by Matthias Penzel

Burroughs in German (flyer from Kosmik Blues)

1969

Translation work started proper after Carl’s return to Germany. More or less in the function of Editor for Joseph Melzer Verlag in Darmstadt (between Frankfurt and Heidelberg / Mannheim further south), Carl edited and translated:

Cut up. Der sezierte Bildschirm der Worte (Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1969) with several entries by William S. Burroughs, Mary Beach, Harold Norse, Jeff Nuttall, Claude Pélieu, Brion Gysin, one by himself and one by Jürgen Ploog.

ACID. Neue amerikanische Szene, more groundbreaking and with many more texts, also by Zappa etc, edited by the late Rolf Dieter Brinkmann with Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, published, after some kind of mini-revolution downstairs in the same building, also featured Weissner’s translation of Mary Beach, an extract from The Electric Banana; and Harry Mathews: Das Drehbuch.

1970

James Graham Ballard: Liebe + Napalm (Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1970). Re-released a couple of times, most recently as Liebe und Napalm: The Atrocity Exhibition (Milena Verlag, Vienna 2008), an association that led to Weissner’s German writing being published there ever since.

Charles Bukowski: Aufzeichnungen eines Außenseiters (Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1970)

1971

Andy Warhol: A (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1971)

1972

William S. Burroughs: Die elektronische Revolution (expanded media editions, Göttingen 1972) The publisher in charge here was Udo Breger, friend of Weissner and together with Ploog editor of the avant-garde magazine UFO, which was for some time also co-edited by Jörg Fauser. Weissner, Ploog, and Fauser would continue, with Walter Hartmann, the less cutting-edge but more legendary lit-mag Gasolin 23.

Allen Ginsberg: Indische Tagebücher (Hanser Verlag, München)

Allen Ginsberg: Iron Horse (expanded media editions, Göttingen 1973)

1974

Charles Bukowski: Gedichte, die einer schrieb, bevor er im 8. Stockwerk aus dem Fenster sprang, poems (Maro Verlag Gersthofen 1974) This is where Fauser’s first book came out, followed by his very first one published by Breger’s expanded media editions.

George Herriman: Krazy Kat, with others (Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1974)

1975

Bob Dylan: Texte und Zeichnungen (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1975)

Allen Ginsberg: Der Untergang Amerikas (Hanser Verlag, München 1975)

1976

Charles Bukowski: Kaputt in Hollywood, stories (Maro Verlag, Gersthofen 1976)

Leonard Cohen: Parasiten des Himmels — Gedichte aus 10 Jahren (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1976)

Anthony Scaduto: Bob Dylan, Die Biographie (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1976)

Bob Dylan: Tarantula (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1976)

1977

Charles Bukowski: Schlechte Verlierer, stories (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1977. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 1981)

Charles Bukowski: Faktotum, novel (1977. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 1997, 20th print-run in 2009)

Charles Bukowski: Das ausbruchsichere Paradies. Stories vom verschütteten Leben, stories (1977). The first seven stories also published as Pittsburgh Phil & Co., the second lot as Ein Profi.

Charles Bukowski: Flinke Killer, poems, translated with Rolf Eckart John (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1977)

Rolling Stones: The Rolling Stones Songbook. 155 Songs mit Noten, translated with Teja Schwaner, Jörg Fauser, Helmut Salzinger (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1977)

Frank Zappa: Plastic People Songbuch, republished after approval by Zappa as Plastic People Songbuch — Corrected Copy (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1977)

1978

Harold Norse: Beat Hotel (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1978

William S. Burroughs: Ali’s smile. Naked scientology (expanded media editions, Bonn 1978)

Allen Ginsberg: Gärten der Erinnerung, possibly translated with Heiner Bastian (HeyneVerlag, München 1978)

William S. Burroughs: Junkie (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1978)

William S. Burroughs: Auf der Suche nach Yage (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1978)

William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1978)

William S. Burroughs: Nova Express (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1978)

Charles Bukowski: Das Leben und Sterben im Uncle-Sam-Hotel, stories (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1978

Edited with Charles Bukowski: Terpentin on the rocks. Die besten Gedichte aus der amerikanischen Alternativpresse 1966-1977, story collection (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1978 & 1980. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 1981 & 1984 $ 1985 & 1996)

1979

Charles Bukowski: Western Avenue. Gedichte aus über 20 Jahren, poems (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1979), extracts have been re-published as Der größte Verlierer der Welt — Gedichte 1968-1972 (1979), Charles Bukowski: Diesseits und jenseits vom Mittelstreifen — Gedichte 1972-1977 (Hanser Verlag, München 1984), and Eintritt frei — Gedichte 1955-1968 (Hanser Verlag, München 1984).

Charles Bukowski: Die Stripperinnen von Burbank & 16 andere Stories, stories (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1979)

William S. Burroughs: Die alten Filme (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1979 & 1995)

Allen Ginsberg: Das Geheul und andere Gedichte (Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1979)

Jack Micheline: Skinny Dynamite (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1979)

1980

William S. Burroughs: Die wilden Boys (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1980)

William S. Burroughs: Port of Saints (Arbeitsjournal zu Die wilden Boys) (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1980)

Charles Bukowski: Das Liebesleben der Hyäne, novel (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1980) Republished several times (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1980)

Will Eisner: Ein Vertrag mit Gott und andere Mietshaus — Stories aus New York (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1980)

1981

Nelson Algren: Calhoun. Roman eines Verbrechens (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1981 & 1982)

Charles Plymell: Panik in Dodge City (expanded media editions, Bonn 1981)

1982

Denton Welch: Freuden der Jugend (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1982), also republished many times, with a foreword by William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs: Die Städte der roten Nacht (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1982)

Hans Hillmann: Fliegenpapier nach Dashiell Hammett’s Kriminalgeschichte Flypaper (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1982 & 1983)

Charles Bukowski: Eine Kinoreklame in der Wüste. 102 neue Gedichte, poems (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1982)

Charles Bukowski: Pacific Telephone – 51 Gedichte, poems (1982)

Charles Bukowski: Die Girls im grünen Hotel, poems (1982)

1983

Nelson Algren: Der Mann mit dem goldenen Arm (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1983; Verlag Volk & Welt Berlin, GDR 1984 & 1987)

Howard Kohn: Wer tötete Karen Silkwood? (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1983)

Charles Bukowski: Das Schlimmste kommt noch oder Fast eine Jugend, novel (Hanser Verlag, München 1983)

1984

Charles Bukowski: Der lange Job, stories and poems with comics by Mathias Schultheiss (Heyne, 1984), a condensed version of this and Ein Reader have been published as Die schönste Frau in der ganzen Stadt (1991)

Charles Bukowski: Kaputt in der City, stories and poems with comics by Mathias Schultheiss (Heyne, München 1984)

Charles Bukowski: Gedichte vom südlichen Ende der Couch, poems (1984)

Marvin Israel and Diane Arbus: .diane arbus. (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1984)

1985

Denton Welch: Jungfernfahrt (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1985; Steidl, Göttingen 1996)

Charles Bukowski: Hot Water Music, stories (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1985)

Ken Kesey: Einer flog über das Kuckucksnest (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1985)

1986

Charles Bukowski: Nicht mit sechzig, Honey, poems (Hanser Verlag, München 1986)

Gerald Locklin: Die Jagd nach dem verschwundenen blauen Volkswagen (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1986)

1987

William S. Burroughs: Exterminator (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1987)

William S. Burroughs: Die letzten Worte des Dutch Schultz (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1987)

Denton Welch: Schicksal (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1987)

Mohammed Mrabet with Paul Bowles: M’Hashish. Kiffgeschichten aus Marokko (Goldmann, München 1987)

Bob Dylan: Liedtexte; translated with Walter Hartmann (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1987)

Nan Goldin: Die Ballade von der sexuellen Abhängigkeit (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1987)

1988

William S. Burroughs: Western Lands (Limes im Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt/Berlin 1988)

Robert Del Tredici: Unsere Bombe (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1988)

Charles Bukowski: Die letzte Generation, poems (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1988)

1989

William S. Burroughs: Homo (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1989)

William S. Burroughs: Briefe an Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1989)

Charles Bukowski: Roter Mercedes (Gedichte 1984-1986), poems (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1989)

1990

Nelson Algren: Nacht ohne Morgen (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1990)

Diane Arbus: Zeitschriftenarbeit (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1990)

Charles Bukowski: Einmal New Orleans und zurück, story (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1990)

Charles Bukowski: Hollywood, novel (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1990

1991

Nelson Algren: Das letzte Karussell (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1991)

LaLoca: Rote Sonne über Echo Park. Gedichte von Liebe & Hass, translated with Pociao de Hollanda (Maro, Augsburg 1991)

Nicholas Shakespeare: Die Vision der Elena Silves (Kellner, Hamburg 1991)

1993

William Bedford: Fish & Chips & Elvis (dtv, München 1993)

Armistead Maupin: Tollivers Reisen (Rogner & Bernhard, Frankfurt/M. 1993)

Charles Bukowski: Jeder zahlt drauf, stories (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1993)

1994

Charles Bukowski: Kamikaze-Träume, poems (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1994)

Armistead Maupin: Die Kleine (Rogner & Bernhard, Frankfurt/M. 1994)

1995

Richard Bausch: Eine unmögliche Liebe (Steidl, Göttingen 1995)

Charles Bukowski: Der Andere, story (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 1995)

Charles Bukowski: Ausgeträumt, novel (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1995), re-released as Pulp. Ausgeträumt

1996

Charles Bukowski: Auf dem Stahlroß ins Nirwana, poems (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1996)

Frank Zappa: Zonx (Texte 1977 – 1994) (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 1996)

Robert Lowry: Die falsche Sanftmut des Schnees (Rogner & Bernhard, Frankfurt/M. 1996)

Robert Lowry: Tag, Fremder (Rogner & Bernhard, Frankfurt/M. 1996)

1997

Robert Lowry: Lebendig begraben (Rogner & Bernhard, Frankfurt/M. 1997)

Robert Lowry: Aufenthalt in El Paso translated with Antje Landshoff (Rogner & Bernhard, Frankfurt/M. 1997)

1999

Charles Bukowski: Umsonst ist der Tod, poems (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 1999)

2000

Richard Bausch: Eine aussterbende Art (Steidl, Göttingen 2000)

Charles Bukowski: Irgendwo in Texas — Gedichte aus dem Nachlaß, poems (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 2000)

2003

Charles Bukowski: 439 Gedichte, poems (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 2003)

2005

Charles Bukowski: Schreie vom Balkon — Briefe 1958-1994, letters (Ginko Press, Hamburg 2005)

Charles Bukowski: Nackt bei 33 Grad, poems (dtv, München 2005)

2006

Charles Bukowski: Den Göttern kommt das große Kotzen, diary (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2006)

William Cody Maher: Geisterstadt translated with Walter Hartmann (Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim/Rhön 2006)

2007

Charles Bukowski: Letzte Meldungen, poems (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M. 2007)

Charles Bukowski: Ein Ablehnungsbescheid und seine Folgen, story (Büchergilde Gutenberg/Tolles Heft, Frankfurt/M./Wien/Zürich 2007)

2008

Leonard Cohen: Buch der Sehnsüchte translated with others (Blumenbar, München 2008)

2009

Charles Bukowski : Opfer der Telefonitis, stories (dtv, München 2009)

William Cody Maher: Spielsachen translated with Walter Hartmann and others (Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim/Rhön 2009)

2010

Charles Bukowski: Ein schlampiger Essay über das Schreiben und das verfluchte Leben; und ausgewählte Gedichte, leftovers (Maro Verlag, Augsburg 2010)

2011

Bill Callahan: Briefe an Emma Bowlcut translated with Evelyn Steinthaler and Vanessa Wieser (Milena Verlag, Wien 2011)

2012

Charles Bukowski: Ende der Durchsage (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2012)

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

It feels good to be back on RealityStudio. Is this mike on?

I can always tell I am feeling under the weather when I take out my copy of the Fuck You Press Despair and I feel no joy. If I become disinterested in my book collection, it is a signal that I am slipping into a mild depression. Further proof of a case of the blues is the fact that months ago I ordered a Burroughs item and lost track of it in the flow of daily life. One way I can jumpstart a spark into my mental and physical engines is by the act of unpacking my library. So recently I decided to clean and organize my bookshelf in order to manage the clutter in my head. And lo and behold, I found, still wrapped in the mailing packaging, that long forgotten Burroughs item.

“It is somewhat rumored that William S. Burroughs, el hombre invisible, will suddenly appear” is the type of Burroughs item that in better times gets my juices flowing. A single, fragile sheet of paper, with a degree of age-toning and some slight chipping, announcing a potential reading at City Lights Bookstore. The bookseller’s catalog description posited that the flyer was from 1962, but as the question mark behind the date demonstrated, this was pure speculation. As much as I wanted that date to be true, I knew in my heart of hearts that there was no way the date was correct. The year was definitely later and, I suspected, much later. The questions concerning the date in no way put the kibosh on the sale; in fact this little literary puzzle was actually a selling point. It would be fun to research the item and reveal its mysteries.

But the hustle and bustle of everyday life intervened and the handbill just sat in my bookcase unopened. Until now. I have to admit that I had forgotten that I bought it. Looking at the package, I thought it was a Fuck You handbill, but I was pleasantly surprised to have the City Lights flyer in my hands as I was sitting Indian-style in front of my bookcase. Looking it over quickly confirmed my initial feeling that the attributed date was wrong. There seemed to be too much hype on the flyer. In 1962, even at a place like City Lights, most people would have no idea who Burroughs was. The rumors anticipating Burroughs’ arrival imply a word on the street, an interested general public, which just would not have existed in 1962. You could argue that the Grove Naked Lunch came out around this time, the Edinburgh Conference had just happened, and the interest in Burroughs was actually quite high. Good points, but this flyer suggested more than just interest. It suggested promotion, showmanship, an act. This air of the circus, the sideshow performance of “el hombre invisible” just did not exist in 1962.

I could narrow down the year rather quickly by going to Oliver Harris’s article, “The Frisco Kid He Never Returns: Naked Lunch and San Francisco” as well as some of my own research on Burroughs’ relationship with the San Francisco Renaissance, but I figured it would be much more fun to follow the clues on the flyer itself and see where they took me.

Saturday, November 4th. There are only a limited number of years in which this date and day could coincide. 1962 is not one of them. On one level, the internet is a wonderful and useful thing. There are date calculators that allow you to punch in the date and calculate the day of the week. Here is just one of the many options. November 4, 1962 was a Sunday. Further calculations reveal that 1961, 1967, 1972, and 1978 are other options for the year of the City Lights flyer.  

Going back to the handbill, which was quickly created on City Lights letterhead, the address for City Lights Bookstore is listed as 261 Columbus Avenue. That location has not changed since the bookstore’s founding in 1953. Everybody knows the location of City Lights, even if they do not stop in. On a recent episode of The Layover, Anthony Bourdain walked by the City Lights storefront and acknowledged its presence. This all the while bashing San Francisco’s other institutions like Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 39, Alcatraz, and the cable car (with which Bourdain fell in love hook, line and sinker despite himself).  

In the late 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time in San Francisco working on a certain anti-trust case and, sadly, I was locked into the institutions, like Alcatraz. Dungeness crab at the Wharf, a dinner at Julius’ Castle, a drink at Vesuvio’s, dim sum in Chinatown. Typical tourist stuff. I walked around a lot but I do not know if I ever really saw San Francisco. I was excited to browse through City Lights and I spent a wonderful afternoon at the secret location of Skyline Books, but what in the hell was I thinking to never stop by Serendipity Books. In never visiting this Mecca, I violated the Sutton’s law of book collecting: If you want good books, go where the books are. With the death of Peter Howard and the closing of Serendipity, it is too late now, but back in the late 1990s, with the dot.com boom, it was something of the golden days of California bookselling. And I missed it.  

During that time, I did venture into the Serendipity booth at various New York City bookfairs. On one occasion (probably later), Howard brought an entire bookshelf of Olympia Press titles. Six to seven feet of green and white. It might have been every Olympia Press title ever published. By this time I was no longer completely green as a book collector myself. I had Burroughs’ Olympia titles, the Olympia magazines, and even an Olympia Press catalog but I was looking for more Olympia Press ephemera. I was advised to stop to talk to Mr. Howard — but warned to make it quick and to the point as he did not suffer fools gladly. I mustered up my courage and practiced my spiel a couple of times and walked up to Mr. Howard sitting in his booth. I think my voice cracked as I asked him in the most confusing manner possible, which made it impossible to understand just what I was looking for, the nature of my search. He turned full around in his chair and looked me in the eye and said, “No,” and turned around. In a weird way, I was elated, because as you know from American Pickers, collecting is all about “breaking the ice.” Things were definitely frosty but I felt that if I ever got myself into his store and demonstrated my genuine interest in his books, there would be an inevitable thaw. I never made it to Serendipity, which is my loss, not just in terms of the missed books, but in the experience of browsing the store itself, an institution as much as City Lights, and in meeting Mr. Howard again.  

The Bookstore and Reality TV

Speaking of American Pickers. This whole reality-show phenomenon around collecting is out of control. Antiques Roadshow, American Pickers, American Restoration, Storage Wars (California and Texas), Auction Hunters, the proliferation of pawn shows (Las Vegas, Detroit and I think I saw one in Cajun Country). I am sure there are more. In fact, a sports memorabilia dealer just started a show on Saturdays here in Baltimore. What strikes me about all these shows in just how few books are featured. Most of these TV personalities have no expertise and no interest in books or magazines. If they do come across them it is with hesitation and disgust. On Storage Wars, Darrell the Gambler came across some first editions and was genuinely befuddled (if not angered) by all the talk of condition and dust jackets when he asked a bookdealer about their value. Even my main man, Barry Weiss, got burned by an automotive racing magazine that he thought was the real McCoy at $2000. It was only a decoy and he threw it aside to collect oil drippings.  

I do not get it. I have always felt that a rare bookstore would be a no-brainer for a reality show. First and foremost the independent used / rare bookshop is a dying industry that feeds off a dying technology. The fetishization of a dying industry or technology seems to be at the heart of these collecting shows. American Pickers is a clear case in point. Mike and Frank are the sucker fish that circle around the whale carcass that is American industry and manufacturing. It is no surprise that their show popped up in the wake of the collapse of Detroit and the automotive industry. Their loving appreciation (and cashing in) of an old Ford rotting forgotten in the middle of a small Iowa farm (another dying industry) restores the aura to an automotive industry that has lost its luster.  

American Restoration works in the same way. Rick Dale restores classic Americana, like gas pumps, soda coolers, and other pieces that remind viewers of the days when the United States actually built things and the American economy revolved around manufactured objects. A fetish develops around that which is dying and these shows eulogize not only cars, Mom and Pop gas stations, and small-town Americana, but the once robust American economy as a whole. People have always collected, but it would not surprise me if the current craze — the fascination with collecting and the publication of guidebooks and manuals — began in the early 1970s, a time of economic and energy crisis.

The rare and used bookstore also speaks of a bygone era. As Jacques Derrida has written in Paper Machine and Archive Fever, a fetish for paper quickly developed with the predictions of the “death of print” in the wake of the digital age. In addition, the rare bookstore would obviously have the historical narrative angle present in most of these reality shows in that every book tells a story on multiple levels. The walk-in sellers provide an element of the face-to-face negotiation of Pawn Stars, as well as the appraisal elements of Antiques Roadshow. An on-location buy would highlight a book dealer’s quick instincts and immediate knowledge, like the shoot-from-the-hip assessments of Auction Hunters and Storage Wars. Then there is the atmosphere of the bookstore itself. From working at a used bookstore for two years, I can vouch for the fact that the owners, employees, and customers are all unusual characters to say the least. For example, Peter Howard’s gruff, no-shit persona is a reality show stock figure, think The Old Man from Pawn Stars.

There are opportunities for spin-offs. I have always thought a show around a working book scout would be interesting. Who would not want to see a show following Martin Stone around as he travels the world looking for rare books? This has elements of the rock star, gourmand, detective, spy, archeologist, global traveler, and astronaut of inner space. And what about record store guy, purveyor of vinyl? Who would not want to see a reality show with elements of High Fidelity, Ghost World, or Empire Records?

Interestingly, Pawn Stars has been revealed to be scripted. In fact much of reality TV has been shown to be rehearsed and staged. This digression on reality TV ties into the City Lights flyer. Like realityTV, public readings are live events, which promise authenticity and spontaneity. An opportunity to experience a writer out in the wild. Yet readings are heavily planned out and meticulously rehearsed. The magic of a Bukowski reading was that it seemed totally off the cuff, anything could happen from one moment to the next. Bukowski was unpredictable, dangerous. The Burroughs flyer implies a similar experience. Its slapdash design suggests that it was made in haste, on the spot. And it might have been, but it was for a planned event not a spontaneous one, despite the rumor that Burroughs will “suddenly appear.” If Burroughs’ appearance was truly spontaneous, there would be no flyer. 

William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights (photo from ferlinghettifilm.com)

Dating the Flyer

But back to the reality of City Lights in time and space. There might not be much to gather from the City Lights Bookstore address, but the phone number is interesting. The seven digit, all-numerical phone number was implemented across the United States in 1968. So 1967 is in doubt. The address for the City Lights Publishing House, 1562 Grant Avenue, narrows the possibilities even further. The book I wish I had when I was in San Francisco is Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in San Francisco. Along with Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City, it is a great travel guide and an indispensible Beat history book all in one. I find myself coming back to these two books often when researching Beat addresses and landmarks. I suspect Morgan’s Beat Altas: A State by State Guide to the Beat Generation in America is essential as well. Morgan as the Beat Livy. Can Morgan’s account of the Beat conquest of the world be far behind? (The book I would really like to see would be Iain Sinclair’s account of walking through today’s Lower East Side. What he could do with the current landscape of the city with his intimate knowledge of this location’s secret history would be astounding.).

Morgan’s book on San Francisco was unavailable in 1999, but thankfully I can pull it down from the shelf now. Morgan writes

In 1978 the brothers retired, and City Lights moved in [to the central room upstairs] making the store twice as large and as interesting. At that time, Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters moved the publishing branch back to the bookstore after a ten-year stay on upper Grant Avenue, setting up an editorial office in the basement where Ferlinghetti had worked in the fifties and sixties.

The brothers are Dick and Bob McBride, who ran the publishing arm of City Lights for years out of 1562 Grant Avenue. Morgan’s book also has a great entry on 1562 Grant Avenue, which states that the City Light publishing ventures moved there in 1967. Today there is a bronze plaque embedded on the corner of the sidewalk out front designating Poets’ Corner.  

Just down the street at 1546 Grant was the location of The Place, a bar opened by Black Mountain alums Knute Stiles and Leo Krikorian. San Francisco artists like Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, and Robert LaVigne drank and showed work here. Bartender John Allen Ryan, a director at the Six Gallery, started Blabbermouth Night at The Place, an early poetry slam. While Jack Kerouac claims The Place as his own in Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums, another Jack, Jack Spicer, was more into the spirit of The Place. 1546 Grant Avenue was the publishing headquarters for his J Magazine, with a submission box at the bar. Again Morgan’s book is indispensible for information like this, as is Killian and Ellingham’s Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. A look through the Burroughs biographies confirms that Burroughs was nowhere near San Francisco in 1967 and as the phone number suggests there must be a later date for the letterhead. 

The 1972 date is interesting. Burroughs appeared in the October 26, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone with a piece on Scientology. It would be cool to think that Burroughs stopped in the offices of Rolling Stone to check in on the reception of his article, given that 1972 is something of a high-water mark in the publishing history of the magazine, if only for the work of Hunter S. Thompson in that period. Sadly it is not to be. Burroughs was trapped in London at this time, preparing his archives for sale, so he could finance his escape to New York.

That would leave 1978 as the probable date of the flyer, and a flip though a couple crucial texts confirms this date. Unfortunately, Ted Morgan’s and Barry Miles’ biographies are no help, but Victor Bockris‘ With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker is. I find quite a bit of useful information in Bockris’ book. It is chatty and gossipy, and thus a great source of what might seem to be useless information but sometimes turns out to be just the anecdote or factoid you need to fill out a story. Turns out Burroughs was in Hollywood in October 1978 visiting the set of Heartbeat, the movie account of the love affair between Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Carolyn Cassady. In the course of his trip, Burroughs meets Timothy Leary, Nick Nolte, Tom Forcade (of High Times), John Heard, Sissy Spacek, and Governor Jerry Brown. In talking with Gov. Brown, Burroughs discusses Henry Miller. Bockris’s book is useful like that. So when Bockris writes, “William flew up to San Francisco where he was interviewed by Raymond Foye in a punk rock newspaper called Search & Destroy,” I had the just detail I needed.

Time to place Bockris back on the shelf and pull out Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997. Foye’s interview, entitled “Call Me . . . Burroughs”, opens with a brief description that sets the context:

Burroughs was in town recently with his secretary, James Grauerholz, to give several readings. This interview was conducted in a bare storefront studio on upper Grant Avenue in North Beach. Mr. Burroughs was impeccably dressed in a glen plaid sportscoat, khaki trousers and crepe-soled shoes, his green-thick felt hat resting on the table . . . By the way, “El Hombre Invisible” no longer chain-smokes Senior Service cigarettes – a recent interest has been physical health.

The interview occurred in the publishing office listed on the flyer / City Lights letterhead. Interestingly the flyer might have been made rather “suddenly” and designed as the interview occurred. It makes some sense as the City Lights letterhead would be easily at hand at the publishing office. At the very least, Foye references the flyer in the introduction to the interview, as the flyer features a caricature of “el hombre invisible” smoking a cigarette, a habit Foye notes Burroughs had recently attempted to quit.  

The flyer has a definite punk-rock feel to it, which fits right in with a publication like Search & Destroy and the date. 1978 would also explain the element of hype emanating from the flyer. In early December, Burroughs would not so suddenly appear at The Nova Convention, a punk rock Be-In in New York City. The Nova Convention was full of rumors about special guests, such as Keith Richards, and the clamoring to get an audience with the Godfather of Punk was at a seemingly all-time high around this time. At The Nova Convention, Burroughs was clearly on display and putting on a show. By 1978, the circus, the sideshow around Burroughs was in full effect. The City Lights flyer speaks with the voice of the carny. Step right up and lay your money down. 

I suspect that Ferlinghetti “designed” the flyer. The magic marker holograph typography is a Ferlinghetti staple and, by 1978, had been for years. It is utilized on several Ferlinghetti publications, like Tyrannus Nix, or even earlier on Jack Kerouac’s Rimbaud broadside published by City Lights in 1960. If I wanted to be negative, I could throw in some thoughts about the use of City Lights letterhead as representative of Ferlinghetti’s business-like approach to Burroughs’ work. City Lights refused Naked Lunch in 1959 because it was not a prudent business decision, but Ferlinghetti was sure to cash in when the obscenity stakes were not so high and the financial payoff was higher. Yet even with The Yage Letters in 1963, Ferlighetti faltered. Ferlinghetti’s cool reception to Burroughs in the early years rules out 1961 or 1962 as a possible date. The financial payoff for a reading by a very controversial cult figure would not outweigh the potential bad publicity.  

I could also rail on about how this period marked the beginning of Burroughs’ career on the performance circuit and that readings were for him one of his primary business ventures. As Foye makes clear, Burroughs was in San Francisco on business and Burroughs was dressed in business attire — the attire that became his iconic look. Burroughs the literary industry did not exist in 1961 or 1962, but was in its nascent stages in 1978. But I have already said too much. Let me just say the Burroughs caricature is a nice touch and a cool reminder that, like Burroughs, Ferlinghetti had another career as a painter. In fact, Ferlinghetti began painting in 1948 in Paris. In 2010, an exhibition of his 60 years of painting showed in Rome.

It would seem to be mystery solved, but in today’s digital age, nothing is true, nothing is real unless it is on the internet. Or on RealityStudio. Oliver Harris’s article on Burroughs and San Francisco confirms that Burroughs did not set foot in the City by the Bay until the mid-1970s. So 1978 it is. Of course, I could have started my research on the internet, where information is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, but there is something to be said for printed matter as a vehicle for research. A true time machine. Get on the paper trail; you’ll never know where you might end up.  

A Deluxe Artist’s Book by Charles Gatewood

BURROUGHS 23 is a deluxe artist’s book By Charles Gatewood published in 2011, in San Francisco, California by Dana Dana Dana in a special small edition of 23

Each 11″x14″ hand crafted book features high-quality digitally printed reproductions of photographs of american author William S. Burroughs (b. 1914 – d. 1997) shot in London, England in 1972, and in New York, New York, USA in 1975. The book also contains photos of writer Brion Gysin, Led Zeppelin singer Jimmy Page, and Rolling Stone Magazine journalist Robert Palmer. Many of these photos have never been seen or published before now.

This book uses the latest digital papers and printing techniques to reproduce the rich, lustrous surface and tonal range of traditional chemically printed black and white photographs. The pages are made of heavy papers and archival inks that have been developed to mimic the silver gelatin prints that Charles Gatewood created in the darkroom throughout his career as a photographer.

BURROUGHS 23 is currently priced at USD $2000 and is limited to 23 copies (plus 2 AP copies). Price is subject to change as more copies are sold.

For more information — and a digital preview of the entire book — see BURROUGHS23.com.

Images from BURROUGHS 23

Charles Gatewood, Jimmy Page with William Burroughs, 1975

Charles Gatewood, Jimmy Page with William Burroughs, 1975

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I turn forty this year. It has always struck me as odd which birthdays are most meaningful to me. Sixteen, twenty-one, and thirty weren’t real milestones. Thirteen was my first pivotal birthday, a time for realizing who I was. That birthday party at my uncle’s house in York, Pennsylvania remains my most memorable. My twenty-eighth birthday was also one of great meaning. Growing up I always wondered what I would be doing in the year 2000. That year I found out who I was not. I am about to turn forty, but it is thirty-nine that I view as momentous. I approached my thirty-ninth year as one of great possibility and potential creativity. It did not really turn out that way, although Beat Scene published my first chapbook, The Last Days of Jack Kerouac, just weeks before I turned thirty-nine. It was at the age of thirty-nine, with the 1953 publication of Junkie by Ace Books, that William Burroughs stepped out as a writer and began to define who he was to the public at large. Charles Bukowski, another writer I greatly admire, was thirty-nine when he put the finishing touches on Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, his first chapbook of poetry. I find myself drawn to such late bloomers, as opposed to wunderkinds like Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney, who found their voices as mere babes and, to my mind, had little else to say.

Thirty-nine was also the age at which my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. It was the same year Olympia Press published Naked Lunch: 1959. So along with the possibility of re-birth, thirty-nine also marks the age at which I can no longer ignore the fact that I will not live forever. I have the rest of my life in front of me but it is also the beginning of the end. Like never before, I find myself examining my body for signs of deterioration. Increasingly I read lumps, bumps, and blemishes, as one would read the lines on one’s palm, for hints of the future. Can my mental decline be far behind?  

As a Burroughs obsessive, I feverishly dig through my library searching for answers to the mysteries of what lies ahead. No worries. I am not reaching for The Western Lands or Last Words just yet. But with my grandfather in mind, I find myself flipping through the now morbidly titled Minutes to Go.

Several months ago, I felt compelled to watch the first episode of Mad Men. I constantly found myself in conversations about the show. These conversations were occurring everywhere: on TV, on the radio, in print, at bars, at the water cooler, over dinner, in bed. So I caught another episode a few days ago in which a character from that first episode, a hipster artist, returns as a desperate junkie. Naturally Burroughs came to mind. I am not the only one thinking such thoughts. In a Book Patrol blog post, William Burroughs is compared and contrasted to Don Draper. Nancy Mattoon provides a lot of interesting points. She notes that Mad Men opens in March, 1960, making Burroughs and Draper contemporaries. She focuses on Naked Lunch, an obvious choice, but for me the key book linking Draper and Burroughs is the Two Cities edition of Minutes to Go I had already been pouring over. Minutes to Go was published in April 1960, just after Mad Men opens, and one of Burroughs’ central concerns in the book is both mine and Draper’s: cancer.

Draper’s biggest account is Lucky Strike cigarettes. In the opening episode, we see that the culture of cigarette advertising is changing. By 1960 it has become an inescapable fact that cigarettes are harmful and carcinogenic. Admen can no longer promote safer cigarettes or doctor testimonials. Yet how do you make nearly identical products, such as cigarettes, unique? Well, you make something out of nothing. It’s the art of the soft sell, a technique that was developed around 1958. At this time, the benefits of the product became less important than associating the product with abstract and appealing images. Joseph J. Seldin, an advertising historian, wrote:

The multiplication of products, brands, and packages made the art of consumership increasingly difficult to practice in the postwar period. Increasingly, the marketplace was dominated by symbolic buying and selling, with the sellers of goods engaged in selling the symbols of goods rather than the goods themselves, and the consumers buying these symbols over the inherent product values.

One of the most famous examples of the time was a 1960 ad for Volkswagen: Think Small. For Draper and Lucky Strike, the key phrase is “It’s toasted.” The selling point is not the cigarette itself but a symbolic process: toasting.

In Minutes to Go, Burroughs’ cut-ups stand out from those made by his collaborators Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, and Sinclair Beiles, partly because they all deal with cancer, especially newspaper articles announcing research and breakthroughs in potential cures. Like Draper, Burroughs is confronting the changing medical opinion about cancer. Burroughs, however, also turns against the admen. Draper could be one of the shadowy Cancer Men of the Minutes to Go poems — a conspiracy of doctors, large corporations, government officials, and admen, who promote dangerous, addictive, but socially acceptable drugs such as cigarettes and alcohol, while at the same time demonizing what Burroughs feels are more benevolent, beneficial, and radical drugs, like marijuana and apomorphine. For Burroughs, the Cancer Men are no better than heroin pushers. Like drug dealers, they are in the business of getting people hooked on cigarettes.

Faced with this conspiracy, Burroughs confronts the admen’s soft sell with a newly discovered weapon of his own: the cut-up technique. In Minutes to Go, Burroughs takes the scissors to newspaper articles, and throughout the 1960s he would cut up and détourne advertising. Time, APO-33 and Rx Morgan (a cut-up published in Aram Saroyan’s little mag Lines) all cut up advertising for radical effect. In fact, APO-33 is a Burroughsian version of pharmaceutical promotional literature. APO-33 promotes apomorphine, which Burroughs saw as a wonder drug ignored by the Cancer Men whose business is not to cure but to promote addiction.

In 1961, Daniel Boorstein published The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream, a book attacking the manipulations of advertising and, in particular, the art of the soft sell.

Now in the height of our power in this age of the Graphic Revolution, we are threatened by a new and peculiarly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, of demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.

What alarmed Boorstein was the endless replication of images. As Joshua Shannon writes in The Disappearance of Objects

Boorstein was describing a cultural shift in which the material world was becoming detached from the ballooning sphere of representation. Focusing on phenomena we can now see as endemic to postmodernity, he worried less about decreasing utility than about the new primacy and arbitrariness of abstraction.

This connects to Burroughs’ theory about words and images as a virus. To the extent that it promotes this endless replication of images, advertising itself becomes a cancer. “I’m just a blooming old cancer and I gotta proliferate.”

The art and literature of the period dealt with this new trend. As Shannon writes, Jasper Johns attempted to combat the rise in abstraction with his sculptures.

Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), after all, is named not for what it represents but for what it is, its representational function appended as a subtitle. We are reminded here that John’s materialism is not one of utility: these are not cans reoriented to their proper function of holding liquid for drinking. Rather Johns seems to have wanted to make a consumer object that could, as if for its own sake, weight down the abstraction that was increasingly circulating through the real, mass produced goods everywhere around it.

Burroughs’ cut-ups in Minutes to Go perform a similar function. Burroughs saw the word as object and as material to be worked with — to be cut, pasted, folded. This materiality combats the increasing emptiness of words in an era of abstraction. Lines such as “cancers that surgery and Xrays C” or “Ociety rack up the score like” are, like the Johns sculptures, “not reoriented to their proper” function as words, which is to convey meaning. “Everywhere March Your Head” offers a collage –

A rap of
Sound
A.
turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the time to you

– that functions like a concrete or language poem. “A rap of/sound/A” makes me think of Zukofsky and the poem as music. Burroughs would also work not just with sounds but with colors, cutting up Rimbaud’s famous sonnet “Vowels” and utilizing a color schema in the Olympia Press edition of The Soft Machine.

Yet utilizing materiality against image and abstraction has its limitations. Addressing his 1959 statement that a picture should be looked at like a radiator, Johns stated in the 1960s “I thought at the time that a radiator was a secure object one didn’t have to bring any special psychological relationships to. Now I’m not so sure.” Likewise, Burroughs might have realized that the form of the poem encourages the development of a special relationship, which naturally leads the reader to endlessly search for and generate meaning. Poems themselves become forms of cancer. Maybe this is why Burroughs largely abandoned poetry after Minutes to Go.

Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, a series of three essays published in the New York Review of Books in 1977 and collected the next year into a book, also comes to mind. In this slim volume, Sontag points out how using cancer as metaphor cheapens the illness, portrays the sick as Other, and serves as a tool for reactionary groups such as the National Socialists. In addition, cancer as metaphor is yet another abstraction that endlessly generates and replicates. In The Secret of Fascination, Oliver Harris has described how Burroughs struggled with the role his General Theory of Addiction should play in Naked Lunch. Burroughs worried that the metaphor of addiction threatened to overtake and schlupp the entire novel. It packaged it by saying too much and drowning out the novel’s other voices. “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” written after the first edition of Naked Lunch but used as a preface for many later editions, further encouraged readers to view Naked Lunch through the metaphor of sickness. Perhaps it was inevitable. As Derrida has written, Western philosophy and thought are intimately bound up with metaphor. Burroughs utilized illness as metaphor throughout his writings and one of Sontag’s most infamous statements — “The white race is the cancer of human history” — even used the device. In Minutes to Go, Burroughs may have sought to cut up the cancer / virus / sickness metahpor, break it down, shake it up, empty it of easy meanings. Yet the only cure was a step Burroughs could never fully take — silence.

William Burroughs in Nike ad

Getting back to Don Draper, it should be noted that the Beats were no slouches at advertising and promotion. Burroughs worked as a copywriter for an ad firm just after his graduation from Harvard in 1936. Allen Ginsberg served as the pitchman for the Beat Generation his entire life. In the mid-1950s, Ginsberg worked on Madison Avenue and learned the tricks of the Mad Men trade. Clearly, Madison Avenue held an appeal for Burroughs. In his 1965 Paris Review interview, he suggests that writers include advertising and product placement in their stories. Burroughs states, “And I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?” Some have argued that Burroughs’ Nike ad of 1994 does just that. Ernest Hemingway did a commercial endorsement in 1951 for Ballantine Ale: “How would you put a glass of Ballantine’s Ale into words?” In the ad, Hemingway states he “would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a real big fish.” At the time of the ad, Hemingway had just finished fighting with the last great novel of his life, The Old Man and the Sea. The novella, completed in Cuba in 1951, would be published the following year. This provides another twist on image and advertising in Johns’ Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), which utilized Ballantine’s Ale cans.

Another benign Cancer Man who lurks behind Minutes to Go is Wilhelm Reich, who died in disgrace and isolation in late 1957 after being hounded by the government for his theories on sexuality. As explained in The Cancer Biopathy (1948), one of Reich’s central tenets is that cancer and a host of other aliments are caused by the repression of sexual energy. Orgone, a “life force” or energy that could be captured in accumulators, could be used to fight repression by improving sexual potency. Burroughs was a firm believer and at various times built his own orgone box.

What interests me about Reich, in terms of Burroughs and Draper, is how he opens up a broader view on the linkage of cancer and sex. For Reich, the nuclear family involved repression of intimacy and sexual relations, with procreation leading to “family values.” In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933) Reich writes:

From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation. In this connection, the findings of Morgan and of Engels are still entirely correct.

In The Job, Burroughs would describe love as a virus and express Reichian views on the family. The Talking Asshole routine in Naked Lunch introduces the idea that cancer can serve as a metaphor for any malignant organism bent on replicating itself: not just the nuclear family but bureaucracy, communism, fascism, global and corporate capitalism, and liberal democracy. Just as sexuality is repressed into procreation, so too is creative energy — emotional, intellectual and spiritual — channeled into chasing monetary gain and acquiring consumer goods. Such a pursuit is the cancer that Draper sells and the one that he struggles to live with on a daily basis. Sometimes a cigarette is not just a cigarette.

(Not surprisingly, Sontag discusses Reich’s theories in depth in Illness as Metaphor, yet she does not discuss Burroughs’ work, which seems odd. Possibly this is because the figure of Burroughs reminds Sontag that using illness as metaphor is not just a device of the Nazis and other reactionary groups, but pervasive in the writings of the avant-garde and the Left as well.)

In the introduction to Queer, Burroughs infamously wrote that he would not have become a writer but for the accidental shooting of Joan. But as I contend in my William Tell piece, Burroughs wrote not just out of guilt but out of freedom. Joan’s death freed Burroughs and enabled him to act and move as he chose. Burroughs could only become the writer we know today outside his responsibilities as a father, son, and husband. This is not just a male phenomenon. The key text in terms of the Mad Men time period would be Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, and other writers of that generation — Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley — have addressed the difficulties of marrying the duties of wife, daughter, and mother with that of the writer. Thus working with words is an act of solitude and isolation, a product of divorce not marriage, a nightmare not an American Dream. Writing is dangerous and deadly — like cancer, an awesome and awful disease.

My copy of Minutes to Go is a pharmakon — both poison and cure. As I mentioned in The Great Mimeograph Revolution Catalog, a library is a virus. It grows, replicates, spreads. It threatens to turn malignant and become a cancerous hoard. In the wrong situation, it can turn on you and leave you alone, ill and isolated like Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone, but it can also lead one on a journey of self-exploration and engagement with the surrounding world. The glass doors of my bookshelves serve as mirrors allowing me to look at myself and to see the reflected world around me. Some would say that the library I have created for myself is much too small and filled with a huge emptiness. That may be true, but at 39 I find that it has also proven a cure for my ills and a source of health and well-being.

by Thom Robinson

Andy Warhol, Polaroid photographs of Truman Capote and William Burroughs

Largely absent from his home country in the immediate aftermath of Naked Lunch, William Burroughs evaded the mass publicity that America lavished on other writers during the 1960s. This was a time when post-war novelists were afforded considerable public attention, with the media’s investment in figures such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote rewarded in the column inches generated by the spectacular fallings-out which occurred between these literary titans, accomplished grudge-bearers all. The high-profile lifestyles enjoyed by these authors would have been anathema to Burroughs. Never one of life’s natural schmoozers, the “literary outlaw” made his home in the pages of the underground press rather than on the set of The Dick Cavett Show.

Nonetheless, crossovers remained inevitable between Burroughs and his more mainstream contemporaries. Norman Mailer was keen to establish himself as one of Burroughs’ earliest champions, supplying a much-quoted tribute (“Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius”) alongside other more dubious commendations (“Burroughs may be gay, but he’s a man”). Gore Vidal passed through the Beats’ orbit in New York in 1953, affording Vidal an appearance in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (as “Arial Lavalina”). It also merited Kerouac a chapter in Vidal’s 1995 memoir Palimpsest, documenting the same occasion described in The Subterraneans alongside the detail omitted from Kerouac’s account (that the two ended the night together in bed). Meanwhile, Capote’s best-known association with the Beats came via his famous dismissal of On the Road on the talk show Open End in 1959: “[It] isn’t writing at all — it’s typing”. 

Yet years before his putdown of Kerouac’s breakthrough novel, American’s foremost literary protégée was already a target of ire for the nascent Beats. In texts written throughout the 1950s, Kerouac and Burroughs denounce Capote, their derision occupying a space between jealousy and contempt. In the case of Burroughs, his most remarkable comments regarding Capote remain unpublished, housed in a two-page typescript in the Burroughs Archive of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. This late 1960s document, listed in the archive’s finding aid as “An Open Letter to Truman Capote,” forms a disconcerting counterpart to Burroughs’ interest in magic, with Burroughs taking Capote to task for a “betrayal” of literary talent before concluding by effectively casting a curse on Capote’s writing abilities. Read with the benefit of hindsight, the text is all the more disturbing given that history bore out the desired effects of Burroughs’ sinister wish. But first, some background…

According to Ted Morgan, Burroughs first became aware of Capote between 1942 and 1944, when Capote was working as a copyboy at the offices of the New Yorker. Morgan recounts that Burroughs was introduced to Capote by a mutual friend, Chandler Brossard, then a reporter for the New Yorker and later a novelist in his own right. Conversely, in his “Afterword” to And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, James Grauerholz states that Burroughs was introduced to Capote by David Kammerer’s friend Marguerite Young (also a writer). Regardless of who arranged the introduction, Burroughs was unimpressed by the encounter, having been notified in advance of Capote’s beauty: “Burroughs,” writes Morgan, “didn’t think [Capote] was beautiful at all — he had a squeaky voice and looked like a wizened, prematurely aged albino.” 

Burroughs’ first impressions notwithstanding, within a matter of years the twenty year-old Capote had made a spectacular entrance on the world’s stage, aided and abetted by his striking appearance and prodigious gift for self-promotion. After the success of a series of stories published in Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar, Life magazine placed a near full-length photograph of Capote on the title page of their 1947 article “Young U.S. Writers” (spotlighting “a refreshing group of newcomers on the literary scene”). The following year, Capote’s looks again garnered substantial publicity when Harold Halma’s photograph of the prostrate author with eyes both beguiled and beguiling was used to adorn the rear dust-jacket of Capote’s debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. The book was an instant cause célèbre and its success facilitated Capote’s entrance into the world of international celebrity. 

Capote’s increasing success occurred during a period in which Kerouac and Burroughs experienced frustration in following their own respective debut novels, The Town and the City (1950) and Junkie (1953). Hence it is understandable that, as his fame grew, Capote became a figure of intermittent ridicule for the struggling writers. Kerouac’s suspicion of Capote is exemplified by a 1952 letter to Allen Ginsberg in which Kerouac describes Capote’s writing as “full of bull on every page” (by comparison with John Clellon Holmes’ Go, which is “sincere, each page”). Kerouac’s eagerness to praise more unsung authors in favor of Capote is similarly displayed by a detail in Gerald Nicosia’s biography Memory Babe, recounting that Kerouac presented a copy of Denton Welch’s Maiden Voyage to Justin Brierly (former patron of Neal Cassady), with an inscription lamenting “that none of the 15th Street book dealers would buy [Maiden Voyage] even though Welch was the literary predecessor of the much touted Capote.” 

This evidence of Kerouac’s interest in Maiden Voyage supports Burroughs’ later claim in interviews that Kerouac was the first member of the Beat circle to read Denton Welch (it was only after rereading the English author in the 1970s that Burroughs took to referring to Welch as the writer “who has influenced me more than any other”). Though Capote never acknowledged an influence from Welch, the overwrought Gothicism and coming-of-age theme of Other Voices, Other Rooms certainly bears comparison both with Welch’s 1943 debut Maiden Voyage and his 1945 follow-up In Youth is Pleasure (regardless of the fact that Capote’s novel is set in the Deep South and In Youth is Pleasure in the English Home Counties). More directly, the title of an introduction Capote wrote for a 1969 edition of Other Voices, Other Rooms, “A Voice from a Cloud,” clearly suggests the title of Welch’s posthumously published final work A Voice Through a Cloud (1950). If Burroughs were ever aware of this unacknowledged lift from Welch, it would no doubt have consolidated the sense he and Kerouac had harboured since the 1950s of Capote as rip-off merchant and charlatan. Though Burroughs also borrowed from Welch in his later writings, he took care to acknowledge the fact in his interviews and essays.

Burroughs’ texts of the early 1950s offer his own mordant mockery of Capote’s success. A letter to Ginsberg from April 1952 finds Burroughs shifting into an effeminate register to mock the gossipy tone of litterateurs: “My dear I simply must read the short story about your affair with a Mongolian hair-lipped idiot in Dakar. It sounds too too Truman Capoty. A hunch back blowing you at the same time?” Most witheringly, Burroughs invokes Capote in the pay-off to the Billy Bradshinkel routine of The Yage Letters (written 1953, published 1963), a tale of an adolescent love affair whose narrative tone treads an uncertain balance between abject sentimentality and self-conscious satire. The latter wins the day as the teenage Billy rejects the advances of Burroughs’ narrator and later dies in a car crash, leading Burroughs to conclude “And I got a silo full of queer corn where that came from,” ending in the bathetic and dismissive address to the reader, “Ah what the hell! Give it to Truman Capote” (a sentiment-puncturing punchline performed to terrific effect in Ed Buhr’s 2008 film of the routine, The Japanese Sandman). Burroughs’ notes on the original Yage manuscript imply that the Bradshinkel vignette was specifically intended as a parody of contemporary American fiction, as a “lapse into typical young U.S. novelist style” (suggesting Burroughs may also have had in mind Vidal’s 1948 novel of gay adolescent infatuation, The City and the Pillar).

Burroughs’ arrival in Tangiers in 1954 offered new reasons to resent Capote, given that Burroughs promptly felt slighted by the city’s expatriate literary community centered around Paul Bowles (who Burroughs would only befriend some years later). In August 1954 Burroughs writes to Kerouac complaining that “[Bowles] invites the dreariest queens in Tangiers to tea, but has never invited me [...] Since Tennessee Williams and Capote etc. are friends of Bowles I, of course, don’t meet them when they come here.” Despite Burroughs’ bruised tone, it is worth noting that at this point Bowles, Williams, and Capote were all successful writers while Burroughs had only one pulp novel to his (pseudonymous) name. Furthermore, Burroughs may have been misinformed as to the likelihood of encountering Capote in Tangiers, given that Capote’s sojourn in the city had occurred much earlier, in the summer of 1949. Yet the following month, Burroughs again bemoans his social exclusion to Kerouac, revealing the extent to which his sense of being ostracised in Tangiers had reopened old wounds: 

I wanted to meet what there was here to meet. But they seem to have scented my being different and excluded me, just all squares instinctively do. And these people, Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Capote, are just as square as the St. Louis Country Club set I was raised with, and they sensed I was different and never accepted me as one of them.

The letter lays bare the lingering scars of Burroughs’ upbringing and his family’s uncertain status on the fringes of St. Louis society. These scars are mined in Burroughs’ later novels, with the striking claim that others can scent his “being different” neatly foreshadowing the experiences of autobiographical protagonists in The Wild Boys (“There was something rotten and unclean about Audrey, an odor of the walking dead”) and The Place of Dead Roads (“It wasn’t anything [Kim] actually did, or might do. He just did not fit.”)

In addition to reawakening his youthful sense of exclusion, Burroughs’ alienation from the Tangiers literary community presumably impinged upon familiar feelings of being an outsider among outsiders. The distaste Burroughs expresses towards Tangiers’ “dreariest queens” and his earlier camp invocations of Capote point to a characteristic antipathy towards effeminacy as expressed in Junky (“A room full of fags gives me the horrors”). As Jamie Russell discusses in his study Queer Burroughs, a letter to Ginsberg of April 1952 gives an insight into Burroughs’ view of his sexuality at this time, sent upon learning that Carl Solomon (Burroughs’ contact at Ace Books) had suggested renaming Burroughs’ manuscript Queer with the alternative title Fag. Burroughs informs Ginsberg, “Now look, you tell Solomon I don’t mind being called queer. [...] But I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a Fag.” Explaining his position, Burroughs cites “the distinction between us strong, manly, noble types and the leaping, jumping, window dressing cocksucker.” Citing T.E. Lawrence as an example of his preferred “strong, manly, noble” type, Burroughs does not offer a specific embodiment of the alternative “type” in this binary take on homosexuality. Nonetheless, it is tempting to imagine that, when evoking the “leaping, jumping [...] cocksucker”, Burroughs may have had in mind Cecil Beaton’s famous shot of Capote caught mid-air in Morocco in 1949 (familiar to later generations through its use on the cover of The Smiths’ 1985 single The Boy With the Thorn in His Side). One can only speculate on the extent to which Burroughs’ “effeminophobia” may have influenced his negative attitudes towards Capote and his work.

When Burroughs did attain literary attention with the publication of Naked Lunch, it was only natural that he should continue to move in circles distinct from those of Capote. Though the men had no direct contact, Capote’s reliable gift for scabrous opinion made it inevitable that he would find occasion to comment on the controversy generated by Burroughs’ work. By the time he did so, his own fame had continued to rise, climaxing in the much-anticipated publication of In Cold Blood in 1966. With his study of the killing of Herbert Clutter and family by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, Capote claimed to have invented a new genre, the “nonfiction novel” (culminating in a firsthand account of the murder trial which resulted in Hickock and Smith’s execution six years after the crime). Capote fiercely advocated his new literary form over other contemporary developments in American culture. Interviewed by the Chicago Daily News in 1967, Capote announced “I hate pop art to death [...] Now William Burroughs. He’s what I’d call a pop writer. He gets some very interesting effects on a page. But at the cost of total lack of communication with the reader. Which is a pretty serious cost, I think.” Interviewed by Playboy the following year, Capote cited Burroughs’ work when defending his conviction that the journalistic style of In Cold Blood “is really the most avant-garde form of writing existent today [...] creative fiction writing has gone as far as it can experimentally. [...] Of course we have writers like William Burroughs, whose brand of verbal surface trivia is amusing and occasionally fascinating, but there’s no base for moving forward in that area.” Meanwhile, asked his opinion of Capote in The Job (1969), Burroughs supplied his own underwhelming verdict: “I thought that Capote’s earlier work showed extraordinary and very unusual talent, which I can’t say for this In Cold Blood, which it seems to me could have been written by any staff editor on The New Yorker.”

Despite this measured criticism, behind the scenes Burroughs’ feelings towards Capote had obviously continued to fester. The “Open Letter to Truman Capote” held in the Burroughs Archive duplicates Burroughs’ remark that In Cold Blood  “could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker,” but adds much else besides. Written in direct response to the flurry of popular interest generated by the book, Burroughs takes as his starting point Kenneth Tynan’s damning review in the Observer newspaper. Tynan identified a moral queasiness at the heart of the book’s construction, suggesting that, in order to ensure his work in progress would receive the ideal narrative closure, Capote chose not to help overturn the conviction of Hickock and Smith:

For the first time an influential writer of the front rank has been placed in a position of privileged intimacy with criminals about to die, and — in my view — done less than he might have to save them. [...] An attempt to help (by supplying new psychiatric testimony) might easily have failed: what one misses is any sign that it was ever contemplated.

Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke avows that “Tynan’s thesis was based on a sloppy reading of the book and false assumptions about Kansas law.” However, Clarke does concede that, though “Truman could not have saved Perry and Dick if he had spent one million dollars, or ten million [...] Tynan was right when he suggested that Truman did not want to save them.” The ethical ambiguity surrounding Capote’s bestseller has remained a source of fascination, providing the basis for the two biopics which emerged within quick succession in the last decade, Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006). 

Burroughs’ “letter” begins with an explanation to Capote that his “is not a fan letter in the usual sense.” Acting as spokesman for a “department” with apparent responsibility for determining writers’ fates, Burroughs announces that he has followed Capote’s “literary development from its inception” and, in the line of duty, has conducted exhaustive inquiries comparable to those undertaken by Capote in his research for In Cold Blood. An engagingly surreal touch finds Burroughs reporting that these inquiries have included interviewing all of Capote’s fictional characters “beginning with Miriam” (the title character of Capote’s breakthrough story of 1945). Referring to “the recent exchange of genialities” between Capote and Kenneth Tynan, Burroughs concludes that Tynan “was much too lenient.” Going one step further than Tynan and accusing Capote of acting as an apologist for hard-line methods of police interrogation (and thus supporting those “who are turning America into a police state”), Burroughs next turns to the question of Capote’s writing abilities. Avowing that Capote’s early short stories were “in some respects promising,” Burroughs suggests Capote could have made positive use of his talents, presumably by applying them to the expansion of human consciousness (“You were granted an area for psychic development”). Instead, Burroughs finds that Capote has sold out a talent “that is not yours to sell.” In retribution for having misused “the talent that was granted you by this department”, Burroughs starkly warns “That talent is now officially withdrawn,” signing off with the sinister admonition, “You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.” 

It should be noted that, at the time of writing, Burroughs was a credulous believer in the efficacy of curses (famously believing he had successfully used tape recorders to close down a London restaurant where he had received bad service). Regardless of how seriously Burroughs intended his prediction for Capote’s future, his words proved eerily prescient. After the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote announced work on an epic novel entitled Answered Prayers, intended as a Proustian summation of the high society world to which he had enjoyed privileged access over the previous decades. The slim existing contents were eventually published posthumously while one of the few extracts which saw publication within Capote’s lifetime notoriously employed Capote’s habit of indiscretion to disastrous effect. When “La Côte Basque, 1965″ was published by Esquire in 1975, Capote’s betrayal of the confidences of friends (who recognized the identities lurking beneath the veneer of fictionalized characters) resulted in swift exile from the celebrity world which Capote had courted for much of his career. 

Given Burroughs’ curse on Capote, it is interesting to note that, in the years before his death, Capote’s dismissive views on Burroughs’ work became even more damning: “Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don’t think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.” By the time these remarks were recorded by Lawrence Grobel in Conversations with Capote, successful canvassing by Mailer among others had resulted in Burroughs’ admission to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. After a long decline, wrought by the inability to break a harrowing cycle of alcohol and barbiturate abuse, Capote died the following year at the age of 59.

A Profile of William S. Burroughs (1965)

By Bill Butler

Bill Butler was an American poet who served as one of the influential managers of London’s independent bookstore Better Books. In 1967 he moved to Brighton and founded Unicorn Books, which was subject the following year to a nasty obscenity trial involving its edition of J.G. Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan and other works of the underground that were being offered for sale. Butler was friendly with William Burroughs and interviewed him for this previously uncollected profile, first published in the Guardian newspaper on 27 November 1965.

Voice dry as the voice of T.S. Eliot droning from a recording, accent still American after years away from America. Appearance as anonymous as a bank clerk’s, forgettable as a bank robber. Writer of books compared with Kafka, Joyce, and dirty postcards. His bruised readers nurse a sense of outrage and assault after trips through the Burroughs landscape, a desert of screams.

All the time he talks he moves around the room, or groping for cigarettes, or gesturing with nervous hands. He lines the cigarette pack up with invisible parallels, rearranges the ash pattern in the ash tray. His work is sentences from newspapers, conversations, other authors, the title of something he is reading, things he hears, what is happening around him; it all makes a sort of collage. “Brion Gysin first suggested the collage technique to me in 1960. I had been working toward something like the cut-up method on my own. Naked Lunch is partially a cut-up. Gysin said that writing was fifty years behind painting and why shouldn’t something else be done.”

“He had started something he called ‘permutating points.’ When you start moving ‘time,’ the word, around, you get many different meanings. We have quite a few different words in the English language such as ‘Two – to – too,’ ‘I – aye – eye,’ ‘there – they’re – their. Once you move them around, change the word order slightly, meanings change, new things come out. Just by changing the punctuation you can have: ‘We are there. Two know,’ or ‘We are their two. No,’ or ‘We are there to know.’ Words intersect in unfamiliar ways. Change the word order and ‘We are too there. No.’ You can’t do that with French — the whole effort of the academy has been to make a language with no permutations, no interest in it.”

From a pile of newspapers on the bed he picked up and waved the Daily Express: “The English papers are amazing. Lok at the variations in headlines, here in the Daily Express it says: ’2 A.M. ANXIETY GROWS FOR IKE,’ right here on the front page, the top story. But in this other paper they’ve put it way over on the back page, down at the bottom. Just not the same story.”

He reads a lot of newspapers. For information: “I once knew a junkie that would hold [sic] up with the newspapers, a couple of packages of cigarettes, and some candy bars and read them through from first to last page. Everything. And remembered it too. If he got the chance he’d reel the whole thing back at you, every word of it. I spend most of my time editing and filing. Some of the files are here with me, but not all of them. I couldn’t travel everywhere with them.”

“For ten published pages there are fifty pages of notes on file and more on tape. I use a tape recorder, camera, typewriter, scissors, scrapbooks. From the newspapers and from items people send me I get intersections between all sorts of things. Plane crashes, for example. They come in sequence. A plane piloted by a Captain Clark crashed in California. Now the crash was caused by a crazed passenger, Frankie Gonzales, who shot Captain Clark. The next major plane crash was at Clark Air Force Base in Manila, no survivors. Frankie Gonzales came from Manila. On the plane once, on the Gibraltar-to-Tangier run, the pilot was Captain Clark. Over the loudspeaker came, ‘Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.’ Things like that. They all tie up, there are connections, intersections.”

“If people keep their eyes open they’ll notice these peripheral things around them. Newsweek magazine some time ago ran an advertisement which said: ‘Read by 1,700,000 families in 186 lands.’ Two weeks later the ad came out: ‘Read by 1,600,000 families in 166 lands.’ Why? I’d like to know what happened to those 100,000 families and twenty countries.”

Word Falling, Photo Falling

In his books William Burroughs constantly repeats: “Word falling, photo falling.” He explains it: “I expect to see the formation of an ideographic language. You know Marshall McLuhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy says that a syllabic language conditions thought. Words and photographs are used by vested interests as a control machine to manipulate humanity. But their manipulation depends on people being able to read; so we have universal literacy promulgated. Theocracies, on the other hand, such as the Mayans and the Egyptians, were dependent on an illiterate population where knowledge of even such information as seasonal times for planting rested only with the priesthood. Their control was through ignorance, whereas we today are controlled through the word which we can read.”

“We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not the image of the thing itself. Try reading something silently without saying the words subvocally. It’s hard to do. Gertrude Stein’s statement: ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,’ is true only if written down; but as Korzbyski says, a rose (flower) is, whatever is it, not a rose (word). So a rose (word) is a rose (word) is a rose (word) is a rose (word). No flower.”

Burroughs’ only published books in England so far are Naked Lunch and Dead Fingers Talk, both published by John Calder. When it came out Naked Lunch was greeted in the English press with a near-total retch of disgust. Those critics who actually read the book are answered in this passage from Nova Express, to be published in February by Jonathan Cape:

Their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer — I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so-called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine. Their drugs are poison to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens — Stay out of the Garden of Delights…

Asked who his “they” are, he answers, “The vested interests. Time / Life / Fortune is one. The Luce magazines are nothing but control mechanisms. They’re about as human as a computer. Henry Luce, himself, has no control over the thing now, it’s grown so large. Yet all it would take to bring it down is one technical sergeant fouling up the works, just one technical sergeant. That’s why the ‘Word falling, photo falling’ image. We’ve got to break down the police organization of words and images. I haven’t had time to do it yet but one possibility would be a color alphabet — using colored dots. Obviously it would be impossible to use 26 colors; but a combination using nine colors and a series of dots, based on the syllable and not on the letter — colored dot symbol for ‘ing,’ ‘ed,’ ‘ch,’ ‘wh,’ and so forth would be an improvement. Or an ideographic language like the Mayan or Chinese systems used in addition to the spoken language.

Unlike most authors, whose personae in books and in flesh are different, Burroughs is completely consonant with his writing, quoting from it occasionally; but more generally he simply uses similar wording to express ideas which he is working out in the books. He regards the weapons of the “machine” as varied: “They use sex as an addiction for control, just as they use alcohol and drugs — a program of systematic frustration in order to sell this crock of sewage as immortality, a garden of delights, and love. In our civilization alcohol is the other accepted narcotic since it also induces sleep. And as a crime-producing ‘drug’ it has no rival. This is the world they want to make us live in and like, where they can use the word, the photo, sex, narcotics, and alcohol. And power addiction, many policemen are addicts for power, if it got taken away from them they’d go through agony. Those are their weapons. And the monopoly has records pertaining to anybody that they feel could be of use to them or who might endanger them.”

In Soft Machine, to be published next year by Calder and Boyars, William Burroughs summed himself up with pretty fair accuracy… “So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers, and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air…”

The Lost Tapes of Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, 1967-1969

by Edward S. Robinson

For academics and fans alike, the archives of the pivotal beat triumvir of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac have long been a source of fascination and a continued wealth of lost texts. Despite the excavation of a large number of letters and minor works, alongside significant manuscripts such as the Burroughs / Kerouac collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (written in 1945, but not published until 2010) there is nevertheless a sense that the well may be beginning to run dry. 

It is perhaps for this reason that interest in the extended “Beat family tree” which has branches that extend far and wide is finally beginning to grow. While largely (and unjustly) neglected thus far, the so-called “European Beats” made a substantial contribution to the dissemination of the cut-up method. Many of these writers were introduced to the technique by Burroughs himself through his many contributions to underground zines in the 1960s, when his project had been specifically to “recruit” practitioners far and wide in order to “spread the virus” and spearhead an assault against linguistic programming and rational thought. Amongst these, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach stand out for their contributions to the cut-up canon. Many of their works were produced with Burroughs’ direct involvement in some capacity: for example the “Counterscripts” which preface Pélieu’s 1967 novel With Revolvers Aimed… Finger Bowls, and Weissner’s The Braille Film (1970) and the “Tickertape” introduction to the three-way collaboration between Weissner, Jürgen Ploog and Jan Herman, Cut Up Or Shut Up (1969), and not forgetting the Weissner / Pélieu / Burroughs pamphlet So Who Owns Death TV? (1967). These publications are relatively sought after and are commanding increasingly high prices on the collectors” market. However, to date, the archives of these authors remain largely unexplored. 

A few months ago, I received an email from Gary Lee-Nova. Aware of my research into these writers, he wondered if I might be interested in hearing a tape he had in his possession, the details of which he explained as follows:

Since the early 1970s, I have had a five-inch reel, ¼” audiotape recording in my collection. I obtained the tape from Richard Aaron of AM HERE BOOKS which at the time, was based in Switzerland.¹

Gary reported that the tape was well-preserved, had been carefully stored and played only once while in his collection, but the recording quality very much reflected the technology of the time, noting:

To my ear, it sounds like it was recorded in a small shed made of sheet metal; a bit tinny. I’ve heard other old tape recordings that sound like they were recorded in a wet, cardboard box.

His intention was, then, to convert the audio to digital files and re-equalize the recording in order to render it as listenable as possible and to “bring about as pleasant a sound of the reading voices as possible.”²

Naturally, I was extremely interested. I knew that Weissner had been heavily involved in a number of recording projects in the late 1960s, as he recalled in a 1988 interview with Jay Dougherty, recounting,

I documented a good part of the New York poetry scene on tape for the German Avantgarde Archive, which is run by an old friend of mine. I think I wound up with about a hundred hours of tape. It was a good cross-section: Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, Ray Bremser, Jack MacLow, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles. Ron Tavel. Jack Micheline. John Wieners. Ed Sanders.³

In the same interview he also remembers being “totally fascinated with William Burroughs’ cut-up thing” which led him to “all these cut-up collaborations with Burroughs, Nuttall, Pélieu, Mary Beach. Tape experiments and whatnot.”⁴ However, I had never actually heard any of Weissner’s recordings myself. What’s more, here was a bone fide rarity, compiling a number of recordings catalogued as being in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in the Northwestern University Library, Illinois, and others that appear to be unlisted.⁵

I did not have to wait long before the suspense was over and I received not only a digital copy of this rare tape, but also photographic evidence of the source, including a high-resolution reproduction of the sheet attached to the box, which contained the full track listing that Gary had provided in his email.

The Contributors and the Material Facts

The facts: the tape contains four separate recordings. There is a gummed piece of paper attached to the box bearing the typed details of the recordings, which read as follows:

CARL WEISSNER reading from THE BRAILLE FILM (San Francisco, 1970) followed by tape experiments (New York / San Francisco 1967/68).

MARY BEACH reading from ELECTRIC BANANA (Darmstadt 1969) followed by

CLAUDE PELIEU, MARY BEACH and CARL WEISSNER reading from their resp. notebooks & works in progress – a spontaneous cutup experiment – recorded by Carl W., Honolulu, 12 Dec. 1968 60 min.

Beneath this track listing is Weissner’s signature.

The Recordings, Side 1: Carl Weissner

The first three tracks or sections in the digital reproduction represent the first side of the tape, and all feature Weissner reading from The Braille Film. The sound quality varies across the three parts, suggesting that they were recorded in different locations and / or at different times, perhaps using different equipment.

The first track — in its digital form — has a duration of two minutes and twenty-nine seconds and features a straight recording of Weissner reading a segment of text. The reading is largely clear, although occasional words are a little difficult to distinguish through a combination of microphone positioning and enunciation. The piece contains a thin thread of narrative, beginning ostensibly with the scene of an execution, while also incorporating “classic” cut-up elements, in the form of references to virus and mutation and biological and technological synesthesia, such as “faded lips, palpitating emphysema lungs” and “infra-red veins” which are representative of the “composite bodies” that populate Weissner’s (anti-)novel.⁶ Interestingly, this section of text does not appear in the published version of the book, which appeared in 1970 on Jan Herman’s Nova Broadcast Press.

The second section is louder and clearer than the first, with a trebly sound which occasionally tweets at certain frequencies. It has a running time of almost twelve minutes. It features Weissner delivering a measured reading of a section of The Braille Film that begins on page 92. The delivery is deadpan, almost Burroughsian in many respects. The meter is reminiscent of those which appear on Call Me Burroughs, and, like Burroughs, Weissner adopts different voices for dialogue. To hear him raise the pitch of his voice and deliver the lines “Why, it is possible? Something’s touching me on the ass…!” in the tone of a posh woman in a state of affronted surprise cannot fail to amuse, while his rendition of an upper-class British accent for her “gray companion” is remarkable for its accuracy. 

Significantly, there are portions of text — the occasional sentence here and there — which are read here that do not appear in the final published version. The interest here lies not, perhaps, so much in the details of textual variations or edits per se (although scholars of major authors, including Burroughs, are often given to analyzing such variant and alternative edits in great depth), but in the way that this evidences the theories that lie at the heart of The Braille Film in live practice. Much of The Braille Film is given to demonstrating the ways in which the media, authors, historians, all manipulate text — and film — to achieve specific ends. Minor, often subtle edits, a change of camera angle or focus, the cropping of an image, all contrive to alter — potentially quite dramatically — the way the audience receives and perceives a “text.” As such, the minor alterations Weissner makes to his own text show the author effectively manipulating, adjusting, altering his own text, and in doing so, in some small way, the course of history is changed. This marks a central theme of The Braille Film, and also stands in parallel with Burroughs’ theories concerning the idea of “history as construct”:

We think of the past as being there unchangeable… the past is ours to shape and change at will. Two men talk… if no recording of the conversation is made, it exists only in the memory of the two actors. Suppose I make a recording… and alter and falsify the recording, and play the altered recording back to the two actors. If my alterations had been skilfully and plausibly applied the two actors will remember the altered recording.⁷

The third track is of lesser quality, and sounds as though Weissner’s voice has been recorded down a drainpipe or processed through a flange effect. This is, in fact, intentional, as he recounts: “I remember producing the effect of talking down a drain on purpose: I talked directly into an empty whisky bottle when I made that recording (Wong’s Cabaret, etc.) in Jan [Herman]‘s room on Bush Street, San Francisco, ’68.”⁸ Seemingly recorded in two takes, the material does undeniably suffer on account of the recording quality. Nevertheless, Weissner’s flat delivery stands in stark contrast to the sex acts he details within this section, which again, is not included in the published version of the book. However, it is worth noting at this juncture that Weissner produced a number of texts entitled The Braille Film; the 1969 German language collection of works edited by Weissner, entitled Cut-Up, which featured works by Burroughs, Mary Beach, Harold Norse, Jürgen Ploog, Claude Pélieu, Brion Gysin and Jeff Nuttall, features a number of short texts by Weissner gathered under the main heading of The Braille Film. While some of these “Composite Soundtrack” pieces do also appear in the book, they do so in re-edited forms. This may appear somewhat confusing, as The Braille Film was written directly in English, yet the texts which appear in Cut-Up, published a year earlier — are in German. However, as Carl explained, “the stuff in the antho was translated (sort of) from the English ms.” As such, this recording provides an insight into the evolution of The Braille Film as a book that emerged from an array of texts written over a period of time and then pieced together: a large-scale textual collage of smaller cut-ups.

The fourth and final track on side one is given to Weissner’s “Tape Experiments (New York / San Francisco 1967/68).” With a running time of eight minutes and ten seconds, it comprises a selection of segments of recordings from a range of courses cut together. Most of the different samples stand separate from one another: a few seconds of the radio, a few more of the television, a few more seconds of Weissner reading. The pieces are, as one would probably expect, of variable quality, although there are some interesting delay effects and overlays, plus an unsettling — not to mention slightly disorientating — loop of a crowd’s recorded laughter, which are noteworthy from an experimental perspective.

Beginning at the 1:21 mark, between a loop of what sounds like coughing accompanied by a droning hum in the background and a segment of narrative delivered in an eerie, echoed whisper, Weissner reads a permutational piece that effectively recreates Burroughs’ “Recalling All Active Agents.” In Weissner’s recording, the words are changed to “Calling All Erogenous Agents” and additional words and phrases are also incorporated. While recorded in 1960, Burroughs’ recording remained unreleased commercially until 1986, when Sub Rosa issued the compilation Break Through in Grey Room, evidencing that Weissner had access to Burroughs’ personal archive during the time they worked on their various collaborations. This demonstrates just how keen Burroughs was during his “cut-up period” to “spread the virus.” His prodigious output through the underground press and in his numerous collaborations, in conjunction with his liberal sharing of his methodology and frequent incitement for others to utilize the cut-up technique, evidence just how strongly he believed it was possible to revolutionize writing and all word-based media. Recordings such as those made by Weissner show how infectious Burroughs’ enthusiasm was. 

Other sections of these “Tape Experiments” are more developed and sophisticated, and contain a number of layers of audio simultaneously. Possibly generated in part by ambient sounds, the hum of electricity or even the amplified recording device itself, between 1:30 and 3:00 and from 7:15 to the end, long, low notes, drones and hums provide a backdrop to snippets of dialogue and also to longer readings from texts, with an almost musical tonality. In many ways, these sections are the most remarkable of all, in that they sound very like contemporary experimental / ambient records, illustrating just how ahead of their time these tape experiments really were.

Leading the Electronic Revolution

It is perhaps because of their continued relevance that Burroughs’ audio experiments, conducted in the 1960s, continue to be a source of great interest on both a literary and technical level. Burroughs’ interest in the applications of audio was well documented, particularly in The Job and Electronic Revolution, which would prove seminal for experimental music pioneers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Burroughs’ own recordings, however, remained in the vaults. Initially recorded for the purposes of his own personal research, the tapes were not intended for public consumption. It wasn Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle who convinced Burroughs to allow him to release a selection of these experiments commercially. After spending many long hours going through the tapes, Orridge compiled the hour’s worth of material that was released as Nothing Here Now But the Recordings on Industrial Records in 1980.⁹

Nevertheless, Burroughs’ influence on music, particularly the music of the avant-garde, precedes the public release of his experimental recordings, primarily on account of his book Electronic Revolution (1970, 1972, 1976), which expounds the theoretical contexts of some of his practical experiments with audio. Along with Cabaret Voltaire and Coil, Throbbing Gristle were among the first to explore the possibilities of using tape loops, cut-ups, samples and “found sounds” to make music. It was in the work of these bands that Burroughs’ influence on music became truly tangible.¹⁰ “A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music,” recalls Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk.¹¹ This was true of many of the bands involved in the Industrial scene that exploded on both sides of the Atlantic between 1978 and 1984. They immersed themselves in studio experimentation and the application of techniques first explored by Burroughs and Gysin some 20 years previous. The reason for the delayed spread of the Virus in sound recordings was largely due to the lack of technology to facilitate widespread experimentation prior to 1978. But once Burroughs and Gysin had made the “breakthrough,” it was almost inevitable that their ideas would spread. Kirk regards Electronic Revolution as “a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd… to create a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself” adding, “that side was always very interesting to us.”¹² The book’s great impact on the underground music scene is indubitable, serving as a catalyst for a new wave of avant-garde musical experimentation. 

The appeal of Electronic Revolution is obvious. While those who had followed Burroughs’ writing through the cut-up experiments would have been able to admire the many qualities of the writing, and even the methodology behind it, to the extent that it was possible to “write like Burroughs,” Electronic Revolution revealed new possibilities, demonstrating the potential for the written word to develop and mutate in new directions off the page. It also represented a “call to arms” for dissenters, providing as it did directions for sonic terrorism with the potential for “real” results:  

…make recordings and take pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, now play recordings back and take more pictures, will result in accidents, fires, removals. Especially the latter. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Center at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was carried out…¹³

Like Naked Lunch and The Third Mind, Electronic Revolution is a “how-to” book, a handbook, with instructions for the replication of the author’s techniques to achieve specific effects. “Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. Recorded police whistles will draw cops. Recorded gunshots, and their guns are out.”¹⁴ Burroughs explained the function of site-specific recording and playback thus:

…playback on location can produce definite effects. Playing back recordings of an accident can produce another accident… We carried out a number of these operations: street recordings, cut in of other material, playback in the streets …(I recall I had cut in fire engines and while playing this tape back in the street fire engines passed.)… (I wonder if anybody but CIA agents read this article or thought of putting these techniques into actual operation.) Anybody who carries out similar experiments over a period of time will turn up more “coincidences” than the law of averages allows.¹⁵

It was the capacity to achieve a specific desired effect, as Burroughs’ empirical testing of the theories demonstrated, which proved a significant factor in the book’s appeal to a certain audience. Although Burroughs believed that “the influence of fiction is not direct,” he always intended for his writing to have a tangible effect upon the reader in some way — after all, “if your writing had no effect, then you would have something to worry about.”¹⁶ That an early Cabaret Voltaire gig where Burroughs’ instructions were put into practice ended in a riot is testament to the effectiveness of the method.¹⁷

It is abundantly evident from hearing these brief examples of Weissner’s experimental recordings that Carl, like Burroughs, recognized the value of applying the cut-up method to audio tape.

The Recordings, Side 2, Part. 1: Mary Beach and Electric Banana

Side two begins with Beach reading from Electric Banana. This is a straightforward spoken-word recording, and Beach’s proper-sounding enunciation stands very much at odds with the colloquial and coarse elements of the prose, particularly within the dialogue. If anything, this heightens the impact of the reading and of the text itself. Beach’s performance is largely clear and confident, with only occasional stumbles, and the lines “wild screams of boys jacking off… on street corner of Madrid” causing some slight difficulty. Rather than detracting from the listening experience, such details remind us that this is a real, live reading captured on tape. While the readings Burroughs recorded for Call Me Burroughs were recorded over several takes and carefully edited to present an almost mechanically precise recording, free of background noise or errors, the scraping chair and other background sounds that can be heard during this twelve-minute recording are integral to its spirit, which is natural and immediate. The text itself is brutal and prosaic, a veritable blizzard of violence and sex, an orgy of drug consumption. 

As with Weissner’s readings from the then-unpublished Braille Film, so Beach’s Electric Banana was yet to be published, at least in its original language. (A section did appear in the Weissner-edited anthology Cut-Up in 1969, the year of this recording, and the full text was published in translation in Germany the following year, although it would be another five years before Cherry Valley Editions would publish an English language edition.) Once again, as with Weissner’s readings, the version Beach reads here is different from the published version. Beginning with a section that starts on page 12 of the Cherry Valley Edition, Beach omits a number of words, alters the tense of others and reads “I was apparently the only one interested in what was going on,” whereas the published version reads “I was not the only one.” Skipping most of page 13, she segues “Bromo-Seltzer trickling, foaming over blue headlights” into “Nothing but my own brain counts now.” 

The reason I draw attention to what may appear to be rather minor details is because, in the first instance, they enable us to observe the evolution of the text and the way additions and excisions were made over a period of time. Perhaps most importantly, however, we must consider the variations within the context of the theories which surrounded the cut-ups, specifically the ideas relating to textual manipulation. The underlying belief that words are malleable — Burroughs likened words to physical mediums such as paint — means that altering the position of a word within the broader context of the sentence and the paragraph in which it is located, and the way different juxtapositions of words can produce radically different meanings or present very different images in the reader’s mind’s eye, is key.

That the published text is, arguably, more explicit — and more Burroughsian — than the version Beach reads here is also noteworthy. The line “lips hovering over the ivory prick raised ready to strike like a snake — Iron exploding on a white moon, cool floods of white sound” would be published as “lips hovering over the ivory prick raised ready to strike like a pink cobra — Iron exploding on a white moon, cool floods of jissom & a white sound.” Whether or not this necessarily adds to the text’s impact is questionable, but one thing that is placed in sharp relief by this recording is Beach’s eye — and ear — for a Surreal image, and I would contend that some of the images conveyed in the recorded, earlier version of the text, are stronger or more striking than those which appear in the later revision. 

The Recordings, Side 2, Part. 2: Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Carl Weissner

The second track on side two has a running time of six minutes and twelve seconds. It comprises two separate readings, beginning with Claude Pélieu reading a brace of short pieces in a segment which has a duration of fractionally under five minutes, with a calm, smooth delivery. He speaks exclusively in French, which renders comment from me on the contents of the piece extremely difficult. On a purely technical level, however, Pélieu’s voice is clear, despite there being significant “snow” on the recording. Beach then reads briefly from a work in progress, which would appear to draw on cut-up articles from medical journals, with references to schizophrenia, liver disease and hepatitis, in juxtaposition with images of apocalypse, life-drawing and dissection. The sound quality suggests that it was recorded during the same session as Pélieu’s piece. 

The final section, which runs for eight minutes, begins with a collaborative piece, in which all three authors read in turn, although in no discernible sequence: Beach and Weissner in English, Pélieu in French. The result is certainly interesting, as each speaker delivers one or two lines from their text, their styles of delivery contrasting dramatically with one another — Pélieu’s style is laid-back and steady, while Beach’s delivery is akin to that of a newsreader, and Weissner has a controlled intensity in his voice. On a formal level, this intercutting of each author’s work effectively creates a new composite text that amalgamates three pre-existing texts. Described as a “spontaneous cut-up experiment,” its use of longer phrases in juxtaposition function more like those which form “The First Cut-Ups” that appeared in Minutes to Go than the choppier, more fragmentary cut-ups that would subsequently become the more popular form. However, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe this eight-minute sound collage as a real-time audio fold-in.

These recordings are fascinating and valuable in their own right, on a number of levels and not least of all because of the names involved in their production. While perhaps not possessing the commercial or mass appeal of discovering a “lost” recording of Burroughs, in the context of the broader Beat “scene,” Weissner, Pélieu and Beach are all significant writers, while Beach’s role in the publication and circulation of some of the most experimental works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, through her Beach Texts & Documents imprint was substantial. While it seems unlikely at the time of writing that further recordings from Weissner’s archive will surface — or find their way to me — it is extremely exciting to speculate about what gems may be in existence. At the very least, this tape affords a fascinating insight into a brief yet extremely fertile time in the ever-evolving, ever-mutating history of the cut-ups and the Beat generation.

Download the Lost Tapes

• Side 1, Track 1 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 2 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 3 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 4 (Weissner)
• Side 2, Track 1 (Beach)
• Side 2, Track 2 (Pélieu and Beach)
• Side 2, Track 3 (Pélieu, Weissner, and Beach)

Notes

1. Email from Gary Lee-Nova, 8th November 2010.

2. Ibid.

3. Jay Dougherty. “Translating Bukowski and the Beats: An Interview with Carl Weissner” in Gargoyle 35, 1988, p. 73.

4. Ibid., p. 70.

5. See the finding aid to the Weissner archive at Northwestern University Library.

6. Carl Weissner, The Braille Film. San Francisco: Nova Press, 1970, p. 26.

7. William S. Burroughs and Daniel Odier, The Job. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989,  p. 35.

8. Carl Weissner, email to K. Seward, April 2011 (edited for capitalization).

9. Industrial Records, IR0016. Reissued as part of The Best of William S. Burroughs at Giorno Poetry Systems 4 CD box set. New York: Mercury Records, 1998.

10. Although David Bowie famously applied the cut-up technique in the formulation of the lyrics to his album Diamond Dogs, this example of Burroughs’ influence being applied on a technical level within music is wholly isolated. Moreover, Bowie still only applied the technique to words on the page as Burroughs has in Minutes to Go, The Third Mind and the Nova trilogy. The cutting and splicing of audio represents a developmental departure from this.

11. Biba Kopf: ‘spread the Virus: How William Burroughs infected the world of music”, in My Kind of Angel: I. M. William Burroughs, ed. Rupert Loydell. Exeter: Stride, 1998, p. 72.

12. Ibid., p. 72.

13. William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution. Gottingen: Expanded Media Editions, (2nd edition) 1970, p. 74.

14. Ibid., p. 67.

15. Ibid., p. 74.

16. “The Nova Convention” by Richard Goldstein, reproduced in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2001, p. 436.

17. Biba Kopf: “Spread the Virus: How William Burroughs Infected the World of Music” in My Kind of Angel: I. M. William Burroughs, p. 72.

Published and Draft Introductions to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke

by William S. Burroughs

Jacques Stern is a writer.. That is he is writing actual events and conditions.. He says he is far away and this is literally true.. He says he is in ice and this is literally true, far away.. He far now is.. Separated from the reader by layers of cold transparent shale.. Distant fingers tapping on the pane in code.. I have endeavored to decode his message by folding some of my texts (which are composites of many writers.. All writing is) and laying them on the text of Stern and reading across so the resulting message rearranged and edited can perhaps be reduced to two words.. STAY OUT.. A writer maps psychic areas.. And like any explorer he runs the risk of being unable to return.. The difference between a real and spurious writer is quite as definite as the difference between an actual explorer and someone who does his exploring second hand (arm chair explorer).. The real writer is there.. And sometimes he can only send back a shortwave code message of warning.

To be followed by the enclosed texts.. I have been experimenting with the folded text method using Joyce and many others.. Results most interesting must be rearranged and edited as in any method of composition..

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
First page in the private edition of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Second page in the private edition of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Burroughs’ original manuscript

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Previously unpublished manuscript intended for the introduction to The Fluke
page 1

William S. Burroughs
Introduction to Jacques Stern’s The Fluke
Previously unpublished manuscript intended for the introduction to The Fluke
page 2

An Archive of Materials by and about Jacques Stern

Including the Complete Text of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs had known Jacques Loup Stern for little more than a year when he declared the man a “great writer.” Writing from the Beat Hotel in Paris on June 8, 1959, Burroughs reported to Allen Ginsberg that Stern “wrote a novel in nine days.” It was called The Fluke. “As for Jack’s writing,” Burroughs continued, using the Americanization of Stern’s first name, “I think it is better by far than mine or Kerouac’s or your or Gregory’s or anyone I can think of. There is no doubt about it, he is a great writer. I think the greatest writer of our time.”¹ This is high praise from a man about to publish one of the most groundbreaking books of the century. In the next month, Burroughs would spend a frantic ten days pulling together the manuscript of Naked Lunch for publication by the Olympia Press in Paris. In late July 1959, while describing this scramble in another letter to Ginsberg, Burroughs reiterated his judgement: Stern “is a great writer.”²

When Burroughs’ correspondence was published in 1993, a legend began to accrue around the name Jacques Stern. Who was this man? What was his writing like? Had The Fluke never been published? Why had its author eschewed the limelight? Was he living or dead? Before the publication of Naked Lunch, Burroughs had been viewed as a mysterious figure haunting the periphery of the Beats. But as Burroughs became famous, it was Stern who became — and was to remain — an hombre invisible. His name would sometimes appear in interviews or books, where he was described with a stock supply of nouns (Frenchman, mathematician, junky) and adjectives (rich, brilliant, eccentric). Burroughs himself would refer to Stern as “the baron” or “the mad baron.” But no one spoke of him as a writer.

Compounding the mystery was the fact that Stern was an inveterate teller of tall tales. In the heady Beat Hotel days, Stern told Burroughs about surviving a horrific car crash. It wasn’t true. He claimed to have undergone profound mystical experiences in India, but his traveling companion painted their trip in a much less metaphysical light. In the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, there is a cut-up of “Jacques Stern’s Telegram to the Captain Barrie of His Alleged Yacht.” The word “alleged” stands out.³ In later years, Stern would still regale friends with stories — he had been in a concentration camp, he would hint, or he had been the basis for the character of Dr Strangelove in the Stanley Kubrick movie — that they wouldn’t know whether to believe. Often his strangest stories were the truest.

Early Years

Even Stern’s birthdate is difficult to pin down. The Fluke contains a scene in which Stern’s own father has to hunt for the information in a mountain of files: “He was looking for something.. My date of birth..” But then the nameless protagonist, presumably speaking for Stern in the autobiographical novel, dismisses the information as “utterly useless.” This contempt for the facts helped to conceal Stern in a fog of misinformation, legend, and deceit. The 1961 poetry anthology Junge Amerikanische Lyrik, edited by Gregory Corso, includes a two-line biography giving Stern’s birthdate as 1930. A rare book documenting families victimized by the French revolution lists Stern as a descendant and gives the birthdate June 3, 1932.⁴ This date was probably provided by a researcher or some other member of the Stern family, thus bypassing the least reliable source of information: Jacques himself. This is also the date to appear in Social Security records.⁵

Stern’s parents were a union of French nobility and Jewish wealth. His mother, Mathilde Simone de Leusse, was a countess. His father, Jacques Leon Stern, hailed from a prominent family of Jewish bankers. According to a French biography, Stern père commanded one of the largest fortunes in France, owned a hôtel particulier on the Champs Elysées, and was “une des personnalités du Tout-Paris d’avant la guerre.”⁶ Politically ambitious, Stern père used his wealth and connections with the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a series of increasingly important positions in the French government. He spent considerable time in America, wrote articles for the New York Times, and penned a book drawing on his experiences as the French Minister of Colonies.

In 1940 the Sterns emigrated to New York. Their fortunes do not appear to have been hit hard by the war in Europe. They took a Park Avenue apartment around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together with the Comtesse de Leusse, Stern père continued to collect old master paintings and to throw dinner parties that were noted in the society pages. Did the Sterns bring their eight-year-old son Jacques and his older sister Rosita to New York? It would be difficult to believe that, with their financial advantage, political connections, and insider knowledge of world events, the Sterns would have left their children in war-torn Europe. In Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan indicates that Stern “had spent the war years in the States.” Was Jacques Stern ever interned in a concentration camp? It seems unlikely.

In any event, Stern was in America by the late 1940s. Records at Woodberry Forest, a private boarding school in Virginia, list him in 1947 as a Form IV student, a sophomore.⁷ He gave Paris as his home address and won a medal for declamation. The next year he gave New York as his home address. He served as a reporter for the school newspaper and a staff member of the Fir Tree, the yearbook. He participated in the Dramatic Club and won the Form V Public Speaking Award. In 1949, he edited the yearbook, managed the basketball team, and represented the Public Speaking Honor Society in the school’s final oratorical contest. He participated in the Monitor Board (a student government group), Smoke House (a social club), the German Club, the Book Club, the Music Club, and the Dramatic Club. He also played tennis and soccer. The write-up in his senior yearbook, likely authored by a classmate, portrays him as a young man full of potential:

Strap… Ah, gay Paree… a two packs a day man… e-nun-ci-ates for the Colonel… astronomical averages… always in the Fir Tree room or across the hall… our theatre’s thrilling thespian… soccer pro… with a short haircut, impossible!… in all big time operations… Harvard next year.

Reading between the lines, it is possible to make out the lineaments of Stern’s future as a substance abuser, an eloquent speaker, a brilliant thinker, and a thespian prone to blurring the line between drama and reality.

To the young Stern, 1949 must have seemed a year full of promise. In May, his sister Rosita married Jacques Dewez, a businessman and race-car enthusiast who later founded the famous golf course at Sperone in Corsica. In the fall, Stern enrolled in Harvard. There he could study with poets Archibald MacLeish and John Ciardi, who would later write one of the first reviews of Naked Lunch. Other faculty included architect Walter Gropius, logician Willard Quine, and the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. In later years, Stern would assert that he had studied with the mathematician Norbert Wiener, originator of cybernetics. This may have been true — Wiener, a Harvard alumnus, taught at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Certainly Stern had an inclination for mathematics, although he was never a practicing mathematician and should not be confused with the French cryptologist of the same name.

At the end of 1949, however, Stern’s life took a dramatic turn. On December 21, Stern’s 67-year-old father died in what Time magazine described as a “plunge from his ninth-floor Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan.”⁸ It was generally assumed that he committed suicide. Stern never completely accepted this as the cause of his father’s death. There were dark insinuations of homicide — “pushed by a lawyer” — about which he would speak to his psychiatrist years later. It isn’t clear whether this was a suspicion harbored by Stern alone or by other family and friends. Late in life, Stern claimed to his young friend Mark Meyer that he had heard the news about his father’s death on the radio while lying paralyzed in an iron lung — a poignant image, regardless of whether or not it was true.⁹

What was undeniably true was that Stern contracted poliomyelitis around this time. He wasn’t alone. A virulent series of polio epidemics paralyzed or killed half a million people a year in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1955 Jonas Salk would announce the discovery of a polio vaccine, but it was too late for Stern. As a young man, he was obliged to walk with crutches, and he likely regretted that “soccer pro” label bestowed on him by his high school yearbook. The Fluke, though it says nothing about polio specifically, contains numerous references to the constraints forced on Stern by the disease.

Between the death of his father and the struggle with polio, Stern must have had difficulties focussing on his education. Though he had become editor-in-chief of the yearbook at his high school, he does not appear in the Harvard yearbooks of the period.¹⁰ He did not, for example, work alongside John Updike, a year his junior, on the Lampoon. By the time the class of 1953 held its commencement ceremony, Stern must have officially dropped out. He is not listed among the members of the graduating class. He likely inherited a substantial amount of money from his father — whose will designated his wife and two children as his heirs¹¹ — and it is easy to imagine that this windfall, combined with grief and illness, encouraged Stern to turn his attention to matters more worldly than academe.

Among these distractions were women. In spite of his physical disability, Stern was charismatic and rich — a combination that would never leave him wanting for attractive companions. A brief notice in the March 1, 1951 issue of the New York Times announced that Stern was to marry a Radcliffe student named Emily Janeway Marshall.¹² The notice described Stern as a student at Harvard College. Emily, also born in 1932, was the daughter of William Lawrence Marshall, a well-regarded lawyer and author. The marriage ceremony was conducted by the bride’s maternal grandfather, Reverend Charles J. Scudder, on June 14, 1951. Stern would have just turned 19. The marriage cannot have been a happy one. “My experience in marital bliss is somewhat limited,” The Fluke declares. It is not known when the relationship ended, but the dispassionate tone with which the book refers to “unfortunate marital episodes” may indicate why.

Meeting the Beats

In 1953, the year he should have graduated from Harvard, Stern married an attractive American woman with thick red hair. Her name was Dini, and she bore him a son in 1954. Stern installed this ménage in a luxurious residence on the rue du Cirque in Paris sometime before 1958, the year he would meet the Beats. Writing to Jack Kerouac on June 26, 1958, Ginsberg described Stern’s “solid Ava Gardner wife who digs him, loves him, and a 3 year old baby, or 4, boy — never saw kid, in nursery of vast duplex apartment.”¹³ Dini did not take to Corso, Orlovsky, and Ginsberg, who wrote that “his tall sexy lovely wife hates us.” Their Bohemian behavior was at odds with the privileged lifestyle she was trying to maintain with her young child and neurasthenic husband. She liked Burroughs, however, whose upbringing and old-world manners must have been more to her taste. The feeling was mutual. “I am getting along well with Stern’s wife,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on July 24, 1958. “I think she is a really nice person and I have come to like her very much.”¹⁴

Corso had been the first of the group to meet Stern. He had audited courses at Harvard in 1954 and, according to Ginsberg, may have already heard of the wealthy eccentric.¹⁵ Four years later in Paris, Corso was intrigued by rumors about a rich, crippled junky showing up at left bank cafés in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Not far from the Beat Hotel on rue Gît-le-coeur was a place called the Café Monaco (now Le Comptoir du Relais). Together with the nearby Café Tournon, the Monaco anchored a thriving literary scene on the Carrefour de l’Odéon. Richard Wright and Chester Himes had hung out there in the years after the war. By the mid-to-late 1950s, the writers had attracted an expatriate crowd that included Korean War vets “studying” on the G.I. Bill. It was a place Burroughs would check out after arriving in Paris in January 1958. “Bill exploring young hip group from Monaco cafe here,” Ginsberg wrote to Peter Orlovsky, “found some very nice guys, the younger generation.”¹⁶

One day the Bentley pulled up in front of the Monaco. Peering inside, Corso introduced himself to its occupant by asking “Would you like to meet a very wise man?”¹⁷ He was referring to Burroughs, thinking not just that his old friend could impart wisdom but that he could connect on the subject of drugs. Stern, who would claim to have read Howl, On the Road, Gasoline, and even Junkie, agreed. Corso carried him up the stairs of the Beat Hotel and — according to the story in Literary Outlaw — dumped him on Burroughs’ bed.

The meeting had an almost symbolic quality, as though Corso were no more than the vehicle by means of which Stern was to meet Burroughs. In fact, it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the poet and the “baron.” In a letter to Gary Snyder written on August 12, 1958, Corso described Stern as “a polio, smileless young Harvard profound very deep junkie writer Rothschild heir who I love very much, really a very beautiful soul.”¹⁸ For his part, Stern admired his friend’s poetry and always felt great affection for Corso himself. One expression of this was described by Corso in a letter to Ginsberg written around October 8, 1958. Debating whether to hit up Stern for money, Corso admitted that “I need an arrogance to ask, and he’s become a friend, and he even thinks I’m conning him, but knows that it’s a natural part of me, and that it’s inherent in me, and that I don’t mean too [sic].”¹⁹ Stern would let Corso mooch. Years later, Corso would even marry an ex-wife of Stern, Jocelyn or “Joss,” without it undermining the friendship.

With Burroughs the relationship was different — more complicated, maybe deeper. Intellectual interests would unite them and personality differences would drive them apart. The two shared heroin when Stern footed the bill. In October 1958, they went to London together to undertake the apomorphine cure at the clinic of Dr John Yerbury Dent. In Paris they worked with the same analyst, Marc Schlumberger, a Freudian who had known André Gide and other literary types. They made plans to travel to India together and to take a working vacation on Stern’s “alleged” yacht. In 1959, they saw each other as mystics tuning in on a frequency that even excluded the other influence to enter into Burroughs’ life at this time: Brion Gysin. (Stern was truly a mystic, Burroughs wrote Ginsberg, whereas Gysin was more “a catalyst or medium.”²⁰) In many ways, Stern was the anti-Gysin — stormy where Gysin was smooth, difficult where Gysin was suave. He was bored by the same old-guard Surrealists (Cocteau, Dali) whose acquaintanceship would impress Gysin’s friends. Stern’s wealth underwrote his exasperating qualities — he could afford to be a jerk — whereas Gysin had only his charm to open doors. Stern was also straight.

Though there is no indication of any sexual tension between Burroughs and Stern — both, Ginsberg wrote at the time, “gave up sex, indifferent,” probably a side effect of their heroin usage — it is interesting that Corso recalled dumping him on the bed.²¹ The next year Life magazine would take photos of Burroughs sitting dejectedly on that bed. Its plain cast-iron headboard was pushed into a corner of the room beneath Gysin paintings and water stains marring the walls. It is easy to imagine Burroughs sizing up the cripple there and flashing back to his wife, Joan Vollmer, who had been left with a limp after a mild bout of polio in 1948-1949. But then it may not have been in his room that Burroughs first met Stern. Burroughs recalled that the meeting took place in the bar.

I remember Gregory bringing him up to the hotel and sitting him at this little bar — it had four tables, the bar in the original Beat Hotel. Now here comes Gregory and this almost transparent green demon on two crutches. It was Jacques Stern, sinister music in the background. He was very lucid, generous, he’d have some heroin, pot, he’d take you out to dinner, he’d seem very very nice and very sweet and at some point he would start to put the screws on, getting very nasty. He’d just scream at us.²²

Stern left no recollection of the meeting. The Fluke alludes to “three fuzzy friends of mine who once vegetated” on rue Gît-le-coeur, a reference to the Beat Hotel and to Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg. “Fuzzy” may refer less to their appearance than to their mojo — “I think,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on May 18, 1959, “Gysin is afraid of me as notorious carrier of Black Fuzz, bad luck and death.”²³ Years later, in an unpublished interview with Victor Bockris, Stern would describe his encounter with Corso and company in abstract terms:

My take on the Beats was simply a) that I was a mathematician, right, who was extremely interested in art, who happened by sheer chance, due to Gregory Corso, to meet probably the 3 or 4 most influential writers in America at the Beat hotel at the time when it was a fascinating, fascinating study for someone who is an objective that I am [sic], an objective mathematical thinker.²⁴

In hindsight Stern may have portrayed his attitude as “objective” — a curious self-description for a man prone to public rages and epic bouts of substance abuse — but at the time there was a conspicuous rapport between the Beats and him. Stern, Burroughs wrote to Paul Bowles on July 20, 1958, “is far and away the most interesting person I have met in Paris. We have a lot in common. Both graduates of Harvard and junk.”²⁵ In a remarkable letter addressed to Kerouac on June 26, 1958, Ginsberg used the phrase “like Bill” six times to describe Stern: like Bill, Stern studied (or claimed to study) anthropology at Harvard; he came from a background of privilege; he was a junky; he wrote; he advocated psychoanalysis; and he had, at least temporarily, become celibate. “Bill digs Stern,” Ginsberg concluded, “his mind, factual information, on junk and on anthro, and advanced experimental thoughts on brainwashing and evil.”²⁶ In a letter to Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg wrote “he and Bill now good friends & sit and talk junk by the hour.”²⁷

Ironically, one testament to the rapport between the two men was Burroughs’ ability to tolerate Stern’s erratic behavior. In summer 1958, Dini confided to Burroughs that “Jacques is a monster. Being in the same room with him is like being with death itself.”²⁸ Not long after, Stern announced their separation and pressured Burroughs into a criminal mission: since he was on good terms with Dini, he was to visit her, slip into Stern’s library, and steal the valuable Molière first editions he had left behind. Burroughs’ heart wasn’t into it. When he failed — just as he had failed at prior attempts at thievery, such as lush-rolling — Stern blasted him, “You moron, you stupid dope” and so on. It is difficult to imagine that Burroughs had ever been subject to such a tirade, and he resented that Stern had manipulated him into pulling this caper on the likable Dini.

Nevertheless, at the end of October the two took an apartment on Mansfield Street in London to recuperate from their apomorphine cure. Following another harangue in which Stern accused him of being a con man, Burroughs left a dismissive note — “To call me a con man is one of the most grotesque pieces of miscasting since Tyrone Power played Jesse James” — and walked out.²⁹ Once on the street, he noticed newspaper headlines trumpeting the news of Power’s death on November 15, 1958. Burroughs was the same age as the movie star and, if he paused to read the obituaries, would have learned that Power suffered a heart attack while filming a duel. It must have made him feel lucky to escape this skirmish with Stern.

Burroughs returned to the Beat Hotel in Paris but the on-again off-again relationship with Stern continued. In January, Burroughs paid an uneventful visit to Stern in London. On June 19, 1959, Alan Ansen wrote that he was “delighted to hear you and Stern are on good terms again.”³⁰ In late July, with Naked Lunch at the printer, Burroughs told Ginsberg he was “immune to [Stern's] tantrums.”³¹ In September he reversed course: “I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again.”³² The cycle would continue for the next thirty-nine years.

Stern as Writer

Though polio had left him unable to play the piano or to type much, Stern “writes, prose, very good, not totally mad, but amazing,” as Ginsberg informed Kerouac on June 26, 1958.³³ Burroughs’ letters made reference to plays and poetry. In September 1958, Burroughs and Corso co-wrote a letter to Ginsberg announcing their idea for a literary magazine to be called Interpol. “For first issue,” Corso wrote in late September, “Bill has in mind” to include Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and “Stern’s most humiliating” writing.³⁴ Just two days later, Corso would expand the list: “for first issue Michaux, Bowles, Stern, Burroughs, you, me, and more Tzara.”³⁵ To include Stern alongside these literary lions indicated no small enthusiasm for his unpublished writings. (Of course, Burroughs hadn’t published much beside the pseudonymous Junkie at this point.) Ultimately the project came to naught. “Don’t get money for Interpol,” Corso wrote Ginsberg on October 8, 1958, “just Bill’s and mine’s crazy idea, and if it comes thru Stern will probably take care of it, but he’s ill and too much on his mind, too.”³⁶ Doubtless it was derailed by the apomorphine trip to London and subsequent contretemps about Burroughs being a con man.

Though Interpol failed, one publishing project did seem to arise from its aborted energies. In 1958 Corso was invited to co-edit a German anthology of contemporary American poetry. He solicited a contribution from Stern, whose nationality was glossed over in the author’s bio by calling him an “American of French descent.” Evidently Stern had been working on a group of poems titled “Motif.” Two of these — “Motif Selection 1″ and “Motif Selection 2″ — appeared in Junge Amerikanische Lyrik when it was published in 1961. The first seems to portray a drug trip, a vision of wild animals coming to children who rub crystals on their gums and feel “for the first time the liquid blue of chills.” This image cues the second poem, which portrays Europe subject to a new ice age: “everywhere pipes freeze… bridges & dams succumb to the weight of ice…” The poems are dominated by images of coldness and immobility, a theme compelling to Stern for the obvious reason of his disability. “So I can only barely move?” The Fluke avers. “So what? Life drips on in bed, just as well as on a mile run.”

The visionary quality of the poems might be what caused Ginsberg to declare, in a June 26, 1958 letter to Kerouac, that Stern “writes prose like Bill’s anthropological images of Yage City.”³⁷ Ginsberg may have meant to imply that Stern had already absorbed some influence from Burroughs or that both were drawing inspiration from Saint-John Perse, whom Stern mentions by name in The Fluke.³⁸ But what prose was Ginsberg referring to? In that same letter, Ginsberg indicates that Stern’s prose attempts to “explain” the “soul of dead Peter la Nice, fellow 20 yr old junkie with Alan Eager, who died, Stern says he was his saint (Peter).” Neither of Ginsberg’s assertions can pertain to The Fluke. The novel hardly inspires comparison to Burroughs’ yage-inspired “Composite City,” and it is based on Stern himself, not on “Peter la Nice.” (Eager was a jazz musician who appeared under the name Roger Beloit in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, but nothing further is known about his friend “Peter la Nice.” Perhaps he was even an invention of Stern.) Moreover, Burroughs would not announce The Fluke until almost exactly a year later, writing about it to Ginsberg on June 8, 1959.

Stern must have had other prose to share with the Beats in 1958. When Ginsberg returned to the United States later that summer, he did for Stern what he did for so many of his friends — promoted his work. As a result, on September 17, 1958, Irving Rosenthal invited Stern to contribute to the Chicago Review, which was about to publish its second excerpt from Naked Lunch:

I’m writing to you at suggestion of Allen Ginsberg. Would very much like you to submit prose to us. He says novel of yours to be published England. You might also send me selection from that.³⁹

Stern replied from Paris on October 7, 1958:

The novel which Allen Ginsberg mentioned to you has been sent back to me from the publishers upon my request since I felt a change was necessary in its structure. I am working on that right now, and will probably be occupied with it for another two or three months. Hence, I can only send you the original version from which you can select any excerpt if this type of writing interests you. I am also including a piece of a different sort in case it possibly fills the more precise requirements of a review.⁴⁰

Stern had submitted a long work of prose that predated The Fluke along with “a piece of a different sort,” maybe a selection from “Motif.” The only clue to the identity of the novel lies in the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, where a manuscript is identified in Burroughs’ handwriting as “A page of Jack Stern’s book 1959.”⁴¹ A page number — 95 — sits above a text fragment that, though written in a style completely different from The Fluke, contains Sternian imagery such as ice, stalactites, and coldness. The fragment begins by describing an “angular feminine figure with all the thunderous luminosity of an El Greco” and ends with “a whole series of half-hidden gestures, desperate effusions of contempt on the part” of the woman who appears in the scene. None of the text reappears in The Fluke. Was this a page from the novel Stern submitted to Rosenthal at the Chicago Review?

Far from being occupied with revising this novel, Stern and Burroughs spent the end of October 1958 in London undergoing the apomorphine cure. On October 25, the day after Burroughs checked out of the clinic, the Chicago Daily News published an excoriating review of the Naked Lunch excerpts that had just appeared in the Chicago Review. On November 17, Rosenthal quit the journal, and on November 24 he wrote to Burroughs: “Yes I got & returned ms. from Jacques Stern. Very talented, but no breakthrough anywhere.”⁴² Because of the disarray caused by the scandal and Rosenthal’s subsequent departure, Stern did not end up receiving an official rejection letter until the following spring. On May 5, 1959, Ray Roberts, writing for the editor, returned Stern’s work, saying “We liked the longer piece and yet we could not use it all and it did not seem to be organic in part.”⁴³ That Burroughs knew of the rejection before Stern must have caused some awkwardness. Did he inform Stern? Keep the information to himself? Did it contribute to the quarrel between the two while they were living together on Mansfield Street after the apomorphine cure?

The Fluke

After Burroughs returned to Paris, Stern remained in London during the winter of 1958-1959. In January Burroughs paid him what must have been an enjoyable visit and wrote to Gysin to describe the mystic moments they shared. Over the next few months, however, Stern dropped out of touch. “No word from Stern,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on April 21, 1959. “Looks like he is out of my picture. Too bad. Not many like that from mystic stand-point.”⁴⁴ Nothing had changed a month later. “Stern in complete seclusion,” Burroughs added on May 18, 1959. “Answers no letters — at least none of mine.”⁴⁵ There might have been many reasons for Stern’s sudden reclusiveness. Perhaps he was sick or temporarily out of funds or sorting out his divorce from Dini. Or he may simply have wanted to concentrate on a new piece of writing. By June 8, Stern had returned to Paris, invited Burroughs to spend a month with him on his “alleged” yacht, and announced an incredible series of events that resulted in the rapid composition of a novel. Burroughs described what he admitted were the “fantastic details” in a letter to Ginsberg. In London, Burroughs said, Stern broke his leg, took another apomorphine cure (his third in less than a year), and developed a sinus headache whose pain was so extreme that he lapsed into a two-day catatonic state. Doctors

gave him a shock and he came out of the catatonia and began writing. Wrote a novel in nine days — I have seen part of it. It is great, I mean great, not jive talk great. This is not only my opinion. I have talked with the translator of French edition, Faber and Faber in London is publishing it in English.⁴⁶

The story behind the novel’s composition turned out not to be credible, and Stern had also claimed to Ginsberg and Rosenthal that his prior effort was going to be published in England. As for the novel itself, Burroughs did not refer to it by name in his letter. But years later, when he reviewed the annotations added to his correspondence for publication, he approved the note indicating that the “great” novel was The Fluke.⁴⁷

A blend of truth and fiction, like anything out of Stern’s mind, The Fluke is plainly autobiographical. It ruminates on two marriages and expresses heartfelt regret at the end of the second, which had lasted five years (the length of Stern’s marriage to Dini). It describes the birth of a son — a surprise that causes the narrator to avow he will “instantly set about forgetting my son, his name, and his age.” In fact, Stern would remain estranged from his son throughout his life. The Fluke reports a trip to India and an inordinate interest, doubtless inspired in the author by polio, in beds: “I have known many beds, fortunately.. I really have a passion for them.” There is a long excursion on drugs that, like Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict,” catalogues various illegal substances and their subjective effects. As for heroin, The Fluke offers its own “algebra of need” (“You eat it; sleep it; live for, or because, of it..”), alludes to “Pentapon Rose” (a misspelled reference Stern can only have got from Burroughs), and endorses Dr Dent’s cure (“apomorphine treatment is the best”). That Stern may have secluded himself while writing The Fluke becomes comprehensible when he admits that “the hermit’s chosen solitude was perhaps safer.. In any case; less to manage.. Than social behaviour..” He can find no kinship and ultimately accepts his existential condition. “I’m a fluke.”

Aside from the shared interest in drugs, The Fluke contains just a few odd references to Burroughs. Stern had read a manuscript version of Naked Lunch in 1958 — “he lay in bed junksick [...] reading Bill’s manuscript,” Ginsberg wrote Kerouac — but it does not appear to have had an impact on The Fluke.⁴⁸ The obvious influence was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Stern adopted the same episodic, autobiographical vantage point, replacing the bitter misanthropy of Céline’s narrators with a vaguely condescending self-absorption. He copied Céline’s signature use of ellipses between sentences — a device which had also figured in the write-up in Stern’s senior yearbook — and mimicked the ejaculations that became frequent in Céline’s later novels. For example, Guignol’s Band began with “Boom! Zoom! … It’s the big smashup!” The Fluke opens with the same tactic — “There; Crack! Sahk! Swick!! Swath!” Late in life, Stern admitted that he had been fascinated by Céline — the tiny Jewish invalid admiring the tall anti-semitic doctor — and had met him twice. “In London,” Stern said, “I showed Burroughs how he and Céline were like vital.”⁴⁹ So Céline was on Stern’s mind not long before he wrote The Fluke. “The only person that was really close to Burroughs in style was Céline. But he knew that only after I talked to him for like hours and hours and hours about it.” Of course, Burroughs was well aware of Céline’s style. He had gone with Ginsberg to meet the literary pariah on July 8, 1958. Really it was Stern who was close — or tried to be close — in style to Céline.

Stern intended to publish The Fluke. He claimed Faber and Faber would put it out in London. He shared it with someone who considered translating it into French — perhaps Stern, who had been educated in America, felt too alienated from his mother tongue to do the job himself. The Beat Hotel crew must have encouraged him to offer his text to Olympia Press, just then preparing Naked Lunch for publication, and to Big Table, the literary review that Rosenthal founded after resigning from the Chicago Review. Stern refused this last option. “Jack says he is not a member of The Beat Generation,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg, “and does not wish to be so typed, which is why he hesitates to publish in Big Table.”⁵⁰ The refusal is consistent with the vaguely disparaging remarks about Beats in The Fluke, and it may also have been motivated by the knowledge that Rosenthal had previously rejected his work. In any event, Stern’s attitude annoyed Ginsberg. “Give Stern my regards,” Ginsberg replied. “This business of not wanting to be associated with the Beat scene?… You make it sound as if he thinks it’s too sordid.”⁵¹ The bloom had started to come off the rose. By September 1959, Ginsberg admitted to Burroughs that, in spite of promoting his work to Rosenthal, he “dug Stern but felt distance, especially after that argument over economics at table. Dont yet understand him.”⁵²

Why did The Fluke inspire Burroughs to dub Stern a “great writer?” It may have been the text’s similarity to Céline, whose work Burroughs admired, or its long digression on the effects of drugs. The two could “sit and talk junk by the hour,” so to Burroughs The Fluke may well have formed a written extension of conversations he already enjoyed. Like many people, Burroughs also had a tendency to overestimate the talents of his friends. The same praise he gave to Stern for being a great writer was lavished on Gysin for being a great artist. (Burroughs even wrote to his parents about his “friend Brion the Painter, certainly the greatest living apinter [sic] living and I do not make mistatkes [sic] inthe [sic] art world…”⁵³) Though Burroughs always maintained this high estimate of Gysin’s work, history has increasingly made it look like a mistake. Gysin is not considered the most important painter of the 1950s or, for that matter, of any decade since then. As for Stern, Burroughs did come to believe that dubbing him a “great writer” was a mistake. In 1981 he refused permission to publish his letters concerning Stern, declaring that he had been “taken in.”⁵⁴

Stern’s Influence on Naked Lunch

When Olympia Press shipped Naked Lunch in mid-summer 1959, the book contained the undisguised name of only one of Burroughs’ friends — not Ginsberg, who had received chunks of the book in letters; not Kerouac, who had coined the title and whose name appears in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” a text that would preface later editions of Naked Lunch; not Alan Ansen, who had helped with the typing; not Gysin, whose name would appear in the cut-up novels. A note on page 55 of the Olympia edition declared: “The Heavy Fluid concept I owe to Jacques Stern.” The acknowledgement was deleted from subsequent editions of Naked Lunch. In his book on the Beat Hotel, Barry Miles suggests that the deletion was “presumably at Stern’s request,” since Stern’s tendency was to shun the limelight. It is also quite possible that Irving Rosenthal, who edited the book for Grove Press, decided to drop Stern’s name. Rosenthal made numerous thoughtful emendations to the text, and he wasn’t impressed with Stern anyway. In either case, it was Burroughs who signed off on the deletion. It may have been an early indication of his feeling of having been “taken in.” It also had the effect of obscuring the subtle influence of Stern on his masterwork.

In crediting Stern with the Heavy Fluid concept, Burroughs seems to have given him a dubious honor. Heavy Fluid doesn’t amount to much of a concept. It appears twice in Naked Lunch — “drinkers of the Heavy Fluid” and “Heavy Fluid Addicts” — and seems to serve as a metaphor for heroin. In later books the term is also associated with coldness, a motif common in Stern’s writings. For example, in The Soft Machine, “the cold heavy fluid settled in his spine 70 tons per square inch” — which invokes the way heroin causes a “spine like a frozen hydraulic jack” in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness.” The phrase “heavy fluid” does not appear in The Fluke, although Stern describes how heroin brings on an “endless freeze that throws up a fluid a frothy black.” It does not require much conjecture to imagine how this might have become Heavy Fluid in those interminable discussions of junk.

Naked Lunch contains a sort of untitled sketch of Stern and, ironically, it portrays the Heavy Fluid Addict in the process of losing weight. On January 2, 1959, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg that he “saw Stern lose about seven pounds in ten minutes when he took a shot after being off a week.”⁵⁵ Stern was tiny — Ginsberg, no bodybuilder, carried “his 95 pounds” up the four flights to Burroughs’ room at the Beat Hotel — so this physical transformation must have been both dramatic and alarming.⁵⁶ Burroughs transposed this event into Naked Lunch twice. In “The Vigilante,” he resituates it to a hotel in New York: “I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other.” The scene is repeated in “Atrophied Preface”: “I saw it happen… ten pounds lost in ten minutes… standing there with the syringe in one hand… holding his pants up with the other.” This time the sketch was broken up with Célinian dots.

The “concept” and the portrait form circumstantial evidence of Stern’s presence in Naked Lunch. A more profound influence was indicated by Burroughs in a letter he wrote to Ginsberg on September 25, 1959. The summer had been eventful. Naked Lunch had been published, but Burroughs had also been arrested on suspicion of being an international drug trafficker. Worried about his upcoming trial, Burroughs blew part of his advance from Olympia Press on a codeine habit. He also met Ian Sommerville, who became his lover and, at the end of August, helped him kick the new habit. In the midst of all this, a change occurred in the relationship between Burroughs and Stern. In July Burroughs had written letters gushing about his friend. In September he expressed a change of heart:

I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again. Don’t misunderstand. I mean he probably does not want to see me, for reasons will appear in next book and in present book as well. The end of Naked Lunch is addressed to Jack, as he must know.⁵⁷

Chunks of Naked Lunch had been addressed to Ginsberg in the form of letters but the end, according to Burroughs, was addressed to Stern. But what was the end of this “endless novel” (as Ginsberg once described it)?

A few weeks later, Burroughs cited his book in another letter to Ginsberg: “‘The heat is off me from here on out,’ I have written, end Naked Lunch.“⁵⁸ This clearly refers to “Hauser and O’Brien.” There would have been good reason for Burroughs to consider this the end of Naked Lunch: it was the only section that he had deliberately placed in sequence. Years later, in the 1978 foreward to Maynard and Miles’ bibliography of his work, Burroughs reiterated that he had shifted “the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ section from the beginning to the end.” Burroughs had also revised “Hauser and O’Brien” in 1959.⁵⁹ He cut a bit of straight narrative (later to be published as the story “The Conspiracy”) and replaced it with new text including Lee’s realization that “the heat was off me from here on out.” Thus the last few paragraphs of “Hauser and O’Brien” may serve as the end of Naked Lunch in the additional sense that they were among the most recently composed parts of the book. Their freshness likely caused Burroughs, in his letter, to transpose that line into the present tense: “the heat was/is off me.”

Significantly, it is in the closing of “Hauser and O’Brien” that the second reference to Heavy Fluid occurs. In Naked Lunch, Stern’s “concept” terminates the description of Lee disappearing through a tear in the fabric of space and time:

I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso… Locked out… Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection… The Heat was off me from here on out… relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls… Far side of the world’s mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien… clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts.

Heavy Fluid ties this to Stern, but how might it have been addressed to him? The original ending of “Hauser and O’Brien” (aka “The Conspiracy”) had explained discursively that Lee, seeking “some key by which I could gain access to basic knowledge,” came to recognize the search as “sterile and misdirected.” In the revised ending (as published in Naked Lunch), Lee does not renounce the search so much as he seems to have been shut out of it, “locked out.” That this may have been a cryptic reference to Burroughs’ relationship with Stern is signalled by the word “key.” In Naked Lunch, Lee loses “a Key, a Point of Intersection.” Stern, in Burroughs’ view, had possessed such a key. “I continue to see visions and experience strange currents of energy,” he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, “but the Key — the one piece that could make it useable — Stern had part of it.”⁶⁰ In both Naked Lunch and the letter, the word is capitalized, like a proper name. The end of “Hauser and O’Brien” addresses Stern not to seduce, as was the case with the sections addressed to Ginsberg, but to bid farewell.

Of course, it is also possible that “the end of Naked Lunch” referred not to “Hauser and O’Brien” but to “Quick,” which is literally the last text in the Olympia Press edition. “Quick” was distilled from the “WORD” section Burroughs had included in earlier drafts of Naked Lunch. “WORD” cannot have been directed to Stern, since it was written before he and Burroughs met, but was there something about “Quick” — the way it was shaped, the way it embraced fragmentation, the way it survived the parts of “WORD” left out of the Olympia Press publication — that “addressed” Stern? James Grauerholz has suggested (in private communication) that “Quick” may indicate an attempt on Burroughs’ part to compensate for his disappointment in failing to form a mystic collaboration with Stern.

Stern’s abandonment of the notional collaborative masterwork, in whose creation William had expected Stern’s assistance, [may have] created a kind of grief — which William overcame by tasking himself to out-Stern Stern. Much like Neal Cassady (whose effusions are better-documented), Jack [Stern] would speed-rap like hysterically funny brilliant crazy. “WORD” is William trying to speed-rap.⁶¹

In retrospect, it is easy to read “Quick” as pointing forward to Burroughs’ use of the cut-up. But in the summer of 1959, prior to Brion Gysin’s discovery of the technique, it might well have represented something else: an attempt to ad lib like Stern. Or if Burroughs didn’t exactly have Stern in his ear while distilling “Quick” from “WORD,” he might well have been trying to make a literary use of their shared experiences in psychoanalysis, where free association was an accepted method for dredging up psychic truths, and in drugs, where disjointed raving could take on profound meaning.

“Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness”

It is not known exactly why Burroughs decided to dissociate himself from Stern in 1959. Perhaps it was Stern who had readdicted him to codeine. (Speaking of that summer’s habit, Gysin said Burroughs fell “back into bad habits through ‘good friends’ who helped him do so.”⁶²) This would be consistent with the stance Burroughs adopted in that September 25, 1959 letter to Ginsberg. Anxious about his upcoming trial, Burroughs insisted that he would distance himself from the petty criminals who had gotten him in trouble with the French police. “I don’t ever want to see or talk to any of these tiresome underworld jerks again.” In the very next paragraph he disavows Stern too: “I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again.” Stern may not have been an “underworld jerk,” but his unpredictable behavior cannot have been appealing to a man declaring that, from here on out, there would be “no more juvenile delinquency.”

It was with the same determinedly sober spirit that Burroughs wrote “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” that September. Though he was repudiating their relationship at just that time, Burroughs had Stern very much in mind. Impressionistic references in the text seem to echo their endless discussions of junk. “I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India” — possibly a tall tale by Stern. “Junkies always beef about The Cold as they call it” — an echo of The Fluke‘s invocation of “The yen.. The cold.. The twitching and kicking.. The cold..” It is also tempting to attribute the sudden profusion of mathematical and scientific language (“algebra of need,” for example, or references to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Werner Heisenberg) in “Deposition” to Stern. However, by 1959 there had not yet been any indication that Stern styled himself a mathematician. The Beats thought of him as crazy, rich, and literary. The more probable influence was Sommerville, who had genuine credentials in the maths and sciences.

Stern does seep into “Deposition” in another important way. The year before he died, Stern told Victor Bockris: “You know this whole thing about virus is falling in the… I wrote that in The Fluke before [Burroughs] wrote that in Soft Machine as a cut-up example.”⁶³ Stern’s memory might have been fallible, or he may have been referring to an early draft of The Soft Machine. Virus does not figure much in that book. However, it is critical to “Deposition,” where Burroughs elucidates his notion of the “junk virus.” This notion may well have originated in those endless discussions of junk. Viruses are a recurrent theme in The Fluke, and they interested its author for an obvious reason: polio is a virus. Lying in bed, Stern must often have reflected on the way in which the “virus power” had determined his life. The phrase “junk virus” does not appear in The Fluke, but Stern identifies addiction with virus:

Brutal! Man, Brutal! The routine is enough to paralyse your mind.. Slave? Much more than that.. You live IT! The junk lives you! Every little cell of your body burns heroin and is content only in doing that; forcing the whole of you to do likewise.. You eat it; sleep it; live for, or because, of it.. In fact, you are no more! It’s pure undiluted Virus!

As if to reinforce that he had Stern in mind while writing about the “junk virus” in “Deposition,” Burroughs echoed the language of that last paragraph of “Hauser and O’Brien.” There he had written about being “relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past.” In “Deposition,” he wrote that apomorphine “can relegate the junk virus to a land-locked past.”

That virus, like Heavy Fluid, was a concept Burroughs may have owed to Stern is further suggested by an unpublished text in the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library.⁶⁴ Using a green pen, Burroughs wrote “1959 Jack Stern said ‘Nobody will ever understand virus’” across the top of a sheet of typing paper. Beneath is an eight-line permutation that begins “Nobody will ever understand virus” and ends “Virus stand under body will ever know.” The same phrase appears in the compendium of first cut-up texts, Minutes to Go, published in 1960: “No body will ever understand virus… Old takings giving terrible ruled out con — Jack S?”⁶⁵ Given that the cut-ups Burroughs contributed to Minutes to Go concern viruses, polio, and cancer, it is tempting to see them as a symbolic affirmation of his break with Stern. Burroughs cut him off personally and cut him up textually. To be clear, however, Minutes to Go was not the “next book” that would give reasons Stern would no longer want to see Burroughs. When Burroughs wrote that, he had not yet learned about the cut-up method from Gysin.

A hint of the emotional dynamics underneath the shared intellectual interests is provided by an undated letter Stern sent Burroughs, likely at some point in 1959.⁶⁶ It refers to a misunderstanding that Stern attempted to patch up by sending Burroughs a check. For Stern this was an obvious way to make amends. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Corso had all previously allowed themselves to take advantage of his largesse. This time, however, Burroughs returned the check, prompting Stern to mail a self-indictment that recalls the “most humiliating” writing he was to submit to Interpol. In the letter, Stern admits that Burroughs “has achieved what I am incapable of; I envy him this power.” He acknowledges that his actions have caused him to lose “Dini + semblance of love; money + semblance of freedom; you + semblance of contact” — a less metaphorical way to express what Burroughs described as the loss of a key or point of intersection. Stern pleads with Burroughs to accept the check and invites him to stay at “our pad,” which is “missing a little mystic fluid.” “I learned a great deal from you,” Stern tells Burroughs, “probably more than from anyone else.” Burroughs had written Ginsberg the same thing about Stern: “I learned more from Jack than from anyone else I ever knew, except Brion.” The echo may indicate that Stern’s letter was reverberating in Burroughs’ memory by the time he wrote to Ginsberg.

How did Burroughs respond to Stern’s letter? By cutting it up. In the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, there is an unpublished cut-up that stems from this letter.⁶⁷ It begins with “space for the mails,” words from the postscript; recontextualizes “mystic fluid” (“God knows they are you come this way its missing a mystic fluid..”); and ends with “you are power if I might,” a pregnant phrase capturing the envy to which Stern had confessed. In order to cut up the letter, however, Burroughs must have retyped it. The original was not destroyed — a fact suggesting that Burroughs attached significance to it, since he did not hesitate to cut up other incoming letters. This was not the last time Burroughs would cut up Stern either. In 1965 he told the Paris Review that Nova Express contained “Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven’t heard about, someone named Jack Stern.”⁶⁸ Not only did Burroughs continue to call Stern a writer, he included him in the company of the immortal bard and the poète maudit.

The Early 1960s

Burroughs’ 1959 pronouncement that he would no longer see Stern did not prove true. The relationship may have cooled, but the two formed part of what had become a literary jet set. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Corso visited Stern at his house in St Tropez in May 1961 then continued on to Tangier, where they doubtless told Burroughs about Stern’s latest antics. Stern would call Corso a “stupid loudmouth poet,” and Corso would reply with “you stinky cripple.” When the harangues subsided, the group recited poetry and talked about the literary scene. In addition to mutual friends, Burroughs’ work provided an excuse for he and Stern to keep in touch. On May 24, 1962 in Paris, they recorded excerpts from Burroughs’ cut-ups for the Harvard Poetry Room, alternating as they read texts that would ultimately appear in Nova Express.⁶⁹ In 1963, Burroughs sent Stern a copy of The Ticket That Exploded. Stern acknowledged the book with a postcard — “I’ve read it twice.” He also indicated that he was leaving London (“got busted”) for Spain.⁷⁰

In January 1964, while Stern was in Spain, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released. In later years Stern would tell friends that Terry Southern, who had worked on the screenplay, had based Dr Strangelove on him. Stern even claimed to Mark Meyer that he had written a thesis at Harvard about a “doomsday machine.”⁷¹ The idea has an immediate appeal — Dr Strangelove could easily be a caricature of the eccentric Stern, who would also tell friends that Adolf Hitler had survived the war and become a drug dealer in New York. Kubrick didn’t know Stern but Southern had been in and out of Paris in the 1950s, was friendly with Burroughs, and referred to Stern as a “freak” in a June, 1961 letter — demonstrating that he was well aware of the Stern legend before working on the screenplay in 1962.⁷²

Then again, Southern worked on the film for only six weeks. He never publicly claimed credit for the Strangelove character, who had already appeared in earlier drafts of the screenplay. Scholars contend that Dr Strangelove was an amalgam of the era’s prominent nuclear strategists and Dr No from the James Bond film.⁷³ Kubrick himself admitted that Dr Strangelove’s accent was “probably inspired” by the “Hungarian father of the H-bomb,” Edward Teller — more or less implying that the accent was the work of Peter Sellers, a gifted improviser. In any event, Stern was an unlikely source — with his American education, he spoke perfect English. It is also unlikely he inspired Dr Strangelove’s wheelchair for the simple reason that, by the early 1960s, Stern had not yet been confined to one. Ginsberg had referred to him carrying “one crutch aluminum”; Burroughs recalled him “on two crutches”; a photograph of Stern at St Tropez in May 1961 shows a crutch leaning on the wall beside him; and The Fluke contains several references to crutches but none to a wheelchair.⁷⁴ In what way can Stern have contributed to the character of Dr Strangelove? He didn’t have the accent, the wheelchair, or the prosthetic hand. He wasn’t a mathematician, let alone a nuclear strategist. Perhaps Southern went along with Stern’s claim among friends — but Southern was always vague about who did what on the screenplay. Kubrick was infuriated by the amount of credit that Southern allowed others to attribute to him.

Though Dr Strangelove brought no attention to Stern, the literary community continued to think of him as one of their own. In July 1964, Philip Lamantia wrote Burroughs asking for Stern’s address in Spain, mentioning that he wanted to include him in an anthology of “USA prose” he was compiling.⁷⁵ In August, Lamantia informed Burroughs that the anthology wasn’t going to happen. However, he was visiting Stern in Malaga:

Jacques found here quit drinking heavily. His young Spanish wife, intelligent and Jacques is currently planning some kind of writing, read me notes recently (I’ve been going thru Motif and projects a kind of news/report on current “El Cordobes” scandal⁷⁶

Significantly, Stern had not only remarried, he was continuing to write. He remained proud enough of the “Motif” poems to share them with Lamantia. Evidently he was also tempted to venture into Hemingway turf. The Fluke had already contained a passing reference to bullfighting: “Did you hear about Frey? gored by a young bull, too young..” Now Stern was writing about El Cordobes, the flamboyant matador who had been gored and nearly killed on live television that May.

Was all this writing an expression of literary ambition? Or just a dilettante’s way of combatting boredom? It is difficult to say what Stern’s intentions were. By this time, he had published nothing but the two poems in Corso’s anthology. In the contributor’s note, he had eschewed biographical detail, declaring only that he “prefers to remain unknown.” He had submitted two texts to the Chicago Review but had refused to participate in Big Table. Years later he would tell Bockris:

I spent 40 years of my life not publishing, not sending anything to publishers because I did not want to be in that act. I mean if I had really wanted to be in that circle, then let’s face it when I wrote The Fluke, and everyone said Oh what a great masterpiece, then I would have published it, but I did exactly the contrary.⁷⁷

Not quite. On June 21, 1965, The Fluke was published in an edition of 250 copies by Buchet-Chastel in Paris. A stolid firm still in business, Buchet-Chastel knew neither the highs nor the lows of an Olympia Press. Its 1965 catalogue contained minor works by major writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller — but it did not contain The Fluke, of which the publisher disavows any knowledge.⁷⁸ Without doubt, Buchet-Chastel did not publish The Fluke but rather arranged a vanity edition of it. A note on the copyright page indicates that The Fluke was published “aux dépens des amis de l’auteur” — at the expense of the author’s friends. A later friend of Stern thought that his sister Rosita might have arranged the publication.⁷⁹ Burroughs, however, approved the footnote in his correspondence declaring that The Fluke was “privately published by Stern.” The question of agency is important in that it sheds some light on Stern’s attitude toward his own writing. He took it seriously enough to do it and to share it with other writers. At the same time, he had the means to publish as many private editions as he would have liked, yet only this short run of The Fluke ever saw light of day. His psychiatrist in later life offered the explanation that Stern did not publish because he “was above all that.”⁸⁰ He did not need money and sought no more notoriety than that which circulated among his friends. James Grauerholz has suggested that “perhaps Jacques simply lacked the courage to risk real failure in the literary realm.”⁸¹

What is beyond doubt is that Burroughs was asked to write an introduction for The Fluke. In a gesture of support that belied his 1959 declaration not to see Stern, Burroughs provided three pages of text: a lightly cut-up introduction followed by two pages beginning “Recorders fix nature of absolute need” and containing fold-ins from The Fluke. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than Stern soliciting this introduction let alone being motivated to make the significant alterations that occurred between the manuscript and printed versions of Burroughs’ text. Two of these alterations stand out. First, Burroughs had used dashes for punctuation, as he often did in cut-up texts. In the published version of the introduction, however, the dashes were transformed into Célinian dots, thus forcing Burroughs’ text to resemble the style of The Fluke itself. It is a deeply symbolic change, retroactively appropriating the cut-up and causing it to resemble Stern’s own method, which he claimed to call “selective automation.”

Second, only the first page of Burroughs’ introduction was used. Perhaps Stern, recognizing that the two pages of fold-in were repurposed in the chapter “A Bad Move” in the recently published Nova Express, decided that he wasn’t going to use his own book as an advertisement for Burroughs’ signature writing techniques. (The two-page fold-in would also reappear in The Third Mind‘s “Technical Deposition of the Virus Power.”) In place of the fold-in, the published introduction to The Fluke was extended using what appears to be an excerpt from the letter Burroughs sent along with the texts. This may have been more complimentary to Stern — the excerpt references James Joyce, implying a flattering comparison — but it is disorienting to the reader because the letter had included instructions intended for an editor. The new introduction thus announces that it is “to be followed by the enclosed texts.” What enclosed texts? The reader, unaware that this referred to “Recorders fix nature of absolute need,” can only assume it refers to the text that follows — Stern’s novel. Not only did Stern retroactively appropriate the cut-up by transforming it with Célinian dots, he literally usurped its place in the published book.

Though Stern manipulated the texts for his own ends, Burroughs had also submitted a frankly ambivalent introduction. The manuscript shows that Burroughs originally put the entire first page in quote marks, positioning the introduction as something overheard, a quote, and thereby distancing himself from any endorsement. He also started writing “Jacques” and crossed it out for “Jack,” as though unsure whether he was writing of an author or a friend. In the printed edition, the quote marks were deleted and the first name restored to Jacques. The ambivalent message, however, remained. On one hand, Burroughs offered praise — “Jacques Stern is a writer” — that cautiously echoed his 1959 letters and their talk of Stern as a “great writer.” On the other hand, Burroughs asserted that the entire message of the book could be “reduced to two words.. STAY OUT..” Not only does this resonate with Burroughs’ sense of having been occluded from Stern’s space-time, it causes the introduction to warn the reader to stay out of the text that follows.

In the printed book, the introduction is completed by a reproduction of Burroughs’ signature — an unusual move suggesting that the publisher or, more probably, Stern himself was anxious to give The Fluke a seal of approval. On Burroughs’ typescript copy, which he must have received in 1964 or early 1965 in order to prepare his introduction, Stern made handwritten annotations that seem designed to appeal to the author of Naked Lunch.⁸² Two chapter titles were penned on the first pages of the typescript, calling the opening “I (Postface)” and the next part “II The Analysis.” To open the book with a “postface” would serve as an obvious counterpart to the “Atrophied Preface” that concludes Burroughs’ masterwork. “The Analysis” was a title that would have caused Burroughs to recall that he and Stern had shared an analyst as well as a general interest in psychoanalysis. Another annotation indicated that “the end + beginning are reversible.” Stern surely knew that Burroughs had reversed the beginning and ending of Naked Lunch by resituating the “Hauser and O’Brien” section.

At the very end of the typescript, after Stern had written “Finis” in blue ink, he added “Part I of MOTIF” and “Part II: The Quadrupeds.” Did the “Motif” poems form an extension of The Fluke? Was Stern planning an anthology of his texts? Was “The Quadrupeds” the title of the earlier prose that Stern had submitted to the Chicago Review? Or was it some other work? The lack of explanatory context may suggest that Stern assumed Burroughs understood these cryptic instructions. Or it may be that Burroughs understood them only as a maneuver, a way for Stern not to conclude but to occlude his text by showing the reader that, while there was more material, it was being withheld. “Stay out.”

With his large coterie of literary friends and acquaintances, Stern would have found plenty of takers for copies of his privately published book. The Fluke, however, did not make any appreciable impact on its recipients. It was not reviewed or blurbed anywhere. Later friends in possession of xerox copies confessed to being unable to read it. The edition itself seems to have all but disappeared. The first published mention of the book, occurring in a 1980 collection of verse and correspondence by Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, called Stern the “author of unpublished prose The Fluke.” It implies that Ginsberg did not even know about the privately published edition.⁸³ Not a single copy of the privately printed edition of The Fluke currently exists in a public institution. A collector in England has a copy purchased from a rare book dealer who happened to know what it was.⁸⁴ At the time of his death, Stern had no more than his own personal copy. “I wish I had a copy of The Fluke to give you,” Stern told Bockris during their interview the year before he died. The book’s title became a self-fulfilling prophecy: it was a statistical oddity, a rarity, a fluke.

The Late 1960s and Beyond

Though the book made no impact, Stern continued to circulate in the literary jet set. In 1967 Ian Sommerville wrote to Burroughs that he’d heard Stern had been in London for three months.⁸⁵ By 1970 Stern had moved into the Chelsea Hotel in New York. There he met Patti Smith, who would later dedicate her book Ha! Ha! Houdini to Stern, and grew close to the filmmaker and ethnomusicologist Harry Smith. Stern “thought Burroughs and Harry were the great geniuses of the age,” Ginsberg told an interviewer.⁸⁶ “He was making plans to have a magazine feature them, but was also very temperamental when he’d get drunk or high on coke or whatever.” Stern and Smith, a self-styled mystic, engaged in a “magic war,” experimenting with tarot and putting curses on each other. Meanwhile Stern would periodically throw tantrums and smash things in his hotel room. Artist Malcolm Mc Neill, who had been collaborating with Burroughs on Ah Pook Is Here, recalls in a forthcoming memoir that Stern could exact a toll on his environment. He liked to “mark stuff up” — a “kind of thinking aloud while studying books, manuscripts, artworks and the like” that included not just the margins of books but the pictures on hotel walls.⁸⁷

In addition to this “thinking aloud,” Stern continued to write. With Smith he collaborated on a work called Even Songs of Ecstasy, an assemblage in which poems by the two men alternate with tarot imagery. In 1982 Stern’s sister Rosita, who had become an artist, exhibited sketches inspired by one of Stern’s poems at the Gallery Charley Chevalier in Paris. The catalogue contains an illustration called “l’habitant de la chambre jaune,” a portrait of Stern seated in a wheelchair, as well as a poem titled “Disillusion.”⁸⁸ A self-absorbed work in which the usually hyper-articulate Stern meditates on stuttering and lapses of speech, the poem recalls his earlier writings in its continued preoccupation with coldness, “the tempting silence of a winter’s layer covering the bristly mats forgotten in a storm.” Stern may have continued to produce poetry in part because, as his mobility worsened, the compact format was physically more manageable for him to write or type.

In addition to poetry, Stern had become increasingly interested in film. Just as he had claimed to be the basis for the character of Dr Strangelove, he would let acquaintances think that he had been involved in some important way in the production of Chappaqua and Easy Rider. What is undeniable is that he collaborated with Terry Southern in the mid-1970s on two screenplays, neither of which would be filmed. One was for a porn film called Tryin’.⁸⁹ The other was for a film of Burroughs’ first book, Junky. Some sense of the misinformation and myth surrounding Stern can be gleaned from the description of that project in the memoir by Southern’s companion Gail Gerber:

Jacques Stern, a well-known physicist also known as Baron Rothschild, was a longtime friend of Burroughs. He had enough money to option the book and finance a first draft of a script even though they had a tense relationship as Stern blamed Burroughs for his not winning a Nobel Prize. Seems Burroughs used to let people think that Stern was on dope.⁹⁰

A well-known physicist? Nobel Prize? Evidently Stern’s self-portrayal as a mathematician had expanded to include physics. The story about the Nobel Prize had to be an inside joke. Gerber was not the only acquaintance under the impression that Stern had been actually been considered for the honor, in spite of the fact that he never published a single paper in mathematics. As for dope, Stern had long been a “master addict” of the same order as Burroughs. Southern recalled Stern giving himself speedballs through a hypodermic gizmo taped to his wrist. “Trying to sort out truth from fiction was what made being around [Stern] so enjoyable,” Mc Neill has remarked. “In the end the distinction was irrelevant. The telling was all that mattered. The fact that he was often on crystal meth only added to the wonder of it. Like the old speed joke goes: It was a great account but it was all written on one line.”⁹¹

What is true, however, is that the relationship between Burroughs and Stern was full of tension and ambiguity — before, during, and after the Junky film project. To observers it was clear that the two admired each other, yet they often maintained a wary distance. The complications are reflected in the evolution of the Junky screenplay itself.⁹² The title page of a draft dated May 25, 1977 reads “Screenplay by Terry Southern / Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs.” A subsequent draft dated July 28, 1977 reads “Screenplay by Terry Southern / Jacques Stern / and William S. Burroughs / Based on the novel, Junky, by William S. Burroughs and The Creation of Adam by Jacques Stern.” Stern was pushing to combine Junky with a work of his own, as though merging the texts could symbolically patch up the personal relationship. Burroughs objected strenuously:

Problems arising from scripts of Junky and The Creation of Adam can be very simply resolved once we realize that Junky and The Creation of Adam are not the same film and that any attempt to combine the two scripts can only result in confusion.⁹³

Legend has it that the would-be production burned through Stern’s money, much of which was wantonly snorted in the form of cocaine. That may have been true, but the underlying tensions between Stern and Burroughs can’t have helped. “If,” Southern would later tell an interviewer, Stern “had taken it more seriously as a real project instead of as a way to work out his relationship with Bill,” the film might have been realized.⁹⁴

Even the time, effort, and money wasted on the Junky film project did not sever the relationship between Stern and Burroughs. Sometimes Stern would visit the Bunker. He would give the local winos twenty dollars to carry him up the stairs then berate them to caustic but hilarious effect. Once, when he had been thrown out of his apartment during a cash shortage, Stern stayed at the Bunker, driving Burroughs to distraction with the unique way he could practically pace in his wheelchair. In 1983 the two corresponded about the possibility of creating a film out of The Place of Dead Roads.⁹⁵ Stewart Meyer, who was close to Burroughs in the 1970s and 1980s, recalls seeing an astonishing moment between the two old friends.⁹⁶ Burroughs, Southern, and Meyer were to give a reading at the 63rd Street YMCA in New York. Burroughs, already living in Kansas by this time, had flown in for the reading and other business. A leather-clad woman — one of the invariably beautiful “nurses” Stern hired — pushed him in his wheelchair to the reading. Burroughs, visibly moved to see Stern, leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Given that Burroughs was not wont to make public displays of affection, it was a pregnant moment, the kiss resonating both with fondness and with something darker, like a goodbye kiss.

It was Stern’s young friend Mark Meyer who would inform him of Burroughs’ death in 1997. Whereas Stern had taken the news of Southern’s death hard, requesting that Meyer leave him alone to digest it, he was calm when learning of Burroughs’ demise. Evidently he expected the news. Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs — the Beat Hotel crew was gone, and Stern must have constrained himself to look upon their deaths as abstractly as the mathematician he fancied himself to be. He accommodated himself to carrying on, watching films from his tremendous library of video cassettes. He loved Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, and for a while he thought Kurt Cobain might have the mojo to assume Burroughs’ mantle as a junky genius. Meyer even helped Stern get an email account, which he would use in conjunction with a voice transcription device because it was becoming increasingly difficult to type with his hands.

Stern died in a Manhattan hospital on June 15, 2002, less than two weeks after his 70th birthday. He was survived by a companion, by his sister, and by friends who accepted his eccentricities as the price of admission to his brilliance and generosity. Though he had long ago indicated in the contributor’s note to Corso’s anthology that he “prefers to remain unknown,” Stern was legend to a small circle of cognoscenti. His legacy lay in the vivid impression he left in their memories, the background influence he exerted on their creative works, and the mostly unpublished writings he shared with them. In a conversation tape-recorded by Stewart Meyer, Stern once explained what distinguished his writing:

Every motherfucker in the world thinks he’s a writer. There are very few writers, very few, man, that you can count on. I don’t consider myself a writer, but I’m a hell of a lot better than 95% of the writers I know. Cause they’re not writers, they’re basically into what I call typing. I can’t type shit, man. I cannot type with this hand. I can’t play the piano either. Isn’t that a fuckin’ shame? [...] There are many things I cannot do. [...] I literally had to replace living by thinking, and then thinking made me live again.⁹⁷

Stern wrote not to become rich, which he already was, nor to become famous, which he did not desire. It would be easy to say that he wrote to live, but the connection may have been even more profound. His life itself became a sort of writing. What he could not expend or express in physical mobility burst out into another dimension, an intellectual mobility that careened from genius to deceit, from abstraction to abuse. Whereas a novelist puts flights of fancy into his work, Stern put them into his life. With his tall tales and disregard for what Kant called “practical reason,” Stern transformed his very existence into an absurdist fiction — he was, as many remarked, a character straight out of Naked Lunch.

References

Note re Jacques Stern Items in the Burroughs Papers

The finding aid to the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library includes several inaccuracies in items related to Jacques Stern.

Box 13, Folder 25, Item 3 — The typescript of The Fluke is not missing pages 2 and 4, as the finding aid indicates. Page 2 is missing but page 4 is misnumbered 5, and the pagination error carries through the rest of the typescript. Additionally, there are two copies of page 21.

Box 84, Folder 4 — This folder contains “Postcards from Unknown Correspondents” including one from “Jacques, Jan 19, n.y.” The author was Jacques Stern and the postmark indicates the card was mailed in 1963.

Box 87, Folder 3, Item 47 — “Jock Stern. Autograph letter signed, n.d.” This item is from Jock Livingston, the filmmaker, as is clear from internal evidence.

Box 87, Folder 4, Item 79 — “Jaques ? Autograph letter signed, n.d.” This letter is from Jacques Stern and likely dates from 1959. See note below for justification of the date.

Box 88, Folder 3, Item 44 — “Jacques Stern. 23 June 1964.” This letter from Burroughs is addressed to Jock Livingston, not Jacques Stern, as is clear from internal evidence.

Box 88 Folder 7, Item 97 — “Jacques Stern, May 28, 1965.” This letter from Burroughs is addressed to Jock Livingston, not Jacques Stern, as is clear from internal evidence.

Endnotes

1. William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

2. Burroughs to Ginsberg, late July 1959, Letters.

3. Box 7, Folder 64, Item 16. “Cut-Up With Jacques Stern’s Telegram to The Captain Barrie Of His Alleged Yacht.” Papers.

4. Le Mémorial de Lyon en 1793: vie, mort et famille des victimes lyonnaises de la Révolution, Lyon, Editions lyonnaises d’art et d’histoire, 1986.

5. See the Social Security Death Index record for Jacques Loup Stern.

6. Jacques Leon Stern biography at the web site of the Assemblée Nationale. See also the biography at Wikipedia.

7. Information provided by the Woodberry Forest School. Email, July 8, 2010.

8. “Milestones,” Time Magazine, Jan 2, 1950.

9. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

10. Stern does not appear in any of the Harvard yearbooks for 1949-1953. His Harvard student records are not yet available to general researchers.

11. Stern’s will: “Attendu que Jacques Léon Stern de nationalité américaine est décédé à New York, où il était domicilié le 21 décembre 1949, laissant sa veuve née Mathilde Simone de Leusse, séparée de bien, de nationalité française et comme héritiers Rosita-Georgette Marie-Thérèse Stern, epouse de Jacques Georges Dewez et Jacques Loup Stern tous deux enfants légitimes nés de son union, de nationalité française.” Revue critique de droit international privé, Volume 40, 1951.

12. “Emily Marshall to Wed,” New York Times, March 1, 1952.

13. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, reproduced in Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, New York, Da Capo Press, 2008.

14. Burroughs to Ginsberg, July 24, 1958, Letters.

15. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. “Jacques Stern, I haven’t explained, Gregory heard of him at Harvard, a rich young Frenchman — crutches, 95lb, polio — had read On Road, Gasoline, Howl, Junkie (not realizing the latter was Bill).”

16. Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, Feb 24, 1958, reproduced in Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters, 1947 – 1980, Gay Sunshine Press, 1980.

17. LO, p 293.

18. Gregory Corso to Gary Snyder, August 12, 1958, reproduced in Bill Morgan, ed., An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso, New Directions, 2003.

19. Corso to Ginsberg, circa Oct 8, 1958, in Accidental Autobiography: “don’t know how to get money but I may find some way; I’m afraid to ask Stern, I need an arrogance to ask, and he’s become a friend, and he even thinks I’m conning him, but knows that it’s a natural part of me, and that it’s inherent in me, and that I don’t mean too [sic]; nor do I.”

20. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

21. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

22. BH, p 117.

23. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

24. Bockris.

25. Burroughs to Paul Bowles, July 20, 1958, Letters.

26. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

27. Ginsberg to Orlovsky, Feb 24, 1958, in Straight Hearts’ Delight.

28. LO p 294.

29. LO p 295.

30. Box 79, Folder 4, Item 20. Letter from Alan Ansen to Burroughs, June 19, 1959. Papers.

31. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Late July 1959, Letters.

32. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Sept 25, 1959, Letters.

33. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

34. Burroughs and Corso to Ginsberg, Sept 28 1958, Letters.

35. Corso to Ginsberg, Sept 30 1958, in An Accidental Autobiography.

36. Corso to Ginsberg, circa 8 Oct 1958, in An Accidental Autobiography.

37. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

38. Significantly, Stern mentions Perse (aka St. Leger) in the same few sentences in which he refers to the Beat Hotel: “Gît-le-Coeur, I have heard mentioned.. So has St. Leger, for he wrote about it.. So have three fuzzy friends of mine who once vegetated there..”

39. Irving Rosenthal to Jacques Loup Stern, September 17, 1958. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

40. Stern to Rosenthal, October 7, 1958. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

41. Box 62, Folder 11, Item 54. Papers.

42. Rosenthal to Burroughs, November 24, 1958. Box 80, Folder 15, Item 6. Papers.

43. Ray Roberts to Stern, May 5, 1959. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

44. Burroughs to Ginsberg, April 21, 1959, Letters.

45. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

46. Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

47. According to information provided by Oliver Harris (Email, Oct 9, 2010), James Grauerholz reviewed the note with Burroughs and indicated that he “orally re-confirms” it.

48. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

49. Bockris.

50. Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

51. Ginsberg to Burroughs, undated. Box 82, Folder 2, Item 15. Papers. The finding aid dates this letter as “probably from Winter 59/60.” However, it is clearly a response to Burroughs’ letter of June 8, so the letter likely dates from mid-to-late June 1959. Ginsberg’s reply reads in full:

Give Stern my regards. This business of not wanting to be associated with the Beat scene? Unless he has something really beyond it? Meanwhile dispite [sic] all the bullshit, there is something basically very sympathetic & honest, open, in what we all have been doing, that’s become known as beat, so that his disassociation from it seemed unnecessary, unnecessarily a put down. Not that it’s all that much of a formal party line. You make it sound as if he thinks it’s too sordid. or has too sordid a connotation now. but in the long run I think our general good nature will seem, will be seen. But Big Table’s not categorizable as just low Beat except by what gregory calls “wicked Opinion.” Oh, well, I don’t know why, I was depressed by what I paran oiaclally [sic] interpreted was his attitude, from your p.s.

52. Ginsberg to Burroughs, Sept 29, 1959. Box 82, Folder 1, Item 7. Papers.

53. Burroughs to his parents, undated letter, Box 58, Folder 23, Item 23. Papers.

54. William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Box 33, Folder 299.

55. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Jan 2, 1959, Letters.

56. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

57. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Sept 25, 1959, Letters.

58. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Oct 7, 1959, Letters.

59. According to the research of Oliver Harris, “Hauser and O’Brien” was composed in 1955 then revised in 1959. See Oliver Harris, “From Dr Mabuse to Doc Benway: The Myths and Manuscripts of Naked Lunch,” RealityStudio, Oct 26, 2010.

60. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

61. James Grauerholz, Email, March 21, 2011.

62. Brion Gysin, Terry Wilson, Here to Go: Planet R-101, London, Quartet Books, 1985, p 239.

63. Bockris.

64. Box 62, Folder 11, Item 53. Papers.

65. Burroughs, Minutes to Go, Two Cities Editions, 1960, p 59.

66. Jacques Stern to William Burroughs, undated, 2 pages. Box 87, Folder 04, Item 79. Papers. In the finding aid to the Burroughs Papers, the letter is attributed only to “Jacques,” but internal evidence (e.g. the reference to Stern’s wife Dini) indicates the author is Stern. The letter cannot have been written before late October 1958, since it refers to the Mansfield Street apartment that Burroughs and Stern shared in London after their October apomorphine cure. Because Burroughs did not cash the check enclosed with the letter, he may have received it after the publication of Naked Lunch, when he had money in the bank owing to advances from Olympia Press. The echo between the letter and Burroughs’ letter to Ginsberg of September 25, 1959 could indicate that Burroughs had received it around that time. That Burroughs subjected the letter to the cut-up technique, which Gysin showed him on October 1, 1959, suggests it may have been fresh in his mind around that time.

67. Box 07, Folder 63, Item 15. Papers.

68. Conrad Knickerbocker, “The Art of Fiction #36: William S. Burroughs,” Paris Review, 1965.

69. Recorded by Sean Sweeney for the Poetry Room in Paris on May 24, 1962. Reel-to-reel tape held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

70. Stern to Burroughs, Jan 19, 1963. Box 84, Folder 04. Papers.

71. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

72. Terry Southern to Mason Hoffenberg, June 7, 1961: “it looks as if you are setting up a billion dollar staff there in Paris, France (how about Jacques Stern for ‘Freak Shoot-Off Editor’? HAW HAW!)” Reproduced in Nile Southern, The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy, Arcade Publishing, p 164.

73. A lengthy analysis of the sources for the Dr Strangelove character is presented by Peter Daniel Smith in Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, St Martin’s Press, p 422 ff.

74. “One crutch aluminum”: Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. “On two crutches”: BH, p 117. Photograph of Jacques Stern in St Tropez: Allen Ginsberg, “Jacques Stern in St Tropez 1961,” reproduced at allenginsberg.org.

75. Philip Lamantia to Burroughs, July 12, 1964. Box 79, Folder 27, Item 39. Papers.

76. Lamantia to Burroughs, August 10, 1964. Fox 79, Folder 27, Item 40. Papers.

77. Bockris.

78. Email from Paul Guillard, 13 April 2010. “Je suis au regret de vous dire que nous n’avons aucune référence à ce livre dans nos archives. Peut-être y a-t-il erreur sur la maison d’édition?”

79. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

80. Interview with Dr Joseph Gross, July 1, 2010.

81. James Grauerholz, Email, March 18, 2011.

82. Box 13, Folder 25, Item 3, Papers.

83. Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight, footnote.

84. Emails from collector.

85. Ian Sommerville to William S. Burroughs, June 13, 1967. Box 80, Folder 20, Item 89. Papers.

86. Allen Ginsberg, Interview with Paola Igliori, 24 September 1995.

87. Malcolm Mc Neill, Observed while Falling, forthcoming memoir of the artist’s relationship with Burroughs.

88. Rosita Dewez, Poème de Jacques Stern, Galerie Charley Chevalier, Paris, 1982.

89. Tryin’: Manuscript in possession of Mark Meyer. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27 2010.

90. Gail Gerber with Tom Lisanti, Trippin’ with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember, McFarland, 2009.

91. Malcolm Mc Neill, Email, October 4, 2010.

92. Screenplay drafts: Terry Southern Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

93. Report dated May 11, 1977 with ANS from “JAS” to Terry Southern. Terry Southern Papers.

94. “Interview with a Grand Guy,” revised version of an interview with Terry Southern published in Patrick McGilligan, ed., Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, University of California Press, 1966.

95. Film of Place of Dead Roads: William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Box 20, Folder 160.

96. Interview with Stewart Meyer, May 13, 2010.

97. Recording provided by Stewart Meyer.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Quite a while back, a heartbroken bookseller offered me a copy of the Mad Motherfucker issue of Fuck You, a magazine of the Arts with the Couch cover for $35. Now realize the bookseller was distraught not crazy. When I received the mag in the mail, I could understand his disappointment. On first glance, it was like a giant zit on the Mona Lisa — the Warhol cover was ripped. In addition the once-tight frame had gone to seed, as the body of the magazine was de-stapled and incomplete. For example, the centerpiece of this issue, Auden’s “The Platonic Blow,” was missing. Still I happily paid the $35 for the Couch cover, which even torn was better than nothing. I could always upgrade, right? As it turned out, easier said than done. Fine copies of the issue with the cover attached have become prohibitively expensive, reaching ever higher into the lower four figures.

After I bought it, I scanned the covers and then packed the battered corpse into an archival coffin — where it lay until now. I was sitting this weekend in the pre-dawn, smoking and waiting for the sun to come up, when it came to me out of the fog: Why the hell haven’t I scanned the rest of the issue, warts and all? Reading as I scanned it, I am really glad I finally woke up. Like a fresh, young starlet turned barfly, glimpses of past glory flash from the opened face of the Mad Motherfucker despite years of abuse. The issue remains, even in this damaged and incomplete state, a truly magnificent example of mimeo publication. Over the years I have read quite a bit of Fuck You Press’ output, and I’ll be the first to admit it is equal parts good, bad and ugly. Nevertheless, above and beyond all else, what stands out are the paratexts: the editorial comments, the notes on contributors, the bibliographic asides, the glyph work and illustration. This stuff, the lifeblood of Fuck You Press, is pure Ed Sanders genius. So feed your head on this glorious mess of a magazine.

What is painfully obvious to me is that a complete reprint of Fuck You magazine is sorely needed. Clearly, the time is ripe. The Fuck You Press Archive has proven to be one of the top eyeball catchers on RealityStudio, second only to the Kurt Cobain / William Burroughs dossier. The publication of In Numbers and an upcoming MIT press book on artists’ magazines highlights the fact that interest is there and growing. I look forward to what seems to be an onslaught of critical work on little magazines and the Mimeo Revolution, but, let me tell you, reading about Fuck You is not enough. People need to get access to the magazine itself. Here is a taste. You’ll be hooked.  

On a complete reprint, the question remains: How to do it? The Internet is one option, an option that RealityStudio has fully explored with Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag, C Press’s Time, several of Charlie Plymell’s publications, and individual issues of a handful of important little magazines. I love this approach because of its populist nature. It is an open buffet for people to graze as they see fit. But I cannot help but wonder if the prestige of print would have shown My Own Mag, in particular, to greater effect. A hardcover edition forces critics and scholars to comment on its existence and get a discussion going, which personally I desire for this neglected masterwork. To me, it is one of the highpoints of William Burroughs’ career and, of course, the Mimeo Revolution generally. Why I don’t feel that it is enough simply to admire it, I have not fully gotten to the bottom of. But I feel compelled to push this intoxicating publication on everybody. For those who are not interested, in the words of Nancy Reagan, “Just say no,” but I can only say it will make you feel good.

So I wonder, even as we hear daily of the death of print, if hard copy is not the way to go for little magazine reprints. For me, the prototype for such a reprint is the Laurence McGilvery publication of Floating Bear from 1973: a full reprint, an introduction, a complete index of each issue, and footnotes full of information on the contributors and their contributions. Obviously, I would love to see this for Fuck You — Ted Berrigan’s C: A Journal of the Arts also comes immediately to mind as a little magazine desperately in need of a serious reprint — but I would cream my jeans to see a complete version of Jack Spicer’s J or, even better, Dan Saxon’s Le Metro and Les Deux Magots mimeos, as these magazines are close to impossible to assemble on the rare book market. This is not just a question of finances; they are, quite simply, not available. Single issues of these magazines are few and far between, and full runs just do not exist, even in institutions. An institution such NYU, Columbia, or the New York Public Library, just to name those in New York City, would have to step up and offer their magazines for scanning. Not an unreasonable request in my opinion and one that would bring attention to the library’s special collections and their educational value.

Let’s move on to the question of who would scan such rarities. A quick look through the news will tell you that public and university libraries are in deep trouble. They cannot adequately preserve their holdings let alone promote and utilize them. I do not know if the project would be profitable for a commercial publisher. There is always the university and academic press, but I would not mind going back to the Floating Bear reprint as a model. I would like to see a return of the rare bookseller as publisher. Once upon a time, booksellers did not just sell books; they printed them. The Wilentz Brothers’ 8th Street Bookshop and their Corinth Books are my favorite example with chapbooks by Leroi Jones, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Frank O’Hara, and others. As the McGilvery Floating Bear shows, bookstores also printed reference books. For the past four or five years, I have heard rumblings from various booksellers about issuing a chapbook of some sort or another. Nothing has been released yet, but the interest is there.

What if NYU or UCONN gave Dan Gregory of Between the Covers access to a complete run of Fuck You to photograph? What if the institution or Sanders threw in mock-ups and stencils of the issues? Let’s go crazy and add correspondence related to the magazine’s day-to-day operations, distribution, and reception. Bear with me as I go even further: What if Ed Sanders wrote a lengthy introduction and provided bibliographic and biographic details on the contents and contributors of each issue? What if there were essays on all aspects of the magazine — the mimeograph machines used to print it; how the technology, the ink, and the paper all influenced the design of the magazine; behind-the-scenes information on certain iconic contributions, like Auden’s gobblefest or Nelson Barr’s flowery prose and poems. What if…? Well, shit, that would be one Mad Motherfucker of a publication and I would buy it in a second. I can dream, can’t I? But for now, there is RealityStudio and a quickie version of the Mad Motherfucker issue. Coitus interruptus, for sure, but at least you can get your tip wet and your appetite for more whetted.

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts

Number 5, Volume 8

Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts #5 Volume 8
Cover

Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts #5 Volume 8
Interior Cover

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Title Page

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Talk of the Town

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Talk of the Town

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “To Fuck Is To Love Again”

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “To Fuck Is To Love Again”

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “To Fuck Is To Love Again”

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “To Fuck Is To Love Again”

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “To Fuck Is To Love Again”

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Michael McClure, “Poisoned Wheat”

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Michael McClure, Letter to Ed Sanders

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Michael McClure, Cutout Cards

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Michael McClure, Cutout Cards

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Michael McClure, Cutout Cards

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Leroi Jones, “Words from the Right Wing”

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Leroi Jones, “Western Front”

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Ed Sanders, “From the Gobble Gang Poems”

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Ed Sanders, “From the Gobble Gang Poems”

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Ed Sanders, “From the Gobble Gang Poems”

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Ted Berrigan, “Four Sonnets from The Sonnets”

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Ted Berrigan, “Four Sonnets from The Sonnets”

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Ted Berrigan, “Four Sonnets from The Sonnets”

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Ted Berrigan, “Four Sonnets from The Sonnets”

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Ronnie Tavel, “Friends of Gerard Malanga”

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Vincent Ferrini, Poems

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Harry Fainlight, “Street”

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Gregory Corso, “At the Big A”

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Gregory Corso, “At the Big A”

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Claude Pélieu, “Four Shriek Pages from Liquidation of Stocks”

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Claude Pélieu, “Four Shriek Pages from Liquidation of Stocks”

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Claude Pélieu, “Four Shriek Pages from Liquidation of Stocks”

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Claude Pélieu, “Four Shriek Pages from Liquidation of Stocks”

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Al Fowler, Poem

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Al Fowler, Poem

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Al Fowler, Poem

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Elise Cowan, Poem

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Elise Cowan, Poem

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Elise Cowan, Poem

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John Keys, “The Relationships”

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Robert Kaye, Poem

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Robert Kaye, Poem

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Robert Kaye, Poem

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John Francis Putnam, “Mythology”

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John Francis Putnam, “Freebie Peek at Remaindered Girlie Mags” and “All Saints Day”

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Carol Berge, “Thank You”

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Carol Berge, “Thank You”

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Carol Berge, “Thank You”

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Bill Fritsch, Poem

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Al Katzman, “Directions I”

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Al Katzman, “The Bloodletting”

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Gerard Malanga, “In the Pores of His Forehead the Hairline Had Weakened”

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Gerard Malanga, “Some Thoughts on Jean Shrimpton”

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Gerard Malanga, “Charles Olson Amid the White Trees”

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Nancy Ellison, “That Which Comes into the World to Disturb Nothing Deserves Neither Respect Nor Patience”

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Nancy Ellison, “That Which Comes into the World to Disturb Nothing Deserves Neither Respect Nor Patience”

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Nelson Barr, “Guernica”

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Notes on Contributors

Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts #5 Volume 8
Notes on Contributors