Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In Burroughs’ first appearance in Chicago Review in 1958, he is presented as a San Francisco poet. As Linda Richman would say, Burroughs was neither in San Francisco nor a poet, discuss. Well, to say the least, many poets in San Francisco were verklempt, particularly Jack Spicer and his circle. Spicer was a founding member of the San Francisco Renaissance when it was the Berkeley Renaissance in the late 1940s and he did not take too kindly to Ginsberg and company rolling into town to take over the Six Gallery space that he had developed. Spicer rightly saw that the San Francisco Scene as presented by Evergreen Review (Issue 2) was the creation of the New York media. Spicer hated nothing more than New York and all that it represented. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs were quite simply Yankees, a team the baseball-loving Spicer loathed.

In 1964, Stan Persky, a recent arrival from Los Angeles who quickly became a member of the Spicer circle, edited Open Space, a mimeo mag that spewed out 15 issues in only 12 months. Like Spicer, Persky lashed out at a number of literary targets in San Francisco from Donald Allen to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Nobody was spared in this deliciously malicious little mag as gossip rag. If you ever get a copy of Open Space — and that is doubtful since they are notoriously scarce (and deliberately so to frustrate attempts by collectors to accumulate complete runs) — be sure to have your copy of Kevin Killian’s and Lewis Ellingham’s Poet Be Like God, a literary biography of Spicer and his circle, on hand. Like J Magazine and a host of other Spicer-related mags, Open Space spread the gospel of Saint Jack to an incredibly limited cloister of initiates. Open Space is totally inside and exclusive, like the best of mimeo.

Issue One features a review of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg’s Yage Letters (see below). Burroughs becomes William Burros and it is clear the Spicer circle considered him a complete jackass. The review cuts like a stiletto. What comes across loud and clear in the review is that Persky, Spicer, and crew considered Burroughs and Ginsberg tourists exploiting not only South America, but also San Francisco. Ferlinghetti and City Lights was the American Express office for the interloping Eastern Beatniks, providing funds generated from the commercialization of the SF Renaissance as well as a kiosk for the dissemination of their propaganda.

The review also makes clear that Spicer fueled the muse with alcohol more than drugs. Spicer did not have to travel to Peru for yage when Gino and Carlo’s cocktail lounge down the street was providing the nectar of the gods that he preferred. Burroughs and the Beats were outsiders, carpetbaggers who would be denied the right to drink with Spicer no matter how much Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg tried to step up to the counter and sit-in.

Lager

William Burros and Allen Ginsberg, The Lager Letters (San Francisco, Baedecker Lights, 1963)

[Satirical review of The Yage Letters, which had been published by City Lights in 1963. The review appeared in Open Space 1, 1964.]

Mr. Burros has written the best travel guide for South America now available. This book would make a wonderful gift. It really tells you the kinds of things you’d want to know without a lot of crap about churches and liberator heroes: where the busses are, what the food is like, who you can talk to, where to get boys, etc. The only thing one is hard put to understand is why is there all this fuss about something called Lager, which, as best as I can understand, is something you could get in the Anxious Asp. I mean, why does he bother to give us all this dope when any normal man would be perfectly satisfied with grass or else one of those little sugar cubes the LSD people put out?

Of course, all these episstles were published in various avant-gargle mags a few years ago and Mr. G.’s histrionics are, as usual, completely unintelligible. I really tried through most of this to keep telling myself about Burros’ humanity, that the boys do matter to him, do have something to do with Eros, that the junk is more than a fixed thing — but after a certain point, despite his well-timed caustic sense of wit, one knows that it is hopeless, they’ve gone over the edge and it aint readable or poetry or love.

The Japanese Sandman (directed by Ed Buhr, 2008, Frameline Distribution)

Reviewed by Graham Rae

“Tears are worthless unless genuine, tears from the soul and the guts, tears that ache and wrench and hurt and tear.” — William S Burroughs, Last Words

Let’s face it, the familiar picture of William S Burroughs now pretty much fixed in the public consciousness is of the wife-killing, hat-and-glasses-wearing junkie with the lust for teen boys, his gravel-rolled burr gutter-muttering obscene scientific and medical prophecies to a wasted cheering audience. It’s nowhere near the whole picture, of course, but why let truth come in the way of a good, easily graspable and marketable image?

What’s especially frustrating about this cliché is that it completely ignores the fact that Burroughs was a human being who lived a pretty dismal life — drug addiction, killing his wife, his son dying in his 30s — and treats him instead as a sort of circus freak-cum-alien with no human or redeeming qualities whatsoever. To this way of thinking Burroughs was just the two-dimensional Hombre Invisible, the middle class drug-crash writing mad prose as he strode and staggered purposefully and notoriously down the still-divided-as-to-his-worth annals of literary history.

The neglected human, feeling aspect of the writer is one that is brilliantly and sensitively examined in The Japanese Sandman by director Ed Buhr. This new 12-minute short film is based on the first letter in The Yage Letters, WSB’s fictional book of letters (see Oliver Harris’ authoritative introduction to the 2006 edition for more information on this complex epistolary hoax) supposedly sent to Allen Ginsberg from South America during WSB’s 1953 quest for the hallucinogen yage. This was the mythical “final fix” used by brujos to paint vivid neon prophecies in the humid conspiratorial jungle air, and Burroughs likely wanted it as some sort of panacea to take away the mental and emotional torment that followed his accidental killing of his wife in 1951.

The Japanese Sandman starts off with a faded jaded 38-year-old Burroughs sitting clattering away at his manual Royal typewriter, film noir monochrome mirroring his scarred internal palette. Words crack and rattle across a surrendering gray sky shaking the leaves of vitality-leeched palm trees as the drug-addict writer composes a screed part travelogue, part routine, part anthropology, part sociology, back to Ginsberg in the USA. Not shying away from its subject matter, the film details WSB’s adventures in Panama with drugs and booze and hookers, and it’s clear by this point in his life that he is a cynical, weary individual who has been through the existential wringer.

Buhr conjures up Panama through a judicious handful of interiors and a few tight exteriors, married with a sterling fast-paced editing job, fine crisp evocative cinematography, and a great bouncing soundtrack. John Fleck, the actor who plays Burroughs, does an excellent job mimicking the writer’s unmistakable atonal voice, looks like him and even has his facial tics and tremors down to a tee. Fleck has clearly done his homework, though it must be said he still has all ten fingertips, so there obviously was a limit to what he was willing to suffer for his art! He looks like he’s having fun with the role as he runs with it, and there’s not really a bad performance in the film.

When a shady Panama joint called the Blue Goose reminds him of a Prohibition-era roadhouse from his youth, Burroughs tells the poignant story of Billy Bradshinkel, a lover from his late teenage years. It’s at this point that lusty vibrant color footage supplants the dreary black and white and Burroughs’ internal horizons are seen to be lush and warm and happy. He rewrites their initial sexual encounter in a car and talks about their young naïve relationship before being crushed as they break up. A few months later the writer is left numb when he learns that Billy has died in a car crash. Here we cut back to contemporary Panama and Burroughs promising he has a “silo full of queer corn” like this to recount, but it’s obvious his off-hand glibness is a mask for real pain and sadness. As Oliver Harris notes, having this “routine” right at the start of the book is important for motivating the quest into the jungle to find Yage “as an escape from haunting memories of home, family and desire.”

The Japanese Sandman is a lean, fat-free film, very faithful to the original fake letter it is based on, easily compacting the complex, poignant subject matter into its short, lively running time. The title itself (the letter has none) derives from a line from an old 1920 song of that name, and the line Burroughs quotes from it — “Just an old second-hand man trading new dreams for old” — provides, as he says, the “theme song of story.” Ironically, the writer misquotes the song, replacing the original word “days” with “dreams” by accident or by design, which helps to make his point about remaking painful memories artistically into pain-free images.

A real, heartfelt, melancholic piece of work, The Japanese Sandman is a very welcome addition to the ever-growing list of projects inspired by Burroughs. Ed Buhr has talked of creating a full-length film made based on this material. Let’s hope he manages to get it together, because Burroughs could use a bit of humanizing now that the initial culture shock of his art has died down. There may be nobody better suited for the job than this fine director with his beautiful and inspiring could-be-feature trailer.

by Oliver Harris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literary Status and Archival Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Definitive” Editions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Textual History of Burroughs’ Early Novels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Queer” (1952)

Queer (1985)

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

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

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

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

“Yage” Ms. (1953)

The Yage Letters (1963)

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

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

Mexican Composite Manuscript

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

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco: City Lights 1963, one of 3,000 copies in wraps. Maynard & Miles A8a. Consisting mostly of letters written to Allen Ginsberg by Burroughs on his trip to South America in 1953, but including letters by Ginsberg as well.

_____ 1975, second edition in wraps, adds a new letter dated 10 July 1953.

_____ 1988, third edition in wraps, this edition has a shorter Introduction by Ginsberg.

_____ 2006, new “redux” edition edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris, bound in wraps.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The first edition of Yage Letters published by City Lights in 1963 is a slim and seemingly unassuming book. The cover has become famous and the book sells well, but it remains largely undiscovered territory to scholars. Only 18,000 words long and struggling to reach 68 pages, it was originally issued without an introduction or notes. In college, Yage Letters was presented as something of a curiosity; a playground upon which a few isolated professors interested in queer, racial, or political theory could tinker with ideas on tourism, colonialism, imperialism and the Other. The Sheltering Sky and The Heart of Darkness share similar themes. Later, I viewed the book as an ur-text in the psychedelic revolution published around the time of Stranger in a Strange Land, The Island, and the Psychedelic Review. (For an archive of the Review, see maps.org.) As a collectible, this collaboration between Burroughs and Ginsberg stood out as an essential Burroughs text, but not a prized possession that I often looked at or sought to learn more about.

Yage Redux and Oliver Harris’ upcoming essay for Postmodern Culture, “Not Burroughs’ final fix: materializing The Yage Letters,” revolutionize my views on nearly every level. Redux roughly triples the size of the first edition, and I spent much of my time in the new introduction, notes, and appendices. As the review on RealityStudio makes clear, Harris researches and clarifies the scientific, cultural, and political history surrounding Burroughs and Ginsberg’s explorations into South America. Harris also demonstrates that a tremendous amount of editing and drafting went into creating the epistolary novel. The immediacy was carefully constructed. On that score, particularly interesting was Burroughs’ drafts for a Yage article that he hoped to publish in a mainstream magazine.

Yet for me, the highpoint of Harris’ work is his exploration into the role of the little magazine in the publication of Yage Letters. His research completely alters the manner in which I view the early Burroughs magazine appearances. As my columns to RealityStudio attest, I saw the magazine appearances of the late 1950s and early 1960s as divided into two camps: Naked Lunch related and cut-ups. The brilliance of Naked Lunch tends to blind readers and scholars to other aspects of Burroughs’ work, particularly in the early period. Harris makes this perfectly clear when he discusses “From Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” that appeared in Black Mountain Review 7. I always focused on the Naked Lunch part of that title and neglected the fact that the piece was part of the earlier written (but later published) Yage Letters. The July 10, 1953 letter which describes the Composite City is the twelfth letter of the “In Search of Yage” section in the second and third editions of Yage Letters. This letter is missing from the first edition. Burroughs cannibalized Yage Letters for use in Naked Lunch. Harris provides much information on the textual relationship between Naked Lunch and Yage Letters.

From the Naked Lunch related material, I tended to jump to Burroughs’ cut-up experiments culminating in the cut-up art books of Time and APO-33 of 1965/1966. As Harris points out in detail in his Postmodern Culture article and more briefly in Redux, I jumped over the important bridge between the Naked Lunch magazines and the cut-up appearances. That bridge in more ways than one was Yage Letters. Much of my time was spent studying Big Table 1, the Chicago Review, Kulchur 1, Semina 4 and Yugen 3. As stated previously, I considered Black Mountain Review as only a part of Naked Lunch. I viewed these magazines as keys to getting Naked Lunch into print and proof of the magazines’ importance in Burroughs’ publication history. This was a gross oversight causing me to minimize their importance. My focus on Naked Lunch ignored Big Table 2 and Kulchur 3 entirely, which printed eleven of the twelve letters comprising the “In Search of Yage” section in all editions of Yage Letters. In addition, I never concentrated on what was actually in Floating Bear issues 5 and 9 (the letter dated June 21, 1960 and “Roosevelt after Inauguration,” respectively) narrowing in on the cut-up aspects of issue 5 and the obscenity trial surrounding issue 9. City Lights Journal 1 (“Am I Dying, Meester?”) represented yet another cut-up. In essence, I overlooked the entire contents of Yage Letters that was published in little magazines before the first City Lights edition. If anything demonstrates the importance of the little magazine in the publication history of William Burroughs, it is Yage Letters.

Harris’ research takes this fact much further. By 1963, no manuscript of Yage Letters existed. Ferlinghetti relied on the little magazines in order to create the City Lights edition. In his Postmodern Culture article, Harris shows how each little magazine left its imprint on the Yage Letters text. Especially interesting is a close reading of the use of colons and commas in the opening addresses of the letters and their implications for a postmodern concept of editing and the text. Harris also shows how the format and editing process of Floating Bear resulted in a remarkably accurate presentation of the June 21, 1960 letter in Issue 5.

Just as Yage Letters bridges the gap between Naked Lunch and cut-up appearances in little magazines, the book demonstrates a shift in Burroughs’ writing technique. The “In Search of Yage” section shows Burroughs developing the routine style that would culminate in Naked Lunch. Letter writing is key to this process. “Roosevelt after Inauguration” leads to the Talking Asshole. The later sections of Yage Letters (the letter from June 21, 1960 and “Am I Dying, Meester?”) utilize and develop the theory of the cut-up. Gysin replaced Ginsberg as mentor and collaborator.

In between the routine and the cut-up lies the Composite City letter of July 10, 1953. In this letter that appeared in Black Mountain Review 7, Burroughs predicted the cut-up before Gysin sliced into the newspapers at the Beat Hotel. While not a true cut-up, the Composite City section reveals an interest in surrealist/Dadaist collage and montage techniques that along with the routine would shape Naked Lunch.

Harris’ work left me wanting more information on a couple of other early periodical appearances: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” in the British Journal of Addiction and the excerpt from Junkie in Man’s Wildcat Adventures. A discussion on Man’s Wildcat Adventures is not really relevant here, but Harris’ research into the mainstream aspirations of Burroughs in the 1950s leaves me puzzled as to how Junkie appeared in a fringe men’s magazine in June 1959. Possibly, Burroughs was so desperate for publication after the rejection of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press that he considered publishing anywhere, including starting his own (eventually aborted) magazine. Perhaps he needed money or maybe Ace sold the rights and it was out of his control. What are the implications of Junkie being published in a men’s magazine? For example, how did this marginalized appearance coupled with the pulping of the Digit edition of Junkie in 1957 affect Burroughs’ view of himself as an author and Junkie in particular? In any case, this forgotten magazine appearance demands further study.

The “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” (“Master Letter”) is more on point. A section of the “Master Letter” deals with Yage. Harris has painstakingly annotated this section showing where the material came from (the aborted Yage article in many cases) and where it went (Naked Lunch in some cases). This work and all mention of the British Journal of Addiction (except for a brief note to the appendices) fell to the editor’s pen. I think this is unfortunate. Given Burroughs’ desperation to see publication (as demonstrated by Harris), the Journal appearance (Burroughs’ second appearance in print) proves of major importance. The “Master Letter” addresses pertinent issues of Burroughs’ authorship (he signed his own name not William Lee or Willy Lee) and scholarship (Burroughs’s views on Yage and other drugs did in fact find publication in scholarly circles as early as 1957). Burroughs’ thoughts and feelings on the British Journal appearance as well as the “Master Letter”‘s reception by the medical community would be interesting. How does the “Master Letter” fit in with Burroughs’ reliance on letter writing in his creative process? How is the “Master Letter” related to Yage Letters and Naked Lunch? How does the “Master Letter”‘s eventual appearance in later editions of Naked Lunch as an appendix change critical and public perception of the Naked Lunch and the “Master Letter?” Many might be unaware of the circumstances and format of its original appearance. This inclusion in later editions dovetails with the editing and textual issues Harris explores in Yage Letters Redux and his article. Clearly, the “Master Letter” deserves further study.

Yage Redux and the Postmodern Culture article answer a multitude of questions, but like any great scholarship they generate a host of new ones. This work provides a ton of information on little magazines and changed my view of my collection. The introductions, appendices and notes give Yage Letters an added weight not merely in terms of size, but also in terms of significance to Burroughs and literature at large. But that significance, like the drug Yage, was always out there; somebody just had to search for it.

RealityStudio notes: Jed mentions Oliver Harris’ annotated version of the “Master Letter.” Professor Harris was kind enough to share one of his working manuscripts, a complex Microsoft Word document that he used to prepare the “In Search of Yage” section of Yage Redux. Copyrights prevent RealityStudio from publishing the entire document here. However, if you want some real insight into the sort of rigor and analysis that Professor Harris put into his work, here are a few images: 1, 2, 3.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I received an email from Oliver Harris, author of William Burroughs: The Secret of Fascination and editor of The Letters of William Burroughs. According to his research and the research of others, much of the information on my web site concerning photographs of Burroughs in New York and Peru is inaccurate. The information Harris provides is wonderful stuff. It is an insight into the type of scholarship we can expect from The Yage Letters Redux and The Latin American Notebook due out soon. See RealityStudio for an interview with Harris on these topics. Hopefully, other readers out there can add their opinions and knowledge to current or future posts. Please check out the link for the Ginsberg Trust. Possibly, Burroughs will get similar treatment in the near future.

Dear Jed,

Just looking at your very interesting site via its link to RealityStudio, and really enjoyed your caption to the photograph illustrating “William Lee.”

However… you’re mistaken about the date. This photograph, taken on Ginsberg’s camera (and presumably by Ginsy himself) dates from autumn 1953; it’s on the same roll and sequence as my favourite picture, the one of WSB in the Met with his Sphinx… Although the exact date is unknown — anywhere between September and December is possible — it’s definitely not ’45, and unlikely to be the Fag in the background… Equally, I think you may be mistaken about the subway station. Like you, I think it ought to be 103rd St and B-way, but Bill Morgan thinks otherwise (and he is pretty reliable). If you check out the Ginsberg Trust site, you’ll see the details they give for this image.

I hope this is useful — I get the impression you care as much about detail as I do, and therefore would prefer to be corrected rather than mistaken, even about little things. Then again, it does rather spoil a nice caption…

One other small query for you – on your page about The Yage Letters, you say that the photographs make you think of “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” but you don’t say why; so what is it about these poses that makes the link?? (By the way, I think you may be mistaken in saying that the picture of WSB with his gun was taken in Pucallpa in July; and with the other picture, I can say with confidence that it wasn’t — I did a lot of research into this one, and worked out that it was taken outside Mocoa in March, and taken by none other than Richard Evans Scultes…)

Oliver

P.S. RealityStudio notes: That doesn’t look like the 8th Avenue and 14th Street subway station to me. The signs there say 14th Street, not 8th Avenue, and the sign in the picture clearly says “Ave.” And it’s definitely not 103rd and Broadway, a location you might pick only because Burroughs mentions it in Junky. To me it looks like the 2nd Avenue station on the F line. The sign looks like it says “2nd Ave.” And compare these pictures of it: 1 and 2. The signs are obviously different but the station is similar. (Then again, many NY subway stations look like that.) This also would have been the nearest station to Burroughs when he lived on East 7th Street with Ginsberg.

RealityStudio Reviews the New Edition Prepared by Oliver Harris

It is an acknowledged paradox at the heart of William S. Burroughs’ work that his greatest books called into question how much they were even his. Whereas Samuel Beckett tried to eviscerate the novel from within — to “naughten” it, to borrow a term from Heidegger — Burroughs seemed to do the same to authorship as such. Friends and chance helped to assemble his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, from fragments he claimed not to remember writing. In the 1960s he advocated mechanical procedures, the cut up and the fold in, for composing literary works. Throughout his career he liked to collaborate with other artists. (You imagine teachers writing “plays well with others” on the report cards of young Bill.) And of course many of his works wouldn’t have seen the light of day without the early boosterism of Allen Ginsberg and the later support of James Grauerholz. It’s as though Burroughs himself were rather like the drug yagé: a source of brilliant visions unable to be realized without an added ingredient to potentiate them. Burroughs might have achieved little without the literary catalysts in his life: Ginsberg, Gysin, and Grauerholz. The three Gs.

Given that Burroughs established this approach — not the composition of books but the decomposition of authorship — early in his career, it is not alarming to see his books continuing to be revised since his death in 1997. First Grauerholz and Barry Miles issued Naked Lunch: The Restored Text in 2001, and then Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris published Junky: 50th Anniversary Definitive Edition in 2003. Now Harris presents The Yage Letters Redux, a rigorously edited, researched, and analyzed version of the book that earlier editions called an “epistolary novel” emerging from Burroughs’ 1953 trip to South America in search of the purportedly telepathic drug yagé.

Like the first two revisions, Yage Letters Redux makes minor corrections to the text and adds previously unpublished material in appendixes. Harris has been careful to document his work in notes — a scholarly virtue that should also have been maintained in the “restoration” of Naked Lunch, especially since it is clearly Burroughs’ most important creation. Unlike the first two revisions, however, Yage Letters Redux is the only book to emerge as practically a different work altogether. Try this experiment: read your old edition of Yage Letters, next read Harris’ introduction to the new book, and then read the rest of Yage Letters Redux. You’ll find that Harris has practically recast the entire book with his introduction alone.

To be clear, this is not an act of academic hubris but rather a scholarly achievement. Harris did a marvellous amount of research, one of whose jewels was the discovery of the diaries of Paul Holliday, a botanist who ran into Burroughs in 1953 and described him as a “tall, lank, droopy sort of person with a pessimistic streak for conjuring up all manner of fearful fevers.” Harris situates Burroughs’ adventure in numerous contexts, both literary and historical, and argues that Burroughs was not just a “comically underprepared” oaf lumping through the jungle but rather a serious if unconventional researcher. “It turns out,” writes Harris, that “in June 1953 Burroughs was making the most accurate classification to date — ‘Indeed, the first real botanical achievement in the scientific appraisal of ayahuasca since Spruce’s seminal work in the 1850s’ — since he was the first to identify the genus of the plant now more correctly classified as Psychotria viridis.”

This background is important to situate the work, but it is Harris’ research into the composition of Yage Letters that forces the reader to reconceive the book altogether. Based on a careful analysis of manuscripts, correspondence, and documents in City Lights’ archives, Harris discovered that this “epistolary novel” is more novel than epistle. “Contrary to all assumptions,” Harris writes, Yage Letters “did not start out as real letters or edited letters or any kind of letters at all.” Instead, Burroughs had originally made several attempts to draft a saleable article — similar to his later attempt to write a “letter from Tangier” for the slicks — which was eventually cut up into letters as a way of providing a loose framework for disparate material.

This is an amazing revelation. It has long been known that great chunks of Naked Lunch were extracted from Burroughs’ letters to Ginsberg. Now it emerges that the vast bulk of yagé “letters” were the opposite, a pseudo-correspondence distilled from an attempt at more purposeful prose. If the letter format had previously given readers the impression of immediacy, as though they were receiving Burroughs’ dispatches from the jungle, Harris’ scholarship forces them to reconsider the book as a carefully contrived literary work, one of whose aims was to provide an impression of immediacy. When transforming the aborted articles into “letters,” for example, Burroughs sometimes changed verb tenses to heighten the action.

The craft — hidden in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter — of Burroughs’ “correspondence” emerges clearly if you compare it to the few actual letters remaining in the book: Ginsberg’s 1960 letter recounting his own experience with yagé; Burroughs’ portentous, pretentious reply (bear in mind Burroughs was writing as a spurned lover); and Ginsberg’s brief 1963 letter addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” as though the sender were no longer sure of the person the recipient had become. Of these, Ginsberg’s yagé account is the only letter of substance, and it tends to remind you of meeting somebody at a party who regales you with some endless narrative of a drug trip. What could be more tiresome? After bearing with Ginsberg’s hallucinations, it is a relief and a pleasure to read Burroughs’ precise and laconic descriptions. In fact, only in contrast to Ginsberg does it occur to you that Burroughs writes very little about the cognitive effects of drug experience, usually conveying it through a list of physical symptoms instead: vomiting, numbness, disorientation. “I was hit by violent, sudden nausea and rushed for the door hitting my shoulder against the door post.” This detail — stumbling into the door — seems to say more about yagé than Ginsberg’s ravings about a “Nose-God.”

Ironically, while the yagé experience dominates Ginsberg’s letter, it is less the experience than the idea of yagé that seems to motivate Burroughs. Harris reminds readers that Burroughs’ narrative — which consists mostly of nothing special: getting drunk, waiting for airplanes that never arrive, coping with visa hassles, sitting in parks, picking up “boys” and tolerating their petty thievery — is “far more about the misadventures of searching than the finding,” and you wonder if this wasn’t true of Burroughs in general. He roamed the world, tried every drug, dabbled with crime, flirted with scientology, loved numerous men, boys, and even a few women. Was it all in pursuit of some “final fix,” as Burroughs put it? God’s Own Medicine? Certainly his books never seem to attain finality or fixation, even posthumously, thus leaving readers to undergo their own misadventures in seeking and finding. Perhaps this even helps to explain their appeal — what could be better than opening up this incredible new edition Yage Letters and discovering a practically “lost” or recovered book by a favorite author?