by Graham Rae

Well, the internet certainly can lead you to some interesting and unexpected places. After seeing him mentioned on RealityStudio and on Nakedlunch.org, I recently became intrigued by Alex Neish, a Scotsman who put out an issue of the Edinburgh University Review entitled Jabberwock in 1959 with the superb first chapter of Naked Lunch in it, And Start West.

Edinburgh is only 25 miles from my old home town of Falkirk, and this proximity to an historical literary event 10 years before I was born started me wondering who exactly Neish was, whether he had published other stuff, what had happened to him, etc. So I started a shot-in-the-dark net search, and quickly found out there were no interviews with the man anywhere I could see, and very little info about him out there either. It was frustrating. Who was this young man who had been publishing Burroughs and Ginsberg and Corso and Kerouac a half century ago?

There were mentions of Jabberwock in 1959 and the two issues of Sidewalk, the 1960 literary quarterly he put out after Jabberwock. Then there was nothing much mentioned until 1966 and an appearance in a book called New Writers V, which I supposed could have been him, especially as being published by literary publishers Calder & Boyars. But then after that, bearing the odd mention of the name Neish in some genealogical search here and there… nothing.

Until…

In 2006, a full four decades after the trail went cold, I chanced a cross a reference to a work entitled The Secrets of Old Haddington by… Alex Neish. It was a long shot, but I looked up where Haddington was. East Lothian. Aha, I thought to myself (cos you can’t think to anybody else, unless you’re telepathic), that’s the Edinburgh area. So I fired off an email to the Scottish historical website with the Neish mention on it, asking if they had any idea whether their writer was the one I was looking for and how to get in contact with him if he was. I got back an email the next day from the man himself: “After going into South American exile for 40 years, I am now retired in Barcelona.”

Takes a Scotsman to find a Scotsman.

I emailed Alex some questions about his unexplored historic transatlantic contribution to Scottish literature, and he graciously answered them below. 

What is your educational background and how did you come to writing?

I was educated at various schools across Scotland as my father was in estate management and so we moved around a lot. At Dumfries Academy I had a marvelous primary teacher who encouraged me to read. Even when we moved we maintained contact and she would send me small gifts to be spent on books she recommended. By the time I hit the University of Edinburgh at 17 she had made me familiar with the great Russian novelists. When we lived at a town called Langholm — where Hugh MacDiarmid, later to become the leader of the Scottish Renaissance Movement, was born — I would visit the local Library. It had a tray of romantic trash that was all the locals wanted to read. On the top shelves were the complete works of Dickens and Thackeray, which I devoured during my vacations from school on the other side of the county. All of this formed my literary influences.

How did you come to be the editor of Jabberwock?

Jabberwock was an introspective political and literary magazine that had been going irregularly since the early 1950s. In the late 50s and early 60s I formed part of a small group that ran all the student publications and was asked to take it over. I edited around 4 issues before deciding to do the American issue in Autumn 1959. This effectively killed it off and then led to Sidewalk. 

How many copies did you print? Did it sell well?

I do not remember how many copies we printed. I think it was around 500-750. It targeted people who could see further than Edinburgh Castle and university students who theoretically had more open minds. It sold at 6d, which was then a shilling in those days.

What was your publishing agenda with the Review? Did you publish some of your own writing in it?

I published in it the odd piece of my own — including some under pseudonyms if I was short of copy. The contents were those I liked and thought had something to offer.

What was the state of Scottish writing at that time?

It was very introverted. Trocchi had not been recognised as the most important writer of the last 50 years — nobody had shown such ability since Lewis Grassic Gibbon in a completely different context. Scottish literature was still in the mists and for minorities. I still find it amazing that I was living in Edinburgh at the same time as that genius Sorley MacLean and knew nothing about him. He was not recognised in Scottish Renaissance circles which just about sums up their vision.

[Alex Neish’ editorial on the state of Scottish literature, as published in Jabberwock, is reproduced in the scans (one and two) to left. — Ed.]

How did you first hear of the Beats?

I honestly do not remember how I first heard of the Beats but I became an enthusiast. It was probably when I picked up isolated copies at an Edinburgh bookshop called The Paperback run by a friend in George Square. It had a rhino head outside. It was owned by an American, Jim Haynes, and he stocked “advanced” literature. Many came to believe he was actually a CIA agent financed to detect “dubious” elements amongst the Americans who flooded to Edinburgh University in those days. He had all the Beat works. We even had Howl on the wall of our bathroom in Edinburgh!

How did you contact them?

I think it was Allen Ginsberg who put me into contact. I do not think it is appreciated what a selfless missionary he was for the cause.

How did you end up publishing the Ginsberg-named first chapter of Naked Lunch in your 1959 American issue? [It was Allen Ginsberg who provided the name “And Start West” for the chapter of Naked Lunch published in Jabberwock. — Ed.]

It was sent to me by Ginsberg. I assumed he had Burroughs’ OK to publish though this later turned out not to be the case. Anyway we were able to sort that out.

You wrote to me that Burroughs thought that you had pirated the chapter of Naked Lunch and wrote you an angry letter about it, then it all blew over when he learned Ginsberg had sent it. How did he learn of Jabberwock‘s inclusion of his chapter?

I have no idea how Burroughs heard about the publication. I presume one of the many other Beat writers included in the edition may have mentioned it to him.

Can you remember what you thought when you first read the first chapter of Naked Lunch? What did you think of the finished book?

I found it very exciting as I had been bogged down in Scottish prejudice and provincialism. The finished book, however, was uneven but — as they say — a “a ray of light.”

You told me that the American issue of Jabberwock quite deliberately ended the life of the magazine because you thought it had become stale and a self-admiring showcase for traditional Scottish poets like Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Sydney Goodsir Smith (who was from New Zealand, but wrote in Scots). What was it about their writing you disliked?

I did not wish to kick against their writing. I just viewed it as being a limited vision of modern literature. Some of the early poems of MacDiarmid and Goodsir Smith were polished works but with their advancing age their writing deteriorated. MacGaig was outstanding as a writer and as a human being.

What was the reaction to the American issue of Jabberwock, both in Scotland and abroad?

The audience reaction was very favourable. Press reaction was largely hostile but that is probably par for the course.

You published two issues of a literary magazine in 1960 entitled Sidewalk, which had contributions by the likes of Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Edwin Morgan. Was this an organic growth of your American issue of Jabberwock? What was your publishing agenda with Sidewalk?

Sidewalk grew from the American Jabberwock. I simply picked the writers I liked. It had to be financed by sales and advertising which was a constant battle. I decided it was time I concentrated on terminating my M.A. LL.B. degrees. I freelanced for newspapers like The Scotsman Group and The Manchester Guardian to keep the wolves from the door and worked as Deputy Editor of a Scottish business magazine when I left university. In 1962 I decided to leave Scotland, which culturally, politically, and economically was stifling and moved to join an international business group headquartered in Buenos Aires. While there I was asked by The Guardian to do long interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea, and the publisher Victoria Ocampo — all of whom at that time were practically unknown in the UK.

I understand the third issue of Sidewalk was suppressed. Is this correct?

No it was not suppressed. There was no Sidewalk 3. I had already left the country and no one appeared to carry it on.

What happened to all your manuscripts from this time?

The American manuscripts were typescripts. The Scottish manuscripts I sold to an English dealer for peanuts to recover some of my own expenditure. 

You were friends with Alexander Trocchi. How did you first meet him?

We were very friendly with John Calder and his then wife Bettina and when visiting London would stay with them. A frequent guest was Sam Beckett who was charming and ordinary — and had a great fascination with bicycles. I persuaded John to publish Robert Creeley and then Alexander Trocchi whom we had met in Edinburgh after he jumped bail (financed by Norman Mailer who agreed) and escaped to Canada where he caught a fishing boat to Aberdeen. This was Cold Turkey. He stayed with us in our Edinburgh flat but soon was back on drugs and destroying himself. Before that once we went out to Milne’s Bar where MacDiarmid was holding court. [Milne’s Bar was a famous Edinburgh pub historically frequented by poets and writers. — GR] I introduced Trocchi to him and the hostility was immediate. MacDiarmid as always had too much to drink, had never read anything by Trocchi, and soon was calling him “an illiterate cunt.” Trocchi looked down at him and said simply “You have a peculiar sense of gender.”

In London Trocchi hit the drugs seriously. What he could get on prescription was insufficient and he needed more money. John Calder appreciated his literary importance and was continuously pressing Trocchi to write another book. Sadly Trocchi was no longer capable but he told Calder he was working on one. Pressed for details he would only say enigmatically it was “The Great Book.” This went on for 2-3 years. At one point visiting London from Argentina we ran into the emaciated figure of Trocchi with his Russian fur hat and his carved walking stick walking down a street. We chatted and he said he was incapable of writing anything and now survived selling stamps. He was dead but did not know it — but he generously was to send me the missing copies to complete the run of the brilliant Merlin magazine he had edited in Paris — and where he had published Beckett and other major writers then unrecognised. I do not think Trocchi allowed the fact that Burroughs was also a drug addict to cloud his literary views. 

Why did you not publish Trocchi?

Simply because he was not writing anything at the time. He had dried up after his drug abuse so I devoted myself to getting his 2 novels published in the UK and publicising his work.

You wrote to me that Trocchi was “far more important than Irvine Welsh.” I would agree with this. I met Welsh at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2001 and he said that Young Adam was “a fucking great book, it’s jist aboot this cunt on a barge.” Have you read any of Welsh’s work? Can you see any influence?

No, I see no Trocchi influence in Welsh — but I do not think Welsh would have been possible without Trocchi.

Are you aware of any of the work of contemporary Scottish writers (Alan Warner, A.L. Kennedy, Laura Hird, Alan Bissett, etc)?

The only one I have read is Warner whom I considered quite brilliant, a real torchbearer.

Did you attend the 1962 International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh?

No — I had already left the country.

Did you follow Burroughs’ work in the years after you first published him? If so, what did you think of it?

Only the cut-up period, which I thought an aberration.

In 1966 you were published in New Writers V by Calder & Boyars, alongside Daniel Castelain and Nazli Nour, with a short novel entitled Before The Undertaker Comes. How did you come to be published by this company and how was this book received?

I think it was well enough received — but not to the extent that it encouraged me to continue as a novelist.

When researching your history on the internet, there don’t seem to be (m)any mentions of you from 1966 to 1997, when you published the non-fiction volume An Introduction to British Pewter which, it has to be said, is a vastly different word-direction from the one you started out in. What were you doing in the three-plus decades between the volumes?

I was the first non-family Director of one of the top 3 commodity trading companies in the world, controlled from South America. This involved continual international travel for long periods.

You are an acknowledged expert on British Pewter. The Shakespeare Birthplace trust has the 16th century Harvard House at Stratford-on-Avon which houses your collection from Roman times through to the 20th century, and it’s regarded as being the best in the world. Please tell me a bit about this interesting digression from your literary roots.

I just developed a fascination with pewter and began collecting it in the 60s. It became something permanent in the world of hyper-inflation of 40% a month, and the terrorist murder in Argentina of 5 fellow executives and friends. I was fortunate to count as good friends in the pewter world the two leading collectors on both sides of the Atlantic. As you say my Harvard House collection is the greatest in the world. Here in Barcelona I have another museum in the 12th century Sinagoga Mayor, which I gifted. I had built up a collection of pewter Judaica because of the quality of the design and it seemed the indicated place to keep it all together.

Why did you disappear from the conventional literary scene? Do you still write fiction these days? Would you ever want to return to the fictional writing world?

No, I no longer write fiction and have no desire to return to it.

In 1962 William S. Burroughs appeared at the International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh. He read statements at the panels on Censorship and on The Future of the Novel. RealityStudio has not yet been able to obtain a transcript of the conference (can anyone help?), but later that year the Transatlantic Review published Burroughs’ statements along with a cut-up.

Censorship

What i am saying has already been better said by Mr Henry Miller in his essay “Obscenity And The Law of Reflection” — Censorship is the presumed right of governmental agencies to decide what words and images the citizen is permitted to see: that is thought control since thought consists largely of word and image — What is considered harmful and therefore censored will of course depend on the government exercising censorship — In The Middle Ages, when the church controlled censoring agencies, the emphasis was on heretical doctrines — In Communist countries censorship is close in the area of politics — In English-speaking countries the weight of censorhip falls on sexual word and image as dangerous to an economic system depending on mass production and a large public of more or less uncritical consumers — In any form censorship presupposes the right of the government to decide what people will think, what thought material of word and image will be presented to their minds — I am precisely suggesting that the right to exercise such control is called in question.

The excuse usually given for censorship is the necessity to protect children, impressionable, unstable and stupid individuals — However, this impressionable being is already subjected to a daily barrage of word and image much of it deliberately calculated to arouse sexual desires without satisfying them — That’s what advertising is all about as anyone on Madison Avenue will tell you, and much popular fiction falls into the same category — And he is continually subjected to word and image deliberately calculated to arouse aggressive impulses on TV and radio, in movies and comic strips — I can not see how he would be harmed by reading the work of Rabelais, Petronius, De Sade, Henry Miller, Jean Genet or my own work (unlikely that he would read these works if they were available to him being in many cases virtually illiterate).

What would happen if all censorship were removed? — Not much — Perhaps books would then be judged more on literary merit and a dull, poorly written book on sexual subjects would find few readers — As to whether people will be sexually stimulated by reading a book? — We know from Pavlov’s conditioned reflect that people can be sexually stimulated by almost anything through association — I think that if censorship were removed fewer people would be so stimulated by the mere sight of four-letter words on a printed page — .

The anxiety of which censorship is the overt expression has so far prevented any scientific investigation of sexual phenomena — Few investigators have asked the question: What is sex? — and taken the necessary steps to find the answers — So far as i know the only scientific work on this subject was done by Doctor Wilhelm Reick — As a result he was expelled from a number of countries before he took refuge in America where he died in a federal prison — His experiments indicate that sex is in all likelihood an electromagnetic phenomena, that physicists and mathematicians could discover precise formulae of sexual energy and contact leading to a physics of sexual behavior — It would then be possible, on the basis of precise knowledge, to determine what sexual practices were healthy and what practices were not healthy with reference to function of the human organism.

The Future of the Novel

In my writing i am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, to use the phrase of Mr Alexander Trocchi, as a cosmonaut of inter space, and i see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed — A Russian scientist has said: “We will travel not only in space but in time as well — “That is to travel in space is to travel in time — If writers are to travel in space time and explore areas opened by the space age, i think they must develop techniques quite as new and definite as the techniques of physical space travel — Certainly if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting, music and film — Mr Laurence Durrell has led the way in developing a new form of writing with time and space shifts as we see events from different viewpoints and realize that so seen they are literally not the same events, and that the old concepts of time and reality are no longer valid — Brion Gysin, an American painter living in Paris, has used what he calls ‘the cut up method’ to place at the disposal of writers the collage used in painting for fifty years — Pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of word and image — In writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, i have used an extension of the cut up method i call ‘the fold in method’ — A page of text — my own or some one elses — is folded down the middle and placed on another page — The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other — The fold in method extends to writing the flash back used in films, enabling the writer to move backwards and forewards on his time track — For example i take page one and fold it into page one hundred — I insert the resulting composite as page ten — When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forwards in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one — The deja vue phenomena can so be produced to order — (This method is of course used in music where we are continually moved backwards and foreward on the time track by repetition and rearrangements of musical themes —

In using the fold in method i edit delete and rearrange as in any other method of composition — I have frequently had the experience of writing some pages of straight narrative text which were then folded in with other pages and found that the fold ins were clearer and more comprehensible than the original texts — Perfectly clear narrative prose can be produced using the fold in method — Best results are usually obtained by placing pages dealing with similar subjects in juxtaposition –,

What does any writer do but choose, edit and rearrange material at his disposal? — The fold in method gives the writer literally infinite extension of choice — Take for example a page of Rimbaud folded into a page of St John Perse — (two poets who have much in common) — From two pages an infinite number of combinations and images are possible — The method could also lead to a collaboration between writers on an unprecedented scale to produce works that were the composite effort of any number of writers living and dead — This happens in fact as soon as any writer starts using the fold in method — I have made and used fold ins from Shakespeare, Rimbaud, from newspapers, magazines, conversations and letters so that the novels i have written using this method are in fact composites of many writers —

I would like to emphasize that this is a technique and like any technique will, of course, be useful to some writers and not to others — In any case a matter for experimentation not argument — The confering writers have been accused by the press of not paying sufficient attention to the question of human survival — In Nova Express — (reference is to an exploding planet) and my latest novel The Ticket That Exploded i am primarily concerned with the question of survival –, with nova conspiracies, nova criminals, and nova police — A new mythology is possible in the space age where we will again have heroes and villains with respect to intentions toward this planet —

Notes on these pages

To show ‘the fold in method’ in operation i have taken the two texts i read at The Writer’s Conference and folded them into newspaper articles on The Conference, The Conference Folder, typed out selections from various writers, some of whom were present and some of whom were not, to form a composite of many writers living and dead: Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding, Alexander Trocchi, Norman Mailer, Colin MacInnes, Hugh Macdiarmid.

Mr Bradly-Mr Martin, in my mythology, is a God that failed, a God of Conflict in two parts so created to keep a tired old show on the road, The God of Arbitrary Power and Restraint, Of Prison and Pressure, who needs subordinates, who needs what he calls ‘his human dogs’ while treating them with the contempt a con man feels for his victims — But remember the con man needs the mark — The Mark does not need the con man — Mr Bradley-Mr Martin needs his ‘dogs’ his ‘errand boys’ his ‘human animals’ He needs them because he is literally blind. They do not need him. In my mythological system he is overthrown in a revolution of his ‘dogs’ — “Dogs that were his eyes shut off Mr Bradly-Mr Martin.”

My conception of Mr Bradly-Mr Martin is similar to the conception developed by William Golding in “Pincer Martin” and i have made a fold in from the last pages of his book where Martin is destroyed “erased like an error”, with my own version of Bradly-Martin’s end — The end of Mr Bradly-Mr Martin is the theme of these pages — as regards The Writers Conference i shared with Mary Macarthy a feeling that something incredible was going on beyond the fact of people paying to listen – -I could not but feel that it was indeed The Last Writer’s Conference.

Nova Police besieged McEwan Hall

The last Writer’s Conference — Heroin and homosexuality war melted into air — the conferents are free to come and go visiting the obscurity behind word and image — Mr Martin was movie of which intellectual and literary elite asked the question: What is sex? —

“Hear Mr Burroughs or his answer?”: Flesh identity still resisted the question and that book in this memory erased the answer.

On reflection we can discover cross references scrawled by some boy with scars — The last invisible shadow caught and the future fumbles for transitory progress in the arts — Flutes of Ali in the door of panic leaves not a wrack of that God of whom i was a part — The future fumbles in dogs of unfamiliar dust — Hurry up — Page summons composite mutterings flashing foreward in your moments I could describe — The deja vue boatman smiles with such memory orders — Shifted with the method of composition, i have frequently left no address — Some pages of straight narrative beside you — Moments i could describe left other pages more comprehensible than the original texts that were his eyes — Inherit these by placing page deals: “Hurry up please — Heavy summons, Mr Bradly-Mr Martin, with texts moved or conveyor belts retained and copied my blood whom i created.”

You are writer since the departed choose the juxtaposition beside you — The image of the hanged man shut off, Mr Bradly-Mr Martin, to fashion heavy summons — Too much comment and the great boatman smiles — Growing suspicion departed have left no address — Falling history beside you — Dogs that were his eyes inherit this — Let them stray please, its time — And they are free to come and go — Fading this green doll out of an old sack and some rope — The great streaks of paint melted into air — Out of the circle of light you are yourself bringing panic or chaos — Heavy hand broken, erased like an error, fading here the claws in The Towers — The great claws, Martin, caught melted into air — Their whole strength with such memories still resisted — Mr Bradly-Mr Martin was movie played the vaudeville voices — These our actors visible going away erased themselves into air — Adios in the final ape of Martin — Just as silver film took it you are yourself The Visiting Center and The Claws — They were our Towers — A Street boy’s courage resisted erogenous summons muttering flesh identity — For i last center falling through ruined September beside you erased like and error —

A Russian scientist has said: “Martin disaster far now” — Shifted with travel in space — Writers were his eyes, inherit this travel in space and time — Areas opened by the heavy summons, Mr Bradly-Mr Martin — I think they must close your account — New and definite my blood whom i created leaves not the third who walks with the past and your dust now ended — These techniques that have been war melted into air — Hurry up in human survival — My last summons Nova Express — Reference is to the ticket that exploded your moments — Nova Police — Heavy summons, Mr Bradly-Mr Martin —

Cross references scrawled by some governmental agency decide what the citizen is permitted to see in Scotland since thought consists largely of the arts — Zero time to the sick areas of politics protecting unfamiliar dust — In English speaking countries, hurry up — Page summons sexual word and image — Consumer’s orders shifted — Any form of censorship left no address — Thought material of method proffers precisely the texts that were his eyes — De Sade, Henry Miller are free to come and go — Censorship is the necessity of chaos for stupid individuals advertising to thin air the story of one absent — Like an error fading here the claws we know from Pavlov — Mr Bradly-Mr Martin was movie of which sex is the overt expression — Voices asked the question: What is sex? — and erased themselves into the answer — Flesh identity, of which censorship is the overt expression, still resisted the question What is sex? and some boy’s memory erased the answers — he had come muttering things i used to say over and over as Mr Martin Weary my blood whom i pent — Then i raised my eyes and saw words scrawled by some boy — Hurry up — Page summons composites — Get it over with — I have never known you moments, but the rages were the worst such memory orders — Shifted with me frequently left no address — Hurry up please — Heavy summons — Voice all day long muttering moved on conveyor belts very low and harsh no wonder shut off — But let me get on with this day and they are free to come and go without sore throat of an old sack and some rope — These flashes out of things i used to say over and over as yourself bringing panic or chaos — Never loved anyone i think fading here in The Towers — Same old things i dont listen to — These our actors going away on the final ape of Martin — Mr Bradly-Mr Martin all day long muttering sick lies — Closed your account — Not even mine it was at the end —

This brings me respectable price of my university — The Kid just found what was left of the window — Pages deal what you might call a journey — Its faily easy thrash in old New Orleans smudged looking answer — Sick and tired of Martin — Invisible shadow tottering to doom fast — Dream and dreamer that were his eyes inherit this stage — Its time — Heavy summons, Mr Bradly-Mr Martin timeless and without mercy — You are destroyed erased like my name — The text of that God melted into air — Mr Bradly-Mr Martin walks toward September weary good bye playing over and over — Out of the circle of light you are words scrawled by some boy with chaos, for a transitory ape of Martin understood Visiting Center and Claws — He had come muttering flesh identity — His dream must have seemed so close there, whole strength to grap it — He did not know that it was still resisted, falling back in that vast obscurity behind memory as the boatman began to melt away — Enchanted texts that were his eyes inherit this continent — Mr Bradly-Mr Martin was movie played to thin air — Vaudeville voices leave the story of one absent — Silence to the stage — These our actors erased themselves into good night far from such as you, Mr Bradly-Mr Martin — Good bye of history — Your whole strength left no address — On this green land the pipes are calling, timeless and without mercy — Page summons the deja vue boatman in setting forth — All are wracked and answer texts that were his eyes — No home in departed river of Gothenberg — Shadows are free to come and go — What have i my friend to give?: An old sack and some rope — The great globe is paint in air —

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Third Mind images from Paris are not the only goodies we have received from our readers. Chris Hughes, a reader from Scotland, forwarded me some scans from a program for the Edinburgh Festival of 1962. 2007 marked the 45th anniversary of the 1962 Festival that in essence established Burroughs’ reputation as a writer on an international level. In that year, John Calder decided to add an International Writers’ Conference to the Festival’s many activities. Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, the best of the Burroughs biographies, provides all the details. Barry Miles’ bio, which is strong on the cut-up and other multimedia aspects of Burroughs’ career, fails to mention the 1962 Conference. This might be because Morgan did such a thorough job of it. According to the Festival’s current website, “[t]he Festival began in 1947, with the aim of providing ‘a platform for the flowering of the human spirit.'” This platform continues to the present. In 2008, the Festival will run from August 8th to August 31.

I do not want to rehash the story of the 1962 Conference here, but I do want to provide readers of RealityStudio with some of the primary documents related to this event. According to the Maynard and Miles bibliography, a mimeograph transcript of the Conference exists. This publication documents the panel discussions that transpired over the five days of August 20th to 24th. The number of copies is unknown, and I have never seen one available for sale. Burroughs appears on pages 5-8, 18-19, 29, 32-33. These sections contain Burroughs’ statements at the panel on Censorship (Thursday August 23rd) and The Future of the Novel (Friday August 24th).

Given the rarity of this publication, I never considered the fact that other ephemera from the Festival and the Conference might exist. But as Chris Hughes’ scans show, such ephemera do in fact exist, and as I found out, they are available. These documents tell an interesting story. I think Hughes’ scans show the program for the entire Festival. He has been good enough to include John Calder’s essay on The Writer’s Conference as well as the schedule for Calder’s brainchild. Interestingly, in Calder’s essay, Burroughs is not listed as one of the delegates from the United States. This shows just how far off the radar screen Burroughs was before the Conference. In hindsight, Burroughs seems like the perfect choice for the panels on censorship and the future of the novel. The obscenity trials surrounding Big Table made Burroughs an expert on censorship. The development of the cut-up and the publication of Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded (not to mention Naked Lunch) made him an authority on the future of the novel. That said virtually nobody at the conference knew who he was. Not surprising really. For the most part, Burroughs was only published by Olympia Press. In all probability, nobody would have read Junkie to say nothing of the small press gems of Minutes to Go (Two Cities) and The Exterminator (Auerhahn Press). In August 1962, Barney Rosset of Grove Press stored copies of Naked Lunch in a warehouse. He was waiting to see how Grove Press’ other censorship battles played out. The book would not be available in the United States until November 1962. The publicity and discussion generated by the International Writer’s Conference in large part assured the book’s release. Naked Lunch would not be available in Great Britain until 1964.

In any case, Burroughs was something of an afterthought for inclusion at the Conference. Calder did not invite Burroughs until summer was already in full swing. Burroughs had to pay his own way, and he did not have a sponsor. In essence he tagged along with Maurice Girodias who attended the censorship panel. At the Conference, Burroughs spent most of his time with Alex Trocchi, the author of Cain’s Book. In fact, Burroughs stayed with Trocchi at Trocchi’s doctor, who no doubt filled scripts all week. This was the first meeting of the two partners in crime. Not surprisingly, Burroughs considered Cain’s Book a major work of drug literature. Calder was actively promoting Trocchi at the time. After the Conference, Calder would do the same for Burroughs.

The program for the Edinburgh Festival supplied by Chris Hughes got me thinking about what else is out there. I remembered John Calder’s autobiography that was sent to me by our correspondent Robert Bank. This book is an essential source on the Writers’ Conference. It includes a description of yet another bit of memorabilia, the Program and Notes for the International Writer’s Conference entitled “The Novel Today.” I never put two and two together. I failed to realize that this program might be available on the rare book market. I guess I got this publication confused with the impossible to find transcript. In addition the two programs available here on RealityStudio are not in the two main Burroughs bibliographies. Some quick searching located a copy of “The Novel Today” right in my backyard. Serendipity!!

About the program, Calder writes, “The conference program, which was really a lavishly produced literary magazine, partly produced on art paper, but with a central section on grey cartridge, gave two lists: a longer one with short biographies of participants and photographs of everyone who had accepted, which was prepared well in advance on white art and a last-minute list, very different, but still incomplete, on grey. The latter section apologized for the inconsistencies and changes, but also gave a longish description of each day’s topic and what was expected to happen, as well as listing the principal speakers for those days.” Burroughs appears in the “last-minute” list as befits his last-minute invitation by Calder. Burroughs is also listed as a participant in the censorship discussion. Not surprising given his publishing history up to that point. What is shocking is that Burroughs was not heavily promoted as a member of the future of the novel panel. Burroughs’ discussion of the cut-up at this panel would prove to be one of the highlights of the Conference and would cause a major stir.

So what did Burroughs say? Literary Outlaw provides some brief quotes, but the best source, besides the mimeographed transcript, is issue 11 of Transatlantic Review from the winter of 1962. Burroughs opens the magazine in its text and headlines on its cover. Clearly he was big news. Issue 11 prints the two statements Burroughs read at the Conference at the panels on censorship and the future of the novel. In addition, Burroughs wrote a cut-up based on the events that occurred at McEwan Hall (the location of the Conference). As is common with Burroughs’ cut-ups of this period, the piece included detailed notes regarding its composition. Parts of it have been collected in The Third Mind and Word Virus, but RealityStudio is putting it online as part of its collection of documents relating to the conference.

Unlike some of the anniversaries that have been celebrated surrounding the Beats in the last couple of years, the 45th Anniversary of the International Writer’s Conference in Edinburgh passed under the radar. This is somewhat ironic since it was after his appearance at McEwan Hall that Burroughs became headline fodder around the world. The Conference directly led to the release of Naked Lunch in the United States and to the publication of a Burroughs novel in Great Britain (Dead Fingers Talk in 1963). In addition, the discussion at the Conference helped legitimize Burroughs as a serious author and helped prove that Burroughs was more than a pornographer. It was in Edinburgh that Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer stood firmly behind Naked Lunch and its author. This support would prove useful for the upcoming obscenity trial that engulfed Naked Lunch in Boston soon after its release in late 1962. For Burroughs lovers, this is certainly something to remember and to celebrate. Hopefully, the primary documents available here on RealityStudio provide a means to do just that.

1962 International Writers Conference Ticket

1962 International Writers Conference Ticket

1962 Edinburgh International Festival Souvenir Program

1962 Edinburgh International Festival Souvenir Program
Front

1962 Edinburgh International Festival Souvenir Program
“The Writers’ Conference” by John Calder

1962 Edinburgh International Festival Souvenir Program
McEwan Hall Agenda

1962 International Writers Conference Program (Excerpt)

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Front

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Day One: Contrasts of Approach

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Day Two: Scottish Writing Today

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Day Three: Commitment

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Day Four: Censorship

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Day Five: The Novel and the Future

1962 International Writers Conference Program
List of Delegates

1962 International Writers Conference Program
Back

1962 International Writers Conference News Clippings

Authors Fail to Arrive
21 August 1962

The Writers’ Conference by W.J. Weatherby
22 August 1962

A Letter from Alan Paton by W.J. Weatherby
23 August 1962

Writers’ Conference by W.J. Weatherby
24 August 1962

Sex and So On at Edinburgh

Writers’ Conference by W.J. Weatherby

Encounter Magazine

Stephen Spender
Letter from Edinburgh
Encounter Magazine
October 1962

Stephen Spender
Letter from Edinburgh
Encounter Magazine
October 1962

Stephen Spender
Letter from Edinburgh
Encounter Magazine
October 1962

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Sir,

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

Very sincerely,

William S. Burroughs
(Novelist)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. Literary Outlaw, p 328.

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

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

21. Idem., p 87.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A recent post mentioned the Edinburgh Beat scene. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, William Burroughs appeared in several Scottish literary magazines and made a memorable appearance at the International Writers Conference in Edinburgh. I have often wondered why Scotland was a hotbed for Burroughs and why he appeared in Scottish literary magazines so early in his publishing history.

In 1959, Burroughs contributed “And Start West” to Jabberwock magazine. Jabberwock was printed in Edinburgh. This section opens Naked Lunch beginning “I can feel the heat closing in” and ending “So we stock up on H, buy a second hand Studebaker and start west.” The Restored Naked Lunch returns the title (“And Start West”) to the opening section. In previous versions like the Olympia Press or Grove editions, there was no opening heading. I assume that the piece in Jabberwock is the first section of Naked Lunch. I have never seen a copy of Jabberwock and I know next to nothing about it. Early in the 20th Century, Jabberwock was the name of a London-based monthly magazine for children. Possibly, the editors of the new venture were aware of this and meant their magazine to be a literary magazine for young hipsters. I dimly recall Jabberwock being a spin off of a University publication that ran afoul with the board of directors à la Big Table, but I could be confusing this with another Scottish magazine mentioned later: Cleft. Anybody with more information on Jabberwock, please pass it along. It was not the only literary magazine in Edinburgh publishing the Beats.

In 1960, Alex Neish published William Burroughs in Sidewalk Issue 2. Burroughs contributed “Have You Seen Slotless City?” from the still in progress Soft Machine. Jennie Skerl has this to say about the image of Slotless City: “Slotless City is a futuristic fantasy of violence and chaos produced by sexual conflict. Through insoluble conflict the Nova Mob seeks to destroy the earth, and the Slotless City fantasy envisions sexual conflict as the cause of a future apocalypse. This narrative portrays science-fiction methods of reproduction in a society in which men and women are at war, leading to the creation of fantastic new life forms fighting with each other for existence, and ending with the destruction of all life on earth. The final apocalypse is conveyed in ambiguous cutup imagery. It is unclear whether the destruction is positive or negative, a victory for the Mob or for the Police, for the disintegration of present reality structures is a form of liberation from control.”

The editorial comment to Sidewalk sheds some light on why Burroughs was included in the magazine. In 1960, Scottish postal authorities seized a copy of Francis Pollini’s Night published by Olympia Press. The book was burned and poet Hugh MacDiarmid was questioned (the book was sent to him in the mail) by police. As a result, obscenity and censorship were hot topics in literary Scotland. Burroughs recently published by Olympia Press was a poster child for censorship issues as proven by the problems concerning Big Table and postal authorities in Chicago.

In addition in April 1960, Burroughs moved briefly to London. Having just escaped a jail sentence in France concerning a drug bust and fearing deportation, Burroughs needed to get away from the Beat Hotel. He lived at the Empress Hotel in London working quietly on Soft Machine. Dr. Dent’s apomorphine cure was nearby and so was Ian Sommerville who Burroughs met in the summer of 1959. It was at the Empress Hotel that Mikey Portman knocked on Burroughs’ door. Earlier in 1958, Burroughs visited Oxford to see Michael Horovitz and David Sladen as suggested by Allen Ginsberg. As a result, two sections of Naked Lunch appeared in the first issue of New Departures magazine in 1959. A similar situation occurred in 1960. The appearance in Sidewalk can be explained by Burroughs’ presence in Great Britain coupled with the censorship issues. Yet larger forces were also at play.

Sidewalk created quite a stir and was part of a larger cultural phenomenon happening in Scotland. In the early 1960s, Scottish culture was incredibly provincial as was Scottish literature. Poets and writers often wrote in Scottish dialect and dealt in age-old Scottish themes handed down from Robert Burns. Social class and authority were respected and protected. Scottish poet Edwin Morgan appeared in Sidewalk 2. Morgan was one of the major forces in Scottish poetry and literary innovation. In a talk on the Scottish Left, he describes the swirl of activity happening in Scotland at the time of Burroughs’ arrival in London and thereafter. Morgan states: “In the Sixties, there was an atmosphere, an excitement, a sense of liberation, of potentialities, of boundaries being crossed, which came from a great variety of things outside Scotland — the music of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, a new explosion of poetry and prose in America with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, a new generation of poets in Russia with Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, the beginnings of space exploration, the international growth off the idea of a counter-culture. All this was reflected in Scotland, to the surprise of not a few observers.”

When Sidewalk appeared in Edinburgh, there were complaints about its American title, to say nothing of its contents. A newspaper headline read “EDINBURGH SURRENDERS TO THE BEATS!” Sidewalk 2 also published Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder. Burroughs and the Beats were the first shots across the bow in a culture war that would be waged in the Scottish literary scene and in Scottish society at large in the 1960s. The literary and cultural change in Scotland reflected changes occurring across Europe and the United States. To Scottish artists in search of new freedoms and art, the Beats spoke in a frank, hip language that opened up new experience and a whole international scene.

Given the literary climate in Scotland and Great Britain in general, a need arose for a daring publisher. Great Britain possessed its own anti-censorship, pro-avant-garde publisher along the lines of Barney Rosset and Maurice Girodias. John Calder sought to expand the freedom of the press through the same plan of action used in France and the United States. Calder took literary works of high quality that deal with taboo or daring topics in a frank, explicit manner, like The Ginger Man, Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Naked Lunch fell into that group. Calder was Scottish. Perhaps this explains the presence of Burroughs in Scottish literary magazines at the dawn of the 1960s. It definitely explains Burroughs’ appearance at the International Writers Conference in 1962.

The cultural battle in Scotland as well as the fight to get Naked Lunch in print in Great Britain and the United States played out at the 1962 International Writers Conference held in Edinburgh. The Conference was a major reason for the interest in Burroughs in Great Britain in the early 1960s and would have repercussions throughout the West. Calder sponsored the conference as a means to champion innovative writing as well as to launch a pre-emptive strike against censorship of works like Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer. In line with that goal, the American delegation consisted of Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. For most participants on the panels and in the audience, Burroughs was an unknown commodity. None had heard of Junkie. Few may have heard of Naked Lunch and most were unaware of Burroughs’ new direction, the cut-up, represented by The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Minutes to Go, and The Exterminator.

The Conference became a media hit. Ted Morgan writes, “[I]t turned into one of those ‘the-lines-are-drawn-and-which-side-are-you-on’ running battles between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns,’ with various side shows concerning regional and national issues. Calder was gratified to see a paying audience of about 2,500 attending the sessions…” Panels discussed the future of the novel, the contemporary novel form, Scottish writers, the Writer and Commitment, and censorship. Alexander Trocchi, a symbol of new Scotland, debated with Scottish poet Hugh MacDaimad, representative of Scottish tradition. MacDaimand wore a kilt; Trocchi sported track marks. The cut-up and the form of Burroughs’ novels were discussed. Burroughs gave a speech on censorship. Mary McCarthy linked him with Vladimir Nabokov as one of the two most interesting and innovative writers in the contemporary scene. Through it all, Burroughs emerged an international figure.

Literary magazines captured it all. While not based in Scotland, the Transatlantic Review published Burroughs’ pieces from Edinburgh. The support of Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer would appear forever after on blurbs for Burroughs’ novels. More importantly, the quotes supported Rosset’s and Calder’s anti-censorship crusades and served as ammunition for obscenity trials. Mailer testified on behalf of Naked Lunch at the 1965 trial.

In 1924, Transatlantic Review ran for 12 issues. Like transition, the magazine was an English language review based in Paris. Ford Madox Ford, author of The Good Soldier, edited the magazine. It captured the writing and excitement of the Jazz Age in Europe. Most famously, the Review published early pieces by a reporter named Ernest Hemingway. In 1959, the name was revived for a new magazine this time based out of New York and London. This project ran for an impressive 60 issues until June 1977. Burroughs appeared in several issues throughout the 1960s and 1970s alongside mainstream heavyweights like John Updike. From 1962-1964, Burroughs appeared in three issues of Transatlantic Review. Issue 11 printed Burroughs’ contributions to the Writers Conference. “Censorship” was subdivided into four pieces: “Censorship” and “The Future of the Novel” (read at Edinburgh) as well as “Notes on these Pages” and “Nova Police Besieged McEwan Hall.”

Scotland also possessed a burgeoning tradition in drug literature thanks to the life and work of the previously mentioned Alexander Trocchi. Born in Glasgow, Trocchi went to Paris in the early 1950s and started the literary magazine Merlin which helped bring Samuel Beckett to worldwide acclaim. Trocchi also hooked up with Olympia Press writing pornographic novels as well as working on his drug masterpiece: Cain’s Book. Trocchi, like Burroughs, was a heroin addict and his novel, like Junkie, provided an unsparing and even glorified account of heroin. Burroughs considered the novel a rival to Naked Lunch and a classic of drug literature. Thirty years later, Irvine Welsh created another international sensation building on the Scottish tradition of drug literature begun by Cain’s Book. Trainspotting and Welsh’s other works owe a direct debt to Trocchi and even Burroughs. Through example, Trocchi lead a fight against Scottish tradition and became a figurehead of the international avant-garde. Trocchi showed Scotland that great and meaningful literature could step outside national borders and literary boundaries.

In the mid-1960s, Burroughs continued to be featured in the Scottish literary scene. In 1963-1964 in Cleft 1 and 2, Burroughs appeared alongside Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and Hugh MacDiarmid showing the influence of the Writers Conference two years before. Editor Bill McCarthur started Cleft after University opposition to what had been published in Gambit. Gambit published “The Mayan Caper” in Spring 1963. The theme of radical youth self-publishing morally and technically challenging literature continued in Edinburgh. The story of Big Table, New Departures, and Cleft highlight the slow rise of the youth culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s that would reach full bloom with the flower children, the Summer of Love and Woodstock Nation. Even in the silent decade, radical students existed or were being awakened. These battles against censorship and the fight for freedom of speech/press foreshadowed student movements like the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and student protest and University occupations throughout the West.

Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan appeared in Cleft 2 which points to another overlapping theme in Burroughs’ Scottish magazine appearances: the international avant-garde, the cut-up and Burroughs the poet. With the cut-up, Burroughs found himself smack in the middle of a newly forming literary and artistic avant-garde. Burroughs’s appearance in Cleft alongside Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan shows Burroughs treading the same terrain as the concrete poets. Finlay and Morgan remain Scotland’s most famous concrete poets. The term was coined in the 1950s and by 1956 an international conference on the subject was held. Concrete poetry is a school of poetry that often focuses on the visual aspect of writing; the visual shape of letters and their placement on the page rather than the content or meaning of language is stressed. Concrete poets also experiment with the sound of words rather than their meaning. Burroughs’ work in this direction in the early 1960s is another reason he appeared in Cleft. Scotland with poets like Finlay and Morgan was a major player in the international concrete poetry scene. Burroughs contributed “Martin’s Folly” to Cleft 1 and “A Distant Hand Lifted” to Cleft 2.

A close look at Burroughs’ literary appearances in Scotland tells much about the cultural ferment in Scotland and the West at large. A Burroughs contribution to a magazine symbolized a blow against censorship, announced participation in the literary avant-garde, sparked media circuses, provided insight into the drug underworld, and ushered in countercultural change. Burroughs in Scotland highlights his importance in the major events and themes of the 1960s throughout the Western world.