The first book of criticism of any sort that I came into contact with was Jennie Skerl’s William S. Burroughs, part of Twayne’s author series, designed to introduce different American authors of consequence to a wider public. It sat on the shelf at the library next to other books that weren’t Naked Lunch, which was what I was actually looking for. The movie version by David Cronenberg had recently been released. My friends and I were entranced by the idea of this whole other world of books that had strange, transgressive ideas that we’d never heard of before. Queer sci-fi full of monsters and non-linear text? Fictional space drugs? Black meat?

We were enthralled. But, also, I was not flush with cash and I was never going to be able to cough up the $15 or $20 that was required to get the Grove Press edition that was easily accessible at the time. I was 15 or 16, and a recession was happening in Canada, so I didn’t have a job. The library was my best bet. But Naked Lunch was always checked out. The movie had made it wildly popular again so the library’s two copies were on permanent loan to much savvier patrons than myself. The waiting list for it was astronomic.

Eventually, after reading Interzone, Exterminator, and being scared off by Cities of the Red Night, I began thumbing my way through Skerl’s book. I was amazed that someone would write a book about a writer, but also mostly write about their work. Not a biography, per se. Writing about writing became an idea which suddenly made me realize that books were something more than just passive entertainments for bored teenagers and people on the beach or subway.

I realized that you could read a book and then take it seriously. You could take it so seriously that you’d spend an entire book comparing your views on it to the views of others. Obviously, for someone as ignorant of the world of literature as I was, the book was too complicated for me. I could see that. But I could also see that one day I’d be able to understand what she was talking about if I read all of Burroughs’ books and then came back to it. A book like Skerl’s made it possible for teenagers like myself to find an entry-point to the world of criticism and commentary. For someone who would go on to study literature in school, this was the opening of an entire other world.

Jennie Skerl was one of the very first critics examining William Burroughs’ work seriously when she began writing about him in the 1970s. Only Eric Mottram had written another book before her. Both Skerl and the critic Robin Lydenberg began writing about Burroughs and demonstrating why his work was important and valuable. In the late 1970s, most critics didn’t take Burroughs seriously. If anything, only Naked Lunch garnered enough interest for a scholarly article. He was seen as a product of a long dead Beat tradition that was slowly disappearing as the years passed. Port of Saints, for instance, was published by Blue Wind Press, which was a significant risk on Burroughs’ part after having much larger publishers showcase his work in the 1960s and early ’70s. Skerl’s work made the point that the post-Naked Lunch books were work that needed to be taken seriously. This helped to solidify Burroughs’ importance as a writer in the beginning of the 1980s.

This interview took place over the spring of 2022.

When your book William S. Burroughs was published in 1985, the only other major book concerned with Burroughs’ work up to that point was Eric Mottram’s Algebra of Need. What was the general consensus on Burroughs as an object for serious critical consideration in academia? What was the response to the book?

First, I should make clear that my book is more a product of the 1970s than the 1980s. I first became interested in Burroughs as an experimental writer and creator of cut-ups when I was in graduate school in the early 1970s. The book was written mainly in the late 1970s and completed in 1982. The publisher at that time was going through an internal re-organization, so publication was delayed until 1985. When I was working on the book, there was no critical consensus on Burroughs because he was not a sustained subject of study or conversation. Most of the criticism was devoted to Naked Lunch, while Burroughs’ theory and practice of cut-ups — now recognized as his most important work — had not yet been addressed with any depth or consistency. Most academic criticism discussed Burroughs as illustrative of a particular theory about contemporary fiction, but his work was not itself a primary object of study. Thus, critical discussion was diverse and fragmented with no unified body of criticism developing from the many different readings. This was still true in 1984 when my introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of Naked Lunch was published and I commented on the critical reception. It wasn’t until the second half of the 1980s that a critical consensus began to emerge: Burroughs as a postmodernist writer.

Another factor affecting the early reception of Burroughs’ work was his association with the Beat Generation which American academe has never accepted as worthy of serious critical attention. That attitude, to this day, discourages graduate students and untenured professors from pursuing work on the Beats. Because Burroughs and other Beat writers were neglected by academe, early reception was formed by the popular press which also denigrated the Beats. (There were exceptions, such as Mary McCarthy’s article in the first issue of the  New York Review of Books.) Initially, I was not interested in Burroughs as a Beat and saw his work as very different from that group of writers who were mostly poets. The Twayne series required a biographical chapter, so that led to my later interest in the Beat Generation per se.

Was it a career risk for you to publish about Burroughs, given that he was not an established subject for criticism as yet?

I thought Burroughs was important and should be the subject of serious criticism. I didn’t think I was risking my career because I thought doing something new and original would be respected. Also, I came of age in the sixties (which extended into the early 1970s as a cultural formation), so focusing on a transgressive artist seemed in tune with the times. I do remember it was difficult to publish articles on Burroughs, but I received a book contract from a well-established series on American authors, which was encouraging. Papers on Burroughs at conferences were accepted. Before our books were published, Robin Lydenberg and I learned about each other, leading to the book we did together (William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception 1959-1989). Having a colleague and friend who was also a Burroughs scholar was very supportive. When my book was published in 1985, it received several good reviews in academic journals.

Also, Burroughs was not the sole focus of my scholarship. I published on Samuel Beckett and was a member of the Beckett society in the 1970s. In the 1980s, I researched expatriate writers in Tangier and wrote about Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles. That work led to a book about Jane Bowles (A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles). Since the 1980s, I have published books on the Beat Generation as a movement (including Reconstructing the Beats and The Transnational Beat Generation) and most recently on Ed Sanders.

From the criticism of the 1970s, what was the critical image of Burroughs being developed in those various, disparate papers about Naked Lunch?

The image of Burroughs in criticism at the beginning of the 1970s was a continuation of the controversies of the 1960s: was Burroughs an immoral or amoral representative of a sick society or its most incisive critic? Was he promoting drug addiction or warning against it? Were the cut-ups a brilliant challenge to conventional socio-linguistic structures or incomprehensible and boring? However, the 1970s saw the beginning of more serious academic criticism. There was greater acceptance of cut-ups and the beginning of an analysis of Burroughs’ radical challenge to identity, language, and psychosexual systems of control. There was less emphasis on morality and more attention to Burroughs’ theoretical constructs and experimental techniques.

How important do you feel Burroughs’ biography was in getting people interested in his work beyond just Naked Lunch? I feel like his biography loomed large in the early days of criticism of his work.

Burroughs’ “biography” has certainly attracted interest in his work, but I put biography in quotation marks because what has attracted people is legend or mythology. The Burroughs legend began in the work of Kerouac and Ginsberg before Burroughs became a well-known writer. Kerouac’s fictionalized portrait of Burroughs as Old Bull Lee in On the Road described him as a mysterious oracle and teacher. Ginsberg, in his dedication to “Howl,” said that Naked Lunch (not yet published) was “an endless novel which will drive everybody mad,” and  few lines in the poem allude to Burroughs as one of the “best minds.” From the beginning, he has been cast in the role of poète maudit, the outlaw artist, perennial outsider, and visionary. Shooting his wife in a drunken game of William Tell was a horrifying event that fed into the legend, and for many years Burroughs avoided talking about it, creating mystery. The fact that he was an expatriate for twenty years living in Tangier (an exotic location that attracted many writers and artists after WW II), Paris (an avant-garde location since the 19th century), and London (metropole of the English-speaking world and a center of sixties youth culture) made him a distant, glamorous figure to readers in the U.S. who could fantasize about his life. After Burroughs returned to the U.S. in the 1970s, Burroughs’ cult image evolved in response to continued experimentation in his work, readings he gave to youthful audiences, summer teaching at Naropa University, and interaction with the punk and performance art scene in New York City. Burroughs himself contributed to the legend through autobiographical allusions in his fiction, his interest in magic and the paranormal, and his evolving presentation of self in interviews. A prominent example of his own myth-making was in his introduction to Queer in 1985, when he said that he would never have become a writer if he hadn’t shot his wife. That statement, attached to the long-unpublished book that everyone had wondered about for years, led to more scandal and speculation. 

The first biographies used the legend in their titles to define their subject and attract readers: Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw (1988) and Barry Miles’ El Hombre Invisible (1993). In 1991, David Cronenberg’s film entitled Naked Lunch, created a romantic narrative about Burroughs as a tortured heterosexual genius, placing the novel within the biographical legend of bohemian artist-hero. Finally, upon his death in 1997, obituaries around the English-speaking world reified Burroughs as a man known for a scandalous life and a scandalous novel (Naked Lunch), exemplified by the New York Times headline:  “William S. Burroughs, the Beat Writer Who Distilled his Raw Nightmare Life, Dies at 83.”

The legend is a fictional construct that fascinates and draws readers into the work, but needs to be recognized as a fiction rather than a key to understanding his writing. Fortunately, we now have Barry Miles’ excellent second biography, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (2013) which presents a carefully researched, detailed factual acccount. Miles has stated his goal was to establish the facts as thoroughly as possible for the next generation of scholars and readers, and this he has done. Oliver Harris also debunks various myths about Burroughs’ creative process in his invaluable scholarly editions of Burroughs’ works.

I want to add a word about Cronenberg’s film, which I like even though it is not very much like Burroughs’ novel. Although he employs the legend to create a familiar narrative that normalizes Burroughs’ radical art, making the protagonist more like himself, Cronenberg does employ a medley of Burroughsian themes and images drawn from the larger body of his work (not just Naked Lunch), at times effectively transposing Burroughs’ vision into another medium. The jazz soundtrack by Ornette Coleman captures the jazzy structure of the novel (improvisation and montage) and the 1950s cool of Burroughs’ early work and the film’s setting. So there is a reflection of Burroughs’ writing in the film. 

Given that you were working, reading and writing about Burroughs as the various stages of this mythos were being played out, do you think that his work after Naked Lunch would have survived on its own merit without the bio?

Absolutely. Those with a serious interest in Burroughs’ work have not made the legend or biography the focus of criticism, but rather have examined the theory and practice of cut-ups, the postmodern narratives in the final trilogy, the parallels with post-structuralist thought, his philosophical positions, and his critique of power.  Over time, critics have been less interest in Naked Lunch and more interested in the work that came afterwards. (See my essay in Naked Lunch @50.) The legend of the bohemian artist-hero does not provide much insight into Burroughs’ artistic achievement, although it does place him in an avant-garde context which can be a good starting point and is helpful in connecting him to other avant-garde artists or movements.

The legend as biography does not reinvigorate interpretations of Burroughs’ work, but rather repeats a familiar story that is not critically productive. The legend is a two-edged sword: it attracts interest in Burroughs but discourages new thinking and close attention to the work.

When you were writing your book about Burroughs, in the late 1970s, he appears to have been at a bit of a crossroads in his career; publishers were not convinced that the Beats were quite as marketable anymore. He had spent a number of years doing very interesting work that didn’t sell books in large numbers. This is also when James Grauerholz began working with him and found ways to sell Burroughs to a wider public. Do you feel like scholars beginning to take him seriously as a subject for wider study helped in the revitalizing of his career after Cities of the Red Night?

James Grauerholz did more to revitalize Burroughs’ career than anyone else. He managed readings and appearances and connected Burroughs to other artists in New York, which brought Burroughs to public attention as an important American writer. It is sad but true, that American critics don’t pay as much attention to expatriate artists as they do to those who are on the scene in the U. S., especially those who live in New York City. Most important, Grauerholz encouraged Burroughs to overcome a writing block and played an editorial role in Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. (Grauerholz also edited other later works and published a Burroughs reader.) The publication of the trilogy in the 1980s caught the attention of the literary world and increased interest in Burroughs’ work overall. The gradual development of academic criticism of Burroughs in the context of postmodernism or post-structuralist theory certainly increased his reputation in the world of letters. Grauerholz was encouraging and helpful to scholars, so he was able to link Burroughs to both popular culture and academe. 

I should also mention that Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman supported Burroughs’ career as a writer by inviting him to teach at the Naropa University summer poetry school. Of course, Ginsberg was instrumental in encouraging Burruoghs to return to the U. S. to teach a course at CCNY that Ginsbeg had arranged. And he continued to promote Burroughs’ reputation as he had always done, including nominating him for the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Where do you see Burroughs in terms of the literary movements of the 20th century? Is he a Late Modernist, a Post-Modernist or somewhere in between? 

Burroughs can be seen as late modern, avant-garde, emerging postmodern, postmodern, amodern, or posthuman depending on how you define the terms and what aspect of his work the critic wants to examine. As Allen Hibbard has said, Burroughs’ work has become a host to many strains of theory, so I am sure his work will attract new designations in the future. (See Hibbard’s “Shift Coordinate Points” in Retaking the Universe.) Postmodern is probably the best general label, and has been given the imprimatur of the Norton anthology of postmodern American fiction. But Burroughs’ work always resists closure, and, for me, in the end, Burroughs is Burroughs. I agree with Anne Waldman when she says, “the ‘Burroughs effect’ defies categories.” (See “The Burroughs Effect” in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century.)

Do you feel Kathy Acker’s work is a natural stylistic continuation of Burroughs’ work, though in a decidedly feminist light?

Acker was influenced by Burroughs’ cut-ups, and she fashioned a transgressive image for herself, but there are many other influences on her work, especially French writers and theorists and the punk scene. She has her own style and preoccupations.

Are there any recent books about Burroughs that you would recommend?

Some recent criticism which added to my understanding of Burroughs’ work and his achievement includes Mosaic of Juxtaposition: William S. Burroughs’ Narrative Revolution by Micheal Sean Bolton, Understanding William S. Burroughs by Gerald Alva Miller, Jr., William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Casey Rae, and The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation by Véronique Lane. Bolton’s brilliant book avoids focusing on biography and ideology in order to analyze Burroughs’ non-linear narratives that require an associative reading strategy in which author and reader collaborate to create meanings which change with each reading. His explanation of how Burroughs’ deconstructs time/history and place/culture made me see Burroughs’ fictions in a new way. Miller’s book, as part of the “Understanding” series, fulfills the same purpose that the Twayne series did, providing an introductory overview of Burroughs’ life and work within a contemporary critical framework. He does a fine job of reaching the that goal, and I think it will become the critical starting point for students in the future. Rae’s book provides a very thorough narrative and biographical history of Burroughs’ influence on rock and roll in a readable style that makes the journey an enjoyable trip. The legend necessarily plays a big role here, but balanced with historical fact. Lane’s book is not solely devoted to Burroughs, but offers fresh perspectives on his early and late work, particularly And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the early cut-ups, and The Cat Inside, as she traces his appropriations of Rimbaud, Celine, Gide, Cocteau, and Genet. She goes back to the beginning of the Beats, reminding us of their shared exploration of modern French authors in which Burroughs’ library played an important role.

Though William Burroughs died in 1997, a steady stream of work taken from his archives has been published on what seems like an almost yearly basis. This is due to various scholars around the world digging into the available work to “look beneath the hood” on many of Burroughs’ texts to see what else could have been if financial constraints were eliminated or reticent publishers were convinced. Of particular interest has always been The Third Mind, the William Burroughs / Brion Gysin visual and textual collaboration that began in the 1960s, went through various incarnations, and was eventually published in 1978 by Viking. A version that is much closer to the book originally envisioned by Burroughs and Gysin is being prepared for release. 

Davis Schneiderman has been publishing about William Burroughs and his work for more than 20 years now. He co-edited Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization in 2004, contributed to Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays in 2009, and has written extensively on Burroughs in other venues. He has performed in celebration of the Burroughs centennial and partnered with the European Beat Studies Network and the Chicago Humanities Festival, among others. He has also contributed to RealityStudio in the past. Schneiderman is Krebs Provost and Dean of the Faculty (and Professor of English) at Lake Forest College, north of Chicago.

His latest project is a collaboration with Marcus Boon and the Burroughs Estate on a reconstruction of the The Third Mind as originally conceived, and a companion volume — The Book of Methods — tracing Burrroughs and Brion Gysin’s long collaboration. Burroughs and Gysin’s 1978 The Third Mind took a different form after many years of almost-but-not-quite getting the original book to market. 

What are your major interests in Burroughs’ work?

One part of my answer is embedded in your question, as I have spent my career as it relates to Burroughs advocating for a focus upon the work rather than the mythopoetic qualities of the man. Biography is important, but it’s never the key: the Romanticization of the author overtaking a careful study of the writing and production often does more to obscure than to reveal.

After that first principle, I have also been interested in the works that most directly challenge linearity, and the collaborative aspects that attempt to power such challenges. Much of Burroughs’ work fits the former, but it is his long collaboration with Brion Gysin and the texts, images, and collages that collectively make up the various iterations of The Third Mind that have, in recent, years, held my particular interest.

This is such an important point. I think that the biography of Burroughs is so prominent in many new readers’ minds that it often obscures the work before they get to reading anything. Do you think it will change in the future? Do you think people — and publishers — will be able to wean themselves off of the mythos and focus more on the work? 

I performed at several events celebrating the Burroughs centennial in 2014; at one, held around midnight with an air of late-night revelry, a young woman was dressed as a heroin needle. I think that’s missing the point (so to speak), but I am not sure the fascination with Burroughs’ life will persist as time passes. I suppose there will be people who will treat him like Byron, but the fact that Byron was, in fact, a Romantic poet makes a biographical reading feel always “natural” to the subject. Because some aspects of Burroughs’ life that come in for, if not celebration then fascination, are often those that our culture is rightly no longer celebrating, I expect a separation over time.

Can you describe how the The Third Mind project came about in the 1960s? What was the initial motivation for Burroughs and Gysin and how does it differ from his 1960s work in small magazines?

This is one of the most circuitous tales in publishing, and it’s one threaded with false starts and disappointments. Gysin’s letters of the late 1960s, in particular, focus upon the book’s unsteady prospects with an almost desperate sense of mission, and when the book finally arrives in compromised form in the 1970s, the triumph of its publication is due in no small part to Gysin’s doggedness. Yet, the collaboration begins when Burroughs and Gysin first strike up a partnership in Paris in the late 1950s, continues in a series of 1963 letters that first suggest the concept, accelerate in 1965 with the curation of previously published works and the production of the collages (in New York City), and continues with the lead-up and let-down of the aborted 1970 Grove Press edition, which was almost complete before abandonment. Many of the Burroughs texts in The Third Mind appeared in small-press publications, but the “cohesiveness” of the concept — a how-to book — is what differentiates the work as a “whole” from any individual small press contributions. The Third Mind includes, for instance, material from My Own Mag, but it also excludes scads of small magazine pieces. In one sense, it’s an anthology, and a thematic one at that.

My sense of Burroughs’ use of the small mags in the 1960s in which he published experimental pieces was as an outlet for his work, a testing ground for ideas he was working on and to promote projects like The Third Mind. Is that accurate?

Yes, and no. The Third Mind emerged somewhat organically — powered by his artistic kindship with Gysin — but I don’t think we can easily say how Burroughs’ projects nested inside each other. Burroughs produced work steadily and with admirable dedication. The old story that he was primarily a novelist who also — incidentally, by the way, as an afterthought — also made small press works and media experiments is clearly wrong, but that doesn’t mean the opposite is true.

It wasn’t that he saw his project as a totalizing one, but that each work should be shared in the forum to which it was best suited. A good example of this was the invitation from Playboy to produce what ultimately became “St. Louis Return” (rejected by Playboy and ultimately published in The Paris Review.)  Because Playboy did not want a three-column “experimental” text, Burroughs took the kill fee and moved on. Yet, there is no question it sacrificed a larger immediate audience for a publication that would accept what he was producing.

If Gysin’s “doggedness” is what ultimately got the book published, how would you rate Burroughs’ feeling about the project?

This is a fascinating aspect to the story. Burroughs was always supportive of The Third Mind and of Gysin, but, at times, Gysin felt Burroughs was not supportive enough. This feeling came to a head in the late 1960s as Gysin’s novel The Process failed to make a significant impact, as Gysin felt Burroughs was dragging his feet on publishing a (supportive) review. Gysin experienced a motorcycle accident in Tangier that he psychically “blamed” on Burroughs’ lack of attention. All of this is connected to the implosion of The Third Mind with Grove.

Marcus Boon and I are working on two volumes, a new edition of The Third Mind as “originally” conceived in partnership with the Burroughs Estate and a companion volume, The Book of Methods, which will in part tell the story I note here in more detail.

How close to the original concept of the book was the Grove Press edition that did not get published? How close to being published is ‘close’?

There is no single, stable edition of The Third Mind. It depends upon when you take the snapshot, but it’s fair to say that the Grove Press edition closely matched Burroughs’ and Gysin’s ambitions for the project at the time. The later Viking edition expressed a significantly altered ambition, and, compared to the 1970 edition, is clearly a compromise product. Yet, to judge them against each other privileges the illusion of a stable project. The Third Mind is what you find depending upon where you look in the timestream, which is why the story of the collaboration as told in The Book of Methods serves as a travel guide through these multiple iterations.

Can you describe what your Third Mind will look like and how you came to determine what version of the book would be the most accurate depiction? Is it very visual or a mix of text and visual elements?

To be clear, and I know this is not what you mean, it’s definitely not “my” (and Marcus Boon’s) The Third Mind, although he and I have been collaborating since 2004 and there is a clear meta-collaboration on top of things. This is Burroughs and Gysin’s work, presented in collaboration with the Burroughs Estate. The amount of time Burroughs and Gysin worked on the project may end up being the same amount of time Marcus and I have worked on the two related projects. So, for The Third Mind, we are providing editorial suggestions and direction in collaboration with James Grauerholz. We would not be in a position to engage in this work without James, whose entry into Burroughs’ life comes after the 1970 debacle but before the 1978 edition. Not only was James there when it happened, but he also remains a source of steadfast wisdom as the steward of Burroughs letters and manuscripts.

With that in mind, our process has been to consult relevant archives — those are in New York, Atlanta, Ohio, Arizona, Los Angeles, Paris, etc. — and to determine where the “story” and the mechanicals of the 1970 edition reconcile or deviate. It’s been an immense forensic puzzle, helped mightily also, by an excellent (then) undergraduate researcher Frankie Paar at Lake Forest College.

The edition, to your last question, is a mix of these types of works: collages, text pieces (many republished in the Viking editing), unpublished typescript texts (some with visual elements), and pieces previously published in places like My Own Mag (but not included in the Viking edition).

If Gysin felt Burroughs was dragging his feet, how did the version that was finally released in the 1978 compare to what they envisioned? How did it effect their relationship?

The swale of the relationship around the failures of The Third Mind changed as Gysin rebooted the project as Oeuvre croisée (the French edition) followed by the Viking edition. They both were pleased to have the work appear.

Now, the Nova Convention celebrating Burroughs only included Gysin as a “last-minute” invited participant (which Gysin took as a slight), and that didn’t help matters, but the dynamic, while never completely returning to the proximate intensity of the early days, had settled into a level of love and acceptance that would persist through Gysin’s death.

Compared to the edition of The Third Mind released by Burroughs and Gysin in the 1970s, is this new edition more visual? Is there text in the 1970s edition that will not appear in this edition for editorial reasons? 

Absolutely. There are 70 or so collages that were prepared or finished in 1965 that were slated for publication in the aborted Grove edition. The 1978 Viking had only around 25 (smaller, and black in white). The 1978 Viking edition had a number of texts added after the 1970 edition’s failure; so, yes, the new edition will exclude those while including a significant series of typescripts that were not published in 1978 as well as the rest of the collages. Some of the post-1965 content includes the introductory commentary by Gérard-Georges Lemaire, and a fragment from the early Naked Lunch screenplay (not at all related to the Cronenberg film).

In terms of forensics, how have you been able to determine the order of the material? Was there a true set ordering of the material in the plans?

Copious staring and tequila. In all seriousness, the book was in the mechanicals stage when it was aborted, so an intended order is evident. Yet, the file had been damaged to remove the collages so they could become free-floating art objects. We had to cross-correlate different guide files.

What kind of guidance does the archive material offer for establishing a more definitive version of this book?

There is no definitive version but the 1970 aborted edition is the closest we have to the intended form of the project once it moved from an embryonic idea in 1963 letters through composition in 1965. This is a project that exists in multiple forms, and it depends what you are looking at, and when. It’s like Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral transmogrified into a drum sample and spliced back through a conch shell.

What was the most difficult aspect of this project and how did you work through it?

The project has loomed large for Marcus and me for more than 15 years. The story of how this has come to pass is an interesting one, and is full of its own stops and starts. One challenge, aside from understandable COVID slowdowns in archival work, are also those of life. On the cusp of a major research trip in 2010, my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly. I delayed the trip, as I needed to, but it was a reminder of how the making of art (or of scholarly research about art) requires time and space of its own. Beyond logistics, the project itself is many-tentacled, and the attempt to understand, define, and articulate its scope has been the “invisible” work that occurs offstage.

When the book is published, do you see it as being able to replace the edition published in 1978? 

Definitely not. This is a version of the book from a different time. We’ll tell that story, but it’s always n+1.

Some of Burroughs’ revisions were based upon market considerations, and the idea of revisions fits well into the larger project of cut-ups to destabilize meaning. Why should there be “forever” editions of any work, rather than snapshots that are presented at certain moments? At its worst, this practice appeals to completionists who want all “outtakes” for the “archive” — but that mindset still prioritizes one edition as the “master tape.” I think of Samuel Beckett or Raymond Federman, who, rather than translate their works, “transacted” them, allowing the linguistic change to evolve into new material as the material conditions so evolved. Despite the fact that Burroughs wrote exclusively in English, his many cut-ups of cut-ups of cut-ups accomplish a similarly digressive feat.

Where do you see The Third Mind as existing in the overall oeuvre of Burroughs’ work?

A word like oeuvre is useful in a general sense, but often useless when applied to a project as deliberately deterritorializing as Burroughs’. The project is not a totalizing one, but one more concerned with puncture and slippage.

The Third Mind, as well as the many other highly visual texts that Burroughs worked on in the 1960s and 1970s are unusual in the work of a writer. They definitely pushed the technological possibilities of the times he created them in, in terms of creating a manageable budget for a project. How do you feel he compares to other writers working in similar mediums or similar intellectual spaces? How does the visual work he did figure in the overall project that was his career?

There is a long tradition of visual work integrated into fictions — Steve Tomasula, W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Andre Breton, Claudia Rankine, William Gass — and while I have collapsed time in my examples, I see Burroughs and Gysin’s collaboration as notable for the visual and collaborative aspects of the work. For Burroughs, his technological innovations would not have been possible absent figures such as Gysin, Ian Sommerville, Anthony Balch, etc., and so it’s difficult to “read” this work in isolation from his partners. To return to an earlier question, the “Romantic” reading of Burroughs centers him in the story of his practice, which ignores the interesting structural tensions of the relationships he held with so many others.

Sometimes I have the feeling that some Burroughs scholars see the action of the cut-up as an all-encompassing metaphor or theme or vocation that Burroughs applied to his work at all times after October 1959. What do you think of this and how does The Third Mind fit into this concept of the cut-up?

Just as the Romanticized “Junkie” Burroughs can lead to a dead end, so does its shadow doppelgänger — the “Burroughs with scissors.” The myths of Burroughs’ production, corrected and demolished and re-presented most effectively over time by scholar Oliver Harris, have done much to replicate and spread his reputation, and the myths of the Cut-Ups are equally misleading. While this aleatory work is extremely compelling to me, and to many others, to fetishize is to ossify. We have to see the limits even if we dream of the expanse. As to how The Third Mind inhabits the concept, that’s the story we seek to share in our work on The Third Mind and The Book of Methods, and Marcus Boon and I hope interested readers will come along for the slice.

I think that the Romanticized Burroughs is something I see most, even now, when I discuss his work with people online and in-person. How do you see this Romanticization influencing work about Burroughs now and what do you hope to see in regards to future projects about Burroughs?

I don’t mean to suggest that people should not be interested in biography, and I well understand the pull of the Beat / counterculture figures as anti-heroes who “revolutionized art and life,” etc. Yet, if you start to scratch the surface of that narrative, you’ll find it is indebted to many of the historical underpinnings and assumptions that our world is rightly rethinking. To think one’s sense of Kerouac begins and ends for all time with the teenage reading On the Road is not a highway I want to travel for too long. The reason I will still revisit Naked Lunch (as I will reread Proust or Morrison or Acker or Genet) is that I understand these texts less with each reading. These books are not puzzles to be solved but questions to be asked again and again, from new and different angles. For that, I need to ask the text, rather than to impose an idea, or a series of ideas, about what the author represents. As for the future, Cut-Ups are one predictor, but they are most right when they produce results — when a cut from the past is reinforced by subsequent events — and easy to enjoy without outsized expectations when they don’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anselm Hollo

Ted Berrigan

David Gitin

Merrill Gilfillan

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

The things we didn’t know.

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

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

How did you come to publish Blade Runner for Burroughs? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do publishers even think that way? 

I’m sure some do. I never did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously we never ever thought any of that was true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a small publisher, the three roles usually overlap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you write a book about Burroughs? He’s not nearly as glamorous or popular as most of your other subjects, or was he?

At the time I started to write the book, January 1979, William Burroughs was one of the most glamorous and hip people in New York. We were deep in heroic chic. But, much more importantly, I set out to write a mythology for the counterculture. And my guide was to first tackle those legendary leaders of the whole thing like Burroughs, Warhol, and Keith Richards, going back to the beginning of the sixties, whose heavy metal images had too long obscured their real personalities.

William Burroughs and Mick Jagger. Photograph by Victor Bockris.

The bottom line was even simpler. I was Burroughs’ aide during the three-day Nova Convention celebrating his life and career in December 1978. I was struck by how many of the young men who asked me to get Bill to sign their books were shaking so hard they could hardly hold them. When I urged them to approach him themselves, they fled in sheer fear. I understood this because the first time I had dinner with William, I fainted.

Anyway, my perception was that after operating from behind their oracle like monosyllabic responses, dark glasses and bluer than ice cool, these icons would be far better appreciated and much more widely received if they revealed the very funny, romantic, and empathetic sides of their personalities. William Burroughs was the sweetest guy I ever met. He was so sensitive to the blows of life he could hardly stand it. As he admitted to me in our last interview, “I am so emotional that sometimes I can’t stand the intensity. Oh, my God. Then they ask me if I ever cry? I say, ‘Holy shit, probably two days ago.’ I’m very subject to fits of violent weeping, for very good reasons.” 

Looking back from the present and knowing the William Burroughs of his days in Lawrence, it is almost strange to think of an icy unapproachable man. The stories of the many random visitors showing up at his house unexpected are numerous. Did he change over time in New York City, or was he really initially that stern in regards to his fans?  

Holy shit! What are we dealing with here, time travel? Are you really telling me that you are so annealed to your Lawrence Burroughs that you have completely lost touch with Burroughs’ initial image as an icy unapproachable alien? Burroughs’ entrance onto the world stage took place at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference in August 1962, where he famously said, “I am not an entertainer.” Burroughs’ carefully constructed image in his books, interviews, photographs, films, and rare public appearances in the 1960s never let his audience relax or get to know him. Comments, like “Love is a con put down by the female sex,” mirrored his alter ego Inspector Lee’s attitudes. With his banker’s drag, pale enigmatic blue-lipped face, and uncomfortable aristocratic distance, Burroughs faded into the boardroom portraits of his faceless ancestors. He was a sheep-killing dog. He did not want to be recognized.

In this composition of negatives, he was similar to Warhol. Back then this was not so much a pose as a defence. The leading, ground-breaking artists of the counterculture were taking on the most powerful establishment of all time: the FBI, Time/Life, CIA, the military industrial complex, the syndicates and cartels of the earth. It took the establishment thirty years to stop them by incorporating all art forms. The terrible thing is that we so recoil from history in America that we have even ignored our own history. The counterculture was the only global movement of a non-military people to campaign effectively for peace. It is currently being studiously written out of history by the Department of Education, and I have not heard a single word of protest. Man, you should have seen them kicking the great satirist Terry Southern. Where is Lenny Bruce now that we need him? Burroughs’ career is counted out in transformations. There is no one Burroughs.

“In America,” Poem by Victor Bockris

What did Burroughs mean to New York in the 1970s?

Burroughs returned to New York in 1974, after twenty-five years of self-imposed exile from America. At that time he was burned out by too many isolated years in London and did not even think he could continue to write fiction. Most of his American fans thought he was dead. Nobody recognized him on the street.

Shortly after he arrived Allen Ginsberg introduced Burroughs to a young man from Kansas. James Grauerholz would be Burroughs’ amanuensis for the next twenty-three years. The first effective thing James did was quickly set up some readings. As soon as Burroughs started to give public readings of his work in New York and beyond, a brush fire was lit. Apart from that great record Call Me Burroughs recorded in Paris around 1964-1965, his voice had rarely been heard. And Bill was a great reader of his writing, with perfect timing and the delivery of a stand-up comedian.

In 1979 when I started having dinner with him several nights a week, Burroughs was the worshipped King of the Beats and Godfather of Punk as well as King of the Underground. He was definitely one of the coolest people in the city. I think the fact that he had never sold out, and had come back to seize his throne at the same time that great yahoo Nixon fell from his, was a true and irresistible story. Plus William loved his life and had lived it to the hilt ever since the breakthrough with Naked Lunch in ’59. By the publication of his new novel, Cities of the Red Night, in 1981, Burroughs read to ten million people on Saturday Night Live, kicking off the Red Night reading tour of the nation. You also have to bear in mind that in Europe and Japan he was considered the greatest writer in the world. Even now who has gone past Burroughs?

The Godfather of Punk moniker was already branded on Burroughs by the time he was in living in New York City because you refer to it in your book With William Burroughs, and of course he flatly denied any association with the punks, just as he denied being associated with the Beats. Nonetheless, he was adopted as a Godfather by the punk movement of that time, whether he liked it or not. Did Burroughs care that much about this need people had to associate themselves with him?

He became the Godfather of Punk in approximately 1977. Bill was not consistent in interviews. He was ambivalent about these associations. On the one hand he rejected the concept of the hero and role model as a Hollywood trap. On the other hand he did not want to reject the very people he had in part written into being. He had a real affection for artists who took risks to push a shared agenda. The Beat-Punk Axis formed under the umbrella of a shared reaction to World War II. He claimed he wrote a letter of support to the Sex Pistols on the release of God Save The Queen. He had written his own version, “Bugger the Queen,” two years earlier. On a parallel track, he remained best friends with Ginsberg till his death in ’97. He was equally loyal to Kerouac and Corso. In his final journals he describes the experience of being applauded on stage before a U2 concert as some kind of mass hug. He appreciated his fans. He was consistent in his great, battered Viking heart.

This fits into an image I have of Burroughs as someone not ignorant enough to pass up good press because he had lived through so much want and poverty. In 1957 he’s cleaning blood off a very old, dirty shirt sleeve, saving up a reserve of smack in the lapel. In 1997 he’s the most respected artist in the Western World, pushing a cart through a U2 video. He seems like he just wanted to be liked, sometimes. And the desire to be liked was important to him, even when he pushed it aside and wanted it called respect instead. Do you think he ever really “sold out,” as they say?

I do not think William Burroughs ever sold out! The idea is preposterous. He was sometimes paranoid about the press in America. (See my crazed flip out in the 1990 Kansas interview regarding this). In fact when I first interviewed him in 1974 I was working with a partner, we wore Brooks Brothers suits and bowties. In 90 minutes he answered monosyllabically and denied knowing who Solzhenitsyn was!! It turned out he thought we were from the C.I.A. But that is not as strange as it sounds when you consider that the last time he tried to move back to New York in 1965, Huncke told Bill that he had been asked by the police to set him up for a bust. As William said, a paranoid is a man in possession of the facts.

You’d have to walk in his shoes before you start accusing William Burroughs of selling out. Hell, the very fact that he didn’t sell out, didn’t go over to Madison Avenue to drink coca-cola and make it! is why he liberated generations to live real life instead of the antiseptic heirloom life of the cardboard dead. People need to be reminded that we learned how to live from William Burroughs and Andy Warhol and all the heroes of the counterculture who dedicated their lives to their callings and lived alone.

I want to try to clear up once and for all the idea that William was manipulated into anything. This is the man who told me, it only takes one man to stand up against this tissue of lies and horseshit… clearly referring to himself. Bill Burroughs was one tough hombre. He changed the world. However, he was also your classic artist who wants to be left alone to dream his dreams and write his books. He wouldn’t remember to eat if you didn’t put a plate in front of him. And there was a side of Bill which remained adolescent and innocent. He was also vulnerable in love, because he was so passionately emotional and had such a poor self image. These conditions led him at times to be overly impressed by one friend’s opinions. There was a period in the 1960s in which he was almost totally under the influence of Brion Gysin. If Gysin didn’t like Warhol, Bill didn’t like Warhol. If Gysin told him to wear tight trousers and Beatle boots, Bill wore tight trousers and Beatle boots, despite making a spectacle of himself. 

William Burroughs and Andy Warhol at Dinner, Collage by Victor Bockris and David Schmidlapp

This tendency led years later to attacks on James Grauerholz for manipulating or controlling Burroughs, which I find disturbing. These attacks came in part as a result of Burroughs leading a larger life, complicated by his post-’83 financial success and painting career. And from his greatly increased fame. It was James’ job to handle all the offers and requests that poured in equally from businessmen and old friends. As Bill got into his later seventies, he was less inclined to travel and more aware of using what time he had left to finish his work. Thus when James had to admonish some of Morgan’s missteps in Literary Outlaw, he earned the writer’s life-long hate. When James had to turn down this invitation or that deal, he earned the resentment of the people he refused. If an old friend couldn’t get through to Bill, James was blamed with cutting them off. And this small army of second-rate losers found in sharing and expanding their complaints some comfort. What seems inexcusable to me is that when these same people, who claimed they cared so much for Bill, caterwauled about how his life was completely manipulated, they seemed not to recognize how much that would have hurt the man they claimed to adore. Revealing the underbelly of their shallow and small-minded aims. 

Nobody is perfect. Life isn’t a magazine. But James Grauerholz dedicated his life to Bill. And gave him twenty-three years of the most splendid, productive, and enjoyable life imaginable which, coming at the end of an often deeply painful life, seemed like a much deserved magic prize for what Burroughs gave the world. Those years would not have been possible without James, and they were not always easy for him. In the long run these rumors will float away like dirt erased by rain. And we’ll get the real story of Bill and James, one of the great examples of an amanuensis rising to the needs of his subject and easing his way to depart. Bill never dipped into old age; he never looked down; he only continued to rise. How many people can you say that about? His life, which seemed so long to be cursed, was finally blessed. Let it be blessed. He was after all a Saint.

William Burroughs and James Grauerholz. Photograph by Victor Bockris.

In With William Burroughs I get the impression he was something like an event that people attended — “Oh, have you been to see Burroughs? No? Oh, you just have to go!” — rather than a writer. It is such a contrast to his life in London. Is this what it was like?

This perception is the fault of my book. I remember when it came out I was visiting Ginsberg who opined it was a trifle chic. I laughed and said, “Évidemment, Monsieur.” I love that book because it was truly a labor of love and, you know, since its publication in the States in 1981, it has been translated into eight different languages, and the 1996 edition remains available here. Plus it is truly a unique book. Nobody has ever used that form of cutting up and re-assembling interview tapes to create a series of fictitious dinners to draw a portrait in the round. But I always thought that once you learned the ropes, writing is largely a matter of character. Each time I write a book I am ferocious in protecting what I’m doing and getting it done. Later, there is always room for the realization that you could have done it better. So what? There is no point in rethinking a war. It’s like rethinking sex for Christ’s sake! Should I have done it this way? If only I had… 

How is it a mistake? These famous people coming in and out of his house at all hours really were doing that. Was William really more of a recluse than the book presents or was he really constantly entertaining and meeting people?

Oh dear oh dear, no, they were not coming in and out of his house! William met Mick Jagger perhaps three times in the 1960s. Once thereafter in 1980. He liked Andy, but after the three meetings I set up, he only saw him on two brief visits to the Factory in the mid eighties. William much preferred and really thrived on a quiet inner circle social life. This dates back to the forties. Meeting at his place for drinks, dinner and conversation, interspersed with boy-scout weapons practices. Spot of fun! It was a boarding school existence, with Bill as the headmaster. He did not like to go out unless it was to small dinner parties in restaurants or friends’ apartments, or for special meetings. His life revolved around the Great Work he had been blessed to deliver. He husbanded his time to its daily demands. I wrote the Bunker book with the express purpose of popularizing the humorous raconteur side of Bill, to get his work more widely read for its humor than its apocalyptic overview. But now I wonder. Maybe in the same way Ted Morgan was the wrong man to write his biography, I was the wrong man to write his portrait. I don’t know how he put up with me after I gave him this image to drag around for the rest of his life! 

Ted Morgan’s biography of Burroughs, Literary Outlaw, refers to the large heroin scene in New York City at the time and how it affected Burroughs’ work. In your book you also refer to a lot of heroin in Burroughs’ neighborhood around the Bunker. What was the impact of heroin to the artistic community? 

Devastating. Let’s get some background straight. This was the Persian heroin the C.I.A had paid the Shah of Iran to block from distribution. When Khomeini took over in Tehran in ’79, it was released straight into the USA among other places to poison several levels of the U.S. population. (It is a damn effective tool). Up until ’77, I never saw heroin in N.Y. You had to go to Harlem if you wanted to score, just like Lou Reed said. In late 1978-1979, a heroin supermarket opened up on several blocks directly across from Burroughs’ building at 222 Bowery. They used to sell a bag called Dr. Nova.

I had never been interested in heroin because I would never stick a needle in myself. However, when it became widely known that you could snort it just like cocaine, many people who had never considered taking heroin started using it. In light of feeling that everything they had been told about drugs by the authorities was totally inaccurate. They said marijuana was addictive. Marijuana was not addictive. Maybe heroin was not addictive either. Junkie was a favorite among our generation, but how deeply had anybody read it? The great, unspanked class of ’79 had to find out for themselves. In the uptight insecure underground, H was the perfect drug to stop you from committing suicide. And punk was the first ultra cool movement that made using heroin chic. Heroin Chic on the cover of the Soho Weekly News opened the gates. Soon it replaced cocaine as the cool drug to bring to a party. We are all so sick with our delight in hearing about people who destroyed themselves with drugs. About the prettiest little girls who fouled their perfect bodies with their minds. What is that about? And what did William Burroughs have to do with it?  

Stewart Meyer entering the Bunker from the Bowery. Photograph by Victor Bockris.

You make the reality of the New York punk scene seem like a bunch of insecure suburban kids what come to the city and tried to live up to the stories in Rolling Stone and Creem and Crawdaddy. Was that what it was? Or was it the first time the middle-class kids suddenly saw that there was an option between pop music and respectability?

No no no no no!!! First of all I love the punks, particularly that first generation, Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Richard Hell etc. who are all neo-beats really. I mean rock-n-roll never changes; you just speed it up. Keith Richards speeded up Chuck Berry to produce the Stones. Steve Jones speeded up Chuck Berry to produce the sound of the Pistols. What I love most deeply about punk is that it was the first rock movement to treat girls equally with boys. There are many great girls in punk. They were new. After all rock is a feminine thing. It is based on girls. It’s just that rock journalists in their own hang-ups about wanting to be rock stars continue to deny the existence of females in rock books. The only people I would ever interview in a rock book would be THE GIRLS.

And on that note I would just like to say that Bill seemed to dig the punk girls I was involved with when I was writing his book. You can see their audacious faces in the photographs. I do think there’s something to say about punk being more of a movement of personalities than, say, glam rock. But that’s a positive thing. A positive hinge. Punk was about doing everything you were not supposed to do. In line with the English poet William Blake, BREAK ALL THE RULES. Looking back now, this feels like a lone trumpet call across a battlefield, the field of the cloth of gold, but it certainly was not a lost battle. WE WON. PUNK STANDS. PUNK WILL NEVER GO AWAY. Like real life it sticks.

Was Morgan’s account of William’s drug use at the time how it appeared to you? Was it really interfering with his work? I know you’ve said in other articles you’ve written that not all Morgan’s biography is completely accurate?

Morgan was particularly inaccurate on this subject, about which he knew nothing. So much of that book reeks of his prejudices it’s disgusting! The fact is William had severe writer’s block at several times while writing Cities of the Red Night. What one did not want to say at the time, but is made quite clear in the magnificent diaries of Stewart Meyer, probably the single most accurate account of the Bunker years 1979-1983, was that Burroughs was plagued by so many problems then — from poverty, through the death of his son and unrequited love, to writer’s block — that without heroin the book might never have been completed. In fact for the rest of his life, Bill never wrote without the parallel effects of methadone. And when you look at how much work he produced between 1983-1997, you begin to see that opiates released the best in him. For good reason. Burroughs was extremely self-critical. Heroin cuts out the self-critical track and puts you inside a warm cocoon in which you can carry out your desired work with a clear mind. 

I want to add this about the relationship between the great addicts, like Cocteau, Burroughs, Keith Richards, and their influence on their followers’ drug habits. First, no writer in the sixties and seventies made it clearer how horrifying and deeply destructive heroin is than Burroughs. Yet, in a strange translation that deserves attention, even his more perceptive readers appear to have taken his use as permission for their own. This is a troubling example of an increasingly common trait, in which the fan is more affected by the artist’s image than his work. And we all know no world artist can maintain control of his image. It differs country by country. William Burroughs and Keith Richards were undoubtedly the coolest guys in New York in the late 1970s. But if you want to immerse yourself in “Sympathy for the Devil” or Naked Lunch, you have to have a strong constitution and mind; otherwise you are as sure to flip out as if you read that book of horrors, the Bible. Lou Reed put it well when he said in defence of Andy Warhol, “the Factory was not a mental hospital.” Don’t you know that you can get run over by a car, or a girl for that matter, anytime you walk out of the house? Now, who you gonna blame? Ghostbusters?

Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and William Burroughs. Photograph by Victor Bockris.

What did Burroughs think of your decision to write a book about him? At the time you did it the book was probably the closest thing to a portrait done so far.

A few months after the book came out I was having dinner with Bill when I came across a response he made to an interviewer who asked about the book. “I could have done without it,” he replied. At first I was shocked, because I had brought people like Christopher Isherwood to the Bunker, and we had had fun during a lot of those taped dinners. But I also saw the humorous side. “Hey, man!” I remonstrated in fake shock, “what’s all this about then?” He grinned sheepishly, but before I left he gave me a small press book in which he had written something like, “to Victor Bockris, a friend through the vicissitudes of time.” There was a clique who resented the hell out of my activities with Burroughs. They formed the opinion I was leading him on, which says little for their opinion of William. They kept pointing out that I was not gay, as if that were some kind of betrayal. But… well these are long forgotten struggles and of little import now. Besides that was in another world and the boys are dead…

How many biographies are there? One real attempt. (Publishers often stamp biography on a portrait). The Morgan book was to my way of thinking a mistake. For several reasons: Ted Morgan did not understand William Burroughs. He’s a French Count, Comte St. Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont, who has written some very good books. But he had met Burroughs in France and Tangier in 1972, I believe. I encountered him at the Bunker on several occasions and he always looked like he had a brick up his ass sideways. He didn’t like the other people around the Bunker because they did not look up to him. And he only saw Bill formally. He couldn’t handle the homosexuality or the drugs, or the passion or the realism. He never hung out nights we came to at 6 a.m. wondering what the fuck happened, or had to be carted home by a sympathetic amigo. He was a stiff uptight, jaundiced motherfucker. The proof is that he never finds his or any voice in the book. He tries to write a lot of it in Bill’s voice, or worse still in Bill’s subconscious, and it was terrible. What a missed opportunity.

They chose Morgan because he had done Roosevelt and Churchill, and they thought it would put Bill in the right context! This was shortly after he had been accepted into the American Order of Arts and Letters, as you can tell by the very boring opening chapter. I mean, to open a biography of William Burroughs on his induction into this meaningless body would seem to me to indicate upfront just how very far the biographer is out to lunch! But, you see, being able to represent William Burroughs is an extremely heady experience. I am sure I would have turned into a complete asshole if I had ever been in Grauerholz’s position.

In Morgan’s defense, it was an authorized biography. He knew that Bill was going to read through it all and could vet certain things. And contractually he gave 25% of the advance and royalties to Burroughs for this dubious right. The whole thing stinks of an agent throwing his weight around and destroying the whole project before it got started. Morgan accepted all this bullshit because he thought if he wrote a biography of Burroughs, people would take him more seriously as a writer!!! And then too, few people understand the art of biography. It is a form as difficult and changeable as its subjects. I spent six torturous years writing the Warhol biography. Actually I offered to write the Burroughs bio, but that’s another story…

Victor Bockris at a party (with Burroughs, not pictured) in 1981. Photograph by Michael Heissman/Radar.

I know what you mean about the Morgan book. I found it hard to reconcile the man who rejected all groups with the man so proud of his inclusion in a group. That’s what I realized on this re-read of your book: you understood him more as a peer than subject. Why did they not choose you to write it? How much say did William have over things anyway?

I appreciate your reading of my book. At the time, 1983, I had no chops as a biographer, whereas Morgan had won the Pulitzer Prize and supposedly knew what he was doing. I had also only just published the Bunker book. The reason I tabled the notion was my agent, Andrew Wylie, was pushing me hard to do the Warhol bio and I just wanted to make it clear to Bill that I would rather have done Burroughs. In retrospect, I am really glad I did Warhol. Even though it almost killed me and took six years of my life, it made my name. Besides, biography is such a tough nut to crack. And on my first time around I would never have survived the authorized aspects of the Burroughs-Morgan deal. I should add that as a private in the Burroughs camp I agreed with it at the time. It is easy to say all these wise-sounding things in retrospect. We were all so young and naïve, including Billy Burroughs. I am currently working on a book called The Burroughs-Warhol Tapes, but that’s all I want to say about it.

William Burroughs had the unusual habit of rewriting and rereleasing his novels during the 1960s and 1970s. He is not the only author to have undertaken a revision of a previously published work. Henry James famously revised and added to his novels in the early years of the 20th century for the special New York Editions; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass saw a number of versions before his death; even Baudelaire reworked and rereleased Les Fleurs du mal. But Burroughs’ commitment to radically changing his already published work separates him from most writers. For Burroughs, there was nothing sacred about his texts; nothing was final, nothing was true, and everything was permitted.

The first published novel that Burroughs revised was The Soft Machine. There was an almost immediate but failed attempt to reissue it in 1963. The Acknowledgements page of the 1962 version of The Ticket That Exploded says “The Soft Machine First Edition: 1961. New revised and augmented edition: February 1963.” Ultimately a second edition would not come out until 1966, followed by a revision to The Ticket That Exploded, which was rereleased in 1967. These revisions yielded the versions most readers are familiar with — the Grove Press editions, which were the first publications of those two books in the United States. A third revision was made to The Soft Machine in 1968 for the Calder Press in England.

It would be interesting to collect all of the interview statements in which Burroughs discusses what he thinks about his novels. I doubt that there were many that he felt really measured up. If there are no boundaries on what you are willing to revise, it may be that nothing ever seems complete. Burroughs said in The Job that he was not satisfied with Nova Express as a novel, though he never revised it. In 1975 The Last Words of Dutch Shultz was revised from a more narrative 1970 version of the novel, and in 1980 Blue Winds Press rereleased the 1973 short novel Port of Saints in a larger, expanded version. Naked Lunch, however, never underwent any major revisions during Burroughs’ lifetime.

A note should be made about Dead Fingers Talk, released in 1963. This book was not a revision of any previous work, but an interesting experiment in taking content from Burroughs’ three previously released novels and creating what is essentially a cut-up at the chapter level. A chapter from Naked Lunch follows a chapter from The Soft Machine, followed by a chapter from The Ticket That Exploded. In the end a new novel emerges with attributes of its own. Strangely, this book has since gone out of print.

The Soft Machine initially took the same publicity route as Naked Lunch. Burroughs published portions of the book in various journals and magazines to introduce the book to the public. Comparatively large portions of Naked Lunch had appeared in journals like Big Table and The Chicago Review. The Soft Machine began appearing in smaller amounts, though in more places and in countries outside of France and the United States, suggesting a growth in Burroughs’ popularity. Burroughs described this plan in a letter to Allen Ginsberg in September, 1959: “I am working on a sequel to Naked Lunch… I will write pieces of the present work in the form of short stories that can be sold to magazines in the U.S. for immediate cash. If you have any suggestions or know of any magazine that might ask for material, I can deliver.” Burroughs did this in earnest both before and after The Soft Machine was released to increase the attention paid to his work.

Burroughs would not repeat this practice with The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express to nearly the same degree. By the time those books were released, he was occupied with other cut-ups and was using the underground press to carry out his experiments with form and text. He knew that the underground press represented a receptive audience and exploited it for his more experimental work, which was suited to short pieces presented in small magazines and alternative newspapers.

The First Edition

The initial edition of The Soft Machine was released by Olympia Press in 1961 after the success of Naked Lunch had placed Burroughs on the map as a challenging new writer of the avant-garde. Taken mostly from the remnants of the rumored 1,000 pages of material (his famous Word Hoard) from which Naked Lunch had been put together, The Soft Machine detailed yet more sexual encounters, scenes of drug use and abuse, the battle between the sexes and the developing Nova Conspiracy mythology that would run throughout the coming novels of that decade. (It was still at that time called the Novia conspiracy). The poetic nature of the prose in the first edition is likely a reflection of the material he was writing at the time — The Exterminator and Minutes to Go, both written with the assistance of Brion Gysin in the early 1960s, just before the release of The Soft Machine.

The first Olympia edition of The Soft Machine is a fundamentally different novel from the edition of The Soft Machine with which most readers are familiar — the second Grove Press edition. For this reason, it is easier to compare both the first Olympia and third Calder editions against the second, making it a kind of anchor.

The first and second editions have little likeness to each other. They are even laid out differently. However, the second and third editions do not vary so radically in content as to be seen as completely different novels. In many ways the third edition is really just a reworking of the second edition’s less commercial material. It adds new passages and cuts away what may have been too difficult or extraneous for a wider audience. Presumably the critical reception of the first two editions influenced the revisions Burroughs made in the third.

The first edition has a very specific framework that was removed from the later editions. There are four units, each assigned a color. The first unit is titled Red, with Green, Blue, and White following in sequence. Each section is made up of generally short chapters, some of which are familiar to readers of the second edition because they are later recycled into it, in both cut-up and straight narrative forms. The opening chapter of the first edition, “Gongs of Violence,” is the third-to-last chapter of the second edition. The opening chapter of the second edition (“I was working the hole with The Sailor…”) begins at a paragraph halfway down the page in the “White Score” section of the first edition, near the end of the book. This signals a shift in the overall concept of the book away from a vision of war to a vision of addiction and control that is typical of Burroughs’ concerns in the mid-1960s.

Throughout the novel, sections that appear in the second edition are found in completely different places, highlighting the concept of non-linearity that Burroughs maintained in the novels of the 1960s. This book can be read any which way. However, the third edition maintains the structure of the second edition, hinting that Burroughs may have settled on a rough structure for the book, perhaps backing away from the original color-unit concept after the first edition of The Ticket That Exploded.

In the first edition of The Soft Machine approximately 80 of the book’s 182 pages are never used again in either of the following two editions. That is nearly half of the novel. This alone shows why the first and second editions are really two different novels. Moreover, they focus to some degree on two separate though similar ideas. The first edition focuses more on war than the second — in particular, the war between the sexes. The second is centered more on control and addiction, with the male-female war basically in the background. As usual, sex in its many forms is a main theme for both versions.

Given that Burroughs so regularly recycled his characters and story lines in other pieces and novels over the span of his career, it would not be incorrect to argue that the first edition of The Soft Machine is a separate entity from the second edition in much the same way that Dead Fingers Talk is a separate entity on its own, despite being a cut-up of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. The first edition could easily be published alongside the second and third editions without treading on their conceptual territory. It’s a pity that the first edition is so difficult for most readers to obtain, since it gives insight into Burroughs’ areas of exploration immediately after and during the publication of Naked Lunch, when he was still living in Paris. More so than the other editions of the novel, the first edition was made up of overflow pages from the Word Hoard material, demarcating a certain period in Burroughs personal history that is presently lacking in print.

The Second Edition

Since the second Grove edition is the version most familiar to readers, it can be a shock when they find out that there were alternates. The second edition has long chapters instead of units cut into small, sometimes half-page sections. It is more narrative and less fractured than the first edition. This may be one reason that Burroughs insisted on revising it, allowing the reader some kind of access to an already difficult novel by offering extended narratives which were absent before.

In the first edition, as Oliver Harris has stated, “the reader is too forcibly & relentlessly reminded that something methodological is going on, without there being any visible means of deducing precisely what it is.” The first edition was a full-steam-ahead operation in using the cut-up method to create a novel-length manuscript. However, the number of cut-ups leaves the reader with nothing to follow consistently. The second edition has much longer continuous sequences. Burroughs could see by the mid-1960s that pure cut-up could not retain a reader’s interest. When Nova Express was released in 1964 a more continuous structure had been introduced into the cut-up novel. As Harris has also noted, “from the wholesale revisions he made to The Soft Machine it is evident that Burroughs had then only learned… that it was barely possible for anyone to read such a text.” The prose-poetry of the first edition was replaced with a more narrative form where cut-ups happened within the story instead of being the whole of the story.

The radical change from the prose poetry and narrative disconnectedness of the first to the second editions suggests more than just the pursuit of perfection or accessibility. Burroughs’ revisions may have been spurred by criticism of the first edition of The Soft Machine, and more than likely Grove Press demanded some changes to make the text more commercial and accessible. Also Burroughs was mindful of his finances, especially in the late 1960s when he was living in London. As Graham Masterson points out in a recent interview, Burroughs was short on cash and the need to create a salable novel must have weighed heavily on him. Thus, the Grove Press edition was released in a form drastically different from the original.

The Third Edition

In 1968, only two years after the Grove edition, Burroughs reworked The Soft Machine again, showing that he cared about it still and had something left to add to the book. It can also be assumed that the publisher, John Calder, encouraged Burroughs to make the book more accessible to the reader and therefore more commercially viable. Joan Didion had written, in a review of the section edition, that “The Soft Machine has only the dulling effect of a migraine attack, after pain and nausea and unwanted images have battered the nerve synapses until all connections are lost.” While on the whole her criticism was favorable and she remained a fan of Burroughs, such reviews may have prompted a more conventional format for the third edition.

The changes in the Calder reissue are fairly significant, though not even close to what we see in the transition from the first to the second edition. In this third edition Burroughs expands chapters that were previously much shorter, using both new material and selections from the first edition which he had omitted. In creating the second edition, Burroughs cut out many of the first edition’s cut-ups. However, in preparing the third edition, he went back to rescue some of the material he felt was still worth preserving. In some instances, this is the reason for extending what were shorter pieces in the second edition.

To demonstrate the difference between the second and third versions I will list in brief the more significant changes he made to the text, which eventually became an amalgamation of material from all three editions with new material added in as well, while still relying heavily on the second edition for structure.

The changes in the third edition are as follows:

• “Trak Trak Trak” replaces two pages with material from the first edition of The Soft Machine and then omits eight pages at the end which are moved in to the “Early Answer” chapter.
• “Early Answer” begins where “Trak Trak Trak” cuts out the last eight pages of the second edition. This chapter adds the first page of the second edition’s “The Case of the Celluloid Kali” onto its end.
• “The Case of the Celluloid Kali” begins in the third edition on the second page of the second edition.
• “I Sekuin” has a half page of new material added to the end of this short chapter.
• “Where the Awning Flaps” is nine pages longer, with both new material and material taken from the first edition.
• “1920 Movies” is retitled “Streets of Chance” and is 13 pages longer than the second edition, again with a mix of new material and material from the first edition.
• “Uranian Willy” has one page of new material with a footnote.
• “Gongs of Violence” has three extra pages of both new material and material from the first edition.
• “Dead Fingers Talk” adds five pages of new material.
• The book ends with 18 pages of new material concerning addiction and the apomorphine treatment. There is a short, one-page piece titled “Appendix to The Soft Machine,” an essay titled “A Treatment That Cancels Addiction,” a short piece titled “Plan Drug Addiction” and a final essay titled “Jail May Be Best RX For Addicts MD Says.” The last essay is in part taken from Burroughs article “The Death of Opium Jones” in New Statesmen from March of 1966.

The third edition is significantly different from the second, but the last 18 pages of material discussing apomorphine stick out as a fairly odd way to replace what was arguably the fine ending of both the first and second editions: “(The shallow water came in with the tide and the Swedish River of Gothenberg).” It is a haunting line almost reminiscent of the “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” that ends The Great Gatsby, a book Burroughs admired. Both have the nostalgic feel typical of Burroughs’ work. However, in the third edition we are left with this line: “Since all monopolistic and hierarchical systems are basically rooted in anxiety it is not surprising that the use of the apo-morphine treatment or the synthesis of the apo-morphine formulae have been consistently opposed in certain drearily predictable quarters of the soft machine.” It lacks the poetry of the earlier versions’ ending. Also it is more concerned with the immediate issues Burroughs was confronting at the time, 1968, than with the more universal theme of the previous versions’ ending.

This is not to say that the third edition is inferior to the second or, for that matter, the first. In many ways the third edition works out and refines the problems Burroughs experienced from the first edition in using the cut-up method on a novel-length scale. As Harris has noted in his essay “Cutting Up Politics,” the cut-up was well suited to short pieces of a page or two but less so on the level of a novel, where the poetic language suddenly demands a continuous narrative to maintain interest. With the third edition, we are introduced to a commercial cut-up method in a book with more logical chapter breaks and fuller story sequences.

It is interesting to speculate what Burroughs’ thought of his second edition and the fact that a version he once felt was imperfect was the only one still in print at the time of his death. Did the appending of apomorphine propaganda to the end of the third edition eventually seem dated? While apomorphine was a popular topic in the media at the time Burroughs was writing about it, it quickly faded into the past. Were the extensive additions to some of the chapters from the second edition still seen as an improvement? Given the complexity of the first edition, it is difficult to say what Burroughs might have thought about the second edition’s poularity.

If nothing else, he could at least have had a university press reissue the third edition in the 1990s, an opportunity more than a few presses would have jumped at. Evidently he was not motivated to seek a wider audience for that third edition of the book, which is less easily found in North America than it is in the U.K. (It took me three months to track down a reading copy that wasn’t priced in the hundreds. I’m not much of a collector, so no flyleaf and a few cigarette burns are fine with me. Regardless, it took actual effort in the age of the internet to find the book.)

What the various versions of The Soft Machine offer are three visions of the first real cut-up novel. They also display the process of a writer refining a technique over a decade of dedication to a single book. However, The Soft Machine also serves as an object lesson in responding to the demands of a publisher in a new market. For this reason alone it is of interest to scholars and writers because the three editions together are almost a textbook in how to conceive, execute, and finalize an influential experimental work.

By Dave Teeuwen

The “Abstracts” of 1969 are a series of seven writing experiments which William Burroughs developed in the writing of his novel The Wild Boys. He published these “Abstracts” that year in small-press journals and underground newspapers, his usual testing ground in the 1960s. Their unusual format of careful juxtaposition is already familiar to anyone who has read The Wild Boys. Added to the five “Abstracts” found in The Wild Boys (actually six Penny Arcade Peep Shows / “Abstracts,” if you include the reprint of an “Abstract” first published in the journal Intrepid), the number of published individual “Abstracts” comes to twelve.

Burroughs provides an introduction to what the reader is viewing in The Wild Boys, as Audrey enters the Penny Arcade Peep Show and seats himself in front of the four screens on which films are being projected: “Audrey looked at the screen in front of him. His lips parted and the thoughts stopped in his mind. It was all there on screen sight sound touch at once immediate and spectrally remote in past time.” This bit of framing is absent in the “Abstracts”. However, it is clear that they are pieces designed to silence the reader and make him think without words, to think only in images. The language is not there to provide meaning, but to provide pictures in the mind. The “Abstracts” are as close as Burroughs could take the English language towards being purely visual without literally drawing it all out.

Burroughs’ obsession with the power of visual writing systems, such as Mayan and Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, comes out of this desire to convey meaning without the use of words. In The Third Mind he writes about hieroglyphics, “If you are able to look at what is front of you in silence, you will be able to write about it from a more perceptive viewpoint. What keeps you from seeing what is in front of you? Words for what is in front of you, which is not what is there. As Korzybski pointed out, whatever a chair may be, it is not a ‘chair’.” The “Abstracts” are Burroughs’ attempt to do the same with the English language through the device of writing a brief summary of an abstract film. (It is perhaps a subtle play on the typical scientific “abstract,” usually a brief overview of a longer paper or thesis, and at the same time an abstract film made of cut-ups, cut-ins, and jumping images.)

Throughout the 1960s, Burroughs dabbled in making / writing films and sound recordings, presciently seeing that the lines between film and the written word were fairly blurry. Many things you can do with film can also be done with words. His cut-ups during this period are an example. As he says in The Job, “Cut-ups have been used in film for a long time. In fact films are assembled in the cutting room. Like the painter film technicians can touch and handle their medium move pieces of it around and try out new juxtapositions.”

Burroughs explored this concept cinematically through his relationships with Antony Balch and Ian Sommerville. Though not all of them were cut up, Towers Open Fire, The Cut-ups and Bill and Tony are films that play with sound and image to explore what it means to see, hear, and experience. This was exactly the point of cutting up texts and films, and the “Abstracts” are just another extension of the experiment. They are each a small film made up of flashing imagery and short, quickly cut scenes reminiscent of the films Balch was making with Burroughs at this time.

There were other artists in the 1960s making films that are amazingly similar in visual imagery to what Burroughs was writing. The films of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner are filled with cut-ins and disjointed imagery. Conner in particular, in his 1958 film A Movie, uses stock footage of war atrocities of the type we see described the “Abstracts.” These films use the aesthetics of German Abstract filmmakers of the 1920s, but with the post-war imagery that Burroughs exploited so effectively.

The abstract films of the 1920s point forward to the imagery found in Burroughs’ “Abstracts.” Hans Richter’s 1923 film Rhythm 23, for example, almost seems to be the very film Audrey sees as he sits in the chair in the Penny Arcade. Shapes move in towards the screen and then recede again. (“Objects and scenes move away and come in with a slow hydraulic movement always at the same speed” — The Wild Boys). New shapes come in, other shapes evolve into something, all of it in total silence. (Rhythm 23 was made before the sound era.) One has to wonder whether Burroughs saw the film. Given his favorite number in the title, he would certainly have considered this an intersection point.

This use of visual imagery and cutting away were new techniques in Burroughs’ effort to “rub out the word.” They lead the reader into silence as the images convey meaning without causing the formation of words in the mind. The shift from cutting up narrative imagery to describing cut-up, film-based imagery shows the evolution of Burroughs’ writing at this point in his career.

The “Abstracts” are as follows:

“Abstract,” Klacto/23 International, 1969

This long “Abstract” appears in The Wild Boys in a much shorter form as the beginning of the first Penny Arcade Peep Show chapter. The introduction of the four screens moving forward and backward immediately ties this “Abstract” to the Penny Arcade Peep Shows. Over six sets of four numbered images, Burroughs ties together nostalgic symbols of carnival midways, adolescent lust and ancient Egyptian scenes. Obviously, all of these themes recur throughout his work of this period. In this instance, however, the colorless prose and slight details of the piece are utilized to create stark pictures in the mind instead of narrative. The repetition of the 1 2 3 4 (the way Antony Balch describes the process of putting together the disparate pieces of the film The Cut-Ups) over and over again brings to mind the Dianetics of L. Ron Hubbard and his theory of the Engram, which stresses repetition to dissolve ideas that block mental or emotional progress. In this case, the progress is adopting the ability to see and think in images, without words. This idea is taken to greater lengths in other “Abstracts.”

“Abstract,” Intrepid 14, 1969

This “Abstract” makes up the final Penny Arcade Peep Show chapter of The Wild Boys, and is likely to be the most familiar one. It is mostly based in an ancient Middle Eastern setting and describes the assassins of Alamout and their leader Hassan I Sabbah. The longest section, set in the Persian city of Resht in 1023, develops into a story about an assassin from Alamout, disguised as a gardener, who waits 10 years to carry out his mission to kill an army general who has been searching for Hassan I Sabbah. Burroughs’ alter-ego Audrey also appears in this “Abstract”, which ties it to The Wild Boys. However, much of the content in the piece has little to do with the general themes found in the book.

“Abstract,” Fruit Cup, No. 0 (1969)

This “Abstract” appears in The Burroughs File and may already be familiar to readers. In some ways, it is more of an essay than a fractured narrative like the other “Abstracts.” Instructions for disrupting media and power centers are outlined, echoing some of the ideas of Burroughs’ essay The Electronic Generation (a postscript of which follows this “Abstract” in both Fruit Cup and The Burroughs File). As in the Lip “Abstracts”, scientists are identified as callous and unfeeling, almost robot-like. “Finally a scientist is making interferon with one hand and malignant hepatitis with the other.” Newspapers are also singled out as prophets of doom, creating the news they report by “reporting” on it before it happens. They are responsible for the events they describe, says Burroughs. Images of horror and destruction are listed as examples of what newspapers can create through the use of the Word. This “Abstract” is somewhat more clinical than the others. It is similar to the first of the Lip pieces in that it approaches its subject more clinically than the strong narrative approach of Best & Company piece.

“Abstract,” Best & Company, 1969

Structurally, this “Abstract” contains both narrative and colorless prose used in juxtaposition. This is unusual, an obvious continuation of the overall experiment. Burroughs seems to have defined two types of “Abstract” and then attempted a combination of the two in this instance. This is the most narrative-driven of the “Abstracts.” It contains a long section based in an ancient Mayan civilization, a familiar theme in Burroughs’ novels. A storyline is developed quickly, concerning the workers overthrowing the priests, who go about arrayed in golden centipede and crab suits. The workers refuse to continue working and burn the codices of the priests, eliminating their power of control. It also contains a familiar passage about how the Wild Boys grow new boys by using a small chunk of flesh from another boy. They have no names or navels, getting rid of the need for identity. Even among the more austere sections in the beginning there are some beautiful passages (“God points with index finger of left hand. The youth dies. A rose bush grows from his body.”). These are almost poetic when compared with the stark language of the other “Abstracts”.

“Abstract” 1 & 2, Lip, 1969

“Abstract,” Mikrokosmos, 1969

This short piece is terse, concise, and utilizes colorless prose more than other “Abstracts.” It contrasts two opposing images, in a method taken from Hubbard again, using a negative image against a positive one. Audrey sees films on the four screens before him. In each section, a barrage of varied images is presented to the reader, then the soothing other side of the coin is revealed in the opposing image. One set of films speeds up while the second set slows down. One man at his desk works furiously while the man beside him does almost nothing. Image is juxtaposed with image to see both sides of a question, pointing the way towards any number of other possibilities, the consummate Burroughsian option. As we will see in other “Abstracts”, the piece ends on a fading color, this time white light, highlighting its visual nature over verbal.

It is easy enough to say what the “Abstracts” are. It is clear that they are the overflow of Burroughs’ work on The Wild Boys and one of his many attempts at exploring different perspectives in his own writing. (There is only one “Abstract”-like part in Port of Saints. See pages 26 – 27. It is questionable whether this was once an “Abstract” or just Burroughs using the tempo of the “Abstract” for a few paragraphs. Exterminator! has no “Abstract”. Also see The Job pages 191 – 193 for an extended treatment of the idea behind the engram and the reactive mind in a very “Abstract”-like format.) The larger question, however, is why Burroughs bothered with them at all? Why include them as a consistent theme in The Wild Boys? They have an almost confusing effect, stuck in the middle of the text, jarring the reader out of the relatively straight narrative, a form to which Burroughs was returning at that point in his career. They do not greatly add to the story, nor do they offer more information about the Wild Boys.

Strangely, however, they do provide a consistency to The Wild Boys which it might lack if they were not included. Barely a novel, the book was made from some of the same material as Exterminator! and Port of Saints. Without the Penny Arcade Peep Show chapters to constitute an odd backbone for The Wild Boys, it is likely that the book would seem as fractured as Port of Saints, but with the disparate feel of Exterminator! due to the fact that included pieces are basically not connected in any real way. Audrey, the principle character of The Wild Boys, does recur throughout the book, but he is not a more prominent character than any of the others until late in the book. Only as the novel ends does the repeated mentioning of the Wild Boys as urban guerilla groups of young boys begin to take shape.

The “Abstracts” are important to The Wild Boys, but also as individual pieces in themselves, because they mark an important point in Burroughs’ work. At this time he was moving away from the cut-ups that defined his early work of the 1960s and towards his somewhat unique version of straight narrative, while still maintaining the philosophical need to fracture language and explore new possibilities. The “Abstracts” are not cut-ups in terms of language, but they are in terms of form — specifically, the medium and language of film. The attempt to write the immediate image and push words from the mind of the reader through the use of words is in part a logical end to the progression of the cut-ups of the early half of the 1960s, which was explored through film as well as through writing. The “Abstracts” mark an important transitional phase between the early experimental work and what may be called the more or less straight narrative of the Red Night trilogy which would occupy Burroughs for most of the 1970s and 1980s.

With an Introduction by Dave Teeuwen

In 1969 William Burroughs published seven short pieces titled “Abstract” and sent them out to various small-press literary magazines and underground newspapers. Throughout the 1960s Burroughs was extremely active with the alternative press. Bibliographies of his work show that he was published hundreds of times in that decade. The less formal and more daring nature of the underground press allowed Burroughs to perform verbal and visual experiments that larger publications would never stand still for. It appears there was little editing of his work by these publications, who were happy just to have a submission from the renowned writer. In essence, the small press and underground newspapers served as a public laboratory for Burroughs’ experiments. This seems fitting given the lack of payment for his work (in most cases).

Burroughs’ style of experimentation is exacting and detailed, while not ignoring the utility of the random happening. He attempts to uncover all angles of a new form or method, seeing just how far the possibilities can be extended. The “Abstract” experiments use old tropes to explore new ideas. Characters familiar from other texts return and are placed in new situations, where they take on different or added significance. For instance, Audrey outside of the context of The Wild Boys comes across differently in the disparate nature of the “Abstracts” than when you read about that character in a continuous series of montages. By mixing and cutting up old ideas, putting them in new frames of reference to see what emerges, Burroughs shows that the writing process itself is often as important as the content.

The “Abstracts” are easily recognizable as being in the same format as the Penny Arcade Peep Show pieces interspersed throughout the novel The Wild Boys. As with all of Burroughs’ novels up to this point, he appears to have used the small press as his makeshift laboratory. He typically wrote many versions of an experiment and then sent out the pieces he didn’t intend to use in the novel, presumably to acclimatize his fans to the coming novel. (This is true, of course for five of the “Abstract” pieces. The “Abstract” that appears in Intrepid 14 was also used as one of the Peep Shows in The Wild Boys. The “Abstract” from Klacto/23 International appears in a truncated form in that book as well. Though it came much later, the Fruit Cup “Abstract” was also reprinted The Burroughs File in the mid-1980s.) It was an effective tool, at the time, and Burroughs especially used it for the books he published in the early 1970s.

By the time the “Abstracts” were written, Burroughs had already experimented with publishing continuous and connected ideas in multiple small press publications. It is unlikely that the journals receiving the pieces knew of the other similar material being sent out for publication, probably at about the same time as the piece they were receiving. A number of texts about Dutch Schultz were published in this same manner, connected mostly by content, though the actual words of Dutch Schultz are always present as an anchor in terms of form. Scientology also gets a thorough treatment at this time, usually in the form of an indicting essay.

The seven “Abstracts” of 1969 share elements of form and content. They are visual pieces, hinting at Burroughs’ experiments with the film script (language describing an always visual end product) and the way a film script is a kind of cut-up by its very nature. More importantly for Burroughs, however, film allowed an immediacy and directness that writing lacked. As he said in a review of Brion Gysin’s book The Process, “Unless writing can bring to the page the immediate impact of film, it may well cease to exist as a genre.” The “Abstracts” are immediate writing, writing about the present. 

They lightly touch on a variety of subjects familiar to readers of Burroughs’ 1960s work, using a more mature, controlled version of the cut-up than is seen in material of the early 1960s. The majority of the “Abstracts” draw on the pre-Wild Boys material coming out of that book’s preparation. Audrey, Burroughs’ alter-ego in The Wild Boys, Port of Saints and Exterminator, appears numerous times. The familiar scenes of cold, fact-hardened scientists and doctors with no apparent human feeling also appear, as do continuous South and Central American narrative scenes.

Lip, a one-off small-press journal published out of Palo Alto by artist Jerry Youdelman (with editing help from underground comic artist George DiCaprio and Noe Goldwasser), was the only small-press publication to publish two “Abstracts” at the same time. All other publications were given a single “Abstract” (though, in the early 1970s, a few more original pieces were published and some of the 1969 ones were reprinted in different journals and underground newspapers). It is interesting, but not unusual, that Burroughs would willingly publish in a journal that disappeared so quickly. This earned him a reputation for being generous with his work among the small-press journals of the time.

The two Lip “Abstracts” bring out some consistent Burroughsian themes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The structure of each is essentially that of a covert Engram audit, a process Burroughs knew well by 1969. In 1968 he had undergone a full audit with the London Scientologists, and though he didn’t trust their adoration for L. Ron Hubbard, he did find the audit process useful (he famously owned his own E-meter), recommending it to friends.

The first of the two “Abstracts” attempts to rid the reactive mind of all negativity, anger and disgust by bombarding it with images of war, fear, embarrassment and disappointment. With Dianetics, Hubbard postulated that constant repetition of negative or frightening words and phrases would render a person’s thoughts harmless, causing the fear or negative reactions in the mind to be negated. The reactive mind is the mind that has not been conditioned to ignore or clear these thoughts from the psyche. It is the subconscious, reactionary part of the brain that you cannot control. As Burroughs says in The Job, “The Reactive Mind consists of goals so repulsive or frightening to the subject that he completely reacts against them and it is precisely this reaction that keeps these goals in operation.”

One after another, the images are presented, tied together by a common theme of horror by naming the “Abstract” itself as the reactive mind. Burroughs then ties it to the Word Virus, one of his more famous concepts. The stated purpose of the “Abstract” is itself to “Destroy all minds,” perhaps through the repetition of horror imagery, clearing and destroying at the same time. It ends with an odd scene of the marriage of two Gods, one male, one female. The female God causes the universe to fade into blackness.

The second “Abstract” is reminiscent of the method employed by Burroughs and Antony Balch in the film Bill and Tony. He creates a scene and then immediately juxtaposes it to another, opposite scene. In most cases these are scenes of social embarrassment or public disgust against an outcast figure in society (the Beatnik, the junky, the faggot — all the familiar Burroughsian stock characters), similar to the first “Abstract.” In his usual fashion, Burroughs does not spare the reader by using the more polite term or image; he embraces the hated image, following Hubbard’s directions carefully, clearing / destroying the mind. For instance, the efficient Swedish workers do everything “right now,” but Burroughs equally accepts the stereotyped image of the lazy, singing Mexican with a guitar who does no work at all. As with the first “Abstract,” the piece ends with an image of exaggerated colour fading to black, this time the red stop-light face of hate that disintegrates into darkness. 

The Lip “Abstracts” stand out among the rest of the “Abstract” collection as they are more instructional and more spare, despite presenting images that realize both grand and small scales. Only the shorter, even more terse “Abstract” sent to the Wichita, Kansas journal Mikrokosmos compares (it is most similar to the second of the Lip “Abstracts” in its style, presenting one idea and then the opposite of it in quick succession). The other “Abstracts” leave more room for narrative and even, to some degree, character development. 

The Lip “Abstracts” are examples of the power of clearing the reactive mind. The language encourages the reader to embrace both sides of every situation, to see with two minds at once. This is reminiscent of his rejection of the the polarizing effects of Aristotelian, either / or approaches to language as described by Korzybski in Science and Sanity, a book Burroughs recommended as mandatory reading for all college students even late into his life. With their instructional tone, the Lip “Abstracts” are dramatic demonstrations to be used for escaping this polar way of thinking, as well as providing a kind of back-bone to the randomness of The Wild Boys. They show that, as always, Burroughs creates art that is meant to be used for confrontation and exploration.

A Bibliography of Texts titled “Abstract”

Best & Company (1969)

Fruit Cup, No. 0 (1969)

Intrepid, No. 14/15 (Fall/Winter 1969/1970)

Lip, (Fall 1969)

Klacto/23 International, [No. 1] (17 September 1899 [sic; i.e., 1969])

Mikrokosmos, No. 14 (1969)

NOLA Express, No. 42 (7–20 November 1969; reprint of Klacto/23)

Ginger Snaps, [No. 1] (March 1972; reprint of Best & Company)

Out of Sight, No. 44 (14 February 1972)

Via/Structure Implicit and Explicit, No. 2 (1973; reprint of Intrepid).

“Abstract” 1 and 2 in Lip (1969)

Lip 1
Front Cover

Lip 1
Back Cover

Lip 1
Table of Contents

Lip 1
“Abstract” 1, Page 1

Lip 1
“Abstract” 1, Page 2

Lip 1
“Abstract” 2, Page 3

Lip 1
“Abstract” 2, Page 4