Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I must admit that I was a bit shocked to learn recently that there is no Big Table archive or essay on RealityStudio. There is a good reason for this: I find Big Table to be a pretty boring magazine. Now do not get me wrong I fully realize the monumental importance of Big Table. The first issue is probably the single most important Burroughs appearance there is. The hoopla surrounding Burroughs’ publication there led directly to the publication of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press. Maurice Girodias, ever the opportunist, reasoned that if Burroughs, Kerouac, and crew could attempt to move an astounding 10,000 copies, Big Table‘s initial print run, then Burroughs was worth the gamble on 5,000 copies of Naked Lunch — a huge run for an experimental novel, although an obscene, sensational one.  

And there lies much of my dissatisfication with Big Table: those 10,000 copies. What category of magazine is Big Table really? It is considered a Mimeo Revolution publication, Clay and Phillips’ Secret Location regards it as such in their book and on the website (please check out Steve Clay’s online version of Secret Location, it is a tremendous resource), and the success of Big Table was instrumental in inspiring the explosion of Mimeo Revolution publications into the 1960s, but with a print run of that size it is really something else. It comes out of the Modernist tradition of little magazines like Little Review or transition. The publication of Naked Lunch being akin to the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. Naked Lunch is the Beat Ulysses or Wake and Burroughs is the generation’s Joyce. In addition, Big Table, coming as it did after the controversy at the University of Chicago and the suppression of the University-sponsored Chicago Review, had its roots in the academic review, like Kenyon Review or Sewanee Review. So Big Table is, well, just too big for my tastes. I much prefer Yugen or Kulchur, Big Table‘s smaller peers on the scene, or true mimeos like C: A Journal of Poetry or Fuck You, a magazine of the arts, which have content as strong as Big Table, as well as being much more radical and compelling as material objects and in their distribution networks. Big Table because of its size just does not fit into my vision of the Mimeo Revolution. Bigger is not always better.

So over the years, Big Table has been wrongly neglected on RealityStudio. Time to rectify that a little bit by focusing on what is neglected in the magazine itself. Rightly, the big selling point of Big Table, we are talking 10,000 copies after all, is Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight (prime example of experimental Kerouac by the way, Kerouac doing his own version of Joyce, and neglected in its own right, give it a read if you have not already in order to place Kerouac as an avant garde writer with Burroughs as his peer), and a selection of some of Gregory Corso’s strongest poems including “Power,” “Army,” and “Police.” Corso was cooking at this time, which included his sojourn in Paris and the Beat Hotel, before drugs destroyed his talent. Yes, there is also Edward Dahlberg’s “The Garment of Ra” and “Further Sorrows of Priapus” but let’s be honest, Dahlberg is not the main draw here. Dalhberg does not fit; he is old news. Big Table No. 1 represents Burroughs, Kerouac, and Corso at their very best. And it is a strong issue that stands up contentwise with any little mag, but I find myself drawn away from this literary stuff and deep into the notes, editorials, and advertisements. All that stuff that seems extraneous but when you really dig into it is fun and interesting it its own right. Paratext rules.

Take the Notes on Contributors for Burroughs from Big Table No. 1. For many readers this would be some of the only information available about Burroughs’ biography. And what is the first thing presented: the Burroughs Myth, of course, and an unfortunate one at that. “WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS is an expert marksman and an authority on the Mayan Codices.” I have to say that this statement shocks me to the core everytime I read it. Forget about the Mayan Codices, which is interesting for sure. But “An expert marksman?” Is this a cruel joke? Did Burroughs sign off on this? Who wrote the note? Would readers of Big Table have known about the William Tell Incident? The editors of Big Table seem to be playing on the shooting of Joan Vollmer as a means to build up the hype around Burroughs. Then there is the description of Naked Lunch: “His novel-in-progress, Naked Lunch, is a ‘mosaic seen alternately through the ‘dead, undersea eyes of junk,’ and the ‘peeled nerves and sense’ of junk sickness” And there we have it: the full Monty of Burroughs as outlaw. Drugs and murder sell. Interestingly the notes in Chicago Review mention the mosaic structure of Naked Lunch but stays away from the more notorious elements of Burroughs’ biography and literary themes. Without a doubt, Big Table is more subtle and supportive, but this type of sensationalistic copy is in the same territory as the Luce Empire and the presentation of Burroughs in the pages of Life a few months later in November 1959. If Burroughs approved this note, it demonstrates a complete lack of shame on his part as well suggesting a willingness to play up his notorious past in order to promote his image as a writer. So in essence the seeds are planted for the “The Introduction to Queer” of 1985, which is the ultimate (and nadir) in the re-telling of the William Tell Incident into the genesis of Burroughs the author.

The note on Burroughs in Big Table No. 2, published in the Summer 1959, provides this tidbit to chew on: “He plans to return to the United States and then go to India.” This information probably came from Allen Ginsberg and may have been reported from a letter from Burroughs to Ginsberg from late July 1959, which mentions tenative plans for these excursions. The trip to India seems unlike Burroughs and yet he did have an interest in the culture of the East. Unlike Ginsberg, Burroughs was not looking for a guru and he was suspicious of the guru con, yet practiced yoga at times and was interested in Zen. It was Burroughs who put Kerouac in the direction eastward. India would also be of interest for Burroughs because of its drug culture. Yet the desire to go to India might also reflect on Burroughs’ desperation to get away from his present situation in Paris and Tangiers. There was the frenzy surrounding the publication of Naked Lunch, which was completed in a hectic ten days, but more troubling were Burroughs’ legal troubles stemming from drug smuggling charges in the late spring, which hung over his head. Burroughs needed to escape and there were seemingly minutes to go.

Big Table No. 4 from the Spring 1960, does not feature a note on Burroughs or any of the contributors for that matter. Instead there are a series of essays by Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, and Paul Carroll laying out background of the New American Poetry landscape as well as a bibliography of relevant poets at the back of the issue. There is also an advertisment for Donald Allen’s New American Poetry 1945-1960 Anthology at the front of the issue and Issue 4 is dedicated to The New American Poets. Interestingly, Burroughs opens the issue with a cut-up short story, a new technique at this point, “But Is All Back Seat of Dreaming.” The consideration of Burroughs as a poet was present at the very beginning of his literary career, remember the “Ten San Francisco Poets” issue of Chicago Review from 1958. It would have been a game changer for Burroughs’ literary reception if he had appeared in Allen’s initial Anthology. The cut-ups in Minutes to Go, published in 1960 in Paris, were probably too late for inclusion, but they fit within the 1945-1960 timeframe, and Burroughs’ cut-ups are solidly within the poetry scene and reception of the time. It is a shame that Donald Allen refused to push the envelope further on the concept of poetry, as being challenged by the New American Poets, and include selections from Naked Lunch. Even more of a shame is that Allen (and Creeley) were so conservative in their handling of Burroughs for their 1965 anthology The New American Story. “Ordinary Men and Women” from Naked Lunch was selected. A selection from Burroughs’ Soft Machine (the Olympia edition) or any number of Burroughs’ cut-up “stories” that appeared in little mags would have been a much more radical choice and much more NEW in terms of where Burroughs’ work was at the time. The reception of Burroughs as a poet, although an open secret and championed by Ginsberg, would have to wait decades for the work of Oliver Harris, and may only become fully realized with the 2020 anniversary of Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, and the cut-up technique. If Donald Allen had followed the lead of Chicago Review and Big Table, the course of Burroughs’ criticism could have been drasticly altered. For the better in my opinion.

Speaking of the advertisement for the New American Poetry anthology, it is the presence of fomal ads that makes Big Table out of step with the Mimeo Revolution. In my romantic view, mimeos are outside of the marketplace and more firmly within the gift ecomony, think Semina and Floating Bear. Ads if they appear are more along the lines of a community announcement of an event, such as a poetry reading or book launch. Looking over the ads in Big Table, you can get a great sense of the counterculture literary and art community of the time. The magazine does not feature lifestyle ads for items like clothing, alcohol, or cigarettes, which signal the development of full-scale Beatnik capitalism. New Directions, Grove Press, and City Lights all have advertisments in Big Table No. 1. City Lights would also be an important distribution point for the magazine. Bookshops also placed ads. The Gotham Book Mart on 41 West 47th Street, shills books by e.e. cummings (95 Poems), T.S. Eliot (A Symposium for his 70th Birthday), and James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake) along with Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums) and Henry Miller (The Red Notebook). Gotham also offers the premier issues of Contact and Noonday magazines. Noonday has a standalone ad as well. Yugen and Kulchur signal the boom in little mags going into the next decade. Ads relating to Zen, jazz, Abstract Expressionism, and men’s magazines round out a comphrensive snapshot of late 1950s hip of which Big Table was a product and a send-off. A magazine like Kulchur would provide a bridge from the 1950s counterculture into representatives of the 1960s like Pop art and magazines such as Fuck You and C. 

Also of note in Big Table, outside of the literary content, are the editorials on the events surrounding Big Table‘s creation and distribution. Big Table No. 1 lays out the Chicago Review controversy and Big Table No. 5 documents the battle with the post office. Cool contempory accounts of pivotal moments in larger little magazine story, which are presented here as scans. This brings us to the March 1961 Issue of Swank. Early on in the Bunker, I wrote on the July 1961 Issue of Swank, which featured Burroughs and a draft of Naked Lunch along with an essay on Burroughs by John Fles. Fles served on the editorial board of Chicago Review and later Kulchur as well as editing a one-shot called The Trembling Lamb, which featured Artaud (his Van Gogh essay), Carl Solomon, and Leroi Jones.  

If possible I underplayed just how cool Swank was during this period and I really trumpeted the importance of that mag in the piece. The March issue again features Fles — this time on the Big Table benefit reading held in Chicago in 1959. Fascinating reading but wait there is more, as that account of the reading appears in a section of Swank, entitled The Modern Scene, and that section is what I underplayed earlier. Beginning in December 1960, and running almost a year, Swank, under the guidance of Seymour Krim, had a literary section that reads like a Mimeo Revolution mag of the period, such as Big Table, Yugen, or Kulchur. The section in March 1961 is roughly 20 pages and features selections from Kerouac’s Book of Dreams as well as writing by Joel Oppenheimer, Diane di Prima, Jack Micheline, and Marc Schleifer (of Kulchur). Outside of The Modern Scene section is a photo-essay on the influence of New Wave cinema on a more explicit American film scene, an article on stereo systems, and a piece on folk music. If Big Table documents late 1950s hip, the Modern Scene section of Swank marks the beginnings of the revolutions of the 1960s. Men’s magazines are a part of that revolution. For those familiar with Dave Moore’s photo index of Beat book covers, there is a similar index relating to men’s magazines BPH (before pubic hair). Take a look at the covers of Swank for 1961 and you will see a host of familiar Beat Generation names from Kerouac to Ferlinghetti to Leroi Jones to Ginsberg. If the March and July issues are any indication, this brief run of Swank should be treated as a wonderful mutation of men’ mag and little mag: a true monster mash to be sure. Highly recommended as an addition to your Beat book collection.

Big Table Archive

Big Table 1
Front

Big Table 1
Table of Contents

Big Table 2
Front

Big Table 2
Table of Contents

Big Table 3
Front

Big Table 3
Table of Contents

Big Table 4
Front

Big Table 4
Table of Contents

Big Table 5
Front

Big Table 5
Table of Contents

Interview with Paul Carroll
Brilliant Corners 6
Summer 1970

Download

John Fles and other Beats
Swank
March 1961

Download

Philip Whalen, Invention of the Letter and Winning His Way

The famous saying of highwayman Dick Turpin, as he pointed his pistol at travelers on the roads of England in the 1670s, was “Stand and deliver, your money or your life!” My partner Frances Butler interpreted this another way: you can spend your life working for others to make money to enjoy what free time you have left, or you can have a life and let the material things go. Most artists are not appreciated in their lifetime, so why struggle to earn a living from your art? Give it away and you wont have to fulfill anyone else’s expectations. The real artist, a true outsider, produces not a body of work which is collectable but their own life as their artwork.

Irving Rosenthal, born in San Francisco in 1930, first attained notoriety as the editor of Chicago Review in the late 50s when he decided to publish William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and other underground writers. He was forced out by the academic editorial board. After moving to New York he started Big Table, printing as his first issue the contents of the suppressed Beat edition of the Chicago Review. In 1961 he visited Cuba and then lived in Tangier from 1962 to 1964. He appeared in Jack Smith’s films Flaming Creatures (1963, with Judith Malina), No President (1967, alongside Charles Henri Ford, Piero Heliczer, Robert Lavigne and Gerard Malanga) and The Borrowed Tambourine (1967). Back in New York he started a small offset press called Carp & Whitefish.

His first publication was Edward Marshall’s Transit Glory, which is 14 cards in a beaded envelope, each with a poem by Marshall on the recto and a drawing by William Heine on the verso. He recalled:

In 1966 I was in New York, putting together a print shop called Carp & Whitefish. By mid-1967 I had one book printed (Marshall’s Transit Glory) and another in the works (Whalen’s Invention of the Letter). The Marshall book was a fancy little contraption with a drawstring that pulled the pages up from a pocket. It was to sell for a dollar, and I was hoping to distribute fifty or a hundred copies to each of the half-dozen or so bookstores in New York City that specialized in modern poetry. As I was planning to move to San Francisco, either temporarily or permanently, I was eager to unload as many books as possible in the East before I left. But the first (supposedly hip) bookstore I approached placed so minuscule an order, that I resolved to sell the book on the streets myself, and bought a two-dollar City of New York Peddler’s License. But I was too busy collating and binding the Whalen book to sell the Marshall book. A month after I got my license I was on my way to San Francisco with both editions.

The book he commissioned from Philip Whalen, The Invention of the Letter, was a hand-drawn fable about Adam & Eve and birds and lions written while Philip was teaching English in Kyoto in 1966. It’s a simple goofy, happy-ever-after number in Whalen’s charming, casual and characteristic style, reminiscent of Edward Lear. But it depressed Rosenthal who was unhappy precisely because Adam and Eve were so happy. He wrote Philip to ask him if he couldn’t add a page of “two males holding hands — so homos don’t cry when they see all the little lion cubs…”

Two weeks later Rosenthal got Philip’s reply to the above suggestions:

As for additions, just leave the book alone. I’ll write you another one entirely, guaranteed to suit your most extravagant fancies — but I don’t want to alter this one, which is another kick entirely. I don’t think that you are sinful or wicked or evil, I don’t put you down I don’t put myself down. All I mean is that THE INVENTION OF THE LETTER is finished, as far as I’m concerned. Let me write you something else.

In response to this offer, Rosenthal wrote, “Please begin work at once on your second book for me — a homo erotic book of text and drawings guaranteed to suit my most extravagant fancies — Jesus! Philip pull out all the stops! I WILL PRINT IT.”

Whalen had taken psilocybin and wrote, “I feel too happy & loose to worry about lovely beefcake book — later, when I’m scared & neurotic enough, I’ll be able to do it, but not today.”

1967 was a pivotal year for Rosenthal. His novel Sheeper, a bawdy, self-deprecatory gay romp, which he started writing in Tangier, appeared from Grove Press, immediately establishing him as an important novelist. It contains telling portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Alex Trocchi & Herbert Huncke. Fifty years on the graphic homosexuality doesn’t phase us, but the misogyny is a bit hard to swallow, however it is tempered by a sympathetic comic portrait of his overbearing immigrant mother:

My mother was a tiny chattering woman who could bully no one but an infant. Alas I was her infant and now blast trumpet and tuba against the monstrous regiment of women.

Richard Brodney, the designer at Grove Press, was a friend of Rosenthal and Mike McClure and a fan of Dave Haselwood’s work. Sheeper was elegantly designed by Haselwood, who had wound up Auerhahn Press the year before. It has an elaborate cover image, not of a sheep, but of a dragonfly — how lovely, yet how like a winged cockroach — with a sunburst and bordered boxes like stained glass. “Style belongs to the insects,” proclaims Sheeper. The rear has a black and white photo of the author looking like the Bearded Lady he mentions in the text. The work flashes like a dragonfly from scene to scene, mentioning authors in passing: “Hurrah for poets who squeak! Wieners! McClure! Lamantia! Corso!”

Later he catches mice, who also squeak, and hurls them out the window. Edward Marshall is a scrounger who went home with a sadist who put a dog collar on him and forced him into sex acts “and him a poet and divinity student too.” He addresses (Don) Allen, pointing out which parts he knows the Grove editor will object to, and the other Allen, the poet with whom he has a love-hate relationship. “And here we sit like two outmoded adding machines, crocheting a passage in Marrows’ great novel from twelve different manuscript versions.”

Sheeper is sex and drugs and a little jazz. And when the sex and drugs run out (infrequently) there is sparkling prose style cut with the baby laxative of literary criticism:

When I first met Charles I thought, O great God a Gargantua! A Pantagruel! A whale! A walrus among men! Great God did Melville have him in mind — in the back of some old black ledger? His tusks rise up from the steamy brine ten feet ahead of him. Above I hear the whirr and boom of gull cries, and down below my mother cries, ‘What’s a goddam walrus doing in the bathtub?’ Throw him a fish! O throw him a fish! (Or throw him a piece of Duncan’s poetry — chunks of whale fat — thick curls and flourishes — can’t see the bum for the blubber.) O great bursts of gas he is a grampus! A house! A cow or barn! A Major Hoople or Mighty Mouse! O.K. black mountain, soon come the caterpillars.

The Invention of the Letter was finally printed by October 1967 and out of the blue the pornographic sequel Rosenthal had requested from Whalen showed up in his mail.

Rosenthal moved back to San Francisco in late 1967 with George Harris, founder of the Cockettes, taking all his printing equipment and they co-founded a commune later known as Kaliflower (after their weekly newsletter, published between April 1969 and December 1971). The collective also organized the Free Food Conspiracy in 1968, whose aims were self-evident. Their printing was done in his Free Print Shop on Sutter Street. Rosenthal ran into Richard Brautigan whose come-on was handing out broadsides of his poems in the Haight and so was inspired to give away the Whalen book at a reading at Glide Memorial Church in May 1968. The book was advertised at $1.25 but copies were handed out gratis to the audience. Then Rosenthal got preoccupied with his social activism and diverted his printing to help local arts and community service groups. While the Hippies and Diggers made inroads and gained acceptance in the local community there was a backlash against gays. As late as 1978 the Briggs Initiative attempted to bar homosexuals from working in California public schools.

Rosenthal still had Whalen’s gay manuscript, titled Winning his Way, or the Rise of William Johnson, stashed away, and finally printed it in 1984. However the cultural climate of San Francisco had changed by then: the gay community was reeling under the blow of the AIDS epidemic, so “gayness” in terms of being lighthearted and frivolous was no longer applicable. Furthermore Whalen was an abbot at the San Francisco Hartford Street Zendo, ministering to indigent people dying of AIDS, and Rosenthal couldn’t find an appropriate venue to give away the work. After Philip’s death in 2002 he took the finished copies to a memorial reading at Presentation Theater and handed them out.

During the time I had edited the Chicago Review, I had slowly come to understand that my calling in life was art, and in those days — my late twenties — I took it for granted that one tried very hard to earn one’s living by practicing one’s calling. But in truth, only a small handful of all the artists I knew or knew of actually earned their livings by selling their art-work. I asked myself what a work of art was worth. What is a poem worth? When I edited the Review I inaugurated a policy of payment to contributors — $5, $10, $15, $25 — token sums, that would, I hoped, make the recipients feel as though their work had value. But after I had written a book, and suffered the humility of seeing it treated by the publisher as a piece of meat, and after I had seen my Marshall books, each one strung with two beads, treated by a bookseller like Greenwich Village earrings, I came to the conclusion that works of art don’t belong in the marketplace, being qualitatively different from pork chops and costume jewelry. They are emanations of the spirit and cannot be priced. For what price tag can be stuck on a Moby-Dick? — which has by now fed thousands of publishers, doctoral fellows, full professors, translators, grocers with book-racks, actors, and make-up persons, not to mention the spiritually hungry — as if it were the dining table of a king. When I came to San Francisco the last stone of this fence of reasoning fell into place. Let others keep an eye on the market and dollar-up their art-work; as for me, mine was unpriceable — it was to be bestowed.

It is from this background of “sharing is caring” that Rosenthal’s feelings about poets who seek fame in order to accrue wealth, groupies, whatever, came to the boil with his polemic essay “Pros in Poetry.” The writing is a bit quaint but the passion is there. It is set in Caslon Old Face, which was Auerhahn’s house typeface and the title page with the swash italic Ps plus the little devices made of inverted cap Ps are also very reminiscent of Haselwood’s style. But while it is set in Haselwood’s signature Caslon, it is photo-set and not repro-ed from metal. (It appears to be the Mergenthaler cutting designed by George Ostrochulski for film-setting.)

We know from Sheeper that Rosenthal had a difficult relationship with Ginsberg when he wrote, “Because when I faced Allen under ether I saw he loved me exceedingly, but my facing him stopped that love in its tracks, built a wall around it that will never be scaled.”

Is your aim to be a brilliant poet or a grinding careerist? he asks. “A little talent may help — the way a little truth lends credence to a lie.” Ginsberg is a poet of publicity and not dissimilar to Zsa Zsa Gabor. His cohort Gary Snyder is the “cult poet of the ecology movement, patron saint of the hippie lifestyle” but given to long-winded, drab prose. Both of them are guilty of feeding into the monoculture they pretend to reject in their work. Say something once and shut up. There’s no need to repeat it ad nauseam, he insists, turning to Whitman. The beef with Whitman goes back a long way also: “I’m not talking about cock itch but rosy boy body love. Or rosy girl body love (phony democratic device we queer writers seem stuck with since Whitman).” (Sheeper, p. 124) “By ‘harmless’ celebration of Self Whitman bumsteered a a lineage of poets into indulging already rampant and ugly self-habits…”

Candide-like, he urges us to avoid the big-city slicker poets who come to town and “water the flowers of our own local yokelhood”: “Either one issues samizdat or is Rod McKuen.”

The book — a fine example of samizdat — bears no copyright, and so we can assume the author’s intent was to have it freely available. And one of the main problems of things given away is they immediately accrue scarcity value, so that all the Carp & Whitefish works now fetch exorbitant prices on the rare book market.

As of this writing Rosenthal, now in his 80s, is still involved in community activism, operating a food pantry and shelter out of his South-of-Market home.