Part of the Hendrick’s Lecture Series, organised by The Last Tuesday Society, 19th November 2010

by Rona Cran

Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, situated unassumingly on Mare Street in Hackney, is a beguiling emporium of which William S. Burroughs would no doubt have approved. There are shrunken heads on sale, and sinister bibelots (a Doll of the Dead slumps in her coffin), and Hendrick’s gin is served in teacups. A foetal piglet slumbers on a cluttered shelf, a pair of Labrador testicles float nonchalantly in formaldehyde, and the majestic, taxidermed head of a warthog charges into the luridly painted room where tonight’s lecture takes place. The locale is marvellously apt: like Burroughs, it is “dreamy and innocent”, whilst also being “ravaged and vicious”, and the sense of double exposure explored by Oliver Harris in his dexterous introduction to the recently re-issued edition of Queer is made freakishly palpable by the sight of a two-bodied lamb encased in glass, as well as the bicephalous teddy bears on sale by the till.

Although the audience is, for the most part, diffident and dishevelled, this is not a coterie evening. The lecture is remarkably well-attended, a testament to the enduring magnetism of William Burroughs, and to the erudition and clarity of vision which Harris brings to the study of his work. Tonight’s discussion centres on the largely concealed production history of Burroughs’ first trilogy — Junky, The Yage Letters and Queer — and on the writer’s excruciatingly literal equation of his manuscripts with his own body.

Harris, a distinctive figure in trademark brown fedora, begins by positing Burroughs as Holbein’s anamorphic distortion in The Ambassadors: “without this ugly act of queer vandalism, American literature makes sense,” he argues, portraying him as an unsettling stain on several canons by inserting the figures of Updike/Bellow and Ginsberg/Kerouac into the painting. The ensuing analysis of Burroughs’ problematic relationship with publication pivots elegantly around a letter to Ginsberg dated April 1952, in which he writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” The joke marks the advent of the morally indifferent comic-grotesque routine that would become Burroughs’ trademark, appearing at this moment, Harris explains, due to the proposed merger of the manuscripts of Junk (as it was originally titled) and Queer.

Harris explores the “manuscript cannibalism” through which the trilogy came about using for his analogy the vaudeville trick uncomplicatedly known as “Sawing a Woman in Half.” We see Burroughs sadomasochistically playing both the part of the magician and the woman in the box, as he both courts and rails against contradictory editorial demands. The prevarications of the fledgling writer, coupled with his publisher’s querulousness, result in a vengefully strategic deconstruction of textual unity and writerly identity (the Lee of Junky is unrecognisable from the Lee of Queer). Whilst Burroughs’ later work moves from mosaic to cut-up, famously frustrating many readers, Harris repudiates the view that his early works are simple, realist texts, from which the writer veers wildly with Naked Lunch. Fascinatingly, each text in the trilogy is revealed to be a collage, and the corpus of his early work to be quite literally “a body in pieces.”

A Few Questions and Answers with the Editor of the New Edition of William S. Burroughs’ Queer

Though the first published edition of Queer was assembled from a mix of manuscript sources, it was done with the collaboration and blessing of the author. In crafting this new edition, which is a sort of remix of manuscript sources, how do you justify to yourself creating a text that would no longer have that authoritative input from the author himself? 

I’ve always been conscious of the trust shown in me by the Burroughs Estate in granting me the tremendous privilege of editing his work, and I go to great lengths to be as rigorous as possible. I’m also very cautious, often conservative, aiming to respect the line between “correcting” and “rewriting.”

But in terms of lacking Burroughs’ imprimatur, I would say this: that what has made researching the material history of his works, and then editing those works, so fascinating, is to find myself caught up in the same processes of collaboration and contingency that always shaped his writing. Everywhere you look, you see the hand of others or indeed the hand of chance, making key decisions for Burroughs. Now, although I wouldn’t cast myself as his “collaborator,” editing is a collaborative process, and I know there is a limit in trying to do “what Burroughs would have wanted” — because he himself did not see it that way. What I have tried to do is to make all my editions as transparent as possible when it comes to both the history of the materials I’m working with and my own editing.

This new edition of Queer puts the emphasis on the text written in the 1950s and seems to consciously defuse the attention-getting preface that Burroughs wrote in 1985. Can you clarify your reasons for wanting to deflect attention from the preface back onto the 1950s text?

I’ve written at some length about this in Secret of Fascination, because there’s no doubt that Burroughs’ 1985 introduction decisively shaped how Queer has been read — or perhaps, misread. I’m not especially interested in speculating about motives, but the effect of the introduction has certainly been to obscure the narrative by explaining it away — displacing a story of homosexual desire by the death of his wife, Joan. That’s why I felt the need to move the introduction and include it as an appendix — very much as Miles and Grauerholz did in their “Restored” edition of Naked Lunch with that book’s equally influential and equally suspect “introduction” by Burroughs. If the only value of my new edition of Queer is to make it easier for readers to really encounter the narrative — to experience it for what it is: “queer,” in every sense of the word — then I’d be satisfied. 

With the new Queer and with your previous edition of Junky, the texts actually seemed to become more Burroughsian than they had been when published by Burroughs. Do you worry about how your own image of Burroughs might shape the texts?

That’s an intriguing idea, that these works have become more rather than less Burroughsian, but I don’t see it that way myself. I guess it’s hard after a while, you become so insanely familiar with all the words that you can lose track of the overall feel, almost forget what it was that drew you in in the first place.

As for “my” image of Burroughs — I really don’t think I have one. I mean, I have images, plural, of him, but I find it hard to redact or reconcile them into one. That’s one reason why, if you look at anything I’ve ever written about him, you’ll see how much I avoid making generalizing claims and prefer to keep to the particulars. I wouldn’t need to do that if I felt confident I understood him; but then again, if I felt I understood Burroughs I wouldn’t need to keep working on him…

In what ways did editing Junky, Yage Letters, and Everything Lost influence your approach to this new edition of Queer?

It wasn’t really a question of “influence,” although certainly the earlier editing gave me confidence in my working methods and taught me some lessons. After all, with editing as with most things in life, you learn by doing. However, what really counted was my familiarity with the manuscripts and their incestuously tangled histories. In that sense, Queer really didn’t stand alone, and how I approached it was certainly shaped by what I had already done with the other manuscripts.

I suppose if I were to start over again, it would have made more sense to edit Junky, Queer, and Yage Letters all together, so that no decisions were made on each individual text without considering the others, rather than one at a time — but that’s not how publishing or editing work out.

You took a trip to Mexico a few years ago. Was this helpful while working on this new edition of Queer?

In terms of my research for Queer, going to Mexico was crucial. With a certain self-reflexive irony, I was following in Burroughs’ footsteps by seeing myself as an old-style gumshoe, piecing together clues and trying to figure out who did what and when.

So in September 2006 I began what you might call location scouting, looking to identify the locales in Burroughs’ work. I started with the very first scene in the novel, which is set in the “Amsterdam Avenue Park.” I’d long been fascinated by the description of this park in Queer, especially those “concrete benches molded to resemble wood” that Lee sits on. One morning I literally walked right into the park, which is in the Colonia Roma district, and found myself looking at one of these crazy benches. Later, I came across a faded photograph of Burroughs from that era, dressed in a battered suit and fedora and looking just like an old-time detective, and he is standing in that very spot, with some of those implausible pieces of park furniture in the background. One mystery solved.

Of course, putting yourself in the place of the author doesn’t offer any practical help whatsoever in editing a text — but it creates an emotional connection, a point of intuitive identification, and that can keep you going when the odds seem against you. And more generally, my couple of weeks in Mexico City were just so weirdly Burroughsian — to list the series of coincidences I had there would make you laugh; there’s no way you’d believe the half of them — and again, that is a sort of psychic supplement, a back-brain stimulus, that works away on a deeper level than deciding whether to change a comma into a period.

David Cronenberg had to confront a lot of questions about his own sexual identity when creating his film of Naked Lunch. Did you think that editing Queer would put you into a similar position?

Funnily enough, this was a question I raised right at the start directly with James Graeurholz — who, unlike me, is very knowledgeable about these areas of sexual identity and history. But he said (I paraphrase): being a straight man hasn’t stopped you doing a good job before, why should it now? 

If Ace had accepted Queer for publication as a sequel to Junky, how do you think that might have changed Burroughs’ writing in general? Would it have set him on a different path?

The trouble with the “what if” question is that once you ask one you have to ask others: what if New Directions had not rejected Junk, and so left it to Ace Books? Would it have appeared a much more literary text? And would the text of Junk have been published as Burroughs originally intended, before Ace steered him into cannibalizing Queer to make Junkie longer? In fact, the most intriguing plan back in 1952 was for Ace to publish Junk and Queer together in one book. Can you imagine the effect of that? If everything else in Burroughs’ literary history stayed the same, the impact of that double book as the precursor to Naked Lunch would have been utterly different to Junkie published alone.

As for whether Burroughs’ path might have been different, I don’t know. From one point of view, Burroughs was a driven man during the 1950s, fulfilling his destiny as a writer even if he didn’t always know it. From another, he diced with a dozen different fates and could as easily have faded out into an old bore under a potted palm in the Parade Bar in Tangier along with English colonels in crumpled sepia linen suits and a warm martini.

Around the same time as Burroughs was writing Queer, Allen Ginsberg was writing of obsessive love in “Green Automobile” and Jack Kerouac was writing about it too in The Subterraneans. Was obsession “in the air,” or did the works encourage each other somehow? It’s especially pointed in the case of Kerouac, given that Alene Lee was the subject of Subterraneans and later helped to type up Queer.

The question is perhaps more interesting than my answer, which is that I don’t really see a connection with Kerouac, although the parallels between Burroughs and Ginsberg in terms of obsessive desire are striking. And the other side of the cultural coin is just as interesting, if you consider the “official” version of love at that time, such as the Gene Kelley-Debbie Reynolds relationship in Singin’ in the Rain (released April 1952). What Burroughs says around that time about “the sex that passes the censor” giving away the “basic American rottenness” is very exact in recognizing what his culture repressed, and what, with a vengeance, his own writing would return…

It’s an incredible coincidence that you were in Lawrence, visiting Burroughs for the first time, on the very day that the first publication of the Queer was announced by the New York Times. Have you wondered what he would have thought of you re-editing it all these years later?

Oh, I don’t think he would have been that bothered. That’s not to say he didn’t care about his work — on the contrary, it’s hard to imagine a writer who took his work more seriously — but I think at a certain point he surrendered possession of it and let others finish it off. But as for the coincidence of being out in Lawrence that day, of course I didn’t know that at the time, but in retrospect it seems so right somehow.

Re-Editing William S. Burroughs’ First Trilogy

By Oliver Harris

This is the written version of a talk given by Professor Harris at Columbia University on 16 September 2010. See also Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer.

In 1943, when Allen Ginsberg was a 17-year-old Columbia freshman and first met William Burroughs, he was impressed by Burroughs’ ability to shoot from the hip and come up with apposite quotations taken from Shakespeare. Allusions to “the Immortal Bard,” as Burroughs called him, crop up throughout his work and come surprisingly thick and fast in his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Here, we might recall, he cites the line from Macbeth (Act II Scene iii) that gives my paper its title: “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece” — referring to the bloody sight of King Duncan’s body. When Burroughs quotes the line in Naked Lunch, typically, he gives it a twist, to become: “Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.” 

In the mid-1960s, the British critic David Lodge claimed that, since Burroughs lacked “precise imaginative control” over his materials, Naked Lunch “seems to offer” this line as “an appropriate epitaph on his work.” It’s a glib put-down, but for now let’s accept that this line gives us the key aesthetic question begged by Burroughs’ work — whether it’s a masterpiece made or fucked by confusion.

To be sure, confusion is the most common state in which the work has left its readers — especially in comparison to Burroughs’ “first Naked Lunch.” That’s to say the trilogy to which, in late 1953, Burroughs originally applied the title “Naked Lunch” — texts published separately as: Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters.

These three early autobiographical works have not usually been read collectively — but we need to take them together if we’re to begin to understand how Burroughs went from these simple, seemingly realist texts written in the early 1950s to Naked Lunch by decade’s end.

But are they so simple? 

In comparison to the chaotic disarray of Naked Lunch, the texts certainly seem relatively straightforward, but their material back-stories turn out to be unexpectedly complex and to contradict the apparent simplicity of what’s visible on the page. Or rather, the back-stories make visible the contradictions within the text — contradictions we otherwise overlook or misinterpret. 

Equally, whereas from the very beginning a genetic mythology attached itself to Naked Lunch, very little was written about the material histories of these three texts, and what little there was turns out to be wrong — and this has significant consequences for interpretation. This is so most spectacularly in regard to The Yage Letters, whose 1953 epistolary section did not reproduce Burroughs’ authentic letters at all — as these wonderful cut-and-paste pages from a manuscript held at Stanford demonstrate. 

This is why it’s seemed important to me to make the material histories visible and put them to use in re-editing the texts — using my editions not only to offer a reliable text, but to bring out into the open the previously concealed processes of production. Each of my editions has therefore highlighted the genetic and editing back-stories — including that involved in my own work — with the paradoxical aim of confusing their apparent simplicity.

So, what are the confusions, and why do they matter?

Burroughs wrote his three manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” during a period of under four years, back to back between early 1950 and late 1953. But they were published out of sequence and spread over four decades: Junkie appearing in 1953, Queer in 1985, and The Yage Letters in 1963. They really couldn’t have been written any closer together or published much further apart.

More than that, this scrambling of chronology and delays in publication had a direct impact on the reception of the three texts — on how they have been interpreted. This is one reason why they’ve hardly ever been read as a trilogy, with the result that Burroughs’ literary history, the chronology of his development from one text to another, has been disguised and confused. But even more fundamentally, this disordering of the trilogy turns out to beg questions about production, since the publication histories of the three titles decisively determined the form and content of each text — and not just separately but collectively. 

As manuscripts, “Junk,” “Queer” and “Yage” display a distinct formal variety: “Junk” written in the first person, “Queer” in the third, and “Yage” appearing as letters. And yet, despite these basic differences in form, far from remaining separate, the three manuscripts became incestuously mixed up in the published texts due to the history of their editing. And this, especially in the case of Queer, is where the confusion really begins — although to get there we have to start from “Junk” (this is the title on the original manuscript held at Columbia).

Having begun it a few months after moving to Mexico City in fall 1949, Burroughs had written most of his first novel by December 1950. Burroughs was still tinkering with “Junk” when, in March 1952, he began “Queer.” That same month, Allen Ginsberg, acting as Burroughs’ agent, secured a contract to publish “Junk” with Ace Books, the pulp paperback house recently established by A. A Wyn. Having stalled while they looked at “Queer,” in early June Ace rejected it, and asked Burroughs to write an autobiographical preface to “Junk” and to make the narrative longer. 

They put him under such pressure that Ginsberg planned to do the expansion on Burroughs’ behalf — as we can see from his letter of June 12, 1952 —

reporting Ace’s request for 6,000 more words, and Ginsberg’s idea to use “Junk parts of Queer” plus Burroughs’ real letters to make a new ending. And we can also see, from this carbon (held at Stanford),

how Burroughs did this expansion by transposing third-person “Queer” material into the first-person for “Junk,” literally striking out “He” and replacing it with “I.” 

As a result of this manuscript cannibalism, an eighth of the Junkie published by Ace Books in spring 1953 had come from “Queer,” while “Queer” had lost almost a fifth of its material in the process. 

Although some have noticed the difference in the final chapters of Junkie, the most straightforward novel in the Burroughs oeuvre turns out to be a hybrid, or composite text — which is ironic, given its packaging as an Ace Doublebook, bound tête-bêche (that’s to say, head-to-toe) with the memoirs of a narcotic agent. That the prime agency driving the cutting up and mixing of manuscripts was not Burroughs but his publisher is a material contingency that grounds what would, in time, become a thoroughgoing critique of authorship. What most interests me, as an editor and a scholar, is to explore the emergence of that critique during the writing of Queer.

When Queer was finally published in 1985, readers would have immediately experienced a series of confusions about the text, if it hadn’t been for Burroughs’ long introduction — which, significantly, had been written at the request of Burroughs’ publishers, Viking, just as, thirty years earlier, Ace Books had asked for a preface to Junkie. Famously, the introduction dramatically tied the writing of Queer to Burroughs’ shooting of his wife, Joan, in September 1951. That disaster, added to what Burroughs says about the difference between writing on and off drugs, effectively pre-empted any questions readers might have about Queer — specifically, questions regarding the identity of its central character and the formal appearance of the narrative. 

For the Lee of Queer is completely unrecognisable as the Lee of Junky; from a cool, tight-lipped and distant reporter he has turned into a near-hysterical character who compulsively tells the most outrageous jokes. Lee seems, quite literally, to have become another person. And likewise formally, there’s been an abrupt shift in person — from Lee as the first-person narrator of Junky to Lee as a character in a third-person narrative — except this shift is then itself undone in the “epilogue,” which is narrated by Lee now in the first person, until, in yet another shift, the finale switches back into the third person. Confused? We certainly oughta be…

The shift in the epilogue from third- to first-person can only be explained by knowing the manuscript history. This shows that Queer‘s epilogue didn’t belong to “Queer” at all, but was written over a year later to conclude Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript and was only added for the 1985 edition. Obviously, clearing that up is essential from the point of view of textual interpretation. 

More revealing still is the question why this material was added. That in turn relates to the 1963 publication of “Yage” in The Yage Letters. For City Lights only published those parts of “Yage” that had already been printed in various little magazines, since the full manuscript — including what became the “Epilogue” to Queer — was not available. And so when Queer was edited for publication in 1985, this unused section of “Yage” was, like Burroughs’ long introduction, added to help make up for all the material that had been cut from Queer to add to Junkie in 1953. 

Or, to put this chain reaction another way: it was because Ace, City Lights, and Viking each required a longer text that Junkie gained parts of Queer, Queer gained parts of “Yage,” and “Yage” was mixed in with later texts to make up The Yage Letters. And that is how the manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” all turned into composite texts, curiously hybrid publications. 

Is this merely happenstance? Is there any more to it than an accumulation of the usual contingencies of publishing? Or is there something else going on to explain why none of the manuscripts of Burroughs’ first three novels were published in toto, and each came to have such confused and compromised textual histories? And if there is more to it, what might be the consequences for editing them?

I’m going to work backwards by considering first the two key structural options for re-editing Queer:

• First, to undo the history of cuts made in 1953 and additions made in 1985.
• Second, to complete the manuscript fragment in other ways.

The first option would have meant adding to Queer the nearly six thousand words cut for Junky and cutting the two-and-a-half thousand words that were added from “Yage.” This option would have had significant implications for the other two editions, of course; but equally, to undo the cuts made in 1953 and the additions made in 1985 would be to deny the agency of history, the passage of time, and the inevitable mutability of texts.

But principles don’t mechanically determine editing practice, and I tried out various experiments. One effort

restored the original opening of Queer, material that had been cut and pasted into Junkie. The effect of restoring it, however, was paradoxical, since it made Queer much less queer. That’s because these first pages — which we’ve already seen just a minute ago — starting from the line “One morning in April Lee woke up a little sick” — set up the rest of the narrative as the fall-out from Lee’s state of drug withdrawal. 

Now, this had clearly been Burroughs’ original intention. However, from an interpretive point of view, to clarify the text in this way would have honoured the author’s intention but have betrayed what the work became: Queer is, as its title promises, a confusing and unsettling text, and it was that identity which I felt bound to respect. 

The second structural option turned out to be just as problematic.

In 1985, James Grauerholz had already considered a range of ways to complete Burroughs’ rough and unfinished manuscript. These included constructing several new chapters and transposing the whole narrative into the first person. However, in the end he rejected all but quite modest interpolations of material, especially needed in the increasingly fragmentary final sections. I myself made some small insertions of newly discovered manuscript material, but concluded that the temptation to complete Queer, and the intractable difficulties of doing so, both pointed to the fact that Burroughs had not left it incomplete in 1952; rather, “Queer” was, in a conventional sense, incompletable. 

Why? Because what’s in play here is more than recognising the agency of history. That invites a social text-editing approach, respecting the authority of all textual collaborators — publishers, agents, and editors, from Ginsberg to Grauerholz — rather than seeing these as corruptions of the author’s presumed intentions. But what’s also at stake is recognising the very particular agency of Burroughs as an author and the model of textual integrity that went with it. And that’s why re-editing his work, especially re-editing Queer, is more than a matter of making a reliable text. 

On the contrary, establishing the material history of Burroughs’ writing is important not so much for producing an accurate base for textual interpretation, but as itself a basis to interpretation. This materiality would become visible on the page in the chaotic montage form of Naked Lunch and more radically still in the texts produced by his cut-up methods. But it emerges in the course of writing his first trilogy, and in what follows I’m going to explore in detail the materiality of Burroughs’ model of textual integrity by focusing on what I see as the turning point in his development as a writer. 

When Burroughs began writing “Queer” in early March 1952 he was very clear about it: “Novel could be part II of Junk,” he wrote Ginsberg on the 20th; “Same straight-forward narrative method as I used in Junk.” The plan was clear enough, but that’s not how it worked out. Queer may have started off “straight,” but it achieved its identity by going awry. 

The turning point comes a couple of weeks later when Burroughs responds to two requests from Ace Books — one to write the autobiographical preface for “Junk,” the other to combine his second novel with his first. This is April 14 1952:

As for publisher’s introduction, I would rather you wrote it as I want to give all my time to the second novel. I will send you a brief autobiographical sketch. Perhaps you can use some of it directly. I give you free hand there, as in making all arrangements. Incidentally I think Queer is excellent title. I personally think it would be a better idea to publish Queer as a sequel to Junk rather than together, but in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee. The financial arrangements are O.K., go ahead and …

Wait a minute! — “as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee”?? Where did that come from? In fact, that is the point: this sick joke comes out of absolutely nowhere — not only in this particular letter, but in the context of all the letters Burroughs had written up until this time. It has a sick humour that is trademark Burroughs, but there’d been nothing like it in his writing before. 

The gag is therefore doubly shocking — both on its own terms and as a sudden change in Burroughs’ style. It registers for the first time the appearance of his routine form, the comic-grotesque fantasies that spring up in Queer and will blossom like fleurs du mal in Naked Lunch.

But what about the torso gag itself? What exactly is Burroughs saying, and why would he identify himself with a sadistic serial killer? Historically speaking, he might be evoking the notorious Cleveland Torso Murderer of the late 1930s, or maybe the equally infamous Black Dahlia case from Los Angeles in 1947. More likely, I think, the tone of moral indifference here — “in this life we have to take things as we find them” — parallels the phrase son cosas de la vida, which will appear in Naked Lunch. There, it is attributed to Sobera de la Flor, who, in March 1952, just as Burroughs was starting to write “Queer,” went on a killing spree that took in the same Mexico City neighbourhood where Burroughs lived. I stress this connection because bloody violence that prompts a shockingly passive moral shrug of the shoulders is a key gesture in Naked Lunch — mainly associated with Dr. Benway — and, quite extraordinarily, it has its origins here, in Burroughs’ response to Ace Books’ plan for combining “Queer” with “Junk.” His gag seems wildly over the top, and confusing too, since it’s hard to see how a merger of two manuscripts could be figured as the brutal dismembering of a body.

What’s going on becomes clearer a week later, when Burroughs was about halfway through the writing of “Queer.” This is the single most important letter he ever wrote, I would say, a defining moment for the material history of his work. Here’s the opening paragraph of his April 22nd 1952 letter: 

Dear Al, I begin to understand the rift between publisher and author. The publisher’s demands are not only highly irritating but contradictory as well. For example, they don’t want to publish books separate or together so far as I can make out, and the question of person is confusion’s masterpiece. I quote: “Necessities preclude publishing book together one part in third person one in 1st”. I wonder precisely what person they expect Queer to be in? I feel as if I was being sawed in half by indecisive fiends who periodically attempted to shove me back together.”

I’ll come back to “confusion’s masterpiece” and Macbeth shortly, because there’s such a lot going on here:

• The “rift” between author and publisher
• The publisher’s contradictory demands 
• The relationship between the “Junk” and “Queer” manuscripts
• The confusion of first and third person narrative
• And finally, feeling sawed in half

On a first approach, this is a letter about practical matters involving the editing of manuscripts for publication, but mainly it is an acutely self-conscious reflection on authorship. Burroughs may have worked on “Junk” for over two years, but only now that he has a contract in the works from Ace Books, does he talk about himself as a soon-to-be-published author. He will end the letter asking Ginsberg to save his letters because “maybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” Right now, however, Burroughs is aware that he has no rep at all, and this is what underlies the “rift” between himself and his publishers.

In accusing Ace of making contradictory and confusing demands, Burroughs recognises the power relations between himself as the writer and Ace as the publisher. They are the ones with the power to make decisions — even the power to torment him by being indecisive. 

Once we stress the word — decision, indecision — we begin to understand what’s going on here. Etymologically, decision comes from the Latin decidere, combining the prefix de with the verb caedere, meaning to “cut.” To decide is to cut off, and the pun motivates the imagery of both the dismembered torso and the body sawn in half. In other words, the images in these mini-routines literalise Burroughs’ sense of the publisher’s power over him. But they do so in a very particular way — by equating his manuscripts with his own body — and this materiality is key to understanding the violence and pain in his first routines, and the polarisation of power relations they embody. 

This polarisation is evident in the contradiction between the images in the letter of April 14th and this of April 22nd, for Burroughs seems to identify with both the cutter — the psycho serial killer who wants to hack off limbs — and with the one being cut, the body sawed in half. To the extent that he is talking about the relationship between his two manuscripts, we have to ask: what does Burroughs himself actually want?

March 26, he writes to Kerouac: “the two stories are really complimentary and should go together.”

April 8, again to Kerouac: “The publishers [...] want to publish both together as one novel. I would just as soon they go ahead and publish Junk separate.”

April 14, as we’ve seen, he tells Ginsberg, “I personally think it would be a better idea to publish Queer as a sequel to Junk rather than together.”  

April 26, “Look here, might as well just put these 75 pages on the end of Junk and publish as one novel.”

May 15, Burroughs mails Ginsberg a 59-page manuscript titled “JUNK OR QUEER” 

May 23, “Whatever arrangement is O.K. by me. If they want to put this 60 pages on the end of Junk to make one novel, O.K. Or I will go on with Queer.”

Whatever is actually Burroughs’ key response — he uses the word three times alone in his April 14 letter, writing Ginsberg “tell them whatever you think best [...] whatever you decide is O.K. with me [...] whatever you tell them I will deliver.”

Let’s just digress a moment to consider a case that couldn’t make for a more instructive contrast — namely Jack Kerouac, who in early May 1952 arrived in Mexico City to stay with Burroughs. On May 18, Kerouac responded to the same publishers who were at this time considering his manuscript of Visions of Cody. He writes to Ginsberg: “If Wyn or Carl [that's Carl Solomon] insist on cutting it up to make the ‘story’ more intelligible I’ll refuse.”

Without wanting to be overly reductive, Kerouac believed in his work with a single-minded passion, and in refusing to accept cuts, he rejects the publishers’ power to force decisions onto him and to impose narrative intelligibility — their commercially-driven definition of aesthetic coherence. In the case of Burroughs, far from writing as if beyond or outside the context of publishing, he has no illusions whatsoever about his position, about all the compromises and economic determinations involved in getting a book to market. 

At the same time, while his publishers did indeed prevaricate about his two manuscripts, the confusion and the indecision that Burroughs attributes to them are really his own. He’s the one who doesn’t seem to know what he wants. 

When, on April 26, he considers combining his two manuscripts, he protests to Ginsberg, “Why the Hell can’t you shift persons in the middle of a book? So it hasn’t been done, well let’s do it.” This is a reminder of what the problem was all about: the shift in narrative person across manuscripts — clearly “unintelligible” so far as Ace Books was concerned. But Burroughs’ apparent decisiveness is asserted only to be immediately qualified: “Anyway I am going to present it third person. If they want to change it, all right, but I think the change would entail considerable loss.” 

Clearly enough, the plan to combine the first person “Junk” with the third-person “Queer” is not just a formal problem for Burroughs’ publishers. On the contrary, this plan to combine manuscripts is also a plan for a visibly divided self: not just two books in one, but in effect two persons with the same name in one book, split by the difference in narrative point of view. The result would therefore embody Burroughs’ own lack of single-mindedness, his own internal rift, which he has displaced onto Ace Books and literalised in the image of being sawed in half. 

In other words, Burroughs casts Ace Books as the unreasonable obstacle to his desire, as if otherwise he would get what it is he wants — when the truth is, what he wants is in a state of self-contradiction.

Interestingly, we can see this displacement of self-divided desire in Burroughs’ allusion to Macbeth. What makes the allusion especially revealing is that it appears in his turning point letter of April 22 as a revision that he then incorporated into a retyped second draft — the original is on the left, the revised draft on the right.

This is itself a crucial moment, for it was the first letter Burroughs ever redrafted in this way. As we can see from my transcription, the opening paragraph is extensively rewritten. This is the key line he struck through:

Personally I am so confused I don’t know whether to think in 1st or 3rd person at this point.

Personally Burroughs is confused about what person to think in… No wonder the line from Macbeth came to him and he substituted the phrase “the question of person is confusion’s masterpiece” — although we can immediately see how this substitution displaces the confusion away from his own person and onto his publishers. 

This confusion of person appears materially in the act of writing itself — for example, in this fragment from the first week of April, where Burroughs experiments with the first-person but mucks it up — again, I’ve glossed it since it’s not easy to read:

I stayed away from the Ship Ahoy for several days to give Allerton time to forget the bad impression he had undoubtedly made.

But this is not just a matter of confusing “I” with “he” when Burroughs writes — far from it. This is not an innocent slip; it’s loaded, and constitutes what Freud called a parapraxis. As the barely concealed psychoanalytical dimensions to Burroughs’ letter suggest, it’s about the confusion of identity in a much more fundamental sense.

To grasp this point, we have to return to how Burroughs quotes Macbeth in Naked Lunch, for now we can see how what’s going on in that passage grows directly out of Burroughs’ April 1952 writing. 

The line that misquotes Shakespeare appears in a comic-grotesque parody of Oedipal confusion — featuring “great big daddy” and “the old lady,” and a cut-up of Genesis with Freud (to make: “male and female castrated he them”) and which is dense with not only physical “cuts” but also a torso job on the mother’s body. As Burroughs’ rewriting of the Bard via Freud has it, God’s masterpiece — man — is thoroughly fucked up by sexual desire. 

But if desire is for Burroughs the basis to confusion, he sees it from a very specific point, one that is encrypted in the image of being sawed in half and its history as a stage act for magicians.

With its origins in Grand Guignol, English music-hall variety, and American vaudeville shows, the act was originally developed by the English magician Percy Thomas Selbit and then perfected and patented in the US by Horace Goldin. However, when Goldin first staged it in June 1921 for the Society of American Magicians at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway and 34th, he made one crucial mistake: the body he cut up belonged to a fellow dressed as a hotel bellboy. Goldin never made that mistake again, and since then the act has almost always been titled “Sawing a Woman in Half.” Or “Sawing a Lady in Half.”

I especially like the poster on the right, with its doctor and nurse in the background, playing up the danger of the act while turning it into a bogus medical procedure, a surgical operation — shades perhaps of Dr. Benway, played here by a blood-splattered Mr Burroughs.

Indeed, the image returns like this in the Benway section of Naked Lunch, where Rock and Roll Hoodlums “saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw.” It is an acutely gendered act of violence. (I love this image, with its Day of the Dead figures that make a Mexican connection back to Burroughs.)

So: as a torso murderer, Burroughs sadistically identified himself with a male slasher, but in the image of being sawed in half he masochistically identifies with the female victim: in other words, Burroughs puts himself in the box as a woman.

As an act of symbolic castration, being sawed in half represents the unequal power relations between Burroughs and his publishers that seem to feminise the writer. But the image also dramatizes what Burroughs dwells on most in his April 22nd letter, which is affirming his maleness as a homosexual. This need is in turn provoked directly by his publishers, as Burroughs reports the suggestion from Carl Solomon that his second novel be titled not “Queer” but “Fag.” This was Burroughs’ reaction:

“I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a fag. That’s what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us manly, strong, noble types and the leaping, jumping, window dressing cocksucker. Furtherchrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somweheres or publishers will swarm all over her sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass.” 

Like the image of being sawed in half, Burroughs’ own contradictions here — asserting his maleness on the one hand and taking on the very queeny, campy tones he despises on the other — materialise the case made by Jamie Russell in his book Queer Burroughs — which is that the historically rigid, binary “opposition of masculine/feminine, queer/fag, man/woman” produced “the gay subject as a schizoid cut-up.” So it’s not just that Burroughs puts himself in the box: sado-masochistically, he plays both parts at once.

Of course, this wasn’t actually funny at all, and the sick humour of Burroughs’ routines in Queer is both hilarious and excruciating. And it’s the pain that brings us back to Burroughs’ texts. 

Now, Queer is centred around Lee’s homosexual desire for Allerton, a thinly fictionalised version of Burroughs’ relationship with Lewis Marker. Lee’s fantasy of physically merging with Allerton, of slupping him as Burroughs puts it, reads like a dark parody of love in Plato’s Symposium. In fact, Aristophanes’ account of love as “the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole” suggests that behind Burroughs’ stage magician and torso killer stands Zeus, who sawed in two the originally rounded whole human being, and so condemned each to the pursuit of their other halves. 

But Burroughs didn’t need to read Plato to learn about love as lack; he felt it as pain. And one reason why the April 22nd letter was such a turning point for him is that here Burroughs reveals that Marker has deserted him: “I am deeply hurt,” he writes, with crushing understatement. In Queer itself, the emotional experience of feeling deeply hurt echoes this letter by consistently appearing in physical terms of the cut body — for example: “Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out toward the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief.” 

Most directly, the imagery here evokes the scene of Burroughs’ own real-life amputation — in which he cut off the end joint of the little finger of his left hand, during an earlier episode of abject, frustrated desire in 1939. The writing of Queer brought back previous traumas of desire, and it comes as no surprise that in his April 22nd letter Burroughs refers to having just written the short story later published as “The Finger.” Fictionalising this earlier episode, “The Finger” mockingly literalises the masochistic figure of Burroughs’ emotional pain: “It’s tearing me all apart. . . . So I hit on this finger joint gimmick.” 

In other words, Burroughs’ confusion about what he wants for his manuscripts, whether their textual bodies should be joined or separate, parts or wholes, shares exactly the same embodied imagery as the literalisation of desire. And if the textual and the sexual seem to be materially, physically one, the imagery also implicates the aesthetic and the economic. 

The implication of these two dimensions is clear from Burroughs’ comment on “The Finger,” which he offers in response to Ace Books’ request for the autobiographical preface to “Junk.” The story is “incomplete of course. What ya think I am, a hack?” 

Hack, which derives from “hackney” — a horse that was easy to ride and available for hire — has, since the days of Grub Street, denoted a writer whose pen is always for sale, a mere professional drudge who churns out commissioned work on time. And that is precisely how Burroughs casts himself in his powerlessness before Ace Books. In two letters — referring to “Queer” on May 23rd and to “Junk” on July 6th — he speaks openly about writing “on schedule” and “to order.” 

However, to hack is also to cut up, and by insisting that his story about the cutting off of one of his fingers is itself an incomplete textual body, Burroughs models a writing that refuses to give his publishers what they want, either aesthetically or economically.

Offering to give Ace Books his finger is clearly an obscene act of payback for publishers who feminise the writer by “sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass.” As for the preface itself, which Burroughs refers to as a “routine, like you see on the back flap,” he offers instead a queering of the writer’s life story, a parody that connects sexual identity and textual integrity via the power relations between author and publisher. Burroughs responds:

Now as to this biographical thing I can’t write it. It is too general and I have no idea what they want. Do they have in mind the “I have worked (but not in the order named) as towel boy in a Kalamazoo whore house, lavatory attendant, male whore and part-time stool pigeon. Currently living in a remodelled pissoir with…” etc.

As a resumé of Burroughs’ employment history and qualifications as a writer, this boasts that no job is too low for him; not merely a “hack,” he’s a whore. But if he feels screwed by his publishers, Burroughs again pays them back by screwing up the biographical portrait they demand — not only by the moral outrageousness of its content, but also by its form. Offering not a metaphorical whole but metonymic parts, he notes that these parts are themselves dis-orderly, mixed up and out of sequence — in other words, confused. But the confusion here is strategic, a deliberate deconstruction of the writer’s identity and the textual unity required by his publishers.

This moment marks the difference between the writing of “Junk” and the writing of “Queer”: He may have described Queer as a “queer novel using the same straight narrative method as I used in ‘Junk,’” but “Junk” achieved coherence and an appearance of closure. The writing of “Queer,” however, marks the breakdown of that method, its unravelling, under the destabilizing pressure of desire and the return — with a vengeance — of the repressed, in the form of jokes, dreams, slips of the tongue, and so on. 

Straight narrative goes awry in Queer because it cannot contain the extreme performances of Burroughs’ vaudevillian routines. Lee is not simply more talkative in Queer than he was in Junkie, he puts on, or rather is the medium for, over a dozen voices: a Mexican boy, a queer doctor, a Texas oilman, a bank president, a driller, his friend Winston Moor, a Vice Squad cop, an old Jew, a Tibetan Holy man and his acolyte, a German doctor, and an American consul… Lee turns polyphonic because the routine is a variety act, useless for coherent narrative but ideal for a quick-change show of vaudeville hoofers, ventriloquists, stand-up comedians, magicians sawing women in half with a two-man surgical saw… 

In conclusion, the shift from “Junk” to “Queer” marked by the appearance in April 1952 of the routine was a turning point in Burroughs’ writing — but what’s equally clear is that it arises as a moment of crisis and self-contradiction — as much the breakdown of a straight method as the choice of a queer one. This was not the end of the story, but its beginning.

“I have not decided on ending for second novel,” Burroughs had written in his torso letter of 14 April 1952, adding, “Perhaps the ending just hasn’t occurred yet.” Unable to decide, waiting on an outside agency, on some contingent circumstance to provide a cut-off point, Burroughs qualifies his desire for control and opens himself to chance — and in this way anticipates the long genesis of the “second” Naked Lunch published in 1959. 

There is, then, no either/or, requiring us to choose between the calculating intentional author or a writer lacking control over his materials. Far from being merely indecisive or confused, Burroughs in 1952 began to recognise that as a writer he was not a unified agent whose work could attain completeness, and the corpus of his writing is emphatically a body in pieces. 

But — and this is what’s most fascinating — his original routines about the dismembered body bring together his writing, his desire, and the material decisions of his publishing house editors. In effect, Ace Books externalised for Burroughs an unconscious dimension, an inner conflict, just as Burroughs himself internalised the commercial logic which dictates that writing for publication is not a unified act but a collaborative process involving contingencies and multiple, divided agencies.

Or to put this another way, if we pose the seemingly nonsensical question, “What do Burroughs’ manuscripts want?” we have here the answer in the very form of their material history. The proof that non-authorial agencies play the part of the work’s unconscious, the proof that, far from being unwanted foreign corruptions that messed up the manuscripts, on the contrary they in fact fulfilled the desire that Burroughs otherwise could not achieve — is simply this: that what Ginsberg referred to as “the Junk parts of Queer” do belong with Junky, and do not belong with Queer; and that the Epilogue taken from “Yage” does fit Queer, and does not fit The Yage Letters. 

To be clear: this isn’t simply to accept that in 1952 and 1985 the editors happened to make or bring about good decisions. Rather, in each case the cuts and additions that they led Burroughs to make internalised the contradiction that was necessary to complete the work. Thus, in the case of Queer, because Burroughs gutted most of the opening two chapters in which Lee withdraws from junk, he prevented this “straight” material from naturalising all that follows — from domesticating the narrative breakdown as reassuringly explicable. 

Likewise, at the other end of the text and thirty years later, the switch from third-person narrative to first-person in the Epilogue is precisely the formal discontinuity demanded by the history of the manuscript, while the finale — where the dream dimension takes over and Lee turns into the monstrous Skip Tracer and the narrative switches back into the third-person — turns out to be the narrative’s true destiny and the realisation of its desire.

And so to simply undo the cuts forced onto Burroughs’ early work would have been to restore an un-cut agency and a unity of intention that Burroughs did not have. Equally, it would have disguised the very material processes that, in the work that was to follow, Burroughs would himself put into the foreground, make visible on the page, as a critique of authorship and textual integrity.

Bringing the back-stories out into the open is therefore particularly relevant to re-editing Burroughs’ work, especially when what those back-stories reveal is contradiction and confusion. Needless to say, editors can’t avoid making definite decisions, line by line, word by word, accidental by accidental — which is why, at times, it’s felt as if I have been sawing Burroughs in half —

and at other times, vice-versa…

by Oliver Harris

Dismissed as Unreadable

The long and intimate association of William Burroughs with poets is well known: Ginsberg, most obviously, as well as Corso, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Leroi Jones, John Giorno, and so on. But to talk of Burroughs’ own material engagement with poetic form and poetics in relation to historical and contemporary practices — this can really only mean one thing: the cut-up project that began in Paris at the end of 1959. As well as brief encounters with old luminaries such as Duchamp, Peret and Tzara, this was the place and the context in which his activities would bring Burroughs in contact with George Maciunas’ Fluxus Group, the Domaine Poetique of Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin, the work of the Lettristes and poesie sonore. It’s easy to forget, but his first novel, Junkie, had been published as a pulp paperback on sale in rail stations only six years earlier. Now, to give just one example, Burroughs would find himself in print alongside John Ashbery, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia and Alice B. Toklas.¹

The enormously fertile and innovative period of the cut-up project has enjoyed a good deal of critical attention since Robin Lydenberg, in her ground-breaking study of 1987, complained that the “cut-up novels of William Burroughs have been dismissed without ever having been rigorously examined” (55). This was her starting point, “to demonstrate that these narratives, which many critics have dismissed as unreadable, offer new ways of reading and thinking” (xi). My point of departure is implied by Lydenberg’s revealing use of the terms “cut-up novels” and “narratives”: missing from Lydenberg, as from all the criticism that has followed, is the historical and material rigour that demands examination of the text that preceded the novels and their narratives; that is to say, the original manifesto and manual of the method, Minutes to Go (1960). Whether this is “unreadable” is open to question, since it remains the critically unread starting point of Burroughs’ cut-up project. It is also, and far from coincidentally, the text most materially invested with the poetry and poetics that gave Burroughs’ method its original identity.

What is at stake here? Why should Minutes to Go, a limited edition pamphlet of sixty pages, a work that had three authors other than Burroughs (Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso), and a text apparently so easy to overlook — why should it be brought in from the margins? In broad terms, there are two reasons.

First, as implied above, Burroughs criticism has taken a surprisingly conventional literary approach to a project conceived so radically in opposition to the conventions of literature. The analysis of Burroughs’ novel-length cut-up texts has been at the expense of his myriad shorter texts from the same era, texts that, taken together, amount to a comparable body of work and demonstrate a much wider range of collage-based experiments.² Even leaving aside his related work in other media — photomontage, collage scrap-books, tape-recordings, films — the effect of putting The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express centre-stage is to distort the history and scope of Burroughs’ experimental practices. Minutes to Go does not fit the critical frame because it inaugurated and belongs to another history, one characterised by publication of hundreds of short texts in dozens of small underground magazines — a history, in other words, where the material, the publishing contexts, and the means of distribution all coincided with the world of avant-garde poetry in general, and the postwar revival of collage-based techniques in particular. It’s tempting to invert critical history altogether and say that, far from being the acme of Burroughs’ cut-up work, the trilogy is in fact its aberration, because the truest realisation of the project lay outside the novel form. At the very least, we can say that it is hard to grasp the poetic identity of the cut-up project so long as Burroughs is approached, first and last, as a novelist.

Second, giving space to Minutes to Go is essential as a corrective to perhaps the most intractable and pervasive difficulty for Burroughs criticism, which is the relation of practice to polemic. That is, the claims Burroughs made for his cut-up methods invariably determine — and often substitute entirely for — close analysis of either the methods used or the variety of texts they produced. For criticism has also conjured up an abstraction fixed by a definite article by speaking of “the cut-up.” This temptation to generalise is, like the priority given to theory, a practical convenience that side-steps the difficulty of dealing with the multiple cut-up procedures that evolved over time, served different functions, and produced diverse results.

The upshot is that Burroughs criticism has in effect entirely reversed the historical priorities. After all, the essential fact of the cut-up enterprise from the outset was that this was an experimental method; “experimental in the sense of being something to do” (Third Mind 31). As Burroughs told Ginsberg shortly after publication of Minutes to Go: “Don’t theorize. Try it” (The Yage Letters 59). An experiment is also a process of trial and error whose outcomes are unpredictable and subject to revision — “an act the outcome of which is unknown,” as John Cage put it in the mid-1950s (13; my emphasis). This is why slighting the material basis of Burroughs’ methods and the text that first embodied them, hides from view both crucial historical origins and alternative potentials. Cited only to be passed over as quickly as possible, so that critics can discuss Burroughs’ theory or analyse his novels, the fate of Minutes to Go is the original instance and prime symbol of this reversal of priorities.

The most direct way to explore the poetics of Minutes to Go is to make good these shortcomings by focusing on the two names almost always cited together alongside the text: Arthur Rimbaud and Tristan Tzara.

Tzara Did It All Before

“At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater” (Third Mind 29). These opening lines from “The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin” (first published in January 1961), and others similar to them, have been endlessly quoted to establish a conscious historical line of descent and immediate context. The problem is not the inaccuracy of Burroughs’ account — the “rally” was actually a 1920 exhibition of Picabia’s paintings at an art gallery, not a theatre, was an event of Paris Dada, not the surrealists, and had there been a “riot” it would only have been one of many — but that it has closed off rather than opened up further investigation of its relevance.³

Now, within the text of Minutes to Go there are two references to Tzara. One is by Corso in his notorious “Post-script” that disowned his part in the cut-up project (“Tzara did it all before” (63)), and the other, which comes in the longer of his two polemical texts, is by Gysin, and is nearly identical to the lines from Burroughs cited above (“the Man from Nowhere . . . pulled words out of a hat” (42)). That Burroughs himself doesn’t mention Tzara in Minutes to Go — or in his one short text included in its immediate sequel, The Exterminator (1960) — is unsurprising, not only because he lacked Gysin’s agenda (Gysin promoted Tzara at least in part to settle an old score with André Breton), but given the specific nature of his contributions. Just over a third of Minutes to Go is attributed to Burroughs — but not “by Burroughs,” for (with the exception of one text, to which I will return) almost every word that appears above his name is itself attributed to other sources. Unlike Gysin, Burroughs did not juxtapose his first cut-up texts with any explicit polemical statement or set of instructions, and it would be another six months before he would publicly identify his method with Tzara’s and credit Tzara (rather than Lautréamont) with the maxim “Poetry is for everyone” (Third Mind 31). This delayed identification is a measure of the larger priority Burroughs gave to offering exemplary work over and above a theory of his practice or the practice of theory; the development of a cut-up poetics would follow from, be produced by, and closely resemble, the actual results of his methods.

What then of the texts themselves in Minutes to Go; do they confirm the prevailing view of the relation between Burroughs and Tzara, namely that “the cut-up begins as an exercise in negativity, as a kind of Dadaist destruction” (Lydenberg 48)? Following the formula of Tzara’s “To Make a Dadaist Poem” (“Take a newspaper. Take some scissors” (39)), as well as Gysin’s accidental re-discovery of the method forty years later, Burroughs worked specifically on newspaper articles, and used them as the basis for eleven of his sixteen texts. Significantly, even this subset is too heterogeneous in form to tell the methods of composition used, and the only certainty is that these texts could not all have been produced according to Burroughs’ own, much-cited “how-to” description. Four of these texts are set out as more or less continuous prose, the rest in stanzas of irregular length — and in one case (“FROM SAN DIEGO UP TO MAINE”) there is both a prose text and a reworked version set in stanzas. The stanza layout appears to imply a poetic intent, and an affinity with such previous uses of newspaper material as the “readymade” i-Zeichnungen and i-Gedichte texts of Kurt Schwitters; but I would argue that the details given of the source texts (“NEW CLUES TO CANCER CURES / Saturday Evening Post / October 31, 1959″ (18), and so on) redirect attention from the form towards the transformations of a specific content.

Indeed, while one text cuts up a recent article on the Beat Generation, and two cut up articles on juvenile delinquency, the other eight all rework articles on a single theme; the latest developments in cancer, gene, and virus research. We don’t need to know where Burroughs would take this material to see that the selection in Minutes to Go is recognisably strategic, indicating both that a predetermined set of issues preceded the indeterminate results, and that there must be a continuity between subject matter and methodology; if scientific material defines the most appropriate content of Burroughs’ experimental method, we might infer from this the scientific form of his experiment. Certainly, it would be difficult to advance precise textual interpretation or aesthetic evaluation of a piece like “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” (15):

Cancer tests… brown blood.. live babies.. proof of virus. vacine? Bio-control the London conference.. it was out sheep cattle and animals have wild system…. Blood time brown blood.

You could say that further interpretation is simply not possible; but the cumulative effect of such texts, enhanced by repetition of words and phrases across several of them, is still clear enough; to invite us to infer a calculated relation between language and the genetic code, twin deterministic systems subject here to systematic scrambling by the use of chance procedures. In this light, phrases such as “Cancer tests” and “wild system” take on meaning, but the closest Burroughs comes to making a direct statement to this effect in Minutes to Go — “In THEE beginning was THE word.. The word was a virus..” (59) — is still minimal and oblique. The conclusion has to be that texts such as “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” remain cryptic the better to exemplify a practice that must, in order to do its work, take priority over a fully coherent thesis. Or to put this the other way, a proselytising polemic, an authoritative statement of theory, would have pre-empted and therefore invalidated the logic of the methods themselves, and it was above all the methods that constituted the cut-up project.

What’s immediately apparent is how little Burroughs’ texts have in common with that of Tzara’s. In fact, the relation of theory to textual practice in Minutes to Go is precisely the reverse of that found in his “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” a set of instructions that actually preceded (by two months) publication of
his own exemplary text — an example that would remain the only one he ever produced according to his own method.⁴ Typical of both the Dada written manifesto and the épatisme of his own public manifestations, Tzara’s recipe for composing poetry flaunts a deliberate mismatch between practical steps and claims for the results: the material is to be selected according to the “length you want to make your poem,” not by its content, while the outcome, after gently shaking the cut-out words and transcribing them, is a poem that will prove you are “an infinitely original author of charming sensibility” (39). Tzara’s formula for making poetry out of newspaper clippings was an ironic, anti-aesthetic manifesto stratagem, a performance trick rather than a creative blue-print, whereas Burroughs produced multiple material examples of newspaper-based texts and fully intended that others do likewise. The creativity of these texts is not bound to the aesthetic criterion of quality,⁵ but nor are they “negativistic” in the vein of “Dadaist destruction”; operating in a clearly calculated thematic context and offered for practical use, their creativity functions according to experimental values of surprise, transformation, and discovery. Are these values scientific or poetic? As Ian MacFadyen argues, you could say that Burroughs produced scientific results from artistic intentions, but equally that “his scientism led to extraordinary artistic results” (33).

Burroughs’ use of chance factors was never an end in itself, as it was for Tzara, and was too pragmatic to be bound by rigid precepts (as, for example, automatic writing was for Breton) so that, while it was often a hit or miss affair, his experiments remained open, and committed to, enormous variation. Burroughs claimed that the results in Minutes to Go were presented intact, but the precise selection of the source material already pointed the way for his use of chance as a middle-term, opening up possibilities for further dialectical development that he would explore for the best part of a decade. Tzara, in short, had not done it “all before.”

Real Rimbaud Poems

“A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images — real Rimbaud images — but new ones” (Paris Review 154). As with Burroughs’ citations of Tzara, these lines, and others like them from “The Exterminator” and “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” have been routinely quoted without question, often even without context; without, that is, establishing the appeal and status of Rimbaud (for the Beat circle in postwar America, and in French avant-garde culture during the early 1960s), or the influence of Rimbaud on Burroughs’ work. In Minutes to Go, Rimbaud’s position is uniquely privileged, with three pages given over to two texts based on “A une raison,” taken from Les Illuminations. Before considering the significance of Rimbaud’s unique status here, one matched in Burroughs’ more polemical pieces, we have to ask what relation these texts demonstrate to Burroughs’ recycled claims that you can “recognize Rimbaud cut-up as Rimbaud” (Third Mind 71) and, “Cut Rimbaud’s words and you are assured of good poetry” (32). The answer is immediately apparent from the start of the first of the two texts in Minutes to Go (23):

EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD”

A rap of
Sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the time to you

From such fragments could anybody identify the source poem? Or recognise Rimbaud? Is this — good or bad — poetry at all? The absolute mismatch between Burroughs’ claims and the texts in Minutes to Go should prompt us to ask quite different questions: what is the relation between these cut-ups of Rimbaud and Burroughs’ cut-ups of newspaper articles? and what is the real significance of associating Rimbaud so emphatically with the cut-up enterprise?

The juxtaposition of these two texts with others created by cutting up newspaper articles might be taken as a statement about the equality of cultural materials, a position that has a long tradition in avant-garde collage-based work. But, while the cut-up Rimbaud poems do resemble the more fragmented of those based on newspapers, so asserting the basic materiality of language, there is a crucial difference. As with the newspaper cut-ups, both these texts end with a note that identifies the source text, but here it is followed by another line: “Words by Rimbaud, arrangement by Burroughs and Corso” (23). There are several things to say about this. Firstly, the term “arrangement” clearly denotes a design, the exercise of control, and so contradicts the assumption of materials presented entirely intact. Secondly, while the result is not offered as itself a poem, this description of creative process clearly maintains a distinction between the use of Rimbaud’s poem and anonymously authored journalism. More than that, it indicates a complex activity of collaboration: these are the only texts credited to two poetic practitioners, while Rimbaud is in effect recruited as a third collaborator (or a fifth, if you consider Minutes to Go as a whole). The result is a very particular act of hommage, one that has nothing to do with imitating Rimbaud’s style or creating “good poetry,” any more than it has with Dadaist destruction and the negation of poetry. Rather, it has to do with the cryptic invocation of a precise thematic relation and the practice of a particular poetics.

Identifying the source text as “A une raison,” Burroughs allows — invites — us to re-read the original in light of the new context he created for it, and vice-versa. The key line is clear at once: “Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps” (“Change our fate, overcome the plague, and begin with time”) (Rimbaud 246, 247). Now we can not only recognise the words but see the felicitous significance of the line “Our lots con” in Burroughs’ text. In “The Exterminator” he would make fully explicit this covert alliance between his method and Rimbaud’s revolutionary call to abolish reason and escape time by deconstructing the “con” of language: “See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines Keep Thee in Slots . . . The Word Lines keep you in Time . . . Cut the in lines” (Third Mind 71). Likewise in “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs invokes Rimbaud’s “colour vowels” (which he would use later in 1960 as the structural principle for the first edition of The Soft Machine) and his “systematic derangement of the senses” (32). However, the crucial fact remains that the cut-ups of Rimbaud’s poem in Minutes to Go do not themselves reproduce such a visionary poetics. The significance of this failure is twofold.

Firstly, as Burroughs must have known, Rimbaud was accorded a special place not only in Surrealist poetics but in historical definitions of collage, such as that given by Max Ernst: “Simple hallucination, in the words of Rimbaud . . . visual alchemy” (126). No coincidence that Gysin, who had worked with Ernst, should begin Minutes to Go with the words, “the hallucinated have come to tell you” (3), or that Burroughs should take the visionary figure literally by identifying Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens as the “place of mescaline hallucination” (Third Mind 32). However, Ernst also stressed that collage was an “alchemical composition of two or more heterogeneous elements” (Ernst 130; my emphasis); in other words, a technique that visibly combines disparate elements of diverse material origins. On this basis, the re-ordering of a single text does not qualify as a collage procedure. For the same reason, the line “Our lots con” cannot be said to function according to the collage principle of quotation as an act of abbreviated reference. Rather, as a cryptic phrase produced by the scissors, it signals one of the seductive pleasures of cutting up: the anticipation and discovery of messages, endowed with a magical potency or fetish quality precisely because they result from a mechanical procedure. The key feature is this private fascination of the “alchemical” act for the practitioner.

In short, the use of Rimbaud in Minutes to Go is determined by the value accorded the material activity of the method, by the process itself, rather than the reception of its products.⁶ Or as Burroughs put it, in his only use of the term “cut up” here: “ANYONE CAN RECORD WORDS — CUT UP your own hustling myself” (60). This emphasis — also integral to his claims for the therapeutic value of cutting up — was an essential ambition of the first-stage of experiment and was central to its promotion as an available method, one that could fulfil the maxim Burroughs attributed to Tzara: “Say it again: ‘Poetry is for everyone.’ Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place” (Third Mind 31).

This brings us to the second point, and to a conclusion. What Burroughs meant by being “in Rimbaud’s place” combined two quite different, even contradictory principles. If the first had to do with the material process of cutting up, as evidenced in Minutes to Go, the second had to do with the content and arrangement of the material, and would be demonstrated in his cut-up novels — texts that did, progressively and on a massive scale, fulfil the collage principle of combining and juxtaposing elements taken from diverse origins. This disposition is anticipated in Burroughs’ exceptional text, “REACTIVE AGENT TAPE CUT BY LEE THE AGENT IN INTERZONE.” This alone cites no sources, but familiarity with Burroughs’ work enables us to recognise lines from The Naked Lunch and other, at that time unpublished, manuscripts, which are cut up to produce a collage of phrases and images that approximates the density, rhythmic measure, and uncanny effect of déjà-vu characteristic of the cut-up novels.

Some six months after Minutes to Go, Burroughs would tell Ginsberg: “I find cut-ups most immediately workable on poetic prose image writing like Rimbaud, St. Perse and Your Correspondent.”⁷ What’s curious about this is that such an understanding ought to have been already clear to Burroughs, since he had achieved something very like it seven years earlier, in the “Composite City” section of The Yage Letters. A variation upon both the “Villes” of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and St. John Perse’s Anabasis, this phantasmagoria, which is motivated by the intense sensual derangement of yagé intoxication, is itself a composite text; for it not only reproduces the elliptical mosaics of imagery and long, densely rhythmic catalogues of Rimbaud and St. John Perse, but does so by recycling and transforming material that appeared earlier in Burroughs’ own text.⁸ As an exercise in “poetic prose image writing,” this was a model that Burroughs, in effect, went back to after Minutes to Go, now armed with a pair of scissors.

In Minutes to Go itself, “poetry” is not understood in terms of words on the page but as the “place” reached by a particular use of chance operations on pre-existing words, and this place is both unknown and where certain things can be seen, precisely because the outcome of the activity cannot be fore-seen. In sum, it was as a method, to be grasped by doing, not as a content to be understood by interpretation, that Burroughs both saw and demonstrated the relation of cut-ups to Rimbaud’s own definition of poetry: “I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses” (303).

While he worked intensively on his trilogy, Burroughs gave less attention to promoting his methods in terms of the practitioner’s active experience, which required simple techniques and short texts. With this shift came more poetic possibilities for the reader to experience, and in a sense the trilogy’s more complex effects were a response to that very shift, a solution to what one critic identified as the “problematics of reading cutups without actual cutup experience” (Géfin 95). The emphatic critical focus on Burroughs’ trilogy assumes that Minutes to Go was abandoned as a dead-end.⁹ But it would be well to recall the full context of John Cage’s definition of an experiment “as an act the outcome of which is unknown”; “providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure” (13). The verdict that Minutes to Go was a false-start misunderstands the evolutionary logic of Burroughs’ procedures that started in 1960, experimental procedures based on trial and error, repetition and variation, multiple functions and provisional results.

Five years later, Ginsberg observed that, since “a page of his prose is as dense with imagery as anything in St. John Perse or Rimbaud,” you could say that “Burroughs is a poet too, really” (Paris Review 320). Ginsberg therefore anticipated the fate of the poetics that cut Rimbaud up with Tristan Tzara, since, like everyone else after him, he was not thinking of Minutes to Go.

Notes

1 Burroughs’ text, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” appeared alongside pieces by these and other poets in the “cut-up” issue of C magazine (February 14 1965), 1.10.

2 For one of the very few articles to analyze such texts, see Skau. Even Laszlo Géfin, who contextualizes cut-up methods within historical collage practices, fails to deal with any specific texts.

3 Gérard-Georges Lemaire identified Tzara as one of cut-ups’ “distant ancestors” (Third Mind 14); Noëlle Batt has observed that “the two moves are decisively differentiated on the one hand in terms of the spirit in which they were undertaken, and on the other hand in terms of the productive power they demonstrated” (14; my translation); and Barry Miles notes that “the circumstances were entirely different” (196) — that these are the most rigorous engagements in Burroughs criticism suggests the scale of the problem.

4 In fact, Tzara had recently practiced similar chance cannibalizations, but applied to his earlier symbolist poetry and done with the aim of negating its poetic and personal expression. See Browning.

5 Jeff Nuttall, who published many of Burroughs’ short newspaper layout texts in the mid-1960s, specifically presented them defined against the “aesthetic frame of reference and intention” that determined “the classic cutups of Tzara and Schwitters” (“Nut Note on the Column Cutup Thing,” My Own Mag, 15 (April 1966), 15).

6 Writing to the publisher of The Exterminator, in July 1960 Burroughs even proposed a variant of the cadavres exquis of the Surrealists (“Perhaps a game would do it. Like, say four people each write a page on any subject comes to mind. Then cut and rearrange. With squared paper and the cut lines drawn you dig.”), further evidence of the priority given to soliciting practice, over and above consumption of Burroughs’ own results (Burroughs to David Hazelwood, July 26 1960 (University of California)).

7 Burroughs to Ginsberg, September 5 1960 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

8 For a more detailed analysis, see my William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003).

9 On this basis, you might as well say that the trilogy failed, since Burroughs published some two hundred short texts between Nova Express in 1964 and his next novel, The Wild Boys in 1969. Given the nature of his experiments, short texts were better suited to the cut-up project, so that Burroughs’ constant revisions of his trilogy — three titles, but six different editions — can be seen as a rather desperate attempt to apply this very logic to his novels.

Works Cited

Batt, Noëlle. “Rupture et déplacement dans l’oeuvre de William Burroughs.” Revue Française d’Études Américanes 1 (April 1976): 12-21.

Browning, Gordon Frederick. Tristan Tzara: The Genesis of the Dada Poem, or from Dada to Aa. Stuttgart: Akaemischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1979.

Burroughs, William. Interview with Conrad Knickerbocker. The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 143-174.

— The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963; 1975.

Burroughs, William, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin. Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities, 1960.

Burroughs, William, and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. London: John Calder, 1979.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, 1971.

Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting.” In Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970: 118-34.

Géfin, Laszlo. “Collage, Theory, Reception, and the Cutups of William Burroughs.” Literature and the Other Arts 13 (1987): 91-100.

Ginsberg, Allen. Interview with Thomas Clark. Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 279-320.

Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1987.

MacFadyen, Ian. “Machine Dreams, Optical Toys and Mechanical Boys.” In Flickers of the Dreamachine, ed. Paul Cecil. Hove: Codex, 1996: 21-48.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Skau, Michael. “The Central Verbal System: The Prose of William Burroughs.” Style 15 (1981): 401-14.

Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: John Calder, 1977.

Presentation by Oliver Harris during Naked Lunch @ 50

San Francisco Art Institute, 20 November 2009

Professor Harris did not give this talk in person but sent a PowerPoint and mp3 audio file. You can listen to the talk by downloading the mp3 (13.8 MB).

I’d like to begin by thanking Peter Maravelis and Jonah Raskin for inviting me to join in tonight’s events and to the San Francisco Art Institute for hosting them — I just wish I could be with you in person and not as a disembodied voice and this snapshot taken on my last visit to the city about 18 months ago.

We’re here to mark the half-century of Naked Lunch, one book that has no need to lie about its age. And it’s been a wonderful six months for such celebrations, which started back in July in Paris, the city where Naked Lunch was first published, with four days of events including the book launch of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays which I co-edited with Ian MacFadyen. Since July, the celebrations have moved westwards with several events in England, and then in Lawrence, Kansas, Chicago, New York, Iowa City and now, finally, the Paris of the Pacific…

As for Naked Lunch itself, as I said, this is one book that simply does not seem to show its age. In these barbarous and apocalyptic times, Burroughs’ book is still as relevant as ever — still as appalling and as inspiring, as beautiful and as ugly, as funny, as prophetic, and as perplexing. But we know all this, and I don’t want to spend the next few minutes only talking in clichés. Instead, I want to tell a particular part of its back-story, a history of its coming into being that is specifically relevant to the event taking place right here right now… To some, much of it will be familiar, but I hope there will be something new in it for everyone.

Philadelphia, Chicago, Peoria, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City, Istanbul, Sioux Falls, East St Louis, Kansas City, Malmo, Tangier, Houston, Lake Charles, Tamuzanchale, Butte, Cuernevaca, Taxco, Edinburgh, Gibraltar, Yokohama, Teheran, Addis Ababa, Shanghai, Esmeraldas, Helsinki, Seattle, Capetown, Zanzibar, New York, the Hague, Aleppo, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Paris, Lexington, Cairo, Mecca, Los Angeles, Timbuctu, Stockholm, Cincinnati, Pasto, Venice, Dallas, Beirut, Texarkana, Tierra del Fuego, Panama City, David, Darien, and Madrid — not to mention Cunt Lick, Texas, and Interzone — in order of their appearance, these are the towns and cities Burroughs names in Naked Lunch — and San Francisco is not among them.

Now of course, Naked Lunch is closely associated with a number of specific places:

Working backwards from Paris, where it was first published and where Burroughs lived in the so-called Beat Hotel while he completed the manuscript and assembled the book — to Tangier, where he lived for four years while writing the great bulk of it — to Mexico and Latin America where he gathered key ingredients of his lunch in the early 1950s — back to New York City, where he had lived in the mid-’40s and where the opening and closing scenes of the narrative are set.

It’s a simple biographical fact of life that Burroughs never set foot in San Francisco until the mid-1970s — although at one crucial point he was California-bound. That was in the fall of 1954 when Burroughs left Tangier intending to move in with Allen Ginsberg, who had just settled in North Beach. But since Burroughs was obsessed with him at that time, this was the very last thing Ginsberg wanted. And, because Ginsberg was the only reason Burroughs was heading west or returning to America in the first place, he never made it further than New York City. Instead, Burroughs returned to Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch, whose routines — those comic-grotesque tours de force like the Talking Asshole — emerged out of the love-sick letters Burroughs mailed back to Ginsberg, an ocean and a continent away.

In other words, had Ginsberg not put Burroughs off coming to San Francisco, had Burroughs not been forced to write at long distance and in the absence of the reader he desired, then Naked Lunch would never have been written at all — certainly not in the form as we now know it. . .

But the connection between the city and the book isn’t only defined by negatives and absence. Indeed, on one important occasion, it was defined by a kind of fantasy presence:

This is the Spring 1958 issue of the Chicago Review, which printed what would, a year later, appear as the opening pages of the book published as Naked Lunch. The little magazine history of part-publication is as complicated as it is interesting and significant, but this was the first true part of Burroughs’ book to be published, and, as you can see from the cover, as well as the Chicago connection — as the place of publication — and the New York connection — as the setting for this opening part of the text — there is a San Francisco connection, since Burroughs is billed top of a list of Ten San Francisco poets that included Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure.

To which the only possible response would seem to be — wrong! Burroughs wasn’t a poet and he had nothing to do with either San Francisco or the poetry Renaissance then under way. Allen Ginsberg may not have been a native, but he lived in the city, wrote in the city, and read out the first draft of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery. Likewise, Kerouac was an Easterner but he also wrote about the Bay Area, and did enough to deserve having an alleyway named after him adjacent to City Lights — but Burroughs, as would so often be the case, did not belong in such company, did not fit, and the connection is way off the mark.

However, in Spring 1958 there WAS an important bridge between Burroughs and San Francisco in relation to Naked Lunch.

First of all, Michael McClure read the section that appeared in Chicago Review and that April reported to Ginsberg that he liked it “very, very much. It is so great I have new eyes now.”

McClure was so impressed, a couple of months afterwards he offered a part of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch manuscripts to Wallace Berman, which is how Semina came to publish a passage from the “Have You Seen Pantapon Rose?” section.

Also in Spring 1958, just a few days before McClure was enthusing over the Chicago Review material, Burroughs wrote, from Paris, to offer Lawrence Ferlinghetti first crack at Naked Lunch.

Well, not exactly first crack actually, since Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press had already turned a manuscript down. In fact, Ferlinghetti had been waiting impatiently for some time, worrying that Grove Press or New Directions would skim the cream off it, but when he saw what Burroughs sent him this Spring of 1958 and suggested he use — a selection of about 60 pages, barely a quarter of the published book — he turned it down. Why?

Because, as he put it in a reply to Ginsberg that May: no bookseller would dare to distribute “the flow of junk and jizzom.” Allen Ginsberg — who had been the middle man in this, as he had been in so much involving Burroughs’ writing during the 1950s — wrote back to say that he and Burroughs had made selections to water the text down and get by the censor, but still Ferlinghetti was un-persuaded. A month later, he said that trying to publish it would be “sure premeditated legal lunacy.”

Six months further on, Ferlinghetti had another chance to publish a different selection of material from Naked Lunch -– again, about 60 pages, this time the contents of the banned Winter 1958 issue of Chicago Review — and again he turned the chance down.

The obscenity just wasn’t worth the court case, and of course, having lately gone through the “Howl” trial, the publisher of City Lights Books was in a good position to know.

So far, so negative: it looked like San Francisco just didn’t dig Burroughs enough and vice versa. And although Maurice Girodias would change his mind in the summer of 1959, and would exploit the succès de scandale caused by the magazine part-publication of Naked Lunch, Ferlinghetti stuck by his guns.

Right or wrong, that decision decisively shaped the book we know by default. And that’s because the final form of Naked Lunch was a matter of timing — and had it been taken on by a different publisher or simply been assembled a little earlier or a little later, the text of Burroughs’ unstable, constantly changing work-in-progress would have ended up quite differently.

However, the relation between Naked Lunch and San Francisco isn’t just the story of near misses and missed opportunities — for Ferlinghetti was drawn to a very particular part of Burroughs’ material:

Writing in June ’58, he singles out what he identifies as the Visionary Yage City or the Composite City — as at the heart of everything.

Far from coincidentally, this would also be the section that Robert Creeley saw as the centre of Naked Lunch — in 1959 regretting there wasn’t more of it that made the final cut, having helped get a key part of this material published in 1957 in Black Mountain Review:

As should be clear from the heading under which it was published — “Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” — this material overlapped what would become two separate books: Naked Lunch in 1959 and, four years later, The Yage Letters.

Burroughs defined the Amazonian hallucinogen as “space-time travel.” These two elements would be so central to Burroughs — the visionary dimension, and the movement in all directions through space and time — and they’re particularly fascinating with regard to both Naked Lunch and its San Francisco connection for two reasons.

Firstly, the Composite City vision goes together with a composite text –

quite literally, as we can see from sections of Burroughs’ extraordinary “Yage” manuscript held at Stanford University: Here we can see the actual cutting and pasting of multiple manuscript pages and their recombination and transformation. Burroughs recognised the visual and material dimension to what he was doing, as we can also see from these –

composites of photographs he took in South America, which set the precedent for the photomontages he made at the time of completing Naked Lunch — another composite of manuscript pieces. I’ll come back to the relevance to San Francisco of this key notion of the Composite Text in just a moment.

Secondly, there is Burroughs’ idea of the Composite City which was originally defined as part New York, part Mexico City and — crucially for what I’m talking about — “part Lima which I had not seen at this time”. This Composite city goes together with the composite text — the text created from multiple materials and sources — and with the visionary promise of the hallucinogenic vine itself, since those who take the drug are — as Burroughs noted in the same letter — reputed to see visions of cities to which they have never been: prophetic, future cities.

San Francisco was not a part of Burroughs’ Composite City but it is absolutely fitting that some of the major poets then based in the Bay Area — Ferlinghetti, McClure, and Creeley — should have responded so enthusiastically to this specific material in Naked Lunch, rather than, perhaps, to the junk and the jizzom. This is not to minimize the importance of heroin and homosexuality to Burroughs’ book, but rather to play up the vital poetic centre of it — the lyricism at its visionary core — which — as Allen Ginsberg would repeatedly say when pushing his friend’s work during the 1950s — was on a par with anything in the visionary poetry of Rimbaud or St John Perse.

Here indeed we see Burroughs in fall 1953, while staying with Ginsberg in New York, reading the just published edition of St. Perse’s WINDS or VENTS while they worked together on editing Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript.

Well, the point I want to make is simply this: that even though Naked Lunch didn’t get published 50 years ago by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, but was printed 5000 miles away in Paris by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, and even though Burroughs didn’t even come to the city until the mid-1970s and didn’t imaginatively include it within his book’s visionary geography, nevertheless San Francisco did recognise and embrace the poetic, visionary heart of Naked Lunch — a dimension too often overlooked.

The connection would be fixed in print in 1963 when City Lights did publish The Yage Letters — which I had the privilege of re-editing just a couple of years ago, a project requiring many wonderful hours of archival work in the collections of Berkeley and Stanford.

And finally, one last, rather more roundabout, but entirely Burroughsian connection, which brings me back to the title of my talk: the Frisco Kid, he never returns –

This is not a reference to the 1930s film starring James Cagney, set on the old Barbary Coast in the days of the Gold Rush, nor anything to do with the 1970s book about life in North Beach by Jerry Kamstra.

No: a year after City Lights published The Yage Letters, a short Burroughs piece appeared entitled “Composite Text.” This was published in the first issue of Bulletin from Nothing –

a magazine printed in San Francisco by Charles Plymell and featuring work from, among others associated with City Lights, Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu. As Jed Birmingham, an expert on Burroughs’ little magazine history, has commented, in this issue, “Burroughs had made himself a home in the experimental literary scene in San Francisco.”

And as if delivering a cryptic message, resonant in a peculiarly Burroughsian poetic way, one of the key recurrent phrases in Burroughs’ Composite Text is none other than — The Frisco Kid, he never returns

And so, while you might say that Burroughs never returns to Frisco because he was never there in the first place, at the same time it seems absolutely right for the curious absence-in-presence that was the key to his writing of Naked Lunch fifty years ago and, I think, to our experience of reading it ever since. Like Burroughs himself, Naked Lunch keeps on never returning, keeps on luring us back to see new visions, with new eyes, and yet somehow always remains a haunting and elusive presence … a ghost in daylight… The Frisco Kid, he never returns . . . And on that note, I take my bow … Happy birthday Naked Lunch and thank you, San Francisco!

Keynote Address given by Oliver Harris during Naked Lunch @ 50

Columbia University, 9 October 2009

Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and fence-straddlers…. I’d like to start with a series of thanks: to Gerald Cloud, Librarian for Reference and Research, for organising today’s talks here at Columbia, and for curating, together with colleagues at the Butler Library, the excellent exhibition up there; to Michael Ryan, Director of the Rare Books and Manuscript department, for so warmly embracing the idea of putting Columbia centre-stage in these anniversary events, which we first discussed some two years ago; and to the organisers of the other special events in the city this week — to Keith Seward for arranging and hosting the terrific evening of readings at the St. Marks Poetry Project on Wednesday; to Marvin Taylor for arranging the panel discussion at the Fayles Library yesterday; and, looking ahead to the finale tomorrow, Regina Weinreich, of the School of Visual Arts, for a day of film-screenings and live performances. To all of them I tip my hat.

We’re here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. We all know the danger of 50th birthday parties — everyone pretending to be younger than they are — but the great thing about Burroughs’ book, one of the signs of what makes it so special, is that it has not aged, that it is still every bit as ferocious and as funny, as ugly, beautiful, offensive and original as it was half a century ago. It is certainly no coincidence that its year of publication, 1959, was itself a special year — indeed, according to the title of Fred Kaplan’s recent book, it was The Year Everything Changed. Kaplan runs through the scientific, political, and artistic milestones and landmarks that made 1959 a turning point in modern history: from Castro’s revolution in Cuba, to the development of the birth control pill and the microchip; from the opening of the Guggenheim Museum or the release of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, to the publication by Grove Press of the uncut Lady Chatterly’s Lover and (although not strictly a “landmark” and so not in Kaplan’s book) my own personal favourite, the release just a couple of weeks after Naked Lunch came out of Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful North by Northwest.

What I especially like about Hitchcock’s film is the way it identifies, with a light but biting comic touch, Modern Man as a Mad Avenue Man, a cipher all at sea and on the run in a world of images of his own making. Saul Bass’s great opening title sequence, perfectly scored by Bernard Hermann, show us a frenetic world of constant motion, a mass of geometric lines all crisscrossing into which we are chaotically plunged. And this is a reminder that Naked Lunch begins in similar fashion — plunging us into a fast-moving world with William Lee making a rube out of the “advertising exec type fruit” who holds the door for him as he boards an uptown A train from Washington Square Station. And of course Naked Lunch doesn’t only begin in New York City; it ends here, too, with the shoot-out of detectives Hauser and O’Brien in a hotel located at 103rd Street and Broadway, only a dozen blocks away from where we are right now.

But in the case of Naked Lunch we shouldn’t be too literal in how we think about its location in space and time, because this is a book we have to take on at an angle, obliquely. So, rather than going back 50 years, I want to start by going back more like 500, and travelling almost 5000 miles — to 1533 and Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors.

Warning Warning Warning

What do we see? The two ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII, and around them a scene of realistically painted objects, symbolising wealth and power, artistic, spiritual, and scientific progress, global exploration, and so on. This would be a fully coherent picture — a confident world confidently represented — if only we could ignore that… that thing … the disgusting, dirty stain, the unpleasant brown smear that cuts across the lower part of the picture, weirdly floating in a space of its own near their feet. This ugly slash is like an act of vandalism, gleefully mocking and violating the sober, confidently ordered realism of the scene. And what is this unwelcome and unsettling thing? The riddle remains until we turn away and look back with a sideways glance. Now, now that the figures and their setting are a blurry mess, all of a sudden we recognise the blot is … William Burroughs.

Of course, Holbein actually painted an anamorphic skull, but my point is we could say this is Burroughs; that he is the death’s head spoiling the group portrait of American literature, and Naked Lunch is a blot on the literary landscape, a stain on the canon of not only mainstream realist fiction but of postmodern fiction, too. Naked Lunch just doesn’t fit, is neither properly in nor out of the picture, neither comfortably inside the canon nor comfortably absent from it.

And if we take the skull analogy literally, we might say that Burroughs functions as a memento mori for literature as well as for life, and this is certainly how he has often been represented: think of his famous pose in Paris, around the time of Naked Lunch‘s publication, beside the word DANGER, or his appearance in Gregory Corso’s The American Express (1961) as “Mr D,” who stands for “danger, disaster, death!”

This is the urgent, polemical Burroughs, at its most emphatic in the title of a piece in My Own Mag from 1964: “Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning.” That same year, on the American publication of Naked Lunch, Marshall McLuhan saw Burroughs’ key role as admonitory, arguing that to criticise his books as books is “a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.”

But as well as taking it politically — and seeing Naked Lunch as a didactic wake-up call — we can also take the death’s head image poetically, or formally, in terms of the anamorphic distortion itself. In other words, on the one hand it’s a black joke against interpretation: when we do make sense of the stain, it turns out to spell (our) D-E-A-T-H. On the other hand, working out the meaning of the stain misses the point, for what the ugly mess in Holbein’s picture does is to call into question our ability to see, by forcing us to face the limitations of our comfortable, seemingly natural, standard point of view — a perspective that must rule out some essential truth (i.e., death) in order to remain an orderly, coherent picture.

So we might see this blot as a kind of hallucinatory vision in the tradition of Rimbaud, with his poetics of obscurity and his project to disorder all the senses. And while this blot may at first appear formless, the ugly opposite to form, if we change our point of view we come to recognise a different order of form. In the case of Naked Lunch, we can surely say that this is one of its functions: to wrench us out of a previously comfortable and innocent viewpoint to reveal what we couldn’t, or didn’t want, to see. “If man can see…”

Paradoxically, we now face the opposite but equal danger — for when we can see Burroughs clearly, when we have begun to make sense out of Naked Lunch while everything else seems stupid-looking, what we’ve lost is that very challenge to comprehension, the very physical disturbance and offence that defines the stain’s unsettling relation to the rest of the picture.

Naked Lunch is not just a stain, but to forget that it is a stain — an offensive spoiling of the official picture and of standard codes of representation — is as big a mistake as being unable to see that there is more to it. That is to say, we must not lose sight of the materiality of the text, a materiality that indelibly stains our senses. And this is where Dame Edith Sitwell comes in.

Genetic Myths

Sitwell joined in the famous TLS correspondence that followed publication of Naked Lunch by John Calder in Great Britain in 1963, at a time when Naked Lunch was dismissed as “literary sewage,” “merest trash not worth a second glance”: “Glug… glug. It tastes disgusting.” Such responses may have been entirely negative, but they were still properly visceral reactions to Burroughs’ visceral writing. In Sitwell’s put down: “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories.”

Sitwell’s nose, however, sniffs the junky as much as the junk, the dirty writer as well as his dirty book. That the two are effectively one is a reminder that, for the great majority, Naked Lunch is inseparable from William Burroughs. As with Kerouac and On the Road, the Biographical Fallacy reigns supreme — with all the obvious dangers of judging the book not in terms of the text in hand, but in terms of the man behind it. The book is seen as just a by-product of the writer’s life — or, for Edith Sitwell, his lavatory.

This takes us deep into Myth territory — into the endlessly circulated legends of how Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, which have over fifty years become as much a part of the novel as the text “itself.” In this area of mythmaking and mystification, Burroughs himself played a crucial part, most obviously in the “Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness” that has been an introduction to almost every edition of Naked Lunch, except the very first — the Olympia edition of 1959, which lacked this text — and the most recent — the restored edition of Miles and Grauerholz in 2003, which moved the “Deposition” to the back of the book.

The image of Burroughs as zonked out on junk, taking his “notes on sickness and delirium,” has either mediated readings of Naked Lunch or completely replaced it for the many who only know of the book, or who started it only to give up once past the “Deposition.”

The image of the stoned writer is, in its apparent repudiation of conscious authorship, a paradoxical assertion of the biographical author. But it is at one with the other key genetic accounts — the oft-repeated stories of Burroughs’ collaborations with Kerouac and Ginsberg in Tangier and of how Naked Lunch was assembled in a rush in Paris, the order of its parts resulting arbitrarily from how the printers at Olympia Press returned the galley sections to Burroughs.

What should we do about these genetic myths? One response would be to ignore them — to focus instead on the actual text of the book, and to stop looking beyond it to the man behind. In the “Deposition,” Burroughs therefore perversely reveals himself only to then insist, like the exposed wizard in The Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

The other answer would be to replace the myths with more accurate and detailed scholarly accounts, so that less people see Naked Lunch as the ravings of a junky or a random mess. But the situation is not so simple.

First, because the small print won’t take back what the big print giveth: the “Deposition” may have been moved, but the stable door has been bolted long after the horse ran away. And second, because the story of how Naked Lunch was written is a part of the story, and has been there from the very start, for a reason. Both the myths and a more scholarly material approach matter because they each answer to a genuine need. And that’s because it’s impossible to read Naked Lunch without some sort of genetic hypothesis, which is needed to hold together a book that seems constantly to spill off the page in all directions — as it redundantly tells us. Burroughs’ “Deposition” answers that question even before it has arisen, and, although his claim that the text consists of the author’s notes on junk sickness actually answers very little — if anything, makes the book that follows even more perplexing — it’s been good enough for most readers as a way to carry on.

The third reason why we should not just wish the myths away in favour of the “real” story is that the very notion of a definitive account is really a promise to explain away the text, to get rid of the stain by cleaning everything up, straightening everything out. We always insist on wanting answers, even though Naked Lunch ends by insisting that we’ll never get them, or at least not from Burroughs’ text: “No glot … C’lom Fliday…”

And the final reason is that we shouldn’t throw away any part of Naked Lunch, even ones parasitic upon it — which would include Burroughs’ own “Deposition” — without looking closely at it first. For this is the irony: although the genetic myths have promoted lazy readings of Naked Lunch, they themselves have been very lazily read — repeated a lot, but never closely examined. And so, before looking into Naked Lunch‘s manuscript history, let’s consider the mythic version of Naked Lunch‘s writing as told by that most potent mythmaker of them all: Jack Kerouac.

We begin with sausages — or to be more precise, “bolognas” — which feature in Kerouac’s account of helping Burroughs in Tangier, during spring 1957, turn his mess of writing into a manuscript. This is how Kerouac famously describes his collaboration with “Bull Hubbard” on “Nude Supper” in Desolation Angels (1965):

When I undertook to start typing it neatly double-space for his publishers … I had horrible nightmares … like of pulling out endless bolognas from my mouth, from my very entrails, feet of it, pulling and pulling out all the horror of what Bull saw, and wrote…

There are two things here. Firstly, Kerouac’s notorious nightmares arise not just from reading the text of Naked Lunch but from typing it — and not just from typing it, but from trying to do so “neatly double-space for his publishers.” That is to say, making it into a clean copy — which inevitably recalls all those legends of the manuscript’s disgusting physical condition: blood-stained, the ends of the pages eaten away by rats, etc. This is the context for Kerouac’s nightmares, the paradox of trying to accommodate Burroughs’ toxic writing to the needs of general cultural production, to make Naked Lunch fit for public consumption.

The second thing would be the bolognas themselves. Sausages are, of course, made of the very cheapest cuts, those parts of the animal that are better left unnamed — the otherwise unspeakable and unsalable body parts that make me glad to be a vegetarian. Kerouac’s point, in short, is that Naked Lunch comprises all that is impossible to swallow if you actually see what is on the end of your fork. No mere load of baloney, Kerouac’s sausages make a precise reading of the book’s title.

In fact, if we go back to the handwritten draft of this passage in Kerouac’s original diary — written from Tangier in spring 1957 — rather than take the (summer 1961) text of Desolation Angels — we see more. Calling Burroughs a “Nausea genius,” Kerouac originally dreamed he was “pulling out of my throat long great globs of undigested food wrapt in cold jellied fat.” This is even less appetising, truly nauseous, but again very precise at the verbal level. I don’t know how often Kerouac ever used the term glob, but the word appears several times in Naked Lunch, twice in the Talking Asshole routine — to which I’ll return — and again confirms Kerouac’s description as a direct and detailed response to Burroughs’ work-in-progress.

Kerouac’s vision of Naked Lunch as “undigested food” is also consistent with the speech he attributes to Burroughs just a few lines later in Desolation Angels, where Hubbard says: “I’m shitting out my educated Middlewest background.” This might be read as a kind of response to Edith Sitwell, in the sense that Burroughs’ shit is to be understood as not just his own but that of his culture.

This leads to — the Waring Blender. During the 1950s, increasingly sophisticated kitchen gadgets appeared in more and more American homes, and they also offered symbolic figures for cultural analysis. The blender appears significantly in a letter written to Kerouac, some eight months after his diary notes in Tangier, by James Laughlin of New Directions. Laughlin was writing to Kerouac regarding the problems of publishing Visions of Cody (the closest, for Kerouac, to those posed by Naked Lunch):

It is all part of the mania for pre-digestion which reaches its worst form in the Reader’s Digest. The publisher is supposed to become a kind of Waring Blender so that even adults won’t have to chew anything that is tough. It is all rather sickening.

Burroughs understood, and much of what makes Naked Lunch sickening is its refusal to chew the food for us… Equally, Burroughs’ work would need publishers who didn’t want to clean up what was necessarily dirty, blend to a paste what was hard to stomach — and he would find them in Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, aided and abetted by, among others, Irving Rosenthal, Richard Seaver, and, of course, Allen Ginsberg.

Naked Lunch literally includes this technology for making things easy to swallow, with a specific reference to a (Sunbeam) Mixmaster — American Housewife: “…and the Garbage Disposal Unit snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get under my dress…” More generally, Naked Lunch opposes the world of consumer commodities by being made of everything hard to stomach, and resists consumption formally by being all mixed up by that “Mixmaster” Burroughs, here conjoining and confusing technologies of waste disposal and food preparation in a typical gesture designed to disorient the reader.

Taking this theme one step further, in the same month Naked Lunch was published, in Moscow there took place the famous Kitchen Debate, when Vice President Nixon thought he had won the Cold War by trumpeting the American Dream as a triumph of domestic appliances. Significantly, Kruschev had Nixon’s number, lampooning him by asking; “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?” Such a brilliantly Burroughsian retort suggests Kruschev had just read Naked Lunch, echoing Burroughs’ line that “Americans have a special horror of giving up control”: “They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.”

This is also to fix on the central issue of Control, and takes us back to Kerouac in Tangier for the second part of his mythic account of how Naked Lunch was written — this time focusing not on his own typing up of the manuscript, but on Burroughs’ original writing of it.

From Dr. Mabuse To Doc Benway

… sometimes he’d whip out his pen and start scribbling on typewriter pages which he threw over his shoulder when he was through with them, like Doctor Mabuse, till the floor was littered with the strange Etruscan script of his handwriting.

This account of Burroughs writing Naked Lunch is well known, but it was not the first time Kerouac had described the writer at work, and, whether consciously or not, the earlier scene is echoed here. In May 1952, Burroughs was midway through writing Queer when Kerouac walked in on him in his Mexico City apartment, telling Ginsberg: “Bill was like a mad genius in littered rooms. He was writing.” It wasn’t only the litter that Kerouac carried over from the writing of Queer in Mexico to the writing of Naked Lunch in Morocco, but in more complex ways also the vision of Burroughs as “mad genius.” More immediately, we should note that “Etruscan” is, like “glob,” another specific term that turns up in Naked Lunch several times — twice in the repeated and resonant phrase, “doodling in Etruscan.” Again, we observe just how precisely and insightfully Kerouac echoed Burroughs’ manuscript in his account of its writing. But clearly the standout phrase is the name, Doctor Mabuse.

Easily missed, indeed always overlooked, the reference to Mabuse has a depth and breadth of significance quite alien to Kerouac’s often-parodied and apparently cartoonish picture of Burroughs the mad writer of Naked Lunch, littering the floor with scattered pages of his disarrayed manuscript.

Fritz Lang’s two great Mabuse films are richly complex, but in this context I want to highlight two or three points of intersection with Burroughs.

At the end of Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) Mabuse, the criminal genius, hypnotist and master of disguises, man of a thousand faces, goes insane, and the second film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), shows us what happened to him after a decade in the mental asylum under the care of Dr. Baum. Baum explains that after a long period of paralysis, Mabuse begins to make motions with his hand, gestures that imitate the act of writing — so they give him pen and paper and Mabuse begins writing, and doesn’t stop writing. At first, what he writes is “meaningless and confused”; then words appear among the scribbles, and finally text — thirty pages a day — until the floor of his asylum room is covered with pages of the stuff.

Clearly, this is the scene hinted at by Kerouac, the precise visual match connecting Mabuse and Burroughs in terms of automatic writing — which is how Burroughs himself regularly described his writing in his letters during the Tangier years, especially immediately before and after the 1957 visit of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and co.

Now, according to Burroughs’ “Deposition,” the notes apparently taken without memory were reports of “sickness and delirium.” Leaving aside the evident mismatch here — the “sickness” in Naked Lunch is less of the body and more of the body politic — what about the content of Mabuse’s delirious writing? Dr. Baum explains that the master criminal is still plotting crimes — but these are not crimes for profit, but seemingly senseless acts designed to produce total chaos, panic, crisis. Mabuse’s notes add up to a manual of terrorist activities. Among the subversive strikes are attacks against banks and the currency system, the poisoning of water supplies, the spreading of epidemics.

The parallels here with Naked Lunch are surprisingly precise, with echoes in the project of Islam Inc., led by AJ, using Clem and Jody as double agents, and the whole idea of an ambiguous organisation, one whose goals are obscure other than to bring down the system by stirring conflict and spreading confusion.

However, this is only one half of it — no less fascinating than the content of Mabuse’s plans are the form they take. For what makes all this especially relevant is the way his acts are described in his writing and then carried out in the world: by a gang who never meet Mabuse face to face, but get their orders in a room with nothing in it but a curtain, behind which they hear the commands of “the man behind the curtain,” as he is always referred to.

There’s also a general parallel between Mabuse, the shadowy mastermind, and Burroughs, routinely mythologised — above all by Kerouac — as an enigmatic and shadowy figure, never really there, as strange as anything in his fictional world and so seemingly, in a reversal of cause and effect, himself a product of it.

Even more curiously, in Mabuse, when a disaffected member of the gang and his girlfriend go to the room to find and challenge the Man Behind the Curtain, they discover that there is no man behind curtain: just a cardboard cut-out and the technical apparatus for broadcasting text.

In Mabuse, the writer’s voice is always mediated, and instead of physical presence, direct expression, the film emphases transcription and transmission. Mabuse is kept alive through recordings that give voice to his writing, that transmit his message without revealing his identity — a process which carries on even after his death.

As the figure of a writer, Mabuse the man disappears into a writing machine, becomes a medium for the compulsive act of writing, while his words are doubly dictated: seemingly dictated to him as automatic writing, and in turn dictating to others what they must do. Again, there’s an echo in one of the most memorable lines in Desolation Angels, where Kerouac has the Burroughs character declare: “I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I haven’t got my orders clearly decoded yet.”

Like Burroughs’ “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” the “Testament of Dr. Mabuse” questions the presence of the author and the agency of authorship, and sees the legacy of His Master’s Voice as curiously independent of the man himself. In short Mabuse is a film about authorship, about our quest to find the Man Behind It All, and about how writing escapes the hand of the man who wrote it, to take on a life of its own.

I am reminded of a telephone interview from the late 1980s when Burroughs was asked how he saw the relationship between his public image, his body of work, and himself, the actual man — and Burroughs replied: “There is no actual man…”

Contrary to the standard reading of Kerouac’s mythmaking — as lazy, sensationalizing, mystifying accounts — it’s clear that his reference to Mabuse in Desolation Angels is informed by a complex understanding of both Naked Lunch and its authorship — but what of Burroughs himself? Although there’s no record of his ever referring to Lang’s films, the fact that Ginsberg as well as Kerouac cast him in a relation with Mabuse — Ginsberg in 1954 imagining a film to be made about Burroughs in the Mabuse style — makes it very likely Burroughs did know them. Then again, the point here is not source-hunting.

If we turn from Dr. Mabuse to Naked Lunch‘s most famous doctor, Doc Benway, the parallels are quite obvious — Benway, the master “manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems” and expert on “brainwashing and control” who terrorizes the population of Annexia and unleashes total chaos in Freeland.

However, it’s not the obvious parallels that interest me here, but the connections that go back to Kerouac’s invocation of Mabuse; that’s to say, links to authorship and the act of writing.

To begin with, what’s most interesting about Benway is that when we look for him in Naked Lunch, we find he is never really, never fully, there: his face “flickers like a picture moving in and out of focus” while his voice is “a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street.” Benway the doctor is, like Burroughs the writer, as absent as he is present: “I am never here… Never that is fully in possession…”

The most revealing point in Naked Lunch when Benway is absent when presumed present is when he speaks the text’s most famous routine: the Talking Asshole. Because on close inspection this routine about ventriloquism itself ventriloquises Benway — the multiple styles of speech, ranging from German maxims to Shakespeare quotations and antiquated Anglicisms, from hip talk to technical terms, are put in his mouth rather than expressing his “character.”

And if we look at the original letter from 1955 in which Burroughs wrote the routine, we can see there’s a material reason for this: originally, it had nothing to do with Benway — who was only added as its speaker when the routine was fitted into a new frame a year, possibly two years, later. As the original epistolary context makes clear, the routine had instead to do with Burroughs’ control over his own writing. In his letter of February 7 1955 (curiously, Burroughs misdated it 1954), the routine is framed first by Burroughs’ description of how he “smokes some tea” and sits down “and out it comes all in one piece like a glob of spit” — note the echoes of Kerouac’s account in Desolation Angels — and afterwards by the commentary: “It’s almost like automatic writing produced by a hostile, independent entity.”

Burroughs couldn’t be clearer that his routine is a parable of the act of writing. By giving this routine to Doc Benway, Burroughs makes a parallel between the political and creative paradoxes of control, and so invites the comparison to Mabuse.

Now of course, we might say that calling on Burroughs’ letters blurs the distinction between fiction and biography, published text and autobiographical context. However, that is not at all the case — and not just because of how important Burroughs’ letters were to the writing of Naked Lunch (the epistolary medium being the machine that produced his routines), but because the letter form itself was at one point the central structuring device of the novel.

Indeed, in 1955, Burroughs made the Talking Asshole routine as a letter a part of his text, as we can see in this manuscript page, a verbatim copy of the original letter, retyped as the work of William Lee. So at one point, Burroughs intended the routine to appear framed by the original letter context, inviting it to be read in terms of automatic writing and the paradoxical absence / presence of the conscious author.

In the book published in 1959 very little of such material would remain — what there is appears mainly in the “Hospital” section — and in retrospect it’s clear that Burroughs cut such material because, ironically, it looked fake, seemed self-conscious and indulgently literary, in the tradition of Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters.

The Composition of Naked Lunch

The letter format was a plan Burroughs abandoned, as he would all the various schema he sketched to hold his work together; but traces of each structure would survive, making Naked Lunch a palimpsest of materials and methods over a six-year period — and it’s this unlikely and unplanned mixing of schemas and sections that makes Naked Lunch more than the sum of its parts. That history of composition and restructuring has yet to be written, but my hope is that the next 50 years of interest in Naked Lunch will be able to build on an increasingly detailed manuscript history. Certainly, we now have one great advantage — far better archival access, thanks especially to the acquisition of the Burroughs Papers by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

The present task is to build from the ground up, starting with a chronology of Naked Lunch‘s composition so that we can answer such elementary questions as: which parts date from what periods during the six years Burroughs worked on it between 1954 and 1959, and how were these parts revised and reorganised?

Piecing the compositional history together from a combination of sources, some primary and others circumstantial, we arrive at some basic overall statistics, given here as percentages by year, of how much of Naked Lunch was written when. Perhaps the main surprise is to see how little new material — barely 15% — was written during 1958 and 1959 when Burroughs lived at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

Looking at it another way — from the point of view of each individual section within the structure of the published text (based on the Olympia edition) — we see something even more striking. Whereas the first eight and the last eight sections are a mixture of materials dating from all periods of composition, from 1955 to 1959, the middle eight sections — almost a hundred straight pages running from “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” to the “County Clerk” — all date from one single period, and were composed by Spring 1957.

Of course, these are crude models, and since the devil is always in the detail, no more than a point of departure. Now, within this history the single most important document is the one preserved here at Columbia University — the 200-page manuscript of “Interzone,” the one Kerouac, together with Ginsberg and Alan Ansen, helped type up in Tangier between February and June 1957.

There’s only time today to address the most elementary questions about how “Interzone” relates to the book published as Naked Lunch, but we should begin with one thing we know for certain: the sections did not belong in any particular linear sequence. That the running order changed and kept changing is evident from this document, reproduced as endpapers in the Restored edition — although the original at Columbia reveals even more clearly, from the use of pencil, green ink, and two types of blue pen, its multiple histories of revision by revealing this as the work of three different hands and four different occasions.

But the simplest question we need answering about the manuscript of “Interzone” is: how much of it ended up in Naked Lunch — or to put it the other way round, how much of the published book came from this manuscript?

Burroughs once said in conversation with Maurice Girodias that the manuscript he saw and rejected in 1958 was “not even approximately similar” to the book Olympia published in 1959. But precisely how different were they, and in which parts? A basic comparison of manuscript and text looks like this:

What this confirms is not just the percentage of material — 75% of Naked Lunch came from “Interzone” — but its organisation: and the fact that the centre all came from “Interzone” suggests there’s something wrong or at the very least misleading about the claim that the order of the sections was random, determined by the order in which they came back from the printers as galleys. Maybe so, but if so, then clearly the sequence they had been sent to the printer in the first place must have been far from random.

As I say, these are preliminary attempts to explore in detail a complex history. They indicate just how much is left to do, how little progress has been made since the work of manuscript and textual analysis started.

That work began, in fact, with this document, drafted by Allen Ginsberg to compare the “Interzone” manuscript with the 1959 edition. Since this was probably drawn up in either late 1959 or 1960, it shows that the work of analysis is effectively as old as the book itself — further confirmation, were it needed, of the instability of the text, no sooner published than already preparing to find a new form, a new shape.

This is a good place to end, since Ginsberg’s role in the writing and assembling of Naked Lunch was so crucial, and because his table, from 50 years ago, inevitably reminds me of this one:

This list I myself made, when I first came across the manuscript of “Interzone,” here at Columbia, in the old Rare Book and Manuscript reading room (room 800 on the third floor, if my memory serves), way back in 1984. In fact, it was October 1984, and I was here having just that month started my doctoral work on Burroughs — which makes this, to the very month, my silver anniversary as a Burroughs scholar, and it is a great personal honour to be here, 25 years later, among such company to give this keynote.

So, if you will indulge me, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the three Burroughsians I first met 25 years ago and to whom I owe so much. Firstly, Barry Miles, whom I met here in New York in October ’84, and whose scholarly and biographical research into Burroughs and the Beats provided wonderful work for myself and others to build on. Secondly, James Grauerholz, who did so much for Burroughs during the last twenty years of his life, and whom I first met out in Lawrence just before Thanksgiving 1984. James not only introduced me to William Burroughs and encouraged my research but has allowed me the extraordinary privilege of being able to edit Burroughs’ work. And finally, Ian MacFadyen, whom I met in London I think about a year later, and whose co-editing with me of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays is just the tip of a great iceberg of intensely shared Burroughsian passion. To Miles, James, Ian — a tip of my hat.

It seemed right to give Burroughs the last word, but I have to admit that I was looking in vain for a good punchline to tie it all up when, just before flying out here, a punchline found me… I only came across this a few days ago, on a French website: news that 2009 is not only the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch but the golden jubilee of the Institut Benway. Since the late 1950s this thriving medical business has specialized in developing prosthetic organs, products truly worthy of the Benway name, and celebrated now in a series of international conferences.

The Institut Benway is, alas, a fictional company, founded in 2004, the brainchild of Mael Le Mée, a French plastic artist and writer. His Institut is, I would say, a true measure of Burroughs and his Naked Lunch. The book may never be in the “canon” or embraced by the academy, it may remain ambiguously on the margins of “serious” criticism, but it continues to inspire humour that cuts like a drunken doctor’s scalpel. So, a tip of my hat to you, too, in the spirit of Doc Benway.

Birmingham University, 12-13 December 2008

by Oliver Harris

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

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

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

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

Birmingham, 5 December 2008

by Oliver Harris

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

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

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

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

Birmingham University, 13th December 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Volume Editor, Oliver Harris

Background: The Crying of Lot 22

Where it had been since 1953 and how it got into the hands of a private collector remain a mystery, but it surfaced in October 1999 as Lot 22 of Sotheby’s “Allen Ginsberg and Friends” sale in New York. The small, black notebook with lined paper that had turned sepia over the past half-century, was bought, for an undisclosed sum, by Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library. At Columbus they have built up an impressive archive of Burroughs papers over the years, going back to 1965 when they acquired Naked Lunch-era material from the manuscript- and book-seller Henry Wenning, who had bought it directly from Burroughs in 1961. There followed two major purchases of materials in the 1980s and then two large donations from the Burroughs Estate in the late 1990s. So the acquisition of the Notebook was both a coup for Ohio and a logical development of their holdings.

I first heard about it from James Grauerholz in November 2002 and was immediately interested because the great bulk of the manuscript research I’ve done has been concentrated on Burroughs’ first decade as a writer — not only for The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959, but also the new edition of Junky: the definitive text of “Junk,” which I’d started in early 2001. But as well as being interested, I was worried. This may sound perverse, but it’s probably a paradox for any scholar who pieces together manuscript discoveries: you end up thinking in terms of a jigsaw, with missing pieces, which, you assume, it would be wonderful to find. But it all depends on the timing. At this point I was just completing William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, and my immediate concern was how this notebook might change the manuscript histories of Junky, Queer and The Yage Letters that I had spent twenty years researching and trying to make sense of. My book was almost ready to go to press. Supposing the Notebook, this totally new piece of primary evidence, undermined everything?

It’s at times like this you recognise that manuscript research is not really like assembling a jigsaw puzzle at all; inevitably, you turn the available evidence into a narrative, one that you hope is at least credible, at best compelling — but it’s still a narrative, an interpretation of the evidence arranged into a certain pattern. As Burroughs himself famously said: “There is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event.” But knowing that a definitive account is impossible doesn’t make you less possessive about the version of events you’ve put together yourself. As it turned out, the Notebook both supported and added to the work I’d already done, but I wasn’t to know that for some time — not until there was a transcript. At this point, it didn’t even have a fixed name.

In November 2002, Grauerholz referred to it as “Mexico City Return,” because the most immediate significance of the Notebook is that it contains most of the first draft of the typescript used for the Epilogue given that title and added to Queer in his 1985 edit. In fact, the contract signed by the Burroughs Estate and OSUP in March 2003 was, a little inaccurately, for a work entitled “Mexico City Return: The Yage Notebook of William S. Burroughs, 1951.” But for a long time we mainly referred to it as “the Peru Notebook.” I didn’t come up with the title “Everything Lost” until much later.

My formal role began in March 2003 with an invitation to be Volume Editor for the Notebook, working with Geoff Smith and John Bennett — people I had met in Ohio and worked with since the mid-1980s — who would be Series Editors, overseeing first the editing of the Notebook and then other projects based on manuscript holdings at Ohio State. In Spring 2003 Everything Lost therefore evolved concurrently with Yage Letters Redux, the follow-up to my just-published edition of Junky. This was, of course, a very closely related text chronologically (the first entry in the Notebook is dated July 16 1953; the last letter in “In Search of Yage” is dated July 10 1953), although in key respects Everything Lost and Yage Redux were quite different editorial projects.

Transcribing the Notebook: Hat on a fisherman pole

The transcript started with a rough draft of about half of it made by James Grauerholz in December 2002. I became directly involved in August 2003, when I began working on the first full transcript. Looking back through my files to see how much longer the transcript became — from first to final drafts — I was a little surprised to find that it hadn’t changed that much (from 5,691 words to 5,886). This, however, is deceptive, since the first draft had many question marks and much very dubious early guesswork.

One of the great interests of Everything Lost as a contribution to Burroughs scholarship is the chance it gives to see inside, to get detailed insight into the processes of both writing and editing. That’s to say, you can see Burroughs the writer at work here — moving back and forth between travel diary reportage, intimate personal reflections, records of dreams, and dramatic routines, so that fact and fiction, waking and dream worlds segue into each another — and you can see something of how the process of editing happens too. The actual work of transcription isn’t so self-evident, however. The first few pages are written in a very steady, clear holograph, legible to most readers. But increasingly, there are passages of hurried writing, with numerous cancellations and erasures. With illegible words, I often went about the task of transcription by playing a kind of academic hangman: you look at illegible words and ask yourself, of each letter, could that be an “a”, a “b”, a “c”, and so on. Since the permutations in this mechanical method are enormous, you have to work intuitively at the same time. Naturally, the less context you have — where, say, a whole sentence is illegible — the harder it is and the more you rely on following hunches. Many times you stare at a word and it’s as if you have it on the tip of your tongue. That feeling can last a long time.

One aspect of the transcription process is therefore very close attention to the graphic element, and for this the pdf files were a very important technical development. In the early 1990s, when I was transcribing holograph manuscripts for Letters, 1945-1959, I needed to hold often poor-quality photocopies up against a light or use a magnifying glass. For a year, I had to do the same with the Notebook, working from a photocopy, until in late 2004 I received the facsimile as a series of pdf files. The advantages were obvious: I could blow the image up until a single word filled the computer screen, and play around with various effects, to lighten or darken the image, and so on. And I then extended that process by cross-referring to other images. For example, if I had an illegible word and it looked like it could be “night,” I’d do a word search in the transcript, and that would identify the page and then the right pdf file where that word occurred; so I would have maybe half a dozen screens open at any one time, comparing images to see what the word might be. And the process didn’t stop there. Over the years, I’ve built up extensive files of manuscripts from the early 1950s, including many letters that were in holograph. I would search the electronic version of Letters, 1945-1959 that I have, to locate letters where a specific word was used, then pull out the manuscript copy from my files, and make a comparative analysis. Sometimes the results were conclusive, but not always, and of course this process was not only very time-intensive but complicated. To borrow the phrase Burroughs used when dealing with his own chaos of manuscripts, I’d be thinking to myself: “What am I, an octopus already?” Finally, I’d usually copy and paste specific words and letter fragments into a document, in order to show — to myself as well as my colleagues — step by step, the process of how I had worked it out. My “maths” I call it.

That was one approach. The other main one was more contextual. That’s to say, I’d be looking for how material might echo or directly repeat its use elsewhere in other Burroughs manuscripts from around the same time, such as “Mexico City Return” (in both the typescript originally intended for “Yage” in 1953 and as published in 1985 in Queer). The intertextuality of Burroughs’ writing is one key feature displayed in the Notebook, both through internal repetition of scenes and phrases, as he reworked them, and through this overlapping of manuscripts — which is the most important revelation. For the Notebook shows how Burroughs’ “Queer” and “Yage” manuscripts overlapped, chiefly through the phantom presence of Allerton (based on Lewis Marker) — and as if the lacerating self-pity of Burroughs’ addiction to him isn’t enough, there’s the extraordinary way that he confuses the real-life lover he has lost with the fictional version of him he has invented. So, while “Mexico City Return” helped contextualise the Notebook and aid with some transcription, the Notebook sheds new light on this piece of writing that migrated from “Yage” to Queer.

Some of the practical difficulties are not readily apparent to a reader comparing the facsimile to the published transcript. For example, the initial transcription that I had to work with included a good deal of guesswork, some of it made by volunteers who were brought in by the Series Editors precisely because they had no Burroughsian expertise, just a fresh pair of eyes. However, when you have a wrongly transcribed word there in front of you, it can make it much harder to arrive at the correct transcription: the wrong word keeps getting in the way. As the transcription evolved, the only disagreements I had with the Series Editors at Ohio State were over our “best guesses,” where basically none of us had much confidence in our readings. I felt the frustration keenly, but there has to come a cut-off point where, even though you believe you could do more, the time and effort is disproportionate, since you can’t guarantee success and you have to work to a deadline set by the publishers. Once the Notebook is out there, I’m sure that fresh eyes are going to discover new, improved readings. Whether they will be significant in any way — and so justify maybe hours of time and attention — is another question. That’s one of the things you never know at the time: whether your labour is going to pay off. That doubt casts a long shadow.

Working on a transcript like this, improving it incrementally each time, is therefore both exciting and frustrating. You can spend hours working on a fragment, looking at it from every angle, comparing it to other manuscripts, and so on, and feel almost euphoric about deciphering it; and then you think, that’s one word. And there were others where the correct reading looks so obvious in retrospect that nobody would ever imagine the time that went into getting it. Equally, some days you get absolutely nowhere. Other days, you work out a complete sentence. There aren’t too many you can share that kind of triumph with. Most reasonable people would find this sort of scholarly rigour indistinguishable from a highly advanced pathological condition.

Some discoveries were quite spectacular. One of the most important to me started out in the transcript as “El Paso / This is yage party. Just as the wind movie and painting and poetry.” I knew that wasn’t right, and eventually cracked it: not a reference to a city in Texas, “El Paso” was actually “St Perse” — and this is in fact the very first reference anywhere in Burroughs to the French poet, as important to Burroughs as Rimbaud. St. Perse was a constant point of reference for him, especially throughout the 1950s and early ’60s; when Ginsberg commented on sections of the work-in-progress that became Naked Lunch, he always compared Burroughs’ “prose poetry” to that of St. Perse. Then, at the start of the cut-up project, Burroughs stated repeatedly that the methods worked best on image rich poetry, like that of St. Perse and Rimbaud. So, finding the first reference in the Notebook was highly significant, while working out the next lines made its significance even clearer: “This is yage poetry. Just as there is weed music and painting and poetry.” In other words, Burroughs was making a very interesting insight into different kinds of drug aesthetics.

Of course, I made scores of corrections and new readings that were less spectacular: an “awkward punch” in the first transcript became a “Delaware punch”; “Hat on a fisherman pole” became “Hot as a plutonium pile” and so on. Right up until the final deadline, I was still working on the most tantalising and intransigent illegible words, hoping to turn a “best guess” into a more confident transcription.

Everything Lost: on the inside

Along with making the transcript, there was the internal organisation of the book to determine. This was an issue I debated from the outset with the Series Editors, who made the decision to have both fair copy and literal transcript. We agreed early on that the priority was to keep the colour facsimile pages together as a unit, so that the book would present the reader with something that looked and felt as similar as possible to the original artefact. The downside to this was that the transcript would have to be separate, and so the reader would need to flip back and forth between manuscript and reading copy, but that seemed unavoidable.

Scholarship always has to keep in mind the readership for what it produces and the purposes to which its results will be put. However, not only can scholars disagree amongst themselves, they also have to deal with publishers who have a different point of view informed by other concerns. That’s why the potential is always there for mutual misunderstandings about roles — which are, in my experience, never clearly defined: if scholars feel entitled to extend the field of their expertise to include aspects of the production design, so too the in-house editors seem to want to be involved in shaping the scholarship.

For example, in December 2005, the editors at the Press came up with the idea of having just a fair reading text, interleaved with the facsimile, relegating erasures and revisions to endnotes. We argued the case for needing not just a fair copy but also a proper “diplomatic” transcript, so that the process of Burroughs’ textual revision was clear to the reader. This was important because the great interest and value of the Notebook is not in its literary quality as a finished text in its own right, and it would have been misleading to present it as a reader-oriented work of prose. People who read the Notebook in that way would find it confusing and, very probably, rather disappointing. The internal organisation of the text is therefore crucial in terms of shaping its proper reception and appropriate use.

This issue returned again, very late on, when in August 2007 the University Press production manager proposed another, entirely different format that the Press’s Senior Editor announced was the way to go. This would have modelled Everything Lost on the variorum edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. With more commercial houses like Penguin and City Lights, the in-house editor had essentially deferred on all scholarly issues and left decisions up to me until or unless they could see a practical problem with it. So for me this latest announcement begged questions about the whole decision-making process, as well as about the merits of this specific proposal.

To take the latter issue first, one of the problems with proposing the Valerie Eliot edition as a model was that it had worked very well for Barry Miles’ variorum edition of “Howl” precisely because the aim of that publication was to bid for the comparable status of Ginsberg’s poem. The facsimile pages and extensive scholarly apparatus gave “Howl” the same kind of attention as The Waste Land had received, and definitely changed how the poem was read and valued. But internal design has to be appropriate to the specific subject. Unlike the landmark poems of Eliot and Ginsberg, Burroughs’ Notebook is a slight text, never intended for publication, and without any public record in the first place. The mismatch seemed self-evident and, happily, the Senior Editor at the Press realised it wasn’t the way to go after all.

The other main ground for arguing against such a format was that it would have meant using black and white instead of colour facsimile. The loss of colour would have been a major problem — not in terms of its information value, perhaps, but in terms of the look and feel of the thing, its presence as a material object with a certain aura. That had always been important to me. In fact, when I received the pdf files, the first thing I did was to print them out to make a mock-up of the actual notebook, binding it in a black cover and faithfully observing the dimensions (eight inches by six). There is a significant subjective element to editing, every bit as essential as the mechanical processes of transcription, analysis, and documentation, and being able to hold the object in my hand was very necessary to me. Of course, this wasn’t the real thing — which I had only held for a few minutes back in Ohio — but it was the next best thing. Likewise, when I was in Mexico City for the Burroughs conference in September 2006, it meant a great deal to be in the very places where Burroughs had sat down and written in that notebook. Half a century had passed, but it still made for a special connection between writing and place, with me as a point of intersection. All scholars have to balance their professional reserve, which goes together with claims to authority and expertise, with this highly personal engagement.

Since the Press’s editor backtracked on the variorum format, the design stayed as originally intended, and then the proofs went out. These arrived just before I left for a ten-day research trip to New York at the end of August this year. I worked on the proofs every night at the Hotel Chelsea, and then put in many more hours when I came back to England, because I know from past experience just how often mistakes appear at the last stage — and almost always ones so large that, like Poe’s Purloined Letter, they are hidden by being in plain sight. All the diligence of years of work can be compromised at this last stage, when the pressure is on and the clock is running down. It suddenly throws into relief the hours, days, weeks spent working on one small detail that nobody will likely ever notice.

Publishing: The Cover Story

As I already noted, there were significant differences between the Notebook as an editorial project and The Yage Letters Redux or, before that, Junky. The interest in those projects wasn’t only in discovering and working on the manuscript — mostly typescript rather than holograph — but in establishing the textual and publication histories. In the case of Junky, the material evidence relating to publishing was limited, since there are no archives holding the business papers of Ace Books. Researching in the City Lights editorial and correspondence files at Berkeley was fascinating for that reason and, although I could only skim the cream off it, telling this story in my Introduction was useful for advancing a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how The Yage Letters came to be published in the form it did. Since all interpretation is necessarily based on material assumptions about the origins of the text, I knew that it was important to establish an accurate factual record of what really happened, who made which decisions, and so on. It’s only when you see, in documented detail, how the publication evolved out of numerous alternatives that you truly realise how the identity of the book depends on elements such as design — not only for our experience of it as readers, but as a statement of authorial expression.

For example, in the case of The Yage Letters, Burroughs had strikingly little involvement in the assembly of the text — which was initiated and largely co-ordinated by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — but he became crucially involved in the cover design. Burroughs had been very impressed by the cover for Paul Bowles’ 100 Camels in the Courtyard, which Ferlinghetti had just published, and that’s how The Yage Letters ended up with the wonderfully evocative image of a shaman on its cover, as a counterpart to the Moroccan images on Bowles’ collection of stories. This degree of involvement goes back to the calligraphic design Burroughs made for the jacket of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch in 1959, which in turn marked a great shift from the Ace publication of Junkie in 1953. Then, as a debutant writer having to deal with a pulp publisher at long distance, he had absolutely no input whatsoever, not even getting to choose the book’s title, let alone its cover design: by default, the Ace cover, with its sensationalist artwork, is therefore as revealing about Burroughs’ status and power as a writer — or lack thereof — as it is about how drugs played in the culture of post-war America.

The awareness of a book’s material history — its long, often strange passage from manuscript to physical publication — has been an increasingly important factor in the work I do as an editor, not just in terms of the story I can tell about the past but in regard to what I want for my own editions in the present. In other words, my historical interest as a critic in the “social production” of Burroughs’ texts coincides with and informs my aims as a scholarly editor. On the whole, I’ve been lucky with the publishers I’ve worked with. For example, City Lights let me design (with help from my eldest daughter, Ella) the cover for Yage Redux. In the end, it wasn’t 100% as I wanted it; I didn’t like the banner they ran across the top for the names of Burroughs and Ginsberg, for example — but that was just a practical compromise. Indeed, this is one of the things you learn most forcefully: that almost everything about a book’s writing and publication is marked by collaborations, contingencies, conflicting decisions, the hand of chance, last minute interventions, good or bad. This is a tough lesson for a perfectionist like myself, but it makes visible the ironic position of scholarly editors these days, since many now embrace a form of “socialised” editing — seeing collaborative involvements as not the corruptions of a solitary author’s intention, but as a valid because necessary part of the book production process. Still, as a scholar, I expect to exercise rigorous control over the most minute textual details and to have a robust editing framework carefully worked out — see, for instance, my essay “Not Burroughs’ Final Fix,” which tells the protracted story of the comma and the colon as used in The Yage Letters Redux — but such details will quite reasonably pass by most readers. Nobody fails to notice the layout of the text on the page or the front cover, however — and yet these, the most visibly important elements of all, are typically seen by publishers as a separate job for their design team.

To some extent, this was my experience with Junky: the definitive text of “Junk,” which ended up with a title and a cover design I didn’t really like. However, I was checking back through the files recently and I realised I’d misremembered certain decisions, like the use of “definitive” in the title. I’ve written about that a couple of times, because the word is so contentious in editing circles, and yet in my files of correspondence I saw that Paul Slovak, my — excellent — editor at Penguin, had actually expressed his own doubts about it. And even with the cover design, I discovered an email I’d sent which effectively admitted it was my mistake: I had chosen the cover as the best out of the half-dozen that Penguin’s designers came up with, when I should really have suggested another approach altogether. Ironically, some readers who liked the grungy, pulpy associations of the rather coarse cover assumed it was my idea. In fact, I would have preferred something entirely different: a classic, high sheen, noir look, redolent of city nightscapes and the post-war underworld. At the last minute I did come up with an image that I still think would make the most brilliant cover — a stunning close-up of a metal and glass syringe, a burning cigarette, and Burroughs’ spectral face over a black background, supposedly taken from the film Chappaqua (although it must be an outtake, as it doesn’t seem to be in the film itself; the image is reproduced in Robert Sobieszek’s book, Ports of Entry). But the window of consultation time had closed by the time I changed my mind, and it would have been unreasonable to expect Penguin’s designers to tear up a cover I had initially approved, and accept my bright new idea.

As a book is readied for production all sorts of design decisions are taken very quickly, and there is a palpable sense that the manuscript is changing hands, passing from the scholarly editors to the editorial team of the publishers. Experience helps — Everything Lost is my fifth book — but it is impossible to predict how such key issues as cover design will be handled. For example, with Letters, 1945-1959, Viking asked for ideas and images, and quickly produced two fabulous cover designs, hard and paper, based loosely on them. Simultaneously, in the UK Picador chose a photograph of Burroughs as an old man, taken about thirty years after the letters — in effect, a different Burroughs (unfortunately, for the French translation, Christian Bourgois have recently followed suit with an even older photograph), but they responded to my queries with a rather tart note explaining they knew their business. Viking’s covers were so good, however, I remained sanguine: some you win, some you don’t.

Ohio State University Press had come up with an initial cover design in late 2006. It used the inside cover of the Notebook to form a mottled green background, and ran a black strip (or “belly wrap”) across the middle with the title in a simple font and Burroughs’ handwritten name below in white lettering. I liked the plainness of the design and it was especially good to see at last the evocative title there at the centre of it, which confirmed my sense of its importance — which needs some explaining here.

For a long while everyone had referred to it as the “Peru Notebook” because that’s where Burroughs had started writing it, in Talara, Peru. But that was only the first entry, and the rest of it is written in Mexico, mainly in Mexico City. So it had to be the “Latin American Notebook.” We didn’t discuss the title for very long; in November 2005 I realised what it had to be. I was working on the long (7,000 word) Introduction and all of a sudden the symbolic force of this particular phrase struck home like a revelation. I realised how extraordinary it was to see, written in his own hand, in this little notebook from fifty years ago, Burroughs weighing up his life as he looked back on his years of travelling and writing in Latin America, and summing it up with those two words in one of the very last entries: Everything Lost. The feeling of despair is all the more striking because this is not the story of those years narrated by Burroughs’ biographers, and made familiar through The Yage Letters. This is one of the major significances of the Notebook, that it forces us to accept a much darker picture of Burroughs at this point; not a writer on the verge of a breakthrough, but a man almost without hope.

So, although my colleagues suggested other titles — “A bus called Proletario” (which is the first line of the notebook), for example — this seemed perfect because it caught the raw emotional centre of the Notebook. The phrase also resonates with the status of the Notebook itself, as the one record that survived to tell this very tale of despair and loss. Naming can be surprisingly important in terms of giving a work its identity, and in this case it definitely seemed to confirm what the Notebook was all about.

In that context, the Press’s initial design was unproblematic; I knew there would be a period of consultation later on, and I was relaxed about it. In the summer of 2007 I suggested some ideas for the design of the back cover, since I had been asked to write the jacket blurb and, while the Press didn’t respond to these suggestions, I wasn’t especially concerned. It was in September 2007, just back in England after my research trip to New York, that the new cover design was posted on the author pages on the Press’s website. I was, to put it diplomatically, surprised by what I saw.

The design as a whole seemed to miss the mark: if it was meant to evoke the actual notebook, then the blue-black front cover was curious, since the notebook is just black, while the Press’s logo looked odd stuck in one corner, unbalancing the composition, and the Burroughs doodle they reproduce seems inexplicably to resemble fragments of barbed wire. But these were minor details; what took me by surprise was the lettering of the title phrase, which was so clearly wrong for the book.

Burroughs’ phrase has a simplicity and gravity about it, an understated quality that was captured quite well by the type font on the initial design. Then again, I knew that my colleagues would, like myself, have argued for reproducing Burroughs’ words as actually written in the notebook, since nothing could have bettered the original and authentic hand of the author; after all, with its wonderful facsimile reproduction, such authenticity was essential to the nature and purpose of the whole publication. Significantly, the final design does feature Burroughs’ own handwriting, in the form of his signature, running vertically down the right margin. Unfortunately, this just draws more attention to the inappropriate lettering of the title phrase, with its odd mix of highly stylized and embellished characters that looks gimmicky and makes the word “Lost” hard to even read. Quite simply, Burroughs’ stark, resonant phrase was no longer recognisable to me as the ideal symbolic statement of the book’s identity.

I had served on this project for a long time — over four years, in total — putting in many hundreds of hours without payment, not even expenses, let alone the promise of royalties. Then again, I have always preferred to work in the interests of professional rigour, not profit, because this, I felt, gave me the kind of leverage that money couldn’t buy. In this case, it meant that my sole interest was in protecting the publication, standing up for what, as the Burroughs expert, I thought was right. Given my scholarly and critical research into the history and symbolic importance of Burroughs’ cover designs, I felt well qualified to understand how a detail as specific as the lettering of the title on the cover represented the book as a whole.

Unfortunately, I lost the battle over the cover design. It is difficult to be both a perfectionist by profession and a stoic, but I have to contextualise this one large regret within my broader experience — as both scholarly researcher and scholarly editor — of the many contingencies and collaborations and outright errors that determine the transmission of a manuscript into a publication. Equally, had not Burroughs himself endured far greater compromises as an author dealing with publishers — most obviously in the transformation of his “Junk” into Ace Books’ Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict? Receiving a copy of Junkie in August 1953 — just as he was writing the last entries in his notebook — Burroughs knew that whatever losses he suffered in the name of literature, they were only small symbols of those he suffered in life. Everything Lost makes that painfully clear.