An In-Depth Account Drawing on Interviews, Correspondence, and Unpublished Documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Exchange of Letters

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

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

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

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

March 23, 1964
4 Calle Larachi Marshan
Tangier, Morocco

Dear Mr. Ballard:

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

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

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

Best Wishes
William Burroughs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dinner at Duke Street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The London Scene

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

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

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

“The great man. But what do I read?”

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

“So am I. Sally…”

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

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

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

The Atrocity Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

Endnotes

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

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

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

4. Rae.

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

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

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

8. Kadrey & Stefanac

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

10. Rae.

11. Times Literary Supplement, Nov 21, 1963.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29. Rae.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

38. Kadrey & Stefanac

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

40. Obit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

49. Obit.

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

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

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

53. Obit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

71. Rae.

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

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

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

75. Personal communication from Carl Weissner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

95. Rae.

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

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

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

by Michael Moorcock

A Review, Written under the Pseudonym “James Colvin,” of The Naked Lunch

Mary McCarthy has said of Burroughs and The Naked Lunch “This must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction — the others are entertainment… In him, as in Swift, there is a kind of soured Utopianism.” Although this suggests that she is not all that familiar with modern SF, she has a good point and Burroughs’ genius of course towers over the talents of the majority of our SF writers. Even those who object to his subject matter and literary innovations must admit that his ability to handle the English language is greater than any of his contemporaries.

Not since Joyce has there been a writer of such power and richness, and never before has there been purely imaginative writing of such wildness and intelligence. Burroughs is a satirist — his most obvious talents lie in this direction. More savage and puritanical than Swift or Eliot, more sweeping in his attacks, he is a cosmic satirist, taking a rise not only out of the human race but also out of Time and Space. He lets no one and nothing — physical or metaphysical — off lightly. Although often compared with Rabelais, he is much closer to Swift in that he lacks the magnanimity of Rabelais — there is no gentle fun in The Naked Lunch. If Swift wrote the first SF tale, then Burroughs has produced the ultimate one — choosing a wider selection of targets, dealing with them with a fierceness of attack, an intensity of vision, a mastery of language that inspires horror at a picture of life which is at once distorted and more truthful than anything else in literature.

The book covers such a wide range of subjects and ideas that it can be interpreted on dozens of different levels. JG Ballard sees Burroughs as fashioning from “our dreams and nightmares the first authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen. His novels are the terminal documents of the mid-twentieth century, scabrous, scarifying, a progress report from an inmate in the cosmic madhouse” (New Worlds 142). On the other hand Irving Wardle (The Observer, 22nd November, 1964) thinks that “the essence of the book is in its record of the addict’s life — the daily pursuit of dope, the voluptuously savoured moment of the fix, and the apocalyptic fantasies it releases for which Burroughs draws on a large medical vocabulary as a brilliant extension of emotional language.” Anthony Burgess does not agree — “Burroughs is demonstrating that his difficult subject can only be expressed through the static (that is neither didactic nor pornographic) shaping of the imagination” (The Guardian, 20th November, 1964) — and so on and so on. Those who admire Burroughs cannot always agree on why they like him — he has so much to offer that The Naked Lunch can be read many times before all its levels and implications become clear. This is partially its appeal for me — to know that I can enjoy it once, begin it again immediately I have finished it and find more to enjoy.

The reader who likes a book with a “beginning, a middle and an end” need not be in the least alarmed by The Naked Lunch. I am much more inclined towards the conventional novel myself. I certainly do not welcome novelty for novelty’s sake, nor obscenity for obscenity’s sake — I find most of the fiction produced under the label of “beat” and “avant-garde” boring and pretentious, disguising bad, undisciplined writing under a superficial cloak of equally bad and undisciplined “experimental” styles. Just as the Buck Rogers brigade of SF writers bring SF into disrepute, so do these so-called experimental writers bring the handful of genuine innovators into disrepute. The simple fact with Burroughs is that he can write. He can write better than anyone else at work today. He has an ear for dialogue, an eye for reality, an ability to conjure up phantasmagoric visions that immediately capture the imagination, a powerful, uncompromising style that rips away our comforting delusions and displays the warts and the sores that can fester in the human mind. Not a pleasant vision at first, yet we are soon captured by Burroughs’s deadpan style which aids us to look upon the horrors without revulsion, and take, instead, a cool, objective look at perversion in all its states and forms — mental, physical and spiritual.

Burroughs’s Black Utopias are more horrifying, more relevant and more convincing than any that have appeared to date in SF. His State of Interzone, dominated by the coolly grotesque figure of Doctor “Cancer is my first love” Benway makes the worlds of Huxley and Orwell seem like paradise in comparison. Its nearest equivalent is the world of [Bernard Wolfe's] Limbo ’90.

Dr Benway had been called in as an advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic façade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been TD — Total Demoralisation. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstance, the use of torture.

“I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skilfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realise that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”

Annexia is somewhat like the world of The Trial — though Burroughs tends to be rather more explicit and specific than ever Kafka was.

Interzone is not only a State, it is a state of time and mind:

Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St Louis Toodleoo … at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street … The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian — races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realised pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of the body) across the Pacific in outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.

Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle … A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games. Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time. The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the tooth-pick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-coloured faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunken heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm … High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes … The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun … People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes.

Other inhabitants of Interzone are “servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states…”, etc., etc. These descriptions of Interzone are amongst the most powerful in the book.

Benway’s sidekick is Dr Schafer “The Lobotomy Kid”:

SCHAFER: “I tell you I can’t escape a feeling… well, of evil about this.”

BENWAY: “Balderdash, my boy… We’re scientists… Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries, ‘Hold, too much!’ Such people are no better than party poops.”

In The Naked Lunch we have left for ever the mythological worlds of Winston Churchill, Mickey Mouse and Ernest Hemingway, have gone past the worlds of the Beatles and James Bond, and have entered the world of the present, seen as indication of Things To Come for, whereas most SF is speculation, The Naked Lunch is visionary — and this contributes to its fascination. Anyone attracted to SF by its more serious elements will find The Naked Lunch rewarding. The novel costs 42s and is published by John Calder.

by Michael Moorcock

An Editorial for the First Moorcock-Edited Issue of New Worlds (1964)

In a recent BBC broadcast, William Burroughs, controversial American author of Dead Fingers Talk, said something like this: “If writers are to describe the advanced techniques of the Space Age, they must invent writing techniques equally as advanced in order properly to deal with them.”

Burroughs’ own writing techniques are as exciting — and as relevant to our present situation — as the latest discovery in nuclear physics. His techniques are science fiction in themselves, and many of the subjects which he treats, the terms and images that he uses, are immediately familiar to the SF reader. His anti-Utopian states where citizens are controlled by fantastic brain-washing methods, his references to Terminal Police, the City of Interzone, Ministry of Mental Hygiene, etc., the last lines of The Ticket that Exploded (Olympia Press): “Mountain wind of Saturn in the morning sky — From the death trauma weary goodbye then,” the title of his forthcoming book, Nova Express, all give some idea of his work’s affinity with the SF of such varied writers as George Orwell, AE van Vogt and JG Ballard. And in a sense his work is the SF we’ve all been waiting for — it is highly readable, combines satire with splendid imagery, discusses the philosophy of science, has insight into human experience, uses advanced and effective literary techniques, and so on.

Many who have been crying out for a novel which combines all this won’t accept Burroughs. They are disturbed, maybe, by his description of sexual aberration and drug addiction, the frequent use of obscenities in the text, are not prepared to read his books from a different viewpoint than that from which they read most other fiction. He is condemned for being obscure.

Burroughs has often stated that it is the job of the writer not to be obscure and, indeed, he is rarely obscure; his work abounds with explicit notes which tell the reader exactly what he is doing and why. Apart from this, his comic writing is equalled only by Joseph Heller’s in Catch-22. His images are stimulating and thought-provoking. The desperate and cynical mood of his work mirrors exactly the mood of our ad-saturated, Bomb-dominated, power-corrupted times.

If you like, he is the first SF writer to explore all the form’s potentialities and develop a new mythology — a new literature for the Space Age. Certain British writers are going in the same direction, producing a kind of SF which is unconventional in every sense and which must soon be recognised as an important revitalisation of the literary mainstream. More and more people are turning away from the fast-stagnating pool of the conventional novel — and they are turning to science fiction (or speculative fantasy). This is a sign, among others, that a popular literary renaissance is around the corner. Together, we can accelerate that renaissance.

This is not to say that we don’t appreciate the entertainment value of SF — you’ll find, we hope, a great many entertaining ideas and stories in this and future issues. The SF reader is an intelligent reader, dissatisfied, perhaps, with other forms of literary entertainment, who looks to SF for something more relevant to his own life and times. Also he wants variety of ideas, style, mood and plot. We intend to keep the contents of New Worlds both varied and stimulating.

John Carnell, who edited New Worlds and Science Fantasy since their start, is a man who has done most for British SF since the War. He has been responsible for discovering and encouraging many of our most popular modern SF writers. He is a man whom many people, including myself, respect and admire. Of late, the demands on his time have been almost overwhelming and it was with great regret that he decided his other commitments in the field would not allow him to continue as editor. I wish him the very best of success with his new ventures, and look forward to seeing the first issue of New Writing in SF which he is now editing.

“To Write For the Space Age”

Interview with Michael Moorcock by Mark P. Williams

Michael Moorcock (1939-) has always been a politically and culturally engaged writer who has been generous in his support of authors from several generations, from diverse backgrounds and with quite different interests including close associations with J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Andrea Dworkin. Moorcock is a highly prolific novelist, with over a hundred novels and edited collections to his name; as his friend and fellow Londoner Angela Carter puts it, Moorcock “can gleefully give you all the formulae for every kind of story there ever was, because he’s tried and tested all of them” (introduction to Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle, Colin Greenland, 1991).

In the mid-sixties it was, in the words of Colin Greenland, “Michael Moorcock and the writers he gathered about him [who] were [most] conscious, even self-conscious about science fiction, its symbolism, its immediacy, its responsibilities, and above all its possibilities” (The Entropy Exhibition, 1983). Between 1964 and 1971 Moorcock edited New Worlds SF Magazine and continued to be involved in the later New Worlds quarterly format and anthology collections. In addition to genre fiction he has produced a number of state-of-the-nation novels, most notably Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000), as well as an historical epic sequence set between the first and second world wars dealing with conflict, social upheaval and the Holocaust: Byzantium Endures (1981), The Laughter of Carthage (1984), Jerusalem Commands (1992) and The Vengeance of Rome (2006). He has also written reviews and political commentary for a variety of publications including The Guardian newspaper, The Spectator magazine and The Index on Censorship. While, as an example of Moorcock’s political and cultural thought in the Thatcher-Reagan years, his polemical essay The Retreat From Liberty (1983, Zomba Books) gives an impression of the era from a firmly egalitarian perspective which still offers useful insights for charting the political path of left and right in British politics for those considering our current political climate.

For Moorcock creative boundaries have always existed primarily to be negotiated, breached and redefined fluidly, and more than other writers of his generation Moorcock has crossed and re-crossed the constructed boundaries of published fiction. One of the key voices by which Moorcock defined his intention to bring new meaning to literature through both generic and avant-garde modes of writing was the distinctively ironic one of William S. Burroughs. The following interview, conducted by email, gives some indication of the breadth of his cultural interactions and shows why he is such an instrumental figure for a number of contemporary British writers. In it he responds in some depth regarding the interactions of his own ideas with those of William Burroughs and the quite different impressions and impacts that promoting Burroughs work in the UK had from his observations of others and that of himself and his friends such as Barrington J. Bayley and J.G. Ballard.

Encountering Burroughs

Mark P. Williams: What was the first Burroughs text you read? What was happening around you at the time? What was your immediate response to the writing in terms of its styles and themes?

Michael Moorcock: To be honest, I don’t remember too clearly. I assume I was in Paris because it was the Olympia Press edition of The Naked Lunch, almost certainly. I know I was very frustrated with modern fiction and genre fiction and was looking for a kind of fiction which somehow related to my own life and experience. Certainly, the Beats didn’t do that for me any more than Waugh. I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.

I suspect that when I got to Paris I was more than ready for a dose of Burroughs. No doubt that’s where I picked up NL, shortly after it was published. Breath of fresh air. It was joyous absurdism which somehow spoke directly to me. A tremendous high. I couldn’t have been happier to have found it, even though I was pretty out of it by then and wound up being picked up by the cops in the Tuilleries and taken to the British Consulate, who put me, for some reason, in the bridal suite of the Madeleine (still not having given me anything to eat — I got my first meal, a hot dog, bought for me by someone I met on the boat home — and promptly threw it up, I’d not eaten for so long!). I must have picked up the book at George Whitman’s shop, which in those days was called Le Mistral and which is now called Shakespeare and Co, after George bought some of Beach’s lending library. As I recall George took a few books off me — no doubt those I’d read on, as it were, the road — in exchange. I came back to London full of enthusiasm. It was an inspiration. I didn’t hope to write like Burroughs, but his writing somehow confirmed what I’d been trying to do.

MPW: Both your writing and Burroughs at this time would fall under what Jeff Nuttall described as “Bomb culture” (Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968), a peculiar reaction to the uncertainties and contradictions revealed in the post-1945 era, which he identifies particularly with the atom bomb.

How much do you feel that the specific cultural circumstances of the mid-to-late-1960s, particularly in the Ladbroke Grove area, are reflected in the appeal of what Mary McCarthy calls Burroughs’ novel of “statelessness?”

Moorcock: Jeff was a bit older than me. I didn’t react much to the bomb. I wasn’t scared of it, maybe saw it as a useful symbol (see my editorial in the New Worlds which carried Behold the Man) and though I sort of went along with friends in the Ban the Bomb movement, I knew it wouldn’t be banned and rather relished the idea of it. I did see it as a way of keeping the peace. I shared this view with Ballard and Barry [Barrington] Bayley, the two writer friends I saw regularly and with whom I had most in common. Ballard had been liberated by the Bomb, as had [Brian W.] Aldiss, another friend. Ballard from the Japanese civilian camp and Aldiss from having to begin the invasion of Japan. I think I was born a little too late to worry. I had enjoyed the excitement of the V-bombs, the majority of which fell in SW London, where I lived, and had always felt slightly let down by peacetime. Few of my close friends gave much of a crap about the bomb. We understood sensibilities had changed and that we needed a new kind of fiction to deal with it, but we didn’t lose much sleep except, maybe, during the Cuban crisis. But even there our attitude was sort of elevated. I was more focussed on discovering a new kind of urban fiction.

I like the notion of the “stateless” novel and indeed you could argue I was looking for a form like that. Cornelius certainly reflects that. A novel which looked for a new form of identity? McCarthy was arguing from a more academic, conventional point of view. I was more practical, I think, in that I was trying to reclaim the “literary” novel for a general public, through sf. Burroughs, Bayley and Ballard all had an interest in taking certain ideas from sf for their own uses, as I did. So we were trying to marry popular and, if you like, elitist art, in much the way Michael Chabon and his Bay Area friends are trying to do today. I did assume Burroughs to be a writer with an audience amongst sf readers, for instance. It turned out that the sf audience, like the audiences for any genre fiction (including the middle-brow “modern” or even “modernist” novel) is deeply conservative and pretty much addicted to generic conventions. Repetition is what it needs, not innovation.

I was generally disappointed by what was offered as literary experiment (by the likes of B.S. Johnson for instance) which just seemed like the mixture as before presented in modified forms. Few were working on finding new forms for the novel. Apart from what we were doing in New Worlds (that is, Ballard’s “condensed novels,” Bayley’s weird notions) I didn’t see much which tried to match Burroughs. We looked back a bit to [Boris] Vian, [Alfred] Jarry, [Ronald] Firbank and a few other absurdists, but found little other than Burroughs in fiction to inspire us. The counter-culture frequently seemed a bit of a wank — a lot of middle class boys being allowed to say fuck a lot. Little sense of attacking the infrastructure and re-inventing it. Although we shared printing facilities, sometimes even editorial staff, with the likes of Oz and IT, we found most of the stuff a bit naive and even irritating.

Contrary to the general impression, few of us used drugs for inspiration and while I had a lot in common as far as music and lifestyle were concerned, most of the others didn’t. I was of my time. I had grown up playing blues, being in early R&B bands, getting into what are now called “prog-rock” bands, reading a bit of sf, so I had that in common, too, but most of what I did was pragmatic “experiment.” There wasn’t a lot of theory discussed. Ballard was a little warier of attacking the literary establishment, though privately he had nothing but contempt for the work it was producing. He was more willing to hang out with the likes of Kingsley Amis and Co and more of their age and class, while I was happy to plunge into the counter-culture lifestyle, work for the magazines, take part in the odd demo and so on, but the rhetoric often got up my nose, I have to say. Burroughs had much the same attitude to mine and in some ways we had more in common, though he really enjoyed meeting Arthur C. Clarke when I introduced them!

Circles and Waves

MPW: How well did you know Jeff Nuttall? Did you encounter his My Own Mag –which he describes as being designed to “counteract the optimistic refusal of unpleasantness” through “nausea and flagrant scatology as a violent means of presentation” (p. 151, Bomb Culture)?

Nuttall was on the mailing list of Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma documents; did you encounter these avant-gardist texts yourself? Was it just a question of your being around the same loosely affiliated groups of people such as the bookstores Better Books or Indica or Unicorn?

Moorcock: Knew them all, but thought most were bullshit artists. That’s the truth of it, though I liked Jeff. Got My Own Mag regularly. Supported some of the “alternative” stuff but I was using girly mags like Golden Nugget to promote Burroughs and others in the “real” world, as I saw it. Rather irritated by the likes of MOM.

Too much theory, not enough practice for us. We tended to produce fiction and sometimes poetry or even non-fiction and see how it ran. Theory followed, if at all. We were nearly all working writers — Ballard, myself, [Langdon] Jones, [Barrington] Bayley and so on — and weren’t too easy around grants and academies. Just how it was. I did get all that stuff but passed it on to others mostly. Lot more beer involved with Jeff than suited me.

We were puritanical snobs for the most part. Trocchi, like Heathcote Williams, was tiresome personally. They tended to cultivate us I suspect because we represented a wider public they wanted to reach.

I wasn’t at that Edinburgh conference [the 1962 International Writers' Conference, at which Burroughs spoke and because of which Burroughs was made famous]. I was probably still writing comics then.

I avoided them for the most part, just as I refused offers to teach and so on. I felt there was only one way to teach — by example or through publication. It was important to us that New Worlds had regular newsstand distribution. Apart from Ballard getting involved with Ambit, after his failure to edit Science Fantasy (!), we didn’t have that much to do with the lit mags. [Thomas] Disch was more eager to appear in Transatlantic or Paris Review, but I was never attracted in that direction. Did stuff for Ambit only because Jimmy [Ballard] asked me to.

Going to Meet the Man

MPW: Where did your views of 1960s culture and counterculture gel most with and/or differ from those of Burroughs on a personal level?

Moorcock: I don’t think we had much in the way of differences. He, like us, was interested in taking conventions and ideas of sf and making them work in modern fiction. We saw sf as a way of making contemporary fiction better able to confront contemporary issues. We were happy to interact with the counter culture, but were not wholly of it, if that makes sense. Burroughs, Ballard, Bayley and self all had our own agendas as writers. We didn’t see ourselves as part of a movement. We were trying to make our own stuff work. Absurdism was part of that, of course. We were generally a bit older than most of the guys doing IT, FRENDZ and so on. These people were mostly enthusiasts, publicists, journalists. We were almost equally inspired by Borges, in looking for ways of addressing literary problems. Magic realism became another method or group of methods, of course. But my Cornelius books had only certain fundamentals in common with Ballard’s “condensed novels” or Burroughs’s cut-ups.

MPW: Burroughs must’ve had something of a complex image already built up in your mind when you met him. How did you find him? And what are the circumstances of your introducing Burroughs to Arthur C. Clarke? It certainly sounds like a potentially formidable meeting.

Moorcock: I met Burroughs through John Calder, I think. Bill was a bit formal. I was a little disappointed, to be honest, because Bill was more laid back than I was at the time, being very engaged with confronting the world, whereas he was more detached and amused by it. I already knew Arthur since I was a kid. We’d always got on well. (See my memoir of Arthur in The Guardian).

How I introduced them was simple. I was persuaded to hold a party at which Judy Merril could meet some of the people she was enthusiastic about. So I did. Arthur and Bill came to the party — there were, of course, a lot of other writers and artists etc. there — and I introduced them.

Making Waves: Into New Worlds

 
MPW: You have mentioned practice as the most important impulse behind the innovations of the 1960s — yours and those of your contemporaries – was this how you promoted Burroughs at the time, as an experimental practitioner?

Moorcock: As someone showing the way, yes.

MPW: There were strongly worded debates between the writers and the modes of more experimental writing you included in New Worlds and some members of the established audience. They seem to boil down to the question of artistic value (or of the values promoted through art). You have described to Colin Greenland (ICA Guardian Conversations) how you felt at the time that a significant part of this audience had a fundamentally conservative attitude: was a writer like Burroughs a help or a hindrance in effecting a positive change in attitude? Or did it signal a change of audience?

Moorcock: Genre audiences are always conservative — including the audience for the modern literary genre exemplified by the likes of Ian McEwan and the average Booker [Prize] contender. I thought I could persuade an sf audience to look at things less conservatively and by and large I was proven wrong. I succeeded with some readers, but my policy was to run relatively conventional fiction in with unconventional fiction, in the hope of familiarising readers with newer stuff. I’d succeeded in changing attitudes on Tarzan and helped do it on Sexton Blake, so knew you could familiarise conservative readers with new stuff — but, of course, we were trying to bring them around to really different stuff and that proved harder. In the end we did have a readership, drawn largely from the counter culture, but we hadn’t brought a huge number of genre fans with us.

MPW: It seems from reading texts like Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, to name two notable examples, that the editorial policy you pursued in New Worlds was very much concerned with extending the kinds of experimental praxis that Burroughs was working with. How much was Burroughs discussed at the time in comparison with such work?

Moorcock: Quite a bit. We all knew Burroughs. Norman more from the US. Barrington Bayley was definitely inspired by him. Ballard and I were less affected by the style, I think. I tried to produce a few “bridge” stories, trying to coax readers over to Burroughs, such as The Deep Fix.

Burroughseana: Traces of Burroughs

MPW: I would like to conclude on a slightly more speculative note:

A recently published critical anthology entitled Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004) suggests that the practices of Burroughs’ writing have explored or provided groundwork for new ways of theorizing the contemporary globalized world economy. From your own practical written experiment and exploration, do you feel that it is time to re-think our views of the function of literature taking cues from Burroughs? Do you personally find that he has further practical lessons for the contemporary writer?

Moorcock: Well, given the sheer absurdism of “Reaganomics” I think Burroughs did a great job of anticipation. In fact I said as much today on the appropriate bit of my website [see Moorcock's Miscellany].

As far as Burroughs’s “practical lessons” go, I think any great visionary writer provides us with all kinds of lessons, since he’s going to be infinitely interpretable. As for me, it’s been a long time since I took much in the way of clues from Burroughs but the function of good literature for me has always been to confront received wisdom and I’d say Burroughs’s work certainly continues to do that. You’ve caught me at a time when I’m rediscovering realism, rather than absurdism, so I’m not very focussed on Burroughs at this precise moment. Burroughs is good for thinking about broad ideas but not so good for thinking through ideas concerning observed character. Of course, his instincts were good, so he’s always a good observer in many ways. But at the moment, I’m reading a lot of Balzac, for instance, and am not in much of a Burroughs mood! Another few months, and that might well have changed, of course. Generally, though, Burroughs must always have practical lessons for the contemporary writer.

MPW: In a less linear way I would like to consider Jerry Cornelius against a specifically Burroughsean backdrop.

I think he is a wonderful character, or, as M. John Harrison says, rather, a technique, with myriad applications, including cultural commentary and satire. Although, as you say, the books where he appears only have particular commonalities with those of Burroughs, Jerry himself (or himselves) seems to be the fulfilment or culmination of something that Burroughs was reaching towards with, for instance, the Nova Mob: he acts as something of a “coordinate point” for your fiction.

Moorcock: Certainly for much of it. Perhaps Mrs Cornelius is even more of a coordinate point! Like her, Jerry’s a character as well as a technique. As I said in an introduction, I think to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, at some point Jerry became a real boy. I think Burroughs appealed to me because, like me, he was inclined to create characters who personified certain qualities. Moliere and the Commedia did the same, of course. I didn’t really learn this from Burroughs but I was encouraged to develop the ideas from reading him. Jerry searches for identities, ways of coping in the shifting sands, if you like, of modern times. I’m not sure Burroughs has such a character, apart from himself. It could be that this hangover from modernism (found in Kerouac for instance) held him back from creating a character like Jerry. He tried to find a useful “self” rather than an “other.” Several of the least successful JC stories by different hands also show a similar attempt to turn Jerry into the author (in Jim Sallis’ for instance, which otherwise have considerable merit).

In passing, I always thought Charles Forte was an influence on Burroughs and wonder how much [J. W.] Dunne of An Experiment with Time (an influence on myself, Bayley and others) meant to Burroughs! [RealityStudio: Dunne meant quite a bit to Burroughs. He referred to Dunne in several interviews, including the conversation with Simone Lazzeri Ellis, and discusses him in a number of works, most notably The Third Mind, the essay "Immortality" in The Adding Machine, and the introduction to Charles Gatewood's Sidetripping.]

MPW: Does it seem like a fair comparison to label Jerry as partly “Burroughsean”? Have others who borrowed Jerry (such as M. John Harrison or Norman Spinrad) made similar comparisons while appropriating him?

Moorcock: Not really. I don’t think Harrison was ever much of a Burroughs fan. Spinrad was, but it was Burroughs’ style and language which really fired him up. Spinrad’s ear was tuned to the street — specifically to the NY street — as mine was tuned to the London street. We were also interested in political language. Burroughs, like Hammett, for instance, taught us to listen. Burroughs pointed us to ways of using our own observations. We sometimes borrowed his rhythms and methods, but I don’t think we borrowed his specific language much. It comes back to what I said earlier about Burroughs being an inspiration more than an influence. I habitually created characters as exemplary figures from Elric on — frequently conflicted or ambiguous characters who could move easily between Law and Chaos, as it were. Seeking a personal position, a bit of firm ground which didn’t shift under us. I found it in Kropotkin, I suppose. I don’t think Burroughs really did that. Maybe his centre was his junk. Not an unfamiliar centre.

MPW: Was your own return to the Western genre (such as Kit Carsons) in your Metatemporal Detective and Corsairs of the 2nd Ether books at all coloured by Burroughs’ Red Night / Western Lands trilogy, particularly The Place of Dead Roads?

Moorcock: No. I have to admit I haven’t read that trilogy. There are very few writers I’ve read in their entirety. I was influenced only by boyhood reading, of my interest in Western mythology, which was one of my main reasons for moving to Texas. I wrote westerns and features about the west for Tarzan Adventures, long before I found Burroughs! That was all part of my revisiting (in 2nd Ether and MD) boyhood influences like Clarence E. Mulford, author of the Hopalong Cassidy books.

MPW: And finally, how would you as a writer explain the impact and import of someone like Burroughs to new readers today who might discover him for the first time?

Moorcock: I would hope Burroughs would act as inspiration to a new generation discovering him, as I did, on their own. Of course, I remain a publicist for Burroughs and he is certainly quite as relevant to modern times as he was to 45 years ago. Like all great writers, Burroughs is always relevant to changing times but I would argue that he is particularly relevant to a readership which has witnessed, in high relief, the rapacity of business and the authoritarian tendency of government. His borrowing, from Bayley, of the “star virus” metaphor must also be especially meaningful!

Burroughs’s vision of society, his absurdist take on it, is likely to win him a considerable number of new readers today who are questioning the accepted wisdom of the past thirty years, just as we were questioning the received wisdom of the years leading up to the sixties. I’m finding, I think, receptive ears amongst newer readers. Maybe we’re even on the brink of some sort of genuine spontaneous renaissance, as we were around the time Kennedy was elected? Obama might act as a similar symbol. Let’s hope he survives a lot longer than Kennedy! And we could certainly do with some fresh vitality in modern popular music!

Mark P. Williams has studied at the University of Hull and the University of Warwick and is in the process of completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia on “fantasy and the body politic in contemporary genre fiction” looking at the work of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville.

He has contributed papers to conferences on Science Fiction, globalization and literature, millennial fictions, the literary canon, the literary response to 9/11, and co-organised a conference on Michael Moorcock at Liverpool John Moores.