BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is the most important new publication by William S. Burroughs not only since the writer’s death in 1997 but quite possibly since The Third Mind made it into print in 1978. Burroughs wrote a number of books in the final decades of his life. His estate, under the leadership of James Grauerholz, has done a terrific job putting out revised editions as well as previously unpublished material including correspondence, journals, and “lost” works. But BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is of a different, higher caliber. The book, never quite finished by Burroughs, brings together typescripts he wrote from May to November 1960. This was a sort of annus mirabilis for Burroughs. In 1960, he was getting a handle on how to use the cut-up technique, discovered by Brion Gysin the previous October. He was learning how to transfer the technique over to tape recorders and he was considering doing the same with a film camera. He was taking mescaline and LSD for the first time. He was experimenting with the flicker phenomenon. These were preoccupations that would inform his work for the next decade, when Burroughs was arguably the riskiest, most relevant writer on the planet. BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS comes to us direct from this period of Burroughs’ greatness and offers a new take on what he was doing — an “uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk,” to borrow a phrase from Junkie.

BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is one of a quartet of cut-up publications newly “oliverized” by Oliver Harris. Since working with Burroughs on the first volume of his collected correspondence, Harris has almost singlehandedly created a corpus of Burroughs editions which usually takes a team of scholars and a university press to assemble. Marking the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the cut-up in fall 1959, Harris now adds to the list Dead Fingers Talk, newly released by Alma Books, as well as Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, and BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, all published by Moloko. The books have been rigorously edited, copiously annotated, and furnished with thoughtful introductions that explain their genesis, context, and intent. Dead Fingers Talk is rescued from neglect by Harris’ contention that the book, once “derided as a ‘mishmash’ and a ‘rehash,’ we now recognize as a literary prototype of mashup and remix.” Minutes to Go and The Exterminator, with Burroughs’ assertion that the cut-ups were “virus time bombs,” feel as fresh as ever in the era of Covid-19. But it is BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS that is revelatory.

Many readers will have had a premonition of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS in “The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah,” known for the recording of Burroughs incanting it in a hypnotically glowering voice. “Last Words” was the text that opened up the whole of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS for Burroughs. He wrote it in May 1960, describing it as “the testament of Hassan i Sabbah which came to me under mescaline,” and sent a draft to publisher Dave Haselwood. It was too late to include “Last Words” in The Exterminator, which Haselwood was just about to put out under the auspices of his Auerhahn Press. (Burroughs called the finished book “not bad” but Haselwood did a beautiful job designing and printing it, meriting it a place on Jed Birmingham’s list of the top 23 Burroughs collectibles.) Burroughs then included “Last Words” in a second manuscript which he sent to Haselwood on August 30, 1960, with the idea that Auerhahn would publish a follow-up called EXTERMINATOR II or THE INITIATOR. Never one to consider a text finished, Burroughs kept working on the material and added several further chapters. It is that never-published Auerhahn manuscript and the additional chapters which Harris has recovered from various archives to create BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, deriving the title from a phrase that recurs in the material.

In an introduction, Harris describes how he discovered a batch of the texts in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. What struck him about the material was not what the texts were about but what they looked like. “What holds [the typescripts] together,” Harris writes, “and gave rise to BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS as a ‘lost manuscript’ in the first place, is chiefly the visible appearance of the text on the page: its wholesale use of BLOCK CAPITALS.” For page after page Burroughs wrote as though the shift key on his typewriter was jammed in the on position. When you first start reading BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, the all caps approach hardly seems worthy of the radical writer. It’s a crude stylistic technique, a beginner move comparable to Burroughs’ unfortunate use of homonyms. (“Meating for “meeting,” “copy write” for “copyright,” “Fraud” for “Freud” — Burroughs doing dad jokes.) The vibe e.e. cummings established using lowercase letters was casual, like people today who text without capitals or punctuation, whereas BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS rants, screams, and harangues. After a while, you realize that what makes the all caps technique effective is precisely that Burroughs pushed it, as he pushed the cut-up technique itself, to an extreme. The style is telegraphic but Harris points out that “a ten-thousand-word cable is a contradiction in terms, overloading the page and making BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS alienating to read.” That’s why it works — excess, audacity, Burroughs steeling himself to take a method to the bitter end.

It is precisely that commitment to the cut-up technique that made Burroughs its lord and master. The dabblers — Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse — cut up a few texts then filed the technique away as a party trick. Burroughs locked in on it. He developed various procedures for manipulating text (cutting, folding, reading across columns, working in grids, adding visual elements). He extended the cut-up into sound and film. He theorized about it. One of the fantastic things about BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is that you can see Burroughs taking the technique to a new level. The first few months of cut-ups produced ruins, texts that were difficult to read or make sense of. Here’s the beginning of “Everywhere March Your Head” from Minutes to Go.

A rap of
sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the   time to you

change
no mat
desires
Arrival of////

What counted in this early cut-up was the bold gesture, the assertion that something interesting happened when you chopped up a poem by Rimbaud. Now look at what happens when “Everywhere March Your Head” mutates in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS.

YES I AM TALKING TO YOU “MR BRADLY VIRUS ADDING MACHINE MORE ME MARTIN.” YOU ANAL NARCISSISTIC BASTARD HAVE STOCKED A PLANET WITH YOUR STUPID SELF. EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR LOUSY GRADE B HEAD. I REPEAT DEACTIVATE YOUR STUPID THE GIMMICK. IS THAT CLEAR ENOUGH OR SHALL I MAKE IT EVEN CLEARER?? GET UP OFF YOUR DEAD TIME ASS AND RUB OUT YOUR STUPID WORD.

It’s prose poetry. It’s fairly comprehensible, especially in context or for anyone familiar with the language of Burroughs’ cut-ups. “Everywhere March Your Head” was clearly a product of the scissors. But the BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS paragraph is the product of something else. Burroughs often said that out of a whole page of cut prose he might only take a phrase or two. In BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS we can see him taking these phrases, memorizing them, manipulating them, repeating them, transforming them into mantras, crafting them into paragraphs whose disjunctions take away little from their intelligibility. “EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR LOUSY GRADE B HEAD” makes sense now. It means something like “you’re always letting your ego get in the way.” Burroughs is doing something he had never before done with the cut-up. He is internalizing it but also making it speak in character. In “Last Words,” he speaks in the person of Hassan Sabbah. In “THE MASTER OF TIME,” he speaks in the person of the “lord of time.” (“STAND ASIDE MR BURROUGHS OF SPACE AND LISTEN TO THE LORD OF TIME.”) In “CALLED THE LAW,” he speaks in the person of a B-movie gangster. (“WITH HIS LAST MOOCHED NICKEL FROM GYSIN BURROUGHS SNEAKED OFF TO THE PAY PHONE AND CALLED THE LAW.”)

In all these instances, Burroughs’ aim is to be insurrectionary. “THESE ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS. SHIFT LINGUALS/ VIBRATE TOURISTS/ /FREE DOORWAYS/ /CUT WORD LINES/ /SHIFT TANGLE CUT ALL WORD LINES.” The book takes the revolutionary cant of texts such as Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book and makes something poetic out of it. In Mao’s case, Burroughs literally borrows from the Little Red Book, repeating the phrase “ENEMY ADVANCE WE RETREAT. ENEMY RETREAT WE ADVANCE. ENEMY ENCAMP WE AGITATE. ENEMY TIRE WE ATTACK” in different contexts and permutations. Who and what were the targets Burroughs was taking aim at with his Molotov cocktails of capital letters? Capitalists, media moguls, governments, liars, collaborators and cowards, as well as insect people, bird people, crab people, “TRAITORS TO ALL SOULS EVERYWHERE.” Presumably we are to read these various animal peoples as metaphors, much the same as David Cronenberg transformed paregoric and heroin into bug powder and mugwump jism in his film of Naked Lunch.

In the introduction, Harris reverse engineers one of these metaphors — the phrase “Elders of Minraud,” which recurs in many Burroughs cut-ups of the 1960s. It turns out that Burroughs derived the phrase “from the definitive anti-Semitic conspiracy text, much admired by Henry Ford as well as Adolf Hitler, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” Burroughs declared that he had “no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch” — a statement he made not because it was true but because he was trying to beat a drug charge in France. Similarly, Burroughs tried to insulate the inflammatory material in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS by saying it was just “ABSTRACT LITERATURE” — a literary equivalent of abstract painting, an exercise in the formal use of words that has nothing to do with their content. He wrote to Haselwood on June 24, 1960.

I do not subscribe to any of the sentiments expressed necessarily. Are not personal opinions. Only a transcription of voices along the streets and quarters where I pass. Abstract literature. Not personal opinions. Do these plots really exist? How in the fuck should I know? Just a writer is all. Just an artisan. Not running for office. Just writing what I see and hear in my imagination. Pure abstract literature.

But Burroughs was well aware the content was not incidental. He wrote to his friend Bill Belli on June 11, “I am only concerned with what they [Jews] represent… Is that Anti-Semitism? I don’t think so.” In one recording of “Last Words,” Burroughs says, “I RUB OUT THE WORD JEW” — which he literally did as he revised the text. He deleted “JEW.” Harris ponders this “gap of silence… a trace of erasure and elimination loaded with historical meaning.” Does the erasure “clean” the text of its anti-semitic elements? Or does it merely encode a sort of exterminating of the Jews?

One irony to the anti-semitism in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS is that the book can be reminiscent of one of the greatest works of Jewish literature — Ecclesiastes. It may sound crazy to say this. Gysin had encouraged Burroughs to cut up the Song of Songs, and Burroughs reworked the Christian Gospel every time he wrote a variation on “IN THEE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD.” It is doubtful Burroughs had Ecclesiastes in mind as he was writing in 1960 and yet, underneath its revolutionary posturing, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS frequently echoes the prophet’s suspicious attitude toward the flesh.

I DONT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR SUFFERING. ALL YOUR WHINING WHIMPERING HUMAN SHIT. OF COURSE YOU SUFFER. BECAUSE YOU WONT TURN LOOSE OF YOUR STUPID BODIES. YOUR STUPID ORGANIC LIFE. YOUR MORE ME EQUATION.

It’s a shorter distance than expected from the refrain “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” in Ecclesiastes to “ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE” in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS. Both texts preach, use repetition for poetic effect, and assume that life is suffering. William Burroughs as religious writer? Hardly — yet BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS implies that victory involves what Burroughs once calls “spirit” and more often calls “awareness.”

PROPHET OF DESPAIR? I THINK NOT. I BELIEVE THAT ORGANIC LIFE AS WE KNOW IT HAS OR WILL REACH AN IMPASSE. CALLEJON SIN SALIDA. DEAD END. I AFFIRM SPIRIT AS FACT… WHEN I SAY: “ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE,” I AM URGING ALL PEOPLE EVERYWHERE TO MOVE IN THE DIRECTION OF INCREASED AWARENESS. TO MOVE OUT FROM THE BODY WITH ITS TIME BOUND ANIMAL REACTIONS OF DEFENSE AGGRESSION ACQUISITIVENESS. NOT IN PURITANICAL BUT IN EXPLORATORY DIRECTION.

It’s not hypocrisy to hear this from a man who spent much of his life in the grip of substances that reduce awareness. That’s precisely the sort of person who would be sensitized to it.

If there is a hero in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, however, it is not an Old Testament prophet but the Old Man of the Mountain. During those same feverish months at the Beat Hotel when Gysin showed Burroughs the cut-up technique, he also gave him Betty Bouthul’s book Le grand maître des Assassins. The master of the assassins was something like a 12th century Charles Manson, using drugs to gain control over his followers’ minds so that they willingly killed for him. The story took root in Burroughs’ imagination. He adopted Hassan Sabbah’s last words, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” as his personal maxim. He used Hassan Sabbah as an alter ego in texts he wrote for the rest of his life. We can witness the birth of this identification in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS.

WE HAVE NO EYES TO SEE?? WE HAVE NO FEELINGS?? WE ARE THE INSECT PEOPLE?? THEN USE THE EYES OF HASSAN SABBAH. AND THE FEELINGS OF HASSAN SABBAH. THE EYES OF HASSAN SABBAH AND ALL THAT HASSAN SABBAH FEELS OR KNOWS NOW OR EVER FREE TO ALL ALL ALL. I REPEAT TO ALL. NO ONE IS EXCLUDED. ALL ARE WELCOME. BURROUGHS HASSAN SABBAH AND WELCOME.

Burroughs Hassan Sabbah — the act of identification takes the cut-up out of literature and into metaphysics. It’s as though Burroughs severed his personality with as much sangfroid as he cut a page of his prose in half, lined it up with someone else’s, and scanned across the fragments to see what new configuration of self emerged from the pieces. “I FIND IT A USEFUL LITERARY EXERCISE,” Burroughs writes, “TO PLACE MYSELF IN EXTREME, UH, CIRCUMSTANCES..” This is what makes BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS such a thrilling addition to the Burroughs canon. It is a vivid record, almost a livestream, of Burroughs at a moment when he was absolutely going for broke.

I bought my first copy of the Olympia Press edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch from eBay. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never seen a copy in person. I knew little about the principles of collecting. But I had the money and the itch so I overpaid for a copy that I wouldn’t consider buying today. The dust jacket is brownish, like somebody used it to prop up a flower pot and dirty water leaked out onto it. Also it doesn’t quite fit the book. It wraps at a slight skew that makes the columns of text in the inner flaps tilt in one direction. The wrapper even has extra scoring lines. For years I prided myself that, yes, indeed, my Burroughs collection contained a true first of Naked Lunch. But really my collection contained a copy so unappealing that it hardly counted. I just didn’t know any better.

Then I stumbled onto the website ParisOlympiaPress.com. The author made a post about the unique copy of Naked Lunch he once possessed:

one day purchased a copy advertised as for sale with an ill fitting dust-wrapper, well surprise surprise, when the book arrived it was not the dust-wrapper that was wrong but the book which was too big, the wrapper fitted comfortably on my other copies, but not fat boy, which was both taller and thicker, with a lighter cover than the other copies, no fucking way was that dust-wrapper or any other I have seen since going to fit on that behemoth of a Naked Lunch

When I read this, two thoughts fired off simultaneously in my brain. First, this book sounded like my copy of Naked Lunch. Second, I recalled the mysterious comment in Maynard & Miles that there was a pirate edition of Naked Lunch, “probably done in Formosa, copying the Traveler’s Companion format.” What if, I thought, Fat Boy was a pirate of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch? What if my copy was a pirate? This thought sent me spiraling down a wormhole of obsessive research. I bought more than half a dozen copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch. I visited several archives. What I learned is that the first edition of William Burroughs’ most famous book still has secrets to tell. I discovered a point of distinction never previously remarked, inaccuracies perpetuated by every bibliographic listing, and the existence of at least one pirate edition.

The Official Story

The publication of The Naked Lunch by Olympia Press is a story we think we know. (The title of the Olympia edition began with the definite article but, for familiarity’s sake, I’ll drop it from here on out.) Maurice Girodias, Olympia’s founder, had previously turned down a chance to publish Burroughs’ masterwork. But the controversy caused by excerpts of Naked Lunch appearing in The Chicago Review and Big Table caused him to reconsider. On June 6, 1959 Girodias sent Burroughs a letter asking for a second look at the manuscript. Girodias tendered Burroughs a contract and gave him two weeks to ready the book for the printer. “I had exactly ten days to prepare the MS,” Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in late July 1959. “Realize that in the last month I have edited the entire MS., corrected the galley-proofs, and the final proofs, and designed a cover, and the book is rolling off the presses right now.” On July 30, 1959 Burroughs wrote to Paul Bowles, “In the past month I have edited the entire manuscript, corrected all the proofs and it rolls off the presses today.” That was a Thursday. Burroughs must have spent the weekend sharing his first copies around the Beat Hotel. On August 1, he was supposed to read from Naked Lunch at George Whitman’s Le Mistral bookshop. Junk-sick, he sent a tape recording in his stead.

The 1978 bibliography by Barry Miles and Joe Maynard is the primary source of information for the publication history of the book. They state that Olympia did three printings. The first consisted of 5,000 copies. The second, “reprinted soon after the original,” consisted of another 5,000. The third printing, done in June 1965, was also 5,000 copies. The first printing has two points of distinction, a green border around the title page and a price of 1.500 francs on the rear wrapper. The very first copies lacked the dust jacket which, according to Miles, was added “after a month or so.” Patrick Kearney’s bibliography of Olympia Press publications repeats this information, adding that the dust jacket was “not issued until some months after the book’s initial release.” Kearney observes that “A number of collectors and dealers have reported that the dust jackets are ill-fitting, suggesting that they were poorly designed.” Finally, Kearney proposes a date of “c. 1962” for the second printing, which lacks the green border on the title page and has a price of 18 francs on the rear wrapper. In their editors’ note to the “restored” edition of Naked Lunch, Miles and James Grauerholz say that Burroughs corrected “about fifty” errors “when the book was reprinted a few weeks” after the initial printing. Later bibliographers add nothing new — but the documentary evidence will tell a more complicated story.

A New Point of Distinction

Once I had accumulated a few copies of the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch, I lined them up to see if I could spot any differences between them. Certainly there were the known points of distinction — the green border, the price on the rear — but I was curious if there were any other telltale signs that might indicate whether my own Fat Boy was a pirate edition from Formosa. At first, I didn’t notice anything. The book stands 17.5 cm tall. The width varies a bit, from about 11 cm to 11.4 cm, but it can depend on how beat up the book is. The spine can skew in one direction or it can cave in, which makes it difficult to judge how to line it up with a ruler. The paper stock is consistent across my copies. The color of the green wrapper varies a bit but that can result from how much exposure the book has had to light. I didn’t notice any differences so I tried inspecting the books with a magnifying glass. That’s when I saw it. My Fat Boy copy had a comma in the price on the rear, like this: 1,500. Another copy had a period, like this: 1.500. Once I’d detected it, I could see it clearly with my naked eye. I checked Maynard & Miles — they used a comma in their description. Kearney used a period.

This was a new point of distinction that no one had ever remarked. But what did it mean? The correct punctuation mark, reflecting common usage in France, was the period. In several years of inspecting Olympia Press books and watching them online, I have only spotted one other book which contains a comma in the price. Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnameable, was printed in fall 1959 with prices in both old and new francs on the rear: 1,800 (old francs with a comma) and 18 (new francs). For a while I was strongly tempted to conclude that the comma must be the sign of a pirate edition. Yet there was a copy of Naked Lunch being offered for sale by Pleasures of Past Times in England that had a comma, was signed by Burroughs, dated by the owner April 1960, and contained a card stating “With the compliments of Maurice Girodias.” (Having already spent thousands of dollars accumulating Naked Lunches, I did not purchase this copy or examine it in person. But the pictures are clear.) This copy suggests that Olympia Press did in fact put out some books with commas in the price. So what was the difference between period and comma copies?

“Designed a Cover”

In addition to performing a close physical examination of the printed book, I also went over multiple dust jackets with a magnifying glass. I can’t say I noticed any differences between them. They’re 40 cm long by 17.5 cm high. They have a glossy finish. The ones that don’t fit well have scoring lines in weird places like the middle of the spine, as though they were originally scored for a thinner book. In fact, the best-fitting dust jackets still look like they were designed for a smaller book. On the front of even the most pristine Naked Lunch, the calligraphic symbols cut off and leave a white gap to the right. The designer must have expected the jacket would fold right where those calligraphs cut off. It suggests that the dust jacket was poorly designed or, more likely, that the book was thicker than expected — which wouldn’t be surprising since Burroughs was sending it to the printer in sections. Burroughs was suffering from a rampaging heroin addiction in July 1959 so Sinclair Beiles did most of the editing, along with some help from Brion Gysin. No one could calculate the thickness of the book in advance because no one knew what was or wasn’t in it until the editing was done.

I got to wondering, though, if it was possible that the dust jacket was poorly designed — precisely because Burroughs designed it. He had written to Ginsberg that he “designed a cover.” But how could this be? Heroin addiction aside, Burroughs did not possess the mechanical skills to lay out a dust jacket — not one as sophisticated as the jacket of Naked Lunch. Olympia must have had a talented designer, as can be seen from contemporaneous jackets such as Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy and Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le Métro. Perhaps Burroughs suggested some color or type treatments but his primary contribution lay in creating the calligraphic symbols. In interviews for Literary Outlaw, Brion Gysin explained this to Ted Morgan. “Um, who did the jacket? William did, I guess, with me sort of guiding his hand a bit. Or he sort of imitating what I was doing. It’s his drawing on the cover of the jacket.” (Tape 143 A) As Burroughs’ letters show, he had been doing many such drawings at the time. He included them as a “chapter” of Naked Lunch in the excerpt printed in Big Table and encouraged Irving Rosenthal to include them in the Grove Press edition.

There are further signs of sloppiness evident in the flap copy inside the dust jacket. Curiously, the price is listed as “Francs 1500” using neither a comma nor a period. It was almost as though Olympia was splitting the difference or refusing to commit to one punctuation mark or the other, although the period was clearly correct. It is unknown who wrote the introductory paragraph inside the dust jacket — Beiles? — but there follows a long excerpt from an article published by John Ciardi in the June 27, 1959 issue of the Saturday Review. In comparing the flap copy to the actual Ciardi article, I noted only one minor difference between the two, a missing ellipsis. Ciardi, however, did not draw his Naked Lunch quotes from the volume that Olympia had only just decided to produce. He drew his from the inaugural issue of Big Table, published in March 1959. As a result, the flap copy correctly spells “dowser” (misspelled “dowzer” in the Olympia edition) and adds a line (“These messages from the blood are infallible, literally always right”) not present in the published book. Consequently, anyone with a dust wrapper literally got more of the text of Naked Lunch than those who bought copies without it.

There is another important piece of information which the dust wrapper omits — the photo credit. The picture shows Burroughs staring out over a shelf of books. His face is illumined in a dark room by a light source coming from behind the camera. The photo was taken in fall 1953 by Allen Ginsberg at his apartment on East 7th St in Manhattan. The same photo was used in the summer of 1959 in Big Table 2. In later years, Ginsberg published variants of the photo, including one of Kerouac in the same pose. He also wrote similar but different captions on versions of the photo, generally giving the time, the place, and the fact that Burroughs was staying with him as they worked on Yage Letters and Queer. In some captions he compares Burroughs to Baudelaire. In others Ginsberg describes how he stood on the fire escape to take the picture. An entire essay could be written about the photo — how it ties together Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac; how it connects Naked Lunch to Yage Letters and Queer; how Burroughs addresses Ginsberg in the picture just as he had addressed many of the Naked Lunch letters to him. Suffice to say that the omission of the photo credit left all this in the shadows. Perhaps it was deliberate. Naked Lunch had many collaborators but this was Burroughs’ book.

Is there any way to be more precise than Maynard & Miles in dating when the dust wrapper was added to the book? They suggest “after a month or so.” Presumably this information was provided by Burroughs and/or Gysin. Burroughs must have received his first finished copies of the book on July 31 or August 1, 1959. The jacket is visible in the photographs of Burroughs that Loomis Dean took for Life magazine on October 1, 1959. I have been unable to locate any correspondence or other text referring to the dust jacket in the intervening period. I did, however, discover a copy of the book on eBay whose owner claimed to have bought it in the summer of 1959. A reasonably reliable source, the owner was a retired architect who was a friend of Robert Lowell and acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg. He could not actually remember purchasing the book and he did not have a sales receipt or other documentary evidence. But the book had the correct price on the back, which suggested it was purchased in 1959. It had a dust wrapper. The owner acquired it when he was a sophomore at Harvard. He had spent the summer in Europe and returned for the fall semester on a Harvard charter flight from Paris. It strongly implies he purchased the book right at the end of August or beginning of September. That would coincide with Maynard & Miles’ claim that the wrapper was added “after a month or so.”

The Loomis Dean photos also feature a series of Burroughs signing a copy of Naked Lunch in a bookstore. David Snell’s dispatch to Life magazine, excerpted in Literary Outlaw, says: “Roll two shows Burroughs autographing copies of his book in a Left Bank bookstore near his hotel…” It’s tough to say which bookstore. Gait Frogé gave Naked Lunch a window display at the English Bookshop but both the English and the Mistral were nearby bookshops on the Left Bank. In the image, the book appears to lack the dust jacket — doubtless local bookstores had a supply of the pre-jacket books. Also Burroughs was signing the very first inside page, which was blank. Usually he signed the title page. The inscription was long too. It makes you wonder if that particular copy exists somewhere out there. Perhaps it was in David Snell or Loomis Dean’s collections? I emailed Chris Dean, Loomis’ son, but he was unable to locate his father’s copy of Naked Lunch.

Printings and Print Run

Since I had many unanswered questions, especially about the difference between the period and the comma in the price, I visited the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. I was particularly keen to read through a file of documents related to Olympia Press, whose own archives were lost or destroyed when the press went bankrupt. Letters flew back and forth between Burroughs, Girodias, Barney Rossett, editors, lawyers, literary agents, Swiss intermediaries. Many concerned grievances about rights, royalties, payments not made. On December 6, 1961, Olympia sent Burroughs a royalty statement indicating that “From publication up to the 1st of December 1961,” Olympia had sold 5.865 copies of The Naked Lunch. (A period was used as the thousands separator in this and other documents.) That was 865 books more than Maynard & Miles said were printed, but it’s not uncommon for a publisher to receive an overrun of 10% or so from a printer.

Then I came across another royalty statement from May 31, 1965. “We sold the first edition” of The Naked Lunch, it says:

5.865 copies at 15 NF
4.034 copies at 18 NF

“Of the second edition of the book,” it adds, “we sold”:

6.800 copies at 18 NF

Ok, I thought, that’s about fifteen thousand copies, which per Maynard & Miles was the total of the three Olympia editions of Naked Lunch. The letter referred to two editions of the book instead of three but I figured that was an issue of terminology. Olympia might have distinguished the editions differently than Maynard & Miles did. Then I realized that this royalty statement was created just before the June 1965 release of Olympia’s third and last printing of Naked Lunch. In other words, the royalty statement concerns the first two editions of Naked Lunch. The first edition was therefore almost double what we have always thought — at least 9,899 (5,865 + 4, 034) copies were printed and sold. And the second edition, the one without the green border on the title page and with the 18 NF price printed on the back, was more than 30% larger than given in bibliographies.

The royalty statement raises another question about how Olympia priced the editions. On January 1, 1960, France revalued its currency so that the original 1.500 price in old francs became 15 new francs. There are many copies of the Olympia Naked Lunch around that show the 1.500 (or 1,500) price overstamped with the price in new francs. I have never seen, however, a copy in which the stamp says 15 NF. The stamps, which are remarkably consistent in their appearance, all say 18 NF. Olympia must have begun repricing the book in new francs on January 1, 1960 yet the royalty statements imply that Olympia did not start collecting 18 NF until after December 6, 1961. Does this imply that Olympia did not overstamp the books until late 1961? I think that there is a more likely explanation, which is that Olympia began overstamping books with the 18 NF price in January 1960. The royalty statements, however, neglected to indicate that the publisher had been collecting an extra 3 francs per unit from January 1960 to December 1961. It’s an error in Olympia’s favor — precisely the sort of gamesmanship for which Girodias was known.

None of the royalty statements in the Burroughs archive give a total print run for the third Olympia edition of Naked Lunch — the 1965 one printed by Imprimerie Crouzet. On November 10, 1966, Girodias attested that Olympia had sold 2,471 copies. In a letter to agent Peter Matson on July 17, 1969, Girodias claimed there were about 1,500 copies of the third edition “still in stock in Paris.” Presumably the print run was around 5,000 copies and sales were undermined by the Grove Press and international editions which had appeared by then. Also Olympia Press had been nearly destroyed by legal fights and bankruptcy issues.

While this documentary evidence was revelatory, it still left me with a number of questions. Did the period or the comma correlate to one or the other printing of the first edition? If so, which was which? Were there any other visible differences between the two print runs of the first edition?

Olympia used French printers who introduced a number of errors into the English text of Naked Lunch. In the very last paragraph, for example, “Old-time, veteran Schmeckers” is printed as “Old time, veteran Scmeeckers.” On page 95 there is also a text decoration consisting of three dots — the only such separator in the book. Why is it there? In the “restored” edition of Naked Lunch, Miles and Grauerholz assert that “Burroughs corrected about fifty [errors] when the book was reprinted a few weeks” after the first printing. On July 20, 1960, Burroughs told Irving Rosenthal that he “corrected the book for second printing and found as I remember not more than fifty actual errors.” But I compared the text in every edition of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch I have. The same errors are in the same places in every book. “Old time, veteran Scmeeckers” is in the first, second, and third Olympia printings. On page 11 the phrase “Now right again” looks like it was accidentally set in bold type. The same mistake occurs in every Olympia edition. If Burroughs really did make corrections — when it came time to go over The Soft Machine, he didn’t want to do it and told Brion Gysin “I am not much of a proof reader” — the corrections never made it into print.

It is easy to explain how Burroughs’ corrections went unused. Olympia had the type set for the first printing. For subsequent reprintings, they used photo-offset — basically photographing the original edition and printing the photographs. That perpetuated the errors, the lone text decoration, and the stray instance of bold type. Maynard & Miles state that Olympia did plan a “special edition” which they never ended up issuing. There are galleys with corrections in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. The handwriting looks more like Gysin’s than Burroughs’ but it’s possible these were the corrections made for the “second” printing. At any rate, they were unused and provide no further way of distinguishing between the various Olympia editions.

Tracking the First Copies of the Book

As much as I learned from the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library, I still had unanswered questions. What was the meaning of the periods and commas in the price? Was there any way to differentiate between a true first and a pirate edition of Naked Lunch? Was it possible to identify the very first books Olympia issued — the ones in the month before the dust wrapper was added? It occurred to me that the next step was to look at copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch which had documented histories. There were books which Burroughs signed to friends in 1959. There were books which Olympia sent to reviewers. Did these indisputably true firsts harbor telltale signs of their primacy? I made a list of Burroughs’ friends and associates in 1959 and set to work seeing if I could figure out where their copies of Naked Lunch had landed.

This was complicated not only by the passage of time but by the difficulty of getting the book out of France in 1959. Allen Ginsberg had predicted that Naked Lunch would drive readers mad. What really drove them mad was getting their hands on a copy. Piero Heliczer wrote a correspondent about the difficulties of getting it into England. “Three people,” he said, “who will pay for it want to peruse a Naked Lunch if you cant bring these within one month please send them at once Naked Lunch must be by personal mercury as customs officials of post like getting indigestation.” [sic] In the United States, the post office confiscated many copies. Bill Dobson, whom Burroughs had befriended in Mexico City, described how hopeless the situation was in small-town America. On October 6, 1959, he wrote Burroughs,

Sure disappointed that the book didn’t get through — I kept hoping though I didn’t expect it would get here. The postmaster in every town big enough to have a radio station gets free broadcast time to inform the public about the revolting stuff that comes through the mails and its direct contribution to crime generally and juvenile delinquency in particular and urging everybody to vote for more stringent laws that will enable the Postmaster General to purify our reading and deliver us from evil.

Allen Ginsberg had received the letters out of which Burroughs fashioned Naked Lunch but even he could not manage to get the printed result. On August 14, 1959, Ginsberg wrote Burroughs: “Send me your book, a number of copies, I don’t have one.” On September 29, he wrote: “I still have not receivd a copy of yr book. Presumably one was sent, & didn’t get through. Please ask Gerodias [sic] to try again.” On November 17, he wrote again: “I still haven’t got my copy — tell Girodias try send me one not under my name but care of my brother… Also another one care of my father.” Another case in point was Edwin (Ned) Erbe, the publicity director of New Directions, who was working with Gregory Corso to publish The Happy Birthday of Death. Erbe tasked Corso with getting him a copy of Naked Lunch in November 1959. In spite of multiple requests, Erbe only received the book in May 1960 when it was delivered to him by Peter Orlovsky. In April 1960, a New York Times article about Girodias claimed that “Olympia had exceptionally bad luck with review copies of ‘The Naked Lunch‘: only two out of twelve reached their American addressees.” What abyss did those confiscated books fall into? One imagines the inscription Burroughs must have written on that first copy to Ginsberg.

Grove Press, which would go on to publish the book in America, struggled to get a copy. On September 21, 1959, Fran Muller of Olympia wrote to Judith Schmidt at Grove: “I am surprised to hear that you did not receive the copies of ‘The Naked Lunch‘ we have sent to you.” On September 29, Gregory Corso wrote Burroughs that “I still didn’t get my copy; Diane was hesitant to send me her copy then I got a letter awhile back from her saying she sent it on, I await.” Diane who? Diane di Prima? Evidently Corso received this or another copy. He wrote Ned Erbe in November to say that Naked Lunch was great and that he had loaned his signed copy to Tennessee Williams. Kells Elvins, Burroughs’ childhood friend, had not managed to obtain Naked Lunch by that point either. On November 13, Burroughs advised him, “If you cannot buy Naked Lunch in Rome I will send copy.” In his letter of July 30, Burroughs had promised Paul Bowles that “you should have a copy within the next few days,” yet on December 7 he was following up to say “I hope you got the copy of N.L. I sent you with Achmed Yacoubi.” In December, Burroughs wrote to his son Billy, “I was glad to hear from you [that you] received Lunch and enjoyed same.. That’s something the cook always likes to hear..” Incredibly, the book had gotten through U.S. customs to a twelve-year-old. (And one wonders about Burroughs’ parental judgement in sending it to him.)

Who else managed to receive books? A pristine copy described as the author’s is located in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. Burroughs must have handed Brion Gysin his copy at the Beat Hotel, presumably within days of publication. He inscribed it “For Brion Gysin / nothing is true everything is permitted / William S. Burroughs.” That copy, covered with a handmade dust jacket of silver leaf paper, is now in the Burroughs archive at the NYPL too. Irving Rosenthal also received a copy hot off the presses. On August 23, 1959, he wrote Burroughs to acknowledge receiving a copy of Naked Lunch. Rosenthal loaned his to Lyle Stuart, a publisher to whom he was trying to sell the American rights to Naked Lunch on Burroughs’ behalf. In the same letter he mentioned that the Partisan Review had received a review copy. “I hope,” Rosenthal wrote, “you have airmailed copies of NL as we asked. Neither Allen nor Jack nor I nor anyone friends we know have rec’d copies from Olympia — but Partisan Review has rec’d a review copy. The copy you sent me has been with Lyle Stuart & his lawyer.” This copy is now located in the Irving Rosenthal Papers at Stanford University. It is accompanied by a note by Rosenthal titled, “On the Olympia edition of [The] Naked Lunch sent me by WSB 8/3/59.” The note begins, “This is the first copy of NL to enter the U.S.” — language repeated in the finding aid for the Rosenthal Papers.

I decided to visit Stanford in order to inspect this copy of Naked Lunch. I have to say that it was an enlightening, even moving experience. It is common knowledge that Rosenthal used the Olympia edition to put together the Grove Press one, which has since become canonical. But until you see the Rosenthal copy in person you don’t really appreciate just how extensive an editing job he performed. At a glance, the book is the most beat-up copy of the Olympia edition that I have ever seen. The spine has been taped. The covers are cracked. The wrappers, normally a flat green, have been so thoroughly handled that they’re sort of greasy looking. Page after page after page contains proofreading symbols, deletions, insertions. Paragraphs are crossed out or moved around. There are inserts with typewritten text. There are sheets of paper with handwritten text — in various colors of ink — taped in. It resembles one of Burroughs’ cut-up scrapbooks from the 1960s. It’s tempting to think that this is exactly how Naked Lunch ought to look — jumbled, unstable, cobbled together from multiple sources, printed and typed and handwritten. “This book spill off the pages.”

Although the cover of the Rosenthal copy is beaten and worn, I was able to use a magnifying glass to ascertain one important detail. The price on the rear of this copy, which is indisputably from the first batch of books printed, contains a period: “1.500.” The price on the rear of the author copy and the Brion Gysin copy at the NYPL uses a period. The price on the copy purchased by a Harvard student in August or September 1959 also makes use of a period. Based on the evidence furnished by these four copies, it is difficult not to conclude that the very first copies of the printed book bear this previously unremarked point of distinction: they had periods in their prices. Books with commas came later. When? They had to have been printed before April 1960, the date scrawled by an owner on the Pleasure of Past Times copy. It’s possible that the Samuel Beckett book, the only other Olympia book of the time to have a comma in the price, suggests a date. Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnameable was printed in October 1959 by Imprimerie du Lion. Naked Lunch had been printed by S.I.P in Montreuil. Did Girodias, reaching out to a different printer for the Beckett volume, task them with generating another run of Naked Lunch? Did the same printer use the comma in both books?

Tracking down other known copies of the first printing would lend further weight to this thesis. The poet-bookseller Harry Nudel purchased Gait Frogé’s copy from her estate. Burroughs inscribed it, “For Gait Froige [sic] – The English Book Shop – Minutes to Go.” The inscription indicates that Burroughs can’t have signed the book before October 1959, when he began experimenting with the cut-up technique, and most likely signed it in April 1960 at the launch of Minutes to Go, which Frogé funded. Notably, the book has a period in the price on the rear. Paul Bowles’ copy appears to be held in the Paul Bowles Collection at the University of Delaware. Bowles himself can be seen showing the book to the camera in the 1995 documentary The Complete Outsider. A snapshot of it has also appeared online. Bowles had the book covered in red Moroccan leather. Was the rear cover with the price bound into the book? Was it taken off and thrown away? I have not been able to visit Delaware to find out. Alan Ansen’s copy is also a mystery. He received his by October 1, 1959, when he wrote Burroughs: “I did get your book and thank you ever so much for the inscription.” Where is Ansen’s copy? I have been unable to find out. Where is the review copy received by the Partisan Review? It is not catalogued in the Partisan Review archives at Boston University.

Another copy that has gone missing is Harold Norse’s. In Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, Norse describes how Burroughs personally gave him the book after a reception at the English Bookshop.

That evening Burroughs came to my room and handed me an inscribed copy with disarming warmth and shyness. “This copy is for you, Harold,” he said, standing in his topcoat and trilby, his back to the window that faced the street. I accepted it gratefully and read the inscription: “For Harold Norse, ally and accomplice, with very best wishes.”

Where is Norse’s copy? I cast around looking for it. Norse sold some papers to the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana. Other papers landed at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. So far as I could find out, neither university has a record of it. I asked Todd Swindell, a friend of Norse who runs haroldnorse.com. He suggested that it might have been pilfered. “Harold did have some of his archives stolen around 1996 by a friend of his roommate — a disastrous event that precipitated his heart attack. Perhaps there’s a chance it might have been amongst that material.” It must be in a collector’s library somewhere.

Putting It All Together

I managed to track down five copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch with documented histories — books that belonged to Burroughs, Gysin, Irving Rosenthal, Gait Frogé, and a Harvard student. Five of five have periods in the prices on the rear. It is reasonable to conclude that the “truest” firsts of Naked Lunch, the ones distributed in August 1959 before the dust jacket was finished, can only have been copies with the period in the price. Conversely, books with commas in the price were probably not available before fall 1959, when the Samuel Beckett book with a comma in the price was printed. The print runs were significantly larger than described by the bibliographies. The first printing, the one with the green border on the title page, was probably 10,000 copies. In my experience, period copies are somewhat rarer than comma copies. It is also harder to find period copies with the New Francs stamp, which suggests again that the period copies were issued prior to the comma ones. As a rough guess, I’d say something like 3,000 copies in the first print run had periods and the remainder had commas. The second official printing, the one with 18 francs on the rear wrapper and no green border on the title page, was printed in a run of at least 6,800 copies. Kearney’s date of “c. 1962” for the second printing is realistic but, in the absence of documentary evidence, it could have been earlier or later.

What about pirate editions? I stumbled on a pirate of the Grove Press Naked Lunch that’s in the Beinecke Library at Yale. It belonged to the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot bibliographer Donald Gallup, who wrote in the front fly-leaf “A pirated ed. sold in Taiwan.” There were likely other pirates of the Grove edition but what about the Olympia? Given how often Olympia Press books were bootlegged, it’s logical to assume pirate editions of Naked Lunch must have been printed. Books too large for their wrapper might be an indicator but eventually I decided that my own Fat Boy wasn’t really that fat in comparison to other copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch that I’d accumulated. Other dust wrappers do fit on it and there are any number of plausible reasons to explain the sloppy fit of some wrappers. Maybe the jackets were scored wrong. Maybe the designer made an assumption about the length of the text and therefore the thickness of the book which changed as Burroughs and his collaborators revised Naked Lunch for publication. Nothing else about my Fat Boy screams “botch job from Formosa.”

I have learned of one pirate of Naked Lunch with an intriguing and indisputable backstory. The book was once in the collection of Barry Miles. It has red wrappers, which some Olympia titles did have, and was purchased by Brion Gysin in an Iranian airport during his pilgrimage to Hassan-i Sabbah’s mountain fortress in 1973. In “A Quick Trip to Alamut,” Gysin mentions finding copies of Naked Lunch for sale “in the airport of Isfahan… probably both bootlegged and pirated.” On his return, he gave one of these copies to Miles, writing in the front leaves, “This copy of Naked Lunch was bought at the airport at Isfahan, Iran and taken on the quick trip to Alamout Castle, the HQ of Hassan I Sabbah, Grand Master of the Assassins, on a very scary day, Wednesday Aug 22, 1973. Brion Gysin.” Burroughs inscribed it too, “All the best to Alamout by Brion Gysin. William Burroughs.” In an email, Miles shares that the book “is a straight forward offset litho reprint — no green border on the TP.” A pirate edition from the command post of Hassan-i Sabbah — this must be one of the coolest copies of Naked Lunch in existence. The thought of other red pirates floating around the mideast has tormented me during the years I’ve been researching the publication history of Naked Lunch. They must be out there.

There is one other pirate of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch in my possession. A few years ago, an eBay auction offered a 1959 text block of Naked Lunch with no wrappers. It had been in the collection of the San Francisco Public Library. Presumably the library rebound the book in boards which were removed when it was deaccessioned. Purchasing the text block, I set myself the task of recreating the famous green wrappers of the Olympia Press edition in Adobe InDesign. I printed this out on a color laser printer, fixed it to a sheet of cover stock, and wrapped the text block in it. My Fat Boy may not be a bootleg of Naked Lunch but I now have this piracy of one, a 1959/2018 hybrid of French printing and American do-it-yourselfism. I imagine dying one day and the book being sold off or deposited in a library along with the other copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch I’ve collected. So as not to confuse bibliographers, collectors, or librarians of the future, I made one tweak to the cover while recreating it. Below the 1.500 price on the rear, I added the domain name REALITYSTUDIO.ORG. If you ever see the book around, now you’ll know who pirated it.

Thanks

Thanks to Barry Miles for sharing the red pirate of Naked Lunch formerly in his possession, Harry Nudel for sharing the Gait Frogé NL, and Jed Birmigham, Oliver Harris, and Jan Herman.

Notes

Archives

ASU. Ted Morgan Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Arizona State University Library.

Berg. William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951-1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

HRC. Paul Bowles Collection 1897-1995, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Kansas. Burroughs-Hardiment collection, 1957 – 1964, Kenneth Spencer Research Library Repository, University of Kansas.

Stanford. Irving Rosenthal Papers, Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University.

Bibliographies

Maynard, Joe, and Miles, Barry, William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953 – 1973, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1978. Miles confirmed in an email on July 27, 2020 that they used Joe Maynard’s copy of Naked Lunch to write the description in their bibliography.

Kearney, Patrick, The Paris Olympia Press (New Edition Revised and Expanded), Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2007.

Correspondence

Unless otherwise specified in the notes, cited letters can be found in the two volumes of Burroughs’ correspondence.

Burroughs, William S., The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945 – 1959, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Viking, 1993.

Burroughs, William S., Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959 – 1974, edited by Bill Morgan, New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Notes

William Burroughs to Paul Bowles, July 30, 1959. HRC.

Brion Gysin interview with Ted Morgan for Literary Outlaw, Tape 143 A. ASU.

Olympia Press royalty statements. Berg.

Maurice Girodias to Peter Matson, July 17, 1969. Berg.

Piero Heliczer to unnamed correspondent, fall 1959. Quoted in listing on BeatBooks.com for “Ten typed letters, nine of them with holograph additions, drawings and other embellishments; one typed postcard; one autograph postcard; and one autograph aerogramme from Michael Horovitz to Piero Heliczer, c. May – November 1959.”

Bill Dobson to William Burroughs, October 6, 1959. Kansas.

Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, August 14, 1959. Berg.

Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, September 29, 1959. Berg.

Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, November 17, 1959. Berg.

Henry Popkin, “The Famous and Infamous Wares of Monsieur Girodias,” New York Times, April 17, 1960.

Fran Muller to Judith Schmidt, September 21, 1959. Berg.

Gregory Corso to William Burroughs, September 29, 1959. Berg.

William Burroughs to Kells Elvins, November 13, 1959. Berg.

Irving Rosenthal to William Burroughs, August 23, 1959. Stanford.

Photographs of Gait Frogé’s copy of Naked Lunch were very kindly provided by poet-bookseller Harry Nudel.

Alan Ansen to William Burroughs, October 1, 1959. Berg.

Barry Miles to the author, July 30, 2017, email.

I tend not to read academic work on William S. Burroughs, though there are exceptions. Oliver Harris never fails to be as insightful as he is eloquent. Recently I also enjoyed Véronique Lane’s book on the relationship between French writers and the Beats. But most academic writing about Burroughs is as exciting as mud pie. It lacks the documentary research that James Grauerholz put into his fantastic essays on Burroughs in Chicago and the death of Joan Vollmer. It lacks the friendly intimacy of Barry Miles’ work. It lacks the daring of RealityStudio’s own Jed Birmingham. Maybe I’m caricaturing the situation but so much academic writing simply tries too hard, like a student using big words to impress. It too often results in books that sag under the weight of their own pomposity. They read Burroughs through the lens of this or that theorist and mistake this exercise for profundity.

As a result of this prejudice, though, it took me years to get around to reading a truly great critical work on Burroughs: Michael B. Goodman’s Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. I happened to stumble on an ex-library copy right at the time I was mulling over some thoughts about censorship. I knew Goodman’s name from his bibliographies, which I respected, so I thought I’d give the book a try — and I’m glad I did. Goodman’s history of the censorship of Naked Lunch is a model of scholarship. It is so rigorously researched that I spent as much time in the footnotes as I did in the main text. It is written in clear prose. It tells an important story not just about literature but about free speech. I am not giving in to hyperbole when I say that this book is essential reading for any Burroughs enthusiast. I was so impressed by it that I googled around to see what had become of its author.

Goodman is currently a professor in Communications Studies at Baruch College in New York. We met in his office one crisp winter night to get acquainted. He generously shared recollections of his time researching Burroughs, as well as many insights gleaned from his later studies in communications. We exchanged a few emails afterward then convened a proper interview via telephone.

How did you first become interested in William Burroughs?

I was in a doctoral seminar in contemporary American literature at SUNY at Stony Book. At that time — the late 1970s — that included Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, people writing at the time who were still alive. We had to do a research project for the doctoral seminar. Our professor, Jack Thompson, said to bring in writers and others that nobody knows about because “I want you guys to publish something.” At that time people hadn’t written much about William Burroughs so I started doing research on his books and his life. I also started collecting what he’d written and published. I went to special collections at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and Syracuse. What came out of that was the annotated bibliography that I published in 1975.

That’s an interesting pathway into Burroughs. Most people start with Naked Lunch or Junky then move deeper into his other works but you were actually a scholar first.

Thank you for calling me a scholar. I was a doctoral student at the time, a pre-scholar. I had known about his books through others so it wasn’t unfamiliar. But there wasn’t a lot of work about him except people saying he’s a scourge or he’s not a literary guy. The literary establishment was pushing back on Burroughs and the Beats in general.

You did an incredibly thorough job researching your book on the censorship of Naked Lunch. Can you talk about the approach you took and the methods you used?

On the back flap of the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch was a bit about the censorship trial. What drew me to researching it was that the trial was a free speech issue as well as literary landmark. I interviewed pretty much anyone who was involved with the book. I looked at archives that were at Syracuse University and Columbia University. It was a literary detective story trying to find out what reallly happened and what was behind the story on the back flap.

You interviewed not just literary figures but also lawyers, judges, and detectives. Were they surprised to learn that there was still so much interest in Naked Lunch?

They were incredibly forthcoming. It was out of the ordinary because it was such a high profile case. The lawyers and judges and everyone involved knew this was important because it had become part of American culture and literary history. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill trial that went through the court system.

When I interviewed Ginsberg, he wrote me a letter giving me access to his collection. It was on deposit at Columbia at the time but now it’s part of their collection. He called my house and at the time my mother-in-law, who was in her late 80s, was still alive. She picked up the phone then turned to my wife and me. “You know this fellow named Ginsberg?” When I picked up the phone, Allen asked for the copy of the letter that he had written to me. This was an important income stream for him — selling his papers. He was giving lectures and readings all over the world. Everyone knew he was a major literary figure. He saw anything that had his signature on it as something that he could put in an archive. I said, “No, that letter is mine now because you sent it to me.” He was a little taken aback and I said “Well, that’s fine, I’ll send you a copy.”

At what point did you decide to reach out to Burroughs and interview him?

James Grauerholz reached out to me. James was Burroughs’ agent at the time. He must have been in his 20s. James was always very professional and represented Burroughs in a strong, positive way. He was also protective because at that point Burroughs was getting older.

Most of my interaction with Burroughs was when Bill was living in a loft on the Bowery across from a fire station [familiarly known as The Bunker — ed.]. When he and James moved to Kansas, they asked me if I wanted to buy the loft but at that point my wife and I didn’t have the funds to buy anything. In hindsight it would have been great. It was a huge empty space with the only drawback being that, whenever fire engines left, the sirens would wake up anybody within a five block radius.

Was Burroughs helpful? Amused?

He was really hard to read. The affect that he had in public was the affect that he had in private. I couldn’t tell whether he was amazed or amused or intrigued or just the opposite. He would answer questions matter of factly. At that point in his life he was pleased that people were still interested in what he was doing. Coming back to the US was a renaissance in attention to what he was doing and the works he had done years before. My fellow graduate student Lem Coley, who was a coauthor on William S. Burroughs: A Reference Guide, and I arranged a reading at Stony Brook. People who may have heard of him but didn’t realize he was still alive were intrigued and wanted to see who this man was, this hombre invisible.

Did you interview Barney Rosset, Maurice Girodias, or any of the other publishers?

Both of them were very helpful. I had to get Rosset’s approval for the Grove Press collection that’s at Syracuse. He was pleased somebody was looking at it. Girodias was in Paris so the distance made it a little harder. I never had a face-to-face interview with him because I was in New York. We corresponded instead.

How did Burroughs react to the work you published about him?

Burroughs seemed bemused by it, as he was by those sorts of things. Mostly it was Allen Ginsberg who was there advocating at the trial. Norman Mailer. I have a complete copy of the transcript, which you can buy from the court. It’s two volumes because the trial was two days. From a legal standpoint it wasn’t a precedent-setting trial but from a cultural point of view it was certanly a milestone in literary freedom and artistic expression.

You invited Burroughs to read at Stony Brook while you were working on your dissertation there. Any memories of the reading?

Lem Coley and I introduced William. When he started reading, we went to the back of the room. The reading was typical or classic Burroughs, with the monotone that you hear in recordings of him. It was one of the biggest crowds for an artistic reading that we ever had. The crowd for Burroughs was as big or bigger than the one we had for Ginsberg reading his poetry a few months later. The crowd was fascinated and silent because they were straining to hear him read.

Do you happen to remember what he read that night?

He was reading from published works but also things he was working on, so possibly some sections of Cities of the Red Night. I’m not sure whether we recorded the reading. It might be at the Stony Brook library.

Did you get any special one-on-one time with Burroughs that night?

We took him out to dinner in Port Jefferson, which is a port town next to Stony Brook. We went to the Port Jefferson Hotel, which at that time was probably the only place you could go with a group of 15 or so. There were a lot of people, fellow graduate students, talking to him. I didn’t personally talk to him much that night because this was their opportunity. My wife went along as well. She made a comment to me about him not connecting with women. He was cordial but not social. The persona that he had in movies was the persona that we saw. There wasn’t a difference between the private and public Burroughs, though I’m sure James Grauerholz would give you a different picture. His relationship with Burroughs was much wider and deeper.

Did you attend any of the classes Burroughs gave at CUNY?

I went to a Columbia class that Burroughs was speaking at. There was a series of lectures that he gave there. The room was packed to the gills. It was late spring, the doors were open, there were people out in a garden area where Burroughs was speaking and reading and answering questions.

You were among the first scholars to work on Burroughs. Was the academic community supportive of your efforts?

Stony Brook was known for putting out folks who were against the literary establishment. Most of the faculty members were literary pariahs at some point. I’m thinking specifically of David V. Erdman, who did incredible work on William Blake. I had taken David’s seminars. Back then he was backlisted because of the McCarthy hearings. Stony Brook took in people like him. Jack Thompson was my dissertation director. He had been outed for his work with the Farfield Foundation. Back in the 1950s that was a CIA operation to cultivate artists and scholars and writers and novelists. Jack was head of that for a long time. When somebody blew the whistle on it during the Johnson administration Stony Brook brought him in as a senior professor. So Burroughs fit in with the sensibility of shaking up the establishment. There was no pushback about his personal life — the drugs, the homosexuality, the death of his wife Joan Vollmer. The focus was on his writing.

Little mags and mimeos played an important role for Burroughs. Did you pay much attention to those in your research?

Yes. As we speak I’m sitting in front of a bookshelf that has Big Table and all of the magazines and underground pamphlets Burroughs published in. They played an important part in his literary life because the establishment houses like Random House just weren’t interested.

You must have developed quite a collection of Burroughs’ work while doing your research. In those pre-internet days, how did you learn about Burroughs publications and how did you go about obtaining the obscurer ones?

Wasn’t there life before the internet? Because I was doing a bibliography, every time I would get a reference to a publication I would try to find it. Some of them were in the collections at Columbia and Syracuse. Most of them were in bookshops or in catalogues of little known works. Another way that Ginsberg and others paid the rent was by selling copies of obscurer publications at readings or through booksellers. When my wife and I were starting off we didn’t have much money but it was a lot of fun to track things down. I didn’t get a first Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch until way late. I found it at some bookshop downtown, probably The Strand.

Did bookstores play an important role in showing what was out there or in forming a community for you?

If I went to The Strand, I would always look for Burroughs. If they got something in, they’d give me a call or send a letter. Or when I bumped into Grauerholz, he would say, “If you’re looking for this or that, I have it.” I do miss having so many good bookstores around. Whenever I would travel, I would go into bookstores around the country to see if they had any Burroughs material. There was also a secondhand bookstore in Port Jefferson when we were at Stony Brook. I’m blanking on their name. I don’t think they still have a physical presence but maybe they have a website.

Although literature has been largely free of censorship in America since the courtroom battles over Naked Lunch, censorship has still been an issue for other art forms — for example, rap music or the photographs of Andres Serrano. Do you have any thoughts about the way censorship has evolved since writing your book?

Next to the trial books I have an entire shelf on literary censorship with works by Edward de Grazia, Charles Rembar’s The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Anne Haight’s Banned Books. There will always be censors because there will always be people who don’t want others’ voices to be heard. But right now the challenge is not so much being censored but cutting through the noise. There are so many opportunities for people to make their statements — you can have a website or a blog and maybe a thousand people will hear it. But does it have any impact? When Burroughs’ book was censored, media outlets were more limited and the issues were more central to the culture.

Have you maintained an interest in Burroughs after all this time?

I am still interested in Burroughs but I’m not focused on everything that comes out. When I see a major book, I buy it and put it with my collection.

After your books on Burroughs, your university career took a turn toward corporate communications. How do you think your Burroughs research influenced your later work?

I still use the same process — asking questions, probing into things. I’m pretty relentless in finding the answer to the questions I pose. I’m on my fifteenth book now and I never want to settle for things. I want to have an original look. That was the major life lesson of my graduate work — be relentless in the work you do because it pays off in the end. In looking at any topic, I go not just for breadth but for depth as well. They’re both important. When you do any research, you want to leave to the next generation a picture of what happened with as much clarity and correctness as possible.

You did a sterling job of that in your Naked Lunch book.

Thank you so much for that. When the Times Literary Supplement did a two-page review of the book back in 1981, it blew me away. I didn’t realize it was going to garner that much attention. My mentor Jack Thompson made a wry comment when he saw it. “Well, you know, Michael, they pretty much gave away the whole book. Nobody’s going to buy it now because they read it all in the review.” I laughed but there might have been a grain of truth to that.

“Lost Masterpiece Rediscovered” claims the blurb on the cover of William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution. Without criticizing the marketing team too much, “lost” should be “previously unavailable but long known to exist,” since an excerpt was published by Re/Search in 1982. “Masterpiece” should be “pretty interesting text well worth adding to the Burroughs canon.” Naked Lunch was a masterpiece. RBSM is more along the lines of Electronic Revolution (hence the subtitle) or The Job. The text is funny and prescient. It can also be tiresome and repetitious. That’s why it’s interesting but not a masterpiece. Lastly “rediscovered” should be “cobbled together from multiple sources” that include not only typescripts but audio recordings. The cobbling was well done by editors Geoffrey Smith and John Bennett for the Ohio State University Press.

RBSM will be familiar reading to anyone who has perused more than a couple of Burroughs’ books. Written around 1970, it contains all the iconography el hombre invisible was working with toward the end of his stay in London: cut-ups, Scientology, Korzybski, the Mayans, Hassan Sabbah, the “discipline of DE,” tributes to Brion Gysin. The text isn’t a cut-up but it does contain different types of writing. It begins with a plan of action for overturning British society. Burroughs advocates (or does he?) various forms of violence. Assassination By List (ABL) is to make a list of the “secret controllers” of society and kill them. “The list is guess work of course, but the real higher-ups will soon expose themselves. So for a start we assassinate a Swiss banker — never go wrong on that.” Random Assassination (RA) is an “ingenious concept” apparently formulated by Gysin. “Five people a day in five districts of a city are killed. Category of person and district are determined by lot… Exempt from this daily lottery are the police and the military. The reason they are accorded this position of privilege: to stir resentment in the populace.” Throw in handguns, homemade weapons, bombs, chemical and biological weapons. Burroughs even proposes to release wild animals as a way to sow chaos.

Having offered up these techniques for overturning British society, Burroughs proposes using them on his homeland — “Now it isn’t every country has a sitting duck like the Royal Family. Bugger the President doesn’t make it at all. The script is quite different for the United States of America.” — and then the world. Routines, black humor, and Burroughs’ inimitable ear for dialogue liven up a text that might otherwise call to mind The Turner Diaries or an alt-right screed. Burroughs finishes this vision of violent overthrow about half way through and then turns to the area where he was genuinely prophetic, what he calls the “weapons of illusion.” “The weapons I wish to advocate are weapons that change consciousness — cutups, scrambling, use of videotapes, etc.” Burroughs writes about tape recorders deployed to escalate riots, speech scramblers used to misrepresent information, and so on. While diehard Burroughsians will already be familiar with these procedures from Electronic Revolution, Blade Runner, “The Invisible Generation,” and other texts, it shouldn’t take away from the fact that Burroughs was uncannily right about the capacity of media to manipulate and be manipulated. As V. Vale remarks in an afterword, Burroughs conceived of “fake news” long before it entered into the national discourse.

In his introduction, Bennett asks “Did Burroughs Have a Plan?” (No.) Similarly, one is tempted to ask, Was Burroughs serious? Did he really mean to advocate for the violent overthrow of society? As with the biography Literary Outlaw, a photo of Burroughs with a handgun graces the cover of The Revised Boy Scout Manual. Such photographs, as well as the countless narratives of “I went to Kansas to shoot with Burroughs,” are intended to portray the man as a bad ass. Doubtless he was a bad ass but it is hard not to suspect that his fetish for weapons was precisely where his vulnerability showed through. Here was a man who deeply regretted the shooting death of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer. You’d think that he would have sworn off firearms forever after — but instead he doubled down on them. He fired at the wall of his room in Tangier while writing Naked Lunch. He kept a gun at the Bunker in New York. He made “shotgun art” while living in Kansas. What kind of guy commits a dumb, drunken murder then continues to tempt fate by keeping weapons to hand? A deeply insecure, vulnerable, frightened human being? “I got the fear!”

It is worth bearing this in mind — that the man advocating for three forms of assassination (ABL, RA, and MA or Mass Assassination) was one who felt great contrition for the lone death that he actually caused. It suggests that he means something other than what he writes. It shows that his purpose is satirical and that he feels himself at war with society. It makes sense. Society oppressed the freedoms that were important to him, notably homosexuality and drugs. Burroughs admits as much at the very end of RBSM. “Mass Assassination I have described as a utopian fantasy.” He sensibly adds that the fantasy is “based on the observation most of the trouble on this planet comes from about ten percent of the population. If these obstructions were summarily removed we would all feel a great deal better. However in practice MA has usually been taken over by precisely the undesirable ten percent… so it is to be regarded as a highly dubious maneuver.” He’s damn right about that. As for his utopia, he offers up two different types. One is made up of MOBs, those who practice the My Own Business approach to human affairs. The other is all male. You can almost hear the Oedipus complex leaking out when Burroughs has Herr Doktor Kurt von Steinplatz comment, “To be without womans is to be without fear — is it not?”

As for the apparatus of the book, there are pros and cons to it. The editors should be commended for documenting their work in footnotes so that readers understand how the text has been processed. The book begins with a foreword by Antonio Bonome. Hardly a household name, Bonome will surely alienate a few potential readers with academic claptrap that should have been consigned to the “trying too hard” file. It’s a horrible way to start off. Editor Smith follows this up with a “Brief Textual History” which, like the legend on a map, helps the reader get a bearing. Editor Bennet follows with yet another introduction that catalogues the different styles of text found in RBSM. At end V. Vale of Re/Search contributes an afterword — a charming read by a guy who has anecdotes about Burroughs, a history with the text, and a light touch in his prose style. Vale’s afterword clearly should have been the foreword. It’s engaging and Vale has bona fides that might actually mean something to people. Here’s the structure that could put RBSM on the bestseller list: Vale, Burroughs, “Brief Textual History,” footnotes, and leave the other texts for academic journals.

In the end, it is fair to say that RBSM is classic Burroughs. It is hysterical and wise at its best. At its worst, it shows Burroughs’ faults — repetitiousness, for example. Or his enthusiasm for sometimes bird-brained ideas, which can generously be regarded as the downside of his willingness to take intellectual risks. Will it change anyone’s conception of Burroughs? No. Is it a masterpiece? Hardly. Was it worth publishing? Emphatically yes — not only because it merits a place in Burroughs’ published work but because it offers a way to understand and resist what’s currently going on in America. Burroughs’ achievement in RBSM and related works was literally to predict the future of communication, foresee how it could be used for control, and to invent techniques for regaining individual freedom. “SLAUGHTER THE SHITS OF THE WORLD,” Burroughs shouts. “You know who they are in America.” He gives a list which is different from ours but no matter. We know who the shits are today. We could all learn a thing or two from Uncle Bill about how to deal with them.

“I got a Christmas card from Burroughs,” J.G. Ballard told an interviewer in 1986.¹ It should not have been much of a surprise: he had known William S. Burroughs for about twenty years; he had recently published an enthusiastic review of Burroughs’ essay collection, The Adding Machine; and Burroughs, contrary to expectation, tended to be meticulous about sending out holiday cards. Still, Ballard added that it was “rather nice” to receive a card, implying that he had not always been on the mailing list. In fact, the two writers were never close. Ballard was extremely generous with his praise, calling Burroughs the “Great Man” and “the most important writer in the English language” since World War II. Burroughs was respectful but less effusive, allowing that Ballard was “good” as a writer.² “I like his work very much,” Burroughs told a Naropa workshop, “and I’ve met him.”³ Theirs was the sort of relationship, based on regard but not camaraderie, which is marked by the exchange of formalities. “I would never call myself a friend,” said Ballard, “more a long-term acquaintance.”⁴

Before he became an acquaintance, Ballard was an admirer. His first encounter with Burroughs’ writing was significant enough for him to recall it in print more than once. He read The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded all in a bunch. The place for this encounter remained clear in his memory — he devoured the three Olympia Press volumes at his home in Shepperton — but the year grew hazy. Ballard gave various dates for his initial engagement with Burroughs’ books: 1959, “about 1960” and “something like 1960”, 1963.⁵ Given that the last of the Olympia Press tomes, The Ticket That Exploded, was not released until December 1962, Ballard must have first read Burroughs in 1963. The books were given to him by Michael Moorcock, who had discovered Naked Lunch at Le Mistral bookshop in Paris. By 1963, Moorcock and Ballard were meeting regularly for lunch at a pub called The Swan. Perhaps they noted that Burroughs, who had yet to publish a book in England, was being interviewed by the BBC and the Guardian. Eventually Moorcock asked a young friend, Maxim Jakubowski, to bring Ballard a set of the Olympia Press volumes from Paris. According to a chronology worked out by Jakubowski and Ballard expert David Pringle, it was during the first week of September 1963 that Jakubowski delivered the books to Moorcock, who passed them to Ballard.⁶

Naked Lunch was a “breath of fresh air” and “a tremendous high,” Moorcock recalled. “It was joyous absurdism which somehow spoke directly to me.”⁷ For Ballard, the book arrived at a critical moment. “It was a rather low time for me,” he remembered.

I had just started out as a writer. I hadn’t written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called “Hampstead novels” seemed to dominate everything. Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us.⁸

By September 1963 Ballard had in fact written more than just a first novel. In 1961, in a desperate attempt to create a salable book, he had spent a two-week vacation cranking out 6000 words per day to produce The Wind from Nowhere. By early 1962 he had completed his next novel, The Drowned World. If Ballard misremembered the sequence of events, however, he did not forget the impact of Burroughs’ work. In 1963, he was still supporting his young family by publishing formally conventional short stories and working as an editor at a scientific journal. To encounter those little green books at this “rather low time” was electrifying. “Naked Lunch,” Ballard wrote later, “was a grenade tossed into the sherry party of English fiction.”⁹ He would remember being struck by the “sheer originality, humour, the unique eye, the coherence of the apocalyptic vision.”¹⁰ The uncompromising example of Burroughs may have been in the back of his mind when, at the end of 1963 or beginning of 1964, Ballard quit his editorship to focus on his own work.

Ballard was not alone in discovering Burroughs’ novels during this period. In March 1962, Naked Lunch overcame an obscenity trial to be published in America. In August 1962, Burroughs stole the headlines at the Edinburgh Writers Conference with his statements on censorship and nonlinear writing techniques. John Calder, anxious to catch the momentum but wary of legal censure in the United Kingdom, arranged to publish a hybrid book that combined cut-ups with the less obscene parts of Naked Lunch. This book, Dead Fingers Talk, was released on November 15, 1963 to immediate controversy. A savage review in the Times Literary Supplement inspired a torrid exchange of letters from literary figures including Calder, publisher Victor Gollancz, critic Eric Mottram, and Dame Edith Sitwell, who proclaimed that she did not wish to have her “nose nailed to other people’s lavatories.” Moorcock contributed to the dialogue with a letter published in the TLS on November 21. Citing a passage in Naked Lunch (“‘So what you want off me?’ ‘Time…'”), Moorcock hailed Burroughs as “one of the first real writers of SF”:

I suppose a moral message can be read into Burroughs’ work, but this is not its prime concern. Just as modern physics approaches the metaphysical with each new advancement, so is Burroughs concerned with Space and Time, its nature, its philosophical implications, the place of the individual in the total universe.¹¹

Moorcock’s letter also mentioned The Drowned World — the first public, or at least prominent, comparison of Burroughs and Ballard. Ironically, The Drowned World might well have been the reason Ballard did not offer his own defense of Burroughs. Victor Gollancz, vituperative in his criticism of Dead Fingers Talk, had published what Ballard called his “first serious novel” and taken him to a celebratory lunch. For practical reasons, Ballard would not have wanted to sour this promising relationship with an important publisher. Once the ruckus subsided, however, he did offer a wry comment on Sitwell’s disgust: “Some lavatory, some nose.”¹²

An Exchange of Letters

The UGH! affair, as the epistolary skirmish in the TLS came to be known, put Burroughs in contact with a range of admirers. On December 18, 1963 Burroughs wrote a thank-you note to Moorcock, adding “I do not know exactly what is meant by a moral message but I certainly do intend to sound an urgent word of warning relative to rather obvious pre-nova conditions.”¹³ Around January 1964 Burroughs made his first contribution to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. In February, he received a letter from a writer who would soon become important in Ballard’s life. Martin Bax, whom Ballard would not meet until 1965, invited Burroughs to contribute to his literary magazine Ambit. Burroughs responded with a three-column cut-up titled, perhaps with Nuttall in mind, “Martin’s Mag.” He described his intentions in an accompanying letter which he encouraged Bax to publish “as a note of explanation.”

I enclose an unpublished page representative of recent experiments in which I extend the newspaper format to fictional material as if I were reporting news. Presentation in columns enables the writer to run three or more streams of narrative concurrently with possibilities of counterpoint contrast and change of temp not offered by the book page. […] I hope that writers may be led to experiment with format and the effects of format on the reading process beyond the limitations of a book page left to right down and over. (What a salutary shock to see words running from right to left on an English page). It is time for writers to break up an unsanitary relationship with a dead typewriter in an empty room.¹⁴

The text was published later that year in issue 20 of Ambit. That Bax’s magazine was already publishing Burroughs was likely one of the incentives for Ballard to join the masthead as prose editor a few years later.

The week after Burroughs replied to Bax, Moorcock became the editor of New Worlds magazine, an established but flagging franchise that would be revitalized under his stewardship. As Moorcock scrambled to prepare his first issue, Eric Mottram discovered that the BBC possessed tapes of Burroughs reading and discussing his work. Mottram took these tapes and rebroadcast them with his own commentary on March 9, 1964.¹⁵ Moorcock and Ballard must have heard Burroughs declare on the radio that he was “writing for cosmonauts of inner space” and “attempting to create a new mythology for the space age.” That month, both of them wrote letters to Burroughs in Tangiers. For his first issue of New Worlds, May/June 1964, Moorcock penned an editorial referencing the “recent BBC broadcast” and touting Burroughs as “the first SF writer” to invent “a new literature for the Space Age.” He also asked Ballard to prepare an essay. Ballard took advantage of the opportunity to introduce himself with a letter which can be partly reconstructed from Burroughs’ reply.¹⁶

March 23, 1964
4 Calle Larachi Marshan
Tangier, Morocco

Dear Mr. Ballard:

Thank you for your letter. I was interested to learn that J. Conrad and J. Joyce received unfavorable notice in the TLS. I have always felt that Conrad is vastly underestimated dismissed with the classification ‘old fashioned’ and Joyce of course receives the ‘great writer nobody can read’ treatment. Have you ever read Conrad’s ‘Romance’ which he wrote in collaboration with Ford Maddox Ford? I think it is one of the greatest science fiction stories ever written and now out of print.

I have been in correspondence with Mr. Moorcock who has told me something of your science fiction writing — ‘The Drowned World’ (‘The Four Dimensional Nightmare’). I will order these books with the English book store here if you can let me know the publisher. Your concept of a lost sacral brain is a most interesting one that should provide excellent material for a work of science fiction.

I am planning a trip to London in September and hope that we can arrange to meet at that time.

Best Wishes
William Burroughs

Ballard had consoled Burroughs about the UGH! scandal with flattering comparisons to James Joyce, whom he had emulated in his early experimental work, and Joseph Conrad — an author very much on Ballard’s mind since, at lunch, Gollancz had stunned him with the allegation that The Drowned World had been derived from Conrad, whom Ballard had not yet read.

In addition to offering his consolations about the TLS, Ballard must have felt the need to engage Burroughs with a more striking idea or observation. Years later he would admit to an interviewer that, when speaking with Burroughs, “I steer the conversation towards those things that I know interest him.”¹⁷ The notion of a “lost sacral brain” was the first such effort. Perhaps Ballard had noticed the frequency with which The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded refer to the spine, a phrase such as “memory hit spine outside 1920 movie theater” causing him to recall the hypothesis that dinosaurs possessed a “sacral brain.” The nineteenth century paleontologist Wilhelm von Branca had even suggested that “in man there appear still to be traces of this” cerebral matter in the spinal column.¹⁸ Had Ballard stumbled across the notion while researching The Drowned World? In a 1968 interview, he used the sacral brain as a model to describe the entire novel:

In The Drowned World I describe the return of the entire planet to the era of the great Triassic forests, which covered the earth some 200 million years ago. I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are amphibious reptiles. I use this portrait of the spinal column as a vessel containing a reflection of the memory of the past […] as a literary device.¹⁹

That Burroughs, always intrigued by offbeat ideas, responded positively to the notion and to the correspondence must have gratified Ballard immensely. A note from his wife Mary to his sister Margaret registered, on April 2, 1964, that Ballard had received “a letter from the writer William Burroughs from Tangier[s].”²⁰ The fact that this was newsworthy gives a good indication of the increasing renown of Burroughs and the esteem Ballard must have expressed for him even en famille. It also hints at the asymmetry that was to remain in the writers’ relationship, in which Burroughs was clearly the senior partner. Ian Sommerville, living with Burroughs in Morocco, did not write to his family about receiving mail from Ballard.

Burroughs’ letter gave impetus to “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century,” the essay Ballard submitted to Moorcock for the May/June 1964 issue of New Worlds. In his first published statement about Burroughs, Ballard focused on Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. To choose these three books was not self-evident. Nova Express had not yet been published, and Ballard may not have realized that Junkie, published pseudonymously, had been written by Burroughs. But what about Dead Fingers Talk? New Worlds presented “Myth Maker” as a review of the book that stirred up the UGH! scandal, but Ballard said nothing of it except that the earlier novels had been “re-worked to form the basis of Dead Fingers Talk.” Perhaps he felt the scandal had already been overplayed, or he hesitated to defend a book which his publisher found repugnant. Ballard may also have been offering a subtle judgement on Dead Fingers Talk, as though to say that it was a compromised presentation of texts whose real and pungent versions were to be found in the little green tomes of Olympia Press. Putting the nail in the coffin, Ballard deleted any mention of Dead Fingers Talk when he collected this “review” years later in A User’s Guide to the Millennium.

Like Ballard’s lost letter, “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century” invokes Joyce and Conrad, contending that Burroughs takes up where Finnegans Wake left off. It echoes the idea, offered by Burroughs and repeated by both Mottram and Moorcock, that the cut-up novels constitute “the authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen.” But the real goal of Ballard’s essay was to characterize Burroughs as a writer of “inner space,” a notion Ballard practically trademarked by promoting it so eloquently. Burroughs’ writing, Ballard argued, furnishes “the first portrait of the inner landscape of the post-war world, using its own language and manipulative techniques, its own fantasies and nightmares.” Burroughs himself attributed the concept of “inner space” to Alex Trocchi, who used the term at the Edinburgh Writers Conference in August 1962.²¹ Ballard, however, had already published his essay “Which Way to Inner Space” in the May 1962 issue of New Worlds. Did Trocchi get the idea from Ballard? Did Ballard, as biographer John Baxter alleges, get the idea from J.B. Priestley’s 1953 essay “They Come from Inner Space?”²² Or was it simply in the air, an obvious counterpoint to the headlines about outer space? In any event, “inner space” was a point of intersection between the writers, and Ballard must have been pleased to hear Burroughs advocating a position he had already staked out.

Burroughs was enthusiastic about this new writer who had sent him the letter and the flattering essay. On May 1, 1964, he sent Jeff Nuttall a list of names that should receive review copies of My Own Mag.²³ Topping the list were Moorcock, Ballard, and Anthony Burgess. Later that summer, on August 15, Burroughs replied to a few interview questions mailed to him by Ramsey Campbell, whose first story collection was put out that year by Arkham House, the publisher long associated with H.P. Lovecraft.

the science fiction writers who have most influenced me are H.G. Wells still one of the best C.S. Lewis interesting that in his obituaries no mention is made of his science fiction work. Recently I have been in touch with J.G. Ballard and Mike Moorcock who sent me New Worlds SF May June Vol 48 no 142. I enjoyed Ballard’s Equinox and the Star Virus by B.J. Bayley I thought Bayley was really first rate. Do you know this Bayley? I understand Bayley is a pen name.²⁴

“Equinox,” the cover story for the same issue of New Worlds containing “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century,” was an early version of Ballard’s fourth novel, The Crystal World. However, it made less of an impression than Barrington J. Bayley’s story. Burroughs borrowed the concept of “deadliners” from “Star Virus” for the revised edition of The Ticket That Exploded (which, while crediting him, mangled the title of New Worlds and the spelling of Bayley’s name). And it was deadliners, not Ballard’s story or essay, that would stand out in Burroughs’ memory. On September 10, 1964, Burroughs wrote to Antony Balch to recommend potential reviewers for an early cut of the film Towers Open Fire. “I nominate J.G. Ballard editor of the magasine in which the deadliners appear or was Mike Moorcock the editor they would both be interested and such a gathering might well lead to scene.”²⁵

The scene was not yet destined to take place. Though he had offered in his March letter to meet Ballard in London in September 1964, Burroughs remained in Tangiers. Ballard, meanwhile, was vacationing in Spain with his family. His wife Mary, perhaps not fully recovered from an earlier bout of appendicitis, contracted a severe pneumonia. Just three days after Burroughs advised Balch to send rushes of Towers Open Fire to Ballard and Moorcock, Mary passed away. By the time a grieving Ballard returned to Shepperton with his children, it is doubtful he would have been in the frame of mind for a meeting. The death “unhinged” Ballard, as colleague Brain Aldiss observed. Then again, was Ballard aware that Burroughs was also a widower? When Burroughs appeared on a BBC television broadcast in January 1964, he discussed the shooting death of his wife Joan, blaming it on alcohol. Perhaps some part of Ballard would have been interested to commune with Burroughs on this morbid level. In a sense, The Atrocity Exhibition undertakes this conversation with Naked Lunch — one widower to another in the fragmented language of experimentalism. Both writers would numb their grief with substance abuse — heroin for one, whiskey for the other — though Ballard would determine to become the model single parent of which Burroughs was the antithesis.

First Meeting

At the end of 1964 Burroughs returned to America for an eventful visit that included the death of his father in Florida, a homecoming in St Louis (where, on assignment for Playboy, he composed an autobiographical cut-up that the magazine rejected), and encounters with the “underground” literary scene burgeoning in New York. He did not forget Ballard during this time. An interviewer from S.F. Horizons asked which science fiction writers interested him. Bringing out a copy of New Worlds, Burroughs listed “Mr. Ballard and Mr. Moorcock in England, Mr. Arthur C. Clarke. Mr Sturgeon, of course.”²⁶ By summer, however, Burroughs was bored in America. “Nothing here really,” he wrote to Sommerville, “I just stay in my loft and work.”²⁷ Leaving New York in September 1965, Burroughs traveled to London. Visa difficulties made it impossible for him to remain in England past December. It was not a particularly productive autumn. Burroughs attempted to patch up his relationship with Sommerville, complained about the weather (“London rather grey”), and gave a reading at the St Martin School of Art, where Trocchi was teaching.²⁸ But it was during this visit that Burroughs may have met Ballard in person for the first time.

Though Ballard gave numerous public accounts of his relationship with Burroughs, only once did he specify the time and place they were introduced. “I met WSB in about 1965 — in London, through Bill Butler, an American poet, now sadly dead, who ran a little publishing house in Brighton.”²⁹ It is not a given that Ballard’s recollection is accurate. In interviews he gave slightly different dates for his interactions with Burroughs, and friends of Ballard offer alternative possibilities. Bax suggests that it was Anselm Hollo who brokered a meeting.³⁰ Moorcock believes the two writers met at one of his parties: “I am pretty sure that JGB met WB at a party of mine which I gave so that some of these people could meet but it could also have been in John Calder’s office. I’m certain Bill Butler wasn’t there and I’m pretty sure he didn’t introduce Bill to Jimmy.”³¹ Memories may vary in their reliability, but the names that crop up — Butler, Calder, Moorcock, Bax, Hollo — do chart the “social graph” or, as Burroughs had put it, the scene connecting the very different milieus of the fantasist in Shepperton and the nomad inventor of Interzone.

According to David Pringle, Ballard met Bill Butler in September 1965 — right as Burroughs was getting to London.³² A year after his wife’s death, Ballard was establishing connections with writers such as Bax and trying to figure out his place in what would come to be called Swinging London. Butler did not yet know Burroughs but had recently befriended Allen Ginsberg, who visited London in summer 1965. In November, using Ginsberg’s name as a reference, Butler requested an interview with Burroughs.³³ Perhaps he bumped into Burroughs on November 18 at Better Books, where Jeff Nuttall had called for a meeting to bring together “people who hold the basic belief that human consciousness must change or humanity will destroy itself.”³⁴ Nuttall had circulated a group invite that included Burroughs, Butler, Alex Trocchi, Harry Fainlight, Jim Haynes, and B.S. Johnson, but not Ballard (in spite of the fact that Burroughs had already recommended adding him to My Own Mag‘s mailing list). The interview was conducted around this time and published in the Guardian newspaper on November 27. Consequently, if Butler brokered a meeting between Burroughs and Ballard in 1965, it had to occur after mid-November. Because Butler occupied a managerial role at Better Books, which was as much a meeting place for the growing underground as it was a bookstore, it is not difficult to imagine an unplanned introduction in the aisles. “Oh, Bill, this is Jim Ballard…” Bax met Burroughs in person in a similar setting at Indica Books.

Because of his visa difficulties, Burroughs decamped to Tangiers for Christmas 1965. By January, however, he returned to London, where something of a scene was coming together. In March 1966, New Worlds published poetry by Butler. In April, Nuttall’s My Own Mag included Burroughs, Butler, and Moorcock — but not Ballard — on a list of contacts. That same month, New Worlds featured Ballard’s story “The Assassination Weapon” and an essay by Butler about Burroughs. Occasioned by the English publication of The Soft Machine and Nova Express, Butler’s essay reworked the November interview with Burroughs that had been printed in the Guardian. The revision begins by acknowledging the “sensitive appreciation” Ballard had offered in “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century.” It then reveals that Ballard’s admiration for Burroughs was at least partly mutual.

William Burroughs reads science fiction and uses fragments from science fiction… He mentioned Ballard’s collection, Terminal Beach, published by Gollancz, saying that he had enjoyed several of the stories very much.³⁵

As if to leave no doubt about the nodes in the developing social network, Butler’s essay also describes the regular column Burroughs was composing for My Own Mag, “Jeff Nuttall’s mimeographed magazine from Barnet, Hertfordshire.”

While Burroughs was reading Ballard’s short stories, Ballard was trying to process Burroughs’ novels. If that processing was latent in the nonlinear narratives Ballard was composing, it was manifest in another critique. The spring 1966 issue of Ambit featured “Terminal Documents,” a reworking of Ballard’s earlier essay on Burroughs. This revised text, which labels him the “first mythographer of the mid-20th century” and the “lineal successor to James Joyce,” continued to position Burroughs as a writer of inner space. However, “Terminal Documents” differed from “Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century” in that it was not wholly laudatory. For the first time, Ballard interspersed his praise with negative judgements. “Certain conclusions” that Burroughs draws about “society at large” and “our notions of reality,” Ballard commented, “seem to me to be questionable.” Burroughs’ “view of the sexual act” is subject to a Freudian interpretation, with Ballard calling it “regressive,” “infantile,” and “excessively dominated by the functions of urination and defecation” — a verdict that, ironically, echoes Sitwell’s barb about not wanting her nose nailed to anyone’s lavatory.

Uncharacteristically, Ballard’s language in “Terminal Documents” is torturous. His judgements are not phrased in the lucid, almost epigrammatic style for which he became known. Instead, they are offered in looping run-on sentences, the divagations of a person struggling to criticize without criticizing. If “Terminal Documents” marked the first time Ballard publicly found fault with Burroughs, it also marked the introduction of an ambivalence that would persist in Ballard’s future comments on the author of Naked Lunch. On one hand, Ballard was frank in his admiration. On the other hand, he was insistent that he had been inspired but not influenced by Burroughs. Ballard may have especially wanted to make this point in “Terminal Documents” because this same issue of Ambit featured “You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe,” another of his new “condensed novels.” Was it necessary to criticize Burroughs in order to disavow any influence on the nonlinear writing technique with which Ballard was experimenting? Or was Ballard disappointed with the man after meeting Burroughs for the first time?

Dinner at Duke Street

The view from 8 Duke Street, St James (photo by William Burroughs)

In July 1966, Burroughs signed a lease for an apartment on Duke Street, St James, beginning a residency in London that would last until 1974. On July 15, Moorcock threw a party at his Notting Hill flat with the intention of introducing the burgeoning scene to the writer Judith Merril. Burroughs and Ballard both attended Moorcock’s Friday get-together, but it was scarcely a meeting of the minds. Ballard likely spent the evening chatting with Merril, with whom he had commenced an affair the previous September. Burroughs preferred to spend the evening with Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for travel, technology, and young men. The two had previously met in December 1964 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.³⁶ At the July party, Moorcock recalled, Burroughs and Clarke “spent the entire evening deep in animated conversation, pausing only to sip their OJ and complain about the rock’n’roll music on the hifi.”³⁷ Not long after, Merril would include both Burroughs (“They Do Not Always Remember”) and Ballard (“The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D” and “You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe”) in the twelfth installment in her respected line of science fiction anthologies.

After Burroughs moved into his Duke Street flat in August 1966, Ballard came for supper. Duke Street was not far from Piccadilly Circus, which interested Burroughs because, Ballard recalled, “that’s where all the boys used to congregate, in the lavatory of the big Piccadilly Circus Underground station.”³⁸ The flat “was very neat and tidy and clean” — the legendary chaos of Burroughs’ Tangiers digs had given way to the orderly rooms whose upkeep he would describe in “The Discipline of DE.”³⁹ (“Cleaning the flat is a problem of logistics…”) In his obituary of Burroughs, Ballard gave his standard account of the evening:

Esquire had asked me to write a profile of him, but Burroughs, though courteous, was very suspicious. The baleful power of media empires already obsessed him. While his young boyfriend, “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, carved a roast chicken, Burroughs described the most effective way to stab a man to death. All the while he kept an eye on the doors and windows. “The CIA are watching me,” he confided. “They park their laundry vans in the street outside.”⁴⁰

The account, repeated with slight variations in a handful of interviews, raises a number of questions. Exactly when did this dinner take place? How did Esquire get involved? Who was the boyfriend with the tattooed knuckles? Why did Ballard not complete a profile of Burroughs for the magazine?

Ballard gave a range of dates for the dinner. The obit situated it in the “early 1960s,” impossible since Burroughs only took possession of the flat in 1966. One interview rightly placed the dinner in the “late sixties.”⁴¹ But what is “late” — 1966? 1969? Esquire cannot furnish a date. Scandalously, the magazine has not retained its correspondence from the period.⁴² Burroughs was in frequent contact with Esquire during the 1960s, not only submitting texts but answering queries for random features such as “if your life were being played by a movie star, whom would you choose?” (Burroughs’ reply: “I would cast myself in a biographical film since I write my own biography.”⁴³) Burroughs’ archives, however, contain no mention of a profile. Ballard never did contribute to the magazine, though Esquire would have been aware of him. The U.S. publication of The Crystal World earned a review from the New York Times in May 1966, and Alice Glaser, an associate editor at Esquire, was cognizant of the science-fiction scene.⁴⁴ In March 1968 editor-in-chief Harold Hayes visited London and Paris to ask Burroughs — as well as Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett — to cover the upcoming Democratic convention. Did Hayes, aware of Ballard’s rising star, give him a call or suggest the profile? The Hayes archive at Wake Forest university contains no letters to or from Ballard.

If the Esquire assignment cannot date the encounter, there remains the boyfriend. Shortly after Burroughs moved into the Duke Street apartment, Ian Sommerville and his lover Alan Watson moved in. Sommerville did not have the tattoos. Watson, who worked in the canteen at Scotland Yard and was capable of producing the roast chicken that Ballard thought “tasty,” did not have the tattoos either. Barry Miles, who knew Watson, says he would have been “shocked at the very suggestion.”⁴⁵ Ending the complicated ménage with Burroughs, Sommerville and Watson moved out in August 1968. Subsequently, in October, John Culverwell moved in and remained for about eighteen months. Did he have “love” and “hate” on his knuckles? A snapshot of Culverwell in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library reveals no ink on his knuckles.⁴⁶ His hands are not prominent enough in the picture to rule it out, though. It is also possible that the boyfriend with the tattooed knuckles was a passing bit of street trade from Piccadilly Circus. “The love-hate thing,” Miles suggests, “was mostly confined to ‘rockers’ or manual labourers and in fact I’m inclined to doubt that Bill ever had a long-term boyfriend with such a tattoo, wrong sort of person for him.”⁴⁷

Alternatively, it may have been the tattoos that were temporary. They were perfectly attuned, with their contrast of “love” and “hate,” to the Scientology techniques Burroughs was exploring at the time. The training required to become a “clear,” Burroughs wrote, “consists of a series of contradictory propositions and running this material does give a certain immunity to contradictory commands.”⁴⁸ In Nova Express, this training is transformed into the “signal switch” — “what they call the ‘yes no’ sir… ‘I love you I hate you’ at supersonic alternating speed…” It is easy to imagine Burroughs picking up a hustler because the tattoos on his knuckles played into his preoccupation with Scientology processing techniques. Or to imagine Burroughs suggesting the tattoos as an intimate way of continuing his Scientology exercises and inuring himself to contradictory commands. Or to imagine one of his steady boyfriends inking himself as a way to tease Burroughs about his obsessions. Intimidating as Burroughs could be, lovers often had him at psychological disadvantage.

Another possibility for dating the Duke Street supper lies in Burroughs’ seemingly paranoid fantasies about the CIA. In interviews, Ballard consistently repeated the anecdote about Burroughs worrying that agents surveilled him from a disguised laundry van. “I don’t think he was having me on,” Ballard said. “His imagination was filled with bizarre lore culled from Believe It Or Not features, police pulps and — in the case, I assume, of the laundry vans — Hollywood spy movies of the cold war years.”⁴⁹ Ballard was almost right about the origin of the laundry vans. Oddly enough, “paranoia about laundry vans” is a theme that can be traced in Burroughs’ writings and interviews. It appears for the first time in an interview Burroughs granted underground newspaper The Rat in September 1968.

A recent article in Esquire Magazine written by a former CIA agent contains this anecdote. A man with photos of the Bay of Pigs was on his way to a newspaper office when the agent who was tailing him called a special number in Washington. “On the way to the newspaper he was run over by a laundry truck.” Not so easy to be sure of nailing someone in a walk across town, after all people do look before crossing streets. I would venture the guess that he was pushed in front of the truck by a laser.⁵⁰

The anecdote derived not from a “recent” Esquire but from the April 1967 issue of muckraking magazine Ramparts, then publishing a series of sensationalistic exposés of the CIA.⁵¹ Burroughs took up the story and repeated it in The Job, finished in October 1968, and in an article published in Mayfair Magazine in January 1969.⁵² If Ramparts was the origin of the laundry van in his ravings, it follows that Ballard cannot have visited Burroughs at the Duke Street flat prior to April 1967. Even more likely is that Ballard visited soon after Burroughs returned from the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Burroughs had been on assignment for Esquire, who had treated him generously. When he returned to London in September 1968, was it with a suggestion from the editors that Ballard should profile him for the magazine? Supper might have been served by John Culverwell, who had just moved in, and Ballard would have been exposed to the “paranoia” inspired in Burroughs by the riots and police brutality he had witnessed in Chicago.

Ultimately the supper left Ballard disinclined to profile Burroughs. “I turned down the Esquire assignment, realising that nothing I wrote could remotely do justice to Burroughs’ magnificently paranoid imagination.”⁵³ Although “paranoid” was not exactly a reproach — Ballard deeply admired Salvador Dali, who described his aesthetics in terms of “critical paranoia” — he appears to have been genuinely unnerved to discover that Burroughs thought like he wrote. In addition, Ballard was unable to find a comfort zone with two major aspects of Burroughs’ lifestyle. Burroughs, Ballard told an interviewer, “was a complete original but difficult to get to know if you weren’t (a) homosexual, which I wasn’t, and (b) a drug user, which again I wasn’t.”⁵⁴ A drinker, Ballard had done no more than dabble with the cornucopia of drugs offered up by the counterculture. And while it would be presumptuous to declare Ballard a homophobe, his recollections indicate that he felt awkward about Burroughs’ sexual orientation. When a female interviewer said she found Burroughs difficult, Ballard — then promoting The Kindness of Women — replied, “Well, he’s so anti-woman, isn’t he? It’s a masculine world. It’s more than that; it’s very hardcore… and a homosexual world which I find very weird.”⁵⁵

If he found homosexuality “weird,” what did it mean for Ballard to include it in the fiction he was composing at the time? In Crash, the narrator “Ballard” wonders whether a “latent homo-erotic element had been brought to the surface of my mind by [Vaughan’s] photographs of violence and sexuality.” Did the real Ballard experience something similar in his confrontation with Burroughs’ images? The title alone of the story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” shows Ballard toying with an aggressive public stance that, in private, might well have made him uncomfortable. In interviews he was sure to contrast his orientation with that of Burroughs.

I admire Burroughs more than any other living writer, and most of those who are dead. It’s nothing to do with his homosexual bent, by the way. I’m no member of the “homintern,” but a lifelong straight who prefers the company of women to most men. The few homosexual elements in Crash and Atrocity Exhibition, fucking Reagan, et cetera, are there for reasons other than the sexual — in fact, to show a world beyond sexuality, or, at least beyond clear sexual gender.⁵⁶

It’s an ambiguous position. On one hand, Ballard’s use of homosexuality is as progressive as Swinging London. It points to a liberality so extreme that, like the novel fetish of Crash, it exceeds sexuality itself. On the other hand, by dissolving homosexuality in a “world beyond sexuality” and using it for “reasons other than the sexual,” Ballard neutralizes the very thing in it that discomfits. It’s not gay. It’s just outlandish.

J.G. Ballard, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, Unicorn Books, 1968

These issues were at play in January 1968 when Bill Butler published a limited, standalone edition of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” According to biographer John Baxter, Butler “regarded publishing Jim’s text in part as a gesture of homosexual activism.”⁵⁷ It was a daring move. Burroughs had already noted, in an April 23, 1967 letter to French writer Claude Pélieu, that “There had been a lot of trouble here book shops raided heat on the drug scene.”⁵⁸ The heat caused John Calder to delay the UK publication of The Soft Machine. Butler’s bookshop, Unicorn Books, was raided the same month it put out Ballard’s text. Over seventy titles were seized — in addition to underground magazines and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” there were books by Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, and John Giorno. Butler was charged with selling obscene material. A trial was scheduled for August 1968 — precisely when Burroughs was in Chicago covering the Democratic convention — and Ballard was asked to testify on Butler’s half.⁵⁹ “Preparing me,” Ballard recounted,

the defence lawyer asked me why I believed “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” was not obscene, to which I had to reply that of course it was obscene, and intended to be so. Why, then, was its subject matter not Reagan’s sexuality? Again I had to affirm that it was. At last the lawyer said: “Mr Ballard, you will make a very good witness for the prosecution. We will not be calling you.”⁶⁰

Ballard’s refusal to apologize for his text was laudable from a literary standpoint. Perhaps he was even gunning for an obscenity trial as a way to put his work on the same plane as Naked Lunch. But this defiant stance helped neither the legal case nor Ballard’s relationship with the man who had introduced him to Burroughs. “Sadly,” Ballard admitted, “all this led to a coolness between Bill [Butler] and myself.” Butler was judged guilty, and friends attempted to defray his legal expenses by compiling an anthology of poetry and prose. Published in 1970, For Bill Butler contained a stellar list of contributors drawn from the bookseller’s sizable social network.⁶¹ Ballard was not among them. Neither was Burroughs, though he had agreed to contribute.⁶² Likely Burroughs’ submission metamorphosed into Ali’s Smile, published separately by Unicorn Books in 1971.

The London Scene

By the time of Butler’s trial, Ballard had become a figure not just in the science-fiction scene but in the literary vanguard. In August 1969, his name appeared in the printed program for the Harrogate Festival of Arts & Sciences, where he was to appear at the Third International Literary Conference alongside Burroughs, Moorcock, Nuttall, B.S. Johnson, his friend Christopher Evans, and others. Deciding instead to vacation in Italy with his children, Ballard withdrew from the event, as did Moorcock. Burroughs, Nuttall, and Martin Bax attended, along with a range of luminaries including Marshall McLuhan, Arthur Koestler, and Herbert Marcuse. Burroughs, according to a review in the Guardian, spoke about “worldwide reaction.”⁶³ Afterward Christopher Priest and Norman Spinrad, who took the place of Ballard and Moorcock, accompanied Burroughs back to London on the train. They were amazed to see the lurid tabloids he purchased at a newsstand. “Look at this stuff,” Spinrad recalled Burroughs chortling. “Juicy.”⁶⁴ John Calder, who organized the literary panel, subsequently wrote a letter apologizing to Burroughs for the way the event had been “dogged by last-minute cancellations.”⁶⁵ It is difficult not to agree. The festival would have been much more noteworthy had Ballard not withdrawn. It would have been the only time Burroughs and Ballard engaged in a public discussion.

As though to make up for missing the Harrogate Festival, Ballard allowed himself to be talked into reading at the Phun City rock festival in July 1970. An advertisement in the July 17 issue of International Times touted the presence of the usual suspects — Burroughs, Ballard, Nuttall, Butler, Trocchi, and others. Burroughs looked forward to the festival as a place to perform experiments with tape recorders. “Scrambles,” a text he contributed to that same issue of International Times (later collected in Electronic Revolution), envisioned planting enough recorders “to lay down a grid of sound over the whole festival.” Ballard fictionalized the event in The Kindness of Women, portraying himself as reluctant to attend except for the opportunity to appear alongside Burroughs:

“You’ll enjoy it — Burroughs will be there.”

“The great man. But what do I read?”

“Anything. One of your sado-masochistic romps should go down a treat. The audiences are very conventional.”

“So am I. Sally…”

The romps were those of The Atrocity Exhibition, published in book form by Jonathan Cape that same month. But however radical his writing may have been, Ballard was reminded of his conventionality from the moment of his arrival on Saturday, July 25. “I was doing a reading, so was William Burroughs,” he recalled, “and when I arrived the Hell’s Angels security guards said to me, ‘Dad, you’re in the wrong place…'”⁶⁶ With his children in tow, he cannot have seen Burroughs much. The Kindness of Women only indicates that “Burroughs hovered briefly into view, as formal as an undertaker in his natty suit.” Ballard described reading — “My dreams of Mrs Kennedy’s sexuality had boomed across the placid downs, unsettling the grazing cattle a dozen fields away” — but it is unclear he even took the stage. According to Maxim Jakubowski,

all the writers present were utterly bewildered as to why they should be there and never made it to the stage although the deejay kept on saying through the sound system that all these fab groovy people were there.

The readings were to be held in an inflatable dome which failed to inflate, obliging the writers to relocate to a makeshift “tent used for collective acts of worship by a Christian group, from which the poets were quickly evicted (by Hells Angels!) due to their continual swearing.”⁶⁷ Meantime Burroughs made less of an impression with words than with drugs. Overdosing, he was carried to the medical tent.⁶⁸ Afterward he wrote to Brion Gysin, “The Phun City festival was rather fun but no chance to do anything with recorders.”⁶⁹ No chance for Burroughs and Ballard to engage in meaningful discourse either.

The Atrocity Exhibition

Their relationship, however, was about to reach the moment that served as its climax. Just six or eight weeks before Phun City, an executive at the New York publisher Doubleday was scandalized by “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and ordered an entire print run of The Atrocity Exhibition, due on June 12, 1970, to be pulped. Subsequently E.P. Dutton purchased the book and scheduled its American publication for April 1971. Lawyers sent Ballard a letter requesting him to remove three entire texts as well as “sexual fantasies about public figures.”⁷⁰ Ballard refused and the book made its way to Grove Press, which had successfully defended Naked Lunch from obscenity charges in 1962. As though to underscore that legal victory, Burroughs contributed a brief foreword to the book. It was his first and only text about J.G. Ballard.

“Grove Press arranged his superb introduction,” Ballard told an interviewer.⁷¹ It is unclear who actually asked Burroughs — Ballard? Barney Rosset? someone else at Grove? — but the publisher would have been alert to the strategic significance of having Burroughs’ name attached to the book. Editor Fred Jordan, who joined Grove in 1956 and began to work more closely with Burroughs after the departure of Richard Seaver in late 1971, wrote Burroughs on June 13, 1972:

Herewith a copy of ATROCITY EXHIBITION which J.G. Ballard has agreed will be titled in the U.S. edition as LOVE AND NAPALM: EXPORT U.S.A. We are delighted that you have agreed to write a short introduction for the book, and we are allowing two pages for it. Since the book is now in production, I would be grateful if you could get it to me as soon as possible.⁷²

That Jordan sent the British edition from New York back to London suggests that Burroughs agreed to pen an introduction without having read the book yet. Likely, though, he had seen some of the stories as they appeared in small magazines. Ballard had also sent him an invitation to the April 3, 1970 private view of his Crashed Cars exhibit at the London New Arts Laboratory, though there is no evidence Burroughs attended.⁷³ (Jo Stanley’s cheeky account of the vernissage does not mention him, although it appeared in the same May 29, 1970 issue of Friends that contained a review of The Job.⁷⁴) In any event, Burroughs tended to be generous about furnishing prefaces, forewords, letters, and “counterscripts” to books produced by writers who were exploring and extending his nonlinear writing techniques. From 1965 to 1972, he contributed to works by Jacques Stern, Jeff Nuttall, Claude Pélieu, Carl Weissner, Jan Herman, Graham Masterton, and others. When it came to The Atrocity Exhibition, he may also have wanted to reciprocate for the support that Ballard had steadily offered.

Renaming the Grove edition of The Atrocity Exhibition after one of its stories, “Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.,” was Jordan’s decision. Carl Weissner, who translated the book into German using a proof copy provided by Cape, had wanted to retitle the book Liebe und Napalm in order to use a Warholesque cover illustration of a screen queen, clad in bikini and American flag, holding a machine gun.⁷⁵ Ballard, writing to Weissner on July 17, 1969, readily assented: “By all means use Love & Napalm.”⁷⁶ Jordan, who was born in Vienna and educated in England, must have encountered Weissner’s translation and thought the new name a good idea. But while Ballard was agreeable about the German title, he disliked it for the U.S. edition:

I remember sitting in a London hotel with Fred Jordan, the intelligent and likeable editor at Grove, and arguing against the title on the grounds (a) that the Vietnam war was over (this was 1971), and (b) that it would give an apparently anti-American slant to the whole book. Jordan maintained that the war was not over and would continue to rouse violent passions for years to come. I felt that he was wrong, and that though the tragedy would cast its shadow for decades across America, the era of street protests and marches was over.⁷⁷

Ballard, who had been insistent on the obscenity of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” ceased to insist on the title. He was being practical — the book was already on its third American publisher. It must also have appealed to him to place the book with the firm that had championed Burroughs’ greatest work. “It gave the book,” Moorcock recalled, “a sort of entrée into American lit circles so he was pleased with that.”⁷⁸

On Wednesday, June 21, 1972, Jordan followed up with a telegram to Burroughs. “CAN I EXPECT INTRODUCTION FOR BALLARD BY END OF THIS WEEK OR MONDAY AT THE LATEST PLEASE KEEP IT WITHIN 500 WORDS.”⁷⁹ The length was critical because Grove was using the layout from Cape and making space for the foreword by removing a chapter heading. Burroughs was already having a productive week: he was drafting an essay about the use of cut-ups (“I was waiting there in someone else’s writing”), recording dreams (“Long dream about the family a rich family called the Macormick family somewhere in South America”), experimenting with a color polaroid camera borrowed from filmmaker Antony Balch, and working with Barry Miles to create a salable archive of his papers.⁸⁰ The day before receiving Jordan’s telegram, he indicated that work on the foreword was under way:

I will now ask the reader to place himself in present time. The day is Tuesday June 20 1972. I have been invited to go to The Glostenbury Tower for the summer solstice. It looks like rain so I probably won’t go. I have a foreword for J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibit under preparation. I am in flat 18 at 8 Duke Street St James.⁸¹

Using black ink, Burroughs drew vertical lines beside eight passages in the copy of The Atrocity Exhibition that Grove had sent.⁸² The passages contain nothing of obvious appeal to Burroughs, though he happened to mark two of the three paragraphs referring to the “suburbs of Hell.” There are no other marginalia in the book and the vertical marks disappear after page 88, suggesting that Burroughs may have read no further. Perhaps he was only half way through when Jordan’s telegram prompted him to stop reading and finish what he had started writing.

An unpublished draft of his foreword shows that Burroughs began in straightforward, even pedestrian style (and continued to mangle the title, shortening “exhibition” to “exhibit”):

I am not surprised that The Atrocity Exhibit by J.G. Ballard has encountered publication difficulties and that two publishers having brought [sic] the book and paid the advance subsequently refused to publish. It is an extremely profound and disquieting book.⁸³

Burroughs approached the text as an exercise in free association or what he called “intersection reading,” alternating quotes from the book with his own responses. For example, he had marked a passage about news magazines littered “around the bedroom of the shabby hotel in Earls Court.” Burroughs noted that it was “just such a shabby hotel as I used to live in” and typed in a line from The Wild Boys referring to a pub in the same neighborhood. Subsequently Burroughs drew quadrants atop a draft of his foreword and cut it into quarters, which he rearranged and retyped. With a pen he underlined compelling phrases such as “a disquieting illustrated hard core news week” and “immense Jane Mansfield Albert Camus wrecked the planet of films.” Finally Burroughs distilled this collection of reactions, recollections, quotes, and cut-ups into 478 words.

The resulting foreword focuses on two points — the “nonsexual roots of sexuality” and the observation that “the line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down” — but it fails to say much about either. Possibly Burroughs was hampered by the word count. In discussing the breakdown between inner and outer landscapes, the published text offers the inscrutable assertion that “earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind.” In draft, Burroughs had added that “I have a whole file on earthquakes and in some cases these were preceded by some upheaval within my own mind.” The addition clarifies his point by showing a correlation between objective and subjective, something along the lines of Charles Baudelaire’s notion of poetic “correspondences.” But even granting that the word count might have posed a challenge, Burroughs’ foreword retains a haphazard, even lackadaisical air. It gives no evidence of enthusiasm for The Atrocity Exhibition. It does not call Ballard a genius or a friend. In public Ballard called Burroughs’ foreword “superb,” but it cannot have been what he hoped for. “I think Jimmy was a little disappointed by Bill’s intro,” Moorcock recalls. “I remember him chuckling about it.”⁸⁴

Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. appeared in November 1972 without inspiring obscenity trials or libel suits. Asking Burroughs to preface the book might have seemed savvy to Grove, but it also posed a danger evident in Paul Theroux’s review in the New York Times.⁸⁵ Ballard’s name did not appear in the review until after Burroughs’, subtly placing the work under his aegis. Calling Love and Napalm “horrible… a boring and pointless book,” Theroux portrayed Ballard’s Dr Nathan as a “less crazed and more ponderous version of Burroughs’ own Doctor Benway.” Ballard must not have appreciated the comparison. He replied to it in a later interview, declaring that “I don’t want to say he’s my Dr Benway, because Benway is Burroughs’ most powerful character. Nathan is a minor character in this book.”⁸⁶ Reviewers of Ballard’s “condensed novels” consistently invoked Burroughs, and Ballard just as consistently took pains to refute the influence. The Guardian’s 1970 review of The Atrocity Exhibition had accused him of “borrowing Burroughs’ techniques and preoccupations.”⁸⁷ The next year, Ballard repudiated the charge:

People have said it’s derived from Burroughs — well, they’ve never read any Burroughs. The thing about this narrative technique is that I’m able to move rapidly from public events to the most intimate private events, in the space of a few lines. Not only that, I can annex an enormous amount of material into the narrative, which one wouldn’t be able to do in a conventional form.⁸⁸

This disavowal was not quite sincere. In 1967, while still writing the nonlinear tales of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard offered to perform his technique on stories sent to him by Michael Butterworth. In two detailed letters describing his procedure, he explicitly acknowledged that it resembled Burroughs’ approach.⁸⁹ “I know that Burroughs uses a similar method,” he wrote Butterworth on January 29, 1967, “condensing out his images and narrative from a much greater body of original material.” He also cautioned Butterworth in these and other letters about emulating Burroughs. “Why not invent your own mythology of time & space, vocabulary of images and the technique necessary to express them?”⁹⁰ Was this a question Ballard was posing to himself as well? To warn Butterworth against Burroughs’ influence reveals that Ballard held a deeper belief about what a writer should be — original, unique, sui generis. It may have been disingenuous for Ballard to deny that Burroughs had affected his condensed novels, but perhaps he mostly stopped writing them — and completely stopped touting the technique to other writers — to ensure that he remained true to that belief.

Later Years

If Ballard wrote a thank-you note to Burroughs for the foreword, it has been lost. The scene connecting the writers dissipated in the years following the publication of Love and Napalm. In 1974 Burroughs moved back to America without Ballard quite realizing he had left. The next year Ballard wrote to Butterworth, “I think [Burroughs is] still living in London — to be honest I’ve rather moved out of underground circles.”⁹¹ In the years to come, Ballard would review Burroughs’ books. He blurbed Cities of the Red Night for the Guardian: “Burroughs may look at life through the wrong end of the proctoscope, but his scatological humour and strange surgeon’s eye are as sharp as ever.” He also reviewed The Place of Dead Roads, though he seemed to prefer publications of a retrospective or biographical nature, such as The Adding Machine, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959, and Ted Morgan’s biography Literary Outlaw. Burroughs did not keep quite as current with Ballard’s work. On April 22, 1979, Burroughs replied to a correspondent who asked him about Ballard:

J.G. Ballard is an old friend of mine who used to write science fiction and is now doing work that is difficult to classify. He wrote a book called The Atrocity Exhibit and more recently Car Crash which is the book you refer to. Grove Press is the publisher.⁹²

Burroughs continued to mangle the title of The Atrocity Exhibition, misremembered the title of Crash, and erred in attributing the latter publication to Grove Press. (The American edition of Crash was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1973.) He also ignored more recent books by Ballard, such as Concrete Island and High Rise. But the respect he maintained for Ballard is clear in the appellation “old friend.”

“I haven’t seen Burroughs in the flesh for a long time,” Ballard told an interviewer in 1985.⁹³ He did describe how he had only met Brion Gysin — “A very nice guy!” — for the first time the year before. On May 31, 1988 Ballard attended the opening of Burroughs’ exhibit of paintings at the October Gallery in London. Burroughs was photographed with Francis Bacon, whom he had known since the 1950s in Tangier, and at one point withdrew to a corner of the gallery with both Bacon and Ballard.⁹⁴ While it may be tempting to imagine what these three luminaries discussed, likely it was nothing more than standard party chat. “In some 20 meetings,” Ballard recalled, “we never discussed anything literary.”⁹⁵ Burroughs, as Ballard was aware, had once caricatured the conversation of writers who don’t discuss 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.⁹⁶

But why would the two have discussed literature? By the time Ballard was championing nonlinear writing techniques, Burroughs had begun a slow return to more traditional narrative forms. In later years Burroughs remained an avid reader of the brand of sci-fi available at airport bookstores — a genre from which Ballard had separated himself. Burroughs also became enthusiastic about the work of Denton Welch, an English writer who would have seemed parochial to Ballard. Meantime Ballard’s public accolades might well have made Burroughs uncomfortable discussing his own work. “He didn’t seem,” Ballard recalled, “aware of the, sort of, compliments I paid him, because he was completely locked into a really, rather paranoid world.”⁹⁷ Yet the two writers respected and appreciated each other. On December 24, 1993 the Guardian asked Ballard what he would give his “heroes and villains” for Christmas. Ballard replied that “I would like to give something to William Burroughs, but I don’t know what.”⁹⁸ Perhaps it was symbolic that this inability to conceive of a gift sounded almost like a form of writer’s block. For Burroughs and Ballard, to exchange formalities such as greeting cards was a way of not writing — a way of not engaging on literature or art or anything of substance — and also a way of rewriting, of making a preprinted “happy holidays” say something about esteem and the affection that arises after decades of mutual regard.

Especial thanks to David Pringle, who contributed invaluable insight and research from the Ballard perspective, and to Anne Garner of the New York Public Library, who expanded and nurtured the research in this essay with her generous knowledge of the Burroughs archive.

Thanks as well to James Grauerholz, Barry Miles, Michael Moorcock, Michael Butterworth, Charles Platt, Martin Bax, Carl Weissner, Jan Herman, Graham Rae, and the October Gallery of London.

References

Endnotes

1. “JGB Interviewed by Mark Pauline” (circa 1986), Conversations, pp 156-157.

2. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs, New York, Seaver Books, 1981.

3. Johnny Strike (aka John Bassett), “The Burroughs Workshops,” Ambit 95, December 1983, p 42.

4. Rae.

5. 1959: Ballard in “The Author’s Author,” The Guardian, Oct 26, 1998, p 49; “about 1960”: Rae; “something like 1960”: Kadrey & Stefanac; 1963: Jon Savage, Interview with J.G. Ballard, Search and Destroy 10, 1978.

6. David Pringle email, Oct 22, 2011. Jakubowski believes he brought the Olympia Press editions of Burroughs to London in early September 1963. Pringle speculates that Jakubowski may have passed them off to Moorcock on Thursday, Sept 5, 1963, at a pub called The Globe, and that Moorcock may have passed them off to Ballard the next day at lunch.

7. Mark P. Williams, “Michael Moorcock on William S. Burroughs.”

8. Kadrey & Stefanac

9. Ballard in “The Author’s Author,” The Guardian, Oct 26, 1998, p 49.

10. Rae.

11. Times Literary Supplement, Nov 21, 1963.

12. J.G. Ballard, “Terminal Documents,” Ambit 27, 1966.

13. Burroughs to Moorcock, Dec 18, 1963, Papers, Box 88, Folder 1, Item 4.

14. Burroughs to Bax, Feb 18, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 1, Item 14.

15. Eric Mottram BBC Broadcast, March 9, 1964, reprinted as “The Algebra of Need,” in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, New York, Semiotext(e), 2001.

16. Burroughs to Ballard, Mar 23, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 2, Item 25.

17. Interview with Ballard in Will Self, Junk Mail, New York, Grove Press, 2006, p 26.

18. Wilhelm von Branca, quoted and translated in Richard Swan Lull, “On the Functions of the ‘Sacral Brain’ in Dinosaurs,” The American Journal of Science, July 1917.

19. “Interview with J. G. Ballard,” Munich Round Up, 100 (1968), 104-6.

20. Quoted in Chris Beckett, “The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library,” Electronic British Library Journal, 2011, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/article12.html.

21. William S. Burroughs, Naked Scientology, Bonn, Expanded Media Editions, 1978.

22. John Baxter, The Inner Man: The Life of J.G. Ballard, London, W&N, 2011.

23. Burroughs to Jeff Nuttall, May 1, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 08, Item 20.

24. Burroughs to Ramsey Campbell, August 15, 1964, Papers, Box 88, Folder 4, Item 61.

25. Burroughs to Antony Balch, Sept 10, 1964, Papers, Box 79, Folder 5, Item 33.

26. “The Hallucinatory Operators Are Real” (New York 1965), interview by “staff reporters” in S.F Horizons 2, Oxford, Winter 1965.

27. Burroughs to Ian Sommerville, July 28, 1965, Papers, Box 80, Folder 20, Item 82.

28. “London rather grey” — Burroughs to David Prentice, October 11, 1965, Papers, Box 80, Folder 11, Item 69.

29. Rae.

30. Martin Bax, Email, August 9, 2011.

31. Michael Moorcock, Email, May 15, 2011.

32. David Pringle to J.G. Ballard Yahoo group, Sept 16, 2011. “I get the impression that Moorcock and the New Worlds crew really only got to know Butler at the Worldcon, in late August 1965. Ballard, as I’ve said, wasn’t there — he was probably still away in Greece with his kids (see Miracles of Life) — but he must have got back to England by the end of August if he was in attendance at Bon’s place in Oxford in early September (as he definitely was). I suspect what happened is that Moorcock called a party, or a get-together of some kind, soon (but not immediately) after the Worldcon, and that Ballard first met their new friend, Bill Butler, there.”

33. Barry Miles attests that Butler only met Burroughs in November 1965 and provided helpful background information about Butler. Miles, Email, Jan 10, 2012.

34. Jeff Nuttall to Burroughs, Nov 5, 1965, Papers, Box 80, Folder 8, Item 27

35. Bill Butler, “William Burroughs,” New Worlds, April 1966, pp 147 – 153.

36. Arthur C. Clarke, Lost Worlds of 2001, New York, New American Library, 1972. An excerpt online describes meeting with Burroughs.

37. Michael Moorcock, “Brave New Worlds,” The Guardian, March 21, 2008

38. Kadrey & Stefanac

39. “JGB Interviewed by Mark Pauline” (circa 1986), Conversations, pp 156-157.

40. Obit.

41. Interview with Ballard in Will Self, Junk Mail, p 26.

42. An Esquire editorial assistant confirmed in an email of June 27, 2011: “We do not have an archive of such materials: the magazine changed hands and offices several times over the years.”

43. Burroughs to John Berendt, September 8, 1965, Papers, Box 77, Folder 3, Item 12.

44. Alice Glaser, who would commit suicide around 1970 or 1971, published a story “The Tunnel Ahead” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 21, 1961.

45. Barry Miles, Email, Jan 10, 2012.

46. Papers, Box 22, Folder 48, Item 62.

47. Barry Miles, Email, Jan 10, 2012.

48. Burroughs, Naked Scientology (originally a piece appearing in Rolling Stone, November 9, 1972).

49. Obit.

50. Jeff Shero, “Revolt!” (Interview with WSB, New York 1968), originally printed in RAT 18, October 4, 1968, in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, New York, Semiotext(e), 2001.

51. “3 Tales of the CIA. (1) How I got in, and why I came out of the Cold,” Ramparts, April 1967. The story, “as told to the editors,” describes a CIA instructor speaking to the narrator’s fellow recruits. “A man photographed one of the staging areas on Nicaragua for the Bay of Pigs invasion; his photos included the numbers and markings on American planes which had not yet been removed. Hitchhiking from Florida to New York, he talked about it to a man who picked him up. The man chanced to be a CIA man returning from one of the Agency’s numerous staging areas in Florida; he notified ‘the company.’ The hitchhiker was intercepted and interrogated. He could not be bought off — he was an idealist who was going to divulge the whole thing to the newspapers. ‘Well,’ the instructor who told the story stressed, ‘that man was on his way to the newspapers when he was struck by a laundry truck and killed. And those photos just plain disappeared.'”

52. Burroughs, The Job, London, John Calder, 1968, p 66. Burroughs, “Rally Round the Secret, Boys,” Burroughs Academy Bulletin 15, Mayfair Magazine, January 1969, p 53.

53. Obit.

54. Philip Dodd, “The Meaningless Universe Demands Meaningless Acts,” Night Waves, BBC Radio 3, October, 2003.

55. Ballard, “Interview with Lynne Fox” (1991), Conversations p 195.

56. Thomas Frick, “J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85,” Paris Review, Winter 1984.

57. John Baxter, The Inner Man, p 182.

58. Burroughs to Claude Pélieu, Apr 23, 1967, Papers, Box 77, Folder 8, Item 61.

59. The Unicorn Books Trial has been explored in depth by Mike Holliday in “A Dirty and Diseased Mind”: The Unicorn Bookshop Trial” and in a post to the J.G. Ballard Yahoo group on Sept 16, 2011.

60. Ballard, annotations in the Re/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

61. Larry Wallrich and Eric Mottram, eds., For Bill Butler, London, Wallrich Brooks, 1970.

62. Eric Mottram to Burroughs, July 31, 1968: “At the Soft Machine reception you very kindly suggested that you would like to contribute to the fund for Bill Butler and his Unicorn Bookshop trial (hearing August 20, Brighton).” Papers, Box 80, Folder 1, Item 1.

63. Oliver Pritchett, “The Writer Tomorrow,” The Guardian, August 11, 1969.

64. Norman Spinrad, An Experiment in Autobiography, p 28.

65. John Calder to Burroughs, October 9, 1969, Papers, Box 47, Folder 21, Item 6.

66. Andy Darling, “Another Girl: Fourteen Star Punters Select Their All-Time Greatest Gig,” Q magazine 106, July 1995, p 36.

67. Simon Matthews, “I Helped Carry William Burroughs to the Medical Tent: More on the ‘Pirate’ Radio Stations of the 1960s” in Lobster 59, Summer 2010.

68. Mick Davis, in “The view from the Mud. Recollections of those who attended Phun City.”

69. Burroughs to Brion Gysin, August 9, 1970, Papers, Box 86, Folder 13.

70. Jerome Tarshis, “Krafft-Ebing Visits Dealey Plaza: The Recent Fiction of J.G. Ballard,” Evergreen Review, 17:96, Spring 1973.

71. Rae.

72. Fred Jordan to Burroughs, June 13, 1972, Papers, Box 3, Folder 7, Item 3.

73. Papers, Box 3, Folder 7, Item 5.

74. Jo Stanley, “Ballard Crashes,” Friends, 29 May 1970, pp 4-5.

75. Personal communication from Carl Weissner.

76. Ballard to Weissner, July 17, 1969, Carl Weissner archive at Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections Northwestern University Library, Box 1, Folder 3.

77. Ballard, annotation in Re/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

78. Michael Moorcock, Email, May 15, 2011.

79. Telegram, Fred Jordan to Burroughs, June 21, 1972, Papers, Box 3, Folder 7, Item 4.

80. “I was waiting there in someone else’s writing”: Burroughs, “The Use of…,” Papers, Box 16, Folder 34, Item 1. Dream: Burroughs, “June 18, 1972,” Box 16, Folder 35, Item 2. Polaroid camera: Burroughs, “Five Photos Taken,” Box 44, Folder 07, Item 01.

81. Burroughs, draft of introduction to archive catalogue reproduced online in Stephen J. Gertz, “Living with Burroughs.”

82. Papers possesses Burroughs’ copy of The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as two unannotated author copies of Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

83. Drafts in Papers, Box 3, Folder 6, Items 1 & 2, and Box 3, Folder 8, Item 6.

84. Michael Moorcock, Email, May 15, 2011.

85. Paul Theroux, “The Auto Crash as Sexual Stimulation,” New York Times, October 29, 1972.

86. Alan Burns, “The Imagination On Trial: J.G. Ballard,” circa 1973-74 interview with Ballard reproduced in Burns, The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, London, Allison & Busby, 1981.

87. Robert Nye, “Gerhardie Revisited,” The Guardian, July 9, 1970.

88. Brendan Hennessy, “J.G. Ballard,” Transatlantic Review 39, 1971.

89. Ballard to Michael Butterworth, January 21 & 29, 1967, letters held in Michael Butterworth and J G Ballard Correspondence: 1965-1975, British Library.

90. Ballard to Michael Butterworth, January 2, 1966, British Library.

91. Ballard to Michael Butterworth, dated by MB as “probably late 1975,” British Library.

92. Burroughs to Michael Gentile, April 22, 1979, William S. Burroughs Papers Spec.Cms.40, Ohio State University, Box 7, Folder 35.

93. “Interview with Graham Revell” (spring 1985), Conversations p 318.

94. See especially Author Q&A with Tim Adler on bloomsbury.com.

95. Rae.

96. Burroughs, “Hemingway,” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York, Arcade Publishing, 1993, p 65. Ballard reviewed this book for The Guardian.

97. Philip Dodd, “The Meaningless Universe Demands Meaningless Acts,” Night Waves, BBC Radio 3, October, 2003.

98. “Just What They’ve Always Wanted…,” The Guardian, December 24, 1993, p 12.

Including the Complete Text of The Fluke

William S. Burroughs had known Jacques Loup Stern for little more than a year when he declared the man a “great writer.” Writing from the Beat Hotel in Paris on June 8, 1959, Burroughs reported to Allen Ginsberg that Stern “wrote a novel in nine days.” It was called The Fluke. “As for Jack’s writing,” Burroughs continued, using the Americanization of Stern’s first name, “I think it is better by far than mine or Kerouac’s or your or Gregory’s or anyone I can think of. There is no doubt about it, he is a great writer. I think the greatest writer of our time.”¹ This is high praise from a man about to publish one of the most groundbreaking books of the century. In the next month, Burroughs would spend a frantic ten days pulling together the manuscript of Naked Lunch for publication by the Olympia Press in Paris. In late July 1959, while describing this scramble in another letter to Ginsberg, Burroughs reiterated his judgement: Stern “is a great writer.”²

When Burroughs’ correspondence was published in 1993, a legend began to accrue around the name Jacques Stern. Who was this man? What was his writing like? Had The Fluke never been published? Why had its author eschewed the limelight? Was he living or dead? Before the publication of Naked Lunch, Burroughs had been viewed as a mysterious figure haunting the periphery of the Beats. But as Burroughs became famous, it was Stern who became — and was to remain — an hombre invisible. His name would sometimes appear in interviews or books, where he was described with a stock supply of nouns (Frenchman, mathematician, junky) and adjectives (rich, brilliant, eccentric). Burroughs himself would refer to Stern as “the baron” or “the mad baron.” But no one spoke of him as a writer.

Compounding the mystery was the fact that Stern was an inveterate teller of tall tales. In the heady Beat Hotel days, Stern told Burroughs about surviving a horrific car crash. It wasn’t true. He claimed to have undergone profound mystical experiences in India, but his traveling companion painted their trip in a much less metaphysical light. In the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, there is a cut-up of “Jacques Stern’s Telegram to the Captain Barrie of His Alleged Yacht.” The word “alleged” stands out.³ In later years, Stern would still regale friends with stories — he had been in a concentration camp, he would hint, or he had been the basis for the character of Dr Strangelove in the Stanley Kubrick movie — that they wouldn’t know whether to believe. Often his strangest stories were the truest.

Early Years

Even Stern’s birthdate is difficult to pin down. The Fluke contains a scene in which Stern’s own father has to hunt for the information in a mountain of files: “He was looking for something.. My date of birth..” But then the nameless protagonist, presumably speaking for Stern in the autobiographical novel, dismisses the information as “utterly useless.” This contempt for the facts helped to conceal Stern in a fog of misinformation, legend, and deceit. The 1961 poetry anthology Junge Amerikanische Lyrik, edited by Gregory Corso, includes a two-line biography giving Stern’s birthdate as 1930. A rare book documenting families victimized by the French revolution lists Stern as a descendant and gives the birthdate June 3, 1932.⁴ This date was probably provided by a researcher or some other member of the Stern family, thus bypassing the least reliable source of information: Jacques himself. This is also the date to appear in Social Security records.⁵

Stern’s parents were a union of French nobility and Jewish wealth. His mother, Mathilde Simone de Leusse, was a countess. His father, Jacques Leon Stern, hailed from a prominent family of Jewish bankers. According to a French biography, Stern père commanded one of the largest fortunes in France, owned a hôtel particulier on the Champs Elysées, and was “une des personnalités du Tout-Paris d’avant la guerre.”⁶ Politically ambitious, Stern père used his wealth and connections with the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a series of increasingly important positions in the French government. He spent considerable time in America, wrote articles for the New York Times, and penned a book drawing on his experiences as the French Minister of Colonies.

In 1940 the Sterns emigrated to New York. Their fortunes do not appear to have been hit hard by the war in Europe. They took a Park Avenue apartment around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together with the Comtesse de Leusse, Stern père continued to collect old master paintings and to throw dinner parties that were noted in the society pages. Did the Sterns bring their eight-year-old son Jacques and his older sister Rosita to New York? It would be difficult to believe that, with their financial advantage, political connections, and insider knowledge of world events, the Sterns would have left their children in war-torn Europe. In Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan indicates that Stern “had spent the war years in the States.” Was Jacques Stern ever interned in a concentration camp? It seems unlikely.

In any event, Stern was in America by the late 1940s. Records at Woodberry Forest, a private boarding school in Virginia, list him in 1947 as a Form IV student, a sophomore.⁷ He gave Paris as his home address and won a medal for declamation. The next year he gave New York as his home address. He served as a reporter for the school newspaper and a staff member of the Fir Tree, the yearbook. He participated in the Dramatic Club and won the Form V Public Speaking Award. In 1949, he edited the yearbook, managed the basketball team, and represented the Public Speaking Honor Society in the school’s final oratorical contest. He participated in the Monitor Board (a student government group), Smoke House (a social club), the German Club, the Book Club, the Music Club, and the Dramatic Club. He also played tennis and soccer. The write-up in his senior yearbook, likely authored by a classmate, portrays him as a young man full of potential:

Strap… Ah, gay Paree… a two packs a day man… e-nun-ci-ates for the Colonel… astronomical averages… always in the Fir Tree room or across the hall… our theatre’s thrilling thespian… soccer pro… with a short haircut, impossible!… in all big time operations… Harvard next year.

Reading between the lines, it is possible to make out the lineaments of Stern’s future as a substance abuser, an eloquent speaker, a brilliant thinker, and a thespian prone to blurring the line between drama and reality.

To the young Stern, 1949 must have seemed a year full of promise. In May, his sister Rosita married Jacques Dewez, a businessman and race-car enthusiast who later founded the famous golf course at Sperone in Corsica. In the fall, Stern enrolled in Harvard. There he could study with poets Archibald MacLeish and John Ciardi, who would later write one of the first reviews of Naked Lunch. Other faculty included architect Walter Gropius, logician Willard Quine, and the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. In later years, Stern would assert that he had studied with the mathematician Norbert Wiener, originator of cybernetics. This may have been true — Wiener, a Harvard alumnus, taught at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Certainly Stern had an inclination for mathematics, although he was never a practicing mathematician and should not be confused with the French cryptologist of the same name.

At the end of 1949, however, Stern’s life took a dramatic turn. On December 21, Stern’s 67-year-old father died in what Time magazine described as a “plunge from his ninth-floor Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan.”⁸ It was generally assumed that he committed suicide. Stern never completely accepted this as the cause of his father’s death. There were dark insinuations of homicide — “pushed by a lawyer” — about which he would speak to his psychiatrist years later. It isn’t clear whether this was a suspicion harbored by Stern alone or by other family and friends. Late in life, Stern claimed to his young friend Mark Meyer that he had heard the news about his father’s death on the radio while lying paralyzed in an iron lung — a poignant image, regardless of whether or not it was true.⁹

What was undeniably true was that Stern contracted poliomyelitis around this time. He wasn’t alone. A virulent series of polio epidemics paralyzed or killed half a million people a year in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1955 Jonas Salk would announce the discovery of a polio vaccine, but it was too late for Stern. As a young man, he was obliged to walk with crutches, and he likely regretted that “soccer pro” label bestowed on him by his high school yearbook. The Fluke, though it says nothing about polio specifically, contains numerous references to the constraints forced on Stern by the disease.

Between the death of his father and the struggle with polio, Stern must have had difficulties focussing on his education. Though he had become editor-in-chief of the yearbook at his high school, he does not appear in the Harvard yearbooks of the period.¹⁰ He did not, for example, work alongside John Updike, a year his junior, on the Lampoon. By the time the class of 1953 held its commencement ceremony, Stern must have officially dropped out. He is not listed among the members of the graduating class. He likely inherited a substantial amount of money from his father — whose will designated his wife and two children as his heirs¹¹ — and it is easy to imagine that this windfall, combined with grief and illness, encouraged Stern to turn his attention to matters more worldly than academe.

Among these distractions were women. In spite of his physical disability, Stern was charismatic and rich — a combination that would never leave him wanting for attractive companions. A brief notice in the March 1, 1951 issue of the New York Times announced that Stern was to marry a Radcliffe student named Emily Janeway Marshall.¹² The notice described Stern as a student at Harvard College. Emily, also born in 1932, was the daughter of William Lawrence Marshall, a well-regarded lawyer and author. The marriage ceremony was conducted by the bride’s maternal grandfather, Reverend Charles J. Scudder, on June 14, 1951. Stern would have just turned 19. The marriage cannot have been a happy one. “My experience in marital bliss is somewhat limited,” The Fluke declares. It is not known when the relationship ended, but the dispassionate tone with which the book refers to “unfortunate marital episodes” may indicate why.

Meeting the Beats

In 1953, the year he should have graduated from Harvard, Stern married an attractive American woman with thick red hair. Her name was Dini, and she bore him a son in 1954. Stern installed this ménage in a luxurious residence on the rue du Cirque in Paris sometime before 1958, the year he would meet the Beats. Writing to Jack Kerouac on June 26, 1958, Ginsberg described Stern’s “solid Ava Gardner wife who digs him, loves him, and a 3 year old baby, or 4, boy — never saw kid, in nursery of vast duplex apartment.”¹³ Dini did not take to Corso, Orlovsky, and Ginsberg, who wrote that “his tall sexy lovely wife hates us.” Their Bohemian behavior was at odds with the privileged lifestyle she was trying to maintain with her young child and neurasthenic husband. She liked Burroughs, however, whose upbringing and old-world manners must have been more to her taste. The feeling was mutual. “I am getting along well with Stern’s wife,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on July 24, 1958. “I think she is a really nice person and I have come to like her very much.”¹⁴

Corso had been the first of the group to meet Stern. He had audited courses at Harvard in 1954 and, according to Ginsberg, may have already heard of the wealthy eccentric.¹⁵ Four years later in Paris, Corso was intrigued by rumors about a rich, crippled junky showing up at left bank cafés in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Not far from the Beat Hotel on rue Gît-le-coeur was a place called the Café Monaco (now Le Comptoir du Relais). Together with the nearby Café Tournon, the Monaco anchored a thriving literary scene on the Carrefour de l’Odéon. Richard Wright and Chester Himes had hung out there in the years after the war. By the mid-to-late 1950s, the writers had attracted an expatriate crowd that included Korean War vets “studying” on the G.I. Bill. It was a place Burroughs would check out after arriving in Paris in January 1958. “Bill exploring young hip group from Monaco cafe here,” Ginsberg wrote to Peter Orlovsky, “found some very nice guys, the younger generation.”¹⁶

One day the Bentley pulled up in front of the Monaco. Peering inside, Corso introduced himself to its occupant by asking “Would you like to meet a very wise man?”¹⁷ He was referring to Burroughs, thinking not just that his old friend could impart wisdom but that he could connect on the subject of drugs. Stern, who would claim to have read Howl, On the Road, Gasoline, and even Junkie, agreed. Corso carried him up the stairs of the Beat Hotel and — according to the story in Literary Outlaw — dumped him on Burroughs’ bed.

The meeting had an almost symbolic quality, as though Corso were no more than the vehicle by means of which Stern was to meet Burroughs. In fact, it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the poet and the “baron.” In a letter to Gary Snyder written on August 12, 1958, Corso described Stern as “a polio, smileless young Harvard profound very deep junkie writer Rothschild heir who I love very much, really a very beautiful soul.”¹⁸ For his part, Stern admired his friend’s poetry and always felt great affection for Corso himself. One expression of this was described by Corso in a letter to Ginsberg written around October 8, 1958. Debating whether to hit up Stern for money, Corso admitted that “I need an arrogance to ask, and he’s become a friend, and he even thinks I’m conning him, but knows that it’s a natural part of me, and that it’s inherent in me, and that I don’t mean too [sic].”¹⁹ Stern would let Corso mooch. Years later, Corso would even marry an ex-wife of Stern, Jocelyn or “Joss,” without it undermining the friendship.

With Burroughs the relationship was different — more complicated, maybe deeper. Intellectual interests would unite them and personality differences would drive them apart. The two shared heroin when Stern footed the bill. In October 1958, they went to London together to undertake the apomorphine cure at the clinic of Dr John Yerbury Dent. In Paris they worked with the same analyst, Marc Schlumberger, a Freudian who had known André Gide and other literary types. They made plans to travel to India together and to take a working vacation on Stern’s “alleged” yacht. In 1959, they saw each other as mystics tuning in on a frequency that even excluded the other influence to enter into Burroughs’ life at this time: Brion Gysin. (Stern was truly a mystic, Burroughs wrote Ginsberg, whereas Gysin was more “a catalyst or medium.”²⁰) In many ways, Stern was the anti-Gysin — stormy where Gysin was smooth, difficult where Gysin was suave. He was bored by the same old-guard Surrealists (Cocteau, Dali) whose acquaintanceship would impress Gysin’s friends. Stern’s wealth underwrote his exasperating qualities — he could afford to be a jerk — whereas Gysin had only his charm to open doors. Stern was also straight.

Though there is no indication of any sexual tension between Burroughs and Stern — both, Ginsberg wrote at the time, “gave up sex, indifferent,” probably a side effect of their heroin usage — it is interesting that Corso recalled dumping him on the bed.²¹ The next year Life magazine would take photos of Burroughs sitting dejectedly on that bed. Its plain cast-iron headboard was pushed into a corner of the room beneath Gysin paintings and water stains marring the walls. It is easy to imagine Burroughs sizing up the cripple there and flashing back to his wife, Joan Vollmer, who had been left with a limp after a mild bout of polio in 1948-1949. But then it may not have been in his room that Burroughs first met Stern. Burroughs recalled that the meeting took place in the bar.

I remember Gregory bringing him up to the hotel and sitting him at this little bar — it had four tables, the bar in the original Beat Hotel. Now here comes Gregory and this almost transparent green demon on two crutches. It was Jacques Stern, sinister music in the background. He was very lucid, generous, he’d have some heroin, pot, he’d take you out to dinner, he’d seem very very nice and very sweet and at some point he would start to put the screws on, getting very nasty. He’d just scream at us.²²

Stern left no recollection of the meeting. The Fluke alludes to “three fuzzy friends of mine who once vegetated” on rue Gît-le-coeur, a reference to the Beat Hotel and to Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg. “Fuzzy” may refer less to their appearance than to their mojo — “I think,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on May 18, 1959, “Gysin is afraid of me as notorious carrier of Black Fuzz, bad luck and death.”²³ Years later, in an unpublished interview with Victor Bockris, Stern would describe his encounter with Corso and company in abstract terms:

My take on the Beats was simply a) that I was a mathematician, right, who was extremely interested in art, who happened by sheer chance, due to Gregory Corso, to meet probably the 3 or 4 most influential writers in America at the Beat hotel at the time when it was a fascinating, fascinating study for someone who is an objective that I am [sic], an objective mathematical thinker.²⁴

In hindsight Stern may have portrayed his attitude as “objective” — a curious self-description for a man prone to public rages and epic bouts of substance abuse — but at the time there was a conspicuous rapport between the Beats and him. Stern, Burroughs wrote to Paul Bowles on July 20, 1958, “is far and away the most interesting person I have met in Paris. We have a lot in common. Both graduates of Harvard and junk.”²⁵ In a remarkable letter addressed to Kerouac on June 26, 1958, Ginsberg used the phrase “like Bill” six times to describe Stern: like Bill, Stern studied (or claimed to study) anthropology at Harvard; he came from a background of privilege; he was a junky; he wrote; he advocated psychoanalysis; and he had, at least temporarily, become celibate. “Bill digs Stern,” Ginsberg concluded, “his mind, factual information, on junk and on anthro, and advanced experimental thoughts on brainwashing and evil.”²⁶ In a letter to Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg wrote “he and Bill now good friends & sit and talk junk by the hour.”²⁷

Ironically, one testament to the rapport between the two men was Burroughs’ ability to tolerate Stern’s erratic behavior. In summer 1958, Dini confided to Burroughs that “Jacques is a monster. Being in the same room with him is like being with death itself.”²⁸ Not long after, Stern announced their separation and pressured Burroughs into a criminal mission: since he was on good terms with Dini, he was to visit her, slip into Stern’s library, and steal the valuable Molière first editions he had left behind. Burroughs’ heart wasn’t into it. When he failed — just as he had failed at prior attempts at thievery, such as lush-rolling — Stern blasted him, “You moron, you stupid dope” and so on. It is difficult to imagine that Burroughs had ever been subject to such a tirade, and he resented that Stern had manipulated him into pulling this caper on the likable Dini.

Nevertheless, at the end of October the two took an apartment on Mansfield Street in London to recuperate from their apomorphine cure. Following another harangue in which Stern accused him of being a con man, Burroughs left a dismissive note — “To call me a con man is one of the most grotesque pieces of miscasting since Tyrone Power played Jesse James” — and walked out.²⁹ Once on the street, he noticed newspaper headlines trumpeting the news of Power’s death on November 15, 1958. Burroughs was the same age as the movie star and, if he paused to read the obituaries, would have learned that Power suffered a heart attack while filming a duel. It must have made him feel lucky to escape this skirmish with Stern.

Burroughs returned to the Beat Hotel in Paris but the on-again off-again relationship with Stern continued. In January, Burroughs paid an uneventful visit to Stern in London. On June 19, 1959, Alan Ansen wrote that he was “delighted to hear you and Stern are on good terms again.”³⁰ In late July, with Naked Lunch at the printer, Burroughs told Ginsberg he was “immune to [Stern’s] tantrums.”³¹ In September he reversed course: “I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again.”³² The cycle would continue for the next thirty-nine years.

Stern as Writer

Though polio had left him unable to play the piano or to type much, Stern “writes, prose, very good, not totally mad, but amazing,” as Ginsberg informed Kerouac on June 26, 1958.³³ Burroughs’ letters made reference to plays and poetry. In September 1958, Burroughs and Corso co-wrote a letter to Ginsberg announcing their idea for a literary magazine to be called Interpol. “For first issue,” Corso wrote in late September, “Bill has in mind” to include Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and “Stern’s most humiliating” writing.³⁴ Just two days later, Corso would expand the list: “for first issue Michaux, Bowles, Stern, Burroughs, you, me, and more Tzara.”³⁵ To include Stern alongside these literary lions indicated no small enthusiasm for his unpublished writings. (Of course, Burroughs hadn’t published much beside the pseudonymous Junkie at this point.) Ultimately the project came to naught. “Don’t get money for Interpol,” Corso wrote Ginsberg on October 8, 1958, “just Bill’s and mine’s crazy idea, and if it comes thru Stern will probably take care of it, but he’s ill and too much on his mind, too.”³⁶ Doubtless it was derailed by the apomorphine trip to London and subsequent contretemps about Burroughs being a con man.

Though Interpol failed, one publishing project did seem to arise from its aborted energies. In 1958 Corso was invited to co-edit a German anthology of contemporary American poetry. He solicited a contribution from Stern, whose nationality was glossed over in the author’s bio by calling him an “American of French descent.” Evidently Stern had been working on a group of poems titled “Motif.” Two of these — “Motif Selection 1” and “Motif Selection 2” — appeared in Junge Amerikanische Lyrik when it was published in 1961. The first seems to portray a drug trip, a vision of wild animals coming to children who rub crystals on their gums and feel “for the first time the liquid blue of chills.” This image cues the second poem, which portrays Europe subject to a new ice age: “everywhere pipes freeze… bridges & dams succumb to the weight of ice…” The poems are dominated by images of coldness and immobility, a theme compelling to Stern for the obvious reason of his disability. “So I can only barely move?” The Fluke avers. “So what? Life drips on in bed, just as well as on a mile run.”

The visionary quality of the poems might be what caused Ginsberg to declare, in a June 26, 1958 letter to Kerouac, that Stern “writes prose like Bill’s anthropological images of Yage City.”³⁷ Ginsberg may have meant to imply that Stern had already absorbed some influence from Burroughs or that both were drawing inspiration from Saint-John Perse, whom Stern mentions by name in The Fluke.³⁸ But what prose was Ginsberg referring to? In that same letter, Ginsberg indicates that Stern’s prose attempts to “explain” the “soul of dead Peter la Nice, fellow 20 yr old junkie with Alan Eager, who died, Stern says he was his saint (Peter).” Neither of Ginsberg’s assertions can pertain to The Fluke. The novel hardly inspires comparison to Burroughs’ yage-inspired “Composite City,” and it is based on Stern himself, not on “Peter la Nice.” (Eager was a jazz musician who appeared under the name Roger Beloit in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, but nothing further is known about his friend “Peter la Nice.” Perhaps he was even an invention of Stern.) Moreover, Burroughs would not announce The Fluke until almost exactly a year later, writing about it to Ginsberg on June 8, 1959.

Stern must have had other prose to share with the Beats in 1958. When Ginsberg returned to the United States later that summer, he did for Stern what he did for so many of his friends — promoted his work. As a result, on September 17, 1958, Irving Rosenthal invited Stern to contribute to the Chicago Review, which was about to publish its second excerpt from Naked Lunch:

I’m writing to you at suggestion of Allen Ginsberg. Would very much like you to submit prose to us. He says novel of yours to be published England. You might also send me selection from that.³⁹

Stern replied from Paris on October 7, 1958:

The novel which Allen Ginsberg mentioned to you has been sent back to me from the publishers upon my request since I felt a change was necessary in its structure. I am working on that right now, and will probably be occupied with it for another two or three months. Hence, I can only send you the original version from which you can select any excerpt if this type of writing interests you. I am also including a piece of a different sort in case it possibly fills the more precise requirements of a review.⁴⁰

Stern had submitted a long work of prose that predated The Fluke along with “a piece of a different sort,” maybe a selection from “Motif.” The only clue to the identity of the novel lies in the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, where a manuscript is identified in Burroughs’ handwriting as “A page of Jack Stern’s book 1959.”⁴¹ A page number — 95 — sits above a text fragment that, though written in a style completely different from The Fluke, contains Sternian imagery such as ice, stalactites, and coldness. The fragment begins by describing an “angular feminine figure with all the thunderous luminosity of an El Greco” and ends with “a whole series of half-hidden gestures, desperate effusions of contempt on the part” of the woman who appears in the scene. None of the text reappears in The Fluke. Was this a page from the novel Stern submitted to Rosenthal at the Chicago Review?

Far from being occupied with revising this novel, Stern and Burroughs spent the end of October 1958 in London undergoing the apomorphine cure. On October 25, the day after Burroughs checked out of the clinic, the Chicago Daily News published an excoriating review of the Naked Lunch excerpts that had just appeared in the Chicago Review. On November 17, Rosenthal quit the journal, and on November 24 he wrote to Burroughs: “Yes I got & returned ms. from Jacques Stern. Very talented, but no breakthrough anywhere.”⁴² Because of the disarray caused by the scandal and Rosenthal’s subsequent departure, Stern did not end up receiving an official rejection letter until the following spring. On May 5, 1959, Ray Roberts, writing for the editor, returned Stern’s work, saying “We liked the longer piece and yet we could not use it all and it did not seem to be organic in part.”⁴³ That Burroughs knew of the rejection before Stern must have caused some awkwardness. Did he inform Stern? Keep the information to himself? Did it contribute to the quarrel between the two while they were living together on Mansfield Street after the apomorphine cure?

The Fluke

After Burroughs returned to Paris, Stern remained in London during the winter of 1958-1959. In January Burroughs paid him what must have been an enjoyable visit and wrote to Gysin to describe the mystic moments they shared. Over the next few months, however, Stern dropped out of touch. “No word from Stern,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg on April 21, 1959. “Looks like he is out of my picture. Too bad. Not many like that from mystic stand-point.”⁴⁴ Nothing had changed a month later. “Stern in complete seclusion,” Burroughs added on May 18, 1959. “Answers no letters — at least none of mine.”⁴⁵ There might have been many reasons for Stern’s sudden reclusiveness. Perhaps he was sick or temporarily out of funds or sorting out his divorce from Dini. Or he may simply have wanted to concentrate on a new piece of writing. By June 8, Stern had returned to Paris, invited Burroughs to spend a month with him on his “alleged” yacht, and announced an incredible series of events that resulted in the rapid composition of a novel. Burroughs described what he admitted were the “fantastic details” in a letter to Ginsberg. In London, Burroughs said, Stern broke his leg, took another apomorphine cure (his third in less than a year), and developed a sinus headache whose pain was so extreme that he lapsed into a two-day catatonic state. Doctors

gave him a shock and he came out of the catatonia and began writing. Wrote a novel in nine days — I have seen part of it. It is great, I mean great, not jive talk great. This is not only my opinion. I have talked with the translator of French edition, Faber and Faber in London is publishing it in English.⁴⁶

The story behind the novel’s composition turned out not to be credible, and Stern had also claimed to Ginsberg and Rosenthal that his prior effort was going to be published in England. As for the novel itself, Burroughs did not refer to it by name in his letter. But years later, when he reviewed the annotations added to his correspondence for publication, he approved the note indicating that the “great” novel was The Fluke.⁴⁷

A blend of truth and fiction, like anything out of Stern’s mind, The Fluke is plainly autobiographical. It ruminates on two marriages and expresses heartfelt regret at the end of the second, which had lasted five years (the length of Stern’s marriage to Dini). It describes the birth of a son — a surprise that causes the narrator to avow he will “instantly set about forgetting my son, his name, and his age.” In fact, Stern would remain estranged from his son throughout his life. The Fluke reports a trip to India and an inordinate interest, doubtless inspired in the author by polio, in beds: “I have known many beds, fortunately.. I really have a passion for them.” There is a long excursion on drugs that, like Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict,” catalogues various illegal substances and their subjective effects. As for heroin, The Fluke offers its own “algebra of need” (“You eat it; sleep it; live for, or because, of it..”), alludes to “Pentapon Rose” (a misspelled reference Stern can only have got from Burroughs), and endorses Dr Dent’s cure (“apomorphine treatment is the best”). That Stern may have secluded himself while writing The Fluke becomes comprehensible when he admits that “the hermit’s chosen solitude was perhaps safer.. In any case; less to manage.. Than social behaviour..” He can find no kinship and ultimately accepts his existential condition. “I’m a fluke.”

Aside from the shared interest in drugs, The Fluke contains just a few odd references to Burroughs. Stern had read a manuscript version of Naked Lunch in 1958 — “he lay in bed junksick […] reading Bill’s manuscript,” Ginsberg wrote Kerouac — but it does not appear to have had an impact on The Fluke.⁴⁸ The obvious influence was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Stern adopted the same episodic, autobiographical vantage point, replacing the bitter misanthropy of Céline’s narrators with a vaguely condescending self-absorption. He copied Céline’s signature use of ellipses between sentences — a device which had also figured in the write-up in Stern’s senior yearbook — and mimicked the ejaculations that became frequent in Céline’s later novels. For example, Guignol’s Band began with “Boom! Zoom! … It’s the big smashup!” The Fluke opens with the same tactic — “There; Crack! Sahk! Swick!! Swath!” Late in life, Stern admitted that he had been fascinated by Céline — the tiny Jewish invalid admiring the tall anti-semitic doctor — and had met him twice. “In London,” Stern said, “I showed Burroughs how he and Céline were like vital.”⁴⁹ So Céline was on Stern’s mind not long before he wrote The Fluke. “The only person that was really close to Burroughs in style was Céline. But he knew that only after I talked to him for like hours and hours and hours about it.” Of course, Burroughs was well aware of Céline’s style. He had gone with Ginsberg to meet the literary pariah on July 8, 1958. Really it was Stern who was close — or tried to be close — in style to Céline.

Stern intended to publish The Fluke. He claimed Faber and Faber would put it out in London. He shared it with someone who considered translating it into French — perhaps Stern, who had been educated in America, felt too alienated from his mother tongue to do the job himself. The Beat Hotel crew must have encouraged him to offer his text to Olympia Press, just then preparing Naked Lunch for publication, and to Big Table, the literary review that Rosenthal founded after resigning from the Chicago Review. Stern refused this last option. “Jack says he is not a member of The Beat Generation,” Burroughs wrote Ginsberg, “and does not wish to be so typed, which is why he hesitates to publish in Big Table.”⁵⁰ The refusal is consistent with the vaguely disparaging remarks about Beats in The Fluke, and it may also have been motivated by the knowledge that Rosenthal had previously rejected his work. In any event, Stern’s attitude annoyed Ginsberg. “Give Stern my regards,” Ginsberg replied. “This business of not wanting to be associated with the Beat scene?… You make it sound as if he thinks it’s too sordid.”⁵¹ The bloom had started to come off the rose. By September 1959, Ginsberg admitted to Burroughs that, in spite of promoting his work to Rosenthal, he “dug Stern but felt distance, especially after that argument over economics at table. Dont yet understand him.”⁵²

Why did The Fluke inspire Burroughs to dub Stern a “great writer?” It may have been the text’s similarity to Céline, whose work Burroughs admired, or its long digression on the effects of drugs. The two could “sit and talk junk by the hour,” so to Burroughs The Fluke may well have formed a written extension of conversations he already enjoyed. Like many people, Burroughs also had a tendency to overestimate the talents of his friends. The same praise he gave to Stern for being a great writer was lavished on Gysin for being a great artist. (Burroughs even wrote to his parents about his “friend Brion the Painter, certainly the greatest living apinter [sic] living and I do not make mistatkes [sic] inthe [sic] art world…”⁵³) Though Burroughs always maintained this high estimate of Gysin’s work, history has increasingly made it look like a mistake. Gysin is not considered the most important painter of the 1950s or, for that matter, of any decade since then. As for Stern, Burroughs did come to believe that dubbing him a “great writer” was a mistake. In 1981 he refused permission to publish his letters concerning Stern, declaring that he had been “taken in.”⁵⁴

Stern’s Influence on Naked Lunch

When Olympia Press shipped Naked Lunch in mid-summer 1959, the book contained the undisguised name of only one of Burroughs’ friends — not Ginsberg, who had received chunks of the book in letters; not Kerouac, who had coined the title and whose name appears in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” a text that would preface later editions of Naked Lunch; not Alan Ansen, who had helped with the typing; not Gysin, whose name would appear in the cut-up novels. A note on page 55 of the Olympia edition declared: “The Heavy Fluid concept I owe to Jacques Stern.” The acknowledgement was deleted from subsequent editions of Naked Lunch. In his book on the Beat Hotel, Barry Miles suggests that the deletion was “presumably at Stern’s request,” since Stern’s tendency was to shun the limelight. It is also quite possible that Irving Rosenthal, who edited the book for Grove Press, decided to drop Stern’s name. Rosenthal made numerous thoughtful emendations to the text, and he wasn’t impressed with Stern anyway. In either case, it was Burroughs who signed off on the deletion. It may have been an early indication of his feeling of having been “taken in.” It also had the effect of obscuring the subtle influence of Stern on his masterwork.

In crediting Stern with the Heavy Fluid concept, Burroughs seems to have given him a dubious honor. Heavy Fluid doesn’t amount to much of a concept. It appears twice in Naked Lunch — “drinkers of the Heavy Fluid” and “Heavy Fluid Addicts” — and seems to serve as a metaphor for heroin. In later books the term is also associated with coldness, a motif common in Stern’s writings. For example, in The Soft Machine, “the cold heavy fluid settled in his spine 70 tons per square inch” — which invokes the way heroin causes a “spine like a frozen hydraulic jack” in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness.” The phrase “heavy fluid” does not appear in The Fluke, although Stern describes how heroin brings on an “endless freeze that throws up a fluid a frothy black.” It does not require much conjecture to imagine how this might have become Heavy Fluid in those interminable discussions of junk.

Naked Lunch contains a sort of untitled sketch of Stern and, ironically, it portrays the Heavy Fluid Addict in the process of losing weight. On January 2, 1959, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg that he “saw Stern lose about seven pounds in ten minutes when he took a shot after being off a week.”⁵⁵ Stern was tiny — Ginsberg, no bodybuilder, carried “his 95 pounds” up the four flights to Burroughs’ room at the Beat Hotel — so this physical transformation must have been both dramatic and alarming.⁵⁶ Burroughs transposed this event into Naked Lunch twice. In “The Vigilante,” he resituates it to a hotel in New York: “I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other.” The scene is repeated in “Atrophied Preface”: “I saw it happen… ten pounds lost in ten minutes… standing there with the syringe in one hand… holding his pants up with the other.” This time the sketch was broken up with Célinian dots.

The “concept” and the portrait form circumstantial evidence of Stern’s presence in Naked Lunch. A more profound influence was indicated by Burroughs in a letter he wrote to Ginsberg on September 25, 1959. The summer had been eventful. Naked Lunch had been published, but Burroughs had also been arrested on suspicion of being an international drug trafficker. Worried about his upcoming trial, Burroughs blew part of his advance from Olympia Press on a codeine habit. He also met Ian Sommerville, who became his lover and, at the end of August, helped him kick the new habit. In the midst of all this, a change occurred in the relationship between Burroughs and Stern. In July Burroughs had written letters gushing about his friend. In September he expressed a change of heart:

I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again. Don’t misunderstand. I mean he probably does not want to see me, for reasons will appear in next book and in present book as well. The end of Naked Lunch is addressed to Jack, as he must know.⁵⁷

Chunks of Naked Lunch had been addressed to Ginsberg in the form of letters but the end, according to Burroughs, was addressed to Stern. But what was the end of this “endless novel” (as Ginsberg once described it)?

A few weeks later, Burroughs cited his book in another letter to Ginsberg: “‘The heat is off me from here on out,’ I have written, end Naked Lunch.“⁵⁸ This clearly refers to “Hauser and O’Brien.” There would have been good reason for Burroughs to consider this the end of Naked Lunch: it was the only section that he had deliberately placed in sequence. Years later, in the 1978 foreward to Maynard and Miles’ bibliography of his work, Burroughs reiterated that he had shifted “the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ section from the beginning to the end.” Burroughs had also revised “Hauser and O’Brien” in 1959.⁵⁹ He cut a bit of straight narrative (later to be published as the story “The Conspiracy”) and replaced it with new text including Lee’s realization that “the heat was off me from here on out.” Thus the last few paragraphs of “Hauser and O’Brien” may serve as the end of Naked Lunch in the additional sense that they were among the most recently composed parts of the book. Their freshness likely caused Burroughs, in his letter, to transpose that line into the present tense: “the heat was/is off me.”

Significantly, it is in the closing of “Hauser and O’Brien” that the second reference to Heavy Fluid occurs. In Naked Lunch, Stern’s “concept” terminates the description of Lee disappearing through a tear in the fabric of space and time:

I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso… Locked out… Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection… The Heat was off me from here on out… relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls… Far side of the world’s mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien… clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts.

Heavy Fluid ties this to Stern, but how might it have been addressed to him? The original ending of “Hauser and O’Brien” (aka “The Conspiracy”) had explained discursively that Lee, seeking “some key by which I could gain access to basic knowledge,” came to recognize the search as “sterile and misdirected.” In the revised ending (as published in Naked Lunch), Lee does not renounce the search so much as he seems to have been shut out of it, “locked out.” That this may have been a cryptic reference to Burroughs’ relationship with Stern is signalled by the word “key.” In Naked Lunch, Lee loses “a Key, a Point of Intersection.” Stern, in Burroughs’ view, had possessed such a key. “I continue to see visions and experience strange currents of energy,” he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, “but the Key — the one piece that could make it useable — Stern had part of it.”⁶⁰ In both Naked Lunch and the letter, the word is capitalized, like a proper name. The end of “Hauser and O’Brien” addresses Stern not to seduce, as was the case with the sections addressed to Ginsberg, but to bid farewell.

Of course, it is also possible that “the end of Naked Lunch” referred not to “Hauser and O’Brien” but to “Quick,” which is literally the last text in the Olympia Press edition. “Quick” was distilled from the “WORD” section Burroughs had included in earlier drafts of Naked Lunch. “WORD” cannot have been directed to Stern, since it was written before he and Burroughs met, but was there something about “Quick” — the way it was shaped, the way it embraced fragmentation, the way it survived the parts of “WORD” left out of the Olympia Press publication — that “addressed” Stern? James Grauerholz has suggested (in private communication) that “Quick” may indicate an attempt on Burroughs’ part to compensate for his disappointment in failing to form a mystic collaboration with Stern.

Stern’s abandonment of the notional collaborative masterwork, in whose creation William had expected Stern’s assistance, [may have] created a kind of grief — which William overcame by tasking himself to out-Stern Stern. Much like Neal Cassady (whose effusions are better-documented), Jack [Stern] would speed-rap like hysterically funny brilliant crazy. “WORD” is William trying to speed-rap.⁶¹

In retrospect, it is easy to read “Quick” as pointing forward to Burroughs’ use of the cut-up. But in the summer of 1959, prior to Brion Gysin’s discovery of the technique, it might well have represented something else: an attempt to ad lib like Stern. Or if Burroughs didn’t exactly have Stern in his ear while distilling “Quick” from “WORD,” he might well have been trying to make a literary use of their shared experiences in psychoanalysis, where free association was an accepted method for dredging up psychic truths, and in drugs, where disjointed raving could take on profound meaning.

“Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness”

It is not known exactly why Burroughs decided to dissociate himself from Stern in 1959. Perhaps it was Stern who had readdicted him to codeine. (Speaking of that summer’s habit, Gysin said Burroughs fell “back into bad habits through ‘good friends’ who helped him do so.”⁶²) This would be consistent with the stance Burroughs adopted in that September 25, 1959 letter to Ginsberg. Anxious about his upcoming trial, Burroughs insisted that he would distance himself from the petty criminals who had gotten him in trouble with the French police. “I don’t ever want to see or talk to any of these tiresome underworld jerks again.” In the very next paragraph he disavows Stern too: “I don’t think I will see Jack Stern again.” Stern may not have been an “underworld jerk,” but his unpredictable behavior cannot have been appealing to a man declaring that, from here on out, there would be “no more juvenile delinquency.”

It was with the same determinedly sober spirit that Burroughs wrote “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” that September. Though he was repudiating their relationship at just that time, Burroughs had Stern very much in mind. Impressionistic references in the text seem to echo their endless discussions of junk. “I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India” — possibly a tall tale by Stern. “Junkies always beef about The Cold as they call it” — an echo of The Fluke‘s invocation of “The yen.. The cold.. The twitching and kicking.. The cold..” It is also tempting to attribute the sudden profusion of mathematical and scientific language (“algebra of need,” for example, or references to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Werner Heisenberg) in “Deposition” to Stern. However, by 1959 there had not yet been any indication that Stern styled himself a mathematician. The Beats thought of him as crazy, rich, and literary. The more probable influence was Sommerville, who had genuine credentials in the maths and sciences.

Stern does seep into “Deposition” in another important way. The year before he died, Stern told Victor Bockris: “You know this whole thing about virus is falling in the… I wrote that in The Fluke before [Burroughs] wrote that in Soft Machine as a cut-up example.”⁶³ Stern’s memory might have been fallible, or he may have been referring to an early draft of The Soft Machine. Virus does not figure much in that book. However, it is critical to “Deposition,” where Burroughs elucidates his notion of the “junk virus.” This notion may well have originated in those endless discussions of junk. Viruses are a recurrent theme in The Fluke, and they interested its author for an obvious reason: polio is a virus. Lying in bed, Stern must often have reflected on the way in which the “virus power” had determined his life. The phrase “junk virus” does not appear in The Fluke, but Stern identifies addiction with virus:

Brutal! Man, Brutal! The routine is enough to paralyse your mind.. Slave? Much more than that.. You live IT! The junk lives you! Every little cell of your body burns heroin and is content only in doing that; forcing the whole of you to do likewise.. You eat it; sleep it; live for, or because, of it.. In fact, you are no more! It’s pure undiluted Virus!

As if to reinforce that he had Stern in mind while writing about the “junk virus” in “Deposition,” Burroughs echoed the language of that last paragraph of “Hauser and O’Brien.” There he had written about being “relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past.” In “Deposition,” he wrote that apomorphine “can relegate the junk virus to a land-locked past.”

That virus, like Heavy Fluid, was a concept Burroughs may have owed to Stern is further suggested by an unpublished text in the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library.⁶⁴ Using a green pen, Burroughs wrote “1959 Jack Stern said ‘Nobody will ever understand virus'” across the top of a sheet of typing paper. Beneath is an eight-line permutation that begins “Nobody will ever understand virus” and ends “Virus stand under body will ever know.” The same phrase appears in the compendium of first cut-up texts, Minutes to Go, published in 1960: “No body will ever understand virus… Old takings giving terrible ruled out con — Jack S?”⁶⁵ Given that the cut-ups Burroughs contributed to Minutes to Go concern viruses, polio, and cancer, it is tempting to see them as a symbolic affirmation of his break with Stern. Burroughs cut him off personally and cut him up textually. To be clear, however, Minutes to Go was not the “next book” that would give reasons Stern would no longer want to see Burroughs. When Burroughs wrote that, he had not yet learned about the cut-up method from Gysin.

A hint of the emotional dynamics underneath the shared intellectual interests is provided by an undated letter Stern sent Burroughs, likely at some point in 1959.⁶⁶ It refers to a misunderstanding that Stern attempted to patch up by sending Burroughs a check. For Stern this was an obvious way to make amends. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Corso had all previously allowed themselves to take advantage of his largesse. This time, however, Burroughs returned the check, prompting Stern to mail a self-indictment that recalls the “most humiliating” writing he was to submit to Interpol. In the letter, Stern admits that Burroughs “has achieved what I am incapable of; I envy him this power.” He acknowledges that his actions have caused him to lose “Dini + semblance of love; money + semblance of freedom; you + semblance of contact” — a less metaphorical way to express what Burroughs described as the loss of a key or point of intersection. Stern pleads with Burroughs to accept the check and invites him to stay at “our pad,” which is “missing a little mystic fluid.” “I learned a great deal from you,” Stern tells Burroughs, “probably more than from anyone else.” Burroughs had written Ginsberg the same thing about Stern: “I learned more from Jack than from anyone else I ever knew, except Brion.” The echo may indicate that Stern’s letter was reverberating in Burroughs’ memory by the time he wrote to Ginsberg.

How did Burroughs respond to Stern’s letter? By cutting it up. In the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library, there is an unpublished cut-up that stems from this letter.⁶⁷ It begins with “space for the mails,” words from the postscript; recontextualizes “mystic fluid” (“God knows they are you come this way its missing a mystic fluid..”); and ends with “you are power if I might,” a pregnant phrase capturing the envy to which Stern had confessed. In order to cut up the letter, however, Burroughs must have retyped it. The original was not destroyed — a fact suggesting that Burroughs attached significance to it, since he did not hesitate to cut up other incoming letters. This was not the last time Burroughs would cut up Stern either. In 1965 he told the Paris Review that Nova Express contained “Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven’t heard about, someone named Jack Stern.”⁶⁸ Not only did Burroughs continue to call Stern a writer, he included him in the company of the immortal bard and the poète maudit.

The Early 1960s

Burroughs’ 1959 pronouncement that he would no longer see Stern did not prove true. The relationship may have cooled, but the two formed part of what had become a literary jet set. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Corso visited Stern at his house in St Tropez in May 1961 then continued on to Tangier, where they doubtless told Burroughs about Stern’s latest antics. Stern would call Corso a “stupid loudmouth poet,” and Corso would reply with “you stinky cripple.” When the harangues subsided, the group recited poetry and talked about the literary scene. In addition to mutual friends, Burroughs’ work provided an excuse for he and Stern to keep in touch. On May 24, 1962 in Paris, they recorded excerpts from Burroughs’ cut-ups for the Harvard Poetry Room, alternating as they read texts that would ultimately appear in Nova Express.⁶⁹ In 1963, Burroughs sent Stern a copy of The Ticket That Exploded. Stern acknowledged the book with a postcard — “I’ve read it twice.” He also indicated that he was leaving London (“got busted”) for Spain.⁷⁰

In January 1964, while Stern was in Spain, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released. In later years Stern would tell friends that Terry Southern, who had worked on the screenplay, had based Dr Strangelove on him. Stern even claimed to Mark Meyer that he had written a thesis at Harvard about a “doomsday machine.”⁷¹ The idea has an immediate appeal — Dr Strangelove could easily be a caricature of the eccentric Stern, who would also tell friends that Adolf Hitler had survived the war and become a drug dealer in New York. Kubrick didn’t know Stern but Southern had been in and out of Paris in the 1950s, was friendly with Burroughs, and referred to Stern as a “freak” in a June, 1961 letter — demonstrating that he was well aware of the Stern legend before working on the screenplay in 1962.⁷²

Then again, Southern worked on the film for only six weeks. He never publicly claimed credit for the Strangelove character, who had already appeared in earlier drafts of the screenplay. Scholars contend that Dr Strangelove was an amalgam of the era’s prominent nuclear strategists and Dr No from the James Bond film.⁷³ Kubrick himself admitted that Dr Strangelove’s accent was “probably inspired” by the “Hungarian father of the H-bomb,” Edward Teller — more or less implying that the accent was the work of Peter Sellers, a gifted improviser. In any event, Stern was an unlikely source — with his American education, he spoke perfect English. It is also unlikely he inspired Dr Strangelove’s wheelchair for the simple reason that, by the early 1960s, Stern had not yet been confined to one. Ginsberg had referred to him carrying “one crutch aluminum”; Burroughs recalled him “on two crutches”; a photograph of Stern at St Tropez in May 1961 shows a crutch leaning on the wall beside him; and The Fluke contains several references to crutches but none to a wheelchair.⁷⁴ In what way can Stern have contributed to the character of Dr Strangelove? He didn’t have the accent, the wheelchair, or the prosthetic hand. He wasn’t a mathematician, let alone a nuclear strategist. Perhaps Southern went along with Stern’s claim among friends — but Southern was always vague about who did what on the screenplay. Kubrick was infuriated by the amount of credit that Southern allowed others to attribute to him.

Though Dr Strangelove brought no attention to Stern, the literary community continued to think of him as one of their own. In July 1964, Philip Lamantia wrote Burroughs asking for Stern’s address in Spain, mentioning that he wanted to include him in an anthology of “USA prose” he was compiling.⁷⁵ In August, Lamantia informed Burroughs that the anthology wasn’t going to happen. However, he was visiting Stern in Malaga:

Jacques found here quit drinking heavily. His young Spanish wife, intelligent and Jacques is currently planning some kind of writing, read me notes recently (I’ve been going thru Motif and projects a kind of news/report on current “El Cordobes” scandal⁷⁶

Significantly, Stern had not only remarried, he was continuing to write. He remained proud enough of the “Motif” poems to share them with Lamantia. Evidently he was also tempted to venture into Hemingway turf. The Fluke had already contained a passing reference to bullfighting: “Did you hear about Frey? gored by a young bull, too young..” Now Stern was writing about El Cordobes, the flamboyant matador who had been gored and nearly killed on live television that May.

Was all this writing an expression of literary ambition? Or just a dilettante’s way of combatting boredom? It is difficult to say what Stern’s intentions were. By this time, he had published nothing but the two poems in Corso’s anthology. In the contributor’s note, he had eschewed biographical detail, declaring only that he “prefers to remain unknown.” He had submitted two texts to the Chicago Review but had refused to participate in Big Table. Years later he would tell Bockris:

I spent 40 years of my life not publishing, not sending anything to publishers because I did not want to be in that act. I mean if I had really wanted to be in that circle, then let’s face it when I wrote The Fluke, and everyone said Oh what a great masterpiece, then I would have published it, but I did exactly the contrary.⁷⁷

Not quite. On June 21, 1965, The Fluke was published in an edition of 250 copies by Buchet-Chastel in Paris. A stolid firm still in business, Buchet-Chastel knew neither the highs nor the lows of an Olympia Press. Its 1965 catalogue contained minor works by major writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller — but it did not contain The Fluke, of which the publisher disavows any knowledge.⁷⁸ Without doubt, Buchet-Chastel did not publish The Fluke but rather arranged a vanity edition of it. A note on the copyright page indicates that The Fluke was published “aux dépens des amis de l’auteur” — at the expense of the author’s friends. A later friend of Stern thought that his sister Rosita might have arranged the publication.⁷⁹ Burroughs, however, approved the footnote in his correspondence declaring that The Fluke was “privately published by Stern.” The question of agency is important in that it sheds some light on Stern’s attitude toward his own writing. He took it seriously enough to do it and to share it with other writers. At the same time, he had the means to publish as many private editions as he would have liked, yet only this short run of The Fluke ever saw light of day. His psychiatrist in later life offered the explanation that Stern did not publish because he “was above all that.”⁸⁰ He did not need money and sought no more notoriety than that which circulated among his friends. James Grauerholz has suggested that “perhaps Jacques simply lacked the courage to risk real failure in the literary realm.”⁸¹

What is beyond doubt is that Burroughs was asked to write an introduction for The Fluke. In a gesture of support that belied his 1959 declaration not to see Stern, Burroughs provided three pages of text: a lightly cut-up introduction followed by two pages beginning “Recorders fix nature of absolute need” and containing fold-ins from The Fluke. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than Stern soliciting this introduction let alone being motivated to make the significant alterations that occurred between the manuscript and printed versions of Burroughs’ text. Two of these alterations stand out. First, Burroughs had used dashes for punctuation, as he often did in cut-up texts. In the published version of the introduction, however, the dashes were transformed into Célinian dots, thus forcing Burroughs’ text to resemble the style of The Fluke itself. It is a deeply symbolic change, retroactively appropriating the cut-up and causing it to resemble Stern’s own method, which he claimed to call “selective automation.”

Second, only the first page of Burroughs’ introduction was used. Perhaps Stern, recognizing that the two pages of fold-in were repurposed in the chapter “A Bad Move” in the recently published Nova Express, decided that he wasn’t going to use his own book as an advertisement for Burroughs’ signature writing techniques. (The two-page fold-in would also reappear in The Third Mind‘s “Technical Deposition of the Virus Power.”) In place of the fold-in, the published introduction to The Fluke was extended using what appears to be an excerpt from the letter Burroughs sent along with the texts. This may have been more complimentary to Stern — the excerpt references James Joyce, implying a flattering comparison — but it is disorienting to the reader because the letter had included instructions intended for an editor. The new introduction thus announces that it is “to be followed by the enclosed texts.” What enclosed texts? The reader, unaware that this referred to “Recorders fix nature of absolute need,” can only assume it refers to the text that follows — Stern’s novel. Not only did Stern retroactively appropriate the cut-up by transforming it with Célinian dots, he literally usurped its place in the published book.

Though Stern manipulated the texts for his own ends, Burroughs had also submitted a frankly ambivalent introduction. The manuscript shows that Burroughs originally put the entire first page in quote marks, positioning the introduction as something overheard, a quote, and thereby distancing himself from any endorsement. He also started writing “Jacques” and crossed it out for “Jack,” as though unsure whether he was writing of an author or a friend. In the printed edition, the quote marks were deleted and the first name restored to Jacques. The ambivalent message, however, remained. On one hand, Burroughs offered praise — “Jacques Stern is a writer” — that cautiously echoed his 1959 letters and their talk of Stern as a “great writer.” On the other hand, Burroughs asserted that the entire message of the book could be “reduced to two words.. STAY OUT..” Not only does this resonate with Burroughs’ sense of having been occluded from Stern’s space-time, it causes the introduction to warn the reader to stay out of the text that follows.

In the printed book, the introduction is completed by a reproduction of Burroughs’ signature — an unusual move suggesting that the publisher or, more probably, Stern himself was anxious to give The Fluke a seal of approval. On Burroughs’ typescript copy, which he must have received in 1964 or early 1965 in order to prepare his introduction, Stern made handwritten annotations that seem designed to appeal to the author of Naked Lunch.⁸² Two chapter titles were penned on the first pages of the typescript, calling the opening “I (Postface)” and the next part “II The Analysis.” To open the book with a “postface” would serve as an obvious counterpart to the “Atrophied Preface” that concludes Burroughs’ masterwork. “The Analysis” was a title that would have caused Burroughs to recall that he and Stern had shared an analyst as well as a general interest in psychoanalysis. Another annotation indicated that “the end + beginning are reversible.” Stern surely knew that Burroughs had reversed the beginning and ending of Naked Lunch by resituating the “Hauser and O’Brien” section.

At the very end of the typescript, after Stern had written “Finis” in blue ink, he added “Part I of MOTIF” and “Part II: The Quadrupeds.” Did the “Motif” poems form an extension of The Fluke? Was Stern planning an anthology of his texts? Was “The Quadrupeds” the title of the earlier prose that Stern had submitted to the Chicago Review? Or was it some other work? The lack of explanatory context may suggest that Stern assumed Burroughs understood these cryptic instructions. Or it may be that Burroughs understood them only as a maneuver, a way for Stern not to conclude but to occlude his text by showing the reader that, while there was more material, it was being withheld. “Stay out.”

With his large coterie of literary friends and acquaintances, Stern would have found plenty of takers for copies of his privately published book. The Fluke, however, did not make any appreciable impact on its recipients. It was not reviewed or blurbed anywhere. Later friends in possession of xerox copies confessed to being unable to read it. The edition itself seems to have all but disappeared. The first published mention of the book, occurring in a 1980 collection of verse and correspondence by Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, called Stern the “author of unpublished prose The Fluke.” It implies that Ginsberg did not even know about the privately published edition.⁸³ Not a single copy of the privately printed edition of The Fluke currently exists in a public institution. A collector in England has a copy purchased from a rare book dealer who happened to know what it was.⁸⁴ At the time of his death, Stern had no more than his own personal copy. “I wish I had a copy of The Fluke to give you,” Stern told Bockris during their interview the year before he died. The book’s title became a self-fulfilling prophecy: it was a statistical oddity, a rarity, a fluke.

The Late 1960s and Beyond

Though the book made no impact, Stern continued to circulate in the literary jet set. In 1967 Ian Sommerville wrote to Burroughs that he’d heard Stern had been in London for three months.⁸⁵ By 1970 Stern had moved into the Chelsea Hotel in New York. There he met Patti Smith, who would later dedicate her book Ha! Ha! Houdini to Stern, and grew close to the filmmaker and ethnomusicologist Harry Smith. Stern “thought Burroughs and Harry were the great geniuses of the age,” Ginsberg told an interviewer.⁸⁶ “He was making plans to have a magazine feature them, but was also very temperamental when he’d get drunk or high on coke or whatever.” Stern and Smith, a self-styled mystic, engaged in a “magic war,” experimenting with tarot and putting curses on each other. Meanwhile Stern would periodically throw tantrums and smash things in his hotel room. Artist Malcolm Mc Neill, who had been collaborating with Burroughs on Ah Pook Is Here, recalls in a forthcoming memoir that Stern could exact a toll on his environment. He liked to “mark stuff up” — a “kind of thinking aloud while studying books, manuscripts, artworks and the like” that included not just the margins of books but the pictures on hotel walls.⁸⁷

In addition to this “thinking aloud,” Stern continued to write. With Smith he collaborated on a work called Even Songs of Ecstasy, an assemblage in which poems by the two men alternate with tarot imagery. In 1982 Stern’s sister Rosita, who had become an artist, exhibited sketches inspired by one of Stern’s poems at the Gallery Charley Chevalier in Paris. The catalogue contains an illustration called “l’habitant de la chambre jaune,” a portrait of Stern seated in a wheelchair, as well as a poem titled “Disillusion.”⁸⁸ A self-absorbed work in which the usually hyper-articulate Stern meditates on stuttering and lapses of speech, the poem recalls his earlier writings in its continued preoccupation with coldness, “the tempting silence of a winter’s layer covering the bristly mats forgotten in a storm.” Stern may have continued to produce poetry in part because, as his mobility worsened, the compact format was physically more manageable for him to write or type.

In addition to poetry, Stern had become increasingly interested in film. Just as he had claimed to be the basis for the character of Dr Strangelove, he would let acquaintances think that he had been involved in some important way in the production of Chappaqua and Easy Rider. What is undeniable is that he collaborated with Terry Southern in the mid-1970s on two screenplays, neither of which would be filmed. One was for a porn film called Tryin’.⁸⁹ The other was for a film of Burroughs’ first book, Junky. Some sense of the misinformation and myth surrounding Stern can be gleaned from the description of that project in the memoir by Southern’s companion Gail Gerber:

Jacques Stern, a well-known physicist also known as Baron Rothschild, was a longtime friend of Burroughs. He had enough money to option the book and finance a first draft of a script even though they had a tense relationship as Stern blamed Burroughs for his not winning a Nobel Prize. Seems Burroughs used to let people think that Stern was on dope.⁹⁰

A well-known physicist? Nobel Prize? Evidently Stern’s self-portrayal as a mathematician had expanded to include physics. The story about the Nobel Prize had to be an inside joke. Gerber was not the only acquaintance under the impression that Stern had been actually been considered for the honor, in spite of the fact that he never published a single paper in mathematics. As for dope, Stern had long been a “master addict” of the same order as Burroughs. Southern recalled Stern giving himself speedballs through a hypodermic gizmo taped to his wrist. “Trying to sort out truth from fiction was what made being around [Stern] so enjoyable,” Mc Neill has remarked. “In the end the distinction was irrelevant. The telling was all that mattered. The fact that he was often on crystal meth only added to the wonder of it. Like the old speed joke goes: It was a great account but it was all written on one line.”⁹¹

What is true, however, is that the relationship between Burroughs and Stern was full of tension and ambiguity — before, during, and after the Junky film project. To observers it was clear that the two admired each other, yet they often maintained a wary distance. The complications are reflected in the evolution of the Junky screenplay itself.⁹² The title page of a draft dated May 25, 1977 reads “Screenplay by Terry Southern / Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs.” A subsequent draft dated July 28, 1977 reads “Screenplay by Terry Southern / Jacques Stern / and William S. Burroughs / Based on the novel, Junky, by William S. Burroughs and The Creation of Adam by Jacques Stern.” Stern was pushing to combine Junky with a work of his own, as though merging the texts could symbolically patch up the personal relationship. Burroughs objected strenuously:

Problems arising from scripts of Junky and The Creation of Adam can be very simply resolved once we realize that Junky and The Creation of Adam are not the same film and that any attempt to combine the two scripts can only result in confusion.⁹³

Legend has it that the would-be production burned through Stern’s money, much of which was wantonly snorted in the form of cocaine. That may have been true, but the underlying tensions between Stern and Burroughs can’t have helped. “If,” Southern would later tell an interviewer, Stern “had taken it more seriously as a real project instead of as a way to work out his relationship with Bill,” the film might have been realized.⁹⁴

Even the time, effort, and money wasted on the Junky film project did not sever the relationship between Stern and Burroughs. Sometimes Stern would visit the Bunker. He would give the local winos twenty dollars to carry him up the stairs then berate them to caustic but hilarious effect. Once, when he had been thrown out of his apartment during a cash shortage, Stern stayed at the Bunker, driving Burroughs to distraction with the unique way he could practically pace in his wheelchair. In 1983 the two corresponded about the possibility of creating a film out of The Place of Dead Roads.⁹⁵ Stewart Meyer, who was close to Burroughs in the 1970s and 1980s, recalls seeing an astonishing moment between the two old friends.⁹⁶ Burroughs, Southern, and Meyer were to give a reading at the 63rd Street YMCA in New York. Burroughs, already living in Kansas by this time, had flown in for the reading and other business. A leather-clad woman — one of the invariably beautiful “nurses” Stern hired — pushed him in his wheelchair to the reading. Burroughs, visibly moved to see Stern, leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Given that Burroughs was not wont to make public displays of affection, it was a pregnant moment, the kiss resonating both with fondness and with something darker, like a goodbye kiss.

It was Stern’s young friend Mark Meyer who would inform him of Burroughs’ death in 1997. Whereas Stern had taken the news of Southern’s death hard, requesting that Meyer leave him alone to digest it, he was calm when learning of Burroughs’ demise. Evidently he expected the news. Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs — the Beat Hotel crew was gone, and Stern must have constrained himself to look upon their deaths as abstractly as the mathematician he fancied himself to be. He accommodated himself to carrying on, watching films from his tremendous library of video cassettes. He loved Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, and for a while he thought Kurt Cobain might have the mojo to assume Burroughs’ mantle as a junky genius. Meyer even helped Stern get an email account, which he would use in conjunction with a voice transcription device because it was becoming increasingly difficult to type with his hands.

Stern died in a Manhattan hospital on June 15, 2002, less than two weeks after his 70th birthday. He was survived by a companion, by his sister, and by friends who accepted his eccentricities as the price of admission to his brilliance and generosity. Though he had long ago indicated in the contributor’s note to Corso’s anthology that he “prefers to remain unknown,” Stern was legend to a small circle of cognoscenti. His legacy lay in the vivid impression he left in their memories, the background influence he exerted on their creative works, and the mostly unpublished writings he shared with them. In a conversation tape-recorded by Stewart Meyer, Stern once explained what distinguished his writing:

Every motherfucker in the world thinks he’s a writer. There are very few writers, very few, man, that you can count on. I don’t consider myself a writer, but I’m a hell of a lot better than 95% of the writers I know. Cause they’re not writers, they’re basically into what I call typing. I can’t type shit, man. I cannot type with this hand. I can’t play the piano either. Isn’t that a fuckin’ shame? […] There are many things I cannot do. […] I literally had to replace living by thinking, and then thinking made me live again.⁹⁷

Stern wrote not to become rich, which he already was, nor to become famous, which he did not desire. It would be easy to say that he wrote to live, but the connection may have been even more profound. His life itself became a sort of writing. What he could not expend or express in physical mobility burst out into another dimension, an intellectual mobility that careened from genius to deceit, from abstraction to abuse. Whereas a novelist puts flights of fancy into his work, Stern put them into his life. With his tall tales and disregard for what Kant called “practical reason,” Stern transformed his very existence into an absurdist fiction — he was, as many remarked, a character straight out of Naked Lunch.

References

Note re Jacques Stern Items in the Burroughs Papers

The finding aid to the Burroughs Papers at the New York Public Library includes several inaccuracies in items related to Jacques Stern.

Box 13, Folder 25, Item 3 — The typescript of The Fluke is not missing pages 2 and 4, as the finding aid indicates. Page 2 is missing but page 4 is misnumbered 5, and the pagination error carries through the rest of the typescript. Additionally, there are two copies of page 21.

Box 84, Folder 4 — This folder contains “Postcards from Unknown Correspondents” including one from “Jacques, Jan 19, n.y.” The author was Jacques Stern and the postmark indicates the card was mailed in 1963.

Box 87, Folder 3, Item 47 — “Jock Stern. Autograph letter signed, n.d.” This item is from Jock Livingston, the filmmaker, as is clear from internal evidence.

Box 87, Folder 4, Item 79 — “Jaques ? Autograph letter signed, n.d.” This letter is from Jacques Stern and likely dates from 1959. See note below for justification of the date.

Box 88, Folder 3, Item 44 — “Jacques Stern. 23 June 1964.” This letter from Burroughs is addressed to Jock Livingston, not Jacques Stern, as is clear from internal evidence.

Box 88 Folder 7, Item 97 — “Jacques Stern, May 28, 1965.” This letter from Burroughs is addressed to Jock Livingston, not Jacques Stern, as is clear from internal evidence.

Endnotes

1. William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

2. Burroughs to Ginsberg, late July 1959, Letters.

3. Box 7, Folder 64, Item 16. “Cut-Up With Jacques Stern’s Telegram to The Captain Barrie Of His Alleged Yacht.” Papers.

4. Le Mémorial de Lyon en 1793: vie, mort et famille des victimes lyonnaises de la Révolution, Lyon, Editions lyonnaises d’art et d’histoire, 1986.

5. See the Social Security Death Index record for Jacques Loup Stern.

6. Jacques Leon Stern biography at the web site of the Assemblée Nationale. See also the biography at Wikipedia.

7. Information provided by the Woodberry Forest School. Email, July 8, 2010.

8. “Milestones,” Time Magazine, Jan 2, 1950.

9. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

10. Stern does not appear in any of the Harvard yearbooks for 1949-1953. His Harvard student records are not yet available to general researchers.

11. Stern’s will: “Attendu que Jacques Léon Stern de nationalité américaine est décédé à New York, où il était domicilié le 21 décembre 1949, laissant sa veuve née Mathilde Simone de Leusse, séparée de bien, de nationalité française et comme héritiers Rosita-Georgette Marie-Thérèse Stern, epouse de Jacques Georges Dewez et Jacques Loup Stern tous deux enfants légitimes nés de son union, de nationalité française.” Revue critique de droit international privé, Volume 40, 1951.

12. “Emily Marshall to Wed,” New York Times, March 1, 1952.

13. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, reproduced in Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, New York, Da Capo Press, 2008.

14. Burroughs to Ginsberg, July 24, 1958, Letters.

15. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. “Jacques Stern, I haven’t explained, Gregory heard of him at Harvard, a rich young Frenchman — crutches, 95lb, polio — had read On Road, Gasoline, Howl, Junkie (not realizing the latter was Bill).”

16. Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, Feb 24, 1958, reproduced in Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters, 1947 – 1980, Gay Sunshine Press, 1980.

17. LO, p 293.

18. Gregory Corso to Gary Snyder, August 12, 1958, reproduced in Bill Morgan, ed., An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso, New Directions, 2003.

19. Corso to Ginsberg, circa Oct 8, 1958, in Accidental Autobiography: “don’t know how to get money but I may find some way; I’m afraid to ask Stern, I need an arrogance to ask, and he’s become a friend, and he even thinks I’m conning him, but knows that it’s a natural part of me, and that it’s inherent in me, and that I don’t mean too [sic]; nor do I.”

20. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

21. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

22. BH, p 117.

23. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

24. Bockris.

25. Burroughs to Paul Bowles, July 20, 1958, Letters.

26. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

27. Ginsberg to Orlovsky, Feb 24, 1958, in Straight Hearts’ Delight.

28. LO p 294.

29. LO p 295.

30. Box 79, Folder 4, Item 20. Letter from Alan Ansen to Burroughs, June 19, 1959. Papers.

31. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Late July 1959, Letters.

32. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Sept 25, 1959, Letters.

33. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

34. Burroughs and Corso to Ginsberg, Sept 28 1958, Letters.

35. Corso to Ginsberg, Sept 30 1958, in An Accidental Autobiography.

36. Corso to Ginsberg, circa 8 Oct 1958, in An Accidental Autobiography.

37. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

38. Significantly, Stern mentions Perse (aka St. Leger) in the same few sentences in which he refers to the Beat Hotel: “Gît-le-Coeur, I have heard mentioned.. So has St. Leger, for he wrote about it.. So have three fuzzy friends of mine who once vegetated there..”

39. Irving Rosenthal to Jacques Loup Stern, September 17, 1958. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

40. Stern to Rosenthal, October 7, 1958. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

41. Box 62, Folder 11, Item 54. Papers.

42. Rosenthal to Burroughs, November 24, 1958. Box 80, Folder 15, Item 6. Papers.

43. Ray Roberts to Stern, May 5, 1959. The Chicago Review Records, University of Chicago, Box 17, Folder 1.

44. Burroughs to Ginsberg, April 21, 1959, Letters.

45. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

46. Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

47. According to information provided by Oliver Harris (Email, Oct 9, 2010), James Grauerholz reviewed the note with Burroughs and indicated that he “orally re-confirms” it.

48. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

49. Bockris.

50. Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 8, 1959, Letters.

51. Ginsberg to Burroughs, undated. Box 82, Folder 2, Item 15. Papers. The finding aid dates this letter as “probably from Winter 59/60.” However, it is clearly a response to Burroughs’ letter of June 8, so the letter likely dates from mid-to-late June 1959. Ginsberg’s reply reads in full:

Give Stern my regards. This business of not wanting to be associated with the Beat scene? Unless he has something really beyond it? Meanwhile dispite [sic] all the bullshit, there is something basically very sympathetic & honest, open, in what we all have been doing, that’s become known as beat, so that his disassociation from it seemed unnecessary, unnecessarily a put down. Not that it’s all that much of a formal party line. You make it sound as if he thinks it’s too sordid. or has too sordid a connotation now. but in the long run I think our general good nature will seem, will be seen. But Big Table’s not categorizable as just low Beat except by what gregory calls “wicked Opinion.” Oh, well, I don’t know why, I was depressed by what I paran oiaclally [sic] interpreted was his attitude, from your p.s.

52. Ginsberg to Burroughs, Sept 29, 1959. Box 82, Folder 1, Item 7. Papers.

53. Burroughs to his parents, undated letter, Box 58, Folder 23, Item 23. Papers.

54. William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Box 33, Folder 299.

55. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Jan 2, 1959, Letters.

56. Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

57. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Sept 25, 1959, Letters.

58. Burroughs to Ginsberg, Oct 7, 1959, Letters.

59. According to the research of Oliver Harris, “Hauser and O’Brien” was composed in 1955 then revised in 1959. See Oliver Harris, “From Dr Mabuse to Doc Benway: The Myths and Manuscripts of Naked Lunch,” RealityStudio, Oct 26, 2010.

60. Burroughs to Ginsberg, May 18, 1959, Letters.

61. James Grauerholz, Email, March 21, 2011.

62. Brion Gysin, Terry Wilson, Here to Go: Planet R-101, London, Quartet Books, 1985, p 239.

63. Bockris.

64. Box 62, Folder 11, Item 53. Papers.

65. Burroughs, Minutes to Go, Two Cities Editions, 1960, p 59.

66. Jacques Stern to William Burroughs, undated, 2 pages. Box 87, Folder 04, Item 79. Papers. In the finding aid to the Burroughs Papers, the letter is attributed only to “Jacques,” but internal evidence (e.g. the reference to Stern’s wife Dini) indicates the author is Stern. The letter cannot have been written before late October 1958, since it refers to the Mansfield Street apartment that Burroughs and Stern shared in London after their October apomorphine cure. Because Burroughs did not cash the check enclosed with the letter, he may have received it after the publication of Naked Lunch, when he had money in the bank owing to advances from Olympia Press. The echo between the letter and Burroughs’ letter to Ginsberg of September 25, 1959 could indicate that Burroughs had received it around that time. That Burroughs subjected the letter to the cut-up technique, which Gysin showed him on October 1, 1959, suggests it may have been fresh in his mind around that time.

67. Box 07, Folder 63, Item 15. Papers.

68. Conrad Knickerbocker, “The Art of Fiction #36: William S. Burroughs,” Paris Review, 1965.

69. Recorded by Sean Sweeney for the Poetry Room in Paris on May 24, 1962. Reel-to-reel tape held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

70. Stern to Burroughs, Jan 19, 1963. Box 84, Folder 04. Papers.

71. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

72. Terry Southern to Mason Hoffenberg, June 7, 1961: “it looks as if you are setting up a billion dollar staff there in Paris, France (how about Jacques Stern for ‘Freak Shoot-Off Editor’? HAW HAW!)” Reproduced in Nile Southern, The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy, Arcade Publishing, p 164.

73. A lengthy analysis of the sources for the Dr Strangelove character is presented by Peter Daniel Smith in Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, St Martin’s Press, p 422 ff.

74. “One crutch aluminum”: Ginsberg to Kerouac, June 26, 1958, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. “On two crutches”: BH, p 117. Photograph of Jacques Stern in St Tropez: Allen Ginsberg, “Jacques Stern in St Tropez 1961,” reproduced at allenginsberg.org.

75. Philip Lamantia to Burroughs, July 12, 1964. Box 79, Folder 27, Item 39. Papers.

76. Lamantia to Burroughs, August 10, 1964. Fox 79, Folder 27, Item 40. Papers.

77. Bockris.

78. Email from Paul Guillard, 13 April 2010. “Je suis au regret de vous dire que nous n’avons aucune référence à ce livre dans nos archives. Peut-être y a-t-il erreur sur la maison d’édition?”

79. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27, 2010.

80. Interview with Dr Joseph Gross, July 1, 2010.

81. James Grauerholz, Email, March 18, 2011.

82. Box 13, Folder 25, Item 3, Papers.

83. Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight, footnote.

84. Emails from collector.

85. Ian Sommerville to William S. Burroughs, June 13, 1967. Box 80, Folder 20, Item 89. Papers.

86. Allen Ginsberg, Interview with Paola Igliori, 24 September 1995.

87. Malcolm Mc Neill, Observed while Falling, forthcoming memoir of the artist’s relationship with Burroughs.

88. Rosita Dewez, Poème de Jacques Stern, Galerie Charley Chevalier, Paris, 1982.

89. Tryin’: Manuscript in possession of Mark Meyer. Interview with Mark Meyer, April 27 2010.

90. Gail Gerber with Tom Lisanti, Trippin’ with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember, McFarland, 2009.

91. Malcolm Mc Neill, Email, October 4, 2010.

92. Screenplay drafts: Terry Southern Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

93. Report dated May 11, 1977 with ANS from “JAS” to Terry Southern. Terry Southern Papers.

94. “Interview with a Grand Guy,” revised version of an interview with Terry Southern published in Patrick McGilligan, ed., Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, University of California Press, 1966.

95. Film of Place of Dead Roads: William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Box 20, Folder 160.

96. Interview with Stewart Meyer, May 13, 2010.

97. Recording provided by Stewart Meyer.

Including the Complete Text of The Fluke

In the summer of 1959, with Olympia Press about to publish the first edition of Naked Lunch in Paris, William Burroughs was raving about the work of another writer. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso — they all paled, Burroughs declared, in comparison with an unknown who was possibly “the greatest writer of our time.” He was rich and eccentric, this newcomer. He was a cripple and a junky. He was capable of great generosity and abusive tantrums. He could be unnervingly eloquent and equally incomprehensible. Burroughs took to calling him “the mad baron.”

His name was Jacques Stern. Corso introduced him to Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, and he went on to become legend among an international group of cognoscenti. But what became of Stern and The Fluke, the novel that elicited such praise from Burroughs? Why did this book never see light of day? (Or did it?)

Drawing on more than a year of research that includes personal interviews and unpublished material from the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library, RealityStudio attempts to answer these and other questions about Jacques Stern. RealityStudio is especially pleased to announce that it is making available, for the first time ever, the complete text of The Fluke, along with William Burroughs’ introduction. In addition, RealityStudio is publishing other exclusive material by and about “the mad baron.”

The Fluke

• William Burroughs, Jacques Stern, and The Fluke
• William Burroughs’ Introduction to The Fluke
• Jacques Stern, The Fluke

Text and Audio by and about Jacques Stern

• Jacques Stern, Poems
• Stewart Meyer, Memory Chips (Excerpt)
• Jacques Stern in Conversation with Stewart Meyer (mp3)
• Jaques Stern and William Burroughs Reading Cut-Ups in Paris, May 1962
  • Introduction to Jacques Stern Reading “Know the Answer” (mp3)
  • Jacques Stern Reading “Know the Answer” (mp3)
  • William Burroughs and Jacques Stern Reading “The Biologic Police” (mp3)

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to James Grauerholz, Dr Joseph Gross, Stewart Meyer, Mark Meyer, Oliver Harris, Jan Herman, Carl Weissner, Victor Bockris, Malcolm Mc Neill, Allan Bradbury, and Jed Birmingham.

Permissions

William Burroughs’ introduction to The Fluke: © 1965 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs, used with the permission of The Wylie Agency.

Scans of William Burroughs’ manuscript introduction to The Fluke: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Stewart Meyer’s Memory Chips: Excerpt provided by the author, © 2011 by Stewart Meyer.

Audio of Jacques Stern and William Burroughs reading cut-ups in Paris: © 1961, 1966 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs, used with the permission of The Wylie Agency. Recorded by Sean Sweeney for the Poetry Room in Paris on May 24, 1962. MP3s provided by the Woodberry Poetry Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University. These three mp3s are excerpted from an hour-long reading that includes nine total tracks.

Jacques Stern in Conversation with Stewart Meyer: Excerpted from a longer recorded provided by Stewart Meyer. © 2011 by Stewart Meyer.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death in Paris

Death in Paris

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

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

Joy Division was given its first opportunity to play outside the United Kingdom on 16 October 1979. That alone would have distinguished the gig for the band, but of special interest to Curtis and his mates was the fact that they would be opening for Burroughs. The avant-garde theater troupe Plan K, which had made a specialty of interpreting Burroughs’ work, were founding a performance space in a former sugar refinery in Brussels, Belgium. The opening was conceived as a multimedia spectacle. Films were to be screened — among others, Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (starring Mick Jagger) and Burroughs’ own experiments with Antony Balch. The Plan K theater troupe were to perform “23 Skidoo.” Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire were to give “rock” concerts. And Burroughs and Brion Gysin were to read from their recently published book, The Third Mind.

Before the evening’s events, Burroughs and Joy Division gave separate interviews to the culture magazine En Attendant. Graciously provided to RealityStudio by the interviewer and the organizer of the Plan K opening, Michel Duval, these have been translated from the French and are reproduced here for the first time since their publication in November 1979. You can read the French original or the English translation of Duval’s interview with Joy Division, as well as the French original or the English translation of Duval’s interview with William Burroughs.

After Burroughs’ reading brought the opening of Plan K to its climax, Curtis attempted to introduce himself to his literary idol. This meeting, like so many things about both Curtis and Burroughs, has already become legend — which is another way of saying that its factual basis may have receded into darkness. If you search around the internet, you’ll see sites describing the encounter in terms like this: “Unfortunately when Ian went up to talk to him the author told Ian to get lost.” And this: “Burroughs probably was tired and bored with the concerts and when Ian went up to talk with him the author told Ian to get lost. Ian got lost immediately, not a little hurt by the rebuff.” Chris Ott’s book Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures repeats the story, and Mark Johnson’s book An Ideal for Living asserts that Burroughs refused to speak to Curtis.

To anyone familiar with Burroughs, the thought of him telling a fan to get lost is perplexing. Burroughs tended to be unfailingly courteous, even a touch “old world” in his manners. Typically he was generous with fans and admirers, particularly with young men as handsome as Ian Curtis. What could have prompted such an exchange? Was Curtis insulting? Burroughs in a bad mood? Were there mitigating circumstances?

RealityStudio began doing research on Joy Division as an offshoot of its work on Savoy Books, aka David Britton and Michael Butterworth. It was a natural progression: both the band and the writers hail from Manchester; both drew inspiration from literary and counter-cultural sources; both toyed with Nazi symbolism (or rather, with the public’s notions of Nazi symbolism); and in fact they intersected in Savoy’s bookshops, where young Ian Curtis hung out and where he may well have discovered Burroughs for himself.

Taken together, this research forms a dossier that paints the encounter of Burroughs and Curtis in a more complicated light. What follows are primary documents — accounts, recollections, and interviews that tell the story. Editorial comments by RealityStudio, which have been kept to a minimum, are set [in brackets.]

Ian Curtis, Reader

Image from Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film Control showing a fictionalized vision of Ian Curtis’ bookshelf. Clearly visible are William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Ah Pook Is Here, as well as books by J.G. Ballard (Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition) and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

Sitting down to drink I ask Ian about his liking for the work of J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs. I discover that he has read a good selection of both authors’ works including Crash (my personal favourite), Terminal Beach, Atrocity Exhibition and High Rise by Ballard and Soft Machine, Naked Lunch and Wild Boys by Burroughs. He also has a small booklet by Burroughs called APO-33 which he happens to have with him. I glanced through it and found it very interesting. I wonder if any of the books have influenced Ian’s lyrics.

“Well, subconsciously I suppose some things must stick but I’m not influenced consciously by them.”

— Ian Curtis, 8 January 1980, in Alan Hempsell, “A Day Out With Joy Division,” Extro, Vol.2/No.5.

Then there were the shops run by David Britton and Mike Butterworth: House on the Borderland, Orbit in Shudehill and Bookchain in Peter Street, just down the road from the site of the Peterloo massacre. As Butterworth recalls, all three “were modelled on two London bookshops of the period, Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in Berwick Street, Soho — which sold comics, sci-fi, drug-related stuff, posters, etc — and a chain called Popular Books”.

With his friend Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis regularly visited House on the Borderland. Butterworth remembers them as “disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They probably saw it as a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the early 70s.”

“They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Michael Moorcock, which was promoting Burroughs and Ballard. My friendship with Ian started around 1979: we talked Burroughs, Burroughs, Burroughs. At the bookshops he would have been exposed to an extremely wide range of eclectic and weird writers and music.”

Dropping out of school at 17, Curtis was an autodidact who took his cues from the pop culture of the time. In 1974, David Bowie was interviewed with William Burroughs in Rolling Stone. The actual chat was fairly non-eventful, but it made the link explicit — especially when Bowie was seen fiddling with cut-ups in Alan Yentob’s “Cracked Actor” documentary — and Burroughs would cast a major shadow over British punk and post-punk.

— Jon Savage, “Controlled Chaos,” The Guardian, 10 May 2008

Ian and Steve came in [to Savoy’s House on the Borderland bookshop] as schoolboys, on Saturdays.

The attitude radiating from the shop was fuck everybody in authority, and that’s what they responded to. The shop played loud rock’n’roll over the speakers which sounded out into the street years before other shops were doing the same kind of thing. And I mean loud.

After about six months or so, they both got expelled from school and then began hanging around the shop during the weekdays as well. They’d go out for sandwiches and hot teas. Sometimes they would accompany David [Britton] to wholesalers like Abel Heywoods, just around the corner, and help carry stock back to the shop, and then help stock the shelves.

What was he interested in?

Ian was interested in counter-culture and science fiction. David remembers them being enthusiasts about Michael Moorcock, whose hard-edged fantasy writing and lifestyle was a great influence, very rock’n’roll. Ian liked Jerry Cornelius and The Dancers at the End of Time. Steve was more into Elric and Hakkmoon, he thinks.

— Michael Butterworth, Email, April 2008

I’m afraid Joy Division never meant anything to me (unlike Mike [Butterworth], who sees something of worth in them). My cronies and I thought it was “crying shit in your underpants” music. Student angst. A glib dismissal, I knew at the time, but it was a comfort to think like that. Despite what [Jon] Savage says I’m pretty sure that Ian wasn’t much of a reader. A skimmer at best, but with the ability to read the right stuff and quote from it. For a Macclesfield lad, quite an achievement, I suppose. Of course, 30 years on from my meetings with him, the world has put him in a different perspective. Fair enough. JD have stood the test of time and have proved to be something far more substantial than I at first perceived. But can one be wrong, and also be right? Is it “Transmission” or “Papa Oom Mow Mow“? But at least it’s better to have JD representing Manchester music than Freddie and the Dreamers.

— David Britton, Email, 13 May 2008

Burroughs in 1979: Junky (Again)

[The late 1970s were a strange period in Burroughs’ life. He had done innovative work exploring the intersection of word and image with collaborators such as Brion Gysin (The Third Mind), Malcolm Mc Neill (Ah Pook Is Here), and Bob Gale (The Book of Breeething), but the publication of these works was compromised by financial obstacles. He was greatly worried about his son Billy, who had undergone a life-threatening liver transplant. At the same time, Burroughs had become the gray eminence of the music scene. A month before the Plan K gig, he was going to Broadway to see Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with Frank Zappa. Plans were being made for a musical of Naked Lunch.

Ironically, with all the scenesters hanging about and with his partner James Grauerholz away in Kansas, “Burroughs,” noted biographer Ted Morgan, “started chipping.” For the first time since he had returned to New York in 1974, Burroughs was a junky — again.]

Plan K

Situated on the Rue de Manchester in the Molenbeek district, Plan K was a labyrinthine former refinery built in the 1850s, six storeys high and adding up to 4,300 square metres… Disused by 1979, the industrial landmark was leased and renovated by choreographer Frédéric Flamand and his avant-garde dance troupe (called Plan K), seduced by the cloistered, industrial, pre-Hacienda architecture and the potential of 22 large rooms as a multimedia performance space. With the object of mixing diverse audiences and promoting new synergies, Flamand sought to combine dance, theatre, music and audiovisual art, so that the Plan K complex — like Brussels itself — would become an international cultural crossroads…

For several years Plan K succeeded famously, the place to be and the place to see. Many early musical bookings at Plan K were arranged by urbane journalist / economist Michel Duval together with Annik Honoré, then working as a bilingual secretary at the Belgian Embassy in London. Annik’s relationship with Joy Division lead to the rising Factory band being booked to appear at the formal Plan K opening on 16 October 1979. This more than lived up to Flamand”s multimedia ambition, and offered music, dance, film and readings across several consecutive nights. The focal point was celebrated addict and avant-garde writer William S. Burroughs, author of Junkie, Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, as well as The Third Mind, a collaboration with fellow cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin. Gysin also appeared on the bill, as did Kathy Acker, along with sundry other readings and lectures. Films included the infamous 1970 Mick Jagger vehicle Performance and two Burroughs shorts by Antony Balch, while the Plan K dance troupe performed a piece called 23 Skidoo. Although the “rock concert” featuring Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire was billed second from bottom on the Marc Borgers-designed poster, healthy import sales of Unknown Pleasures and the Cabs’ several singles on Rough Trade ensured a healthy audience of two or three hundred in the ground floor concert hall.

— A Factory Night (Once Again), CD Liner Notes

Video still of Joy Division performing at Plan K, 16 October 1979

I organised the famous Plan K gig and I did interviews of Burroughs and Joy Division. The interviews took place at Plan K hours before the event. Burroughs was very affable and courteous… I remember that both Ian and Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager — ed.] were into Burroughs and also obviously the Cabs [Cabaret Voltaire] for the “cut up.” I remember very clearly Ian falling in the arms of William Burroughs at the end of the show. Whether they spoke really I don’t know.

— Michel Duval, Email, 22 April 2008

Joy Division “capitalized on the chance to play at Plan K in Brussels on October 16th, with the more experimental Cabaret Voltaire, both groups supporting a reading from idolized American author and poet William S. Burroughs. (Ian was rebuffed by Burroughs, which hit him hard as he was a great fan.) At Plan K, Ian either met or reacquainted himself with Annik Honoré…”

— Chris Ott, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures

I have no memory of seeing William Burroughs in Brussels or Ian telling me anything about it later… At the time I was living in London and I came back to Brussels for a very short time for the concert (and I remember on top of it having some kind of flu). Although I had known Ian for a few months, we were not going out together yet (this was on 26th October so after the concert in Brussels) and therefore did not spend all the time with them (and I stayed at my parents).

— Annik Honoré, Email, 21 April 2008

Philippe Carly, Ian Curtis at Plan K, 16 October 1979

Someone contacted me from some email group about something that Cabaret did when we played in Europe with Joy Division at a festival on the outskirts of Brussels called the Plan K, where in fact I actually met William Burroughs. It was a big festival on about three floors and was like this 60s happening — it was great. It was an old sugar beet plant: there was a stage on one floor, they were showing some Brion Gysin films, all sorts of things, performers, dance, readings — Brion Gysin and William Burroughs were on one floor just reading. Cabaret Voltaire were playing downstairs so we went over in a big furniture van.

— Chris Watson (Cabaret Voltaire), Invisible Jukebox: Chris Watson

The audience was very diverse: a serious group of intellectuals (French, Belgian, and American), a few posers, five tourists, more than three hundred rock fans. When Cabaret Voltaire, originally from Sheffield, went onstage at around 10:30 PM, the sound system wasn’t right and the sound coming out of the speakers was oversaturated…

Joy Division (from Manchester) made up for it. Though they were capable of even better, their set was incomparable. Those who have never seen Ian Curtis, the singer, on stage can only imagine a sort of epileptic with a mad, hallucinatory gaze, working his arms like a broken windmill and mouthing his lyrics in a bleak but exasperated tone.

— Gilles Verlant, “Cabaret Voltaire et Joy Division au Plan K. à Bruxelles (16 octobre 1979)”

Ian Curtis Meets William Burroughs

On October 16 the group journeyed on their own to Brussels Raffinerie du Plan K, an old sugar refinery converted into an arts centre. The evening culminated in a reading by beat legends William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their collaboration The Third Mind. “To be honest, we all liked that kind of stuff, but we didn’t go on about it,” says [Stephen] Morris. “We didn’t go around in black or wearing sunglasses inside. But occasionally [Ian Curtis] would reveal that part of himself. I remember he went smooching over to Burroughs. We were like, “Great, we’ve got a crate of double-dead-strong beer, can we get another?” He was off getting his book signed.

— Pat Gilbert, “The Outsider,” Mojo Magazine, April 2005

The next day we go to the gig and Ian was really made up that Burroughs was on, reading, and Ian’s a big fan. He wanted to tell Burroughs what a great person he thought he was. Ian went over and then somehow hoped that Burroughs might know something about him or his lyrics, but he just blanked him really, as if he was anybody in the crowd.

— Terry Mason, quoted in Mick Middles and Lindsay Reade, Torn Apart: The Life of Ian Curtis (London: Omnibus Press, 2006)

In Belgium we did this t.v. show, it was a compilation of various things. There was us, Cabaret Voltaire and William Burroughs who was reading from his new book The Third Mind. Afterwards we got introduced to him and I asked if he had any spare [books] but he hadn’t. As well as that there was these guys on the show making nasty noises on violins and shouting every so often, really awful.

— Ian Curtis, 8 January 1980, in Alan Hempsell, “A Day Out With Joy Division,” Extro, Vol.2/No.5.

Gerard Pas, William Burroughs reading at Raffinerie de Plan K. Brussels, Belgium, 1979

I think that the Burroughs intervention was done in the upstairs space at Plan K. Je n’en ai pas de souvenirs ou alors celui d’un petit monsieur (qui me semblait très vieux) dans un coin qui lisait des choses dans un brouhaha avec un mauvais éclairage bleu et blanc. [I only recall a small man (who seemed very old) in a corner reading in the midst of a brouhaha poorly lit by blue and white lights.] I remember the Joy division gig and I found that very hard (I know it is not politicaly correct to say that now). I didn’t like them live. But Cabaret Voltaire was incredible.

— Stephan Barbery (Digital Dance), Email, 8 May 2008

On arriving at Raffinerie de Plan K, I was impressed at the size of this huge hall, which was previously a sugar refinery. It was filled to capacity with some 10,000 people [more probably 300 — ed.] all there for poetry and literature. I was overwhelmed yet again that such an interest even existed and that these readings could be such a big draw. I remember coming in the back entrance and be[ing] escorted in the cavernous underbelly of the building to a waiting room filled with notable writers from around the world. There was Steve Lacy, Joy Division, Kathy Acker, Cabaret Voltaire and many more…

It came time for Bill to enter the hall. Bill sat down at the table as he often did when reading publicly with his manuscripts open before him as though it was his desk at work or wherever he wrote. Sitting there like “the chairman of the board,” he began to read from The Third Mind his collaboration with Brion Gysin, Viking, New York, 1978…

The formalities of the readings and the hoopla ended but we didn’t stay long to party and celebrate each other’s laurels with pats on the back. No Bill, [Soyo] Benn [Posset] and I high-tailed it back to the hotel so that we could expedite our journey back to Amsterdam and tame the monkey on our back. No cold shivers or shakes as Bill’s formidable knowledge of pharmacology had already tempered that back at the drug store. Yet we all knew where the real party was and it wasn’t here in Belgium, it was in the den of an opiate-induced hallucination and calmed by the thrilling rush of the heroin cursing through our veins. Amsterdam beckoned and we answered its clarion call by parting our hosts, friends, and celebrations with sudden dispatch. At first light I got the car, went by Le Plan K to pick up Bill’s cheque, and then we drove through the Belgium countryside with urgent speed, hastened like a galloping horse to be near our sweetheart the white nurse, or the black tootsie roll. Stopping along the way only to relieve ourselves and eat something — Bill was good that way he always took care of his body even as a junkie.

— Gerard Pas, “How I Came To Know William Burroughs: Confession Of A Wild Boy”

The lecture by WSB was fascinating — it was the first time I heard his amazing voice — but as far as the conversation between him and Ian Curtis is concerned, I wasn’t there…

How long did Burroughs read?

It was quite long, I’d say one hour.

How was he received by the audience?

Very respectfully, as far as I recall.

This was the opening night of the Plan K venue — were you impressed with the surroundings?

The idea of creating a “salle de spectacles” in an old sugar refinery was groovy — but then again I had seen the Plan K shows before in the strangest places (including a church & a sort of monument at the Parc du Cinquantenaire) — it was badly heated, industrial, I was very much into punk in those days and I sort of resented the pretentious & “intellectual” aspect of the whole Plan K concept (and their shows, a sort of local version of the Living Theater) — but then again they were trying, they were annoying the establishment, did shocking things like performing naked (ooooooohmyyyygoooood) — and that, I suppose, was good for the times — as was the idea of borrowing from WSB, which was good and very “branché” in the 70’s

— Gilles Verlant, Email, 7 May 2008

Philippe Carly, Cabaret Voltaire at Plan K, 16 October 1979

Legend has it that Burroughs uncharacteristically told Ian Curtis to fuck off at the Plan K gig.

I very much doubt wether William told Ian Curtis to fuck off. I approached Mr Burroughs at the Plan K event, and mentioned I was a friend of Genesis P Orridge from Throbbing Gristle, who of course was known to William — he didn’t know me or had heard of my band Cabaret Voltaire, but was very friendly and a very polite old gentleman. I even gave him a Cabaret Voltaire badge, which he pocketed. This was the first of several occasions that I met Mr Burroughs.

Do you have any recollections of Burroughs or Curtis at the gig?

I already knew Ian quite well by the time of the Plan K event. Joy Division had played with Cabaret Voltaire at the Factory Club in Manchester, the Revolution Club in York, in 1978, and at the Futurama Festival in Leeds in 1979, and we were quite excited by the fact that Burroughs was going to be reading at the event.

My one enduring memory from Plan K was of sitting around a table with Ian, William and other band members of Joy Divison and Cabaret Voltaire. Ian asked William what he thought of Suicide (the band), William thought he meant the act of suicide, and I think said he disapproved. William was disturbed by the popping of champagne corks at the party, which he mistook for gunshots!

Do you have any recollection of Burroughs’ reading?

I did attend the reading. I recall the reading being given from a long table where William, Brion Gysin and others were seated. It looked like a political broadcast, until you heard what was being read! I can’t recall exactly what was read, but it was well received. Because it was a mixed media event it was attended not just by music fans, but also people from many areas of interest, including writers, filmmakers etc.

Any idea if Burroughs attended the musical performances?

I’m not sure, but the received wisdom was that William didn’t like stuff to be too noisy, so probably not.

Did you ever hear Curtis speak about Burroughs or his admiration for the man?

Yes, many times. I guess we bonded because of our interest in Burroughs, J.G. Ballard as well as music (Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Kraftwerk and so forth).

More generally, how would you describe the importance of Burroughs for bands such as Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire?

I can’t really speak on behalf of Joy Division, but I think it was mainly Ian who was interested in Burroughs. From a personal point of view, Burroughs was very important to me. I discovered Naked Lunch in 1974/75 and was very taken by its content, and did loads of cut-up text through until the early eighties. The anti-establishment / black humour / political satire and general contempt for society / methods of control was very appealing to a 17-year-old kid! Not the sort of stuff you show your folks! Later, I discovered the tape cut-up experiments that William did with Brion, and the films with Antony Balch, Towers Open Fire and the Cut-Ups (which were shown at the Plan K event) and saw a very big connection with the experimental sound / music and film that I was doing with Cabaret Voltaire. It was a great source of inspiration, knowing that people had done this kind of thing earlier, and I like to think that in some way I carried on that lineage / tradition with the work that I did with Cabaret Voltaire.

— Richard Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire), Email, 23 April 2008

Suicide

[Ian Curtis committed suicide on 15 May 1980.]

It seems clear that Curtis used his books as mood generators. At the same time, his wife thought “the whole thing was culminating in an unhealthy obsession with mental and physical pain.” As she recently wrote: “I think that reading those books must have really nurtured his ‘sad’ side.”

— Jon Savage, “Controlled Chaos,” The Guardian, 10 May 2008

I can’t see this suicide kick.

— William S. Burroughs, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 11 January 1951, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume I: 1945-1959

The English boy was talking about suicide, life not worth living. This seems incredible to me. I think I must be very happy. I got like a Revelation but can’t verbalize it.

— William S. Burroughs, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 16 September 1956, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume I: 1945-1959

Suicide is never good. “It is a cowardly vetch, O my brothers.”

— William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs

Envoi

I can remember one day at the beach. I went there with one of my cousins and his friends. They were smoking hash but I didn’t. I was only listening on my headphones Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and reading The Naked Lunch. I get at chapter “A.J’s Annual Party,” and I can’t remember what happened. Everything had disappeared there were only the smell of smoke and the music in my ears. I was reading with my eyes closed. The lyrics were coming into me but I didn’t know how. That was the WSB work.

— Post at the Web Memorial for William S. Burroughs, 27 November 1998

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

Meeting William Burroughs

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked them for their memories of that meeting.

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

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

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

Inkster: How did you arrange your meeting with Burroughs?

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

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

Inkster: How much time did you spend with him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More about William Burroughs

Email interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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