queer. In the Yage Letters, Burroughs more radically experimented with the form of the novel by ransacking the novel’s origins with the epistolary format. By Naked Lunch, Burroughs completely exploded the novel in form and content. The cut up and the cut up novels attacked the novel at its most basic level by experimenting with the construction of the sentence, and in some cases, the individual word.

Increasingly, what was packaged as pulp fiction in the 1950′s is being revealed as avant garde by later critics. The seeds of Burroughs’ textual experiments of the 1960′s were planted in deceptively simple pages of Junky. Junky might read like a drug tale, but he had larger, more radical fish to fry.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Burroughs collector finds himself faced with several stoppers in his quest for a complete collection. Some items while not particularly rare are prohibitively expensive such as the Ace Junkie, Olympia Press Naked Lunch or the many beautifully constructed limited editions of Burroughs’ later collaborations like the Seven Deadly Sins. Then there are those items that are legendary rarities never seen on the modern literature market. The offprint of the “Letter from a Master Addict of Dangerous Drugs” is one example. Issue Number 24 of Floating Bear magazine is yet another.

Possibly the most notorious Burroughs rarity is the Digit edition of Junkie published in Great Britain in 1957. This rarer offspring of the Ace paperback of 1953 was the first separate printing of Junkie. Collectors of pulp fiction, drug literature, first novels, Beat literature, modern highspots and of course Burroughs collectors might seek this slim volume for a lifetime. The reason for this rarity proves quite interesting. Junkie was published in Britain in 1957 as one of many examples of drug store pulp popular in the 1950′s. Like its Ace predecessor, the wrappers of the Digit Junkie possessed lurid cover art depicting a man and a woman struggling over a syringe. But unlike the Ace Junkie which was published dos-à-dos with a novel by Maurice Helbrant about a narcotics agent, the rear wrapper of the Digit Junkie depicted a risqué picture of a woman raising her skirt and injecting heroin into her exposed thigh. As in the United States, British censorship authorities at the time were investigating and regulating the pornographic qualities of pulp fiction cover art. The rear wrapper of Junkie was just too graphic and British authorities demanded the book never hit the stands and in fact demanded that the entire print run be pulped. The result was a legendary collectible much like pulp counterpart Reform School Girl, or the previously discussed Dot recording of Jack Kerouac.

The Digit Junkie proves to be so rare that some collectors are willing to purchase it in almost any condition. Case in point is a copy that recently appeared on eBay. The text block of the book was completely detached from the wrappers. A few pages separated from the text block as well. Yet all the pages were present and the wrappers were fairly bright and clean. Generally, condition of this type would make the book completely undesirable even as a reading copy. This copy sold quite handsomely at roughly $2700 to a dealer who promptly sold it to a customer. The book comes to the market that rarely. Unless there are boxes of Digit Junkies wasting away in a warehouse waiting to be discovered, this book will continue to be the holy grail of Burroughs, pulp, drug culture collectors for years to come. The recent re-discovery and marketing of a Bill Graham warehouse of rock memorabilia proves that anything is possible.

How rare is it? The Zinnato collection possessed a beautiful copy. Zinnato attempted to sell his entire collection in 2002 or so through Dailey Rare Books. One of the booksellers who catalogued the collection stated that copies come on the market every ten years. In an article on the profitability of pulp fiction, the Guardian UK specifically pointed out the Digit Junkie as a true rarity. I have never seen a number associated with existing copies but recently I asked several dealers which were more unusual the British Journal of Addiction offprint at a rumored 50 copies or the Digit. All dealers agreed that the Digit was the trickier item to locate.

This assertion is somewhat proven by my experience. I have been diligently collecting Burroughs items since 1993. Believe me both items are rare and I can remember seeing the offprint once or twice in ten years in catalogs and at auction. I dimly recall a Digit at the Nelson Lyon sale in 1999 but no other. Granted I did not actively search for these items until the last 1-2 years for financial reasons. In the past two years or so, I have come across more Digits that offprints. BeatBooks in London offered at least two that I know of. Skyline Books sold a signed Digit (the only signed copy James Musser or myself had ever heard of). The eBay copy is another. The Offprint seemed harder to come by although a search on the internet reveals that two British booksellers have offered copies recently. In any case, the Digit Junkie is truly a find for any collector.

Price: The Guardian UK article claims that Junkie sells for as much as 7,000 pounds a copy unsigned. This seems sensationalistic. The general consensus agrees that $5,000 is the going rate for a suitable copy, i.e very good to very good plus with the usual fading and creasing to spine and wrappers. One dealer told me fine copies just don’t exist. A signed copy can range from $9000-$15,000. BeatBooks had a copy at 650 pounds in a recent catalog. That surely must have been a misprint.