Reflecting on the end of 1965, Sanders describes a pivotal moment in his memoir when he became determined to make a living from his art (Fug You 181). This decision placed him in a tough position: how does one make a living from the counterculture without betraying its anti-establishment ethos? Sanders’s Peace Eye bookstore catalogues from the 1960s embody this tension since Sanders needed to sell what he listed without selling out. 

Peace Eye bookstore was a cornerstone of New York City’s 1960s counterculture, functioning simultaneously as a hub for underground publishing, a salon for Lower East Side creatives, and even, for a time, a crash pad for wandering youth. The bookstore’s cultural importance was recognized from its inception—Time magazine sent a team of reporters to cover its opening (Fug You 129)—and it quickly became integral to the East Village’s counterculture identity. Sanders’s catalogs were the public face of this multifaceted operation, making them one of the most significant surviving artifacts of both Peace Eye specifically as well as the broader American counterculture of the 1960s.

One way the catalogs address this tension is through humor. By listing items that read as elaborate jokes (which Sanders in his memoir refers to as “literary relics” such as the pubic hairs of various literary figures who have signed a pentagram in Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Lies), the catalogs allowed Sanders to generate income without directly commodifying serious artistic work. These ironic offerings performed a dual function. They shielded writers’ legitimate artistic reputations from market pressures while mocking customers gullible enough to purchase them. The authentic artistic work remained untainted by commerce, preserved behind a screen of absurdist merchandise. 

Yet this strategy is somewhat contradictory. Even as parody, the catalogs had to maintain enough credibility to generate actual sales, which risked their eventual absorption into the very mainstream commercial culture they mocked. The line between satirizing and participating in the market can be remarkably thin. 

Allen Ginsberg’s Ponds Cold Cream jar embodies this tension. Sanders featured the jar in his inaugural catalog, complete with an inscription from Ginsberg himself: “This is the jar of bona fide ass-wine or cock lubricant, into which I regularly plunged my hardened phallos to ease penetration of the rosy A-hole of P. Orlovsky and used vice-versa by P.O. on A.G. winter 1964 N.Y.” Sanders’s catalog description elaborated: “The inscription is on a strip of paper taped around the jar. When we received this relic, there was still A.G.’s cock-dent in the cream, but due to the ????? ??? (“everything flows” from Heraclitus) scene, the rim have proven under microscopy to be tobacco hunks. A literary document & relic never offered before in the history of western civilization……. $35.” The value of the jar comes specifically from it being Ginsberg’s jar, which is to say that its value is tied to his literary reputation, but by virtue of being a joke, the jar can be sold without infringing upon Ginsberg’s literary reputation.

The evolution of the catalogs show Sanders recalibrating his joke, but as the joke evolves, the risk of selling out increases. In the second catalog, Sanders, still trying to sell Ginsberg’s cold cream jar, makes two notable changes. First, he drops the Heraclitus reference, opting for a more direct explanation that the cock-dents in the cream have “fluxed out.” More significantly, beyond its status as a so-called groundbreaking literary relic, the jar is now described as “marvelous, wonderful, & USEFUL.” This emphasis on utility coincides with a price reduction to $22.50. Sanders is trying to find the right pitch, as determined, apparently, by a buyer, for his joke. 

By the third catalog, Sanders risks playing the game he parodies, ramping up his marketing tactics while further slashing the price. “ATTENTION ALLEN GINSBERG FREAKS!!!!” he announces. This call to those interested in all things Ginsburg demonstrates just how thoroughly Ginsberg’s literary reputation remains at stake in the sale of the cold cream jar. “Allen Ginzap, noting a lack of response from the last catalogue, has requested his Pond’s cold cream jar back! ‘I can use it,’ he told us recently. This is the final call to all relic-freaks, Ginsberg lovers, & all interested in the cold cream conspiracy.” Utility continues to be the guiding principle here. 

In the second catalog, Sanders makes the pitch that, hey, even if the jar is of marginal literary interest at least it’s useful. While utility is a consolation prize in the second catalog, by the third catalog, it’s as if Ginsburg is a prop for utility: maybe potential buyers don’t see the utility in the overpriced jar, but Ginsburg himself does, so you’d better buy now while you still have a chance! Sanders concludes the third and final listing: “Because we feel that some collector should have this historical relic, we place it here for a fantastic bargain basement price of: [$]15.00.” Over the course of three catalogs, the price for the jar bottoms out at less than half of the original price sought. In 2025 dollars, the original price was about $365 and the final $155. Ginsberg’s cold cream jar disappears after the third catalog. 

In his memoir, Sanders says he eventually gave the jar to photographer Richard Avedon during a Fugs photo shoot (Fug You 86). However, there appears to have been more than one cold cream jar. In a handbill issued for celebrating his court victory against obscenity charges, Sanders announced an exhibition of “literary relics & ejaculata” that featured—and apparently offered for sale—“several of Allen Ginsberg’s autographed cold cream jars fresh from sensual spurt scenes” (Fug You 256). While the third and fourth catalogs aren’t dated, this handbill from the summer of 1967 suggests that the Ginsberg cold cream conspiracy continued after the jar was no longer included in the catalogs. Sanders’s multiplying cold cream jars look less like intimate relics and more like reproducible merchandise. 

Whether sold or given away, the fact that no cold cream jar made it into an institutional collection prevents it from rising to the status of the literary relic that it was marketed as. The catalogs are clear that Sanders’s target buyers were major institutions such as universities: “We will gladly cooperate in typing invoices to Universities, libraries, etc, in such a manner as to ‘cool the controversy’ of freaky items. We do not want to produce any panic in university finance administrations, library executive committees, or command bunkers in state accounting offices.” Again, it’s difficult to determine the degree to which Sanders parodies or plays the game here precisely because he’s trying so hard to make a sale. Yet without the institutional recognition (such as that bestowed upon other items Sanders sold, including the catalogs themselves) Ginsberg’s cold cream jar (or jars?) fails both to achieve full status of literary relic and to live up to its advertising. In this way, the cold cream jar perhaps points towards a relationship selling out and literary status. It’s possible that not selling Ginsberg’s cold cream jar was actually a success by countercultural standards—or it could have been had Sanders not been so set on making the sale.

Sanders’s catalogs stage a major contradiction of the countercultural literary economy by mocking commodification while also relying on it. The Ginsberg cold cream jar, in particular, shows how quickly parody can collapse into what it parodies, with Sanders shifting tone, price, and sales pitch in response to buyers. What appears to mock collectors and the literary marketplace ends up playing by its rules, with Ginsberg’s celebrity functioning as Sanders’s most valuable game piece. The cold cream conspiracy reveals both the ingenuity and the precarity of Sanders’s strategy: he could use parody to resist selling out, but only by continually flirting with the very commercialism he ostensibly opposed.

References

Sanders, Ed. Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. Da Capo Press, 2011.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

An installment in The Visible Man: A Coffee Table Zine of Photographs of William S. Burroughs

In the last few years there has been a trend in book-collecting circles of getting away from traditional books in favor of ephemeral documents like photographs and photo albums. Booksellers at the forefront like Between the Covers — you might remember that they changed the game in the sale of Mimeo Revolution collectibles years ago — and Brian Cassidy are going to fairs and seeking out your uncle’s old photo album of his platoon in Vietnam or your Grandparents’ pics of a family vacation driving along Route 66 in the 1950s. As time passes, old photographs taken by amateurs, such as those on a vacation, are becoming important historical documents valued by individual collectors and institutions.  

This intersection of vacation time and experiencing a historical moment makes me think of Burroughs in Chicago in 1968. Wish you were here, All the best, Bill. It is a cliché to discuss the Democratic Convention of 1968 in terms of absurdist theater. Chicago challenged Gil Scott-Heron’s assertion that the revolution will not be televised, just as Vietnam demonstrated that war was a form of entertainment, even if it was a horror show. But what about thinking of Chicago as a vacation destination? In the summer of 1968, Burroughs was looking for an escape from London when the Esquire assignment to cover the Democratic Convention with his idol Jean Genet and his old buddy Terry Southern fell into his lap. Burroughs gladly accepted. Sounds like fun. For Burroughs, Chicago was a vacation to a Westworld-style amusement park for those playing at the Revolution. It also had elements of a bachelor party where simulations of war, like paintball and laser tag, are offered as amusement.

The city was crawling with photographers and TV camera crews and Burroughs’ trip to Chicago was well-documented by Esquire photographers. Seemingly there are as many shots of Burroughs in Chicago as there are of Burroughs in any other city. You have all seen the photos. One of the most famous is of Burroughs with comrade-in–arms Jean Genet marching in the streets of Chicago along with Richard and Jeanette Seaver and Allen Ginsberg. This is the photo which makes me think of Westworld. This is the essence of the simulated Revolution. Fighting in the street as a walk in the park. In particular, Jeanette and Richard look dressed to kill. Jeanette as Baby Jane Holzer watching the Plastic Exploding Inevitable at the Dom. 

1968 Chicago is textbook theory of the spectacle and hyperreality. Simulacra and simulation. Case in point, the most famous photo of Burroughs in Chicago, the cover of the November 1968 issue of Esquire featuring Burroughs’ article “The Coming of the Purple Better One,” did not take place in Chicago at all. It was staged in the safety of New York City. Genet in particular was offended by this display of fake news and demanded more money for the photoshoot. Storm the Reality Studio!!!

There are a few photographs of Burroughs on stage in Grant Park addressing the crowd and in one he flashes the peace sign. For me this is the most fascinating photo of Burroughs in Chicago. It is easy to be cynical and dismiss this pic as a joke and say that Burroughs saw through all this shit and was just along for the free ride. But it is also easy to forget that the violence in Chicago was very real and that the feeling the United States teetered on the edge of revolution was palpable. I love this pic because I think it captures Burroughs being caught up in the moment and losing himself in the revolution. This is Burroughs as true believer. It is pictures like this one which place The Job and The Electronic Revolution in context. In fact, it could be a cover image for those books. Burroughs to Gysin from September 9, 1968:

You were right when you said I might not want to leave America. The place has changed unrecognizably since we were last here. There is real resistance among both black and whites on a scale and organization I have not seen anywhere else. In Chicago I was addressing rallies and taking part in marches and its fun.

Like pot, the revolution was fun. And real. Burroughs to Gysin from September 28:

Point of images is to bring some real, I mean real, thing on set where it isn’t now. What is really going on here is resistance like I have not seen before. I tell these kids about infra sound and DOR and they are on the way to build these machines right now and intend to use them. The gap between idea and action has really been bridged at last. So I feel one should follow through on it.

Seeing Burroughs on stage giving the salute of the Revolution you wonder what music was playing in the background. The MC5 rocking through “Dancing in the Streets” or maybe the newly released Rolling Stones tune “Street Fighting Man.” Maybe so but the photo also suggests a song from the near future: The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Surely Burroughs would never be this naive again, but he would also never be this young again either.

Read further installments in The Visible Man: A Coffee Table Zine of Photographs of William S. Burroughs

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Steven Taylor

There is no single, right way to tell the story of William Burroughs. Here was a guy who distrusted and refused to believe in the tyranny of the definitive article. Burroughs hated the Do-Rights. Those with THE answer. A single doorstop biography, such as Ted Morgan‘s or Barry Miles‘, no matter how detailed and inclusive fails to fully capture a man so complex and so protean. Something always falls into that space between. Those who proclaim to have the true story, the full Monty, can only be talking assholes. How can you possibly organize such a multidimensional, fantastical life? Given Burroughs’ travels far and wide across multiple temporal Interzones, as well as inner and outer space, geography has proven popular. These attempts hopscotch the globe like that cut-up byline from of the Nova trilogy. “Ew york Aris Ome Oston” and so on and so on throughout North and South America, Africa, and Europe. Surely, a valid and often fruitful approach, but I have always wanted to know more about all those Burroughsian locales outside of the context of Burroughs. But is there a truly a context outside of Burroughs? He is seemingly everywhere.

Miles expanded the lens on Burroughs by focusing on a single locale with the history of the Beat Hotel but I fantasize about something even more archival. I envision a 1950s steamer trunk, like that with which Burroughs travelled, filled with the artifacts of Fifties and Sixties Paris. A vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunk is an artifact of Paris in and of itself. Nothing is forbidden; everything is permitted. The trunk is hungry. Throw in menus from the cafes and restaurants Burroughs frequented. What were the food and drink served at La Palette? How much did everything cost, including the drugs Burroughs copped there? Fill the trunk with copies of the books that Burroughs read as Naked Lunch came off the press in the exact editions and printings as consumed by Burroughs. What populated the bestseller list in Paris that week? Ditto for newspapers and magazines. What was on the newsstand the day the cut-up was rediscovered? What little mags circulated? What papers lay underneath Gysin’s Stanley knife? What songs drifted through the streets of Paris as Burroughs walked back to his garret at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur after an afternoon browsing at The English Bookshop on 42 Rue de Seine? What teams won the national soccer matches, the French Open, the local elections? What movies flickered on the screens of the movie houses? What plays and shows entertained the Parisian public? What concerts? What paintings hung in the white cubes of the galleries? What exhibitions filled the museums? Gather as much of the archival evidence as it is possible to find. Track down the ephemera: the posters, the handbills, the pamphlets, the catalogues, the advertisements. But dare not distill them. Dare not write them up. Throw them all in the trunk and let Burroughs fans experience them for themselves. Construct their own narratives. Cut them up in their own minds.  

Yet maybe this is all wrong; the truth may not be stranger than fiction, the facts over time can only be recreated as myth and the story of Burroughs is best made up as fantasy. Each Burroughs historian a novelist or, better yet, a poet. There are as many ways to tell a Burroughs story as there are Burroughses. I wrote up My Burroughs. One’s own Burroughs might be the only true one, if only to the maker. I also desire a history of Burroughs as told through his bibliography. I tried my hand at this as well and that story, too, was as much fiction as fact. To be honest, the entire RealityStudio trunk, as deep as it is, as vast and infinite as the Internet seems to be, is only a fragment of the Burroughs story. There is far, far too little on the Burroughs of the Seventies and beyond to say nothing of the Burroughs of the Thirties and Forties.  

And there lies yet another approach to the Burroughs story. Chronicling Burroughs’ pivotal years. I have always wanted to know more about Burroughs in 1936, his final year at Harvard. There is a book I have been meaning to read on gay Harvard in 1920: Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage Purge of Campus Homosexuals. Was Harvard in the Thirties the same? What was it like for Burroughs living in this persecuted underworld? I would also like to reconstruct Burroughs’ complete curriculum at Harvard from freshman year onwards. All the classes, all the syllabi. Burroughs received a remarkable education, one which stuck with him his entire life. Burroughs memorized his reading at Harvard and it was this classic education that astounded and fascinated the New Vision Beats in New York City in the Forties. I need to get all the yearbooks. Who was there? The mere fact that James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, overlapped with Burroughs at Harvard, has sent my mind racing for years. I have yet to write the piece on Burroughs, James Laughlin, and New Directions that ping pongs and pogoes in my brain as I sit in the alley behind my house with a 12-pack of Natty Bohs. Someday. Someday.

Rightly so, geography is important for Burroughs, but let us not forget that Burroughs was also obsessed with time. Miles and Morgan link geography with time as a structuring device. This practice serves as the foundation for Burroughs biography. Texas 1947-1948. Mexico 1949-1952. Tangier 1954-1958. Paris 1958-1960. London 1966-1973. New York 1974-1981. Lawrence 1981-1997. It would be interesting to break with geography and focus on time down to the granular. Individual pecks of sand in the hourglass. What if we broke Burroughs’ life down to just ten pivotal years, or even more finely to ten pivotal dates, and blow these minutiae out to book-length with ten individual chapters. Think Greil Marcus’ History of Rock and Roll in Ten Songs. The key years may look something like this:

• 1959
• 1951
• 1944
• 1981
• 1965
• 1973
• 1953
• 1985
• 1962
• 1992

The pivotal dates might read something like this:

• September 6, 1951 – The shooting of Joan Vollmer
• Late July 1959 – The publication date of Naked Lunch
• July 7, 1966 – The Supreme Court Decision on Naked Lunch
• 1944/1945/January 1946 – Meeting Herbert Huncke
• August 1973 – The Sale of the Vaduz Archive
• October 1959 – The Rediscovery of the cut-up
• August 26-29,1968 – Democratic National Convention
• August 20-24, 1962 – The Edinburgh Conference
• November 7, 1981 – Burroughs’ appearance on Saturday Night Live
• December 27, 1991 – The Release of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

For sure, this is yet another example of My Burroughs. For example, listing the meeting of Herbert Huncke and not the meeting of Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Gysin might seem like the hottest of takes. Now, I love a hot take more than anybody but this is one that I firmly believe in. It is an event so monumental yet so ephemeral that it seemly occurred out of time. The dates shift from 1944 to 1946. A shady deal shrouded in mystery. To me the guy who introduced Burroughs to a lifetime of hard drug addiction is more important than the guys who arguably introduced Burroughs to the writing life. “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” a true Burroughs classic, was written well before Kerouac and Ginsberg ever came on the scene. In this story the routine as form is fully developed as is Burroughs’ style of humor. Junky could only be written after meeting Huncke and Huncke served as Burroughs’ Virgil in the Times Square underworld, a world that eventually led Burroughs from the hell of addiction to the paradise of Naked Lunch. I also think that Burroughs’ writing has more in common with Huncke than, say, Kerouac. This strikes me as particularly true in terms of Burroughs’ nostalgia for a romanticized Midwest and the hobo/criminal life of Jack Black, a life Huncke experienced firsthand.

Seemingly, books making arguments for the importance of pivotal years come out like clockwork. Usually after fifty years. Gysin may have had something when he noted writing looked back fifty years in the rearview mirror. From the list above, books have recently been written on 1959, 1965, and 1968. It would not be too difficult to frame a chapter around these histories and structure ithem around Burroughs’ biography. I have flirted with documenting Burroughs’ pivotal years. It could be argued that RealityStudio is an entire site built around Burroughs and the counterculture of 1964/1965. I have also written about Burroughs in 1981. These years could easily be expanded into individual chapters. As for the dates, James Gruerholz has already written the chapter on September 6, 1951, the day Burroughs shot and killed Joan Vollmer. The Supreme Court decision on Naked Lunch has been the subject of books and numerous essays already. Surely the telescoping of time does not preclude a larger canvas. I love histories that take on a seemingly narrow topic or timeframe and then expand them into the history of the entire universe.  

1992, which is in my opinion was Burroughs’ last pivotal year, also happens to be my first truly Burroughsian year. Now I read Naked Lunch maybe a year or two earlier, but 1992 was the year I truly took the deep dive. And it was the Grove Press reissues of that year which made that possible. Now, the pastel yellow Naked Lunch was not my Naked Lunch. I read the earlier Grove mass market paperback published in 1990. This was not an ideal situation. Although the 1990 Grove was truer in size to the original Olympia edition, I appreciated the space of the larger format Grove reissue from 1992. I definitely experienced the cut-up trilogy in the rainbow Grove editions of 1992. Maybe even The Wild Boys as well. It is these novels which separate the Burroughs beginners from the Burroughs fanatics. You can go in two directions after Naked Lunch on the road to becoming a Burroughs devotee. The path well beaten is Naked Lunch and Junky on to the late trilogy and then maybe on through to Exterminator!, Port of Saints, Blade Runner, Queer. This is the path of narrative. The path less taken is through the cut-up trilogy to Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, Time, APO-33, the little magazines. But no matter which direction you take, for readers of my generation, Coupland’s Generation X, the 1992 reissues were often the starting point. These editions and their cover design served as a tie-in to the Cronenberg movie, which was for me, after the reissues, the other pivotal Burroughs event of 1991/1992. If these books served as a jumping off point for a generation they were also the beginning of the end. The reason I say this is because the 1992 editions were the last major reissue series before the Restoration Era that completely changed the landscape of Burroughs’ bibliography. Current readers of Burroughs may never read much of Burroughs’ output as it was published in Burroughs’ lifetime unless they become collectors. Is there another writer in 20th Century literature with such a publishing situation? Which leads to a poem:  

A Dissertation Written on the Occasion of Seeing Naked Lunch For Sale at Hudson Booksellers in Washington, DC’s Union Station

I Kidd
Because
I love
When I say
That
The only way 
To read 
Burroughs 
Is to 
Collect him
And
In a world 
That cannot 
Agree on
The 
Definitive
Article
We have
To restore
Our faith 
In 
Piracy

I happened to be living la vida Burroughs in 1992; a life of self-imposed exile, or, maybe more accurately, a life inspired by the travels in Kerouac’s On the Road. For more than half the year of 1992, I was living in London as a student abroad and it was Kerouac and the Beats who encouraged me to see the world. I aspired to go to Oxford for the year but I did not make the grade; my second choice was studying in Australia, but the schools there did not make the grade, so I somehow found myself at King’s College, London smack dab in the center of The Strand. I could not possibly have made a better choice if I planned it. As I have written before, Eric Mottram, the first scholar of Burroughs and the father of American Studies in the UK, taught at King’s, and established a curriculum centered on the American counterculture and literature that was probably better than my college back home. I know the library system was far superior. By attending King’s College, which had a fine library, I was able to gain access to the entire University of London system. I spent days in the stacks and travelled high and low to the London University satellites searching for books I needed for research projects on the characterization of women in James Bond and the novels of Chinua Achebe; “The Ballad of the Despairing Husband” by Robert Creeley; the use of Biblical writing structures in Ginsberg’s “Howl”; Nabokov’s powers of deflection and deception in the depiction of sexual deviance in Lolita; and, finally, an essay on Naked Lunch‘s anal imagery. It was also here that I discovered the writings of da levy, who was nowhere to be found in my college library, the poetry of Charles Olson, and a host of others.

In the late spring during break, my dorm room turned over to tourists; the dorm basically became a hostel, so I was forced to travel for a full month or pay for room and board for a bed that I had technically already paid for. Forced is the wrong word; because by reading the Beats, I could not wait to wander throughout Europe without a plan or itinerary. This was no following in their footsteps. I did not see the Beat Hotel when I was in Paris; when I got down to Madrid, I did not tag along with a group I met on the train, who were heading down to Tangier (my biggest mistake on the trip), so I guess I was not totally into the Beat biographies by this point, just their writing. Throughout my travels to Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan, Grenoble, and Paris, I carried a backpack that held more books than clothes. I distinctly remember packing a single pair of blue jeans for the entire month and as for the books, there were several, half a backpack full, but the only one I can remember, is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, which was a perfect choice for a young man studying abroad in the UK. Reading the adventures of Sebastian Dangerfield was heady stuff and I could not help but see myself in Sebastian and wish that I could turn a phrase and write with the poetic flair of Donleavy. It was an inspired choice for the trip and a book I found roaming the fiction stacks at the University of London, which I did for literally hours at a time.  

During my time abroad in 1992, the letters of William Burroughs had yet to appear. Even the legendary letters of Jack Kerouac remained unpublished except in fanzines, like the Knights’ Beat Journey or Beat Road. Inspired by a legendary example that I had yet to fully experience, I sat in places like The Bulldog in Amsterdam or U Flecku in Prague (Flecku 13 remains one of the finest beers I have ever tasted. As with LSD, a good sip is all about set and setting. I was a beer snob then, a member of the first craft beer revolution, yet like many revolutionaries I became conservative in my old age. Give me the beers of our forefathers. Pabst, Schlitz, Ballantines. In 1992, Flecku 13 was considered extremely expensive at a dollar for a huge mug. In comparison, at a workingman’s spot, a sizable Pilsner Urquell and a sausage cost about twenty cents.) and fired off long letters to my girlfriend back in the States filled with what I saw as great adventures worthy of the Beats. Nowadays I guess a series of texts or social media posts would suffice, but if 1992 was the beginning of the end for readers to experience the unrestored Burroughs, it may also have been the last great era of letter writing. It was no big deal to sit in a café or bar for hours and bang out a five- or six-page handwritten letter and then trek to the post office for stamps in order to send off a packed envelope filled with not just the letter but beer coasters, a sheet of Eastern European toilet paper on which bathroom graffiti was transcribed, or other ephemeral items. Maybe that is why I am so obsessed with publications like Semina and Floating Bear and the relationship of the postal system to art and literature.  

Not all my time in London was spent in the library; there were of course the pubs, which I haunted like Sebastian Dangerfield during much of my free time. I especially sought out literary and historic pubs in order to drink in whatever atmosphere remained. The Cheshire Cheese, which was just down The Strand from King’s, was closed for renovation, so instead I spent a lot of time at The Blackfriars near the Blackfriars tube stop. I commuted from south of London into Blackfriars each morning and afternoon so it was convenient and an Art Nouveau beauty of a pub to boot. I was just beginning my studies into the counterculture so I had yet to read as deeply as I did recently when I finally cracked open Barry Miles’ London Calling on the post-WWI counterculture. I had only an inkling that I was right in the middle of a counterculture flowering with raves happening all over London and the UK. While I was chasing the ghosts of literature past in pubs and libraries, mini-raves sprouted like mushrooms all over the dorm behind closed doors in rooms transformed into E-dens for all-night dancing and partying.  

My idea of a party was attending the gallery opening at The October Gallery on April 28, 1992, for Burroughs’ Seven Deadly Sins series of paintings. This show is all a blur. I am pretty certain I was at the opening but how I got there is a mystery. Quite possibly, Clive Bush, a professor at King’s, may have been responsible, as I wrote the paper on Naked Lunch for him. He could have gotten me a ticket. It is both funny and frightening (did it happen if it is not on YouTube?) that I have to go on YouTube in order to know that Marianne Faithfull was there (and other London scenesters) although at the time I would have had no idea at all who she was. I was a complete fish out of water. A total bumpkin. “Who the fuck are these people and what do they do?” was my primary response at the time. I dimly remember the showing of Burroughs reading “The Thanksgiving Day Prayer” and a spotty audio (or was it video) hookup of Burroughs back in Lawrence where he addressed the attendees. What I distinctly remember was that The Seven Deadly Sins books in various editions were ungodly expensive. At the time I may not have even started book collecting, but if I had, my holdings would have been scant. Around this time I bought a Grove Ticket That Exploded without a dustjacket. The bookseller convinced me that I could marry the jacket later. Yeah, right!! A complete rip-off but a lesson learned. I also owned a paperback first of Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death published by New Directions, found at a book sale in the Berkshire Mall in Reading, Pennsylvania. So as a mere beginner The Seven Deadly Sins books completely intimidated me and it did not occur to me to pick up every last scrap of paper in the entire fucking gallery as a future collectible. As Burroughs would say, I was a rube, but 1992 was the start of my collecting life and The October Gallery show really opened my eyes to a whole new world.

With all the pub-going, I had little money for expensive Burroughs books; in fact, I scalped my ticket for 100 pounds to see a show by The Cure, which was described as a warm-up show before they went on the road in support of the Wish album. The show was on May 3, 1992, at The Kilburn National Ballroom. Another big regret, not attending that show. The buffet pizza that I ate for the next few weeks was nothing like the feast for the ears that is The Cure playing “Pictures of You” at the height of their powers. Again YouTube to the rescue. Right here, right now, listening on YouTube I find the show completely enthralling and a pure joy. Yet at the time in 1992, The Cure and, in fact, music in general, were just not of interest. That would come later after a term of study in a rare bookstore as I turned thirty and only then would I appreciate The Cure, New Order, Joy Division, and The Happy Mondays just to mention the Manchester bands that played constantly in rooms though out the dorm at King’s.  

That art gallery opening was the closest I ever got to a Burroughs reading. Attending readings and signings was just not my thing; it is still something I am not fully comfortable with. For someone so immersed and interested in literary events of the past, like the Six Gallery reading, the Black Mountain happenings, or the Berkeley or Vancouver Conferences, I literally have to drag myself to attend such events in the here and now. Hate may be a strong word but I know I feel very uncomfortable at a reading or conference. At one point I was on video stating as much, in less than polite language. That said, 1992 was probably the year where all that could have changed. I am very much of the kill your idols mind set. I want to keep my distance from those I admire. It is enough for me to read their work, studying their biography, and pour over their letters and journals. I have no illusions that my literary idols were saints or even nice people; I often wonder whether I would enjoy their company at all. But if a friend of mine said to me in 1992: “Let’s head out to Lawrence and see Bill!!!!” I would have hopped in the car in a second. 1992 was a year of beginnings and exploration and I was open for anything. It was not to be. The connections with other Burroughsians had yet to be made. I read and thought about Burroughs in solitude. What if I had reached out to Burroughs? What would it like to be in conversation with Burroughs in 1992, a year of beginnings for me and endings for Burroughs?  

Well, now, I have at least something of an idea; in what, I guess, is the fitting way for a wallflower like me, by reading a book. In case you did not know this is a book review of the Three Rooms Press edition of Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg with a cover illustration by R. Crumb. The book is due out in October of 2018. In this over 300-page volume, with pictures taken by Ginsberg, Steven Taylor, longtime assistant to Ginsberg, transcribed eleven tapes of conversations between Burroughs and Ginsberg between March 18 and March 22, 1992. I want to stress these are conversations not interviews, which is the joy of the book. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others in their company fly from one topic to another. Tapes stop in the middle of conversations and prove to be inaudible in other instances. This is raw footage so to speak. This is the closest I could come to experiencing a sit-down with Burroughs in 1992, besides actually being there.

As I began to read, I wondered to myself: Am I going to enjoy this? Well, it was a shaky start because the Burroughs that I dislike, the Burroughs that is definitely not My Burroughs, is all over this book. The book opens with a conversation about Burroughs’ experience with a shaman hours before the tape starts rolling. This ritual, which also opens Miles’ biography of Burroughs, was conducted to exorcise Burroughs of The Ugly Spirit. Shamans, exorcisms, demons, Ugly Spirits, cats, guns. It is all here; the Burroughs of conspiracy theories and newspaper tabloids is on full display. Yet I must admit that the participation in a shaman ritual by Burroughs is precisely why 1992 is such a pivotal year, a year that also saw Burroughs suffer heart problems and have a car accident. Burroughs is facing death and coming to terms with his past. The release of the Naked Lunch movie signals another ending for Burroughs. The book was supposedly unfilmable, completely immune from being co-opted by the mass media. Yet the impossible had happened. Burroughs and his work were now packaged for mass consumption. 1992 was the Burroughs of sound bites, factoids, and People articles. Burroughs was schlepped by the Time-Life empire he fought against all his life. The Burroughs’ address at The October Gallery was basically a sound bite to sell books. The Grove reissues: yet another ad campaign. Bright colors, fun typography. An effort to make Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels inviting and accessible. It was bound to happen; it had been happening for decades, but the outsider was now truly a man inside. El hombre invisible was fully in the public eye and broadcast by the mass media.

Don’t Hide the Madness is full of Burroughs’ and Ginsberg’s assessment of the movie. Burroughs understood that this was Cronenberg’s project and not an accurate representation of the book or even of Burroughs himself. It was the product of one genius being inspired by another. It was yet another form of collaboration. Burroughs allowed his collaborators room to operate, to express their creative side, to have their say. The same cannot be said for Ginsberg. Ginsberg is in full Ginsberg mode throughout this book. Monopolizing conversation and directing it to what he wants to talk about, obsessing about sex and his diet, and coming across as a needy, whiny wimp. Some of the funniest sections of the book are when Ginsberg complains about the treatment of him as a wimp in the movie versions of Naked Lunch and Heartbeat. Ginsberg knows it is accurate; he just does not like it being public knowledge. For all of Ginsberg being Ginsberg, these conversations would be totally different if conducted by anybody else. I doubt Burroughs would be so comfortable and so candid. The scenes of Burroughs and Ginsberg shooting guns are priceless. I despise Burroughs’ gun fetish, but here, visualizing Ginsberg shooting a .45 at a target of the Buddha with Burroughs acting as shooting coach, is just too funny to hate on. It was scenes like this that won me over and made me think that hanging with Burroughs for an afternoon might be fun after all.

For readers, like Michael Stevens of The Road to Interzone, there is a ton of information about Burroughs’ reading and what he thought about other writers. Burroughs read deeply and throughout these conversations Burroughs quotes texts from memory, a trick honed at Harvard, and you can see his breadth of knowledge, which astounded the young Beats with conversation of Spengler, Rimbaud, Gide, and Yeats. Burroughs’ ability to not just quote Shakespeare but to quote him off the cuff in a manner pertinent to an ongoing conversation was what impressed the young Ginsberg (an episode recounted in Don’t Hide the Madness). The section on Greenwich Village writers of the 1920s is great and gossipy. Burroughs lecturing on lesbian poets (he can spot them a mile away), recounting his aborted visit with Witter Bynner (he was drunk and would not answer the door), and discussing truly obscure poets, like Adelaide Crapsey and Sara Teasdale, are classic stuff and thoroughly enjoyable. Burroughs on Teasdale is gossipy, bitchy fun. Burroughs quotes Teasdale, a fellow writer from St. Louis, who was forced upon Burroughs at an early age, from memory as definitive evidence of Teasdale’s lesbianism. I would have loved to have experienced Burroughs in this mode. Ginsberg and Burroughs speaking on the Salman Rushdie affair demonstrates just how powerfully the Fatwa on Rushdie hit the literary community at the time. There is one brief section where Burroughs and Ginsberg reminisce about meeting Edith Sitwell in 1959, just after the Life magazine hack job, and then shift to a quick tangent about red raspberries and then just as quickly Burroughs is off gushing about cats and love. This is just one example of the tapes doing a wonderful job of capturing the twists and turns of conversation as opposed to an interview.

Reading the book, I laughed at Udo Breger’s attempts to question Burroughs. His questions were always interesting and always cock-blocked by Ginsberg, who invariably jabbered on about his salt intake. Poor Udo. He did get a word in edgewise at one point with a brief account of his first encounters with the Beats in print in 1962. I had the pleasure of meeting Udo in Paris in 2009 at the Naked Lunch Conference. I distinctly remember sitting across from him at a Mexican restaurant (!!) in Paris along with Carl Weissner, Jan Herman, Oliver Harris, Miles and others. The conversation was far-ranging and riveting. Udo took my single favorite picture of my wife at that restaurant. That same trip Miles gave my wife and me a guided tour through the streets of Paris pointing out the location of the club at which Jim Morrison really died before he was carried to his bathtub for discovery by the authorities. I have already recounted in a podcast a late afternoon dinner with Carl Weissner at Allard. The food and the conversation were delicious. This was 2009 not 1992. Participation in RealityStudio made participation in those conversations possible. RealityStudio built up my confidence and established relationships. In 1992 I was still finding my voice, getting my bearings in the world of the Beats. I may not have had much to say but I was ready and willing to listen.

As I finished the book, I felt regret for never making the trek to Lawrence in 1992. I was ready for the experience in what was a pivotal year for me. It could have been life changing. But reading Don’t Hide the Madness now, I feel that this Burroughs, Burroughs v.1992, is not the Burroughs for Jed v.2018. And I wonder which version of Burroughs I most want to have a conversation with. The Burroughs of 1944, who so marveled the New Vision Beats. Burroughs in 1951 hanging out at The Bounty Bar in Mexico City. Burroughs in 1953 in a tent in the Amazon. Burroughs in 1957 in the Grand Socco sipping mint tea in Tangier. Burroughs in 1959 at the bar at the Beat Hotel. And it goes on and on. The possibilities are endless just as our time here is finite. Personally, I would have loved to talk to Burroughs at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City in 1965. The Knickerbocker interview in the Paris Review of that year gives a glimpse into what that Burroughs was into at the time and that is My Burroughs. Burroughs of The Third Mind, the Mimeo Revolution, the assault on the Time-Life empire. Burroughs the experimentalist and book artist.  

For those of us who missed our chance and for those who were born out of time, books like Don’t Hide the Madness prove invaluable. They capture a moment, in this case a pivotal moment for Burroughs, and, maybe as in my case, a pivotal moment for the reader as well. Along with Burroughs Live, Don’t Hide the Madness is essential reading. It captures an intimate, casual Burroughs missing from Burroughs Live and, for this reader, represents a missed opportunity much regretted. Thanks to Three Rooms Press for the chance to experience it, even if only second hand.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I’m that type of guy that gets lost in the footnotes. So ridiculous, but more often than not there is a ton of cool information to be found in there. Read beneath the lines because many times the real story lies buried at the bottom of the page or in the back of the book. Yet sometimes a footnote can lead you astray and send you on a wild goose chase. Such was the case recently in connection with John Wieners‘ seminal little mag Measure. Luckily at the end of the day this wild goose produced some golden eggs. 

Here is the footnote in question:  

William S Burroughs (1914-1997) was a central figure in the Beat movement and the larger American avant-garde, known for surreal gritty novels like Junky and Queer. Before challenging censorship laws in Boston and Los Angeles in 1962, Naked Lunch was published in excerpts in the Chicago Review, the Black Mountain Review, and Measure, where it appeared under the pseudonym William Lee.

The footnote comes from “the sea under the house”: The Selected Correspondence of John Wieners and Charles Olson Part I, edited by Michael Seth Stewart, and published as part of CUNY’s Lost and Found Series. I have raved about the Lost and Found Series before and Stewart’s chapbook is no exception. The Wieners/Olson letters are yet another great collection recovered from the archives. Again if you have not already sampled these nuggets, give yourself a treat and get the Lost and Found chapbooks. They are really special.

This footnote — number 70 on page 44 — is of interest to Burroughs fans and one to mull over a bit. Like the question: What is Burroughs really known for? Is he a literary figure or a cultural figure? Is he really read or just referenced and named-checked? If read, what mark did he leave on literary history? What books to people “know?” Is it really Junky and Queer? Junkie seems a good bet. But Queer? Strange choice to be sure. Also are those books surreal and gritty? Debatable. Again that is what makes it an interesting footnote, it opens up discussion and gets you thinking. How would I describe Burroughs’ legacy? Well, I would probably focus a little further down in the footnote with Naked Lunch, censorship, and little mags. That is where my attention is and, in this case, where my attention was drawn.  

I was particularly excited and confused by the suggestion that an excerpt of Naked Lunch appeared in John Wieners’ Measure. I knew that it could not be true. There is absolutely no way that Maynard & Miles, and then Shoaf and Schottlaender, would have missed a Burroughs appearance in a magazine as important and celebrated as Measure. No fucking way.  

But you know what, I drank the Kool-Aid, quite simply because I wanted it to be true. In my world, My Burroughs would have been published in Measure. His bibliography would be a more interesting, more fascinating place because of such an appearance, just like Burroughs appearing in Jack Spicer’s J would alter the boundaries of Burroughs’ bibliography. So I did what any Burroughs collector would do, I bought Measure No. 2 in the futile hope that everybody missed something and that Burroughs was tucked in there somewhere. It is the Magic issue after all and finding Burroughs within its pages would be like pulling a White Rabbit out of a fedora. Reading Burroughs alongside Creeley, Olson, Stephen Jonas, and Robin Blaser would be quite juxtaposition. Such is the alchemy of the little mag. What Burroughs collector would not search for this philosopher’s stone, the elusive unrecorded Burroughs item? That is a lot of woulds. But what it all comes down to is: Wouldn’t You?

So Measure #2 arrived and of course Burroughs was nowhere to be found. Natch. Then I did what any Burroughs collector would do, I doubled (maybe I should say tripled, quadrupled??) down and bought all three issues of Measure as well as a poster announcing a benefit reading held to raise funds for Issue 3 and the accompanying press release, possibly a draft, typed on carbon paper with some slight hand corrections. Now this is perfectly natural, because for a true Burroughs obsessive even where Burroughs does not appear his presence is felt. Burroughs’ absence is fascinating and worthy of note. Right? Well, maybe not, but I could not help getting the complete Measure because of this incorrect footnote.  

You have to go back to the body of page 44 to get a sense of where I am coming from. In a letter from Wieners to Olson, dated August 19, 1957, Wieners lays out the plan of action for Measure‘s future: “I think I gave you contents of II before, it is III now that has all kinds of excitements potential.” And there in the list of potential contributions to what became Measure 2 and 3 is this tidbit: “Then long prose FRAGMENT OF A BLUE MOVIE by someone who has to write under pseudonym of William Lee.” Let’s chew on this for a minute. Let’s savor it. How fucking cool and mysterious is that?  

August 19, 1957. Burroughs is in Copenhagen. Ginsberg and Kerouac had been in Tangier in the Spring and early Summer and, with the help of Alan Ansen, the collation and composition of Naked Lunch was going full steam ahead. “FRAGMENT OF A BLUE MOVIE” appears to be a version of what became the A.J.’s Annual Party section of the published novel, which opens:

A.J. turns to the guests. “Cunts, pricks, fence straddlers, tonight I give you — that international-known impresario of blue movies and short-wave TV, the one, the only, The Great Slashtubitch.”

The Ohio State University archive possesses the original manuscript and a note by James Grauerholz confirms that this section made it into the published version of Naked Lunch. Well, in the Summer 1957, Burroughs is hot to trot to get Naked Lunch into print:  

I wish someone would take five minutes to send along the MS. — leaving “Word” aside for the moment and ending MS. with “Market” section. After all, it takes long enough to locate a publisher without unnecessary delays. (Letter to Alan Ansen, July 18, 1957).

Olympia Press, New Directions, New Writing were in the mix, but as Burroughs pointed out such publishers were slow to act. In fact they, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, were steadfast against publication. What to do? Turn to the tradition of the little magazine, naturally.  

And it is at this point that you have to close the book of Burroughs’ letters and open up the letters of Ginsberg. The importance of Ginsberg is often compared to T.S. Eliot. “Howl” is considered “The Waste Land” of the post-WWII era, a work that altered the poetic landscape from the moment of its arrival. True, but I think of Ginsberg’s primary influence as Poundian in nature. The Pound of the Teens, the Pound associated with Poetry and The Little Review. Ginsberg was a mover and a shaker through his poetry to be sure, but I am more interested in his role as a promotor and cheerleader of the work of others. Pound did this throughout the Teens and Twenties with Eliot, James Joyce, and others. Particularly with Joyce, Pound got the unpublishable into print. Pound’s network of contacts was as important as his Cantos.  

Same with Ginsberg’s legendary address book. The period of 1957-1963 is parallel to the period of 1913-1922 when Modernism found its voice in little mags. The mags of 1957 to 1963 represents the talkie era that emerged out of the silent era of the Mimeograph Revolution that began at Waldport conscientious objector camp with Untide Press. The publication of “Howl” and On the Road in 1957 announced that a young generation of writers had something new and revolutionary to say and Ginzy, like Ez before him, was that generation’s spokesman. The letters of Ginsberg from this period provide an amazing record of just how hard he networked to get writers like Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder into print — all while dealing with the obscenity trial relating to “Howl.” Ginsberg learned how to network not from his job in advertising, so much as from following the example of Pound. Pound’s concept of the little mag provided the blueprint for the Mimeo Revolution. Pound’s Blast was the shot heard round the underground. The Big Bang if you will and nobody benefited from Ginsberg’s putting Pound into practice as much as Burroughs.

The first mention of Measure in Ginsberg’s published letters is in a letter to painter Robert LaVigne from June 8, 1957:  

New poetry magazine from one John Wieners, Boston, should be the great one, he’s trying to draw all threads together and is good poet himself, sort of an east coast Creeley-Olson axis but more humane digs [Jonathan] Williams and Kerouac and Gregory. Write him subscribe if you have loot or tell him you have none and ask for free copy — MEASURE magazine.

Ginsberg wrote this letter from Tangier while working with Burroughs on Naked Lunch. Wieners sent Ginsberg a letter asking for a submission. Ginsberg was too busy working on Burroughs’ manuscripts to have any of his own, so between June and August, Ginsberg sent Wieners the Burroughs manuscript for potential publication along with other material he had at hand such as Peter Orlovsky’s first poem. Over the years, Ginsberg continued to have high hopes for Wieners and Measure, which never became a true “great one,” like Black Mountain Review. Black Mountain Review was a model for Measure, which is not surprising given that Wieners attended the experimental college and studied with Creeley and Olson, whose concept of the little mag Wieners adopted. Again Creeley and Olson learned from Pound’s example.  

Wieners’ financial, drug, and mental problems would eventually destroy Measure‘s potential, but in the summer of 1957 anything seemed possible. The first issue of Measure came out featuring poems and work from Charles Olson, Edward Marshall, Robin Blaser, Edward Dorn, Larry Eigner, Frank O’Hara, Fielding Dawson, Stephen Jonas, Michael Rumaker, Gavin Douglas, Jack Spicer, Jonathan Williams, and Robert Duncan. The “axis” of the magazine was Boston Renaissance (Olson, Blaser, Spicer, Jonas) and Black Mountain (Olson, Dorn, Dawson, Rumaker, Williams, Duncan) with a pinch of San Francisco Renaissance (Spicer, Duncan) and New York School (O’Hara). In essence Wieners succeeded in “draw[ing] all threads together” of what would become defined in Donald Allen’s landmark anthology of 1960 as New American Poetry. All that was missing from this first issue were the Beats. Ginsberg’s efforts would change that in the second issue, which featured Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso along with Holy Barbarian and West Coast Beat Stuart Perkoff. With these two issues, Wieners provided the foundation for Donald Allen to build his anthology, which eventually did more than merely define New American Poetry, it canonized it — thus solidifying Measure‘s crucial role in the Mimeo Revolution and Wieners’ genius as an editor. Designed as a quarterly, Issue Two of Measure appeared over a year later. Issue Three would not appear until Summer 1962, by which point New American Poetry was fully established. The third issue lacks the previous issues’ cohesion, purpose, and force of statement. Despite being only 36 pages as opposed to the 64 pages of Issue Two, it rambles and stumbles. The issue reflects Wieners’ own mental state of disorientation and confusion. It gives off a sense of depression and exhaustion.  

Despite Wieners’ personal and financial difficulties, Ginsberg remained optimistic about Measure as a viable outlet a couple of years after the first issue. If Ginsberg could not improve Wieners’ mental state, he could attempt to improve his financial situation, which he did in May 1959, by spearheading a group reading in support of the third issue of Measure: A Return of Measure Monster Poetry Reading held on May 23, 1959, at Garibaldi Hall on 441 Broadway in San Francisco. Ginsberg and Wieners composed the press release for the reading. Once again Ginsberg demonstrated his acumen with public relations. Remember Ginsberg performed this task in the advertising industry at one time. “This is the first and last time that these Monsters will hold hands on the same stage. People in the sticks like would die to get in on this scene. The poets will read from a high balcony surrounded by American Flags and Lunar Haloes. There will be no bad jazz.” That sounds like pure Ginsberg.

The reading featured Ginsberg, James Broughton, Christopher MacLaine, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen and Wieners. Tickets were $1 and 400 people showed up. It is primarily interesting for bringing together many of the “monsters” in the SF Renaissance, which by 1959 were far from the cohesive group presented in the 1957 San Francisco Scene issue of Evergreen Review. In fact they never were and by 1959 that scene was further fragmented with the group in-fighting among themselves rather than operating as a front against the literary establishment. It is an impressive gathering of poets. And filmmakers by the way. Broughton and MacLaine were both. MacLaine has been lost to history to an extent. A tragic story of a mad genius that was all too common with the poets and people around Wieners. Think Issue 33 of Floating Bear as guest-edited by Wieners with its collection of poet-junkies who crashed and burned. That issue could be viewed as Measure 4. The work survives even if the poets and artists themselves fade from memory. For example, check out MacLaine’s film The End on UbuWeb.  

Besides the presence of the reclusive MacLaine, the fact that Jack Spicer participated in the reading is particularly remarkable given his feelings about Wieners and Measure. Unlike Ginsberg, Spicer lacked faith in Wieners’ ability to pull much of anything off be it poetry or publishing. From Poet Be Like God, the biography of Spicer and his circle:  

The same ambivalence can be seen in his attitude toward John Wieners’s prospective magazine Measure. In his letters to Boston, Spicer circled warily about Wieners’ potential as an editor, his plusses and minuses. Avoiding the use of Wieners’s name wasn’t difficult, not when you could call him “Hot Dog,” as Jack did.

In his conspiracy theory as poem on the 1962 National League pennant, “The Fix,” Spicer wrote, “This is an ode to John Wieners and Auerhahn Press/who have driven me away from poetry like a fast car.” As explained in Poet Be Like God, Spicer was fed up with the four-year delay in publishing the third issue of Measure due to Wieners’ ongoing financial and drug problems. So it is startling to see Spicer’s name on the poster announcing the Measure reading and even more shocking that he actually showed up to read in support. Ever the peacemaker, at the after-party for the reading, Ginsberg attempted to “patch up bad feelings by giving Spicer a blow job in full view of the other guests,” according to Bill Morgan’s biography of Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself. Spicer did not rise to the occasion and remained leery of Ginsberg and Wieners.  

Burroughs did not appear in the third issue either, although by this time Burroughs was all over the little magazine scene. Possibly the urgent need to publish Naked Lunch had passed by that point, but the question remains why Wieners declined to publish Burroughs in the Winter 1958 at a critical juncture in the publication history of the novel. By that point only Black Mountain Review, The Chicago Review, and Yugen had taken the bait thrown out by Ginsberg. These appearances occurred in the Spring and Fall 1958 (Black Mountain Review #7 is listed as Autumn 1957, but Maynard & Miles states it was actually issued in Spring 1958. I am not sure about that. Paul Blackburn in “The Grinding Down” states the magazine was available to the American public in Autumn 1957.) Publishing a section of Naked Lunch in Winter 1958 would have been a big catch for Wieners’ magazine.  

And therein resides the problem: Burroughs’ notoriety. Remember Ginsberg sent Wieners “FRAGMENTS OF A BLUE MOVIE,” which may have included this (as published in the Olympia Press Naked Lunch in the Summer 1959):

“Come along baby.” She leads the way into the bedroom. He lies down on his back and throws his legs back over his head, clasping elbows behind his knees. She kneels down and caresses the backs of his thighs, his balls, running her finger down the perennial divide. She pushes his cheeks apart, leans down and begins licking the anus, moving her head in a slow circle. She pushes at the sides of the asshole, licking deeper and deeper. He closes his eyes and squirms. She licks up the perennial divide. His small, tight balls. A great pearl stands out on the tip of his circumcised cock. Her mouth closes over the crown. She sucks rhythmically up and down, pausing on the up stroke and moving her head around in a circle.

In 1957 when Wieners received Burroughs’ manuscript, he had no idea who Burroughs was. He was merely “someone who has to write under the pseudonym of William Lee.” The excerpt above suggests the reason for the subterfuge. We cannot excuse Wieners for wondering: What the fuck is this and who the fuck wrote it?!!? Remember in the Summer 1957, the Howl trial was in full swing. Wieners was one of the “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Wieners knew intimately of those “who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love.” He after all wrote “A Poem for Cocksuckers” in The Hotel Wentley Poems, published as the first book of David Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press in the Summer 1958. Wieners’ experience with publishing his first book suggests why Burroughs did not appear in Measure. The San Francisco printer of The Hotel Wentley Poems issued “A Poem for Cocksuckers” as “A Poem For _ _ _ _suckers.” Haselwood was so incensed that he took up printing himself to prevent future censorship. Wiener would always fill in the blanks when signing copies of the first edition, but clearly he understood that if the word “cocksuckers” was deemed as obscene, Burroughs’ manuscript was unpublishable.  

At the time in 1958, despite the efforts of Black Mountain Review, Yugen, and The Chicago Review, this seemed to be the general consensus. In a long letter to John Hollander of September 7, 1958, Ginsberg lays out the state of the union in the nascent world of New American Poetry. The letter is a rant about the difficulty of getting published, reviewed, and recognized by the literary establishment. It is a letter as fascinating and famous as his one to Richard Eberhardt in 1956, which laid out the poetics behind “Howl.” The Hollander letter demonstrates that two years later, the powers-that-be still don’t get where “Howl” or the New American Poetry is coming from. The job of being the movement’s spokesman was making Ginsberg scream. Ginsberg writes:  

To have to tackle all that single-handedly practically and then be put down for all that — I DIDN’T HAVE TO TAKE THE TROUBLE- to have to listen to Rhav in Venice giggling that there’s no poetry in U.S. so that’s why they didn’t have a poetry editor at all 2 year ago — which was just his ignorance and the ignorance of all non-poets — yet he’s RUNNING this so called mental newssheet!? and to call that responsible culture? And to have them and everybody else ignoring totally the productions of Jonathan Williams’ Jargon series which for 8 years was the only respectable publishing company for experimental poetry — and total ignorance of all the work developed out of Black Mountain — the fuck sneers if anything — total incomprehension of Creeley’s funny volumes of verse, nobody reviewed or heard of Blackburn’s book (Dissolving Fabric — not GREAT but real), nor Levertov’s nor Zukofsky’s books there reviewed, Black Mountain Review the only decent mag operating for poets in America circulating 300 copies and nobody supposedly responsible at Columbia or anywhere else taking the trouble to HELP, and the other BM poet minors, Oppenheimer, Perkoff, maybe Duncan etc. — and the great new young ones John Wieners and Edward Marshall — whom nobody ever heard of — or will investigate — and don’t think I haven’t written this to anybody I could get hold of, Gold, Rhav, Mademoiselle, Hudson, New World Writing, endless conversations and letters and explanations and trying to spread some good news, Life, and have them fuck it all up with the indifference or vulgar money journalism — and the whole problem of the Burroughs manuscript legally uncirculatable here in the U.S. — to say nothing of the great unknown Boston group around John Wieners (got a magazine Measure out in SF now) — and the beginning of interconnection of all these with the NY people, O’Hara Ashbery Koch — at least these latter three pick up on something, and have some sympathy and openness, and respond to original attempts at composition.

To go back to Stewart’s footnote in his chapbook. In 1962, Naked Lunch faced an obscenity trial in Boston. What would have been the reaction to Issue Two of Measure had Burroughs appeared? Ginsberg spells it out in the quote above. The climate in the Fall 1958 was complete indifference by the literary establishment unless the response was complete outrage and censorship as in the case of Burroughs. In such a climate with his limited financial means, it seems likely that Wieners could not risk an obscenity trial. No benefit reading, no matter how well attended, could foot the legal bill. So I suspect that Wieners, despite the courage and conviction demonstrated in his own poetry, had to pass on the Burroughs manuscript. So even Burroughs’ absence from Measure tells quite a story.

It is a shame; as I have written about in connection with John Ciardi, Burroughs has a place in the literary scene of the Boston Renaissance. I for one would love to read Burroughs alongside Stephen Jonas, a forgotten junkie poet out of Boston that I am particularly fond of. Little mags let you eavesdrop on those types of conversation. Even if they never happened. That is why I collect little mags and love them so much. So buying the complete run of Measure is really a no-brainer for a Burroughs collector, if you just take the time to think about it a little bit.

Measure Archive

Measure#1

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Measure#2

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Measure#3

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Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Last month, Alex Wermer-Colan, intrigued by the virtual Bibliographic Bunker, sought out its physical location for a brief twenty-four hours. Specifically, Alex wanted to get direct access to the magazine appearances from 1959-1965 in order to recreate the contemporary encounter with Burroughs and his work. Magazines, literary or popular, are incredible time machines. For my taste, the further you get away from the hardcovers of corporate publishers the closer you get to the authentic experience of a bygone time and place. The ephemeral is where it’s at, and where the aura of an era resides. As Puffy says, “It’s all about the Benjamins.” Or something like that. I might be mistranslating.

Anyway, Alex had come to the point in his research where digital reproductions were no longer enough. The visual was no longer enough. The other senses had to come into play. The textures, scents, sounds, and tastes of paper had to be experienced. Alex entered into the Bunker and immersed himself in the Mimeo Revolution. I hope he had a good trip.

Rummaging through the shelves lining the Bunker, Alex suggested I scan Birth 3 Volume 1 & 2 for RealityStudio. Founding Fug and original BASE jumper Tuli Kupferberg’s legendary mag is an inspired choice and gets to the heart of what drew Alex into the Bunker in the first place: the magazine as time machine and archive. Each of the three issues of Birth center on a single theme — Bohemia, children’s literature, and drugs, respectively — and each provides a collage of primary materials relating to that topic. The mosaic approach is very Burroughsian and Burroughs is naturally featured in the drug issue (quotes from the Master Addict Letter in the British Journal of Addiction and quotes on cocaine and morphine from The Naked Lunch). Note the “The” as Naked Lunch was only available at the time in the Olympia edition or, of course, in the pages of little magazines. So Birth holds great interest for Burroughs fans as an early appearance, but what Alex quickly realized flipping through its pages is that the magazine gathers together the hipster’s concept of drug culture at the exact time that Burroughs’ Naked Lunch entered that culture and changed it forever. In the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle, Allen Ginsberg was asked what the coming decade would bring. He answered drugs. Birth exists on this pivot point into a shifting drug culture. A dying concept waiting to be reborn. As such it helps readers of today sample the flavor of Naked Lunch as experienced at the time of its publication and helps one to understand the words of the dormouse in 1967. Download Birth and feed your head.

Download

• Birth 3, Vol 1
• Birth 3, Vol 2

Birth 3, Vol 1 Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: A word from the Guide
TED JOANS Travelin
ALCOHOL SECTION
MY BEST DRUNK
LOUIS ANDREATTA
FAITH BEILEY
WALTER CANNON 2 poems
MARIHUANA SECTION
PEYOTE SECTION
ALLEN GINSBERG from the Journals
MARC SCHLEIFER States and Visions

Birth 3, Vol 2 Table of Contents

More words from the Guide
OPIUM SECTION
MARC SCHLEIFER States and Visions
TOBACCO SECTION
SHERMAN DRIER Cartoon
WALTER CANNON Poem
TEA & COFFEE SECTION
VARIOUS STIMULANTS SECTION
ANONYMOUS “Stramonium”
MARCH SCHLEIFER States and Visions
STIMULUS
HARRY HOOTON
& RESPONSE

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 1 (May 1963)

Cover Page: A title page and table of contents [i]

Endless Resoundings Fill the RCMM — Dick Gallup [1]

Ember Grease — Dick Gallup [2]

It’s Everywhere, Like So Much Glue — Dick Gallup [3]

Out West and Back East — Dick Gallup [4]

Persia is Falling Beneath the Blue Triremes — Dick Gallup [5]

Sonnet I (“Three thoughts about a bad boy. Chapped punk”) — Ron Padgett [6]

Sonnet II (“As the blue cup sits upon the table, postcards”) — Ron Padgett [7]

Sonnett III (“The stone house your father built by hand, thirty”) — Ron Padgett [8]

Untitled (“Most sensual of recluses, faint” — Ron Padgett [9]

A Play — Joe Brainard [10]

A Diary August 4th — 15th — Joe Brainard [11-13]

Poem in the Traditional Manner — Ted Berrigan [14]

Poem in the Modern Manner — Ted Berrigan [15]

Homage to Beaumont Bruestle — Ted Berrigan [16]

Two Scenes (after John Ashbery) — Ted Berrigan [17]

Homage to Mayakofsky — Ted Berrigan [18]

It is a Big Red House — Ted Berrigan [19]

In Place of Sunday Mass — Ted Berrigan [20]

From a Secret Journal — Ted Berrigan [21]

Sonnet I (“His piercing pince-nex. Some dim frieze”) — Ted Berrigan [22]

Sonnet II (Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.”) — Ted Berrigan [23]

Sonnet III (“Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,”) — Ted Berrigan [24]

Sonnet IV (Lord, it is time. Summer was very great.”) — Ted Berrigan [25]

Sonnet V (“Squawking a gala occasion, forgetting, and”) — Ted Berrigan [26]

Sonnet VI (The bulbs burn phosphorescent, white”) — Ted Berrigan [27]

Real Life — Ted Berrigan [28]

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 2 (June 1963)

Cover Page [i]

Title Page and table of contents [1]

The Birth of Lamantia — J. Richard White [2]

February in San Francisco — J.Richard White [3]

From The Lady — J. Richard White [4]

From a Letter from Joe Brainard to Ted Berrigan/20 May 63 — Joe Brainard [5]

Words for Love — Ted Berrigan [6]

Doubts (to Dave Bearden) — Ted Berrigan [7]

I Am Alone. You Are a Jungle. These Are the Ties That Bind — Ted Berrigan & Dick Gallup [8]

Untitled (“Dear Aunt Rose and Uncle Bert,”) — Sandra Alper [9]

Homage to Max Jacob — Ron Padgett [10]

Gamma Rays — Ron Padgett [11]

X (“I hope somebody else writes your story you zombie!”)– Ron Padgett [12]

Ash Tarzan — Ron Padgett [13]

Tristan Tarzan — Ron Padgett [14]

The Portable Life of Dr. Reverdy — Ron Padgett [15]

Sonnet XVIII (“Dear Marge, hello. It is 5:15 a. m.”) — Ted Berrigan [16]

Sonnet XXIII (“On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar”) — Ted Berrigan [17]

Sonnet XXXII (“The blue day! In the air winds dance”) — Ted Berrigan [18]

Sonnet XXXVI — Homage to Frank O’Hara (“It’s 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 28th of July [and]”) — Ted Berrigan [19]

Sonnet XXXVIII (“Sleep half sleep half silence and with reasons”) — Ted Berrigan [20]

Sonnet XL — (“Wan as pale thighs making apple belly strides”) — Ted Berrigan [21]

Sonnet XLI (“bangin around in a cigarette she isn’t ‘in love'”) — Ted Berrigan [22]

Sonnet XLII (“She murmurs of signs to her fingers”) — Ted Berrigan [23]

For Richard White Sonnet LII (“It is a human universe: & I”) — Ted Berrigan [24]

Sonnet LIII: “for all the history of grief” (“The poem upon the page is as massive as” — Ted Berrigan [25]

A Mother’s Love is a Blessing — Joe Brainard [26]

Sally — Joe Brainard [27]

Poem (“Last night was blue or maybe arabia”) — Joe Brainard [28]

Penn Station — Ted Berrigan [29]]

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 3 (July/August 1963)

Cover: Image by Joe Brainard [i]

The Waking — Theodore Roethke [1]

Title page and table of contents [2]

A Sonnet for Dick Gallup / July 1963 (LXXII) (“The logic of grammar is not genuine it shines forth”) — Ted Berrigan [3]

$$$$$ from Re-Establishing Raymond Roussel — John Ashbery [4]

Sonnet (In this house I feel sad”) — John Stanton [5]

Sonnet (“Is the effort of my poem worth Manhattan:”) — John Stanton [5]

Now in Another Way (for Andy Warhol) — Gerard Malanga [6]

Some Feathers — Richard Gallup [7]

Sonnet XXXI (“And then one morning to waken perfect-faced”) — Ted Berrigan [8]

Sonnet XXXIV (“Time flies by like a great whale”) — Ted Berrigan [9]

Sonnet XXXVII (“It is night. You are asleep. And beautiful tears”) — Ted Berrigan [10]

Sonnet XLIV (“The withered leaves fly higher than dolls can see”) — Ted Berrigan [11]

Sonnet XLV (“What thwarts this fear I love”) — Ted Berrigan [12]

Sonnet XLVII (“Frances Marion nudges himself gently in the big blue sky”) — Ted Berrigan [13]

Sonnet LVIII (“A glass of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-“) — Ted Berrigan [14]

Sonnet LXXIV (“The Academy of the future is opening its doors”) — Ted Berrigan [15]

A Final Sonnet for Chris (LXXXVIII) (“How strange to be gone in a minute! A man”) — Ted Berrigan [16]

Two for Barbara Guest — James Brodey

(“Muscular, standing past the station’s rim”) [17]

(“Melancholy changes its constant vigorous heart”) [17]

Three Sonnets After Frank O’Hara — Ron Padgett [18]

Poem Play (A Beautiful Day) — Ruth Krauss [19]

A Play (In a Bull’s Eye) — Ruth Krauss [20]

A Play (untitled) — Ruth Krauss [21]

A Play (There’s a Little Ambiguity Over There Among the Bluebells) — Ruth Krauss [22]

Homage to Pierre Reverdy — Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan [23]

Egg Plants Are Not Green — Ron Padgett [24]

Lettuce — Unattributed (Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan) [25]

Instead of a Man in Black the Men in Blue — Ron Padgett [26]

Choctaw — Ron Padgett — [27]

Sonnet Written in the Time it Took Lauren Owen to Walk 100 Feet — Ron Padgett [28]

Building a house — Richard Gallup [29-30]

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 4 (September 1963)

Cover: Andy Warhol [1]

Title page and table of contents [2]

The Poetry of Edwin Denby — Frank O’Hara [2-4]

An Introduction — John Wieners [5]

Grace After a Meal — Ted Berrigan [6]

Edwin’s Hand — Frank O’Hara [7]

Poems from In Public, In Private — Edwin Denby

The Climate [8]

The Shoulder [8]

Standing on a Street Corner [9]

Summer [10]

The Silence at Night [10]

City Without Smoke [11]

Elegy — The Streets [11-12]

From a Sonnet Sequence 

13 (“Suppose there’s a cranky woman inside me who”) [13]

21 (“The street is where people meet according to law”) [13]

Aaron [14]

The Friend [14]

Long Island City [14]

A Domestic Cat [15]

Poems from Mediterranean Cities — Edwin Denby

Ravenna [16]

Florence [16]

Siena [17]

Rome [17]

Via appia [18]

Villa Adriana [18]

Naples [19]

Amalfi [19]

Paestum [20]

Syracuse [20]

Segesta [21]

Taormina [21]

Forza d’agro [22]

Brindisi [22]

Athens [23]

The Parthenon [23]

Attica [24]

Mycenae [24]

Thebes [25]

Delphi [25]

Snoring in New York, an elegy — Edwin Denby [26-27]

Some Notes — Ted Berrigan [28]

Back Cover: Andy Warhol

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 5 (October/November 1963)

Cover: Joe Brainard (i)

Title page and table of contents [1]

The New Realism — John Ashbery [2-3]

A Game of Chess — Ron Padgett [4-7]

Passivation — Joseph Ceravolo [8-9]

Kerygma — Sotero Torregian [10]

Prose Poem (“The soul clings with its tenacity to the broken edge”) — John Wieners [11]

Sickness — John Wieners [11]

Untitled (“Do not let the silent, secret reaches of the night”) — John Wieners [12]

Happiness Is Just a Thing — John Wieners [13]

The Frightened City — Ted Berrigan [14]

Cathedral Towns — Ted Berrigan [15]

New Junket (for Harry Fainlight) — Ted Berrigan [16]

Wind — Ron Padgett [16]

What Price Salvation? — J. Richard White [17]

Spelunca (for A.R.) — J. Richard White [17]

Late December — John Ashbery [18]

Copy of a Copy — John Ashbery [19]

Undated — John Ashbery [20-22]

Political Science — Lorenzo Thomas [22]

The Infant Jesus of Prague — James Schuyler [23-28]

Poem II (“Muezzins, buzzards, newspapers — like”) — Harry Fainlight [28]

Olivetti Ode — Barbara Guest [29]

Hands — Barbara Guest [30-31]

Florida Hillocks — Kenward Elmslie [31]

Piazza of the Bananas — Kenward Elmslie [32]

Another Island Groupage — Kenward Elmslie [33]

The New World — Leroi Jones [34]

*The Success — Leroi Jones [35]

*Predicates/Categories (after M.H.) — Leroi Jones [36]

*Cant — Leroi Jones — [36]

*Poem (“There were more dirty”) — Joseph Ceravolo [37]

*Grass — Joseph Ceravolo [37]

*Poem (“Come and go see over there”) — Joseph Ceravolo [38]

*Poem (“Lapping water”) — Joseph Ceravolo [38]

*Funny Day — Joseph Ceravolo [39]

*Happiness in the Trees — Joseph Ceravolo [39]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 6 (December 1963/January 1964)

Cover: Joe Brainard

Dedication Page: Trista Tzara (4 April 1896 — 24 December 1963) [1]

Title page and table of contents [2]

Canzone — Ted Berrigan [3]

Presence — Ted Berrigan [4]

Destination Moom — Ted Berrigan [5-6]

Prose Keys to American Poetry — Ted Berrigan [6]

Andy Warhol: Andy Do It — Joe Brainard [7]

Nancy — Joe Brainard [8-9]

Inside the Park — Dick Gallup [10]

Stillness — Joe Ceravolo [11]

I Am Lonely in My Crib — Joe Ceravolo [11]

Five Poems — Joe Ceravolo [12-13]

The Night Passes Through April Wind, No One Wants to Sleep — Joe Ceravolo [13]

Non-Sonnet IV — Gerard Malanga [14]

Non-Sonnet XII — Gerard Malanga [14]

Across the Table — Robert Dash [15]

C’est Toi Qui Dors Dans L’Ombre — Harlan Dangerfield [16-17]

Johnny — Joe Brainard [17]

From the Beaumont Series — Dick Gallup [18]

Duet — Ruth Krauss [19]

Poem in Honor of Some Bombs — Ted Berrigan [19]

The Pastor — Harlan Dangerfield [20-21]

Orange Jews — Harlan Dangerfield [21]

Enureseis — Lorenzo Toumes [22]

The Blind Dog of Venice (To Pat) — Ron Padgett [23]

The EMS Dispatch (To Ted)– Ron Padgett [23]

Blimps — Kenward Elmslie [24]

Poem (“the wooden junk flood closed the city”) — Kenward Elmslie [24]

Television Scenario: The Users — Kenward Elmslie [25]

Your Fun is a Snob — Kenneth Koch [26]

Sweethearts From Abroad — kenneth Koch [26]

Rapping Along — Kenneth Koch [27]

The Cat’s Breakfast — Kenneth Koch [27]

Sun Out — Kenneth Koch [28]

The Dead Body — Kenneth Koch [28]

In Every Victim Awaits the Guest of Honor — Ted Berrigan [29]

It Makes You Think, — Ted Berrigan [29]

The Complete Works: A Story-Poem (To Joe) –Ron Padgett [30-32]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 7 (February 1964)

Covers: Joe Brainard [i-vi]

Title page and table of contents [1]

Some Troubles — Ted Berrigan [2]

Cremations — Tom Veitch [3-4]

A Story from the Bushmen — Joe Ceravolo [4]

Warmth — Joe Ceravolo [5]

Ending — Joe Ceravolo [5]

The More You Take It — Joe Ceravolo [5]

From A Sonnet Sequence — Ted Berrigan

Sonnet LXXIII [6]

Sonnet LXXVI [6]

Sonnet LXXVIII [6]

Sonnet LXXX [7]

Sonnet LXXXI [7]

Sonnet LXXXII [7]

Sonnet LXXXIV [8]

Sonnet LXXXVII [8]

After the Broken Arm — Ron Padgett [9]

I’d Give You My Seat If I Were Here — Ron Padgett [9]

Sonnet / To Andy Warhol — Ron Padgett [10]

Rome — Ron Padgett [10]

Nothing in That Drawer — Ron Padgett [10]

The Windows — John Wieners [11]

Les fenetres – Guillaume Apollinaire [11]

Prologue — Tony Towle [12]

Apology — Tony Towle [12]

Thoughts Near the George Washington Bridge — Tony Towle [13]

Somebody Else, Black Poems, Brown Poems — Tony Towle [13]

Gilbert and Sullivan — Lorenzo Thomas [14]

Another Abstract etc — Lorenzo Thomas [14]

The Conscience of Cole Porter — Lorenzo Thomas [14]

Abuela’s Wake — Frank Lima [15]

In Memory of Eugene Perez (drowned may 25, ’62) — Frank Lima [16]

John Perreault — John Perreault [16]

Yesterday Down at the Canal — Frank O’Hara [17]

Poeme en Forme de Saw — Frank O’Hara [17]

To jane: And in Imitation of Coleridge — Frank O’Hara [18]

Unpacking the Black Trunk — James Schuyler & Kenward Elmslie [19-26]

*Poem (“I do not always understand what you say”) — James Schuyler [26]

Two poems — James Schuyler

(“In the café I sat and watched the rain”) [27]

(August, smelling of ripe grapes and afternoon sleep”) [27]

From a Sonnet Sequence: Sonnet 30 (“Roar drowns the reproach, facing him) — Edwin Denby [28]

Political Poem on a Last Line of Pasternak’s — Frank O’Hara [28]

The Lay of the Romance of the Associations (to Kenneth Koch) — Frank O’Hara [29]

Commercial Variations — Frank O’Hara [30-31]

34 mile wind — Frank O’Hara [31]

Rhapsody — Frank O’Hara [32]

Those Who Are Dreaming, A Play about St. Paul — Frank O’Hara [32-33]

Ah, London — Harry Fainlight [34]

Meeting – Harry Fainlight [35]

Lyric — Harry Fainlight [35]

Echo & co — Harry Fainlight [36]

28 — Harry Fainlight [36]

You Have Wasted Your Life — Harry Fainlight [36]

The Home Book — James Schuyler [37-44]

Recoting — Dick Gallup [44]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 NR 8 (April 1964)

Cover: Love Pictures by Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard [i]

Title Page and Table of Contents [1]

From a Sonnet Sequence: Sonnet 20 (“the grand republic’s Poet is”) — Edwin Denby [2]

In His Distant Camp, Ted Awaits the Priests — Ron Padgett [2]

Mess Occupations (after Henri Michaux) — Ted Berrigan [3]

The voyage of the Argonauts (for Lionel Trilling) — Harlan Dangerfield [3]

From We Are Gentle Part I — David Shapiro [4]

Invention (to John Ashbery) — Ted Berrigan [4]

Literary Days — Tom Veitch [5-7]

Boils — Ted Berrigan, Gerard Malanga, Peter Orlovsky & Ron Padgett [8-11]

Theme and Variation — Harry Fainlight [12]

(“The chant, le chant, the song”) — Harry Fainlight [12]

Childhood — Harry Fainlight [13]

Poem (“what matter of luxury is this?”) — Al Fowler [13]

A letter from Tom Veitch/ April 5, 1962 — Tom Veitch [13]

Book III: The Concluding Book — Joseph Ceravolo [14-19 

Eskimos again — Dick Gallup [19]

From The Gobble Gang Poems — Ed Sanders [20-21]

Some Bombs (Mistranslations) (after Reverdy) — Ron Padgett [22-25]

Prick Song — J Richard White [25]

February in San Francisco] — J Richard White [26]

Poem for Things — J Richard White [26

San Francisco Ephemeris — J Richard White [26]

Early Sunday Afternoon — J Richard White [27]

Conversation — J Richard White [27]

Il penseroso — Ted Berrigan [27]

The Secret Life of Ford Maddox Ford (for carol clifford) — Ted Berrigan

Stop stop six [28]

Then I’d cry [28]

Fauna time [28-29]

The upper arm (for Andy Warhol) — Ted Berrigan [29] 

Sonnet XXVI (One sonnet for dick) — Ted Berrigan [29]

A Poem of the Forty-Eight States — Kenneth Koch [30-32]

Rain dunce (after Ted) — Ron Padgett [32]

Hygiene Sonnet — Dick Gallup [32]

Hatred — Frank O’Hara [33-35]

Reeling Midnight (to Pierre Reverdy) — Ted Berrigan [35]

The Jolly Abyss — Tom Veitch [36-40]

(“Spooky-wooky-wooky”) — Joe Brainard [40]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 Number 9 (Summer etc. 1964)

Cover: Joe Brainard

Title page and table of contents [1]

Y..R D..K — Ron Padgett [2]

Begun — Ron Padgett [3]

The Rodent — Ron Padgett [3]

Jimmy — Ron Padgett [4]

To Henry James — Ron Padgett [4]

Some Plays — Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett

Looking For Chris [5]

Teresa (A Play) [5]

Seventeen (A Play for Kay Boyle) [5]

Seventeen (A Play)

Teresa [6]

Seventeen (A Play for Signor Melone of Venice) [6]

The Rest of the Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford — Ted Berrigan

On His Own [7]

The Dance of the Broken Bomb [7]

Putting Away [8]

Owe [8-9]

We Are Jungles [9]

What Is That Flying Away? — Joe Ceravolo [10-16]

Life in Darkness — Dick Gallup [17-21]

From Newstand Report — John Stanton [22-23]

Sally — Joe Brainard [24-26]

Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch — William Burroughs [27]

From The Jolly Abyss — Tom Veitch [28-31]

Two Poems — David Shapiro

(“Light became audible, that is, a child, and took the empty place”) [32]

(“The most terrible spasms”) [33]

Three Poems — Tony Towle

Attached Poem [34]

Poems (to Joe LeSueur) [34]

Skylarks [34]

Juvenglandia — Harry Fainlight [35-37]

To the Autumn Sunbeam God — Harry Fainlight [37]

White — John Ashbery [38]

Vocalise — John Ashbery [38-39]

Evening Quatrains — John Ashbery [39]

At the Railway Station — Kenneth Koch [40]

Dostoevski’s The Gambler — Kenneth Koch [40]

Triste E Una Donna — Kenneth Koch [41]

Morro Rock — Kenneth Koch [41]

Schweitzerreich — Kenneth Koch [41]

Mateeyanah — Kenneth Koch [41]

Wahego — Kenneth Koch [42]

In Harmonium — Kenneth Koch [42]

Chiaroscuro — Kenneth Koch [42]

Heanorupeatomos – — Kenneth Koch [43]

An X-Ray of Utah — Kenneth Koch [43] 

Religiously — Kenneth Koch [43]

Givers of Winds Is My Name — William Burroughs [44-48]

Strum Night — Barbara Guest [49]

Looking at Flowers Through Tears — Barbara Guest [49-50]

Dada Proverb — Tristan Tzara [50]

The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express July 18, 1963 — Allen Ginsberg [51-54]

The Return of Yellow May — Kenneth Koch [55-57]

The Revolt of the Giant Animals — Kenneth Koch [58]

The Building of Florence — Kenneth Koch [59-60]

The Beverly Boys Summer Vacation — Kenneth Koch [61-64]

For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson — Frank O’Hara [65-67]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 1 No. 10 (February 14, 1965)

Cover: Joe Brainard

Title Page and table of contents [1]

Poop — Francis Picabia [2]

Fits of Candor (A Manifesto) — Dick Gallup [2]

The Return of Philista — Dick Gallup [3]

Washington, July 5 — John Giorno [3] 

Inside Speech — Harlan Dangerfield [4]

December — Giuseppe Ungaretti [4]

Brett — Ted Berrigan [5]

Brett (A Play) — Ron Padgett [5]

After Breakfast — Giuseppe Ungaretti [5]

Richard Cory — Ron Padgett [6]

Revised Poem — John Stanton [6]

Montana — Giuseppe Ungaretti [6]

Poem (“I stand last night near a lonely son-of-a-bitch.”) — Aram Saroyan [7]

From the Poetry Machine — Al Katzman [7]

Blandford, England, Sept. 23 — John Giorno [7]

December — Ron Padgett [7]

“Yes, I Am William Burroughs. . . .” — Tom Veitch [8-9]

To the Imperial Wizard — Jeff Giles [9]

A Grave — James Schuyler [10]

Moving — Aram Saroyan [10]

Georgia — Philippe Soupalt (trans. By Peter Schjeldahl) [10]

Dirge (South Africa) — David Shapiro [11]

From Five Songs — David Shapiro [11]

*From The Mutation of the Spirit — Gregory Corso [12-14]

*Precipice: A Story — Tom Veitch [15-17]

*The Day Before the Windowshade Fell — Les Gottesman [18]

*Apologies for the Angry Postcard — Les Gottesman [18]

*Principia Mathematica — Ron Padgett [18]

*Anecdote of Mumbly at Home — Louis Nasper [19]

*Homage to _______________ – John Perreault [19]

*Ragtime Cowboy Joe — Louis Nasper [19-20]

*From the Paris Sonnets — Peter Schjeldahl

Sonnet 16 (“Darkness rises from the sewers of Paris which I hear”) [20]

Sonnet 20 (“I cannot go on like this a mother hen”) [20]

*We Hardly — Richard Huelsenbeck [21]

*”My arms are warm” — Aram Saroyan [22]

*Falling in Love in Spain or Mexico — Ron Padgett [22]

*Prison of Souls — Jeff Giles [22]

*Pomp Ilk — Dick Gallup [23]

*Mother Cabrini (a play) — Ted Berrigan [23]

*Poem (“In the corner of my room an American!”) — Aram Saroyan [24]

*My First Story — Szabo [24]

*Poem (I don’t belong to you”) — Harlan Dangerfield [24]

*Preface to “The Champ” — Kenward Elmslie [25-27]

*The Champ — Kenward Elmslie [27-34]

*Craze Man Wiliiker — Pierre Reiter [35]

*Memoirs — Douglas MacArthur [35]

*Secret Wallpaper — Ted Greenwald [36]

*The Pirates — David Shapiro [36]

*A Memory Filled with White — Giuseppe Ungaretti [36]

*(“There was an old prude from St. Paul”) — Harlan Dangerfield [37]

*(“A young maid awalking alone”) — Harlan Dangerfield [37]

*The Groundhog — Ted Berrigan [37]

*Song — Richard Kolmar [38]

*To Modigliani, to Prove to Him That I’m a Poet — Max Jacob [38]

*The Fernandez — Ron Padgett [39]

*Miss America — Kenneth Koch [39]

*Did Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate Plan to Enter Medicine — Joe Brainard [40-41]

*The Custard Sellers — James Schuyler [42-43]

*Ghost Tantra #9 — Michael McClure [43]

*Excerpt from The Jolly Abyss — Tom Veitch [44-46]

*Recipe Department — Hasheesh Fudge — Brion Gysin [46]

*(When the mercenaries ran away . . . “) with image [47]

Ten When My Eyes Were Hurting — Larry Swingle [48-50]

A Man Saw a Ball of Gold — Ron Padgett [50]

John Button Birthday — Frank O’Hara [51]

Can’t Keep — Joseph Ceravolo [51-52]

Sestina with a Lost Line — Bruce Kawin [52]

Poem (“A new telephone on the table”) — Aram Saroyan [53]

The Bermudas — Richard Kolmar & Aram Saroyan [53]

Balance of Payments — John Ashbery [54]

Supplements — Tony Towle [55-57]

Ave Maria — Frank O’Hara [57]

Fits of Affection — John Dent [57]

The Ecclesiast — John Ashbery [58]

The Woman — Frank Lima [59]

In Three Parts — Ted Berrigan [59]

Fortune — John Ashbery [60-61]

Revolting (A one act play) — Dick Gallup [62]

The Courtier — Kenneth Koch [63]

En L’an Trentisme de Mon Eage — Kenneth Koch [63-65]

Leapfrog (for Jim Sears) — The Poem Machine [65]

Hoboken — John Ashbery [66-68]

(“From Aphrodite”) — Ed Sanders [68]

The Ode to Music (for Morton Subotnick) — Philip Whalen [69-72]

Fits of Nerves with a Fix — William Burroughs [72-73]

Street — Joe Ceravolo [74] 

Ed Sanders’ Language — Charles Olson [74]

Music — Joe Ceravolo [74]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 2 No. 11 (Summer 1965)

Cover: Joe Brainard [i]

Title page and table of contents [1]

On Frank O’Hara’s Birthday — Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan [2]

Adios Lecture — Ken Weaver [3]

Police Lock — Aram Saroyan [4-5]

The Luis Armed Story — Tom Veitch [6-15]

From Looking For Chris — Ted Berrigan [16-23]

From The Bingo — Dick Gallup [24-26]

From Motor Maids Cross the Continent — Ron Padgett [27-32]

Two Stories — Barbara Guest

Another Daddy [32]

The “Adventures of Tin-Tin” Story [32]

Selections from a Novel — John Stanton [33-34]

Barbie and Ken — Kenward Elmslie [35-39]

From A Sonnet Sequence — Edwin Denby

(“New York, smog dim under August”) [40]

(Neighbor sneaks refuse to my roof”) [40]

(In tooth and claw red, not nature”) [40]

(“Disorder, mental, strikes me; I”) [41]

(“In a hotelroom a madman”) [41]

(“Nocturnal void lower Fifth, I”) [42]

“Drenched saw Doris home, midnight gale” [42]

Sonnet 18 (“Sunday on the Senator’s estate”) [42]

Sonnet 19 (“The size balls are sudden Lamarch”) [42]

Sonnet 20 (“The grand republic’s Poet is”) [43]

Sonnet 21 (“Blue grey ridge, green grey leafage”) [43]

Sonnet 23 (“Heavy bus slows, New York my ride”) [44]

Sonnet 24 (“New year’s near, glass autumn long gone”) [44]

Sonnet 30 (“Roar drowns the reproach, facing him”) [44]

Advertisement for an Ed Sanders Catalog [45]

From The Red Robins — Kenneth Koch [46-55]

Frost – Harlan Dangerfield [56]

Saturday Night at the Movies — Harlan Dangerfield [56]

A Fine Thing — Tom Veitch [56]

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 2 No. 12 (NEVER ISSUED)

C: A Journal of Poetry Vol. 2 No. 13 (May 1966)

This issue has printed page numbers in the upper right corner beginning with page 2 after the cover and title page. As a result , the page numbers are not placed in brackets.

Cover page: Image of a stencil cutter by Joe Brainard

Table of contents and title page [1]

In Praise of the Postal System — Stéphane Mallarmé p. 2

From The Bingo — Dick Gallup pp. 3-7

Mortality — Théophile Gautier p. 8 

The Suitor – Théophile Gautier pp. 8-9

From Julius Caesar — tran. John J. Murphy p. 10

The Heavenly Skater — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

At Dawn — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

The Traveller and His Shadow — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

Fetish — Pierre Reverdy p. 11

Natural Greatness — Pierre Reverdy p. 12

The Hard Heart — Pierre Reverdy p. 12

From Clear the Range — Ted Berrigan pp. 13-15

The Great Melancholy of an Avenue — Phillipe Soupault p. 15

Fragment — William Saroyan p. 16

Saving Japan — Theresa Mitchell p. 17-18

Two Sad Birds — Harry Mathews pp. 19-20

Brunswick Stew — Joe Brainard p. 21

Alas! — Max Jacob p. 21

History of France — Kenward Elmslie pp. 22-23

Valiant Warrior on Foreign Soil — Max Jacob p. 23

Juile ou la rose — Guillaume Apollinaire pp. 24-29

Julie ou j’ai prete ma rose pp. 24-25

Corona di Cazzi p. 25

Epithalame p. 25

In Vase Proepostero p. 26

Petit Balai p. 26

Le teint p. 26

VIII (“Linda la noire aux paumes roses”) p. 26

CartesPostales pp. 27-28

Le Chat p. 28

Le Negre p. 28

Quelques Distiques Pour Plaire a Dupuy pp. 28-29

Bibilographie p. 29

Justification p. 29

Notes on this C Edition p. 29

The Julie or the Rose Newsletter — Ron Padgett ed. pp. 30-31

Introduction p. 30

Commentaries, blurbs p. 30

Two letters from Pascal Pia pp. 30-31

Letter from Leroy Breunig p. 31

Notes p. 31

Notices p. 31

Blank back cover [32]

C: A Journal of Poetry No. 14 (1967)

Behind the Wheel — Michael Brownstein

No Empty Hands [2]

Nations [3]]

Sunny Barn, Special Guests [4]

Behind the Wheel [5]

The Plains of Abraham [6]

Large Blue [7]

Fingertips [8]

Janice [9]

*Lily Flower [10] — Missing from Harter Index

*Waitress [11] — Missing from Harter Index

*News [12]

*Florence Was Fine in the Summertime [13]

*Clean & Clear [14]

*Poem (“Yours the taught climb borne security”) [15]

*Navel [16]

*Pond [17]

*A Final Storm [18]

*Coincidences [19]

*Moving You Along [20]

*Massachusetts [21]

*Against the Grain [22]

*Typhoon [23]

*A Modern Instance [24]

*Pounds and Ounces [25]

Colophon [26]

Author Bio [27]

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

There are a lot of “what ifs” in book collecting. What if I had bought this and not that? What if I had more money? Or more time? What if I collected this and not that? “What if I did not collect William Burroughs?” is a question I consider. In a piece I wrote over a decade ago, I came to the conclusion that I would have collected Charles Olson instead. The question that serves as the boundary I can never cross or the horizon I can never see beyond is “What if I did not collect?” Such a question throws my very existence into doubt like “What if my parents never met?” If I did not collect, I quite simply would not be the same person I am now.

Another question that I often consider is “What if I did not collect Burroughs’s little magazine appearances?” This came to mind this week when I received my latest purchase in the mail: a program for an art exhibition involving David Budd, Earle Brown, and William Burroughs at the Galerie Stadler in Paris in 1964. I love these little programs and buy them when I get the chance. An interesting collection could be made by collecting Burroughs the artist rather than Burroughs the writer — or I should say “Burroughs the novelist,” since I consider cut-up texts such as Time, APO-33, and The Dead Star artist’s books and some of the finest examples of Burroughs’s talent as a visual artist.

If the Maynard and Miles bibliography was the blueprint for the foundations of my Burroughs little magazine collection, Robert Sobiezek’s Ports of Entry would be the guidebook for constructing an archive on Burroughs the artist. Besides the artist’s books mentioned above, such a collection would also acquire Burroughs’ later collaborations with Keith Haring, George Condo, and Robert Rauschenberg. The Third Mind material done with Brion Gysin has been institutionalized but until recently the raw material relating to Ah Pook by Malcolm Mc Neill was still available. Such material would be a centerpiece to a Burroughs-as-artist collection. Similarly, Joseph Zinnato, a major Burroughs collector, was able to get his hands on the proofs and drafts relating to the C Press edition of Time and make that material a cornerstone of his collection.

Of course there is the late period visual art from manila folder to the shotgun paintings. From what I can tell, much of this art is available to the collector. Patricia Elliott, friend and neighbor of Burroughs in Lawrence, had several pieces for sale just a few years ago. In connection with the visual art, there are also the ephemera associated with Burroughs’ gallery shows, like the one I just received relating to Galerie Stadler. I have a real soft spot for these programs. The Budd / Burroughs / Brown program is just plain cool visually. For the more ambitious, it might be worthwhile to collect all the reviews of these shows that appeared in art magazines or newspapers. Thus an archive could be gathered on the critical reception of Burroughs the artist.

Then we have Burroughs the art critic. Again there are some great ephemera with Burroughs’s small essays on Takis as well as some clunkers. A collector would have to lower his standards to pick up the horribly designed Paintings and Guns by Hanuman Books. Other collectors find these little gems cute. They are not for me although I find some of the texts to be fascinating.

Looking through my collection, I have the humble beginnings of a Burroughs as artist collection: Paintings and Guns, the Mimeo Revolution artist’s books, a handful of gallery catalogs. But this is a beginning that I will unfortunately not take to its conclusion (if a conclusion to a collection is ever possible), which is a shame because I think such a collection would be fun to compile and to research. Then it occurred to me to open a gallery on RealityStudio dedicated to Burroughs as artist. I am posting the bits and pieces that I have, but we at RealityStudio would love it if other collectors sent us images and write-ups of art-related pieces from their collections. For example, if you own a Burroughs painting, take a clear photograph of it and send it in with the background information on the piece as well as a short (or long) write-up. This could be as simple as how you acquired it, a personal impression about what the piece means to you, or a more formal piece of art criticism. If you have a program, scan it and send it to the site. The same goes for reviews of Burroughs’ art shows from newspapers and magazines. We are also posting a bibliography for what a Burroughs as Artist collection would look like. This is clearly a work in progress. If you have any edits and suggestions, please send them in.

Collecting like art is for everybody and the creation of this gallery provides an opportunity to get into the action.

• Bibliography of William S. Burroughs and the Arts
• Checklist of William Burroughs Art Exhibitions by Barry Miles
• Reviews of Burroughs Art Exhibits

Note: this material focuses on printed publications, not notebooks, sketchbooks, manuscripts, or paintings.

William Burroughs and the Arts

1961 Guy Harloff Exhibit

Guy Harloff, Exhibition Catalogue
Galerie “La Cour d’Ingres”
1961

Nanos Valaoritis and William Burroughs texts
Guy Harloff, Exhibition Catalogue
Galerie “La Cour d’Ingres”
1961

Guy Harloff, Exhibition Catalogue
Galerie “La Cour d’Ingres”
1961

1962 Takis Exhibit

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Front

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Marcel Duchamp epigraph

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Texts by Nicolas Callas and William Burroughs (Italian)

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Text by William Burroughs (Italian)

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Text by Brion Gysin (Italian)

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Takis sculpture

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Text by Alain Jouffroy (Italian)

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Biographical notice (Italian)

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
French translation of texts

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
English texts

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Takis in studio

Takis, exhibition catalogue
Galleria Schwarz
1962
Back

1963 Towers Open Fire at ICA London

“On March 28th, 1963, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) on Dover Street, Bill, Ian, and Antony Balch presented an evening of cut-ups. Bill sat in a chair and stared at the audience, a powerful blue spotlight making it difficult to see him, while earsplitting cut-up tapes were played featuring distorted Moroccan flutes, pneumatic drills, radio static, fragments of radio broadcasts, and Bill’s own flat, dry voice reading texts and news reports. Stills from Towers Open Fire were projected on a screen above his head (they had intended to screen the film but it was not ready). The Evening Standard reported, “The club was filled to busting point with intrigued spectators even standing outside in the passage to catch one or two eerie twangs of Burroughs’ voice. I found him mysterious as ever. He sat with hands folded and a deadpan expression in front of a blue screen as his voice, sometimes crackling into a strange blend of humour and irony, came over a recording machine.” — Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs

Towers Open Fire
ICA London
1963

Towers Open Fire
ICA London
1963

Towers Open Fire
ICA London
1963

Towers Open Fire
ICA London
1963

Towers Open Fire
ICA London
1963

1963 Mark Brusse Exhibition

Mark Brusse – Reliefs Machines
Galerie 20, Arnheim, Holland
1963
Catalogue

Download PDF of entire catalogue

William Burroughs
Statement on Mark Brusse

Mark Brusse – Reliefs Machines
Galerie 20, Arnheim, Holland
1963
Invitation – Front

Mark Brusse – Reliefs Machines
Galerie 20, Arnheim, Holland
1963
Invitation – Interior

1963 Bizarre Magazine

Bizarre Magazine
1963

William Burroughs
Untitled Text on Guy Harloff
Bizarre
1963

1964 David Budd Exhibit

David Budd rencontre William Burroughs et Earle Brown cover
Galerie Stadler
1964

Transcription and Translation of Catalogue

David Budd rencontre William Burroughs et Earle Brown back (French)
Galerie Stadler
1964

Transcription and Translation of Catalogue

1967 Takis Exhibit

Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

William Burroughs
Untitled Text Dated “Paris 1960”
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis
Double Signal
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Nicolas Callas
“Takis’ Magnetic Nowhere”
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis
Magnetic Nowhere
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Gregory Corso
“Purple Subway Ride”
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis
Magnetic Needles
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Allen Ginsberg
Untitled Text Dated “Bombay Apr 22, [19]62”
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis
Quavering Mobile
Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

Takis, Magnetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue
Galerie Stadler
1967

1969 Architectural Design Magazine

Architectural Design
1969

William Burroughs
Untitled Text about 24 Peter Street, London
Architectural Design
1969

1970 Gette’s Crystals

(Images courtesy of BigCrux.)

Gette’s Crystals
1970

William S. Burroughs
Untitled Text
Gette’s Crystals
1970

Gette’s Crystals
1970

Brion Gysin
Untitled Text
Gette’s Crystals
1970

Gette’s Crystals
1970

Bernard Heidsieck
Untitled Text
Gette’s Crystals
1970

Gette’s Crystals
1970

Gette’s Crystals
1970

1974 Ruby Editions Portfolio 1

(Images courtesy of BigCrux.)

Portfolio 1
Ruby Editions
1974

Copyright Page
Ruby Editions
1974

William S. Burroughs
Untitled
Ruby Editions
1974

Henri Chopin
Untitled
Ruby Editions
1974

1988 Tony Shafrazi Gallery

William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1988

William Burroughs
“Entrance to the Museum of Lost Species”
William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1988

William Burroughs
“Entrance to the Museum of Lost Species” (continued)
William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1988

William Burroughs
“Entrance to the Museum of Lost Species” (continued)
William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1988

William Burroughs
“Entrance to the Museum of Lost Species” (continued)
William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1988

William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1988

1988 Burroughs Exhibit at October Gallery (London)

William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
October Gallery
1988

1988 Burroughs Exhibit at Klein Gallery (Chicago)

William Burroughs exhibit postcard
Klein Gallery
1988

1989 Burroughs Exhibit at Galerie Specht (Basel)

William Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Galerie Specht
1989

2005 Burroughs Exhibit at Riflemaker Gallery

Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Riflemaker Gallery
2005

Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Riflemaker Gallery
2005

Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Riflemaker Gallery
2005

Burroughs exhibit catalogue
Riflemaker Gallery
2005

Undated Postcard for Mrabet Exhibit at Gotham Book Mart

Undated Postcard for Mrabet Exhibit (front)
Gotham Book Mart
Anyone have the date?

Undated Postcard for Mrabet Exhibit (back)
Gotham Book Mart
Anyone have the date?

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.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Last Times was an underground newspaper published in San Francisco in 1967 by poet and printer Charles Plymell. It contained works by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Antonin Artaud, and others. Issue one has become collectible for the contribution by Crumb, printed just a few months before Zap Comix #1. At least two variants of the second issue were published.

Charles Plymell Holding The Last Times
Photograph by Guy B. Taken at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on 26 May 2011.

The Last Times I

The Last Times I
Collage by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“Day the Records Went Up” by William S. Burroughs, photograph of Herbert Huncke

The Last Times I
“Do It Yourself & Dig It” by Claude Pélieu, interview with Buckminster Fuller, photo and text by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“The Orion Dream Stuff” by Carl Weissner, “Introduction” by D.A. Levy, texts by Carl Solomon and Bob Kaufman

The Last Times I
Text by Dennis Williams, drawing by Jeff Nuttall, poem by Roxie Powell, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” by Charles Bukowski

The Last Times I
“Television Baby Crawling toward that Death Chamber” by Allen Ginsberg

The Last Times I
Conclusion of poem by Allen Ginsberg, text by Dave Harris

The Last Times I
“Head Comix” by R. Crumb, collage by Jean-Jacques Lebel

The Last Times I
Found photo

The Last Times II (variant a)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall

The Last Times II
Poems by Charles Plymell and Philip Whalen

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Poems by Yvonne Bond and Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Mini-poster

The Last Times II (variant b)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall, “Dominion” by Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Poem by Philip Whalen

The Last Times II
Centerfold by Bob Branaman

The Last Times II
Poem by Yvonne Bond

The Last Times II
Poem by Charles Plymell

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Rhinozeros #5
Front cover

Rhinozeros #5
“Song” by David Meltzer

Rhinozeros #5
“Song of the Tusk” by Anselm Hollo

Rhinozeros #5
“Attention!” by Gregory Corso

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Michael McClure

Rhinozeros #5
“An Africa Ode” by Edward Dorn

Rhinozeros #5
“Spel 1” by Robert Kelly

Rhinozeros #5
“Song” by David Meltzer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Larry Eigner

Rhinozeros #5
“Oil” by Gary Snyder

Rhinozeros #5
Poems by Gael Turnbull and Michael Horovitz

Rhinozeros #5
“The End” by Allen Ginsberg

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Peter Orlovsky, “Apples” by Gregory Corso

Rhinozeros #5
“Wind Hand Caught in the Door” by William S. Burroughs

Rhinozeros #5
“To Fidel Castro Somewhere in the Sierra Maestre” by Marc D. Schleifer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by David Ball

Rhinozeros #5
Poems by Theodore Enslin

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Anselm Hollo

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Dell Hymes

Rhinozeros #5
“Pome (for Rhinozeros)” by Jack Kerouac

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Piero Heliczer

Rhinozeros #5
Poem by Philip Whalen