Gerard-Georges Lemaire
13-15 re Paul-Fort
75014 Paris
FRANCE

18th Dec. 78

Dear Gerard,

Many thanks for your participation in the Nova Convention. In some respects I regret that the event strayed so far from the original conception of a visit to New York by the French intellectual community who recognize my work. Certainly I must apologize for the problems encountered with Lotringer – it would seem that he “dropped the wand” as we say.

Of course, the Colloque de Tanger and the Paris-New York events were the inspirations for the Nova Convention, and I am grateful to you for you many efforts behind those and other matters.

It was good to talk with you here, and I am looking forward to seeing you again, perhaps as soon as this Spring as we discussed. Please write to me or James with details of these things as soon as you know more.

With best wishes for the New Year.

William Burroughs

WSB: jg

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

William Burroughs met filmmaker Antony Balch in 1962 at the Beat Hotel. Balch made the very Grade-B movies that Burroughs felt create a space between, which provided a modicum of Lebensraum in a Puritan society. Today, Balch is best known for his film collaborations with Burroughs, like Towers Open Fire or William Buys a Parrot.  

RealityStudio has been able to acquire roughly one hundred letters from Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Ian Sommerville to Balch from the 1960s to the 1980s. The attached letters are a small sample of letters of interest from Burroughs in the 1960s. We have also included an index of the archive to give some sense of the importance of the collection. 

It is unfortunate that RealityStudio received the letters after publishing Dave Teuween’s article on Burroughs’ “Abstracts” because a few of the letters below provide much-needed detail on Burroughs’ theories regarding film. Please read or re-read his essay in conjunction with these letters. Of particular interest is a 1968 letter written just after the Democratic Convention in Chicago in which Burroughs reveals his political side and his belief in the decade’s cultural revolution. Included in the letter is a reference to pornography, which sheds light on The Wild Boys material of the period. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hardcore pornography, gay or straight, was considered a part of the cultural avant-garde. Antony Balch made his living distributing European soft-core movies and even Grove Press considered entering the experimental film market with a movie division. Burroughs’ idea of making avant-garde porn films was not that far-fetched. Warhol films such as Blow Job, Flesh, and My Hustler are cases in point. Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated film, won the Oscar for Best Picture. In the early 1970s, Deep Throat began the process of making porn mainstream. Porn has emerged from the 8mm stag party and infiltrated everyday life. Elements of porn are everywhere. The experimental films of Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage and even Burroughs and Balch helped make that happen. Clearly Burroughs believed his films had the capacity to change the world and they have.

This is just one example of the value of these letters. The thought of what lies in the New York Public Library archives staggers the mind. The coming decade promises a complete revolution in the understanding of Burroughs provided the material is made available. RealityStudio is proud to provide scholars and the curious all the ammunition they might need.

Index to Burroughs-Balch Correspondence
Page 1

Index to Burroughs-Balch Correspondence
Page 2

Index to Burroughs-Balch Correspondence
Page 3

Index to Burroughs-Balch Correspondence
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William S. Burroughs
Letter to Antony Balch
20 Sept 1964

William S. Burroughs
Letter to Antony Balch
11 Feb 1965

William S. Burroughs
Letter to Antony Balch
19 May 1965

Brion Gysin
Letter to Antony Balch
10 June 1965

William S. Burroughs
Letter to Antony Balch
2 July 1965

William S. Burroughs
Letter to Antony Balch
10 Sept 1968

Brion Gysin
Letter to Antony Balch
09 December 1968

Antony Balch
Letter to Brion Gysin
01 February 1969, Page 1

Antony Balch
Letter to Brion Gysin
01 February 1969, Page 2

Brion Gysin
Letter to Antony Balch
09 February 1969, Page 1

Brion Gysin
Letter to Antony Balch
09 February 1969, Page 2

Brion Gysin
Letter to Antony Balch
26 February 1969, Page 1

Brion Gysin
Letter to Antony Balch
26 February 1969, Page 2

William S. Burroughs
Letter to Antony Balch
10 September 1969

Felicity Mason
Letter to Antony Balch and Brion Gysin
23 May 1973

Tim Head interviewed by Joe Gilbert, 2 a.m. December 5th 1968

Introduced by Ian MacFadyen

The 1969 issue of Package magazine consisted of several A3 stiff paper sheets folded and encased in a white paper bag featuring an ink drawing of a sailor from Battleship Potemkin by Brian O’Toole. It included a text on Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, one on Jean-Luc Godard, and an interview with artist Tim Head called “Return to Peyton Place — A Word to the Wise Guy.” The interview was conducted by Joe Gilbert. The art editor was Andrew Morley, and the editors of the magazine were Gordon Sharp and Mike Jones.

The interview is charming and funny and sometimes silly but also very pertinent in its fascination with Burroughs’ image. A rather typical 1968 self-conscious faux Warholian aesthetic is apparent in the piece, but it’s also a real Roshomon in disguise in which an indefatigable interviewer pushes his source to the point where the latter begins to doubt his own encounter with the phantomatic Mister B. It’s definitely, even if somewhat unintentionally, revealing of how Burroughs was/is seen/not seen.

The magazine included a reproduction of a postcard from Burroughs to Joe Gilbert, the interviewer, which reads: “Dear Mr Gilbert, I thank you for the reality studio photos which I found most helpful. Sorry for the delay in answering, I have been in Morocco. All the best to you from William Burroughs.” The card is dated 23 August (23!!!!!) 1968. The interview has been transcribed exactly, although RealityStudio has added line breaks to facilitate reading.

Return to Peyton Place

Joe: I hear that you met William Burroughs.

Tim: Yeah, that’s right.

Joe: Where?

Tim: The intersection of Broadway on Grand Street, downtown New York.

Joe: When?

Tim: Sometime this summer.

Joe: Precisely when?

Tim: Sunday, September 1st at 16.28

Joe: Were you alone?

Tim: Yes. No.

Joe: Were you alone?

Tim: Um Lee Lorenzo was with me.

Joe: Who’s he?

Tim: She.

Joe: Who’s she?

Tim: A painter.

Joe: What’s she paint?

Tim: She’s great.

Joe: Did you recognise William Burroughs first?

Tim: Yes.

Joe: What did you say?

Tim: Hey that man looks just like William Burroughs.

Joe: What did she say?

Tim: That is William Burroughs.

Joe: What did you say?

Tim: No kidding.

Joe: What did she say then?

Tim: Nothing. [laughing] Do you want some more cake?

Joe: Thanks. And after the no kidding?

Tim: We walked on to the edge of the pavement.

Joe: Then?

Tim: I said shall I go up and say something and she said why not.

Joe: Go on.

Tim: I just went up.

Joe: What did you say?

Tim: Excuse me are you William Burroughs?

Joe: His reply?

Tim: Yes.

Joe: What did you say then?

Tim: Um I said rather inanely I like what you’re doing.  I don’t remember his reply. I asked him what he was doing at the moment, he said he had just finished the new The Ticket That Exploded I think. I asked him how he liked London as I knew he’d . . . and he said something like London’s a dead scene, I prefer New York. I know what he meant.

Joe: Was that the end?

Tim: Probably.

Joe: Do you know what he was doing there?

Tim: He was hanging round by a phone booth, I think a friend was phoning someone.

Joe: What happened after that?

Tim: I moved off. No I shook hands with him — no that was when I first met him.

Joe: What can you remember of his dress?

Tim: He seemed very smart in a seedy way just like you’d expect.

Joe: Any details?

Tim: New large, pale felt hat.

Joe: Crazy. Suit?

Tim: Pressed pin stripe suit dark blue or black. Dark blue I think.

Joe: Shoes?

Tim: Brown.

Joe: Tie?

Tim: Yes. Maybe he was wearing a coat, no that’s not very likely it was too hot.

Joe: Was he carrying anything, books, a briefcase, a camera?

Tim: No.

Joe: Did you record the experience?

Tim: Yeah for fun. I took two photos of where he’d been standing to see if I could recapture his image on my instamatic. Maybe I should have used infra red.

Joe: How did meeting him differ from meeting anyone else?

Tim: That’s a bugger isn’t it?

Joe: No comment. What was the duration of the meeting?

Tim: Twenty seconds — two minutes — two days.

Joe: What would you like to have discussed with him?

Tim: His methods of time travel using his camera and his documenting of experiences in his journal.

Joe: Did the meeting motivate you to do anything?

Tim: Thinking about writing an article about it which I never got round to. It was going to be a piece of pure fiction.

Joe: Who would you most like to meet?

Tim: The Duke of Edinburgh. It doesn’t really matter what I say.

Joe: What do you associate with the meeting, words, images, colours?

Tim: Dust, greyness, withdrawn kind of warmth.

Joe: That is just how I see him.

Tim: Some sort of receding image.

Joe: What do you think it’s like to be William Burroughs?

Tim: Crippling. No, not really. Exciting.

Joe: Why am I asking you these questions?

Tim: Because I can’t be bothered to write an article.

Joe: For me Burroughs is a unique mixture of extreme toughness and sensitivity. Were either of these attributes apparent?

Tim: I think that’s a fairly accurate description of what it appears that he’s like. It’s quite interesting to meet people on this surface relationship. Maybe it tells you a lot. I don’t believe in depth.

Joe: You imply he’s not as he appears.

Tim: I don’t know.

Joe: What was the most important thing about meeting him?

Tim: Meeting him.

Joe: How do you feel about my asking you these questions?

Tim: I’m sure it will be more interesting than most of the crap in this magazine. In any case it saves me writing that article.

Joe: Sounds like you’re more intelligent than me!

Tim: No just less conscientious.

Joe: What would you like me to ask you?

Tim: [hesitates] Ask me if I’ve been honest.

Joe: O.K.

Tim: Yes. “If my memory serves me well.”

Joe: What is the value of our conversation to the reader do you think?

Tim: It has the value of not giving him a clue as to what Burroughs is about.

Joe: What is Burroughs about?

Tim: I’m not going to tell you.

Joe: Me neither. He wouldn’t. Would it be nice to say yes or no to all this?

Tim: Don’t see it makes any difference. I’ve not said anything anyway.

Joe: Without knowing he was a writer, what would you have taken Burroughs for?

Tim: A writer.

Joe: Did he look nondescript or a character?

Tim: Kind of unusually nondescript.

Joe: Sinister?

Tim: Yes, but that was romanticism on my part.

Joe: Did you like him?

Tim: Yeah, seemed more pleasant than I thought he would be. [yawn]

Joe: Describe his general physical appearance.

Tim: He looked surprisingly well.

Joe: Why surprising?

Tim: Suppose I expected to see signs of [pause] results of use of drugs.

Joe: What did his face look like?

Tim: It wasn’t exactly . . . it was halfway between sunburnt and unhealthy yellow . . . no . . . what do you call somebody who just looks pale and yellow . . . not sallow . . . just pale and yellow. He had very hard eyes. Not harsh just — cold? No.

Joe: Remote?

Tim: Remote and . . . and . . . remote and . . . remote but . . . observant.

Joe: Did his face look tense?

Tim: Yeah, fleshy at the jowels but very economic.

Joe: Emaciated.

Tim: No. More fragile than I’d have thought. I must contradict this because I’m not sure how it was. Frail? Maybe that’s an illusion.

Joe: What was the scene of your meeting?

Tim: By an empty parking lot, a bus had just gone by down Broadway.

Joe: Weather?

Tim: Warm, grey, sultry, quite hot.

Joe: Ginsberg describes Burroughs as ‘reserved and dignified’ . . . Was this your impression?

Tim: Yeah.

Joe: Conrad Knickerbocker found his manner ‘didactic . . . forensic’. Did you?

Tim: No.

Joe: What was your impression of William Burroughs?

Tim: Fleeting.

Joe: He has been mistaken for a British diplomat.

Tim: Not portly enough.

Joe: Did he smile?

Tim: I think so. He was friendly anyway. Yes he did smile.

Joe: How about his voice?

Tim: Thin, reedy, like his eyes. That’s a bit absurd.

Joe: Why do we like William Burroughs?

Tim: One word answer?

Joe: If you like.

Tim: Because he knows.

Joe: Yeah I know. Where were you going when you met him?

Tim: To see Dan Graham, a writer. He said Burroughs was the most important person I was likely to meet in New York.

Joe: What was your reaction to meeting him?

Tim: At the time or afterwards?

Joe: Both.

Tim: Strange.

Joe: Yeah?

Tim: Just strange.

Joe: What did you think as you walked away?

Tim: I was thinking about not getting run over.

Joe: From what source did you recognise him, obviously photographic?

Tim: It’s funny. He was standing with his back to me. It wasn’t his face. Just the way he was standing there.

Joe: Did the meeting confirm your preconception?

Tim: Yeah but it was over in such a short time it was like I made it up. I got to thinking maybe it wasn’t Burroughs at all, maybe it was [consults book] Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare. Or someone. It made a good interview anyway.

Joe: Yeah I enjoyed it.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have a theory that if you dig deep enough, take the time to ask the right questions, and do diligent research, everybody is interesting. It is my spin on Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes. I guess I see the silver lining in the gray flannel suit. Take David Solomon. Solomon was an editor at Esquire, Metronome, and Playboy in the 1950s and 1960s, and I recently bought a very small archive of his papers relating to William Burroughs. The documents deal with Burroughs’ projects for those magazines and for some related anthologies. Given my obsession with magazine appearances, they were interesting enough for me to shell out the cash. A little more digging and a bit more research into Solomon make the papers even more valuable to me and I hope to others. I planned on writing a completely different essay utilizing this material, but that will have to wait. In researching Solomon, I took a trip and got sidetracked into the weird and that is always a fun place to go. Hop on the bus if you care to.

Born in 1925 in California, Solomon came of age at the same time as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady. Unlike the Beats, Solomon served in World War II and suffered tremendous loss. His two brothers were killed in bombing runs over Germany, and like Private Ryan, Solomon was pulled from the front lines as the only surviving son in his family. Solomon was discharged in 1946 and took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college. He received a BA from Washington Square College of New York University, but his real education was earned in combat in Europe, in the jazz clubs of New York, in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, and in the drug culture of Washington Square. Attempting to come to terms with the Bomb, traumatized by their war experience, and fascinated with African-American and drug culture, young men like Solomon became the hipsters and White Negroes represented by the early Beats and belatedly described by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay in Dissent.

Solomon married and had two children, but he remained in the Village, refusing to move out to the Levittowns that sprang up like mushrooms around New York City. By the mid-1950s, Solomon was an assistant editor at Esquire. His tenure there lasted until 1960, and he left just before the magazine’s renaissance under the editorial leadership of Harold Hayes who beat out such young lions as Clay Felker and Ralph Ginzburg for the position. Hayes, Felker, and Ginzburg would change mainstream magazine publishing and challenge the rules of the game in the 1960s. Solomon lacked their editorial genius but, in his own way, he would make his mark on the profession by incorporating his hipster sensibility into the mainstream press. Solomon was the White Negro as editor.

While at Esquire, Solomon contacted Aldous Huxley about revising Huxley’s “The History of Tension” article in light of another piece, “Drugs that Shape Men’s Minds,” which Huxley had published in The Saturday Evening Post. The Esquire essay was to have been titled “The Coming Defeat of Tension” and would have reflected Huxley’s belief that “present and yet to be developed pharmacological agents will bring about a religious and ethical revolution.” Huxley’s writings on drugs, notably The Doors of Perception, were read as sacred texts for psychedelic adventurers of the 1960s. It was while researching Huxley that Solomon became an early psychedelic enthusiast. The revised article never appeared in Esquire, but Solomon took Huxley as his guru and soldiered on in a hands-on exploration of psychedelics and their history. In time, Solomon’s knowledge of drugs and drug culture became legendary.

In 1960, Solomon became editor of Metronome, a mainstream jazz magazine. Solomon was a friend of Dizzy Gillespie, a regular at jazz clubs, and, of course, was well-versed in jazz’s druggy elements, particularly marijuana and heroin. Under Solomon’s direction, Metronome made a play to be hip, and his interest in drugs filtered into the magazine. Here is where William Burroughs comes in. It always struck me as odd that in May and August of 1961, Burroughs appeared in Metronome. Learning about Solomon, it all became clear. Naturally, Solomon was a big fan of Burroughs’ writing, and throughout the 1960s, Solomon attempted to get Burroughs published in his mainstream ventures. In May of 1961, Burroughs contributed “No Bueno,” a selection from the just published Soft Machine, to Metronome. Burroughs received $50. The selection was presented as an anti-drug piece showing the horrors of heroin use — which, in jazz circles, had become a plague that destroyed the lives of Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, and numerous others. Miles Davis and John Coltrane temporarily kicked heroin habits in the late 1950s and entered into a period of incredible creativity. In August 1961, Burroughs contributed “This Is the Time of the Assassins,” a Hassan I Sabbah inspired piece. No doubt, Solomon was well-versed in the hashish cult of Sabbah.

While Burroughs was featured in a 1959 issue of Life (including a photograph) and appeared in the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle, Metronome provided the first appearance of Burroughs’ fiction in a mainstream publication. Thus, in the summer of 1961, Burroughs’ fiction hit the newsstand. This was the Burroughs of Soft Machine and the cut-up (even if the selections were less jarring than usual), not Naked Lunch or Junkie. I suspect that readers of Metronome would have been left shaking their heads and muttering “No Bueno.” Burroughs’ writing clearly stands out in the magazine.

This was the height of the Cold War, and the psychedelic 1960s had yet to emerge from the decade of Miltown. Solomon’s editorial on The Jazz Gap in the May 1961 issue makes this clear. The editorial refers to the alleged missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States that placed the world on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Solomon assured his readers that the United States was the leader of the jazz world. However, with the USSR entering the field, the gap was threatening to narrow. As a result, Metronome assigned a Soviet correspondent to cover this new jazz scene. Solomon did not last long as editor of Metronome. Printing Burroughs probably had a role in his departure. Burroughs wrote to Solomon on January 27, 1962, “When I was in New York I tried to reach you through Metronome — Long purged pause — Mr. Solomon isn’t with us anymore — ”

In the mid-1960s, Solomon latched on as literary editor for Playboy, and he thought of William Burroughs as a potential contributor. Burroughs and Solomon traded various ideas for contributing to the magazine. Burroughs suggested his old stand-bys: words of advice to young writers or his experiences as a drug addict. The fee would be $250 “turn-down guarantee” with $1500 payable if the article was accepted. The proposal was rejected by A.C. Spectorsky, Playboy‘s publisher. It was back to the drawing board. In late 1964, Burroughs planned on returning to the United States after a decade of exile. Burroughs hoped to travel to St. Louis, his place of birth; why not, Burroughs suggested, write a piece about his impressions on his return home? Solomon pitched the idea as follows: “I strongly advise that we assign Burroughs. The return of the outcast, the reformed junky lately turned literary genius, to lay down a ‘smog of nostalgia’ on his grimy hometown is enough to make me want to meet him in St. Louis.” Burroughs’ proposed title: “Meet Me in St. Louis.” The idea was accepted by Playboy and Burroughs got to work.

I suppose Solomon had less control over the content in Playboy than in Metronome. Playboy received Burroughs’ article, later entitled “St. Louis Return,” and could not make heads or tails of it. As advertised the article contains much nostalgia but little of the hip, yet safely consumerist, take on sex, politics, or lifestyle endorsed by Hugh Hefner. Instead the piece was largely a statement of the cut-up technique in the cut-up style. The piece was mostly veiled literary discussion, not about lifestyle or life story. Burroughs’ contribution was rejected and never appeared in Playboy.

Yet Playboy‘s loss was the Paris Review‘s gain. “St. Louis Return” appeared in 1965 in Issue 35 of the Paris Review along with an interview of Burroughs by Conrad Knickerbocker for the Art of Fiction section. In my opinion it is not an exaggeration to consider this magazine appearance one of the most important of Burroughs’ career. To this day, the interview remains one of Burroughs’ most detailed and thoughtful statements on his personal history and literary techniques. In addition, the inclusion of images from Burroughs’ St. Louis Journals gave a rare glimpse into the kind of visual-textual work Burroughs was doing at the time. The Paris Review presented Burroughs as a major writer and theorist, not a popular culture figure. For a piece such as “St. Louis Return,” the Paris Review proved the ideal venue.

This treatment of Burroughs was a masterpiece of editorship. This is indicative of the work published during Tom Clark’s tenure as poetry editor. The Burroughs material benefitted from a strong editorial hand and vision coupled with the right venue — both of which Solomon lacked. As we will see, Solomon would soon find his niche and succeed as a salesman of drug culture on multiple levels. On the other hand, Clark was a young poet, who became poetry editor in the mid-1960s, and completely revitalized the Review, making it a major outlet for new poetry. He did this by including his friends — Ted Berrigan and other New York poets — as well as incorporating these poets’ heroes: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Issue 35 includes Robin Blaser, Ed Dorn, Ron Padgett, Tom Pickard, and Aram Saroyan — cutting-edge choices to be sure. The issue also features an interview with Dizzy Gillespie. It is as if Solomon edited a little mag. For me, the period of Clark’s editorship was the high-water mark of the Paris Review.

While Solomon was largely unsuccessful in magazine publishing, his serious and evangelical take on drugs proved perfect for mainstream book publishers. From 1964 to 1975, Solomon edited a series of anthologies that provided intellectual, philosophical, medical, and historical takes on various drugs from LSD to marijuana to cocaine. The titles include LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (1964), The Marijuana Papers (1966), Drugs and Sexuality (1973) and The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers (1975). He created a forum of educated and academic discussion for much mythologized subjects. For a public fascinated but largely uneducated about drugs, these anthologies proved irresistible and became best sellers. The books were available, in some cases, in both hardcover and paperback. They highlight Solomon’s skill in marketing psychedelics and drug culture to mainstream audiences.

Burroughs no doubt appreciated the cash. In a February 5, 1962 letter on Avon stationery, Solomon writes Burroughs proposing an anthology in order to get Burroughs some money. Quite possibly the resulting anthology was the one on LSD. Burroughs got paid $100 for reprint rights to “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness Expanding Drugs” for the LSD anthology eventually published by Putnam. Avon was part of the book division of The Hearst Corporation, acquired by Hearst in 1959. Avon made its name publishing comic books and pulp paperbacks. The imprint was far from literary and dealt strictly with topics with mass appeal. Solomon was something of a hipster spy. Solomon writes, “Working for Hearst a morbid kick…unless I learn to turn on with formaldehyde, I’m cooked.” The letter is redacted, and I like to think the “informal postal exchange” referred to a drug exchange with Allen Ginsberg undertaken in the belly of the publishing beast.

Huxley was the guiding light of the LSD anthology and the book is dedicated to him: “guru extraordinaire, whose words first beckoned me through the doors of perception.” Timothy Leary wrote the introduction. It is a serious treatment of LSD with the table of contents loaded with MDs and PhDs. Burroughs stands out with his lack of an advanced degree, but he belongs. He was a Master Addict of Dangerous Drugs, after all. The anthology was aimed to introduce philosophical and medical evidence in support of the benefits of LSD at a time when the drug was coming under fire by the police, government, and mainstream media. The last paragraph to Solomon’s editor’s note could have served as a Bill of Rights for a psychedelic nation: “Moreover, I believe that the astonishing human brain is man’s most inalienable possession, his intellectual birthright. No person or institution has the moral right to muffle or inhibit its development. No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the right to dictate and fix the levels of consciousness to which men aspire, whether those states are induced pharmacologically or otherwise. Die gedanken sind frei.”

In 1966, Solomon and his family moved to Mallorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean that was dominated by the presence of Robert Graves. Graves’s literary career roughly paralleled that of Aldous Huxley. Both were British modernists who later in life transformed into psychedelic pioneers. Graves became particularly fascinated with mushroom cults, and such interests filtered into his increasingly mystical worldview, developed in Food For Centaurs (1960) and elsewhere. Solomon insinuated himself into the literary and drug culture of Mallorca but just as quickly found himself on the wrong end of the law. Forced to leave the island, Solomon moved to England and settled in the intellectual confines of Cambridge, which was in throes of the psychedelic revolution. Given his vast knowledge of drugs and England’s cultural climate at the time, Solomon, like Huxley and Graves, found himself considered a guru, a position he came to relish.

At this point, Solomon’s interest in drugs reached a new, and ultimately disastrous, level. Like many proponents of psychedelics, Solomon was well situated to become involved in drug manufacturing and trafficking. Timothy Leary followed a similar path. For example, Leary’s International Foundation for Internal Freedom became aligned with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Billy Hitchcock, a young heir to a vast fortune and a believer in Leary’s philosophies, financed Leary’s LSD headquarters in Millbrook, a place of introspection and self-discovery. But the potential for profit was too great for Hitchcock and others to ignore and what started as a spiritual exploration mutated into a money-making enterprise and a criminal organization. Eventually, Hitchcock became the financier for much of the LSD underground.

Solomon, along with two refugees from Millbrook, came up with the idea of liquefying the active ingredient of marijuana, THC, in order to allow mass distribution and easier transportation. At the time (1968), THC was legal in Great Britain. Perhaps Solomon’s ambition was to spread the drug in order to advance the psychedelic revolution, but his associates were less idealistic. Eventually, Solomon’s utopian vision would prove susceptible to corruption as well.

In Cambridge, a circle developed around Solomon and drugs that had wide-ranging influence on intellectuals’ reception of psychedelics and on the illicit LSD trade. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Francis Crick was briefly involved with Solomon’s social scene. Crick, who developed the concept of the DNA double helix, came up with his revolutionary idea after an LSD trip. Solomon searched around Cambridge for a chemist with the scientific knowledge he required for the THC project and met Dick Kemp through Crick. Kemp was drawn to Solomon’s circle because of Crick’s presence. Crick convinced Kemp of LSD’s value to society.

Like Augustus Owsley and Tim Scully before him, Kemp bought into the idea of a psychedelic revolution and became a drug chemist on an international scale. The ability to liquefy THC eluded Solomon and Kemp, but Solomon with his drug connections was able to acquire large quantities of Ergotamine Tartrate, which is the base material for the manufacture of LSD. Thus Solomon was no longer just a drug enthusiast; he was a major player in an international drug enterprise.

Yet Solomon remained something of a schlemiel. As in his career as a magazine editor, his ideas and his ambition overreached his abilities. Solomon may have been well-versed in drug knowledge and culture, he may have talked the talk, but he could not walk the walk. He was clearly out of his league in the area of drug manufacture. The LSD whose production he oversaw was usually of poor quality and often cut into diluted doses. In one case, Solomon attempted to create his own LSD capsules and succeeded in dosing himself with 1000 mics of acid, which left him with the trip of his life and bedridden for nearly a week. Solomon was far from a criminal mastermind.

Solomon’s drug partners realized his incompetence and attempted to distance themselves from him. In addition, Solomon bragged of his involvement in the ring to anyone who would listen. The path to eventual disaster was well paved and Solomon raced downhill to his fate. Despite Solomon’s lack of street smarts, he was well connected with drug suppliers. Unfortunately for his drug associates, Solomon was a necessary evil.

For the full story of the development and unraveling of this drug ring, see the book by Stewart Tendler and David May. To make a long story short, the dominoes began to fall as members of the ring were arrested on unrelated drug and smuggling charges and the extent of its activities became clear. Gerry Thomas, a partner of Solomon’s in the THC scheme, was arrested in Canada and due to a feud with Solomon supplied the information that led to the investigation of The Micro Dot Gang, which included the British LSD group co-founded by Solomon and The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Once again, Solomon proved the weak link in the drug ring.

Inspector Dick Lee, a figure straight out of a William Burroughs novel, spearheaded Operation Julie to take down the LSD empire. Lee’s organization was the culmination of over a decade of harassment and demonization of the LSD counterculture. Operation Julie demonstrated the possibilities of international police cooperation, adequate funding, fully developed informant and undercover networks, and hi-tech surveillance. Narcs and wire/phone tapping were standard courses of business for this beefed up, and increasingly, well-funded police bureaucracy. The blueprint for the War on Drugs in the 1980s was set into action. The policies of fear, misinformation, and intolerance pursued by the government and police created a poisonous atmosphere ripe for generating a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a great example of the importance of set and setting. In part, such policies changed what began as an exploration of freedom, peace, and love into a culture of paranoia and violence. The Weathermen, Charles Manson, and Altamont also demonstrate this shift. On another level, the LSD trade mutated from a loose community of psychedelic idealists to an international network of psychedelic capitalists. This is indicative of a similar evolution in the counterculture generally, both in the 1960s where the counterculture quickly became co-opted by the consumer culture, and in the neoconservative revolution of the 1980s, where yesteryear’s hippies became the Me Decade’s Gordon Geckos. To a certain extent, David Solomon can be viewed as a case study in such trends.

Eventually Solomon was arrested and sentenced to ten years in jail. In 1980 in the International Times, Allen Ginsberg wrote an article on Solomon. This was the Frivolous Summer Issue that also featured articles on American Indian genocide, Baader Meinhof, and the Cannabis Conference. IT appeared in fits and starts over the coming years, but the Frivolous Summer tabloid was effectively the swan song for this long-running underground paper that began during the Summer of Love in 1966. The incarceration of Solomon and his LSD cohorts likewise signaled the end of an era. Reagan and Thatcher were soon in office and the idealism and accomplishments of the 1960s, already disillusioned and crumbling, were demonized and dismantled even further. Solomon served a partial sentence until 1983 when he returned to New York City and the jazz clubs where he had received his first tastes of the drug culture that would eventually consume and destroy him.

Solomon died in April 2007 at the age of 81. His obituary in The Villager passed over his role in Operation Julie and instead focused on his editorial work with Esquire, Metronome. and Playboy. Yet Solomon’s role in the British LSD Group proves more interesting and important than his editorial work. Like the rise and fall of Timothy Leary, the story of David Solomon shows how the seductive power of the psychedelic revolution and the intrusive fear tactics of governmental and police bureaucracies can corrupt an idealistic vision of a better, freer world into a nightmare of criminal activity fueled by paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and blind ambition. Solomon, like Leary, traded his dreams of a new society for power and wealth. At their cores, both men were feckless squares who just wanted to be accepted by a community and culture they were fascinated with but were really outside of. The desire to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out was mainly a need to Fit In. In this effort, they got wrapped up in forces beyond their imagination and control.

The psychedelic revolution was, and is, an inspired act of hubris. Even gurus such as Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and David Solomon had trouble harnessing their power. Ultimately such drugs are stronger than humans, and a society based on psychedelic exploration and widespread permissiveness seems to me doomed to failure. We are a Faustian species, but we cannot handle psychedelics’ truths. Possibly the weak link is more than an atmosphere of misconceptions and mishandled policy but is instead actually written into our DNA. We are not gods; we cannot feed on ambrosia. In his exploration of such drugs, David Solomon, like many of the true believers of the psychedelic era, bit off much more than he could chew.

Texts by William Burroughs in Metronome

William Burroughs, “No Bueno”
Metronome, May 1961

William Burroughs, “No Bueno”
Metronome, May 1961

William Burroughs, “Time of the Assassins”
Metronome, August 1961

William Burroughs, “Time of the Assassins”
Metronome, August 1961

David Solomon and William Burroughs: Correspondence, Contracts, and Ephemera

Letter from William Burroughs to David Solomon
27 Jan 1961

Letter from David Solomon to William Burroughs
19 April 1961

Letter from Timothy Leary to David Solomon
15 Jan 1962

Letter from David Solomon to William Burroughs
5 Feb 1962

Letter from William Burroughs to David Solomon
12 August 1964

Letter from David Solomon to Jack Kessie
21 Aug 1964

Letter from David Solomon to William Burroughs
1 Sept 1964

Letter from William Burroughs to David Solomon
9 Nov 1964

Letter from David Solomon to A.C. Spectorsky
13 Nov 1964

Contract for William Burroughs’ contribution to LSD anthology
7 April 1964

Check from David Solomon to William Burroughs for his contribution to LSD anthology
23 Oct 1964

Introduction

After going to see the Villa Seurat, where Henry Miller lived when he wrote Tropic of Cancer, we stopped at the Café Zeyer for drinks. The Zeyer, which he described as “a gaudy place with red plush and mirrors and polished brass,” was where Miller often took a fine à l’eau and argued metaphysics with friends. It was a burning hot day in Paris. Carl Weissner ordered beer. His close friend Jan Herman, publisher of San Francisco Earthquake and the Nova Broadcast Press, ordered a kir, as did his wife Janet. “Tell Carl the story about Buk,” I urged.

The previous night Janet had told me about the time Jan took her to meet Charles Bukowski in Los Angeles. They brought a bottle, on Carl’s advice, and ended up finishing it. When they were taking their leave, Buk moved to kiss the young and fetching Janet — and promptly shoved his alcoholic old tongue down her throat. She was disgusted, but it made for a great story a few decades later. “You should have challenged him to a duel on the beach — with sabers,” Carl growled, rubbing his hands together with a glee suggesting that he was really visualizing this oceanside face-off.

Carl, born in Germany during World War II, once joked to me that his greatest ambition was to become an American writer. In a way, he has fulfilled that ambition vicariously. His definitive translations of Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, and others have sold literally millions of copies in Germany. “It was Carl,” Jan once told me, “who really turned Bukowski into something. It was Carl who got him major notice in Der Spiegel. That set off the craze in Germany and boomeranged back here. Bukowski never became a mainstream success till that happened.”

Bukowski made no secret of his gratitude to Carl, not just for his translations but for something much more important — understanding, support, friendship. Buk told one interviewer:

[Weissner’s] letters were quite incisive, entertaining (lively as hell), and he bucked up my struggle in the darkness, no end. A letter from Carl always was and still is an infusion of life and hope and easy wisdom. I was in the post office at the time and living with a crazy and alcoholic woman and writing anyhow. All our money went for booze. We lived in rags and a rage of despair. I remember I didn’t even have money for shoes. The nails from my old shoes dug into my feet as I walked my routes hungover and mad. We drank all night and I had to get up at 5 a.m. When I wrote, the poems came out of this and the letters from Carl were the only good magic about.

Presumably William Burroughs must have felt the same. In 1966 Burroughs traveled from Paris to Heidelberg to meet Carl. They had been corresponding and publishing cut-ups in the same little mags. “I opened the door,” Carl wrote in a letter later published by Victor Bockris in With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, “and for a fraction of a second before the hall light went out I caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, about 52 years of age, black suit black tie white shirt w/ black needle stripes black phosphorescent eyes black hat. He looked like Opium Jones.” If Carl thought Burroughs’ apparition was dreamlike, perhaps the feeling was mutual. Years later, after Carl had translated some dozen of his books, Burroughs recorded a dream in My Education that may have harked back to that first meeting: “With Carl Weissner in Germany. I ask him: ‘Just where are we? Germany? Belgium?'”

In the five years after their initial meeting, the writers would intersect in a number of book projects and little mags, including Weissner’s own Klacto. In 1967, Beach Books in San Francisco published So Who Owns Death TV?, a pamphlet containing cut-ups by Burroughs, Weissner, and Claude Pélieu. Herman’s Nova Broadcast Press would publish Burroughs’ The Dead Star in 1969; The Louis Project, containing texts by Weissner and Herman, in 1970; and Weissner’s book of cut-ups, The Braille Film, which contained a “counterscript” by Burroughs, in 1970. In 1972 Agentzia in Paris would publish Cut Up or Shut Up, a compilation of cut-ups by Weissner, Herman, and Jürgen Ploog, with a “tickertape” by Burroughs running across the top of the pages.

Braille Film is the most significant of these books. The title hinted at either a synesthesia (touch compounded with sight) or an absurdity (touch compounded with sight?) that has since become less inconceivable owing to the invention of touchscreens. Doubtless Weissner also intended an assault on every sense possible. The density of the imagery in Braille Film is a key component of the book’s impact. “Weissner,” Jed Birmingham has written, “is one of the foremost practitioners of the cut-up, and when Burroughs scaled back the technique Weissner pushed it forward.” Just as Burroughs was turning to more narrative texts such as The Wild Boys (1971), Weissner emitted this bombshell of relentless images and standout lines. “Dead tissue fades in the searchlights” … “The white labyrinth of silence has no emergency exits” … “I watched him masturbate in the halflight. (Looks like he’s counting money.).” … “The thoughtographs went up in silver dust.”

Though the cut-up technique gradually made its way into popular culture — most notably when David Bowie used the method to produce song lyrics — it was not for experimentation but for translation that Weissner won acclaim in the 1970s. He once explained to me that, of all the books he’d translated, Nova Express was the most difficult. Consider a random phrase, “so the Venusian Gook Rot flashed round the world.” Venusian gook rot? It takes a unique sensibility to translate that. In an essay included in Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays, Ploog describes how Weissner achieved that sensibility. “Weissner,” Ploog writes, “had hung out in jazz joints in Heidelberg frequented by GIs, and he’d spent considerable time in the States. He was the man to get the rude and loose intonation across. Where the Behrens [previous translators of Naked Lunch] had to say ‘opiates,’ Weissner was able to go straight to ‘junk.'” In his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, old friend Harold Norse pronounced Weissner “the best German translator of the Beats and raw-meat writers.”

Although the renown from his translations enabled Weissner to write for mainstream magazines such as Rolling Stone, literary experimentation never ceased to form an important part of his repertoire. From 1973 to 1986 he co-edited, with Ploog and Jörg Fauser, the little mag Gasolin 23, which published his own work alongside that of Burroughs, Bukowski, et al. In more recent times, Weissner has been working on two novels and further experiments. The latest of these is Death in Paris.

This new text clearly references its namesake, Death in Venice: Thomas Mann’s narrative moves from Munich to Venice, Weissner’s non-narrative from San Francisco to Paris; the cholera plague in Venice becomes a spree of random violence in Paris; Mann’s protagonist, a world-weary writer, becomes Weissner’s cynical but sharp-eyed littérateur; etc. Each text is the story of a man, a city, and a love interest — except that Mann’s hero obsesses over a young man, while Weissner’s anti-hero prefers death, particularly its homicidal forms.

Death in Paris, however, is no simple rewrite of Death in Venice. Weissner does not do the Hollywood remake, “updating the story for today” or some such. What he does to Death in Venice is what a terrorist does when tossing an improvised explosive device into a crowd. He sews chaos, inflicts violence, and, most important, makes a statement. In that sense, the m.o. is creation through destruction — except that to say as much of Death in Paris runs the risk of diminishing the text’s real creativity, its black humor, wisdom, and vitality. Is there a bad metaphor in the thing? I read it (for the sixth time now) and think to myself, “How can a foreigner write like this in English?” Or more simply: how can anyone write like this? Jesus.

RealityStudio is truly thrilled to be able to present this previously unpublished text by Carl Weissner. Death in Paris is available in its entirety to read online or to print. Doubtless it will help to put La Louisiane, the Paris hotel which figures so prominently in the text and where much of it may have been written, alongside the Villa Seurat and so many other places on the literary map of Paris.

Death in Paris

Death in Paris

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An Archive Celebrating Carl Weissner’s Publications in the Avant-Garde

• In Memory of Carl Weissner
• The Braille Film (34 mb pdf)
• Carl Weissner in Books and Pamphlets
• Klactoveedsedsteen
• Gasolin 23
• UFO
• Weissneriana
• Weissner in My Own Mag
• Correspondence
• Dripping Wet in Reykjavik: An Airmail Interview with Carl Weissner, by Victor Bockris
• Translations
• A Bibliography of Carl Weissner Translations by Matthias Penzel
• Nothing Here Now But the Lost Recordings by Ed Robinson
• Audio: The Poetry of Equal Time
• Jan Herman & Carl Weissner, Mayor Daley: “i press my lips / to my toetips” (1971)
• Jan Herman & Carl Weissner, President Nixon: “that is the way to make progress” (1971)

In 1979 Savoy Books was prepared to publish a uniform edition of works by Burroughs when it was subject to a series of police raids that temporarily forced it into bankruptcy. The project was scuttled, but Britton and Butterworth never lost their tremendous admiration for Burroughs. A few days after his death in 1997, the two gave an interview to Sarajane Inkster describing their visit to the Bunker, Burroughs’ abode on New York’s down-and-out Bowery. Now they expand on that interview to commemorate the 2008 publication of Horror Panegyric. A collaboration between Savoy Books and Supervert, creator of RealityStudio, Horror Panegyric features an enthusiastic analysis of the Lord Horror novels, excerpts from the hard-to-find books themselves, and a timeline of Lord Horror productions including books, comics, and CDs. The hardcover book may be purchased from Amazon, and the text is also available in its entirety at supervert.com.

Meeting William Burroughs

An interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth at the Savoy Offices, 12th August 1997, ten days after Burroughs’ death. Conducted by Sarajane Inkster and originally published on Savoy’s web site.

On 23 May, 1979, Michael Butterworth and David Britton of the Manchester publishers Savoy Books took the opportunity to visit William Burroughs. They met him at The Bunker, his home on the Bowery, New York, before he moved to live in Kansas. The publishers were staying in Manhattan, en-route to the American Booksellers Association Trade Exhibition in Los Angeles. Michael Butterworth’s note book records the visit briefly with the barest facts:

NOON — William Burroughs, 222 The Bowery, between Prince St. and Spring St., on The Bowery. (Google Map) Call first by phone before knocking. We to make offer to his London Agent for Cities of the Red Night and arrangements to discuss The Job and Dutch Schultz. [Verbatim text from Michael Butterworth’s 1979 American Notebook.]

Ostensibly their intention was to discuss with Burroughs a Savoy line of his work. However, although the meeting went well, the venture was ill-fated.

As of writing, the company has recently emerged from 20 years of persecution by the Manchester police and city authorities. Unknown to them in 1979 — the time of their visit to the Bunker — they were soon to be dealt a body blow. Returning to England, after successfully contracting to publish the paperback edition of Cities of the Red Night, Savoy was hit by the first of three big raids. (Two other raids, in 1989 and 1990, concerned the publication of their novel Lord Horror and various graphic works.) Led by “God’s Cop” Police Chief Constable James Anderton, this raid was a co-ordinated simultaneous swoop on their main retail and publishing premises, and almost achieved the intention of shutting down their company. It was the culmination of many smaller raids. In total, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock were seized and not returned, including Savoy-published titles by Samuel Delany, Charles Platt, and Jack Trevor Story. At the same time, an unrelated action by the Times Mirror Organisation in America dealt a body blow to the publishing house New American Library. This had a knock-on effect on Savoy’s distributor-publishers, New English Library, who went into liquidation. Savoy was forced into temporary bankruptcy in 1981, and in 1982 David Britton was jailed — the first of two jail sentences connected with his publishing which he had to endure. Savoy lost Cities to another publisher.

Butterworth and Britton’s other agenda worked out well — they met one of their literary heroes, one of the great people of the 20th Century.

I asked them for their memories of that meeting.

David Britton: My memories of William Burroughs at that date are mixed up today with the images you see of him on film. You know — “Did I really meet him, or was it the dream celluloid Burroughs who sat opposite drinking tea?” However, I do remember thinking that the Bunker was definitely an extension of Burroughs’ personality. Burroughs added ambience to the place, which was an old gymnasium — the sort you would see depicted in gangster films set in the Brooklyn of the ’30s, where Pat O’Brien plays the honest priest, and all his young punks are working up a sweat in the gym — Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, etc. You could just see Burroughs as the Daddy, The Bowery Daddy, and the Dead-End Kids as his private street gang. Even their name sounds like one of his creations.

There was a flight of long stairs up to the Bunker which was a long room with a couple of side-rooms and a kitchen. I remember the “john” — a partitioned-off area with a row of old-fashioned tiled urinals, which had the sort of sleazy sex connotations you would expect of Burroughs’ living quarters.

Michael Butterworth: The Bunker was in a run-down low-rise area of stores, bars and light industry, very like Ancoats in Manchester, only busier. On the ground floor was what seems in my memory to be a used furniture store selling tall cabinets and cupboards, or wardrobes. It had open iron security gates, and was the general entrance to the building. I can’t remember how we got upstairs, or who met us to show us up. It may have been Burroughs. Possibly we walked up after calling on a door entry system. I remember Burroughs brewing us tea. During the meeting there was the sound of typing coming from a small side-room — probably his companion, James Grauerholz, who was also his secretary and manager. It was Grauerholz who — with Allen Ginsberg — did so much to help gain establishment respectability for Burroughs. It would figure, because at this time Victor Bockris was being allowed to make introductions between Burroughs and celebrities like Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Nicolas Roeg, Andy Warhol, and Tennessee Williams. [Bockris was the author of With William Burroughs, A Report From the Bunker, 1981, Seaver Books, New York.]

Inkster: How did you arrange your meeting with Burroughs?

Butterworth: We phoned Burroughs before we called round to see him. We told him that we were interested in doing the UK paperback edition of Cities of the Red Night, which he was still working on. At first he wondered why we wanted to see him rather than his London agent. I said we would do this, but we would still like to meet him as we were in New York and could show him our titles, and explain to him what type of company we were. On reflection, he probably realised that we were looking for a slender reason to meet him, and he very kindly allowed us his time. Yet we were seriously interested in publishing Cities, which we thought was his best novel since The Naked Lunch. We also told him that we seriously intended to make available new paperback editions of harder-to-get works like The Job and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. We were planning for these to be in uniform editions, if we could, and this seemed to please him. When we got back home we contracted with John Calder, his UK hardback publisher, to do the paperback edition of Cities. This was to have been the first title in what we saw as a Burroughs line, which could establish Savoy as a major publishing company.

Britton: We offered what was for us a high advance of £10,000, and were surprised when it was accepted. For someone of Burroughs’ calibre, it was a low figure. It made us wonder what other publishers had offered, what they thought he was worth. He never did earn a vast amount of money, despite what people think. When he was in England he was reported as saying that he was earning what the average plumber would earn.

Inkster: How much time did you spend with him?

Britton: It’s hard to recall how long we were with him. (Records show no more than about 2 hours). We’d brought with us a selection of our titles. I can remember discussing The Savoy Book with him. This is a collection of fiction and graphics which we’d just put out. It had such writers as M John Harrison, who worked for us at the time, and Harlan Ellison. We’d published Harlan’s book, The Glass Teat, and were going to see him next, to discuss further titles with him at his home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. Our good friend Heathcote Williams was in there… and artists such as Jim Leon, who had illustrated for Oz magazine. It was a showcase collection for Savoy. We would also probably have left with him titles like Charles Platt’s The Gas, Delany’s Tides of Lust, Michael Moorcock’s The Golden Barge, Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, and Henry Treece’s Celtic tetralogy. We discussed Harry Clarke, the Irish artist, who Burroughs knew of. Clarke illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination — which suggests that we also talked about Poe. At the time we were contemplating doing a book of Clarke’s colour and stained glass work…

Inkster: Was there any sense of the atmosphere at the Bunker being “contrived” in any way?

Britton: No — not at all. It was very definitely a home, first and foremost. The place was very clean, and pleasing to the eye, with no sense of the dereliction of the streets outside. It was open-plan and so from where we were sat we could see across the room to the kitchen area, where he made us tea. Burroughs dealt with everything, and he knew his way about. We saw no one else. He was the perfect host.

Butterworth: There were no windows. It was where Burroughs lived, slept and worked — like a bunker. But it was strange because you were actually upstairs, on the first floor. We sat on one side of a longish table, with him facing us, constantly smoking thin cigarettes. He was very polite and well dressed in a light suit. He looked and behaved exactly as you would expect from his public profile, but his formality broke and he became genuinely interested when he came across one of Dave’s illustrations. The picture, from The Savoy Book, was called “A Fortnight on Calvary: Don’t Put Me Down Like All the Other Fish.” It has a weird alien landscape, in which are two figures. The main figure was Count Sublime Hubris, one of the characters who later appeared in Lord Horror, imperiously tall, black, and dressed in finery, like Little Richard, but with an exposed cunt. The other was also black, but winged, small and naked, and fierce, with a very large hard-on, sucking on a tube which has been fed into the Count’s vagina. It made Burroughs chuckle, and he asked who had drawn it.

Inkster: Were you nervous about meeting someone who was obviously so important to you?

Britton: Yes, it was nerve-wracking, and easier that we had been a pair visiting him.

Inkster: How much did this meeting with Burroughs mean to you?

Butterworth: It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. As a writer he had had an altering effect on me — after coming across his work I was not the same person. He opened my mind to possibility more than any others except other greats like Rabelais, or Lautréamont or Bosch. He was by far the most important person I have met or probably will ever meet. I regret that we took no pictures, but that was what everyone else was doing, which was not the Savoy style. Savoy was a calling card that allowed us to legitimately meet people we admired, like Burroughs, Gerald Scarfe or Burne Hogarth. At the time, that was enough.

Britton: There was something magical about meeting him. I thought of him as a sorcerous “Tinkerbell” — and some of his inspiring talent might just dust off. Mr Burroughs was Chaos Magick incarnate and, like the best oneiric spells, your memories of what was said and done are fractured. Just the “distant wonderland” of it all stays with me. It was a very important moment in our lives.

Inkster: Can you think of anyone else to compare him with?

Britton: Ironically, despite his anti-drug stance, Frank Zappa comes immediately to mind. Particularly the early Zappa, who had a similarly cynical turn of mind and cold intelligence. It goes without saying that Burroughs was the greater, original artist. Andrea Dworkin has his passion, though her obsessions are elsewhere. It’s difficult to think of Burroughs having any peers. To me, he never seemed to quite fit with the Beats, nor with later contemporaries like Vidal, Mailer, Bellow or Updike. They were writing about the present, but Burroughs was “leaking in” the future for us: which will be alien. His mindset was genuinely alien, his mental umbilical chord was cut off from the rest of humanity, and he could articulate that discord within himself with the most powerful of visions. Burroughs had opened himself up, fallen into hell and climbed back out again. There are no other living writers capable of sustaining such visions. He was a mutant product of those strange decades, the ’30s-’50s. They gave him a primitive quality denied to later generations of writers — who are urban, literate in computers and technology, but lacking his connections with the fleshy and sinister.

Butterworth: I can’t compare him with anyone except, strangely, considering what Dave has just said, in a small way to Don Van Vliet — Captain Beefheart — with his ability to draw so directly on experience to make art. Burroughs’ work is so different to what went before. No one today has his idiosyncratic genius. He has had such a diverse effect — on literature, music, films, and electronic culture. Whatever detractors say of him — that he is misguided, lightweight, or whatever — will only serve to confound all the more, as his influence is seen to continue to grow, particularly now that he is dead. He is a hybrid genius, a great poet of the technological age, and a great satirist… and to some a spiritual leader.

His best poetic writing, especially his depiction of things gone, in broken, fragmented images — a yearning for the absolute, and at the same time an intense sadness or grief for man’s inability to attain ‘something’ lost — produces an acute nagging pain inside me. It is like the worst love sickness, a terrible ache in the stomach, a feeling of fragility. I sense his loss, his fear. I pick it up off him like a worrying parent does off a child. Of course, if his writing did just this, that would not make it great. What makes it great is the way he is able to use this peculiarly intense emotion to describe reality, unbearable beauty and awfulness of the universe, of distant galaxies as well as the human life processes.
Inkster: And now that he is dead?

Butterworth: His death — his final editor — only intensifies everything he has written. What he has recorded between 1914 and 1997 is truly awe-inspiring, and has had an effect on the way we perceive things and how we communicate these things ourselves — his is a way of seeing humanity in all its pain and humour that cannot be reversed.

A great deal of my writing which I most identify with is not written out of any sort of objection at all, it’s more poetic messages, the still sad music of humanity, simply poetic statements. If I make a little bit of fun of Control with Dr Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, they say, “This dark pacifist who’s paranoid, who’s motivated completely by rejection of technology.” This is a bunch of crap. [From an interview with Victor Bockris.]

To me, death was something that Burroughs always seemed to face head on.

Butterworth: Burroughs wrote a novel as long ago as 1970 called Ah Pook is Here, which is about him trying to come to terms with his death. "Ritual and knowing the right words," he says with dry humour, is no solution to the problem. Death can come on the unprepared suddenly, like a "forced landing, or in many cases a parachute jump ". Far better, he writes, to know your landing site — where and how you are going to die — in advance. Cultivate a mindset of "alert passivity and focussed attention". When he finally came in to land on the far shore across the sea of his life, I hope he landed exactly where he planned, give or take a few yards.

More about William Burroughs

Email interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth, 2008

RealityStudio: Michael, you published with the seminal New Wave magazine of the late 1960s, New Worlds. Did Burroughs have an influence on you and the other writers working at New Worlds?

Butterworth: The general atmosphere of New Worlds was imbued with Burroughs. Burroughs was living in London in the 1960s, of course. Not only did Michael Moorcock promote him in the magazine, JG Ballard also did. Michael was one of the main supporting contributors to the ‘Ugh!’ correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement, and on his travels made a habit of bringing Maurice Girodias titles into the UK before they were available here. He and Charles Platt promoted authors like myself (Michael wrote about me in an introduction that I “sprang full-grown from the head of William Burroughs!”). He even wrote an experimental science fiction novel called The Deep Fix, with a character called Seward. Then there were the New Worlds parties, at least two of which were attended by Burroughs. These could be “star”-studded events. At a celebrated one Mike introduced William to Arthur C Clarke, and apparently they got on well.

It was a very heady time. New Worlds is hardly ever mentioned in books on the UK 60s’ scene, not even in surveys by Miles (whose Indica Books was just around the corner from the NW offices), but to a small group of people it is the most influential magazine of the last 50 years. To me, one of the younger writers, thoroughly corrupted by cut-ups and unable to read linear prose, and used to having work rejected, the magazine seemed to be tailor-made to fit, and appeared just at the right moment. When it finished, many of us were left directionless, a condition compounded by the disillusion felt by the ending of the 60s.

RealityStudio: You didn’t cross paths with Burroughs at any of these parties?

Butterworth: I went to several of the parties, unfortunately not the ones Burroughs attended. I lived too far away to go to more than a few, and only learned afterwards in agonised constriction that Burroughs had been to the ones I missed. Jimmy Ballard attended some, so it’s very likely he met him there.

My memories (as a 20-year-old) of Ballard are frustrating. I didn’t know what to say to him, even though he was there in front of me at a party and was talking to me and only me. By the time I met Burroughs I was twelve years older and had brought Dave as cover, so got slightly more out of that. Regardless of what you manage to take away intellectually, you get something else off these great people. As Andy Warhol once said, it’s best you DON’T KNOW THEM in any way, because that way they still have an aura to touch you with.

RealityStudio: Jed Birmingham has written extensively of Burroughs’ contributions to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. Were you aware of Nuttall, his zine, or other small-press ventures?

Butterworth: The small press Burroughs and Burroughs-related pamphlets and books I managed to buy over here were got mainly from a bookshop called Compendium, in North London, and visits there were rationed because of distance (200 miles from Manchester).

That Burroughs regarded the small press magazines as his saviours makes sense of something that happened to me around the same period. I was about 17 or 19 (1964 – 1966), and co-editor of a new college magazine to be called “Top Drawer.” Imagine my surprise when I wrote to Burroughs to get a contribution — and very promptly received one, a kind of permutation! Alas, I dropped out of college, and so far as I know that was the end of the magazine. Youthful stupidity prevented me from keeping a copy of the contribution to run in a later, then unenvisaged, Concentrate or Corridor. (Zines produced by Butterworth — ed.) What an irony for me, then! Burroughs was routinely contributing to Nuttall in Leeds, Nuttall’s home town, where Nuttall was a teacher, only thirty miles away from where I was based, and may have regarded the North as fertile ground. For many years it worried me that he may have wondered what happened to my magazine. Very likely he forgot about it. But somewhere out there, is an unaccounted Burroughs contribution, perhaps lying forgotten in a top drawer….

RealityStudio: As Englishmen, did you find the language of Naked Lunch difficult?

Britton: On its initial reading it gave me no sense of confusion. As a front-row kid of the 1950s, I was well versed in Americana, serials, dime novels, B-movie noir, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, American comics and of course that great universal binding blanket, American (50s) rock’n’roll. And Lash LaRue, the rebel cowboy, a creature from the Place of Dead Roads if ever there was. This cultural exchange, as you know, worked in reverse, when America picked up (a decade later) on The Who, the Beatles and the Stones, all reselling a warped mirror image back to America. Now that smells like teen spirit to me.

John Lennon, for instance, had pretty much the same sensibilities that we had. He supped on Larry Williams and hard-sold songs like “I Am the Walrus” with its children nursery rhyme-like lyrics (“Yellow belly custard, green snot pie, dead dogs’ giblets, green cat’s eye”) which was a song we all sang in the playground. Like much of Lennon’s work, it was taken directly from working class culture, as is Meng & Ecker. Once you’ve got Bo Diddley down your neck, Niggaz With Attitude are no problem. Compton is much like Miles Platting, Manchester.

Willie Burroughs’ take on sexuality was the infusion that threw me, not the language. But when eclectic prose and sex conjoin they conjour a powerful brew. There will never be another book as talismanic as Lunch. The world is now too small a place.

Butterworth: Did I find Naked Lunch difficult because of the slang and American 50s’ patois? Yes. I had a father who forbade television and American comics. Unlike Dave I grew up in a more sheltered middle class culture. Also, in terms of books and film I was drawn to sf and horror and westerns, rather than to crime and hard-boiled books. So when I came to read Naked Lunch in my late teens, apart from it lifting my head off I found it perplexing and mysterious in equal measure; its strange words increased its awesome imaginative power. Eg, “I can feel the heat closing in.” Now I had no idea to what “heat” referred. The way Burroughs said it, it seemed like a metaphysical alien radiation of some kind — which of course it was also; the way Burroughs used words, they had multiple meanings. Then words like “lush” and “roll.” I knew they were not being used “correctly.” Encountering them, I didn’t at first question these strange words, but as I read through Naked Lunch I imbued them with “tonal” meanings, much as I had done in my early and mid-teens encountering Poe’s Victorian prose. Eventually, of course, I began to use the slang glossary Calder had helpfully supplied for English readers. Gradually, over the months, after I’d read and seen more, I “wised” up. Knowing what the words mean did not decrease the book in any way.

Language, and what Burroughs did with it, fascinated and shocked me more than the sex. I first read about him in the Times Literary Supplement, after encountering a passing reference about a writer who was cutting-up writing. My initial reaction was that this was a cheap way of proceeding. In fact it outraged me. Dave (a Catholic) was more shocked by the sex. (Around this time he was probably taking Little Richard’s homosexuality on the chin — a revelation which outraged working-class kids who saw the American rockers as heroes; the very last thing they wanted to hear was that he was queer.) One good thing my father DID do for me (but for the wrong reasons) was to send me to an eccentric Quaker English boarding, where, among many other things, I encountered male sex. It was a mixed progressive school, so all kinds of sex was going down, but the girls and boys slept in different wings in the houses. Though I had lived a more limited cultural life, Burroughsian sex, at least, did not come as such a shock. Though the way Burroughs mixed it did. Overall Dave and I are agreed that Burroughs’ mix of graphic sex, literary experimentation and imagination was explosive.

RealityStudio: Cut-ups clearly influenced the “concentrated” writing you (Michael) were doing for New Worlds. Dave, did they also influence the later Lord Horror novels in any way? Much has been said about the transposition of an anti-gay speech into Lord Horror, but there are numerous other passages (especially in Motherfuckers) that seem to imply the technique.

Britton: Lautréamont and the surrealists used a form of cut-up that’s more applicable than Burroughs to the Lord Horror book. Ernst would cobble together illustrations from Victorian art books to gain entry into a mysterious absurd world. That always seemed more useable to me than Burroughs’ method, which as you know influenced people like David Bowie in a more productive way.

My own preference is thieving from a whole range of texts. Am always on the lookout, and collect cheap books with eclectic subject matter — fiction or fact. I will nose out this pirate stuff like a shark turning over a coral reef. Sometimes I lift paragraphs, with slight changes, which you’ve astutely noticed. Not only Motherfuckers, but every Lord Horror spin-off has this weirdness inserted like a deviant germ. A flowering of disease that makes the whole thing shake and shimmy. The ingredients of the soup again. Carefully chosen spices — a bit out of fiction, a bit out of a voodoo book, a cookery book, a botanical book, a bit of Cotton Mather, pieces of some really obscure pulp writing, and so on. The way certain authors write sentences will appeal to me, and I’ll lift them and drop them into the narrative stream. Hopefully I get the “fit” right, but if I don’t I’ll at least get something interesting. Like Topsy, it just keeps on growing.

RealityStudio: Naked Lunch was considered an unpublishable book, and yet Burroughs’ market had been primed by Kerouac and Ginsberg. Savoy’s market may have been primed by your bookstores and by other bits of alt culture, like rock and roll. But otherwise your books seem to have just careened into consciousness.

Butterworth: When you say that Burroughs’ market had been primed by Kerouac and Ginsberg and that our market has been primed by our “bookstores and by other bits of alt culture, like rock and roll”, this is it in a nutshell, and puts the finger on the probably insurmountable difficulties of inventing an entirely new market possessing such a degree of eclecticism — the length of time of the undertaking, the very real likelihood of failure. Once we’re no longer around to plough money, time and energy in, the shebang comes to an undignified and unnoticed stop.

After finishing with the summer job his father had negotiated for him at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, William S. Burroughs returned to Harvard in September 1935. It was his senior year. An English major, Burroughs had studied with the Shakespeare scholar George Kittredge and would retain throughout his life an ability to quote the bard from memory. However, he had been a diffident student. Biographer Ted Morgan describes Burroughs’ attitude toward this final year of college: “Back at Harvard it was more of the same — sexual blockage, a sense of isolation, classes.” The following June, Burroughs would skip his own commencement ceremony.

Given that Burroughs was an English major and would ultimately become an important member of what he called the “Shakespeare squadron,” it is difficult to imagine that he would have failed to note a major literary scandal that occurred as he was returning to school that year. His classmate James Laughlin — a steel heir who would go on to found New Directions, the modernist publishing house — managed to convince the estimable Harvard Advocate to print a story by a shocking new writer whose books could not yet be published in America. The writer was Henry Miller, who described the scandal in a 1935 letter to Lawrence Durrell:

Laughlin is the chap who tried to reprint my Aller Retour New York (under the title “Glittering Pie”). He had the first ten pages published in the Harvard Advocate, and then the Boston police descended upon the paper, destroyed the existent copies and locked the editorial staff up overnight, threatening them with a severe jail sentence.¹

Local papers ran headlines such as “Pornography at Harvard!” and the Advocate‘s editors were compelled to resign. “I do not recall,” observed historian Arthur Schlesinger in his memoirs, “that the Harvard authorities protested this miserable assault on the freedom of expression.”²

Was this the moment that Burroughs first became aware of Henry Miller, the writer to whom he would so often be yoked in later years? Or did Burroughs, who supposedly viewed literary matters askance until Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac convinced him of his own genius, consider this scandal a tempest in a teapot, in-fighting at a college newspaper that never interested him anyway?

Ironically, though Burroughs may or may not have known the name of Miller in 1935, Miller certainly knew the name Burroughs. In 1936 Obelisk Press in Paris issued his second book, Black Spring. In the chapter titled “Burlesk,” Miller wrote impressionistically about the crowds outside the “fastest, cleanest show in the world”: “Outside it’s exactly like the Place des Vosges or the Haymarket or Covent Garden, except that these people have faith — in the Burroughs Adding Machine.” For Miller, the company founded by Burroughs’ grandfather had become symbolic of a modern malaise: “faith” in the calculator, finance, technology, materialism — precisely the things that the author of Naked Lunch would come to satirize in his creepy tycoons.

This thematic connection between the two writers was apparent even before Burroughs could be considered a writer. In a 1949 letter in which he railed against conformism, Kerouac clearly viewed Miller and Burroughs as exemplary non-conformists:

Wanting money is wanting the dishonesty of a servant. Money hates us, like a servant; because it is false. Henry Miller was right; Burroughs was right. Roll your own, I say.³

At the time Kerouac was writing, Burroughs had yet to publish anything. In 1945 he and Kerouac had collaborated on the mediocre And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, and only in the fall of 1949 did he begin writing what came to be known as Junky. Kerouac did not learn about Burroughs’ renewed efforts at writing until 1950, and yet he was already associating his friend with a writer acclaimed as one of the century’s most important. This ought to astonish, and yet Burroughs and Miller have been conjoined so frequently that it has come to seem natural to separate them by nothing more than a semi-colon.

If you place Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch side by side, the books do seem to exhibit a secret rapport, like the telepathy of twins. Both are “pornographic,” non-linear, autobiographical, and bristling with black humor. The hunger that is the driving force in Tropic of Cancer parallels the addiction in Naked Lunch: Miller is always looking for a meal, Burroughs is always desperate for a shot. Tropic of Cancer even anticipates Burroughs in some of his obsessions. For example, Miller toys with a technique that Burroughs would dub the cut-up: “These beautiful paragraphs we sometimes lifted from the encyclopaedia or an old guide book. Some of them Carl did put into his book — they had a surrealistic character.” And Miller recites a French limerick whose subject is that most Burroughsian of images, the erotic hanging.

L’autre soir l’idée m’est venue
Cré nom de Zeus d’enculer un pendu

(The other night — Zeus be damned! —
I thought to sodomize a hanged man)

The publication history of the two books adds to the illusion of literary ancestry. Tropic of Cancer was published by Obelisk Press, which had been founded in Paris by Jack Kahane. Naked Lunch was published by Olympia Press, which was founded in Paris by Kahane’s son, Maurice Girodias. It sets up a neat analogy. Girodias was the spawn of Kahane. Was Naked Lunch not the bastard child of Tropic of Cancer? “To me,” Barney Rosset told an interviewer in 2001, “the direct line of descent was — you know, like a lineup in baseball — Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs.”⁴

In a 1974 interview, John Tytell asked Burroughs if Henry Miller had ever been an influence. “No,” Burroughs replied without further elucidation.⁵ Similarly, Victor Bockris reported: “I also found out that Bill has never been particularly interested in the writings of Henry Miller.”⁶ Given the resonance between their respective masterpieces, it would be tempting to think that Burroughs, suffering from anxiety of influence, disavowed the importance of Miller to his work. However, this was not his modus operandi. Burroughs tended to be very forthright about his interests and influences, to the point of often incorporating Brion Gysin’s name into his own texts. If Burroughs did not consider Miller an influence, it is logical to take him at his word.

After all, Burroughs’ word is not betrayed by his work. There are surprisingly few references to Miller in Burroughs’ published texts, letters, and interviews. Sometimes he mentions Miller in discussions of obscenity and censorship. In The Job and in a 1990 interview, Burroughs cited Miller’s argument that potentially scandalous works can become acceptable by virtue of age.

As Henry Miller pointed out, if it is old, then it is all right. Something that is perfectly acceptable in a museum may meet with opposition when it appears in new work.⁷

And in a 1986 interview, Burroughs approved of a remark by Miller on the subject of authorship. “Henry Miller says, ‘Who writes the great books? Not we who have our names on the covers.'” Burroughs slightly misremembered the line, which had come from Miller’s 1962 “Art of Fiction” interview with the Paris Review. “Who writes the great books? It isn’t we who sign our names.”⁸

If these citations seem paltry, that is precisely the point. Burroughs does not quote Miller’s work but rather Miller himself. There may have been a practical reason for this in that Miller’s signature books were largely unavailable during Burroughs’ formative years as a writer. In his book on the Beat Hotel, Barry Miles notes that Ginsberg had been unable to buy Miller’s books before arriving in Paris, where he searched bookstalls for “all the Olympia Press editions of Henry Miller and Genet that were banned in the United States.”⁹ Brion Gysin went so far as to prostitute himself in order to buy a Miller book in Paris.¹⁰ And in a letter dated January 12 1960, Kerouac emphasized how unavailable Miller’s books had been in America:

Don’t say that I read Henry Miller all my life, it just isn’t true, I did read Louis Ferdinand Céline, from whom Miller obtained his style. I could never find a copy of the Tropics anyway. I think Miller is a great man but Céline, his master, is a giant.¹¹

If Burroughs was not enthusiastic for Miller’s work, it may simply have been that he had little access to it. This must have been especially true during the years he spent making his home in literary backwaters such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico. Like Ginsberg, Burroughs may not have been able to buy any of Miller’s works until his 1959 arrival in Paris, by which point he had already written Naked Lunch. Subsequently his deep involvement in the cut-up might well have made Miller aesthetically irrelevant to him.

Of course, there may have been a thousand other factors that discouraged Burroughs from seeking inspiration in the work of Miller. The two were half a generation apart in age. Miller’s he-man heterosexuality would have failed to strike a chord with the homosexual Burroughs. Perhaps there were even class differences, as a 1984 interview with Burroughs suggests. Asked about Cyril Connolly’s notion that readers should “tip” writers, Burroughs replied:

I don’t like the idea at all. Miller did a lot of that. He was very poor for years and years and years. So when people wrote him admiring letters he’d write back, Well, send me some money. He was in actual want, you see. But otherwise, I just don’t see it; it doesn’t seem to me a dignified procedure.¹²

It is difficult not to perceive the silver spoon in Burroughs’ upbringing when he implies that a writer must not betray his dignity. Evidently the “algebra of need” pertained to heroin, a recreational drug, but not to staples such as food and housing.

The disconnect between Burroughs and Miller was evident when they met at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference in 1962. By most accounts Miller was reticent to attend, agreeing only when Lawrence Durrell convinced him that there would be ample time for self-indulgence. Once there, Miller is reported to have been unforthcoming in public. Jim Haynes, co-organizer of the conference, said Miller “was modest, polite, curious about everyone there, did not say much.”¹³ To Victor Bockris Burroughs described how he finally encountered Miller:

I met him at the Edinburgh Literary Conference in 1962 at a large party full of literary people all drinking sherry in the middle of the floor and he said, “So you’re Burroughs.” I didn’t feel quite up to “Yes, maître,” and to say “So you’re Miller” didn’t seem quite right, so I said, “A long-time admirer” and we smiled. The next time I met him he did not remember who I was but finally said, “So you’re Burroughs.”¹⁴

The awkwardness of the moment is palpable. Burroughs had been the star of the conference but was still a relative nobody. He was aware of Miller’s reputation, and he may have respected the freedoms that Miller stood for.¹⁵ However, at this point in time, there is no indication that he had read a single one of Miller’s books. “Yes, maître” would have been too reverent. They were peers at the conference. “So you’re Miller” would have been too familiar. What should Burroughs have said? “A longtime admirer” was the diplomatic thing. It might also have been a bit of a lie. Depending on how you view Burroughs, you could consider it either courteous, le mot juste, or obsequious.

Unfortunately, there is no record of any further conversation. Nor is there any record of where they might have met a second time. At the conference, however, Burroughs did mention Miller in the remarks he made against censorship. “I can’t think,” Burroughs told the audience, how children “would be harmed by reading the work of Rabelais, Plutonius, Henry Miller, and my own work for that matter.”¹⁶ Superficially the remark seems to outline a genealogy extending from Rabelais via Miller to Burroughs, but it is doubtful Burroughs intended that. Rather, in his view, the four writers were equally satirists. (By “Plutonius” Burroughs likely meant — or said, if the conference transcript is incorrect — Petronius, whose Satyricon he sometimes mentioned as a precursor to his own work.) Consequently, anything obscene in their literature is merely a distorted mirror of obscenities in the world. This makes for a stronger argument against censorship, since it ties obscene literature to social critique, than the mere suggestion that, if older writers such as Rabelais and Petronius are accepted, then contemporary writers ought to be too.

The moment the Edinburgh conference ended, the association of Miller with Burroughs was no longer confined to the minds of friends such as Kerouac. In a review of the conference, the New York Times opined that Burroughs “now occupies a position roughly comparable to that of Henry Miller before the war.” In an article titled “Unshockable Edinburgh,” published in the October 1962 edition of Books and Bookmen, Anthony Blond quipped that “If Henry Miller was the hero of the week, William Burroughs was the heroin.” Rebecca West was even less kind in her comments, denouncing “that old fraud Henry Miller” and “an unutterably disgusting creature called William Burroughs, an heir to the wealth of IBM and the author of a filthy book called The Naked Lunch, who was much publicised as another drug addict.”¹⁷

If Burroughs had little to say about Miller, Miller had plenty to say about Burroughs. Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, sent a copy of Naked Lunch to Miller in January 1961 in an effort to drum up support for the book. Miller admitted:

I’ve tried now for the third time to read it, but I can’t stick it. The truth is, it bores me. The Marquis de Sade bores me too, perhaps in a different way, or for different reasons. There’s no question in my mind, however, as to the author’s abilities. There’s a ferocity in his writing which is equaled, in my opinion, only by Céline. No writer I know of has made more daring use of the language. I wish I might read him on some other subject than sex and drugs — read him on St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, or on eschatology. Or better yet… a disquisition on the Grand Inquisitor.¹⁸

Burroughs on St. Thomas Aquinas? Miller may have had a peculiar affinity for the theologian, but the notion of Burroughs expounding on the Doctor Universalis sounds preposterous today. Clearly Miller was looking for something — a humanism, empathy, or compassion — that Burroughs never displayed until, in old age, he began to write about lemurs and cats. It makes you wonder what Miller would have thought of the comparison made by Burroughs himself, in an October 1957 letter to Ginsberg, between his and Dostoievski’s best known characters: “Benway is emerging as a figure comparable to the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov.” ¹⁹

Evidently Miller was unable to see the parallel between Dr. Benway and the Grand Inquisitor. He continued to see not Dostoievski but Sade in the younger writer. In 1964, Miller told Playboy:

The only forthrightness [about sex] I’ve seen is devoted to all these perverse and sadistic books and films and plays. They’re being fairly straightforward in what they’re doing, these more abnormal people. But what are they doing? They’re dealing with a very limited area, you know, perversions and dope and all the rest of it. I’m not condemning them. I was just never interested in perversion or sadism of any kind. We’re just different types, myself I mean, and someone like Burroughs or Genet.²⁰

Obviously you could take issue with Miller’s claim that he was “never interested in perversion or sadism.” His early books in particular describe all sorts of deviant sexual behavior. Probably this is where the half a generation that separates the two authors becomes significant. By 1964, Miller had matured and mellowed. If he did not feel much spiritual affinity for Naked Lunch, he might well have appreciated the fact that eventually Burroughs also arrived at a mellower vantage point. “Love,” noted Burroughs in his last written words, “What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.” By the end of his life, Burroughs had imbued his “limited” subject, narcotics, with precisely the compassion that Miller thought he lacked.

In spite of their differences in outlook, Miller did not fail to recognize Burroughs’ genius. To Rosset he had spoken of Burroughs’ “ferocity” and “daring use of the language.” To Playboy he continued to temper his distaste for Burroughs’ subject matter with his admiration for Burroughs’ prose.

Burroughs, whom I recognize as a man of talent, great talent, can turn my stomach. It strikes me, however, that he’s faithful to the Emersonian idea of autobiography, that he’s concerned with putting down only what he has experienced and felt. He’s a literary man whose style is unliterary.²¹

Burroughs would doubtless have agreed with this perception. It accords with his assertion in the “Atrophied Preface” to Naked Lunch that “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument…” More broadly, Burroughs — like Miller — thought that his entire oeuvre constituted one great autobiography.

Probably because of his disinterest, Burroughs never said anything so perceptive about the work of Miller. However, he did lend his public support when in 1978 Miller actively campaigned for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Miller had asked friends, fellow writers, and other acquaintances from his long career to compose letters of support to the Nobel Committee. Burroughs obliged and forwarded a copy to Girodias, who had perhaps solicited the letter on Miller’s behalf. The hitherto unpublished letter, dated 12 September 1978, addresses the Secretary:²²

Dear Sir,

Henry Miller is a uniquely qualified candidate for the Nobel Prize, as a writer whose work — over a period of forty years — possesses not only great intrinsic merit, but has also contributed immeasurably to freedom of expression.

Very sincerely,

William S. Burroughs
(Novelist)

Burroughs did not sign the copy, though his amanuensis James Grauerholz appended a handwritten note to Girodias stating that Burroughs would write at greater length after a trip to Amsterdam. Burroughs may have been willing to support Miller, but the endorsement was hardly inspired. The lone sentence had the virtue of concision, but it did not exactly strive to make a convincing case. It’s a purely pro forma declaration of support, less a plea on Miller’s behalf than a signature on a petition.

When you inspect this map showing the points of intersection between Miller and Burroughs, it is surprising to learn that the map is not more dense — that the intersections are not more frequent or more meaningful. Given the resonances between their work, their stature as figureheads in the fight against literary censorship, and the fact that Miller had more involved relationships with the other Beats (particularly Kerouac, whose Dharma Bums so impressed him that he wrote a preface for The Subterraneans), Miller and Burroughs seem to form an obvious pair. Yet the evidence shows no influence, zero camaraderie, little interest, and a qualified amount of mutual respect.

Partly this is due to the simple fact that, historically speaking, the two were not really peers in the Shakespeare Squadron. Only twenty-five years or so separated their most fertile periods of creativity, and yet those few decades were chopped down the middle by World War II. The Depression that forms the background of Miller’s Tropics remained, like a troop formation, on one side, and the Cold War that subtends Burroughs’ work took root on the other. There was a veritable sea change that reverberated back into the arts. In her diary, Anaïs Nin saw its reflection in the change of management at one of Paris’ most famous literary bookstores:

So it is no longer Silvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company visited by André Gide, François Mauriac, Pierre Jean Jouve, Léon-Paul Fargue, Caresse Crosby, James Joyce, and Henry Miller. It is The Mistral, visited by James Jones, Styron, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the beatniks and the new bohemians. The difference is that where there was a warm, hospitable, friendly, demonstrative affectionate fraternity between writers and artists now there was often a sullen silence, a disinterested attitude, and the young bohemian lying on the couch reading a book would not stop reading when another writer came in. I marveled at their insulation. Unlike Miller, when they had cadged a meal, they did not rush to their room to write twenty pages in exultation. They sought drugs to help them dream, they had no appetite for life, no lust for women. They read like people waiting for a train. They are spectators, Xerox artists, perhaps obsolete in a world of science.²³

The entry was dated “Fall 1954” — an obvious bit of retrospective editing, since Burroughs did not arrive in Paris until 1959 and, in a curious bit of synchronicity, Xerox did not become a household name until it introduced the first plain-paper copier in the same year. Plainly Nin was biased toward Miller and his aesthetic, and yet she correctly perceived something new in literature. Drugs, technology, “no lust for women” — these were precisely the things that would come to be hallmarks of Burroughs’ writing, just as drink, inspiration, and lust for women would be hallmarks of Miller’s.

On another level, the lack of personal connection between Miller and Burroughs may point to a more fundamental truth about writers as such. When you go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore, each one is outfitted with a great big mural showing the geniuses of literature hobnobbing at some imaginary café des arts. “Look! There’s Joyce and Kafka hanging out with Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde!” It’s a fantasy vision of the canon that almost never matches up to reality. How often do great writers really forge friendships? If Burroughs and Miller didn’t click when they met, neither did Burroughs and Beckett, who denounced the cut-up as “plumbing.” (For the record, Miller and Beckett disliked each other when they met in the 1930s, though in later life they found each other congenial enough. They did not become friends, though.²⁴)

To be truly great is to be, relatively speaking, without peer. On the odd occasions that great writers end up encountering each other, they often seem not to know what to do with each other. If you’ve ever heard the forced insights that can occur when writers of note are brought together for a radio program, you’ll understand that sometimes a conversation can conceal a complete lack of connection.²⁵ Conversely, it may also be possible that the most astonishing connections can occur in the ostensible absence of any communication whatsoever. Burroughs may have parodied the comportment of writers who wouldn’t talk about writing —

[Graham Greene] is frankly horrified at the thought of formulating a technology of writing. “Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed writing.” This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk about anything so long as it isn’t important.²⁶

— but perhaps important things transpired in those conversations about trivialities. One spoke about a clear blue sky and the other understood that prose should be lucid and limpid.

Miller and Burroughs did not forge a personal rapport. Miller did not understand Burroughs’ work, and Burroughs expressed little interest in Miller’s. But does this surface disconnect not conceal the greatest connections? You can only imagine what the two talked about in the middle of a sherry party at Edinburgh — likely nothing. But the work of the one speaks very strongly to the work of the other, and this conversation — probably the more important — is there for the hearing.

Notes

1. Quoted in Lee Bartlett, Editor, Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991, p 31.

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, New York: Mariner Books, 2002, p 119.

3. Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters, Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956, New York: Penguin, 1996, p 194.

4. Win McCormack, “The Literary Fly Catcher,” Tin House Magazine 8, Summer 2001.

5. John Tytell, “Interrogation,” in William Burroughs and Sylvère Lotringer, Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of Wiliam S. Burroughs, 1960-1997, New York: Semiotext(e), p 252.

6. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, New York: St Martins, p 132.

7. See Daniel Odier and William Burroughs, The Job, New York: Penguin, 1989, p 112. Simone Ellis, “A Conversation with William S. Burroughs,” originally published in Contemporanea, 1990.

8. Peter Von Ziegesar, “Mapping the Cosmic Currents,” in William S. Burroughs and Allen Hibbard, Conversations with William Burroughs, Mississippi: University Press, 2000, p 162. George Wickes, “Art of Fiction No. 28: Henry Miller,” Paris Review 28, Summer-Fall 1962.

9. Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs & Corso in Paris, 1957-1963, New York: Grove Press, 2001, p 58.

10. “Gysin had no money to speak of, and wanted a book by Henry Miller which cost exactly what he had to live on for a month. ‘The only way I could get hold of a copy was to prostitute myself. I was too timid to steal books so I went to the Café Select in Montparnasse and hung out until I found a Sir Roger… British naval term for sugar-daddy.'” John Geiger, Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, New York: Disinformation Company, 2005, p 42.

11. Quoted in Kevin J. Hayes, Conversations With Jack Kerouac, Mississippi: University Press, 2005, p 24.

12. T.X. Erbe, “Still Get a Thrill When I See You, Bill,” in Burroughs Live, p 599.

13. Jim Haynes, email communication, 20 June 2007.

14. Bockris, op. cit., p 126.

15. Burroughs aware of Miller’s reputation: “Maybe a year after Naked Lunch had been published here in Paris,” Brion Gysin told an interviewer, “William and I had sat down saying Well, yeah yeah, we’ll never see this printed in America now will we? No, well, we never will, no no no… and then we read in Time magazine I think it was that Barney Rosset had paid what seemed to be the colossal sum of $75,000 for the rights to all of the Henry Miller books.” Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson, Here to Go: Planet R-101, London: Quartet Books, 1982, pp 189-190.

16. Quoted in Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, New York: Henry Holt, 1988, p 335.

17. The New York Times cited in Literary Outlaw, p 341. Anthony Blond, “Unshockable Edinburgh,” Books and Bookmen, October 1962, pp 26-27. Rebecca West quoted in Gillian Glover, “Where It All Began,” The Scotsman, 24 Jan 2003.

18. Literary Outlaw, p 328.

19. Letter to Allen Ginsberg, Oct. 19 1957, in William S. Burroughs and Oliver Harris (ed.), The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume I: 1945-1959, New York: Penguin, 1994, p 374.

20. David Dury, “Sex Goes Public: A Talk with Henry Miller,” in Frank L. Kersnowski, Alice Hughes, and Henry Miller, Conversations with Henry Miller, Mississippi: University Press, 1994, p 114.

21. Idem., p 87.

22. Unpublished letter, Burroughs to Maurice Girodias, 12 September 1978, provided by the Manhattan Rare Book Company.

23. Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 5 (1947-1955), New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1975, p 203.

24. In an interview, Barney Rosset described setting up a meeting between Miller and Beckett: “I took [Beckett] to lunch with Henry Miller after we won the Tropic of Cancer verdict in Chicago. They had known each other from the thirties; they did not like each other. Everything that you read about these two would tell you that they were not easy people to get along with. But when I brought them together, each of them told me afterwards, ‘Boy, has he changed! He’s so nice now.'” “The Art of Publishing Interview No. 2,” Paris Review 145, Winter 1997.

25. Consider philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s disparagement of conversation: “Most of the time, when someone asks me a question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I don’t have anything to say. Questions are invented, like anything else. If you aren’t allowed to invent your questions, with elements from all over the place, from never mind where, if people “pose” them to you, you haven’t much to say. The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. None of this happens in an interview, a conversation, a discussion.” Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, New York: Columbia UP, 1997, p 1.

26. Burroughs, “Hemingway,” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993, p 65. Perhaps perversely, J.G. Ballard told a recent interviewer that “in some 20 meetings [Burroughs and I] never discussed anything literary.” Graham Rae, “Can’t Rub Out the Word Hoard,” laurahird.com, 2007.

Read Ian MacFadyen’s insightful response to RealityStudio’s overview: Henry Miller and William Burroughs: A Letter.

_____ Uncorrected Galley Proof in yellow wraps.

London: Picador 1993, first British edition, small first printing of only 1,000 copies, hardbound in dust jacket.

_____ 1994, first British printing in wraps.

New York: Penguin 1994, first printing in illustrated wraps.