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 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.

by Oliver Harris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literary Status and Archival Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Definitive” Editions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Textual History of Burroughs’ Early Novels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Queer” (1952)

Queer (1985)

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

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

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

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

“Yage” Ms. (1953)

The Yage Letters (1963)

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

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

Mexican Composite Manuscript

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____ Uncorrected Galley Proof in wraps including a dust jacket with a different design from the final issue.

London: Picador 1985, first British printing, hardbound in dust jacket, rather scarce for a trade edition.

_____Uncorrected Galley Proof in pale pink wraps.

New York: Penguin 1987, first US softcover printing.

London: Picador 1987, first British softcover printing.

When I lived in Mexico City at the end of the 1940s, it was a city of one million people, with clear sparkling air and the sky that special shade of blue that goes so well with circling vultures, blood and sand–the raw menacing pitiless Mexican blue. I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there. In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day. My New Orleans case for heroin and marijuana possession looked so unpromising that I decided not to show up for the court date, and I rented an apartment in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City.

I knew that under the statute of limitations I could not return to the United States for five years, so I applied for Mexican citizenship and enrolled in some courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College. The G.I. Bill paid for my books and tuition, and a seventy-five-dollar-per-month living allowance. I thought I might go into farming, or perhaps open a bar on the American border.

The City appealed to me. The slum areas compared favorably with anything in Asia for sheer filth and poverty. People would shit all over the street, then lie down and sleep in it with the flies crawling in and out of their mouths. Entrepreneurs, not infrequently lepers, built fires on street corners and cooked up hideous, stinking, nameless messes of food, which they dispensed to passersby. Drunks slept right on the sidewalks of the main drag, and no cops bothered them. It seemed to me that everyone in Mexico had mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wanted to wear a monocle or carry a cane, he did not hesitate to do it, and no one gave him a second glance. Boys and young men walked down the street arm in arm and no one paid them any mind. It wasn’t that people didn’t care what others thought; it simply would not occur to a Mexican to expect criticism from a stranger, nor to criticize the behavior of others.

Mexico was basically an Oriental culture that reflected two thousand years of disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism. It was sinister and gloomy and chaotic, with the special chaos of a dream. No Mexican really knew any other Mexican, and when a Mexican killed someone (which happened often), it was usually his best friend. Anyone who felt like it carried a gun, and I read of several occasions where drunken cops, shooting at the habitués of a bar, were themselves shot by armed civilians. As authority figures, Mexican cops ranked with streetcar conductors.

All officials were corruptible, income tax was very low, and medical treatment was extremely reasonable, because the doctors advertised and cut their prices. You could get a clap cured for $2.40, or buy the penicillin and shoot it yourself. There were no regulations curtailing self-medication, and needles and syringes could be bought anywhere. This was in the time of Alemá¡n, when the mordida was king, and a pyramid of bribes reached from the cop on the beat up to the Presidente. Mexico City was also the murder capital of the world, with the highest per-capita homicide rate. I remember newspaper stories every day, like these:

A campesino is in from the country, waiting for a bus: linen pants, sandals made from a tire, a wide sombrero, a machete at his belt. Another man is also waiting, dressed in a suit, looking at his wrist watch, muttering angrily. The campesino whips out his machete and cuts the man’s head clean off. He later told police: “He was giving me looks muy feo and finally I could not contain myself.” Obviously the man was annoyed because the bus was late, and was looking down the road for the bus, when the campesino misinterpreted his action, and the next thing a head rolls in the gutter, grimacing horribly and showing gold teeth.

Two campesinos are sitting disconsolate by the roadside. They have no money for breakfast. But look: a boy leading several goats. One campesino picks up a rock and bashes the boy’s brains out. They take the goats to the nearest village and sell them. They are eating breakfast when they are apprehended by the police.

A man lives in a little house. A stranger asks him how to find the road for Ayahuasca. “Ah, this way, señor.” He is leading the man around and around: “The road is right here.” Suddenly he realizes he hasn’t any idea where the road is, and why should he be bothered? So he picks up a rock and kills his tormentor.

Campesinos took their toll with rock and machete. More murderous were the politicians and off-duty cops, each with his .45 automatic. One learned to hit the deck. Here is another actual story: A gun-toting politico hears his girl is cheating, meeting someone in this cocktail lounge. Some American kid just happens in and sits next to her, when the macho bursts in: “¡CHINGOA!” Hauls out his .45 and blasts the kid right off his bar stool. They drag the body outside and down the street a ways. When the cops arrive, the bartender shrugs and mops his bloody bar, and says only: “Malos, esos muchachos!” (“Those bad boys!”)

Every country has its own special Shits, like the Southern law-man counting his Nigger notches, and the sneering Mexican macho is certainly up there when it comes to sheer ugliness. And many of the Mexican middle class are about as awful as any bourgeoisie in the world. I remember that in Mexico the narcotic scripts were bright yellow, like a thousand-dollar bill, or a dishonorable discharge from the Army. One time Old Dave and I tried to fill such a script, which he had obtained quite legitimately from the Mexican government. The first pharmacist we hit jerked back snarling from such a sight: “¡No prestamos servicio a los viciosos!” (“We do not serve dope fiends!”)

From one farmacìa to another we walked, getting sicker with every step: “No, señor. . . .” We must have walked for miles.

“Never been in this neighborhood before.”

“Well, let’s try one more.”

Finally we entered a tiny hole-in-the-wall farmacìa. I pulled out the receta, and a gray-haired lady smiled at me. The pharmacist looked at the script, and said, “Two minutes, señor.”

We sat down to wait. There were geraniums in the window. A small boy brought me a glass of water, and a cat rubbed against my leg. After awhile the pharmacist returned with our morphine.

“Gracias, señor”

Outside, the neighborhood now seemed enchanted: Little farmacìas in a market, crates and stalls outside, a pulquerìa on the corner. Kiosks selling fried grasshoppers and peppermint candy black with flies. Boys in from the country in spotless white linen and rope sandals, with faces of burnished copper and fierce innocent black eyes, like exotic animals, of a dazzling sexless beauty. Here is a boy with sharp features and black skin, smelling of vanilla, a gardenia behind his ear. Yes, you found a Johnson, but you waded through Shitville to find him. You always do. Just when you think the earth is exclusively populated by Shits, you meet a Johnson.

One day there was a knock on my door at eight in the morning. I went to the door in my pyjamas, and there was an inspector from Immigration.

“Get your clothes on. You’re under arrest.” It seemed the woman next door had turned in a long report on my drunk and disorderly behavior, and also there was something wrong with my papers and where was the Mexican wife I was supposed to have? The Immigration officers were all set to throw me in jail to await deportation as an undesirable alien. Of course, everything could be straightened out with some money, but my interviewer was the head of the deporting department and he wouldn’t go for peanuts. I finally had to get up off of two hundred dollars. As I walked home from the Immigration Office, I imagined what I might have had to pay if I had really had an investment in Mexico City.

I thought of the constant problems the three American owners of the Ship Ahoy encountered. The cops came in all the time for a mordida, and then came the sanitary inspectors, then more cops trying to get something on the joint so they could take a real bite. They took the waiter downtown and beat the shit out of him. They wanted to know where was Kelly’s body stashed? How many women been raped in the joint? Who brought in the weed? And so on. Kelly was an American hipster who had been shot in the Ship Ahoy six months before, had recovered, and was now in the U.S. Army. No woman was ever raped there, and no one ever smoked weed there. By now I had entirely abandoned my plans to open a bar in Mexico.

An addict has little regard for his image. He wears the dirtiest, shabbiest clothes, and feels no need to call attention to himself. During my period of addiction in Tangiers, I was known as “El Hombre Invisible,” The Invisible Man. This disintegration of self-image often results in an indiscriminate image hunger. Billie Holliday said she knew she was off junk when she stopped watching TV. In my first novel, Junky, the protagonist “Lee” comes across as integrated and self-contained, sure of himself and where he is going. In Queer he is disintegrated, desperately in need of contact, completely unsure of himself and of his purpose.

The difference of course is simple: Lee on junk is covered, protected and also severely limited. Not only does junk short-circuit the sex drive, it also blunts emotional reactions to the vanishing point, depending on the dosage. Looking back over the action of Queer, that hallucinated month of acute withdrawal takes on a hellish glow of menace and evil drifting out of neon-lit cocktail bars, the ugly violence, the .45 always just under the surface. On junk I was insulated, didn’t drink, didn’t go out much, just shot up and waited for the next shot.

When the cover is removed, everything that has been held in check by junk spills out. The withdrawing addict is subject to the emotional excesses of a child or an adolescent, regardless of his actual age. And the sex drive returns in full force. Men of sixty experience wet dreams and spontaneous orgasms (an extremely unpleasant experience, agaçant as the French say, putting the teeth on edge). Unless the reader keeps this in mind, the metamorphosis of Lee’s character will appear as inexplicable or psychotic. Also bear in mind that the withdrawal syndrome is self-limiting, lasting no more than a month. And Lee has a phase of excessive drinking, which exacerbates all the worst and most dangerous aspects of the withdrawal sickness: reckless, unseemly, outrageous, maudlin–in a word, appalling–behavior.

After withdrawal, the organism readjusts and stabilizes at a pre-junk level. In the narrative, this stabilization is finally reached during the South American trip. No junk is available, nor any other drug, after the paregoric of Panama. Lee’s drinking has dwindled to several good stiff ones at sundown. Not so different from the Lee of the later Yage Letters, except for the phantom presence of Allerton.

So I had written Junky, and the motivation for that was comparatively simple: to put down in the most accurate and simple terms my experiences as an addict. I was hoping for publication, money, recognition. Kerouac had published The Town and the City at the time I started writing Junky. I remember writing in a letter to him, when his book was published, that money and fame were now assured. As you can see, I knew nothing about the writing business at the time.

My motivations to write Queer were more complex, and are not clear to me at the present time. Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories? While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation. As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage when a weakened virus has created alerted antibodies. So I achieved some immunity from further perilous ventures along these lines by writing my experience down.

At the beginning of the Queer manuscript fragment, having returned from the insulation of junk to the land of the living like a frantic inept Lazarus, Lee seems determined to score, in the sexual sense of the word. There is something curiously systematic and unsexual about his quest for a suitable sex object, crossing one prospect after another off a list which seems compiled with ultimate failure in mind. On some very deep level he does not want to succeed, but will go to any length to avoid the realization that he is not really looking for sex contact.

But Allerton was definitely some sort of contact. And what was the contact that Lee was looking for? Seen from here, a very confused concept that had nothing to do with Allerton as a character. While the addict is indifferent to the impression he creates in others, during withdrawal he may feel the compulsive need for an audience, and this is clearly what Lee seeks in Allerton: an audience, the acknowledgement of his performance, which of course is a mask, to cover a shocking disintegration. So he invents a frantic attention-getting format which he calls the Routine: shocking, funny, riveting. “It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three. . . .”

The performance takes the form of routines: fantasies about Chess Players, the Texas Oilman, Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot. In Queer, Lee addresses these routines to an actual audience. Later, as he develops as a writer, the audience becomes internalized. But the same mechanism that produced A.J. and Doctor Benway, the same creative impulse, is dedicated to Allerton, who is forced into the role of approving Muse, in which he feels understandably uncomfortable.

What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton’s consciousness. Failing to find an adequate observer, he is threatened by painful dispersal, like an unobserved photon. Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since this is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not. Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction. He has already made the choice between his life and his work.

The manuscript trails off in Puyo, End of the Road town. . . . The search for Yage has failed. The mysterious Doctor Cotter wants only to be rid of his unwelcome guests. He suspects them to be agents of his treacherous partner Gill, intent on stealing his genius work of isolating curare from the composite arrow poison. I heard later that the chemical companies decided simply to buy up the arrow poison in quantity and extract the curare in their American laboratories. The drug was soon synthesized, and is now a standard substance found in many muscle-relaxing preparations. So it would seem that Cotter really had nothing to lose: his efforts were already superseded.

Dead end. And Puyo can serve as a model for the Place of Dead Roads: a dead, meaningless conglomerate of tin-roofed houses under a continual downpour of rain. Shell has pulled out, leaving prefabricated bungalows and rusting machinery behind. And Lee has reached the end of his line, an end implicit in the beginning. He is left with the impact of unbridgeable distances, the defeat and weariness of a long, painful journey made for nothing, wrong turnings, the track lost, a bus waiting in the rain . . . back to Ambato, Quito, Panama, Mexico City.

When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer’s block like a straitjacket: “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by which one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded. –Painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951.

While I was writing The Place of Dead Roads, I felt in spiritual contact with the late English writer Denton Welch, and modelled the novel’s hero, Kim Carson, directly on him. Whole sections came to me as if dictated, like table-tapping. I have written about the fateful morning of Denton’s accident, which left him an invalid for the remainder of his short life. If he had stayed a little longer here, not so long there, he would have missed his appointment with the female motorist who hit his bicycle from behind for no apparent reason. At one point Denton had stopped to have coffee, and looking at the brass hinges on the café’s window shutters, some of them broken, he was hit by a feeling of universal desolation and loss. So every event of that morning is charged with special significance, as if it were underlined. This portentous second sight permeates Welch’s writing: a scone, a cup of tea, an inkwell purchased for a few shillings, become charged with a special and often sinister significance.

I get exactly the same feeling to an almost unbearable degree as I read the manuscript of Queer.

The event towards which Lee feels himself inexorably driven is the death of his wife by his own hand, the knowledge of possession, a dead hand waiting to slip over his like a glove. So a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one’s teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind or to one side of them, a presence palpable as a haze.

Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: “For ugly spirit shot Joan because . . .” A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed–or was it? It doesn’t need to be completed, if you read it: “ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause,” that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. (As if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer.) I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded. And for this reason the possessor shows itself only when absolutely necessary.

In 1939, I became interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics and went out to see someone in the Department of Egyptology at the University of Chicago. And something was screaming in my ear: “YOU DONT BELONG HERE!” Yes, the hieroglyphics provided one key to the mechanism of possession. Like a virus, the possessing entity must find a port of entry.

This occasion was my first clear indication of something in my being that was not me, and not under my control. I remember a dream from this period: I worked as an exterminator in Chicago, in the late 1930s, and lived in a rooming house on the near North Side. In the dream I am floating up near the ceiling with a feeling of utter death and despair, and looking down I see my body walking out the door with deadly purpose.

One wonders if Yage could have saved the day by a blinding revelation. I remember a cut-up I made in Paris years later: “Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance blew the shot.” And for years I thought this referred to blowing a shot of junk, when the junk squirts out the side of the syringe or dropper owing to an obstruction. Brion Gysin pointed out the actual meaning: the shot that killed Joan.

I had bought a Scout knife in Quito. It had a metal handle and a curious tarnished old look, like something from a turn-of-the-century junk shop. I can see it in a tray of old knives and rings, with the silver plate flaking off. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, a few days after I came back to Mexico City, and I decided to have the knife sharpened. The knife-sharpener had a little whistle and a fixed route, and as I walked down the street towards his cart a feeling of loss and sadness that had weighed on me all day so I could hardly breathe intensified to such an extent that I found tears streaming down my face.

“What on earth is wrong?” I wondered.

This heavy depression and a feeling of doom occurs again and again in the text. Lee usually attributes it to his failures with Allerton: “A heavy drag slowed movement and thought. Lee’s face was rigid, his voice toneless.” Allerton has just refused a dinner invitation and left abruptly: “Lee stared at the table, his thoughts slow, as if he were very cold.” (Reading this I am cold and depressed.)

Here is a precognitive dream from Cotter’s shack in Ecuador: “He was standing in front of the Ship Ahoy. The place looked deserted. He could hear someone crying. He saw his little son, and knelt down and took the child in his arms. The sound of crying came closer, a wave of sadness. … He held little Willy close against his chest. A group of people were standing there in Convict suits. Lee wondered what they were doing there and why he was crying.”

I have constrained myself to remember the day of Joan’s death, the overwhelming feeling of doom and loss . . . walking down the street I suddenly found tears streaming down my face. “What is wrong with me?” The small Scout knife with a metal handle, the plating peeling off, a smell of old coins, the knife-sharpener’s whistle. Whatever happened to this knife I never reclaimed?

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

I have constrained myself to escape death. Denton Welch is almost my face. Smell of old coins. Whatever happened to this knife called Allerton, back to the appalling Margaras Inc. The realization is basic formulated doing? The day of Joan’s doom and loss. Found tears streaming down from Allerton peeling off the same person as a Western shootist. What are you rewriting? A lifelong preoccupation with Control and Virus. Having gained access the virus uses the host’s energy, blood, flesh and bones to make copies of itself. Model of dogmatic insistence never never from without was screaming in my ear, “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!”

A straitjacket notation carefully paralyzed with heavy reluctance. To escape their prewritten lines years after the events recorded. A writers block avoided Joans death. Denton Welch is Kim Carson’s voice through a cloud underlined broken table tapping.

William S. Burroughs, February 1985