By Dave Teeuwen

Graham Masterton is the amazingly prolific author of over a hundred horror and thriller novels, as well as self-help / how-to guides about sex. He has been publishing steadily since the mid-1970s. Earlier in his career, however, he was the editor for Mayfair magazine and later the editor of Penthouse and Penthouse Letters in England.

During this period he was able to develop what would become the Mayfair Academy articles with William Burroughs. The articles appeared monthly over a period of two years from October 1967 to November 1969. Some of Burroughs’ most precisely stated essays and stories, they were distributed to a much different audience than the one that had experienced his writing in smaller press journals and underground newspapers. Even though Burroughs appeared regularly in magazines such as Evergreen Review, which did have a large distribution, Mayfair introduced him to a readership who was probably not buying the magazine for the chance to read his work.

The Mayfair articles were not just a great forum for Burroughs to expound on any subject he liked; they were a steady paycheck. Given the nature of his work, money was generally short, and as Masterton points out, the Mayfair articles were two years of guaranteed income. Much like Jack Kerouac’s column in Escapade in the late 1950s, Burroughs was now given the headmaster’s position of his own academy, simultaneously writing much of the work that would become The Wild Boys, The Job and Exterminator!

The following interview helps fill in some areas that are currently missing from the official story about Burroughs’ work and his life in London.

As an intro to the first Academy Series piece, “The Future of Sex and Drugs”, there is a short interview between Burroughs and Ginsberg and the editors of Mayfair, of which you were one. Was this interview more of a device to introduce the Academy Series or was this actually how it happened? Was the series Burroughs’ idea or Mayfair‘s?

I had been corresponding with William when he was living in Tangiers. At that time I was a newspaper reporter in Crawley, West Sussex. By the time he came to London I had landed the job of deputy editor of Mayfair, which wasn’t as grand as it sounds, because the entire magazine was put out by the editor and me and Brian Fisk’s dog. I went to meet William when he moved into his top-floor apartment in Duke Street, St James’s, and after a couple of meetings I asked him if he had any articles or excerpts from his forthcoming novels which we could publish. He had long had the concept of an academy at which he could expound and discuss his ideas on government repression and big business and the future of social control, so I suggested that he write a series of articles which we would call The Burroughs Academy. So I suppose you can accurately say that we thought of the idea between us. The interview was absolutely as it happened, although edited of course to make it rather more comprehensible than it actually was.

Including a literary figure like William Burroughs in Mayfair would be considered an odd choice for most pornographic or men’s-magazine equivalents of today. What was the philosophical approach behind the magazine?

Within its very limited budget, Mayfair was modelled closely on Playboy, which had always used prestigious authors and artists to give the magazine a veneer of respectability. We used to call it “excuse material”… in other words, readers would justify purchasing Mayfair by saying that they only bought it for the articles… and, good gracious, I hardly noticed that it’s full of pictures of naked girls. Brian Fisk, the founder of Mayfair, liked the idea of a magazine that had the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club. It sounds very dated now, but in the mid-1960s there was a big resurgence in interest in Edwardian-style men’s fashion, as well as wine and cigars and all the trappings of luxury living which of course had been missing in the 1950s. This veneer of respectability meant that we were accepted by WH Smith wholesalers while Penthouse was not.

The Academy Series is some of Burroughs’ most realized, precisely stated work of the 1960s. How did audiences react to the articles over the two years he contributed them?

In actual fact we received very little reaction from the readership and I suspect that few of our hardcore readers actually bothered to read his articles… or, indeed, any of the features and stories that we published. Most of the letters we received were about glimpses of girls’ panties as they went upstairs in double-decker buses. Or the lack thereof. The rest of the letters we invented. But there is no doubt that word got around about the series and eventually it became a kind of secret classic for Burroughs aficionados. Much of it ended up in his novel The Wild Boys. These days you can read it on the internet, and I have seen some snarky comments about the rather simplistic introductions that I wrote for each article. But you have to remember that William was never easy to read and his thinking was way ahead of his time, so I make no apologies for having tried to explain to Mayfair‘s readers what he was saying. If I could get them to read even half a page before they turned over to ogle Millie (of My Boy Lollipop fame) with not much on, or even Shakira Baksh (now Lady Michael Caine) wearing only a pair of pantyhose, then I counted that as a success for the counter-culture.

How did pornography and/or men’s magazines fit into the counter-culture in those days?

There had been one or two avant-garde stories and articles in Playboy but in those days girlie magazines were not really perceived to be part of the counter-culture, if by that you mean the Beats and the hippie and the satirists of the time (such as Screw and Oz magazines and TW3 on television.) So when we included William’s Academy Series in Mayfair, it was really the first time that a sex-oriented consumer magazine had featured articles that seriously questioned the Establishment.

While the Mayfair pieces were pivotal pieces in Burroughs career, especially in terms of stating his views on the world, for some reason they do not figure very largely in any of the biographies of Burroughs. Why do you think that is?

Mayfair‘s circulation was not enormous and it was not published in the United States, so the Burroughs Academy did not reach a very wide audience at the time. I don’t think that many of William’s followers would have been natural Mayfair buyers, either. I think there is a certain literary snobbishness about it, too, from what I have seen from several biographies. Those biographers fail to realize how important the Mayfair articles were to William as a writer and a thinker, and how they also helped him to pay the rent.

The Academy Series in Mayfair introduced William Burroughs to a much different audience than before. How was his homosexuality viewed by this new audience, since he was writing for a decidedly heterosexual publication?

William’s homosexuality was never an issue either with me or the readers of Mayfair. I suppose if we had published the articles today we might have included more arguments about the status and treatment of homosexuals in society, but most of the articles were concerned with thought control and political issues.

The tenor of the Mayfair pieces is very different from the work Burroughs began doing once he moved to NYC later in the 1970s. Do you think it was just a symptom of the times that he was so focused on political issues / control in the late 1960s? Why do you think he moved on to the more reflective work we see in The Cities of the Red Night and the novels that followed?

William did not like London and he was deeply suspicious of the politics of the 1960s. Not only that, I think that when he was writing for Mayfair he was feeling not only culturally displaced but politically and socially and even physically claustrophobic (his apartment was very small and confining, with sloping ceilings because it was on the top floor.) I lost touch with him when he moved back to NYC, partly because I was now newly married with a child and partly because of the geographical distance and partly because times had radically changed. His work always had a sentimental / nostalgic element to it… “last boat whistling in the last harbor” … “dim faded far away” and I think when he returned to the United States he felt able to wallow in his historical interests like the Johnson family and the myths and legends of the Old West.

What was the main demographic for Mayfair? I’m assuming it was 18 – 45 year old men from all backgrounds, but did you find that there was a much wider audience than that?

I think the audience ranged from 16 to 96, and included any man who liked looking at girls with no clothes on.

What do you feel Burroughs’ views on pornography and the world of avante-garde art were?

William hated censorship of any kind. As a homosexual he obviously preferred the stimulus of gay pornography (although I never saw him look at any, and there was never any overt gay activity in his apartment while I was there, apart from Ian Sommerville bursting into tears because his boyfriend had left him). But William never expressed any adverse opinions about the pictures or sexual articles in Mayfair. As far as avant-garde art was concerned, he was right at the leading edge. He and the artist Brion Gysin were working on a way of turning words into art.

As a noted writer of manuals and self-help guides on sex, what is your opinion of Burroughs’ view that Christian attitudes towards sex were the main thing holding back Science at that time, as he expressed in the interview you did with him in Penthouse in 1972?

I believe that narrow-mindedness of all kinds was holding back sexual and scientific progress, not necessarily Christian repressiveness. William wrote about sex openly, which is why The Naked Lunch was considered to be obscene when it was first published, and one of the main themes of my sex manuals was that sex should be discussed openly, especially between sex partners. I even wrote a Christian sex manual Love Thy Lover, Love Thy God which was commissioned by the American inspirational publishing house Pillar Books, but never published (although to be fair they paid me for it.) In those days, people did not have the vocabulary, either in words or emotions, to talk openly about sex, or to explain to their partners what they wanted and what they didn’t want. Teaching people to be articulate about their sexual needs and anxieties is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

Do you feel that this is still true in the present day?

Less so, obviously, than in 1972. I like to think that the sex books I wrote were instrumental in helping society to be less repressed about sex. They certainly did so in Poland when they were first published there after the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989… I still get blushing Polish ladies coming up to me today to tell me that I taught them everything they know, but of course the great explosion in sexual communication came with the internet, when people could freely see images of sexual activities that excited them and aroused them, and could instantly and confidentially look up anything about which they were unsure.

You have said in interviews that Burroughs taught you to “pick up your typewriter and walk.” How did he influence you most as a writer?

He taught me most of all to live the story rather than write it… to be there as the action unfolds, and to forget about the sheet of paper in front of me (or the screen, these days.) William’s novels are full of smells and sounds and weather and all kinds of sensations that make the narrative feel real. I work very hard even now to make sure that I am El Hombre Invisible, the Invisible Man, and that once readers start one of my novels they forget that they are reading words on a page, and think that they are actually living the story. The other thing that always impressed me about William was his dialog, which is actually highly stylized but “sounds” when you read it as if it is how people really speak. He brings over an enormous amount of character in his dialog and I always try to do the same. In fact I work on my dialog relentlessly, rewriting it again and again until it hits exactly the right note.

In what ways is your early novel Rules of Duel influenced by Burroughs?

Rules of Duel is written in the style that William and Brion devised called “intersection writing”. This means that the writer follows factual coincidences and synonyms as if they are a kind of code. It is an entertainment more than a mystical way of expressing yourself. I also used William’s method of cutting up sentences so that they are more than a mystical kind of code. This means that William hits exactly the right note.

Could you summarize the method you used to write Rules of Duel and the overall story for those who have not been able to read it yet?

I wrote most of Rules of Duel in the evenings after work, but I would take pages around to William’s apartment for him to read and comment on. It is set in London in the late 1960s and the hero is a newspaper reporter who suspects that central government is trying to introduce some repressive plan to control everybody in the capital. When it was finished I showed it to Wolf Mankowitz the film director and he loved it, and (if you don’t mind me being big-headed) called it a “psychedelic masterpiece.” “Psychedelic” — how’s that for dating it? Unfortunately he thought that it was probably unfilmable. William used one or two sentences from Rules of Duel in Nova Express, and he also said that he had used some in The Ticket That Exploded but I have never been able to find any in that particular book of his.

How close would you say you and William became during his time in London? It sounds as if you saw him pretty regularly.

I suppose I went round to see him about two or three times a month. We would either have a meal in his apartment or else we would go out to a restaurant in Knightsbridge or Covent Garden, usually with other friends of his such as the film director Antony Balch and Allen Ginsberg and Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin. We talked about all kinds of stuff, some of it totally inconsequential, like how much he hated Jacques Tati movies because he couldn’t stand clumsiness and incompetence — some of it serious like the politics of mind control or Scientology (which was a great new interest of his at the time.) He had a dry, droning voice and the appearance of a bank manager from the mid-West, but he could be incredibly funny and irreverent and we had some really good evenings and days together.

I drove him and Antony Balch down to the Scientology Center at Saint Hill in East Grinstead so that he could have a snoop around. We adopted the names of William Lee and Graham Thomas, and Antony made an 8mm movie of our visit which he later intercut with old black-and-white movies. I don’t know who has a copy of this film now but I would love to see it again.

Somewhere I have a photograph taken by Antony that day but it was temporarily buried during my move to Ireland. William and I talked a lot about the whole Rules of Duel concept, which was to educate young people, help them to become literate — but, more than literate, to give them their own language which would not only give them more control of their own lives in an increasingly technological world, but free them from the baneful influence of politicians and old farts. In some ways, much of that has come to pass in the internet age.

I have a picture in my mind’s eye of the evening at Duke Street when Alex Trocchi came to visit and brought William a swordstick. Nobody who has seen movies and photographs of William looking less than animated can imagine what it was like to see him dancing around his apartment with this sword, swinging it dangerously from side to side and shouting, “Ho, there, you ruffians!”

You have said that you have been reading Gysin’s book The Process for the last 25 years. Burroughs also made a point of calling it one of his favorite books of all time. What is it about The Process that keeps you coming back to it?

The Process is magical. The writing is so visual and so tactile that sometimes I have to re-read a sentence twice to work out how it was done. It is far too druggy and plotless to read all the way through. The first two chapters are enough. To quote: “I joggle the miniature matchbox I hold in my hand and these masterpiece matches in here chuckle back what always has sounded to me like a word but a word which I cannot quite catch. It could be a rattling Arabic word but my grasp of Arabic is not all that good and no one, not even Hamid, will tell me what the matches say to the box.” Technically, “chuckle” is such a brilliant word to use for matches in a box. And there are dozens of passages like that.

What was it about Brion Gysin do you think so fascinated Burroughs? At one point he said that Gysin was the only man he ever really respected.

Brion was probably the laziest man in the world but he had abundant talent as a writer and an artist and he was prepared to consider anything to express how he felt. No conceptual boundaries.

How close were you with Brion Gysin?

Not very. I met him a few times and he signed his book for me, and we got on well. We had a hilarious evening at a restaurant full of Middle Eastern gentlemen when William got very drunk and started shouting that we should bomb the Ay-rabs. Brion and I had to remove him with apologies to our fellow diners and take him home.

Is there anything about Burroughs and his work that you think people, even fans, misunderstand?

Maybe this is apparent to other people, too, but William told me one evening that he felt as if he had never lived the life he was supposed to live, and that somehow he had ended up as an outsider on the edge of his own existence. This could well have been brought on by the displaced feeling he had when he was living in London, but throughout his work there is always an underlying sense of lives that never worked out… of opportunities missed or squandered. There is such strong nostalgia, too, even for places that he never visited. Overall, I think he felt that nobody else could see the world the way he saw it, or think the thoughts that he was capable of thinking, and sometimes I think that made him feel desperately detached. That is what Rules of Duel is all about, that feeling of alienation in London in the late 1960s, that feeling that officialdom is always watching you and out to get you. That’s why I thought it so appropriate to see it published today, when we are back to heavy-handed state control and surveillance.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

One of the great things about the Naked Lunch celebration in Paris was wondering whom you might bump into on any given day. At the Beat Hotel ceremony, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Roy Pennington and his brother Jim. Roy and I have been in and out of contact for quite a few years. I bought a small collection of My Own Mags from him on eBay. After I bought the mags, I found out that Roy was the publisher of Burroughs’ Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973 as listed in M&M) and the Urgency Press Rip-Off of Time (1972). This led to a correspondence that progressed in fits and starts.

Published in the early 1970s, these bootlegs strike me as precursors to what would become a burgeoning punk zine scene by 1974-1975. Of course, Burroughs was one of the Godfathers of Punk. Many people realize that Burroughs influenced the musicians, like Lou Reed, Blondie, and Television, but I think fewer people are aware that Burroughs was a major influence for the writers who covered punk and the editors who published punk fanzines. That said, these writers and editors were also inspired by the little magazines that featured Burroughs. Take a look at Punk or Search and Destroy. I see a lot of My Own Mag and Fuck You in them. Pennington’s publications, done in a true DIY spirit, provide a bridge from the mimeo scene of the 1960s to the punk zines of the mid-1970s.

Pennington’s two Burroughs publications very much invoke a particular time and place in Great Britain: the area of Brighton and Hove in the early 1970s. These two towns used to be “a haven for bookshops,” and an oasis of alternative culture in Britain. I have described elsewhere how a bookstore can serve as the center of a community and that was the case around Sussex University in Brighton. The two bookstores in question were Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop and John Kieffer and Richard Cupidi’s The Public House Bookshop. Pennington’s publications would not have been possible without both bookstores. I know bits and pieces about these two stores but a thread on Michael Nimmo’s blog A Haven for Bookshops really captures the spirit of the community that surrounded these two bookshops. Pennington’s books come out this heady atmosphere.

In talking to Roy in Paris, I asked him if I could publish a revised version of a letter to another book collector he sent me years ago that detailed the history surrounding the publication of The Mayfair Academy Series More or Less. He agreed and the edited letter is available on RealityStudio. Roy also allowed us to reprint his essay on Burroughs (“Some Disparate Mentionables“) that appeared in the Appendix to The Mayfair Academy Series. The essay captures the youthful enthusiasm that surrounded Burroughs’ work among university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Burroughs’ writing puzzled and astounded readers and thus inspired young admirers to become young publishers. This scenario occurred numerous times from the late 1950s to the present day.

Pennington’s publications are some of the more interesting and appealing A-items of Burroughs’ entire bibliography. The Mayfair Academy Series More or Less and The Urgency Press Rip-Off of Time highlight the fact that given the time and the inclination anybody can become a publisher. This is alternative publishing miles away from the mainstream press. It is rough, it is raw, and it is truly wonderful, inspiring stuff.

Letter from Roy Pennington on Mayfair Academy Series More or Less

Dear ____:

Here is the Mayfair Academy Series More or Less; because the original has coloured pages, the photocopy is not perfect. Also enclosed is a photo I took when I visited Burroughs in his flat in London [8 Duke St., St. James] in 1973 after I had done the “book.” This was the only time I had ever met him and we had a long talk. He interviewed me, really, asking “What do you young people want to read these days?” He was at the time doing The Job and not the later more “readable”, “narrative” stuff, e.g. The Dead Roads trilogy. Burroughs also asked, “Why do you say I am an arch-materialist?” I had rambled on about this in the little essay at the end of the Academy Series [republished here at RealityStudio]. But we did not get very far with this: I was petrified and bewildered to be there. I just wish, in retrospect, that I had gone through that rambling essay “Some Disparate Mentionables” with him, word by word. This was after all a by-product of an MA thesis I had just completed at Sussex University on self-referentiality. I think I offered Burroughs compensation for the bootleg, and the offer was declined. I cannot remember much more about the evening as he plied me with scotch.

Anyway, here is some background to the Academy Series:

I had just graduated from University and had some time on my hands (and some speed in my pocket). There was a local bookshop, which also did printing in Sussex called The Unicorn Bookshop, run by Bill Butler. Burroughs’ Ali’s Smile, published by Unicorn Bookshop, proved popular, and Butler encouraged me with my earlier Urgency Press Rip-off publications. My brother Jim of Aloes Press in London (who published The White Subway) also helped. I noticed the Mayfair magazine stuff, and I decided to collect them into one publication. Collecting the articles required going to the British Library and getting all the back copies of Mayfair and photocopying them. This proved a curious episode as I needed my philosophy tutor to provide a letter of introduction so I could access the magazines as they were kept in the restricted-access erotica archive. So I sat there, doing the “academic” research with this pile of skin-mags on the desk surrounded at the other tables by the slightly more erudite researchers.

I then typed the photocopied Burroughs Bulletins onto litho-plates. This explains the limited print run of 650 as the platen wore out. The press was located upstairs at 50 Gloucester Road, the address of Unicorn Bookshop. Mike Hughes, Butler’s partner, operated the machine, but I did the typing on an IBM Golf at a flat in Hove and took the stencils over to Bill in Brighton. After printing, I then collated the piles of pages in my flat with friends and got them stapled and trimmed back at Unicorn Bookshop. The coloured paper was a consequence of what stock Bill Butler had left lying around the store.

The illustrators were a couple of friends who etched (drew) directly onto the plates, plus my filling in spaces with the Mayan glyphs. I cannot remember where I copied the glyphs from other than a reference to Public House (on page 30), which was another bookshop run by Richard Cupidi who had previously worked with Butler and set up a rival bookshop specializing in Native American material. Glyphs were chosen because they are mentioned in some of the Bulletins.

On reflection, I think Richard Mahoney was too stoned to do any illustrations. I got another person to fill his space (p. 87). Personally I was worried about page 87 as it had little relevance to any of the Bulletins, and it represented a woman masturbating in a prison cell. These fears were not unfounded as Butler and Unicorn Press had obscenity issues with the authorities stemming from J.G. Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. Mahoney’s name remains in the Table of Contents since those off-set plates were completed (deletions are difficult) before he proved unable to complete his illustrations. Caroline did all the others (p. 9, 20, 96, 104). She was an artist / jeweller in the area who was living in the basement. She was annoyed with me when I added bits to her work.

The cover was just a collage of stuff cut out from Mayfair. For example, the photo of Burroughs on the cover was from Mayfair, and I think, was used for each Bulletin. The young man taking his knickers off must have come from another mag. There is not any publication date in the book, but the earliest version I have is from November 1972. Copies were 30p. Cheap, I tried to make up the difference by charging delivery to London, but was told off by Compendium Books.

Back copies of the original Mayfair magazines are actually still available on the used magazine / book market. I looked for them as I thought the Scientology bulletins were worth collecting together as I am not sure they have re-appeared subsequently in his books.

It’s been a pleasure to write this down, as it brings back fond memories of a time when I had the energy to get excited about language and literature and do something. I do not have that energy or excitement any more. It also caused me to re-read my own bit in the Mayfair Academy, which I found excruciatingly embarrassing and naïve in bits, but quite funny elsewhere. Incidentally, the last three lines on p. 103 come from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book La Prose du Monde. These lines are the opening sentence of that text, which I studied (and translated from French) for my Master’s degree in Phenomenology of Language. It is also embarrassing to see again how I misspelled Academy. Somewhere in my pile of rubbish, I have the delivery notes for all those who I sent copies to (mainly bookshops), but I cannot find it.

Roy Pennington

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cable: “What do you want in the next decade for world, not self”

Reply:

Chere Mademoiselle:

I am placed by you in the otherworldly, selfless and detached position of a losing better [sic] before and/or after the race. I have nothing to lose. I won’t be there for the finish. Safe in Not-Self, I firmly extol the virtues of every horse until starting time: High Metal (carrying a lot of weight): Conversion and Peace. Houses of flexible, translucent but decently opaque — in the right places — plastic, all hues, inflatable and deflatable, for the Pause That Refreshes, Helicopters and every kind of motor vehicle. Gadgets, contrivances in dazzling number and variety, all mute and odorless. Soft sidewalks, floors, steps. Stratosphere Purple has become a household word.

China Boy (good mud runner): Too little and too lately known, has developed a formidable boardinghouse reach with an Old China Hand. Is it fragile? Will it break? The Colonial Dames are invited to drink the bitter tea of General Yen. (Yen means opium need, or perhaps just plain need. Yen pox is opium ash taken with hot tea, if any) Will they accept? He shrugged and reached for his yen pox, and China Boy kicked his brains out at the first hurdle and re-regulated him to his Club Seat in Not-Self.

Bet my last Non-Self coupon on North Sea Bubble (unknown stable): Came from nowhere in the Stretch and crossed the Finish Line with a burst of silent fireworks. I could not hear the cheers. My ears stopped with dust, sealing wax, losing stratosphere tickets in Parimutuel Purple and other Not-Self debris, which swept across the track in a black wave of protest…

Photo Finish. Foul Claimed. The Judges’ Box is empty. Outraged spectators forced the winning horse to eat his jockey, establishing an ominous precedent, inviting carnivorous disaster into Green Pastures.  

Please Accept My Most Distinguished Sentiments.

Official in Absentia

William Seward Burroughs

p.s. The Sacred Geese are equipped with outboard marine motors.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Q: What is with all the men’s magazines?

A: Oh, I read them for the articles.

Really? In part. Take exhibit A: the July 1961 issue of Swank. For anybody interested in the textual history of Naked Lunch, this issue proves to be very interesting. Burroughs contributes “The Word,” “a first draft of a section of [Naked Lunch] and contains material that has never been published before — given to Swank by poet Allen Ginsberg.” In the introduction to the piece, John Fles, a former editor at Chicago Review during the Naked Lunch scandal in 1958, writes “The Word is the striptease the author does for you with the snake of language. The Word — this is just a thin slice of a 60pp unpub’d ms. — is the précis of all of Naked Lunch…” In fact, this piece of The Word manuscript appears in cannibalized form in the Atrophied Preface section of the Olympia Press and Grove Press Naked Lunch. The prefaces of the Grove and Olympia printings differ from each other and differ from this selection in Swank. In fact, this piece from Swank does not directly correspond with the version of “Word” that was published in Interzone.

In July of 1961, Naked Lunch had yet to be published by Grove. The book was, in certain circles, highly anticipated and expected at any moment. A note attached to Fles’ Introduction states that publication was expected in April or May of 1961. The book was not officially released until November 20, 1962, over a year later. One reason for the delay was the expected (and rightly so) obscenity trial following the novel’s publication. Barney Rosset and Grove Press were waiting until the time was right to defend the novel in the courts and the court of public opinion. The trials surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer set the stage. The potential obscenity trial surrounding Floating Bear 9 which published “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in June 1961 further put matters on hold. Every magazine appearance and review relating to Naked Lunch was potential material for the trial, so even this issue of Swank can be viewed as an exhibit for the defense of the novel.

This section of “The Word” coupled with Fles’ introduction stands alongside the more obvious “Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness” and “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” as a document that provides a statement of purpose for the seemingly immoral and inexplicable Naked Lunch. “The Word” is described as a “striptease” and a “précis.” It is an unveiling, a revealing of the mysteries of the novel. In it, Burroughs lays the text bare in his own trademark style. He shows his hand. I have written elsewhere about how the prospect of an obscenity trial dictated critical and readerly approaches to the novel that continue to be in force to this day. The peek into the flesh of Naked Lunch that Burroughs allows in Word becomes something of a complete revelation in the Deposition. Or does it? Elsewhere, I have also discussed how these statements of purpose are a drain on the power of the novel, and can be considered a con of sorts. Such ideas are by no means original to me or to critics, like Jennie Skerl or Robin Lydenberg, who made similar statements in William Burroughs: At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. There were concerns about the literary cost entailed in defending Naked Lunch back in the 1960s.

Take “Sigma Project No. 13,” the minutes from the inaugural meeting of John Calder’s Writers Night at Better Books in November 1964 that included Peter Brook, John Arden, and Adrian Mitchell discussing The Theatre and Its Future. This single mimeographed sheet was a supplement to the Moving Times, a rather nebulous newspaper / little magazine project of Burroughs’ that appeared in My Own Mag as well as in a broadside poster issued by the Sigma Project as Project No. 1. The minutes state, 

How much longer must we wait before it dawns on us that the world of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is far more real and even at its most phantasmagoric, more to the point than this blind, self-perpetuating, hysterical delusion we call modern civilization.

The fact that we can allow ourselves again and again to be sidetracked into “seriously” discussing whether Burroughs’ book is “obscene” or “art” or anything else underscores how deeply we are immersed in our delusion and just how widely we have missed the point he is making.

Our tactics for defending its publication must surely be relative to the nature of the resistance it engenders and, if they are to be effective, must break entirely with the terms in which that resistance in (sic) expressed. They must be an OUTFLANKING.

The time is NOW. The climate is changing. Let us indulge no longer in the kind of mutual masturbation that will allow the Times Cultural Consensate to show your benevolent faces (incolour) lined up behind Mr. Wesker’s record player as is pumps Bach’s 42nd concerto for Wind, Culture and Community down the coal-mines of the Provinces.

Calder published Naked Lunch in the United Kingdom in 1964 so a similar process of defense to Grove’s was in progress at the time of this meeting. Champions of Naked Lunch were offended by all the various stripteases surrounding Naked Lunch. Some things should be left to the imagination.

Clearly, the July 1961 issue of Swank proves of interest to those immersed in Burroughs on several levels. This issue advertised itself as “the search for sex in hipdom’s high society.” Here are articles on jazz (Charles Parker), blues (Billie Holiday), the French, modern art, and beatniks. Jonas Mekas, the critical voice of underground cinema, contributes an article entitled “The Honest Art of Hollywood.” Tuli Kupferberg, who later gained fame as a member of the Fugs, writes an article. Check out Tuli’s staple bound treasures from around 1961/1962, Yeah and Birth, if you get a chance. They are a sign of the times around the corner. Similarly, the gumbo of obsessions that boiled over later in the decade is present in this issue of Swank.

I mentioned in an earlier post that a collection of men’s magazines is an inexpensive way to collect the writers of the Beat Generation. As you can see from this issue of Swank, such a collection is very informative as well. The multifaceted role of sex in the avant-garde and counterculture is a field that has been turned over by scholars for years, but there is much left to uncover. Publishers, like Taschen, have issued multiple volumes on the history of men’s magazines, but for the most part these books reproduce images rather than study them. Stephen Gertz’s book, Dope Menace, provides a similar look into elements of sleaze in drugstore paperbacks. Yet his essay introducing the book is worth a close look as well and opens the door to future scholarly attention. Gertz’s book has gotten quite a bit of notice in the media. At last count, two dozen University libraries have purchased the book, and Gertz has been asked to lecture on the subject at the University level.

And then there are the photos. The recent death of Betty Page brings to the forefront that many images from men’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s have become iconic. Many people appreciate them as art. Many enjoy their comic elements, just as many others despise them. For better or worse, the men’s magazines of the post-WWII era are a major part of the story of not just the sexual revolution but the myriad other revolutions occurring after Hiroshima. As a brief scan of these magazine covers related to Kerouac and Burroughs reveals, much has changed in the presentation of sex since the 1950s and 1960s, but much has remained the same. The story of the sexual revolution is still in the act of being told. Whether you are telling a cautionary or celebratory tale, a close look at the photos and articles of men’s magazines are an essential part of the history.

William Burroughs in Swank

	“The Word” Swank (Front cover) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Introduction by John Fles) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 1) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 2) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

This list is by no means comprehensive, although I attempted to make it as complete as possible. I combed through Maynard & Miles and Eric Shoaf’s Checklist marking down all the men’s magazines with William Burroughs fiction, essays, or interviews. I took adult men’s magazines to be glossy magazines with a mixture of nude pictorials, fiction, and lifestyle articles. Basically, they are skin or porno mags; be it girlie or gay.

The key element to this list is the glossy Time / Life magazine format mixed with the nude photos. As a result, the Mayfair Academy Rip-off of 1973 did not make the list although this publication would be a nice addition to a Beat / men’s magazine collection and is a simple way to get a hold of the many Mayfair articles in one place. I did not include Olympia Magazine or the later issues of Evergreen Review (especially the issues of the late 1960s) which flirt with the men’s magazine format but remain literary magazines at heart. I also listed gay magazines (a men’s magazine from a different bent if you will), most notably Playgirl, to show the changing ways Burroughs’ image and works could be utilized. In some cases, I just was not sure if the magazine was in fact a glossy men’s magazine at all. I listed Suck, National Screw, and Blueboy, for example. National Screw started as a newspaper tabloid format like an underground sex paper, but morphed into a glossy after a couple of issues. I know little about Suck and Blueboy but they clearly are sex-oriented magazines and they tell an interesting story about Burroughs so I included them. Any additions to this list would be greatly appreciated as well as a brief write up describing its contents both Burroughs related and otherwise.

William Burroughs in Wildcat Adventures

	Excerpt from Junkie Man’s Wildcat Adventures (Front Cover) Volume 1, No. 1, pp 23-25, 47, 55-72. New York: June 1959 (35 cents)
	Excerpt from Junkie Man’s Wildcat Adventures (First Page of Burroughs Text) Volume 1, No. 1, pp 23-25, 47, 55-72. New York: June 1959 (35 cents)

William Burroughs in Swank

	“The Word” Swank (Front cover) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Introduction by John Fles) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 1) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 2) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

William Burroughs in Mayfair

	“Interview” and “The Future of Sex and Drugs” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 1) Mayfair Vol. 2, No. 10, pp 11-15. London: October 1967
	“The Engram Theory” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 2) Mayfair Vol. 2, No. 11, pp 28-31. London: November 1967
	“Where’s Our Killer Whistle?” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 3) Mayfair Vol. 2, No. 12, pp 54-56. London: December 1967
	“Scientology Revisited” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 4) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 1, pp 29-31. London: January 1968
	“The Last Broadcast” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 5) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 2, pp 28-29. London: February 1968
	“By Far The Most Efficient and Precise Language We Possess is the Common Cold” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 6) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 3, 54-56. London: March 1968
	“The Fire Breaks Out” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 7) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 4, pp 32-34. London: April 1968
	“In That Year of 1969, Astonished Motorists Were Hustled at Random into the Death Cells for Parking Offenses” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 8) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 5, pp 54-55. London: May 1968
	“Switch On and Be Your Own Hero” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 9) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 6, 52-54. London: June 1968
	“The Academy’s Ultimate Offer — Immunity to Death” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 10) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 7, 52-54. London: July 1968
	“Do You Remember Tomorrow?” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 11) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 8, pp. 28-29. London: August 1968
	“Oh God, Get Me Out of This!” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 12) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 32-34. London: September 1968
	“Wind Die You Die We Die” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 13) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 10, pp 52-53, 62. London: October 1968
	“Man, You Voted for a Goddam Ape” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 14) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 12, pp 52-54. London: December 1968
	“Rally Around the Secrets, Boys” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 15) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 1, pp 52-54. London: January 1969
	“Infiltration” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 16) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 2, pp 52-53. London: February 1969
	“The Brain Grinders” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 17) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 4, pp 32-34. London: April 1969
	“I’m Scared, I’m Scared, I’m Not” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 18) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 5, pp 52-54. London: May 1969
	“The Final Crusade of the Veteran Warriors” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 19) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 6, pp 52-54, 56, 58. London: June 1969
	“The Voracious Aliens” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 20) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 8, 32-34. London: August 1969
	“Days of Great Luxury Are Coming Back” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 21) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 9, 54-56. London: September 1969
	“My Challenge to Scientology” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 1. London: January 1970
	“The Transplant Apocalypse” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 32-33. London: February 1970
	“Without Your Name, Who Are You?” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 52-54. London: March 1970
	“And a Final Word From William Burroughs” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 36. London: June 1970
	“D.E. My Super Efficiency System” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 7, pp. 52-54. London: July 1970
	“Twilights Last Gleamings” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 12, pp 61-62. London: December 1970
	Mayfair Academy (More or Less) Urgency Press Rip Off, 1973 Contains ten of the Burroughs “Academy Bulletins” from Mayfair

William Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill in National Screw

	“Los Niños Locos” National Screw June 1977
	“Los Niños Locos” National Screw June 1977
	“Day Is Done” National Screw August 1977
	“Day Is Done” National Screw August 1977

William Burroughs in Various Men’s Mags

	“Prophet or Pornographer” Jaguar New York: January 1966. (Interview with Jaguar Staff)
	“Exterminator!” King pp 58-60. London: July 1966 (7s 6d)
	“O Say Can You See If Bently’s Who He Appears to Be?” Cavalier Vol 18, No. 12, pp 43, 57. New York: October 1968 (60 cents)
	“William Burroughs ‘I’ve Noticed a Regrettable Vagueness in Accounts of Hallucinogenic Drugs. In Time I Think These Just Lead to a Sort of Dreamland State” Penthouse Vol. 3, No. 7, pp 44,46, 52. New York: March 1972. (reprint of June 1971 Interview)
	“Face to Face with the Goat God” Oui 2, No. 8, pp 68, 92, 94. Chicago: August 1973

Jack Kerouac in Escapade and Mayfair

	Kerouac on our “bloody mad history” Escapade February 1960
	Kerouac on the Berlin Question Escapade April 1960
	Kerouac on Zen Escapade October 1960
	Kerouac on Jazz Escapade December 1960
	Kerouac on Cody and the Road Escapade April 1961
	Kerouac “In the Ring” Mayfair November 1968

More Burroughs in Men’s Mags

“Discussion Playboy Panel: The Drug Revolution”, Playboy Magazine, 17, No. 2, pp 53-74, 200-201. Chicago: February 1970 ($1.00)

“William Burroughs: Mind Engineer”, Penthouse, 6, No. 6, pp 37-40, 60. London: June 1971 (30p). (Interview with Graham Masterson and Andrew Rossabi)

“The Penny Arcade Peep Show / The Wild Boys Smile”, Suck, 5, pp 10, 15. Amsterdam: Summer 1971

“Blue Movie/Who Are These Boys?”, Suck, 6, pp 15-16. Amsterdam: 1971

“William Burroughs Takes a Look at Sex Films”, Suck, 6, p 15. Amsterdam: 1971

“First Meetings: One Dozen Memories from the Files of William Burroughs”, National Screw, April 1977. Taken from discussions with Victor Bockris

“Los Ninos Locos”, National Screw, Vol. 1, No. 7. June 1977. Part of Port of Saints

“Day is Done”, National Screw, August 1977. First issue as a glossy magazine

“My Life on Orgone Boxes”, Oui Magazine, October 1977

“The Health Officer”, Club Magazine, October 1977.

“Women: A Biological Mistake?”, Playgirl Magazine, March 1978.

“Dear Allen…Love Bill”, Blueboy, April 1978.

“Dinner with Andy and Bill”, Blueboy, October 1980. Interview with Warhol and Burroughs

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Continued from Part 1, Introduction to Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines.

From the 1950s to the late 1970s, William Burroughs supplied men’s magazines with fiction, essays, and interviews. The sheer number of pieces Burroughs provided to the skin trade is amazing. Burroughs first appeared in a men’s magazine in June 1959. I have written about Man’s Wildcat Adventures elsewhere and I do not want repeat myself. I do want to make clear that I consider this to be a very important publication for Burroughs and one that deserves much closer consideration. As the recent auction on eBay proves, other collectors agree. On one level, the magazine represents an early and rare Burroughs appearance in a fascinating setting. On another level, the magazine is collectible as a nice example of drug and sex exploitation. The illustrations accompanying the Junkie selection are highly prized by collectors of drug images. Like the Ace and Digit Junkies, Man’s Wildcat Adventures ranks with Reefer Madness in the 1930s or the various LSD exploitation movies, books, and posters of the 1960s. It should be noted that in June 1959, before the publication of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press, Burroughs is marketed by the publishing industry as a sensationalistic, pulp, exploitation writer. Despite the fact that Junkie was a serious, objective look at drug culture, the book and its author were not treated that way.

By 1961, Burroughs cut a much different figure in the publishing industry, including the men’s magazines. Burroughs’ breakout appearance occurred at the Edinburgh Writer’s Conference and the Grove Press Naked Lunch in 1962, but even before then, the little magazines and the small press had performed miracles. No longer perceived as a pulp writer, Burroughs was a member of the international avant garde. Burroughs’ appearance in Swank in July 1961 makes this clear. Like the little magazines, Swank ignores Junkie and publishes a piece from the Naked Lunch cycle of material. I do not own this issue of Swank, but I would guess that “The Word” represents a part of the just published Soft Machine. The myth surrounding Burroughs and Burroughs the experimental writer become the sensational and titillating commodity. Rumors abounded about Naked Lunch and Soft Machine then unavailable in the United States. The mere mention of his name suggested the forbidden, the criminal, the pornographic. Never mind that the fiction selected for publication in men’s mags rarely delivered the goods. Burroughs’ reputation as a drug addict, pornographer, murderer, trust-fund baby, avant garde writer provides the hook to the square reading public. The mystery surrounding Burroughs sold magazines even more than the writing. A 1966 interview in Jaguar entitled, “Prophet or Pornographer?,” underlines the hype that surrounded Burroughs.

Many people closely associated with Burroughs considered his cut-up experiments commercial suicide. Mainstream publishers did not know what to do with the writing and thought it unpublishable. Adult men’s magazines were no exception. When Burroughs returned to the United States in late 1964, Playboy commissioned him to write an article on his impressions of a return to his hometown. Burroughs wrote “St. Louis Return,” a piece full of nostalgia and the demented logic of cut-ups. Playboy rejected the piece. Paris Review published it in 1965 along with the first full-length interview with Burroughs in which he talks about the art of fiction. A selection of Burroughs’ manuscript was also printed. The publication in Paris Review testifies to the high literary quality of Burroughs’ work. Was it too much to consider Burroughs’ piece an early form of new journalism as practiced in the pages of Playboy by Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson throughout the 1960s and 1970s? Playboy thought so. The content was tame and lacked sex appeal; not to mention that the form utilized the textual and visual cut-up. Burroughs’ reputation hurt him here: “St. Louis Return” presented neither prophet nor pornographer, merely a literary experimenter.

I did not mention homosexual in my rap sheet on Burroughs. I wonder how Burroughs could be marketed as a pornographic fictioneer to the straight public when so much of his sexually explicit writing is gay in nature. In addition, what was a misogynist like Burroughs who was disgusted by and wary of women as sexual beings and objects doing in men’s magazines? I suspect that Burroughs’ fiction in these magazines tended not to emphasize the pornographic nature of his writing. I can not comment on the content of “The Word” in Swank, but in the July 1966 issue of King, the short story “Exterminator!” presents Burroughs in his most accessible writing style (no cut-ups) concentrating on a bit of his mythologized past: his job as an exterminator in the late 1930s. Again this highlights the fact that Burroughs the mythic, pop culture figure (representative of vanguard literature in the newly emerging underground) was highlighted over actually presenting the pornographic and experimental nature of his fiction. Unlike Bukowski, Burroughs did not provide sex stories, and the underground little magazines, like My Own Mag, remained the outlet for the cut-up.

The sexual aspect of Burroughs’ fiction tended to appear outside of the heterosexual men’s mag market. From what I can tell, Suck (edited by Bill Levy who also edited Insect Trust Gazette which published Burroughs’ cut-up experiments in the mid 1960s) explored all aspects of the new sexual freedoms as well as taking advantage of Amsterdam’s freedom of the press. Selections from The Wild Boys, Burroughs fantastic smash-up of the sexual, gay and youth revolutions, appear in Suck‘s pages. Burroughs also reviews sex films in an issue. Only after Stonewall in 1969 would gay sex go glossy, like Playboy. Not surprisingly, Burroughs’ sex life became a topic for readers. Burroughs’ most misogynist statements from The Job appear in the 1978 issue of Playgirl. In addition, Burroughs’ love life is featured Blueboy (also in 1978) when the magazine published a selection of Burroughs’ letters to Allen Ginsberg revealing a more vulnerable and intimate side of his personality.

As demonstrated by the rejection by Playboy and the selection by King, men’s magazines presented a watered-down version of Burroughs’ fictional content and style. Like Kerouac, Burroughs was better represented in his monthly columns, occasional articles, and interviews that appeared side by side with nude pictorials. From 1967-1973, Mayfair featured more than twenty pieces by Burroughs, most of them in the form of the “Burroughs Academy Bulletin.” Mayfair was the British equivalent of Playboy. These appearances overlapped with Burroughs’ stay in London. The regular column provided Burroughs with some much needed money, since by 1966 Burroughs made his living only on his writing. He no longer received a stipend from his parents. Mayfair provided Burroughs with a sounding board for his various obsessions, of which Scientology was a major one. Several of Burroughs’ Mayfair pieces deal with his in-depth examination of L. Ron Hubbard’s religion. In Mayfair and other magazines, Burroughs wrote on the 1960s political scene, Moroccan music, and drug hysteria. In 1973, the Mayfair articles were bootlegged as the Mayfair Academy Series More or Less by Urgency Press Rip-Off in a run of 650. Burroughs also planned a book called Academy 23 which would have included The Wild Boys and Mayfair material.

The adult magazines’ changing attitude towards drugs as well as Burroughs’ thoughts on drugs are particularly interesting. In 1959, Burroughs’ drug narrative was treated as an Amazing Story and pulp fodder. By 1970, Burroughs sat on a panel discussion on drugs in the pages of Playboy. The magazine treated Burroughs as an authority on drugs and drug culture. In addition, drugs were treated as a serious topic for discussion and a part of the fabric of modern society, not a shadowy and sensationalistic underworld.

In fact the packaging of Burroughs in men’s magazines highlights the changing perception of Burroughs by the literary community and the public at large. In essays, articles, and interviews, Burroughs was presented as an authority on religion, politics, drugs, and sex. In Mayfair, Penthouse, and Playboy, Burroughs was interviewed in depth on all these topics. While he clearly presented an outsider’s view, his thoughts were not demonized or downplayed. Burroughs had something of value to say to the hip, intelligent reader and it was not just shock value. Cultural elements that were considered a deviant, degraded underworld in the 1950s were by the 1960s and 1970s elements of a flourishing counterculture that threatened to become mainstream. As Burroughs’ presence on a legendary album cover, as well as in men’s magazines, proves, he morphed from a sinister, mysterious figure into a counterculture icon and a revered talking head.

It sounds like a joke, but in the case of the Beats, men’s magazines are collectible for the articles. The magazines are desirable for a host of other reasons as well. Magazines, like Man’s Wildcat Adventures, are collectible for their exploitative images of sex and drugs. Like Reefer Madness of the 1930s, these depictions are important pieces of cultural history. The advertisements for liquor, cigarettes, cars, and the other accessories of the good life detail the consumer culture of the post World War II era. Many of these images are collectible. Men’s magazines provide a unique view of the world through the lens of sex. Again ads and even want ads demonstrate changing sexual images. The fiction, interviews, panels and articles of these magazines all document the changing popular culture of the Western world. For example, a review of the pictorials of Man’s Wildcat Adventures and Escapade provides a look into the sexualized and idealized image of women just before the Pill and the revolutions of the 1960s. These pictorials tap into what was considered beautiful, sexy, trashy, dangerous, or refined by the American male at a particular time. Body image, body shape, and body hair all change over time. In some cases, particular models, like Bettie Page or Marilyn Monroe, become icons. Photographers become associated with a particular look or style; and there develops a cult following around their images. A review of Escapade, Swank and Mayfair records the sweeping changes of the Sexual Revolution, but the effect of all the various revolutions of the post World War II era are in evidence.

The Beats helped create the atmosphere that made men’s magazines publishable and popular on a larger scale. It could be argued that the proliferation of pornography (gay and straight; good and bad), as well as the rise of profanity into everyday conversation or the changing definitions of obscenity, can all be traced back to the trailblazing candor of the Beats. As a recent book called Queer Beats makes clear, the Beats in large part turned America on to sex and pushed it out into the open. It makes perfect sense that the Beats appear in men’s magazines, since they were the leading figures in most of the major cultural changes after 1945. A comprehensive collection of men’s magazines with Beat appearances documents this influence in an unusual and rather inexpensive way.

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In the last few weeks, eBay featured a couple of men’s magazines with William Burroughs appearances. A nice copy of Man’s Wildcat Adventures attracted several bidders and sold to a book dealer in California. Later, a copy of the little known British magazine King appeared on the market. On a whim, I picked up it for around $40 with shipping. Having never noticed the magazine before, I have no idea if this is a good price or not. But these two items reinforced an idea gestating for quite some time: men’s magazines with a Beat appearance would make an unusual and interesting collection.

By men’s magazines, I mean adult men’s magazines: the glossies fashioned in the style of Time / Life magazines featuring nude pictorials, lifestyle articles, essays, interviews, and fiction. Playboy remains the epitome of this genre; not GQ or Esquire. I will discuss adult periodicals all across the exploitative / explanatory spectrum. A handful of Beat and Beat-related authors graced the pages of these mags. The authors that immediately come to mind are Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs.

After the publication of On the Road thrust Kerouac in the spotlight, he became a heavily sought after and well-paid writer for hire. Not surprisingly given the sex, drugs and jazz elements of On the Road, men’s magazines, like Playboy, asked Kerouac to define the Beat Generation within their pages. Kerouac’s good looks did not hurt either. It was like James Dean and Marlon Brando could write. For the most part, Kerouac wrote non-fiction presenting his world view. Kerouac’s most sustained work in this area was with Escapade. Escapade was a high circulation competitor of Playboy that featured major authors like Nelson Algren and Ray Bradbury as well as articles on Hemingway and Salinger. From June 1959 to April 1960, Kerouac wrote a monthly column called “The Last Word” on a variety of topics like jazz, baseball, Zen, and the literary scene. Readers might expect Kerouac to chronicle the hot, racy underground culture he depicted in On the Road. He writes on the underground but not the world of the sexually hip. Instead, Kerouac’s jazz articles show him to be knowledgeable about the avant garde music scene. In a column on the literary scene, he champions the yet unpublished Naked Lunch as well as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Kerouac ends that piece calling for a revamping of the publishing industry and urging the growth of independent publishing. His writings on Zen are groundbreaking in addressing Eastern religion before it swept across the American consciousness. Yet, his eleven pieces (thirteen if you count an earlier piece in April 1959 and a much later rewrite of his first “Last Word” column in January 1967) also reveal the rather nostalgic and conservative side of Kerouac that fully emerged in the late 1960s. This side becomes most clear in his columns on baseball, world history, and politics. The Escapade pieces have been published in their entirety in the Good Blonde collection. The material collected in Good Blonde, of which Escapade plays a major part, is essential reading for anybody wanting to get a fuller understanding of the real nature of Jack Kerouac and not just the mythic figure. Tom Clark, author of a biography on Kerouac, wrote an essay entitled: “Kerouac’s Last Word: Jack Kerouac in Escapade.” It was printed in a small run of 500 copies by Water Row Press in 1986. I have not read Clark’s piece, but clearly, Kerouac’s essays and articles merit such treatment.

Charles Bukowski also enjoyed a long relationship with the adult publishing industry. I do not think Bukowski ever wrote a column for a men’s magazine, like his cult classic “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for Open City or his openly sexual column for The LA Free Press. Bukowski flourished in the underground papers in Los Angeles. In addition, I do not remember him often being interviewed or consulted on issues concerning the hip and oversexed, although he may have been interviewed by Hustler on the topic of sex. When I think of Bukowski and the men’s mags, I think of Buk’s short stories of the 1970s. Buk on the make both financially and sexually. Buk just about to make it big in the writing game. The Buk of Women, reading engagements, Love Is a Dog from Hell, and Linda King. As Bukowski’s cult fame grew, so did the line of women eager to get in between his dingy sheets. One product of this period was a steady stream of explicit short stories depicting his sexual fantasies and exploits. Buk had sex on the brain and the men’s magazines, like Adam, Fling, Hustler, and Screw, ate it up. For Bukowski, such writing was profitable (it helped supplement the checks from Black Sparrow Press), but generally it was not fun or easy. Like the porno writers for Olympia Press, this material was not Bukowski’s best work, and the work was in some cases poor and forced. Unlike Burroughs and Kerouac, Bukowski wrote for the harder porno mags of the time. And his material is of the type one would expect to see in a very explicit men’s mag. Howard Sounes in Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life writes of this period, “Bukowski commonly used extreme language to shock: women were ‘whores’ and intercourse was ‘rape’, pandering to his reader’s basest expectations.” In some cases, Bukowski’s work proved even too strange for the likes of Hustler. Like Kerouac, Bukowski’s writing for pornographic magazines has been overlooked. A closer look at these works provides interesting insights into role of sex, pornography and women in his fiction. If Women and Love Is a Dog from Hell are considered classics and enjoy critical scrutiny, then the underside of that coin deserves attention as well. Bukowski’s pornographic stories (both well and poorly written) bear re-reading by both critics and laymen.

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

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.