Anyone who has collected Burroughs’ novels eventually finds Port of Saints, the 1971 novel which operated as a kind of sequel to The Wild Boys, although it was not published until 1980 in a widely read edition put out by Blue Wind Press. Your eyes run along the bookshelf and it stands out from the typical Grove Press pastel neons that the novels lived in during the 80s and 90’s for most readers. The book is slightly larger than the Grove editions and opens quite easily in your hand on creamy paper. A line drawing of Burroughs by Mattingly is found on the inner final page with legal information about the cover and the text.

Port of Saints is unlike the thin one-off volumes of Burroughs’ work that intersperse most of his career. It is a major novel instead of the small, slim volumes of usually experimental or odd ephemera which are not poetry, not major novels and not designed to sell by the bundle. As well, the book is a shift in tone that switches from the hardened language of The Wild Boys and the cut-ups of the previous decade, passing into a nostalgic, violet golden sun haze of distant Michigan holidays in the 1930s and fantasies of a possible outside world unlike the world of Cobble Stone Gardens, his parent’s gift shop.

The size of the book and its importance to the overall oeuvre is what has always seemed so odd to me about it: why was this major novel not published by Burroughs’ usual publishers, whichever it was at the time? Why has it not been republished in the years since by one of them — Penguin, for instance? Obviously, the market plays an important part, but this novel is not just ephemera and forms an important part of the Wild Boys Trilogy, which readily leaks over into the Red Night Trilogy of the 1980s. Port of Saints is a significant Burroughs novel. 

George Mattingly and his Blue Wind Press published the book — in the form most readers currently know it — in 1980. At the time, Burroughs and his work were at an odd point, as George mentions in the following interview, in that he could not find a publisher who wanted to take on his books. There was the growing sense among some publishers that perhaps Burroughs, who had found fame and world-wide acclaim with a certain readership through the chaos of Naked Lunch and the linguistic deep-dives of the Cut-Up Trilogy, was not likely to have much more to say. Maybe all of the Beats were washed up?

Regardless, George was able to publish Port of Saints, as well as Blade Runner and The Book of Breeething for Burroughs, a brave business move on the part of James Grauerholz and Burroughs, considering the body of work before it. Instead of opting for a publisher that might push for cheap editions and “off-brand” choices for cover illustrations and marketing as a trade-off for wider, indiscriminate exposure, they chose George Mattingly and the artful editions from Blue Wind Press.

So, if I understand correctly, Blue Wind Press began in 1967. Is that correct and what were you doing at the time?

Summer of 1969. I was an undergrad at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. (I was kicked out of Exeter in my senior year, 67–68, and finished high school in my parents’ town of Newton, Iowa.)

At the time, I lived in a big house across from the Johnson County Courthouse, on South Capitol Street, rented by Ted and Sandy Berrigan. I watched their two kids, David (5) and Kate (4) in return for room and board.

In addition to regular U of I undergrad courses, I also took at least one course each semester in the undergrad Writers Workshop.

Why did you decide to start an independent press? What did you hope to be able to do with it?

As a writer, I was curious about publishing, and took a course in typography from Harry Duncan (of Cummington Press) in the School of Journalism. Printing letterpress editions of original work was part of the course. (My friend Allan Kornblum was in the same class, and started his Toothpaste Press — later Coffee House Press — at the same time.)

Like probably every other young person who starts a magazine or a press, I imagined that I had a unique editorial spin & would be able to reach a new, different, larger audience than existing publishers. (As it turns out that’s partly true but mostly aspirational.)

Initial goal was simply to put into print (in the most interesting packages I could create and/or afford) the work of friends and teachers.

Which authors are you most proud of publishing at Blue Wind Press?

Short answer of course, all of them. In order that they come to mind?

Anselm Hollo

Ted Berrigan

David Gitin

Merrill Gilfillan

Burroughs is in a different category. I loved his work (and very much enjoyed knowing him to the extent that I did) but it was really only after publishing those 3 books that I realized that WSB was having trouble getting published in the mid 70s into the early 80s. (Imagine that.) … If only I had known that another now-famous writer whose work I loved was in that same predicament at the same time … and lived (for awhile) a block away from me in Berkeley. (Philip K. Dick.) 

The things we didn’t know.

And, obviously, the Blade Runner title has become a direct connection between Dick’s novel and the Ridley Scott adaptation of it that ultimately used Burroughs’ title.

The film is a long story. Initially it was to be based on Bill’s book. A great title, so they kept that at least. 

How did you come to publish Blade Runner for Burroughs? 

I got to know Bill through Jan Herman, with whom I worked at Something Else Press. Jan was going to publish The Book of Breeething, under his Nova Broadcast imprint, but then convinced me and Lucy to do so as a Blue Wind Press title (after I had left Vermont and moved to California).

Bill and James Grauerholz liked what we did with The Book of Breeething, and it sold well for us. When we asked if we could do another book, we were offered Blade Runner, which we really liked.

Had you known that WSB was struggling to find a publisher in the 70’s and early 80’s, would you have pushed to publish more of his work? I mean, were his books selling enough to justify the work you had to do as a small press publisher to get them on the market? 

In hindsight, yes, we should have asked for more titles. But it was difficult for us to finance and properly promote books in the 70s — even (or almost especially) those that sold really well, as Bill’s did.

Also James was trying to get a big commercial publisher to do the larger books. The right approach, of course.

Was WSB a “hot commodity” at the time you began working with him (late 70’s) or was his name as a writer not fully guaranteed in literary or financial terms? I assume, even if you were a fan, as a publisher you have to ask yourself if the writer who wrote a great book in 1959 is going to write a great book in 1979?

I’d say that some of his TITLES were “hot commodities,” but that he himself was less so. It was difficult to get book buyers and reviewers to pay attention to his other books. Weird, no?

Do publishers even think that way? 

I’m sure some do. I never did.

We actually did well with all three of his titles that we published. We were still selling the two that we had kept in print (Port of Saints and Blade Runner) until the [Burroughs] estate asked us to return the publication rights a couple of years ago.

With Port of Saints, it had been originally published in a small number in England. However, it is an important novel in Burroughs’ oeuvre, despite the lack of attention it has had. What was your feeling about publishing that book versus the two others? Obviously, the size of the book must play some part in your consideration of it as a publisher. 

Yes, we thought Port of Saints might be taken more seriously (by Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, book reviewers & buyers). That was the case, and it did sell well. Lots of positive reviews.

Over time, though, Blade Runner has been taken almost as seriously and sold even better. (Partly because people mistakenly thought it was the screenplay for Ridley Scott’s movie, I think.)

I know there were some minor changes between the British Port of Saints and Blue Wind’s Port of Saints. In terms of editing, what was Burroughs most concerned with in publishing that book with Blue Wind? Obviously, it is the edition that nearly any reader of Port of Saints is familiar with.

According to James Grauerholz, the main differences between the British original and our edition were matters of copyediting and proofing, not content.

I admit I’ve never compared them line for line.

Something occurred to me when you were talking about how WSB had difficulty finding a publisher in the 70s and early 80s. 

I can see going to an independent publisher to put out smaller items like Book of Breeething and Blade Runner, as a larger house might find those less appealing, I’m guessing. But, do you think that a fairly significant novel like Port of Saints went to you because they were finding it difficult to find a new publisher? Or, did WSB not think that the novel would sell as consistently as it has? 

The shorter books were definitely hard to pitch to New York publishers.

I heard that while Port of Saints was treated more seriously — they had no idea how to sell a weird book like The Book of Breeething or an unconventional and short book like Blade Runner — readers at the big houses thought it was too “experimental” and/or not a “major” WSB title. Not Naked Lunch but also not Nova Express. 

And, yes, Bill’s reputation was at a low point in New York at that time. Group think: his time had passed.

Obviously we never ever thought any of that was true.

When you published Port of Saints, was there a sense in the industry that Burroughs’ time was over, or his “schtick” was played out? Or, did he still have the interest of people in publishing? What was his reputation at that specific time?

Speaking of “schtick,” did you ever hear him read (solo)? Those readings were GREAT! People fell out of their chairs with laughter. The recordings capture some of it, but you really had to have been there. Video recordings are better.

While WSB had fans within the NY publishing world who understood exactly how important he was, as I said before, I think that corporate publishing decisions are made more by the marketing and sales departments than by editors. And they indulge in groupthink to a degree that’s embarrassing (and not something they would ever admit either).

Yes, clearly, the Group had decided that the time for Burroughs, the Beats, Jean Genet, was in the rear view mirror.

It’s always seemed to me that New York publishing decisions are self-fulfilling: they decide they “can’t” sell something, so they don’t try (or don’t bother to research and do it in an effective manner), then it doesn’t sell, and they report back that see we knew what we were talking about when we said it couldn’t be sold.

It’s like Republicans claiming that government doesn’t work. They take power and prove that, yes, government doesn’t work. (Thomas Frank has written brilliantly on this topic.)

After Burroughs went to Henry Holt for Cities of the Red Night and his later books, how did it affect sales of books with Blue Wind?

If anything we sold more copies. Not as if the potential audience for POS abandoned us for Cities of The Red Night.

Obviously in the present, a publisher can interact with the audience they sell to far more directly through the internet. Was there a way to know that the books you decided to publish were making an impact other than just through sales? How could you tell that people were connecting with those texts?

In the late 70s and early 80s there were still print publications which reviewed independent press titles. Publishers Weekly and Library Journal reviewed two of the books we published in 1980: WSB’s Port of Saints and Ted Berrigan’s So Going Around Cities. It was a watershed moment.

We had several distributors, one (The Subterranean Company, which also distributed City Lights Books, Four Seasons, and Gray Fox) had a national sales force, so our books were in retail stores across the country —

— and we heard from booksellers and readers (mostly through the mail).

All points and modes of contact which are more or less gone now.

What did it mean for a smaller publisher to take on a large book by an author like Burroughs? And given that Burroughs appeared to be waning a bit at that moment, did people around you express any hesitation about taking such a large book?

Having a big book by a known author made a lot of difference. It got reviewers to take you seriously (and sometimes to review the lesser-known authors on the list). It got the sales force in the door to sell the list to book buyers. It made a huge difference.

It was certainly no more difficult to market and promote such a “big” book than the many “smaller” ones we published. 

No small publishers I knew at the time would have had any hesitation publishing a well-known author (even if “on the wane”) or a large book.

About the cover for Port of Saints: who designed it and what was the idea behind it? Who is the partially visible person on the cover?

I designed the cover of Port of Saints, and the collage is mine. It doesn’t reference anything specifically in the book, and is simply inspired by the idea that our “port” is the planet, the human body, and the cosmos beyond. 

This is a cut-and-paste collage (something those who cut their teeth on Photoshop can’t possibly imagine!), and the sources are taken from art and photography books. The model is unknown.

William liked the collage, but both he and James wished the figure were male. (In the age of Photoshop I would have swapped in a male model’s body, but . . . not possible with cut-and-paste art that was already finished.) I agreed with them btw: it would have been better if male. 

Ha! I assumed they were male! Did you do the line drawing of Bill on the last page?

Yes, that’s my line drawing of Bill. I was very fond of him & really enjoyed doing that drawing. People have such a wrong idea about Burroughs. He was a moralist — and a real mensch.

Since you’ve been a writer, editor and publisher, in what way would you say each role is an art in its own right? My sense is that in Blue Wind’s case, your approach was like an artist to a piece of work rather than a businessman to a product.

For a small publisher, the three roles usually overlap.

I became a publisher because I was a writer and had friends who wrote in styles that didn’t seem to easily fit into existing publications.

Once I became a publisher I learned that I needed to also be an editor.

But it’s hard to combine roles. Sometimes there needs to be a dialog or debate between editor and publisher, to determine where lines should be drawn, and it can be difficult to have that conversation with oneself.

Yes, the “publisher” should be the “businessperson” on this team. It’s hard to do that when you realize that most of what you want to publish isn’t going to sell well (is in fact “non-commercial”).

I hate to fall back on a cliche, but literary publishing really is “a labor of love.” For most small publishers a point is reached where whatever funds and/or other resources made publishing possible just dry up.

We reached that point in the mid 1980s. While we did issue a few books after that time, we realized our fantasy of creating a self-sustaining publishing house was just that, a fantasy, and any books we did would lose money (a loss we simply had to accept because we loved the work itself).

I think many (probably the vast majority) of small literary publishers always accepted that.

Two Deleted Entries from The Road To Interzone and the Origin of an Investigation into the Influence, Use, and Appropriation of Other Authors’ Works in the writing of William S. Burroughs

I

I was in Oklahoma for what was the hot, dry and dusty summer of 1990. It was the summer I read Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Mickey Spillane, Sartre and Glendon Swarthout. The high temperatures, which have a tendency to drive more stable men and women to madness and mayhem, had driven me inside an air-conditioned house with a bunch of books. After suffering through Nietzsche, falling in love with Prince Myshkin and Mike Hammer, and feeling nauseated by Sartre and his self-absorbed prevarications, I picked up a western book called The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout that I’d seen mentioned in William Burroughs’ The Adding Machine. Unbeknownst to me, The Shootist had been filmed under the same name in 1978 and featured John Wayne, as J. B. Books, “the shootist,” in his final role before dying of cancer in 1979.

A few pages into this almost entertaining yarn I was struck with a strange sense of déjà vu. Another few chapters and I was assaulted with full blown recognition, no longer an awkward and misunderstood sense of confusion. It was the encounter between Doctor Hostetler and Books, the “shootist” of the title, that set my mind reeling. First, let me state that upon my arrival in Oklahoma I had ordered a copy of Burroughs’ Tornado Alley from a bookstore in San Francisco. It was a handsome little production and also my first exposure to Charles Plymell‘s publishing company, Cherry Valley Editions. Most famous for the short piece, “A Thanksgiving Prayer”, Tornado Alley had another offering that would reveal to me a new understanding of William Burroughs, the author and master appropriator. By sheer “accident,” a word I will never use again in a piece about Burroughs, I had read Tornado Alley mere days or weeks before I read The Shootist. When I came to an exchange in Swarthout’s novel between the cancer-stricken Books and his doctor, I became aware of a segment of Burroughs’ creative process that I had previously been oblivious to — his appropriation of other writer’s work.

Holed up in a refrigerated room I came upon the following exchange from The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout:

“Well?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Books, every few days I have to tell a man or a woman something I don’t want to. I’m not very good at it. I have practiced medicine for twenty-nine years, and I still don’t know how to do it well.”

“Call a spade a spade.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-one.”

“All right.” Hostetler crossed his legs. “You have carcinoma of the prostate.”

“Carcinoma?”

“Cancer…”

Now the story of The Shootist is one of a man who comes to realize he is going to die young. He then spends his final days seeking a way to die in a dignified and respectful manner. The Burroughs book Tornado Alley is a collection of short pieces. One of them is a four-page story called “Book of Shadows,” in which a man (Lee Ice) finds out he is going to die and subsequently consults his little black book, or his “book of shadows”: “A few calls to make, a few scores to settle…. Nobody ever did him a favor or an injury without being fully repaid.” The following interlaced exchanges are between Lee and his doctor in “Book of Shadows” and Books and his doctor in The Shootist: 

“Book of Shadows”:

“You don’t have to beat around the sagebrush with me, Doc. It’s cancer, isn’t it? (…) After all, Doctor, we have known each other for a long time.”

The Shootist:

“Can’t you cut it out?”

“It’s too far advanced, I’d have to gut you like a fish.'”

“Book of Shadows”:

“Yes, it’s cancer. Of course, it might be operable… have to go in to make sure, but–” (…)

“Well, how much time would you say? I mean, how much time in which I can get around?

A spasm of pain twisted the man’s body, and he leaned forward onto his cane.

The doctor shrugged. “A month, perhaps two… I’ll give you a prescription. You know how to use a hypodermic?”

The Shootist:

“How long have I got?”

“There’s no way to tell. You must be in a lot of pain already.” (…)

“Now.” On the table he set a twelve-ounce bottle filled with purplish liquid.

“Here you are. Your medicine.”

“What is it?”

“Laudanum. A solution of opium in alcohol.”

“Opium? Can”t that get to be a habit?”

“It can. An addiction in fact. But in your case–“

The doctor shrugged.

Books scowled. “Yes. What’s it taste like?”

“Terrible. But there’s a consolation. You’ll likely have dreams.”

“Amazing dreams. Perhaps you’ll even have visions. Are you much of a reader?”

“No.” (…)

Books was looking at the laudanum. “The milk of Paradise — at least there’s alcohol in it. What’s the stuff for?”

“It’s the most potent painkiller we have.”

“Book of Shadows”:

The doctor knew that Lee Ice was well-read — in fact, a learned man.

Yes he knew how to use a syringe.

These two scenes are not identical and every day across the world men are diagnosed with cancer of the prostate. What is striking though is how similar these two scenes are and the purpose of each of the character’s lives following their diagnosis. Both men proceed to seek a dignified death. Burroughs adds his own flavor to the scene and removes a significant amount. Swarthout’s book is a full-length novel and Burroughs’ story is just that, a four-page short story which consists simply of the exchange between Lee and his doctor.

In reference to laudanum in The Shootist, the Doctor quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge and explains to Books how to use laudanum. In Burroughs, Lee already knows how to use a syringe as a result of his use of opium. In Swarthout, Books is not a reader but, in Burroughs, Lee is a well-read man. Clearly this is not a case of plagiarism. It is, though, a clear-cut example of the creative process and a perfect illustration of what John Livingston Lowes referred to as “the deep well” — the place of the unconscious where influence and bits of reading, pieces of overheard conversation and segments of unrelated information coalesce into what we read as the great literature of our time. The hunting and collecting energy of consciousness has dragged the depths of submerged cuts and fragments only to resurface as a completely new construct. The mind of genius is an assimilating force and could exist but cease to be artistically productive in isolation. In case after case, as we shall see soon with The Bladerunner, vivid segments of what Burroughs read are discarded into this deep well and reappear as texts only Burroughs could have written.

The only mention of Swarthout’s The Shootist in Burroughs’ work is a brief mention in “Light Reading,” an essay included in The Adding Machine. Burroughs’ character Audrey Carsons picks some books to read in space and one of them is the Swarthout novel. Many years later, after I started the work for what was to become The Road to Interzone, I was informed by James Grauerholz that Burroughs had created a list of his favorite books, passages of which were to be published in a collection called Granta 52: Granta Anthology of Deathless Prose. Guess what book was on that list. Yes, The Shootist… and take a shot at what year this project was conceived. You got it, 1990. And, as promised, I will use the word synchronous. Mr. Grauerholz provided me the table of contents for this projected, but never published, anthology in 2003 and the books on this list are included in The Road to Interzone. Further research could flush out an even clearer picture of Burroughs’ appropriation of other writers’ work and the extent to which his literary input influenced his writing.

II

Ten years later (2000), I thought it would be interesting to read Blade Runner: A Movie by William S. Burroughs alongside the original science-fiction novel on which it was based, The Bladeruner by Alan E. Nourse.

Before proceeding I must clarify for and inform the reader about the history and sometimes confusing use of the title Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner takes its name from a book by William S. Burroughs called Blade Runner: A Movie. And as you can see from the copyright page of Burroughs’ screen treatment — “The author wishes to thank Alan E. Nourse, upon whose book The Blade Runner, characters and situations in this book are based.” — he took the name for his work from the science-fiction novel by Alan E. Nourse.

The Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which starred Harrison Ford and has nothing at all to do with the Burroughs or the Nourse books, is actually based on the classic science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Rudolph Wurlitzer and Hampton Fancher (who were involved with the film in the early stages) were responsible for getting the title to Ridley Scott. Philip K. Dick, Burroughs, and Nourse are all thanked in the end credits of the Director’s Cut of the film.

Burroughs stated in a lecture delivered at the Naropa Institute and published in Disembodied Poetics, “I turned this into a filmscript, and Kubrick made it into a spectacular that would be filmed in the ruins of Manhattan devastated by health act riots. (Filming those riots alone would cost five million dollars.) On Rudy Wurlitzer’s advice, I dropped the idea of producing this lavish and impractical film. He said, ‘You’ve got twenty million dollars to spend already — and you’ll have to tear down New York for this film.’ So I’m now turning the script into a novel with another name.”

The Bladerunner (1974) by Alan E. Nourse is set in 2017 in a New York City where medical treatment has gone underground as a result of the Health Riots of 1994. Based on the research of two scientists, Heinz and Lafferty, the government restricts public healthcare to a select few people. If someone visits a hospital for any reason they are forced to be sterilized as a result of hereditary findings that suggest diseases and conditions such as diabetes are being found in more and more of the population. Professor Heinz discovers that modern medicine, by breaking down natural immunity, is causing more, not less, illness. 

The underground doctors have helpers called bladerunners that run errands and carry their supplies. This ominous future is also inhabited by groups of people called naturists, who refuse medical treatment in opposition to sterilization. With religious vigor, they protest the medical establishment, the government, and a violent police state. The naturists pose almost as big a threat to the bladerunners and underground doctors as the government. 

The main character in this novel is a boy named Billy Gimp, who was in and out of foster homes, orphanages, etc., and doesn’t know his real last name. He is called Billy Gimp because of a lame leg. Billy is a bladerunner and works for Doc, a skilled and well respected surgeon who is a government-employed medical doctor by day and an underground surgeon by night. 

The Nourse novel opens with Billy Gimp waking from a dream to find a bug in his room:

He had been dreaming, as usual, and the dream had been unpleasant, as usual. Someone had been chasing him through a strange and unfamiliar wooded countryside, relentlessly closing the gap on him as he had limped down brush-filled gullies and scrambled over windfallen logs, dragging his bad foot painfully as he went. He remembered vividly climbing up a ridge and down into a logging camp where chainsaws had just fallen silent and piles of fragrant pine sawdust were lying about… Sawdust.

In the Burroughs treatment we find the dream:

Flash of nude boy with Mercury sandals and a doctor’s satchel. A boy is seen running through the streets of Lower Manhattan, dodging from one doorway to another as the credits come on. Blowing snow… dogs bark from the windows of derelict buildings. The boy is leaning into the wind, snow in his face. He collapses for a moment, leaning against a tree. He passes a vacant lot with frozen corn shucks. As he runs, the weather gets milder. Frogs jump into a pothole, weeds and bushes grow up through undergrowth and gulleys full of branches. He is clearly running from something now. Sound of a chain-saw behind him. He stumbles and falls and turns screaming as a tree falls on him in a cloud of sawdust.

From Nourse:

a short metallic stalk emerging like a periscope from the floorboards, with a tiny pile of sawdust beside it. At the end of the stalk, like the head on a kitchen match, there was a glistening crystal bead.

Burroughs: 

a short metallic stalk emerging like a periscope from the floorboards. At the end of the stalk, a glistening crystal bead. There is a little pile of sawdust beside the device. Flash of erect penis with a glistening bead of lubricant.

This is a screen treatment of the Nourse novel so of course there are obvious similarities, and much is going to be left out. What we see here is an amalgamated of Nourse’s fiction with the Burroughs’ mythology. The boy (typical of Burroughs’ heroes) Billy Gimp is seen nude in a dream running from some ominous presence. When awakened, the dream is not too different from the reality. The presence of the bug is parallel to an erect penis. In the Nourse novel, Billy is alone in the apartment. In the Burroughs treatment, he is with his lover, Roberts. Roberts is also a character in the Nourse novel, but is not Billy’s lover and does not appear until the end section.

In the Burroughs treatment, Roberts is seen as a fellow bladerunner and a companion. He helps Billy kick drugs, which Burroughs has given Billy as an imperfection, in exchange for the Nourse defect, a gimp leg. There is a warm exchange where Billy and Roberts flip a coin to see who will fix dinner. This companionship is much deeper than the one between Billy and the token female, Molly Barret, who appears in the Nourse novel as the Doc’s assistant. At the end of the novel there is an exchange between Molly and Billy which implies a tension that was noticed nowhere in the novel until that moment. Billy seems happy about the prospect of furthering his relationship with a female who had previously only been a coworker. Molly is suspiciously absent from the Burroughs treatment, as is Katie Durham, the other female character from the Nourse novel.

Nourse:

The nurse is okay. The anesthetist is drunk about half the time, so Doc and I have to pinch hit sometimes.

Burroughs:

Where’s that fucking anesthetist? The anesthetist reels in dead drunk. “He’s shit drunk. You’ll have to take over Billy.”

In his treatment, Burroughs has portrayed Doc from the Nourse story as a sort of Doctor Benway.

I am surprised that Burroughs ignored another passage from the Nourse book:

— but that was not all that was bothering Doc. Deep in his mind there was another worry. Far more ominous, yet strangely undefined, chipping away stubbornly at his subconscious. It was something quite aside from Billy Gimp or the Hardy Boy — a cold, relentless sense of impending disaster that Doc could neither shake aside or identify.

Compare this to Burroughs’ description of the “Ugly Spirit” from Queer:

a feeling of loss and sadness that had weighed on me all day so I could hardly breathe intensified to such an extent that I found tears streaming down my face… This heavy depression and a feeling of doom occurs again and again in the text… the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Another character occurring in both the Nourse novel and the Burroughs screenplay is Professor Heinz. In Nourse’s novel, Rupert Heinz is led to the “frightening hypothesis: that the miracles of medical progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might in some cases, have ultimately led to more human illness, rather than less.” And in Burroughs’ version:

Professor Heinz addressing a class: “…The conclusion seems unmistakable. The medical miracles of the 20th Century, by destroying natural immunity, result in more illness rather than less… deadly outbreak of adult diphtheria in the early 1990s… And still more alarming the incidence of hereditary degenerative diseases… Where can this proliferation of recessive genes end? (…) In plain English, sterilization is now the price for any medical care.” 

The penultimate scene in Nourse, the action scene, is set in a tavern (Burroughs calls it the Silver Dollar Bar). Billy makes contact with Roberts, his first appearance in the novel, who is at the tavern. He is with some companions, fellow bladerunners, and comes across as a bit hardened. After Roberts contacts one of his suppliers regarding Billy’s story he is confronted by a group of Naturists. “‘Hold it, Bud,’ he rumbled, ‘What’s in the package?’ ‘That’s my business,’ Roberts said, ‘And any lousy bladerunner with bootleg medical supplies is my business,’ the big man said, ‘hand it over'”. Burroughs cuts back on the dialogue here. After a big fight scene, Doc comes in and saves the day in both stories. 

In the novel, Doctor Long takes Billy from the tavern and gets him to the hospital with little exchange. In the Burroughs treatment, Billy asks, “‘Doc, what’s the date?'” The doctor’s response: “‘January 18th.’ ‘The whole date Doc.’ ‘January 18, 1914.'”

In Nourse this end sequence is a hallucination induced by illness, but in Burroughs it is a dream. It can be seen as a cyclical sequence that returns to the beginning of the actual on-screen treatment, where Billy is seen running through the city nude with Mercury sandals. Compare the two ending sequences.

Nourse:

“– you’re the Boy Heroes of the Plague City, and Health Control knows it.” He tossed a pile of newspapers on the bed. “Take a look.” Billy blinked at the banner headlines, ILLEGAL MEDICS HEROES IN FLU CRISIS

Burroughs:

Snow blurs into confetti, streamers, cheering crowds in Times Square. Advertisement shows animated figure in lights running across the Manhattan skyline.

Billy is seen to have blown a hole in time. Both books end with Billy staring out of a hospital room window at the Manhattan skyline. 

Burroughs had expressed interest in J.W. Dunne’s books and theories multiple times throughout his career, so we know that this idea isn’t remote.

(J. W. Dunne’s time theory, documented in his books An Experiment with Time and The Serial Universe, was the result of self-experimentation through close observation of his dreams and subsequent events that seemed to indicate a trend of precognition. Dunne concluded that time is not linear, as is commonly thought, but is instead a series of events taking place simultaneously. Past, present and future are happening all at once. In dreams we are less bound by conventions of thought, and therefore we are able to see past, present, and future as coexisting layers.)

In Blade Runner: A Movie Burroughs appropriates not just one author or idea but multiple sources. Consequently, it is not a surprise to discover not only J. W. Dunne but L. Ron Hubbard and Wilhelm Reich. Look at the scene where Burroughs assigns Benwayesque attributes to the Doctor Long character, “‘Shut up, you’ll give my patient an engram…’ Doc screams back.” And in regards to Virus B-23, the “virus of biologic mutation” Doktor Unruh von Steinplatz

calls it Unruh’s Disease. U.D. is characterized by an itching burning erogenous rash in the genitals and surrounding areas, accompanied by an uncontrollable sexual frenzy. U.D. victims undergo bizarre changes in pigmentation during intercourse, and these changes are genetically conveyed. U.D. was extracted by the Herr Doktor by exposing the crystal skulls to D.O.R.-Deadly Orgone Radiation- in a highly magnetized pyramid.

Blade Runner, A Movie is an important work for studying Burroughs’ fiction and his use of appropriation. It serves as a guideline for understanding not only the structure of his novels to come but also provides the reader a clear vision of the methods Burroughs used, borrowing from other writers’ works and making them his own. The book is presented as a film treatment, yet we see all of the Burroughs methodology, mythology, and use of language — from packs of wild boys and anti-government naturists to deadly orgone radiation, serial time skips, and virus theory. 

III

From that hot summer in 1990 stumbling upon Book of Shadows as a Burroughsian rewrite of a western novel to my later parallel reading of Bladerunner and Blade Runner: A Movie, I have come some distance in developing a basic understanding of some of Burroughs’ methods. Still I am in the dark, but now with a match I can see isolated images, pieces of the puzzle that with enough exposure will form an elaborate depiction of a web of associations.

For many years my research library formed an imitation of Burroughs’ library. This was not necessarily intentional but resulted from the massive collection of books used to research the work that became The Road to Interzone. That dream started in 1990 and culminated in 2000 after eleven years of reading. Unfortunately, in 2004 I discovered that a bibliography was inevitable. My parallel readings and side-by-side comparisons could fill multiple volumes of speculative criticism that would cost thousands of dollars and years and years of time. I settled for what I consider a pretty all-inclusive bibliography of Burroughs’ reading. What I succeeded in doing there was to create a document of sources, a sort of Q, or the lost gospel of William S. Burroughs.

My hope is that The Road to Interzone will get Burroughs fans studying his reading and a thousand eyes will see what two cannot. There will be more hot, dusty, and soul-blistering Oklahoma days, and there will be a near infinite number of curiosity seekers, so with this essay and the upcoming release of the second edition of The Road to Interzone I wait anxiously to read the studies and observations of future William Burroughs scholars. I hope to revel at the excitement of others’ discoveries and know that maybe I had a hand in getting the ball rolling. And as for what Oliver Harris called the “secret of fascination,” let it come down and let us enjoy the fruits of future revelation and until next time, as Burroughs was fond of saying, Via con Dios.

_____ Advance Review Copy ink-stamped with handwritten info concerning publication date, price, etc. Dated 6-21-79, bound in wraps.

_____ the trade edition, hardbound in dust jacket.

_____ simultaneous wraps issue.