Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Gilbert Sorrentino’s “Prose of Our Time” from Floating Bear #30 (1964)

Burroughs: Clue here is that he is not a writer, he merely writes. Doesn’t care about the overall pattern, if he enjoys writing it, in it goes, Naked Lunch the most dazzling prose of this decade (and last), but not great writing. Thinking shallow and amoral, magnificent construction of comic characters, greatest “funny names” since Rabelais. Style is reminiscent of Nashe, though not consistent, I mean, he can bore the hell out of you. Power is often misdirected, because his greatest hatred, his full venom falls usually into scenes in which the characters are not people. Irritates because he has the arrogance of the addict, viz, “you poor dopes”. Best things in Lunch are Clem and Jody, episode about Bradley the Buyer, the fantasy land near the and of book. If he could cut out and edit, in terms of the work, and not what he likes, he’d be a good writer. Latest “cutup” method merely amusing, old stuff from the transition days, a bore and a fake. In the current Futurism show in town, we find the same sort of thing done as collage, ca. 1915. It didn’t work then, either.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Gilbert Sorrentino to Leroi Jones, April 5, 1961, published in Floating Bear #11

Just before I left Dillon’s last night you and Joel were talking abt this Burroughs stuff in the last issue of The Bear — that Joel cdnt read it, etc. Which got me to thinking abt Burroughs and this morning I dug out a review of The Naked Lunch that I did abt a yr or so ago, but which I buried later, not because I thought it wasn’t the right angle to take on it but because I didn’t know if my reasons for putting the book down were valid. I think maybe it’s time we talked abt that book, instead of just taking it for a “classic” or whatever the fuck you want to call it, what the clowns call it anyway . . . well, what the hell is the book? I mean what is so good about it that we must pay attention to it, which we must . . .

I didn’t like the book, as a Book, because of reasons extra-literary, that’s why the review I did bugged me — the trash about its lack of organization etc., well, we won’t go into that old shit. I don’t care if he wrote the book with a pair of scissors in each hand etc., etc. Like, he’s fooling us? “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I shall reveal to you that this book was actually written by my pet bedbug.” (fanfare) — like that weary bullshit about the monkeys winning prizes at abstract painting exhibits in Bohunk and so on. No. At least that wd be the literary come on and the indefensible in the year 1961, it holds some water. My bitch against the book is I’m afraid, a moral one.

Now, is Burroughs showing us the world? And I don’t mean the English Class world, so that our lives can be better etcetc, but is he showing us the junk world, nightmare world, not even “as it is,” but is there a human agency involved in all that jazz? Where is our compassion to go, what figure do we setup as someone worth it all, there isn’t even the rejection of love, like in let’s say Cubby’s Tralala, where the whore has her chance with the Army officer and doesn’t even know what he’s talking about, she tears his love not up looking for a check, etc. Or is Ferdinand (?) in Celine’s Journey: when he gets to New York, well, you writhe, and not in horror, but because he is so pitifully defenseless, hopeless, and is such as a man, a human being. Or taking it out as far as it will go in my mind: Dostoievski’s hero in Notes from the Underground. Now there is alienation to the 3rd power, no figure in literature has ever been more not with it than this guy, more so than Benway or Bradley the Buyer, but the point is that something is lost and gone in him and we know it: I mean we know that he’s lost something that human do/shd have. The Burroughs people come at you like they never had anything to lose; that “undreaming insect world” that he talks about IS the world of The Lunch. And so what? I mean this is sheer horror and I don’t know but what it gets to an oversaturated point at which it turns into almost caricature (intended? — no not certainly that word, but what then? — superhumanism, certainly not antihumanism, that doesn’t occur in the book), Burroughs, that is, does not have a Swiftian comeon in that he loathes people, he starts from the premise that all these folks ain’t really human, they are alienated to the point at which they turn backwards and become — not evil, but just horrors. I think it’s Coleridge talking abt Lear and the evil of Cordelia’s sisters, talking that the horror is truly that because we expect them to act like human beings at some point and they don’t they are absolutely without moral values. This the truly horrible. Ok, so does this put Burroughs on that level of making: /? But where the relief? Like, where are the good guys? There is Edgar; where Kent?

Work of art? Or valid lesson-book? Or even a reference to gauge the junkies that we know against? Balls, nothing happening here/ Sex in the head, Lawrence would have cut him up in little pieces, like he’s cutting things out of the phone book or whatever books he’s got going for him — and on that score, Christ: Haven’t we had enough of Transition and nightwriting and all the rest of that half-assed spawn of JJ who picked up ass-wise on everything from Portrait to the Wake? Like all the terrible shit that Bloom lets go thru his mind, used, USED, mind you, as a valid and workable technique by all the slobs who thought that Joyce like bumped into it, and won’t believe you if you try and tell them that this was the MOST explicit putdown of the Bloomian mind, this the mind that encounters OB-JECTS, and lets them flow out the back of the head like shit thru a sieve. Yep, Bloomian thought in The Lunch, we got that, sure, but what again, is the point? That these cockroaches think like this is no surprise, and to show us that they think like this, so what. When they wig out, and die, or get hung with an OD, it’s not the Pequod going down, that went down a long time ago, and though I hope and trust and MUST believe that Lawrence was wrong as hell when he said that all American writing after Moby Dick was post-mortem effects, here we have a book at hand that justifies and proves that observation, and it bugs me. I don’t mean either that these cats dying and fucking up is not important as the sinking of the Pequod in the same terms, that is, life for life, etc., but that Burroughs doesn’t let you give these cats life. Who the fuck in the whole Naked Lunch is worth saving, I mean can you care abt Hassan O’Leary in any other context but what chills and laughs he can give you?

What the hell is the man up to? Blah, Blah, “an indictment of American society,” etc. Whatever the jerks say, no, no, simple, much too simple for me, and I won’t buy it. It is a rage, a destruction, not of American society but on the mind of Burroughs himself, he hurls all that hate around like shit from a bucket, and then some goddam stupid sonofabitch stands there and has the idiocy to say to me that this spastic shitflinging is an “indictment of American society”; as if we needed it anymore after Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Maximus Poems, Paterson, Pierre, and on and on . . .

What do we have to be told for? I mean to say does the intensity of the hatred leveled make the “indictment” stronger? You don’t need a machinegun to kill a dying man. You don’t need this fierceness to do in our kulch. A question: what, considering time, place, and values, is the fiercer book? The Red and the Black or Naked Lunch? In REAL terms, the Red and the Black make the Lunch look like petulance. I ain’t gonna play with those dirty coplovers and gunsellers . . . ok, but what to say after that? Obviously, nothing: grab the honeybucket and start flinging.

I want compassion, I want it, I need it, I ain’t going buy Hussan, I don’t like him, I don’t give a damn abt him. OR, I want real hatred directed against real people, who do things that are evil in a world that still has those values (of good and evil), which the world does have, even though we are in our “cycle of decay,” and the rest of the German Romantic Spenglerian horseshit, flow, flow time is a god, bullshit. You are my friend because you are a good man, no, not corn, you are a good man, the important word here, man. I mean, it makes no difference if I say you are a good roach/you are a bad roach. Who cares whether a roach is good or bad?

OK, just some ideas I wanted to write you while I had them; I must believe in the goodness of Creation or I stop living.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Issue 30 of Floating Bear (November 1964) contains a text by Gilbert Sorrentino which gives his impressions of the prose writers of the day. Here are a transcription of his comments on William Burroughs and a scan of his entire article.

Sorrentino on Burroughs

Burroughs: Clue here is that he is not a writer, he merely writes. Doesn’t care about the overall pattern, if he enjoys writing it, in it goes, Naked Lunch the most dazzling prose of this decade (and last), but not great writing. Thinking shallow and amoral, magnificent construction of comic characters, greatest “funny names” since Rabelais. Style is reminiscent of Nashe, though not consistent, I mean, he can bore the hell out of you. Power is often misdirected, because his greatest hatred, his full venom falls usually into scenes in which the characters are not people. Irritates because he has the arrogance of the addict, viz, “you poor dopes”. Best things in Lunch are Clem and Jody, episode about Bradley the Buyer, the fantasy land near the and of book. If he could cut out and edit, in terms of the work, and not what he likes, he’d be a good writer. Latest “cutup” method merely amusing, old stuff from the transition days, a bore and a fake. In the current Futurism show in town, we find the same sort of thing done as collage, ca. 1915. It didn’t work then, either.

Gilbert Sorrentino, “Prose of Our Times”

Gilbert Sorrentino
Prose of Our Times
Article from Floating Bear 30

Gilbert Sorrentino
Prose of Our Times
Article from Floating Bear 30

Gilbert Sorrentino
Prose of Our Times
Article from Floating Bear 30

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Several years ago, I wrote on the potential joys of collecting Charles Olson. Olson loomed as a literal giant over the small press and little magazine scene from 1950 until his death in 1970. As a result, his work appeared in some of the most interesting chapbooks and magazines of the period. His books are beautiful and expansive (I am thinking of the Jargon Press Maximus Poems) as objects above and beyond the epic scope of their contents.

Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka, but Jones for the purposes of this column) appeals to me in a way similar to Olson and, of course, William Burroughs. My interest in Jones centers on his Beat phase lasting until the mid 1960s. This work would make an outstanding collection. In 2000, Brown University showcased its Jones holdings and the Beat pieces really spoke to me. I was especially struck by Jones’ work as an editor. It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. This does not include his founding of Totem Press and that press’s publications with Cornith Books. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.

I am going to focus here on Yugen. Yugen ran for eight issues from 1958-1962. The magazine filled a void for newly emerging schools of poets that were denied publication in the academic and mainstream venues, like Poetry or The Kenyon Review. Jones stated, “It was started because I didn’t see publications coming out that carried poetry or writing that I was interested in. Therefore, I thought I should start one to try to gather that poetry that I thought was interesting… I just thought nothing was happening on the poetry scene as it should be so I started publishing.”

Yugen is often described as a Beat outlet. Work by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen definitely appears frequently, but I think the content is much broader than that. Yugen billed itself as a “new consciousness in arts and letters.” The poetry dovetailed with the groundbreaking and monumental New American Poetry anthology of Don Allen published in 1959/1960. Jones included the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch), Black Mountain (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson), and San Francisco Renaissance (Robin Blaser) poets alongside a healthy helping of the Beats. The Black Mountain poets made a very strong showing. In the last issue, the table of contents reads like a who’s who of New American Poets. By 1962, Yugen‘s work was done. On ending the magazine, Jones stated, “Well, I think it just outlived its usefulness as far as I was concerned. By the time Yugen stopped publishing there were innumerable magazines that were publishing poets and writers that I had some respect for.”

Much of the work of constructing Yugen was done by Jones’ wife, Hettie Cohen. Cohen worked as an editor as Partisan Review which gave her invaluable experience in putting together a magazine. She performed many editorial tasks as well as designing the layout. Like with many magazines of the period, the construction process, such as collating, folding, mailing, and stapling, provided a center for the literary community. Collating parties became literary events. Hettie Cohen’s How I Became Hettie Jones is mandatory reading on the literary community in New York City in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as is Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman. Both books provide detailed accounts of the day-to-day process of running a literary magazine. I highly recommend them.

Yugen was printed by Troubador Press in New York City. All eight issues have a similar design and feel. They are simple yet handsome chapbooks, much like the small books published by Jones’ Totem Press, like O’Hara’s Second Avenue and Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. The defining characteristic of a Jones chapbook was arresting cover art drawn by an artist closely affiliated with the literary scene. The artwork for Yugen possessed a strong Black Mountain feel with illustrations by Basil King and Norman Bluhm. The covers contained elements of Eastern calligraphy and the brushwork of the abstract expressionists like Franz Kline. Yugen shows how printing cheaply does not have to detract from richness of design. All Jones productions of this period appeal to me as objects saying nothing of the appeal of the writing within. Highpoints include Kerouac’s “Rimbaud” in Issue 6 as well as defining work by Charles Olson. While all the work is not of a high quality (it is uneven like most little magazines), the sense of a newly emerging literary community shines through. Yugen captures a snapshot of alternative poetics as the New American Poetry anthology broke things open.

William Burroughs appeared in two issues of Yugen: Issue 3 and Issue 8. These appearances highlight a change that occurred in Burroughs as a writer between the late 1950s and early 1960s. In issue three, Burroughs submitted “Have You Seen Pantapon Rose?,” an early piece of the still gestating Naked Lunch. Issue eight features an essay: “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin.” In 1958, Burroughs was still searching for himself as a writer and unsure of both his work and his method. As I have mentioned before, Yugen proved instrumental in giving Burroughs confidence as a writer, providing publication at a crucial time in Burroughs’ development. Burroughs’ collaborator at the time was Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs’ letters containing routines were addressed to him. Oliver Harris details letter writing as a key to Burroughs’ method in William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination.

By 1962, Burroughs was a completely different man and writer. Burroughs discovered the cut-up which replaced the routine as his major literary technique. Similarly, Gysin replaced Ginsberg as the major collaborator and confidante. The effects of the change can be seen in Burroughs’ essay on Gysin and the cut-up. Burroughs writes an authoritative essay featuring a cut up, not a routine. He has become a spokesman on writing technique and history. His belief in his style is absolute. Everything is a cut-up and all literature can be subjected to the cut-up. “ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD?” Burroughs’ voice is more confident and strident. Burroughs speaks from the mountain top; he has seen the light. You get the sense of a power shift between issues three and eight. In issue three, Burroughs benefits tremendously by appearing in Yugen. In issue eight, Yugen benefits tremendously by featuring Burroughs. Between the two issues, Burroughs went from literary unknown to an international cult figure.

To this day, Yugen remains fresh and vibrant, like the New American Poetry it featured. Putting together a complete run of Yugen is tough but not impossible. Issue four marks a turning point in the magazine’s availability on the collector’s market. Issues 1-4 are tough to find and are expensive, roughly $100-150 per issue. Issues 5-8 are much more common and cheaper. The later issues provide a good bang for the buck. Issue 6 includes Kerouac’s “Rimbaud” before it was published as a broadside by City Lights. Of course, issue 8 has the early Burroughs appearance. Visually and textually they are worth the $35-50 price tag. For anyone interested in the Beats and modern poetry in general, Yugen is a fun purchase. Truly, Yugen was a laboratory in which poets of the post-WWII era experimented before their work became accepted as mainstream.

Yugen Archive