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.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

This may not be exactly true, but permit me to float it out there anyway. I have a firm belief that anybody who owned a copy of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch from 1959 to 1962 was interesting. A person to sit down in a bar and talk to for a couple hours. You know what I am talking about: the idea that the possession of certain objects bestows an aura on the owner. Got a copy of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica then you must be wonderfully weird and eccentric. Is there a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on your shelf then you must be into some deep ass shit. I fall victim to this myself. When I was setting up my first house back in 1998, my hardcover copies of DeLillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason Dixon, and Gass’ The Tunnel were lined up like squat soldiers upon the middle shelf. They shouted to all who passed through the doors of my library that I was a serious motherfucker when it came to Modern Literature. Or so I hoped. Better not to mention that I got lost and could not find my way to the end of The Tunnel. Who was I fooling? Who was I trying to impress? I was definitely trying too hard. Man, did I break a sweat with all that mental heavy lifting.

Now mind you, this theory is on one level complete poseur bullshit, but I cannot shake the feeling that owning the Olympia Naked Lunch from 1959 to 1962 held real meaning. It made a strong statement of who you were. It spoke of one’s credentials. Reading Naked Lunch bought you to the table of a secret society, a bubbling underground. It was like breaking bread with the in-crowd. This is because getting a copy of Naked Lunch at the time was something like a back-alley drug deal. It was clandestine and seemingly dangerous. Brown paper and under-the-counter type shit. Or you took the time and effort to go to Paris and hit the bookstalls. Think of Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky. It is all about literary tourists vs. travellers. Owing Traveller’s Companion No. 76 was part and parcel of being a flâneur who explores bibliographic roads less travelled.

There is something definitively less hip about the Grove Press edition when compared to the Olympia Press edition. Maybe it is the dust jacket. The Grove is not dressed as sharply as the Olympia. The purple and white, the olive green. That reminds me of a zoot suit. The Grove gives off a little too much of grey flannel. Or maybe it is the old New York vs Paris debate. Paris is so exotic, erotic, and faraway. The Olympia copy just because it was published in Paris seems sleazy yet sexy. It is decadent and depraved. In the City of Lights, the Olympia edition reminds you of the red light district. It is a true dirty book. After all it could get you busted. It definitely put you in contact with undesirables like beatniks, junkies, and jazz musicians. The Grove with its paratexts, which explain away all mystery and depavity, is too clean cut. It is a dirty book sanitized like a rapist conservatively dressed and shaven in preparation for trial. Reading the Grove put you in contact with professors, lawyers, literary critics, and the public at large. So November 20, 1962, the publication date of the Grove edition, spells the beginning of the end of cool in some ways for Naked Lunch. Instead the book became a hot topic. No longer spoken about in whispers in dark, seedy cafes and cold-water flats, it was now proclaimed and promoted far and wide by loudmouth poseurs like Norman Mailer at literary conferences to any who would listen. Naked Lunch was no longer the work of a drug addicted murderer, but a work of genius.  

Philip Larkin found the pivot point of the 1960s to be 1963. He states his case in “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

It just so happens that 1963 was likewise a crucial year for the reception of William Burroughs. In a sense that was Burroughs’ Annus Mirabilis, or if you are a curmudgeon like me, his Annus Miserablis. You may have noticed that we have been posting a few reviews and articles on Burroughs of late. They all happen to be from 1963. This is no surprise or accident. That was the year in which the mainstream press firmly got its hooks into Burroughs. It could be argued that Burroughs never escaped the clutches of the mainstream media. Remember Life took Burroughs’ mugshot just months after the publication of Naked Lunch. Hauser and O’Brien were always hot on Burroughs’ trial, but in 1963 the deluge. It was then that the definitive edition of Naked Lunch shifted from the Olympia edition to the Grove edition.  

In book-collecting circles, the most highly prized collectible is that which is closest to the author’s hand. Manuscripts and letters trump proofs and galleys which have an edge over first editions and then there are the lowly reprints and reissues. There is something to this especially in terms of Naked Lunch. The rawest, funkiest Naked Lunch is in the letters to Ginsberg and can then be found in the pages tossed into a scattered pile in Burroughs’ dingy apartment in Tangier. Naked Lunch in this nascent state is something like performance art. The routine is a literary striptease strictly for Ginsberg, an act of provocation. The scene Kerouac describes of Burroughs writing Naked Lunch in Tangier is also a performance and something of a Happening or installation involving the Hunger Artist. Here’s Kerouac from Desolation Angels:  

In fact I hung around his room several hours a day altho I now had a great room on the roof, but he wanted me to hang around about noon till two, then cocktails and dinner and most of the evening together (a very formal man) so I happened to be sitting on his bed reading when often, while typing out his story, he’d suddenly double up with laughter at what he done and sometime roll on the floor. A strange compressed laugh came out of his stomach as he typed. But so wont Truman Capote think he’s only a typewriter, sometimes he’d whip out his pen and start scribbling on the typewriter pages which he threw over his should when he was through with them, like Doctor Mabuse, till the floor was littered with the strange Etruscan script of his handwriting.  

The preparation of the proofs for Olympia Press is a scene out of Rashômon. Nobody can agree on how the final version actually happened; in fact it seemed to appear spontaneously like a rabbit pulled out of a magician’s hat and it kind of did. (Burroughs’ next act, the cut-up, sprung from Tristan Tzara’s fedora.) The Olympia edition retains that sense of mystery and excitement. On to the Grove edition which is not a performance or happening, but instead Exhibit A in a courtroom drama over obscenity. Then we get to the various reprint paperbacks which package Naked Lunch for consumption by the mass market. Despite the claims of The Restored Edition of authorial intention and definitiveness, for me the progression of Naked Lunch over time has been a dilution of the book’s energy and vitality. The Olympia edition will always be the definitive published edition and I will always wish I could have watched Burroughs perform Naked Lunch in Tangier.

It might seem daring and transgressive for an article on Burroughs to appear in the men’s magazine Rogue in September 1963. Burroughs and porn. A potent combination. Yet by that time Naked Lunch‘s obscenity was being explained away as satire and magazines like Rogue (itself bastardization of Playboy, which mixed sex with science fiction, making one wonder why the publishers did not get a little more creative and print excerpts from Novia Express) presented sex as a consumable product and lifestyle packaged in a safe vehicle that company men could drive home to their recliners in Levittown. The piece titled “The Invisible Man” opens: “William Lee Burroughs, a man who for many years has been a mystery in the writing world, is becoming increasingly visible these days.” Make no mistake; the mystery still lingers to some extent. Even the author, Ann Morrissett, cannot get a firm grasp on the elusive Burroughs. William Lee Burroughs. The cover story of the secret agent, the pseudonym from Junkie, still protects Burroughs’ identity even as “[his] notorious book, ‘The Naked Lunch,’ after surreptitiously floating between continents beshrouded with rumor, has of late been clothed in so many reviewers’ words that the work itself may come as an anti-climax for those who finally get down to its bare reality.”

Morrissett’s article captures the pivot point I described earlier: the emergence of Burroughs into the bright light of the mass media. Another article by Morrissett makes this clear through metaphor. In Evergreen Review No 29 (March/April 1963), Morrissett opens “An Account of the Events Preceding the Death of William Burroughs” as follows: “Nine Lies-the-Heart: the door opens on a narrow cell with a bright window. A high figure is silhouetted against the light. Gradually I make out its features. Stretched over the skeleton and meat is a fine yellow parchment on which have been written many things now carefully erased. Dark-rimmed glasses are painted around the eyes.” From March/April 1963 to September, Burroughs has become “increasingly visible.” The death Morrissett describes is the demise of Burroughs’s anonymity and the birth of Burroughs as a celebrity in popular culture.  

As for Morrissett, during her travels to Paris and the Beat Hotel in 1962, she undoubtedly picked up a copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch. Morrissett’s interaction with Burroughs may have been a pivot point in her life. Just as these articles were published, Morrissett married William Cooper Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford. Was her trip to Paris and her interaction with Burroughs one last adventure before settling into comfortable married life on a college campus? Not exactly. Throughout her life she was an anti-war advocate, pacifist, and feminist. She and her husband practiced tax resistance against the Vietnam War and her husband was, in 1971, named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger, and Davidon organized the March 8, 1971 FBI office break-in, in Media, Pennsylvania, and informally lead the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI which led to the disclosure of COINTELPRO. Morrissett sounds like quite an interesting person, no? Maybe my theory is not so far-fetched.

1963 Burroughs Publicity

John Pearson, “The Burroughs Affair,” The Sunday Times Colour Section (3 February 1963)

Ann Morrissett, “An Account of the Events Preceding the Death of Bill Burroughs,” Evergreen Review (March/April 1963)

Ann Morrissett, “The Invisible Man,” Rogue (September 1963)

Ann Beat, “Junkie Culture,” excerpted from Books and Bookmen (November 1963)

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Edward Dorn’s “Notes More or Less Relevant to Burroughs and Trocchi” from Kulchur #7 (Autumn 1962).

Explanation: these notes are from an accumulation of about a year — they occurred at random mostly as a result of having read The Naked Lunch and Cain’s Book. As they are here they are in rough chronology and the separation by asterisk indicates a different day’s entry.

Cain’s Book is a novel in the tradition. The changes are exceedingly expert, derived from a good natured relaxed dexterity of the subjective I. Trocchi is an intellectual for this reason: he is able to place the proper weights on the scale of what we already know more absolutely than one who arrives at these inevitable forms casually. Genius unbalances. Intellect is always relative, to a mastering of material, i.e, what is external to man. The External is a preoccupation of the very sane.

Genius has the same possibility as a blow to the head, it can make one roll on the floor — Burroughs is a genius, but not intellectually vigorous — for instance he makes less sense about dope than Trocchi does. It could truthfully be said Burroughs sees dope as a specter, rather than a powerful vegetable God inhabiting the traceries of “. . . a great ravelled knot . . . trailing off to a sort of stalk.” Burroughs doesn’t need dope?, making use of it, but suggesting policies against it. This is a methodology derived from the State. Trocchi never makes the mistake of turning against the best interest of his subjective universe. It is significant and at the same time a vast pleasure that there are no unsolvable in C’s B. It hardly needs pointing out the overwhelming advantages of creation by a deeply intellectual gift. If horizons are manageable it is because of such a gift; genius is shocking but largely incapable. The devil, because he is primarily cognizant man, has made use of Trocchi in a quietly fulfilled illumination.

This is a statement from Drugs and the Mind which is undoubtedly untrue, from Trocchi’s point of view:

Such are the effects of opiates. As pain relievers they are unequaled; as euphoriants, “givers of happiness,” they have nothing to offer normal man or woman. The “abyss of divine enjoyment” which De Quincey discovered in opium is evidently open only to psychopaths, and that De Quincey was a . . . (etc).

Why I wonder does he say that? Evidently there are normal doctors and nurses and former normally pain-demented people who continued the use of morphine after it was needed not because of a differential that was at first equalized, but because they liked to use it. Doctors are in the habit of trying to tell you a great deal more than they should. They know very little, and do not stick to what their training affords them — a skill for local analysis.

*

They stand there as such, no matter what Chlorpromazine is. By attaching significance to shoes and haircuts the definition of the normal is as defined as it possibly can be, as everyone knows. Drugs have no bearing except in so far as they are given a subjective receptacle. One might inject reserpine into an oak tree, but the man who would be most interested is a botanist. Whatever enlightenment proceeded from such an act would revert back to its conjunction with a “self.” Thus normal is never a definition but is a temporary fact of instance in the human subject. When it is not recognized in that way it leads to a confusion of what is Subject and what is Object, one of the more brutal confusions with which modern man is beset, is beset by arrogance originating on the outside.

*

A book of the kind of Communitas is as subjective as C’s B. The problems attacked and disposed of under the good attentions of these two authors must have a resident possibility of solution for the book to make sense in any other than a subjective way. That in turn depends on some sort of proposition that a man or group of men, in power or able to come into power on whatever level necessary, will be influenced by their areas of reasoning. One inevitability of man’s nature has been rooted in him from the time he either wobbled to his feet or fell on his pratt from a tree — he has never, starting on the local hardware store level, at any time been led (beset) by other than the most confirmedly sick members of his species. The phrase “He exhibits qualities of leadership,” is a standard indication of the baseness of an individual and a warning everyone understands as meaning that if you were to meet him, it would make you ill for however long the meeting took, and for some time afterwards. Leaders are not set aside from us because of an inherent superiority, that is not what forms the class, congeals it; rather it is violating a quarantine to approach them. Look at what they do, Burroughs’ sense of this is infallible.

In the subject properties Trocchi expands to make his book, he shows intimate awareness of this truth. In their hypothetical exercise the Goodmans pretend they don’t know this, or if not, that, they are behaving as if it isn’t so. Trocchi is his own hero, which is nearer the myth than positing a hopeful, outside figure.

Countless thinking Americans, and others, have turned a jaundiced eye towards certain signals of the American scene: Over-elevated Standard of Living; the overproduction of nonessentials is a favorite hook. From page 12 of Communitas, this statement: “With the machine-analysis of manufacture, the tasks of labor become simpler, and as the machines have become automatic our problem has become, astoundingly, not where to get labor but how to use leisure.” That’s not true. Part of the cross-purpose of research in every field is just to deaden and make empty and meaningless that leisure. The fact that leisure does not exist, and won’t, is another argument. Men look for jobs in many different ways. The ones I know walk the streets. The ones I know do not find them for very long, the majority of their lives constituted by the harassment of having no money source, and the ones I know are mostly too cowardly to steal. Unemployment is not the same thing as leisure, although a few intrepid individuals turn it into that. The cleanliness of Trocchi’s attitude toward work (the state’s) is useful and clear, not deployed by the state’s use of a man (such as Burroughs’). The effect of community planning is the same a drugs on the mind, a barrier is erected between those people who are starving “wherever they are,” and the possibility of self-disclosure: horrors are varied or replaced by the state, not abandoned.

*

Cain’s Book recalls very much to me the pleasure of reading Robinson Crusoe. They both lived on an island. Had few possessions, those calculated and laid out with simplicity. They both travel about in a small intimate realm doing no harm and behaving in a most exacting manner, a little afraid of their surroundings it’s true, as they should be, both terrifically busy and premeditating on the self. Crusoe had Friday, Trocchi has many Fridays, whom he has the added advantage of coming upon the footprints of, more often. Of course, he, Trocchi, has a masterful and graceful way of recalling and inhabiting as a tribute to it, the past. Crusoe had not that need, but the differences are less interesting than the similarities of the two books. They both watch the shore in a sense, for what washes up. Trocchi watches for women, Crusoe looks out for himself.

*

Trocchi is using a drug which has a life only in terms of a man. When the state fixes, it uses people. The difference is sufficiently clear. Needs are subjective. They can hardly be otherwise. When the state fixes it uses people, if the war is a great one like the wars called #I & #II, it may shoot an overdose and get finally hooked, (die) and not even need wars to supply itself, as now, it’s its own pusher. But the state is an object and can be anesthetized. Trocchi is apparently a dangerous man because he is harmless, i.e., without the power to starve a continent. The paradox is not so obvious. It is unnatural for the objective state to need flesh and blood for its life, a simpler proposal is that a rock is a carnivore.

*

There is a great scarcity of things, contrarily we are told there is a saturation. To take one example, it is beside the point utterly that the mass needs no more cars. One has to talk about the car. Why are Fords made at all when obviously a Ferrari is better? It is a greater pleasure to go 150 mph in a vibrationless, well grounded vehicle than to fall apart in a rut at 40. When a man maintains we need no more Fords without pointing out that all cars should be Ferraris, there is some purpose behind his thesis.

*

De Ropp’s confidence that a population on soma, run by a gallant gang at the top, will be able to sustain itself in the face of a more obvious select population which is the master of its own soul would be driven batty in no time at all by the indifference of the subjugated masses. One of the simplest reasons that addicts are never given their stuff free, although wealth is such that this is certainly possible, is that addicts enjoy addiction to the exclusion of what the giver considers to be the real world; i.e., the world they rule.

*

There are various natures possible to the I. The patience Trocchi marshals when rummaging reality, the careful picking and placing and mortising of incident and word, are enough. Defoe and Trocchi occupy the subjective with much the same sternness. It is a single stem of commitment differing from the clustered patterns of the I as Dostoevsky used it, say in Crime and Punishment, in which he is the central character who operates a battalion of impingements in the form of men and women. Crime and Punishment, along with Hardy, closer to us, is the last legitimate use of the grand emotional architecture of an elaborately constructed ego of a writer. Our world has been successfully reduced to one man. How interesting one man can be now where shipwreck is obviously impossible, has been shown by Trocchi. He is his own helmsman too, and even if he steers badly, he will probably not be lost.

*

Labor has always been in surplus. There is no theoretical or practical plan to cope with this phenomenon which doesn’t have two heads, one consuming the other. Jesus said the poor would always be with you. This was a commonplace observation for him to have made. The strata of classes from the subprofessional up — have come to thrillingly expect the perpetuation of this truth. To alter it nothing short of a grotesque evolutionary abbreviation would do the trick, and then I am not convinced that chemopsychiatry couldn’t plan ahead sufficiently to insure the safety of the class whose interest it is to have such human creatures of misery as a constant reminder of their own championship of fair play in progress. Another use of the I is that employed by Genet. In this use the I is not directly self-assertive except as it is a necessary presence. Otherwise it operates as a sponge, utterly undistinguishing, utterly at the mercy of external bombardment, engorging itself to bursting. It does not constitute a self. It is a limp, ever changing basin into which can run the fluids given off by all contact, by all touch, by all sense excitement. It is the ideal ego-condition envisioned by any power-authority. When they get around to properly studying it, chemists will find in Genet the first standard of what a chemical for man (material man, i.e., that broad mass of man who is simply treated as material) should do. This is not going to be use for leisure, but by that time all pretensions will have been permanently masked.

*

Civil disobedience has become routine; and certainly ineffectual. When Thoreau made his point it was different enough to be noticed, at least locally, at least by himself. Life disposed of its reasons and terms in a world that was limited enough, and very much familiar enough to grant a man with nerve and good humor his refusal. “Are you in there Henry?” Now it is difficult to know where one goes to apply for a refusal, a desire, a need. One remains just as aware as it was possible then to be. One also needn’t assume the world has become more “complicated” in the last 125 years. More dense, yes. Whitman said, “I can conceive a community . . . in which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities without noise meet; say in some pleasant western settlement or town.” Said in his own disillusionment, that hope has proved hopeless. Something else he said however, at least in its continued necessity, is as correct now as then “. . . that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic.” A clever man will laugh at that. Because it too seems radically hopeless, if you care to run your eyes over the material of men here in these United States. Suppose one wanted to write a “great poem of death,” can you imagine who, out of a population of 180,000,000, could die to that purpose if you would, as you should, exclude your personal friends. This is putting it backwards of course. But then it is backwards.

It would seem that Civil Disobedience is not the business of the writer anyway, because if he writes anything worth reading right there he is disobedient, and uncivil. Burroughs is a sort of Thoreau.

*

When Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Thoreau, or Frank Skinner try telling us how to live, it’s pretty boring — it always involves going back somewhere to pick up — back, to recapture some wisdom that’s said to be missed now, etc.

*

Burroughs . . . . . . . . how Lawrence mistook Dahlberg.

There seems something midwestern in Burroughs. Perhaps it isn’t the machine co. which I think is in Indianapolis. Dahlberg is Cleveland. Lindsay I guess Illinois. Sandburg nothing — being everywhere there is corn. Staying vegetable when those other men attempt a sighting through some siding. Sandburg is a midwest facism. What does he want? A silly Chicago rail splitter city-state. Dahlberg has his ears full of language. Not spoken language. No ear for that. American learned language. The descriptive nouns of the midsection of the U.S. See From Flushing to Calvary. Lawrence is quite wrong about Dahlberg. So is Duncan. He is not empty, wicked or whatever else, man. He exhibits that peculiarly American thing: growth — from a dismally cold bed to a complex technique of reality — like any seed. Go from Bottom Dogs and From Flushing to Calvary, (Can These Bones Live is an adjunct emotion), to the Autobiography:

Then he went out. He was in no place and no place was in him. He had nowhere to go and so he sort of went on. He walked through the light and the light walked through him

That’s certainly more the point than Eliot’s nerves flashed on the wall.

*

The Burroughs prose is of little value unless a general abandonment of the earth is forthcoming (which might appear to be the case). All writing regardless of its nature, reflects in various degrees the referent, this parenthetical proposition. If a plan like this is posited, does the sense of the Burroughs prose increase? Yes. Only if an area is to be forsaken, to be totally given up, is analogy capable of rendering sense. To begin with analogy is a special comparison, a comparison only useful if one is say, gone. Again an approximate record. There is never time enough for a “record” to complete. For instance, no one knows what a bureaucracy is, beyond a demented notation. Virus is as good as any, but no better. It operates on the comprehension with a great deal of “remains.” All quick notations do, myths, symbols, etc. This is feasible only if posited in great frameworks of time. What good is any collective recognition if there are no collectors? Languages die without completing themselves, Latin and Greek being no exception. When a language becomes hyperpersonalized i.e., Joyce and others, Burroughs, the process takes place in a matter of seconds — from one word to the next there is no possibility. He may be saying plenty. He is. So does a treadmill. It isn’t as if virus is a parameter for Bureaucracy. The number of analogues for Bureaucracy must be very high. The point in doubt is that any one of them is any clearer than the next. Language put to any use inevitably has a varying amount of nonsense in it. It seems a structured defect for Burroughs to have counted so much on the rather high-powered analogy of the virus and bureaucracy. Other comic shots work superbly, (the firstest with the moistest) the rusty sardine can top surgery of Dr. Benway. But that segment of his line isn’t required to support any “statement.” Benway is the most exact construction of a doctor I have ever encountered.

*

It is probable that all art has finally to respond to the constant exclamation, “help!” Burroughs certainly has indexed all the propositions thereof but he has not sense whatever of response. One is not talking of solution of course. Those are not forthcoming form him anymore than from anyone else. There is nothing to hamper any arrangement of content. But if a novel is not various it is no novel, i.e., it cannot be singular — The Naked Lunch is solely composition. Of course N.L. isn’t a novel. Traditional American journal writing.

*

So The Naked Lunch is entertainment.

*

“Human analogue approach” attempt to duplicate mind process of a human translator as closely as possible in computer.

*

Burroughs should have been a “T” man. Burroughs is against Democracy. Crazy. That puts him in the same booth with John Wesley, Allen Dulles, Barry Goldwater and William Z. Foster. Democracy is pretty relaxing as a matter of fact. All it means any way is that you have on stage certain idiots going through a routine at which they don’t excel any more than you would. How then does it differ from any other form of “government,” drug oriented or not?

*

Necessity is a formalized notion in literature, as against what happens in “life,” just as moral precepts are in religion or philosophy, i.e., relative only to what is given, to the argument of what is, not what is. The absence of a moral ordering is common enough, though hard to recognize because the habit is to supply missing parts. Cain’s Book is built solidly upon the large foundation of the late 19th century novel, i.e., Dost., Hardy, Lewis, Ford, possibly even Lawrence who is like a delayed reaction proceeding from that century. C’s B is antimodern through its use of a strict exclusiveness, a, an, the, individual, is the only opportunity of its sense. Nihilism is precisely exclusive and limited to a class, the underclass, which has not had the use of the machinery of possibilities, which if it did have it wouldn’t be.

*

One of the failures of form in T.N.L. is that is isn’t indexed. Who get there the firstest with the mostest stands in a simple arithmetical relation to who get there the latest with the leastest. Both vicious tricks. Both the cheapest tricks in the industry.

*

What structure more dull than an ego — a self assertive referent to the arbitrarily external.

*

Use:

Burroughs’ only referent is himself — the machine referent is only to itself — for instance it has only been talked about that data fed a machine has solution value — this is not inevitable — the machine is just as much machine when the plug is pulled. The plug is where the human element enters — but it is hardly a necessity of the machine. There is a self satisfied containment in isolation — plugged in or plugged out.

*

T.N.L. should be a popular book — something for everybody — needs only a glossary of terms for the unhip. Poses no problem of intellectual sophistication as to form, profundities, etc. Dr. Benway, “a loveable character.”

*

Burroughs as an anthropologist: I have a feeling another thing that’s wrong with T.N.L. is that it doesn’t have pictures.

*

Trocchi should be given money, grants, whatever, because he is the primary aesthetician of habit. The National Science Foundation could do no better than support him. Trocchi at least has the decency not to preach. He’s not a man called Peter. I find the “appreciation” of dope in C’s B of a deeper order than in T.N.L. Trocchi’s precise will is a superior conveyor than Burroughs’ mere autonomy of needle.

*

Irritating (imitative of the state?) that Burroughs is literally without presence — the writer not there — it seems less a question of masks than absence — (he is time-bound, i.e., to the present) one can accurately deduce he has led a terrifying life — o.k. — but before he made that aesthetic choice he probably didn’t bust his ass too much — it remains so sticky — where is he? — that’s a good question — it’s just like that goddamn sniveler Henry Thoreau looking out the window at his neighbor trundling around some stores. Hank is so cute, about what a fool his farmer friend is — while he, Thoreau, has the gig utterly exposed for the silliness it is, from his window, mind you — they’re all ranters, the bastards, of little use to anyone save a few hip middle class pricks here and H.T. let someone pay his taxes.

*

All right, The Naked Lunch is a description of the present state of emergency, and occasionally the positing of possible combinations for the various possible conclusions of the future — run by occasional surrealist traditional imaginative machinery — the interrogation to all this is where is the pain between men?

*

Phrases like “he got there there firstest with the mostest” are impeccable memories of language, like feedback.

*

How does the economy — the reality of how a man lives in the flux of the demands of the “world” — how do these forks grab. In a novel like T.N.L. are they, for instance, as full of care as the text of Jude the Obscure? What happens to a man, etc. — the only theme anyway.

*

Burroughs doing what Miller suggests . . . Miller equals emotional participant . . . Djuna Barnes equals arty . . . the third sex equals Genet equals ambisexuality equals limbo of omni-decision. William Golding: expert, you go to a man and say, etc., write me an allegory — he says ok, I’ll do ‘er. Symbolising, downfall, expert, method.

*

Junkies must be the tightest little group of how-to-live-ers since the days of Brook Farm.

*

In principle there is no more difficulty in connecting for heroin than in connecting for, on the part of masses of men, food. At first glance the term “addicted” can be applied to all use — but the most unfortunate user is a lot better off than the starving man.

*

Phrases like “he got there the firstest with the mostest” are impeccable reach-backs into the language, operate like feedback. Although terrible and truly funny it isn’t humor at all, it is research and I dare say, at the right moment countless other phrases would be employed. The funny business doesn’t arise from any internal necessity of the prose line, it’s superimposed as one possibility — depends on what’s been fed. This necessity isn’t necessarily a necessity, but too great a collection of miscellanea, single shots, into a prose body whose anatomy is otherwise barren of any kind of birth, is a frustration for everyone, both husband and wife. The Naked Lunch is like the eternal pregnancy, the caesarian that had to go ten months and of course the 10 months stretched into 20, etc. (I heard of a woman who carried a feotus 7 years.)

*

No demand that anything be born, finally obviously that’s not up to me — that’s a concern of the writer. But this much is clear — a piece of writing, any kind, can’t stand as a body outside itself, i.e., to be an allegory of what the whole sense was intended to transmit. What I am driving at is that if The Naked Lunch has the intention to convey a large, general reality as a state of unfulfilled pregnancy, the birth that was anticipated but for some private reason never occurs — it simply can’t. Not that way. And doesn’t. Politically and socially it is a singularly naïve book. Messages aren’t art, or writing, even. They are a vortex of horseshit perpetrated for one irrelevant reason or another. They depend on what anyone of us has known for a very brief time, say 2, 3 years (archetypes are news multiplied by 1000). If that’s the case with T.N.L. as I suspect it is, it should be rewritten — more carefully paying attention to what language is — a plant potted in the mouth, no a finger between the toes. Big difference. The fingers can go elsewhere to thrive, the language can’t.

*

But is it great anthropology, in the traditional sense — gathering, like Bastion, Rassmusson, Levi Strauss?

*

The language of the novel, is not special (anthropology uses a semi-special language, some mathematicians use a pure, exclusive, special language). Novel language is anti-special. Otherwise novel would not be a current, available, trans-cultural form. Anthropology is a casual, entertaining science that doesn’t have to reiterate instantly the terms of belief of which sciences are augmented. The whole range of the writing of internal original necessity — poetry, novels, stories — is not subjected, except perhaps by an eccentric, to belief. And if what Whatmaugh says is true, “Not only is equivalent reproduction, i.e., translation, impossible,” then the hang up of T.N.L. consists of its by-passing simple analogy in order to represent itself. As T.N.L. is a series of scrambled messages, it is in its inception a translation, in its original form a translation. This is probably the first time a book has been written in translation instead of the normally original language. Whereas Finnegans Wake is a “score of different and incompatible linguistic pattern, thereby giving rise to a very large amount of noise,” T.N.L. is one removed from the original language by the author’s informal collections being superimposed on a generally alarmed self-identity. He, Burroughs, is plugged into a reality, namely a vaguely shaped, haunted pharmacopaeia, while his phantoms are those which are Smith Brothers to us all. The “connection” he know he would wait a long time for, but he didn’t know he wouldn’t make it — Burroughs is an imperfect machine — only one prong of the plug got into the socket. Those phantoms don’t work that way anymore. As significant recall it is a bad failure — he is certainly the aesthetician of the asshole but “cork screw motion” has the power of the jargon of two close friends in high school. Don’t they laugh a lot.

*

Again, there is an unlucky dependence on the topical, on rubrical reiteration to hold together anecdotes from the activities of primitive anthropological gathering. I see it as a failure of form. Gilbert Sorrentino, in a letter in “Floating Bear,” does not, if I am to take him seriously, by saying he wouldn’t mind if the man proceeded with a pair of scissors in each hand. But Burroughs is a painstaking and deliberate worker whose method of work I can detect as only highly conventional. Personal applications aside, he clearly proceeded with the constructive logic of a plumber. Everything comes out in the end, like a joke. There are no questions in T.N.L. There are many implied answers. Back to the machine. This tape, T.N.L., is a parody of the machine and in that perhaps Burroughs is also a prophet, i.e., gives answers when no questions were fed. This procedure has the obvious advantage that the writer doesn’t have to propose anything and further is totally uncommitted. The rat. Then why is he so preposterously puritanical about dope? I’ll never know. I can’t see the slightest reason for his concern. And those implications are so thoroughly preached, and by application that element constitutes a distinctly boring characteristic of the book. Once more, this question-answer hanger might be the intended lesson that there are no questions only answers? A reversal of the simple usual. And the dope concern a cute play for the status of expert?

*

The Burroughs’ dream is not horrifying. Dreams are capable of invoking a horror of a very specific time only — that point at which you open your eyes from them and “realize” where you were. Within the dream, before wakefulness, the horror is isolated from open cognizance like an ocean liner at sea. His dreams are entertainment, to a certain extent: (his pronouncement at one point that he is no entertainer, but a recording instrument, his own desire for notoriety as a machine, the latest thing, is itself theatrical and of course he is a liar, he is actually an entertainer). And an excellent one. Years ago in Chicago, 2 pictures — “Desire” and “Passion” played. Hedy Lamarr was said to run through them naked, chased by something. A clinging fascination. I never saw them. Lots of rubes like me did. Certain parts of T.N.L. involved that quality of hesitant curiosity in men. But even these props — the recurring act of breaking the neck, snapping the spine or neck in the midst of anal-sodomy — is straight from the farm, in the form of an anecdotal joke. An old farm joke, usually involving chickens because chickens wiggle so when their necks are snapped, not very important; but then neither are rubes not are those jokes. That all comes through anthropology. Edgar Anderson says anthropologists should pay more attention to the midwestern farm. The Burroughs machine is I believe now located in Indianpolis. Cornhole is a word for sodomy with animals in the midwest. Sodomy is very strong in the midwest, the fantasy of sodomy at least, or should I say was; to a large extent, I understand, animals have been isolated on the present farms for various reasons — sanitation, confined quarters to insure “thriftiness,” etc. But this material is finally real, i.e., chronologically before dream — i.e., isn’t dream a definition of what goes before and only prophetic of future time/lag? Burroughs should reframe his work with non-informational material. If he really desires not to be an entertainer. Entertainment is dead information — “the funniest thing happened to me on the way to the theatre this evening.” As a matter of fact this is all machines can handle too. Recording instruments. It is a great fallacy to be enamoured of the potential of the machine creature. No matter what finally or in a hundred years comes to pass for the machine’s benefit, think for itself and all, it will probably not learn to do the job better than Burroughs does right now. I don’t care how funny it gets to be, because after you pay your money and get your kicks and leave the book or the movie you want to stop laughing. You always do. And as for any kind of information, (by the way I am not considering “warnings” to be information, but rather uncomplicated flat data) it’s useless to the exact extent that you knew it or you didn’t know it and now you do.

But if the desire of T.N.L. to be a strict record has not been frustrated, the author has oversimplified himself at one point, to the extent the sense is unclear. His allegorical disposition of Bureaucracy as virus is so close to the objections to bureaucracy by Herbert Hoover, Robert Welch, and Barry Goldwater as to make me wonder if he means it that way or is this one of the jokes I don’t get. This again is a spot in which he chooses to object to people who don’t like addicts.

*

The means of communication being what they are today, i.e., manifest, a work like T.N.L. is obsolescent by the time it hits the streets, I mean in its possible value to the English speaking and reading race at large. Any small daily has enough AP dispatches to fulfill the demand in the area T.N.L. is able to cover. Burroughs is of course a much better writer than anyone the AP has, but is that so important, for that material? This is the grit of a UP dispatch today, picked at random: an unemployed man moves into line at a cafeteria his burning eyes on the steaming cabinets. (Now I won’t play around with the quality of eyes — insect or otherwise — the thing about any eye is that it sees and is not an eye, input.) The man moves closer and grabs a piece of ham and it lodges in his throat and he falls down and is dead a few minutes later. No matter what Burroughs has to say it is no more important than that. And that isn’t important because it is one of those “endless” fragments in the stream of what is called reality. If what you mean is not important or engaging enough to pause for — to stare at even, or linger with, and it with you, in some peculiar fashion — it is sadly that flat. All of it is dumped into the digester to be reprocessed — or that story in Time magazine about the technicians’ concern over what would happen to the carcass of a man who might die enroute to the moon, Mars, & points beyond — couldn’t put him in the digester (which would convert all waste back into food, etc.) along with the other shit because of the clear implication of cannibalism.

*

I am not trying to frame any requirement that a man tell us something new. I know better than that. Us, no. No one ever did. But plenty of people have told me things new and different, so much that I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Any attempt to discuss T.N.L. as a “literary” endeavor is pointless. It is more to the point to bring in Skinner with his one-thing-at-a-time, or as against that other man on the west coast who wants big chucks. It is that kind of a proposition: because this might make a text book of sorts — would be a good style book for AP, make a dull scene lively and much more vivid and entertaining at least for a while. One thing is quite clear — T.N.L. is in no way a dangerous book politically or otherwise, and the only thing that stops its publication in this country must be that Grove Press has not completed its buildings to the orgasm (money) of the publishing date.

*

The novel as it is popularly read is still being written because it is still commercially profitable — there is a boredom with more efficient media which makes a passive attention to the novel still financially interesting. When those other media (T.V most obviously, but also a whole host of other “electronic” possibilities) become set in the now recalcitrant mind the novel will be read only as Latin is read now, or as whist is played, or as poetry is “read.” In a limited way both C’s B and T.N.L. are departures in form because they make of the remnant of the novel a diary. All diarists are “recording instruments.” How can one so easily define a form as it is used? Most AP dispatches are brief novels. All writers have a keen notion of what it is they are doing. Both Trocchi and Burroughs can be thanked for continuing the anti-state line. Brawny, adventurous men, with the minds of globe-trotting piglets, will continue to extol the virtues of having plenty of bread, while they themselves chew placidly away. That much was always certain. In a sense all “social” novelists are simply white traders. The life is excellent but the writing a little preachy in the sense that if you posit a god — sex, a bull, a bullet, you have to also make it remotely available, otherwise it’s the same old small print fable. One must say this for Burroughs — he gives you the whole formula, you don’t have to go chasing after missing ingredients — the kit is complete, you don’t even have to assemble it — great improvement, he assembles it for you — a tireless man. Lawrence is quite out-dated in that the kit is never complete — you find yourself having to have a certain kind of myth-date, a certain kind of sex-key, a certain bit of travel experience, a certain kind of woman, a specific kind of looking on certain primitives, every notion in the writing of Lawrence is so “derived” there is no one place to go to verify it, because Lawrence is no “common” which is precisely that commoner with a message — worst sort of preacher of all (Burroughs) — of course you can take his word for “experience.” That’s certainly up to anyone. Lawrence tried to push the moral hang-up resulting from an increased insignificance of the single industry of single man back to a metaphysical question — is there an alarming and dominant dark guidance in his gut? – the answer turned out to be yes but it had been yes from the beginning. All Lawrence’s work ends up nowhere, and not significantly there, one extension Burroughs has made is a shambles of any kind of a race and hence all other darknesses.

*

Burroughs is correct in not wanting to be an entertainer, although he is one. He is as greedy as the next. I mean he has his piercing hog-call going for eternity or “his-own-time,” to who said it. His particular trough is not likely to runneth over. A great deal of “literature” which is “great” is simply curiousity. Like, a man who was capable of many things, did one. The state of the machine is still undecided. The hopes of some small eyed men of course are apt to be fulfilled. They always are, or have been thus far, the machines can’t answer any question it ain’t wired for; and presumably can’t ask any.

*

It would seem too early to chuck the human active process into an “abyss” of diaryism. Records were never worth a damn anyway, and given the lobotomized hopes of the “specialist,” they will be worth less. The brain becomes a “mechanism” easily, dependent upon the bank of simple external phenomenal material for its clear, and clever, manipulations. “Shock,” as a matter of fact, is subject to tolerance also, as “dope” is, and I see this tolerance of recorded phenomena, from assholes to elbows, leading right straight not to hell, that might be too interesting, but to a hideously simple minded rock in the chair. Burroughs I am aware is out to point his finger at this state. Trocchi is simply saying no matter what happens I will have the shit cooking, which strikes me as utterly simple and clear. Between the former and the latter there is a no man’s land that houses apparently lots of people, I am never arguing any “responsibility” for god’s sake, the direction of that emotion is totally unstated in this world, 1962.

*

Form is never outside the question — for when it is begged it is no less there as a force to be disposed of. Trocchi is in command of the recurrence of his people. Apparently Burroughs isn’t. Obviously the internalized traffic, his people, is not regulated by any will. Trocchi may be operating form an “unconscious” memory held briefly to with all the arrogance of ego. Trocchi continues to write as a man with the conscious range of a mind which has grasped what it is capable of. It seems to me this process is both older, and will be, newer, than the locally modern, i.e., upset stomach, throw up Burrougsh.

*

It is practical to treat the reader as a voyeur, i.e., involve him in that way, but only if one is an entertainer, with that exhibitionistic necessity. Joke books require a special audience; T.N.L. has no means in operation, that I can discover, beyond the recitative, i.e, most all jokes forgo meaning in exchange for the setting into motion of their basic machineries, i.e., the joke seeks to make the auditor “function” in a certain way (viz — the joke’s on you). What is the aim of Burroughs and his naked lunch? What does he seek for, say, an ideal result, reaction of, his subjects? Is the joke on us? I know what the joke was, of course, but I want to know where it is. I am not demanding that as a “right to know,” but simply to know, after all, I could have been reading another book. It is personally important for me to know because I don’t read joke books, and if his rancor, and sensibility are aimed at making me function, i.e., plugging me in, I reach for the cord, because I am as puritanical as he is, I choose who turns me on. For better or worse, he has, I found the book a succession of minor wrecks. What I had wanted, is a place to locate him, B. The only difference between a hydroelectric dam and a river without one, is simple. Burroughs is continuous so long as he defies location, that is the cheapest trick in the industry. The thought that one, anyone, can write for oneself is nonsense. The writer is no longer private the minute he has taken himself to be cute enough to be printed.

Cannot the modern world charge be met in a clearer way than T.N.L. proposes? (C’s B. is pre-modern individualism, T.N.L., “modern” same.) The strongest indicator of which is the unlocatability of the human individual — nearly dead — about to be reclaimed by a new visit, as in the case with the moon, the early modern, or pre, is different from the present only in terms — there haven’t been any new motivations in 500 years — D.H. Lawrence is dated only by his terms, nomenclature — can’t our predicament be suffered with deeper penetrations? Does prose, to enjoin an ugly time, have to be itself ugly? or clumsy? Is there truly a correspondence between the thing wrought and the wroughting? A likeness? Is it that way? Or does it come to be the light and dark it is by virtue of the torque which throws it somewhere else? By its haunting (suggestive) dissimilarity? DHL’s essay on The Scarlet Letter seems to say the art in spite of the artist. Is T.S.L. a representative of the world above and beyond the pedestrian exposures of Burroughs?

*

Henry Miller, like every humanitarian, was simply having a good time, at least Burroughs has more to say than that. Lawrence has the advantage of time of course — when The Scarlet Letter was fresh it did not have all the barnacles of terms picked up later in the psychoanalytic seas. Whatever cognizance accrues from a later time, it was an advantage to T.S.L. that it was not “representational.” Even, if it is the most beautiful allegory in the language, is allegory removed by no more than one step from “representation?”

*

The symbol still has a persuasion literal portrayal does not — both consciences yield better when the nail is driven into the grain, rather than head-on, straight in. Has it been more than a tradition to go in sideways, a requirement, the word at the gate?

*

T.N.L. is bereft of symbols, singularly Benway is the most neatly rendered literal doctor imaginable, being an exact conventional portrait of members of that fraud class of men. Burroughs’ achievement with that character is a grand, brief, uh-huh, i.e., he stops just then — but do doctors? One disadvantage of literalness is that it reaches its limits — its outpost of awareness immediately, instantly — there it comes to a halt with the throwing of the lives into the corner of the ward, the putting of the rusty sardine can, back into the black bag, or, coincident, with T.N.L., the selling of stale blood to dying men. But, there is another point, what is lovable, lascivious windbag, Benway, doing now, to us. I find myself mauling the idea — I find Burroughs utterly “accurate” in one respect (he is polemical of course), i.e., his common sense — Burroughs says something like: “if anybody’s in something, there’s something in it — the scientist is a reality addict — he wants everything real so he can get his sweaty hands on it, and of course it is a forgone conclusion when he does he’ll squeeze the shit out of it.” But there is something else Burroughs ought to feel obligated to say — scientists are in no danger, they constitute a harem for the State. As long as the shiek makes it, they make it. The scientist doesn’t want to get his hands on reality, not at all, in fact it is true the scientist hasn’t any wants or needs. He is rather directed to get his hands on your reality.
*

It could hardly be more obvious that the scientist does what he’s told, the more liberal, the truer. The scientist can only operate against you. He can’t help it, really. (Burroughs in his impotent generalness only hints at this as he does at all things — “wouldn’t you?”). The fact is built into that “industry.” Addict is quick. The scientist isn’t a user in that limited argot. He doesn’t even have necessarily, only incidentally, to use your reality. He’s got his own still, and shows every sign of keeping it, while you weren’t looking he pinched yours and kept his own. It’s an old banking principle. Thus he doesn’t want “reality.” Or I mean it isn’t an important point. Nothing new in it at all. So, he is allowed to keep his reality, and what is in it? Nothing much! Never forget the scientist is a worker. Millennia ago he was a muscle man. He still is but his lapels have narrowed. He has the defective sensibility of the worker; after work, he goes home. There, he does this routine (ritual to his objective “intelligence”) with his “reality.” A definite hierarchy — i.e,. if he is a very big shot snob scientist, ultimate snob as he thinks of it, he listens to esoteric music instead of the technologist’s funeral of Beethoven, Mozart, etc., served through the dish of a machine “sensitive” enough to pick up the aftermath of the conductor’s lunch. This is needless to repeat of course, after Ortega. Suffice it to say the scientist’s reality is not yours, it is cheap, of course, his reality, but it is inviolable, that’s all that interests him in this position — he doesn’t even care about your reality — he is compelled by those who control him to do what he can with it. He’s paid. Why not? It is a curious miscomprehension on Burroughs’ part that he doesn’t seem to get this simple point — making important basic distinctions is not his strong point — there is manifest in his prose the inability to make simple separations of dangers to those he must see to engage. Does this make him a “recorder?” No. The simplest records would perform this service. They do, in fact. In that sense he very much underestimates the worlds that alarms him. The mark of the type of a good puritan Burroughs wants to be is that he doesn’t make such errors. Some factors of actual men are not subject to mutation. The proof seems to be that the world has known a continuous change, but a tedious one, the briefness of all time notwithstanding, and, possibility being one of the established infinities, there has been a poverty of variables. The speeded up “mutation” of the nerve-brains by drugs is an excellent thought. But Burroughs’ use of “mutation” is not classical, it is adjectival, the same as Lawrence’s “blood-conscience,” it means simply an infirm change of short duration, the need of repetitive administration basic. It was never settled whether man could “change” himself (presumably for the good) through other means toward some flexibly real different thing. As long as the charge is put upon the nerve-brains the whole residue of malevolent conventional authority, i.e., the pricks, is still a free, thus dangerous agent.

*

The nature of T.N.L. is one of misconceptions riddled with a tour de force here, some brilliant writing there. It was suggested to me that Burroughs has created the one truly new character in modern “fiction.” Viz, the purple assed baboon. That I accept as the truth.

*

William Burroughs is Westbrook Pegler in disguise. The language. One thing seems certain — language has no shock as such — there’s no material weight to it after the Victorian reign of suggestion, the great English and Americans drained that energy by forcing generations of readers and writers to search and they worked, i.e., they weren’t “fed” — the main reason the coercive machinery of censorship is run down now is that everybody knows language cannot shock (rather than the official “anything goes” account — the collapse of the morality/suggestion means is complete — only the words remain and the names have been changed. That letter of Thoreau’s to H. Blake, Dec. 7, 1856, in which he says of Leaves of Grass, “I do not wish so much those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them” — i.e., all the modern quarrel with self knowledge, the split “twixt the mind and body, the danger of an ascendancy of either.” The social terror of that former talk is all gone — there is a dirty thrill to see easily fuck shit piss cunt cock juice, etc. on the page, but not on the part of the “populace,” they still read the 19th century style prose. Only the “intelligent” reader is exposed to that new liberation bestowed on him by the groovy presses — good luck. Hot dogs. But it isn’t scatological, like the rightists say, scat is a study. If there is a textual force derivable form such spillage, it must be words qua words, that immediacy of effect, those processes such words are studs for (like keys) are not necessarily what best springs the desired myth-anthro-Jung memory story.

*

It seems true that the two consciences might be choosy in what they want to acknowledge and thus might be bored by familiarity, they may not be exactly autonomous regarding what they will allow called forth, but maybe devious. Boredom is a reality. Some idiots, who look just like men, insist on the ignorance that the subconscience is a helpless depository of all the human being might suspect it wants to accrue, like learning a language while you sleep, either to its delight or controlled uncontrollable terror. It seems unlikely the selectivity of the whole organism has this special exception — the subconscience. A great many rather jazzily terrible bits must be ignored by it. Persons who suffer “breakdowns” might just be indiscriminate recorders. In fact that’s so. But it isn’t a problem for those who seek to manipulate personal systems in a certain way. The susceptibility may be only for that highly specialized group. Usually the writer addresses the world at large and then lets it go to hell. The knowledges (not great) Burroughs operates with levers seems valuable — his mistake I can’t quite define — but when he climbs in the cab of his Euclid he heads for the dump, where certainly there’s a lot of stuff, besides his own, and he’s got his content in the bed, yet his assumption is, instead of being however poor an excuse for a man, is that you are the city dump. He’s a thoughtless man. He get paid for dumping.

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.

Paintings by Phil Wood

Merging

The live reading of Naked Lunch at St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York this October (2009) focused attention on the book as profoundly oral both in its origins and effects. Readers have long been inspired to spontaneously read the text aloud, and Naked Lunch contains a number of ideally, insistently performative monologues, each with its own rhetorical style — the routines of Lee, Benway, the County Clerk — but it is simply not the case that these voices are distinct and discreet. Rather, they move from the individual to the generic and merge and blur as they continually imitate and quote and parody and reference one another, mixing argots and breaking rhetorical modes, undermining and disrupting both narrative coherence and the ostensible stability of character and any notion of the fixity of identity. Though the voices of many of the characters are described specifically in terms of tone and register and inflection, the hybridisation of discourse is paramount — it embodies Burroughs’ concept of language as invasive, osmotic and parasitic, possessing and autonomously speaking through the dehumanised subject.

Mouthing

The Queen Bee’s fruit “talks out of one side of his face,” the lips of the Eskimos and the Shoe Store Kid turn purple, the commandante drools while Lee wipes his own mouth with distaste, the Mugwump is “catching termites with his long black tongue,” the toothless Egyptian eunuch shows his gums in a bestial snarl, Mugwumps have “purple-blue lips over a razor-sharp beak of black bone,” the junkies grunt and squeal and slobber and gibber, “Fats” Terminal has a “lamprey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow, black, erectile teeth,” froth gathers at the corners of the Expeditor’s mouth, the Cobra lamp woman vampirically licks a drop of blood off her finger, the Arab boys are “Toothless and strictly from the long hunger,” sperm hits the Javanese dancer on the mouth and the boy pushes it in with his finger, electric drills are clamped on the victim’s teeth and hooked up to a switchboard, the safety pin leg hole is like “an obscene festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress,” and don’t forget to buy biting-fresh amident toothpaste — the latter derived from ‘amide’, ammonia, a household cleaner. These are just a few examples of the fearful orality and predatory debasement of the mouth which are everywhere evident — whether speaking or snarling, dabbed with a napkin or bursting into gristle and bone, the mouth is both shockingly vulnerable and rapine, and the fear and disgust it invokes in Naked Lunch are inseparable from its speech — it is the cool remote mouthpiece of headquarters and the jabbering orifice that never shuts up, it is always opening and closing pneumatically with a will and intent all its own, discharging, dribbling, eating / speaking in undifferentiated profusion, uncontrollable, helplessly suctional, the biomechanical instrument of logomania, ravishment and possession — For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. The mouth of subjugation speaks only to condemn itself to the trauma of being finally unable to speak. Fear and pity the poor mouth.

Switching

Benway’s voice and persona are now indissolubly bound up with Burroughs’ own filmed and recorded performances, but the bloody, abominable surgical episode gives only one facet, if the most brilliant and darkly memorable, of that character. Several times Benway’s voice is precisely described in all its ambiguity and ethereality, it “drifts into my consciousness from no particular place . . . a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street.” The voice is like the opening bars of East St Louis Toodle-oo which is also described as “at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street.” And it isn’t just Lee who experiences this effect — during his demoralising psychological examination, Carl hears Benway’s “voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street,” a record on continual replay in the jukebox of memory, Benway’s voice grooved into the shellac, crooning abjection and loss. But the doctor’s voice changes dramatically from scene to scene — in one of its manifestations it is described as “strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice,” like the “dead, junky whisper” in which the Sailor sometimes speaks, before it explodes into a scream of rage. The doctor’s voice turns on a dime — he abruptly shifts from “a tone of slightly condescending amusement” to speaking “in a crisp voice,” now “chuckling,” then whispering, then suddenly shooting up “to a pathic scream,” shattering his suspect professional cover, the “bona fide croaker” routine. The extreme unpredictability and instability of Benway’s speech reveal his derangement while at the same time he systematically employs the schizoid voice as an audio-surgical instrument, he plays with the subject’s psyche through a technique of rapidly alternating threat and empathy, the internalisation in a single character of the Hauser / O’Brien, soft cop / hard cop routine. Benway is the genius version of the low-life Sailor, and the doctor and the junky both require psychic access, to see what they can make use of, turning a kid on and turning his psyche inside out, oscillating between threatening insinuation and glacial disdain, implicit malevolence and friendly persuasion — it’s the voice as cold-calling salesman coming on like your only true friend, your conscience and confessor, putting down that old Pavlovian punish-and-reward routine.

Ventriloquizing

Lee turns away in disgust from the County Clerk’s evil shit, but he stands still for Benway’s fascist science, as that indefatigable voice of authority insinuates itself, becomes the voice inside. Benway claims he is “restrained by my medical ethics” and that he is “a reputable scientist” whilst referring repeatedly to his “learned colleagues” as “nameless assholes” and though he protests against the “vile slanders” perpetrated against his own good person, he blithely confesses to ethical malpractice, including “performing cutrate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets.” His is the voice of unshakeable self-belief and unquestionable authority, but he is equally anarchic, splenetic, deranged, he’s possessed by ideas for transcending the speaking subject, but he himself will never be part of that program — “I digress as usual,” he admits, while one of his disquisitions is introduced with “Benway has this to say,” and he surely does. It is crucial that the Talking Asshole is described in a Benway routine — the Asshole does not speak for itself, it is quoted, that is, it is supposedly remembered by Benway, it’s part of his talking auto-hagiography, and in this fantastic reminiscence he effectively ventriloquizes the Asshole’s words, apparently letting it speak for itself, whilst those words are nevertheless transmitted through his own mouth. In this way Benway becomes both the guy who taught his asshole to talk and the Talking Asshole itself, the entire package in one — the ventriloquist galvanised and possessed by his own performance, by his own “thrown” demonic voice, the asshole routine is his routine, and he is helpless to speak otherwise. Benway’s deranged will-to-power is projected through the Asshole’s megalomania, and vice versa — the Doctor doesn’t just recount its story, he literally gives it voice, he speaks through it, just as the Asshole speaks through him. Benway isn’t one of those “nameless assholes” because his asshole has its own name — it’s his name. A variant of the Talking Asshole routine is delivered by the County Clerk when he recalls Doc Scranton’s prolapsed asshole with its travelling intestine — “it go feelin’ around lookin’ for a peter, just afeelin’ around like a blind worm.” That anal mouth is more than a routine device, a subject of the routine, it is the anterior locus of the routine’s creation, the vocal apparatus which brings everything low, the true scatological source, as in, You’re talking shit, You’re talking out of your ass, Just listen to that total asshole, You’re shitting me, I don’t need to listen to this shit, Will someone please tell that asshole to shut the fuck up. Benway cannot converse, he can only speechify and justify every cruelty and abomination through a logorrhoea of logic that bypasses deductive and inductive argument as well as all human empathy and feeling. Like the Talking Asshole, Benway won’t shut up, he can’t shut up, he whispers and titters and he croons an old song mocking disappeared synapses and brain-dead patients, he hectors and harangues, lectures and reprimands, demands and excoriates, screams and rages — and even when his voice becomes “barely audible,” it persists, like the hum and drone of a phone off the hook, the voice ineluctable, quite regardless of the pickup.

Demonizing

Whatever is consumed or injected in Naked Lunch brings on derangement and death, possession is both narcotic and demonic and turns the body into a host for linguistic contagion — to be spoken through. The Pythagoreans placed a taboo on the eating of beans because they believed that flatulence caused nightmares, giving access to the souls of the dead who would then invade the sleeping body. Porphyrios — “As we eat, they enter into us and settle in us and thus they pollute, not by divine interference. They generally delight in blood and filthiness and invade the possessed. In a word, compulsion of greed and desire, and general excitation cloud rational thinking and unintelligible sounds connected with them and also flatulence cause man’s breakdown which satisfies the demon.” Wilhelm Roscher commented on this passage — “The unintelligible sounds most probably refer not only to belches and flatulence but to the inarticulate shrieks of the victim tormented by the nightmare.” Benway attempts to describe the Asshole’s voice and he says it’s “a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell,” the spirit of possession farting out the words while the possessed human victim screams at it in torment to shut up, before his mouth and his fate are literally sealed. It’s those old nightmare demons, their voices bubbling and babbling away at “gut frequency.” In demonology they’re known as larvae, diakka, embryonats, necromantic assimilators, and like Ryam’s “furious sprites that dwell in the waste,” they enter through the passage of the digestive tract and take up night residence, sending out their filthy spells from the unspeakable place.

Hamming

Benway’s voice has entered popular culture. He was the first recognised persona posted in 1973 on the Community Memory Board BBS, the first electronically accessible bulletin board system. The message took the form of an imitation of the most recognizable aspect of the Benway voice, the crazed doctor of control demanding drugs and typically taking over the technology for his own swell purpose — “DOC BENWAY HERE . . . NURSE SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE OF LAUDANUM . . . USE AUTHORIZED DATA BASE ACCESS PROTOCOLS ONLY . . . SENSUOUS KEYSTROKES FORBIDDEN . . . DO NOT STRUM THAT 33 LIKE A HAWAIIAN STEEL GUITAR . . . SEND NO REPLICA. BENWAY OUT. TLALCLATLAN.” The voice of Benway the monomaniac and autodidact has surpassed the performances of Doctors Frankenstein, Jekyll, Mabuse, Moreau, Strangelove, and Faustus in the popularity stakes and, however corrupted, the voice has truly “risen up off the page” and now speaks through his legion of admirers, and in particular through his filmed reenactments — because Benway went into the movies. He haunts Stuart Gordon’s 1985 film Re-Animator, a retake on HP Lovecraft — “Prepare to meet Dr. Herbert West, the sickest man in science!” And we can catch him in Timothy Leary’s stab at a mad scientist in the 1981 Cheech and Chong movie, Nice Dreams. Or there’s Donald Sutherland playing an inmate who takes over an asylum in Rebecca Horn’s 1991 film, Buster’s Bedroom. Paul Morrissey reconnects Benway and his Gothic progenitor in the bloody camp of his 1973 Flesh For Frankenstein, while Doctor Benway is paged in the hospital ward in Alex Cox’s 1984 Repo Man, and in Larry Charles’ 2003 Masked And Anonymous, his allegory of American decline and fall, inspired by and starring Bob Dylan, you’ll find Doctor Benway’s office located in the Midas And Judas Building. However tacky or arty, that’s where you’ll find the good doctor — hamming it up on DVD. Benway’s character is also osmotic within the text of Naked Lunch — both he and the German doctor have performed appendectomies with a rusty sardine can, and the German Doctor is a variation of the Benway character, a version of the role played by Benway in a phoney “von” accent. Doctor Benway — his voices really do the rounds.

Shapeshifting

The characters dramatically quick-change accents and parlance, while speech is wildly inconsistent and volatile in delivery and manner. Lee puts down a con routine, next thing he’s some kind of beat poet on the road, then the detached agent filing his reports, the cruelly gloating junkie, the noir criminal-as-victim, the metaphysical time traveller, and his discourse shape-shifts accordingly — it depends entirely upon where he is, who he’s with, and what role and genre he’s been cast in this time around. The fake radio prophet and the Professor and the Sheriff all switch to convincing impersonations of the County Clerk’s Texas drawl, and the mouth in Naked Lunch is a mosaic — the voice grafted on, speech pieced together out of disparate, cannibalised parts. Accents and speech styles of period and place are brilliantly achieved and conveyed by Burroughs, the vernacular and demotic transcribed with elocutionary exactitude, but consistency is repeatedly undone by the mutability and disruption and “schlupping over” of voices — one speaks as many, many do as one. Salvador impersonates a Texas accent but when he gets excited he speaks in a broken English of possible “Italian origin” before breaking into “a hideous falsetto.” A.J. likewise “is actually of obscure Near East extraction” but had an English accent “which waned with the British Empire,” though he is now ostensibly an American . . . Voices are as hybridised and osmotic as the racial and cultural origins of the characters, fake or otherwise, and their improvised accents and dialects vocally shape-shift with the action which is always the con and the put-down, the dissimulation inherent in selling something / anything is always necessarily an act of verbal imposture, the multiple voices of the confidence man flipping through counterfeit cover stories. The Inspector speaks cod Nordic, the Moroccan street boy jive-talks just like the NY Rock ‘n Roll Hoodlum — vocal imposture is the rule of the game. Whether delivering the verbal goods at maximum volume, “louder and funnier!,” or in insinuating sibilants, these our actors are always pitchmen, salesmen, conmen, their business is showbiz, their politics hoopla, their voices mixing in the melee, a great closing-down sale — language’s Last Few Days.

Jiving

The German doctor begins by addressing Carl in film-Nazi-SS English then “goes on smoothly in his eerily unaccented, disembodied English” before finishing “in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk.” A German practitioner of Technological Medicine, his clipped English is a villainous Teutonic von Stroheim act — “You can get by vit one kidney . . . They need lebensraum like the Vaterland.” This vocal switcheroo, mimicry and deceit is omnipresent in the book — there is no authenticity of utterance, the one who speaks is always dissimulating, or passing on some second-hand story, or knows not of what he speaks. It’s a husking bee for queer corn, a convocation of jabbering bird brains, and what is said is patently as fake as how it is said — like the Islanders who claim in unison, “We are Breetish . . . We don’t got no bloody dealect.” Identity here is always a cover story, but the discourse stops in its tracks, is unaccountably severed, the personality pitch unravels through dry, flat statements of meaningless or questionable facts, lascivious taunts and sly but insistent demoralization, or deranged monologues full of filth and fury. Words are instruments of betrayal and terror, and then again, they’re just so much jiving around — words, they really couldn’t care less. This is the place where “all agents sell out” — and to speak is either to lie or inform, and it isn’t just the stool pigeons who are hexed, every speaker is a helpless performer in a cursed echolalia.

Propositioning

The propositions of Naked Lunch, whether philosophical, sexual or mercantile, are always losing propositions, the characters forever shooting under an Indian sign — every plan is a corrupt selling opportunity, every deal rigged, each statement of fact conceals an immoral invitation, and every theorem is patently untrue, because to speak is to lie and talk is cheap, it’s cut, unfailingly dismissive, mercenary and hostile. It’s attack language — “Find the weakest” . . . “Fuck off you!” . . . “make with the smile” . . . “I hate everybody” . . . “disgust me already” . . . “what an angle” . . . “Take a walk” . . . The mouth is aggressive in Naked Lunch, while the ear is passive, and the damage is perpetual, it reverberates, feeding on the acoustic violence. Salvador’s criminal aliases and his police informer monikers suggest his transformative vocal inflections — he “picks up a Texas accent” along with 23 passports, and his spurious identities take in Mexican and North African, Bronx and Irish, adopting Jewish, Queer and cowboy talk as the occasion demands. We’re told that he “reads and speaks Etruscan” — it may be an obsolete language, but what else is being said and sold around here but terminally used-up words and goods, and actually, the words are the goods — the true merchandise of the addictive selling routine. The words of the characters, and the text of Naked Lunch itself, are traded, bartered, bantered, exchanged, and both expeditiously and blatantly moved around in the book’s debased word economy — the wheedling or straight-talking or authoritarian voices are all in ironic counterpoint to the true nature of the deals going down, whether psychic, sexual, narcotic, monetary or combination of same. But what the sharp or confidence trickster really wants to see in the mark’s face is not stupidity, it’s vulnerability, absolute loneliness, and then that insistent, wheedling voice inside will be the rube’s final and only friend — like “that unspeakable blood-joined twin” described by Donald Newlove, the smiling psychic fetch, the resident djinn who whispers, “I’ll come too, buster.”

Staging

The voices are mediated, incorporating advertisements, popular songs, psychoanalytic and medical jargon, business spiel, hipster jive talk, junkie lingo, candy butcher and carny pitches, film and TV voice-over narration, radio announcer and newspaper columnist shtick, legal jargon and officialese, literary and anthropological references, viral and cybernetic terminologies, switching and combining quite different parlances while the source material shifts from old radio serials to dime-store comics and pulps, noir to sci-fi to horror and western film scenarios and teen gang flicks, characters flipping between quite different discourses and scenarios in a cultural hullabaloo which is all echoes — dubbed, spliced, ventriloquized, post-synchronized. The book’s showbiz scenarios mock theatrical and film prototypes and stereotypes — the revolving cast and their scrimshank plaster-of-Paris mise-en-scene go round and round on the book’s gigantic turntable, a shambolic revue, a whirlwind farce . . . Despite the dissolves and the cuts, and the exploding, collapsing sets, the skits are unstoppable and the performers are always on, even though they may sulk and pout and complain about the indignity and grossness of what they have to put up with in showbiz, before they do it all over again — because for Burroughs, the ringmaster, this “show” biz is life itself, or what passes for it, and something other than a satire on popular culture. As Raymond Chandler said, “Maybe you had to be absolutely shameless to be a good comedian. That was a thought.” John Fuegi has written of those “theatrical facades [that] have hidden the most deadly realities” in the 20th century — the concentration camp disguised to look like “a model of open-minded penal reform,” the fake Treblinka railway station, the shower rooms waiting for the Zyklon-B. What lies behind Burroughs’ blatantly theatrical sets, his foregrounding of genres and their stereotypical discourses? He would accept the role of satirist and yet maintain he was “making a little skit is all,” while readers and critics continue to seek moral justification and profound satiric purpose in his relished pastiches. It may be that Burroughs did not wish the creative, improvised performativity of his text, and his own delight in his prowess as skit-maker and master puppeteer, to be buried beneath weighty analysis, to be taken so seriously by those with no sense of humour or spirit of anarchy. All those characters, writes Burroughs at the end of the book, the doctors and junkies and authority figures and shills and majordomos, they are multiples of themselves and shape-shifting versions of one other, and “subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances that is to be the same person . . .” And that “common vocal apparatus” must, we feel, be the author “himself,” the writer who “sees himself reading to the mirror as always . . .” — it’s the Great Ventriloquist, his study a backstage dressing room, and he reads and acts out his scenarios to a mirror while he writes, like Charles Dickens whose writing room was furnished with a mirror for just this purpose, the author literally reflecting and dramatically acting out his characters because “every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage” — as Burroughs wrote in “Word,” “The author has gathered his multiple personalities . . .” Burroughs’ actors read and perform from a script — and several sections, like Dr. Berger’s Mental Hour, the Luncheon of the Nationalist Party, and Chez Robert are presented in dialogic screenplay format. These are the actors’ lines, and you read that script along with them, and reprise lines which recur in variant form throughout the text and which are passed back and forth . . . This is script writing, written for the voice, so can we just run through it one more time? Like Billy Wilder’s directorial technique when he rehearsed actors on set, whenever Burroughs does a pickup, another read-through or replay of the dialogue, he doesn’t bother to get the characters to read back entire lines, he just wants them to deliver those words and phrases which he needs for the next cut. The effect is that the characters, though that appellation defies even a minimally realist representation of identity and motivation, may seem to be continually dissimulating as they edit and elide their own spoken words — but those words are not “their own” words, and they were definitively cut, in every sense, from the very start.

Examining

Police and analysts force or seduce the subject to speak, treating him as irredeemably criminal and perverse, the investigation or the therapy having the same objective — not to discover what is being hidden by the subject from himself and from the Law, but to inculcate that shameful knowledge, instilling a fearful awareness of subterfuge and the consequences of exposure. The examination is always an interrogation seeking a confession and takes the form of a dialogue, a Q&A stimulus-response set-up, in which the answers are strategically procured, testing the reactive mind of the subject, and implanting the desired responses of shame, fear, self-loathing, paranoia. Reply, remember, repeat, recant, reinstate — every response is part of a conditioned act of self-betrayal and loss, every belief and every protestation of innocence or incomprehension is compromised at source, and for this the subject will become eternally grateful, like the grovelling Young Reporter who clasps the foul-smelling hand of the Inspector, protesting the “unspeakable pleasure” of the interview. Benway tests the reflexes of an irreversibly brain-damaged man with a chocolate bar, and he employs drugs, electronics, hypnosis, and physical torture, but his principal weapon of humiliation is language, the voice of the interrogator launching the “assault on the subject’s personal identity.” Benway’s voice seems to emerge from the psyche of the listener who can only helplessly submit to its galvanic incantations and insistent refrains, like the version of his voice which repeatedly, insinuatingly addresses Carl by name — “Well, Carl . . . And now, Carl . . . Yes, Carl . . . You are frank, Carl . . . And now, Carl . . . And so Carl . . . Yes, of course, Carl . . . Where can you go, Carl? . . . The Green Door, Carl?” Benway’s voice comes on like false memory syndrome masquerading as the return of the repressed, fading in and out of consciousness along with the buried memories of distress and shame which Benway purports to reveal even as he implants them in the psyche.

Desanitizing

The radio prophet broadcasts his delirious hokum over the airwaves, his religious shtick delivered rock’n’roll hoodlum style, alternating between parodic faggotry, the 1950s Mad Ave sell, cracker auctioneer spiel and hipster jive with a significant pinch of the County Clerk’s porch vernacular — “And he was a lovely fellah, too” — thrown in along with other varieties of the “Impersonation Act,” including advertising breaks — “Today I’d like to talk about the importance of being dainty and kissin’ fresh at all times . . . Friends, use Jody’s chlorophyll tablets and be sure.” Janet Malcolm has written of “the soap and deodorant advertisements of the 1940s and ’50s in which the words ‘dainty’ and ‘fresh’ never failed to appear” and Burroughs gets Ahmed’s spiel right on the money, it’s a summa of Mad Ave sales speak. As with so many of the staple lines and song lyrics replayed in the book, the advertising pitch is skewed and subverted, deliciously détourned — like the Technician’s “hideous parody of a toothpaste ad,” and Lovable Lu’s dildo tips — “Confidentially, girls . . . it’s more hygenic that way.” Ahmed croons a colon cleanser like a toothpaste, blithely conflating anus and mouth, the established advertising pitch for oral hygiene flipping into advice on analingus, just as Burroughs détournes an advert for a grippe remedy into a sinister, literary junkie pitch, “Sore throat persistent and disquieting as the hot afternoon wind?” — and the smooth, soothing mellifluous sell has a mouthful of sand in it. Burroughs is jubilant in his overthrow of the sanitized and decorously civilised, but it would be wrong to take his scatological scenarios as merely satiric of man’s bestial nature. On the contrary, it may be that it is the super-clean transparent Horn and Hardart food dispenser and the mix-master housewife’s kitchen antisepsis, and the 1950s de rigeur “kissing dainty” deodorant slogan which most truly appall him, fueling his violations of the sanitary code and his contempt for the sanitization of the wildness and unpredictability of life, the shutting-out of biology in the raw. The Cincinnati Anti-Fluoride Society wants to “sweep this fair land sweet and clean” and the rider, “as a young boy’s flank,” is, of course, spectacularly détourned. The congregants drink a toast in pure spring water and naturally all their teeth fall out on the spot. It’s a pet Burroughs bugbear — nothing so terrible as the word “purity” in the mouth of a puritan, nothing so sterile as that hygienic existence in which, as Raymond Chandler noted, the all-tile bathroom becomes the basis of civilisation. It’s the terrible desire for the cleanliness of the mouth, synonymous with the cleaning-up of speech, the religio-consumerist purity trip, upon which Burroughs pours his spleen, driven to despoil the pristine gleaming surface with so-called unmentionable dirty words like blood and Kotex and sperm and shit — Benway literally splatters that tiled wall with blood, the lavatory turned into a filthy operating theatre and dripping corrida. Bataille believed that the abattoir “is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains and in which, subject to the ineradicable obsession of shame, they are reduced to eating cheese.” Burroughs celebrates unseemliness, insists upon leeches in an old tin can, shit wrapped in comic books, and Gains and Iris and other characters keep up the flow of unmentionable bodily excretions and embarrassing medical conditions, reinstating the baseness, the cloacal lowliness of the speaking base body against the civilized, sterilized literary grain.

Broadcasting

Ahmed’s a jacked-up shape-shifting voice artiste, a specialist in diverse locutions, switching and ditching personas at speed — he’s all mouth, nothing but a mouth, a motor mouth imitating and scrambling and inter-cutting the cultural trash and sales talk of other voices, morphing and mixing other stations, the dial whooshing between channels. Like the section Have You Seen Pantopon Rose, his broadcast anticipates the Atrophied Preface and Burroughs’ unleashing of his “own word horde” which is itself a scrapbook of quotations full of cross-echoes and ready-made phrases, a pile-up of fragmented speech taken from many sources including variant replays of voices taken from elsewhere in the text, re-spliced and rebroadcast. Throughout the book, the human voice is plugged into the media machine, it’s broadcast by radio, TV and film, transmitted via switchboard and loudspeakers, short-wave and walkie-talkie, singing telegram and telephone, it’s taped and played back, shouted through a megaphone and through a dustbin, telepathized and surgically implanted, prosthetically and biologically mutated, it’s recorded, amplified, distorted, splintered, copied, mixed, and degraded into gibberish and noise, “a rising crescendo of grunts and squeals and moans and whimpers and gasps,” and even as the voice dies to a whimper rather than a scream, it’s described as “rising to a deafening whine,” as if amplified in the book’s echo chamber.

Remembering

The fragmented speech patterns of the radio prophet and Sailor and Bill Gains resemble the scattered elliptical phrases of Burroughs’ final “word horde” — and that misspelling is entirely apposite, the “hoard” of amassed words becomes a “horde” of insects seething in a mass and spilling “off the page in all directions,” un-containable and ungraspable. Burroughs’ “own” written discourse is a maelstrom, a cacophony of discordant competing voices, and it comes on as a transcription of spoken fragments from memory — muttering, humming, pleading, complaining voices, banal and aphoristic and apocalyptic, insistently oral, with toothless gums and a taste of metal in the mouth, mangling the asp speech from Anthony and Cleopatra and other scraps in a show of “second-hand . . . titillation.” There are many direct speech quotations in the final five pages, a convocation which includes the voices of Sailor, Eduardo, the American Tourist, the blonde usherette, Lee, the Chinese druggist, old junkies, Lola La Chata — ghost voices called back through the ether to reprise an elegiac line, to leave their parting ironic and apocalyptic funereal words, to fall from the air, not as brightness but as “soft mendicant words falling like dead birds in the dark street . . .” — words as stark as a street begging routine, and their axiomatic, gloating refusal: “Wouldn’t feel right fucking up your cure.” The Atrophied Preface resembles a method of cryptomnesia — the mediumistic channelling of voices which Theodore Flournoy, at the beginning of the 20th century, called “teleological automatisms.” Flournoy understood such spirit voices to be beneficent, and though Burroughs’ discarnate voices are far from that, it as if their cryptic utterances promise the uncovering of the repressed, the writer cast as the medium at a séance, the channeler of discorporate voices and decoder of mysterious messages emerging from the ether. Burroughs’ final pages repeat and re-order and re-layer memories, and his method of re-transcription here suggests the metaphor of geological strata used by Freud when explaining how memories are transformed in the unconscious and preconscious systems of the psyche — “our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances — to a re-transcription . . . memory is present not once but several times over . . .”

Elegizing

Scott Bukatman, writing about the later cut-ups, notes that “relations among signifiers are lost, each now exists in glittering isolation,” and this analysis of the individual, fragmented sentence or phrase applies equally to the concatenated passages of the “Atrophied Preface,” a collage which preserves its material splices and cuts, the jumps and disconnections of its constituent parts. The old queen “gets the knee from his phantom” and there are “phantom twinges of amputation” in this ghostly burlesque. The “Dilapidated Diseuse in 1920 clothes . . . dead weight of the Dear Dead days hanging in the air like an earthbound ghost,” from the Campus of Interzone University section, reappears as a guy in a 1920 straw hat, while the earthbound ghost and atrophied gangster from the And Start West section return in disembodied form to repeat their ghost mantras . . . The book’s ending is a fitting mass epitaph for a Book of the Dead, the voices speaking their Last Words as the flame goes out, the shot is blown, and the “smell of death” and the “skeleton grin” are left to preside over the discorporate world . . . The cut-and-paste editor of these “raw materials of death” threatens to “terminate my services” as items on serial killers, immolation, overdoses, and infection find their random but fated places in the crumbling marble index, a terminal bricolage of entropy and planetary doom. It’s a death chant, a ticker-tape funeral oration, a scrapbook of autopsy reports, cuttings from a newspaper morgue. As Oliver Harris has noted, this litany echoes a moving and resonant passage in Interzone, a meditation on the deaths of people Burroughs had known, and on his own fated survival.

Terminating

Terry Wilson has pointed out that the book ends with a vocal impersonation by Burroughs — of writer Sax Rohmer‘s inscrutable Chinese shopkeeper. Burroughs always claimed to detest Rohmer, but “No glot . . . C’lom Fliday” replays and homages the voice of Rohmer’s inscrutable racial other, the Yellow Peril stereotype — “We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship with a civilized shaving salon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair. A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations. From behind a curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and, advancing, shook his head vigorously. ‘No shavee, no shavee,’ he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes. ‘Too late! Shuttee-shop!'” The druggist at the end of Naked Lunch is addressing Bill Gains and every other junkie con artist, and this transcription of broken pigeon English concludes the book with a kind of definitive inarticulacy, a terminal abridgement, the refusal to deal is also a refusal of language to engage beyond its essential minimal requirements, because there is literally nothing else to be said ever again in this alien tongue. As the Sailor says, with a nod to Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go back no more” — and that longed-for score and that far-off “Fliday” will never come.

Eliding

Fragments of speech, strung out on ellipsis, are used throughout the book, signalling, for example, the stuttering disconnection of the Sailor’s furtive old junky discourse which is “slowed down with twenty goof balls,” Benway’s strategic pauses creating maximum unease and fear, Bill Gains fading in and out of his con stories as each one surfaces only to fail to hit the mark, the practised fake amnesiac digressions in the County Clerk’s memorialising monologue in which old-timers like him, gone ancient before their days, are forgetful-like. But these spaces between words, these gaps and elisions and breaks in discourse also signify the unsaid — some things must remain hidden, should not be disclosed, or they cannot be said, they are unknown, unknowable. Still, when the words run out or break down, we may wonder what runs through and beneath the caesura? It seems something other, something more than the transcription of the rhythms of natural speech, the marking of pauses or inarticulateness . . . It might be ennui, it might be dissimulation, but when spoken pauses are transcribed on the page, they textually signify that it is here, in these fissures, not in the characters’ filthy, blasphemous utterances, that the literally unspeakable resides, as if the Beat aesthetic of saying it all, letting it all out, has its limits, and so the unspeakable remains, a signalled absence — “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Stefan Hertmans has noted that “anyone complaining about unspeakability is bound to enter an insoluble paradox. For the subject is spoken about and referred to.” Naked Lunch is filled with gaps and cuts and caesura, empty places where the words run out or are severed, left hanging — the text elides, fractures, fails to articulate and grasp something which is half-recognized but cannot be named or described and must be passed over in silence . . . “I’ll give it to you in the ass,” “Now, baby, I got it here to give,” “So I put it on him,” “the school motto: ‘With it and for it’” — here and in song lyrics détourned by Burroughs, the “It” word sustains cynical double entendres conflating sex and narcotics, while elsewhere it signifies a taboo which cannot be broken and cannot be spoken — even though Burroughs writes that “You can write or yell or croon about it,” the taboo is crucially unnamed, unnameable. That poor, unspecific, dehumanized, stand-in pronoun must suffice, suggesting some ultimate point of despair or transcendence, the death of someone who really existed, or an unbearable, unimaginable, overwhelming regret, which must remain forever beyond identification or expression.

Telegraphing

Bill Gains nods out while trying in vain to con the Panamanian Chinese druggist, like he’s put himself to sleep with his endless recitation by rote of ludicrous sob stories, each one fixated upon crude bodily needs. His flat-liner delivery erases all unnecessary participles and connectives — well, who needs syntax anyway? He’s laying it down on a Chinaman in any case so only the key words, the really happening parts of the con need be uttered in his disembodied stupor, he can hardly make the effort is all — fill in the blanks yourself. He’s laid down those inane tales of woe countless times, and the druggist has heard it all before too — the dying racing dogs routine, the mother’s piles, the wife’s menstrual cramps . . . Bring it on, and let it go. We can read this ellipsis as an authorial edit, removing the longeurs and narrative bridges from Gains’ interminable pitches to score, or perhaps he actually does talk this way, fading in and out of consciousness and speech before snapping his head up and cutting to the chase. In either case, it lets the key elements, the real base elements do all the signification, literally strung out on a skeletal narrative line — “Kotex . . . Aged mother . . . Piles . . . raw . . . bleeding.” We see the con like a telegram — the whole interminable rigmarole condensed into a few words, to cut the cost, in every sense, of the sent communication, which the listener may reconstitute, if so inclined. Burroughs later laments the waste paper of written narrative spent “getting The People from one place to another,” and so the Atrophied Preface adopts and adapts the Gains Method at the end of the book, while the voices of Naked Lunch either fill available airtime with verbiage or what they say is cut down to a few phrases, uttered with a minimum of effort — “You sabe shit?” Gains and the druggist will wait forever, and much of the talk in Naked Lunch comes from that special kind of waiting around, for the script in both senses — the RX to be filled, and the words to be spoken, until they are terminally done with.

Explicating

Burroughs would claim that an author is his characters, but at the same time he would maintain that the author is not responsible — he creates and speaks through them, and then they escape his control. Critical discourse often helplessly repeats Burroughs’ own concepts and metaphors, figures and tropes, but in this case there is no choice — the alien mouth which betrays and rebels against and usurps its creator appears in Benway’s famous routine, but it is the key mechanism of spoken discourse running in variations throughout the book. The characters are always treated as ventriloquist dummies and then they are real talking assholes — they are spoken through, mouthpieces of corrupt authority and criminal, immoral subterfuge, and they rant and rave with a doomed will to autonomy and power. The inflexible mouthpiece of authority and the raw mouthing orifice return the reader endlessly to Burroughs’ obsession with possession and its manifestation in the form of the mouth. He insists upon the literality of his metaphors — language is not “like” a disease, it is the disease. In the Deposition Burroughs writes of that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” and he maintains that this interpretation is exactly what the title Naked Lunch means — it means, he says, “what the words say,” that is, they accord with his own explication, as well as suggesting, on the contrary, that those words speak autonomously, “for themselves.” But there is no literal, transparent, self-evident meaning for those words — the author’s definition is only one of many possible interpretations, and this authorial insistence is a consequence of the adoption of a polemical voice which is profoundly suspect and at odds with the refutations of intentionality within the text itself. But it is this very voice of insistent explication and knowing certainty which, through oral performance, would become synonymous with the essentially autodidactic “Burroughs voice.”

Reminiscing

The routine is a form of compulsive reminiscence with the memorialist as possessed fantasist — putting on other people, putting other people on. It’s always another suspect story, another’s story that is being re-told and re-sold, the impersonation of an impersonation, the replaying of the words of some absent party, and so doubly unreliable. If conversation in Naked Lunch requires recourse to quotation, like the English colonial: “So the doctor said to me . . .,” then the routine comes on entirely like dictation from another source, it takes the form of a series of spiralling and tangentially connected narratives and stories-within-stories in which one thing immediately recalls or suggests something else which supposedly, incredibly, actually happened, even though the routine continually morphs from the past tense into the present tense, betraying the intertwined processes of recitation and reinvention — this is reminiscense as the reliving of fantasia. For the listener/reader, the underlying connections may be bafflingly unapparent and infuriatingly ungraspable, whilst simultaneously deliriously captivating. The routine may be a two-minute skit, picked up and soon abandoned, like the Throckmorton Diamond scenario, but it’s exponential in its improvisatory combinations, its Proustian derivations. As soon as that “I recollect when . . . ” goes down, we fear the running out of time, and the running on of the monomaniacal mouth. Neither Benway nor the County Clerk are willing to be distracted or interrupted in the flow of their indefatigable soliloquies, their endless extemporization — if it’s better to die in silence than to start to say something and get cut off, then there’s still the alternative of never shutting up in this life and continuing to transmit from the afterlife, like the voices of the dead in the atrophied preface. “Now if you’ll take care, young feller, till I finish what I’m saying . . .” The Old Man says, “I am subject to tell a tale” and he is utterly subjected to that tall tale telling, his being entirely caught up and consumed by the “endless saga” he launched upon so many years ago.

Travelling

Reminiscence in Naked Lunch literalizes time travel, and that trip down Memory Lane takes the form of a guided tour of the hinterland — it’s the travelogue as monologue, with many detours and linguistic dérives, and necessary stopovers to score. “Now I happen to remember,” “I recall, me and the Fag,” “Recollect when I am travelling with K.E.,” “I was travelling with Irene Kelly,” “Recollect when I am travelling with the Vigilante,” etc. And then you’re in that car, you’re the passenger along for the language ride, the verbal dérive, and the voice in the driving seat takes you there, to all the places and times lost forever — like a voiceover to a moving route line on a B-movie road map. To travel in Naked Lunch is always to flee the heat of an unnamed crime, an unbearable situation, to quit a scene gone bad, and these escape trips ineluctably merge with the quest for drugs, and take the form of tour-guide directions for scoring, dowsing for the words of procurement, a litany of drug locations from the log book of memory — “North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park,” “Dolores Street . . . Exchange Place.” It’s a verbal drift off the beaten track, seeking possession, feeling out the hot milieus and those trails gone cold, reciting the magical topography of connections, picking up on a ghost itinerary of remembered scores. The scenes we pass through are given in slide-show format, like a junky projectionist in a cold-water flat talking us through his shots of streets and tenements and vacant lots. The jumps and cuts and intersections create a fractured map, disorienting and re-routing the reader, revealing the book’s structure as a series of fatal arrivals and desperate departures. To speak is to name and remember, to recover and re-conjure the past, bring it back into existence, keep saying it and it shall be so — the past is the longed-for connection, and memory will furnish the final fix.

Repeating

The Sailor’s voice is described as “feeling” because it is searching its way through the listener’s psyche, where it “reassembles” the spoken words “in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers,” imprinting words on the brain, leaving its neural traces, the old junkie voice palpating the cortex through remote control like fingers moving over a soft typewriter keyboard, spelling it out, tapping out the junk patter letter by indelible letter on the psychic writing pad. Sailor speaks and the word becomes script, transcribed in the brain of the listener, like a screenwriter’s dialogue or a noir detective’s report taken down by a stenographer. Sailor’s own seemingly improvised and fragmented discourses are essentially scripted, the phrases worn smooth through time, and they include popular song lines and hackneyed sayings — “Every day I die a little” . . . “Right down the middle” . . . “When the roll is called up yonder” . . . “You can’t go back no more.” These clichés and pot-boilers apparently require minimal effort to utter, a lugubrious junky homespun, they’re stand-ins, fill-ins to keep the talk show on the road, Jack, just plugging the gaps, just something to say to keep the voice in play while waiting for the next thought to materialise, so to speak — but at the same time their very banality elides their implicit threat, hiding the Sailor’s deadly agenda in plain site, because every one of those well-worn phrases, crooned and whispered and hummed like a lullaby, contains its own phased warning, like a colour cancer picture on a pack of cigarettes you just bought and already smoked. “Order in The Court!” “Sauve qui peut.” “Zut alors.” “Son cosas de la vida.” “Do yourself a favor.” “Let’s get out of here.” “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.” “I’ve heard everything now.” “Isn’t life peculiar?” The most conventional expressions occur repeatedly in Naked Lunch — they’ve been around a lot those lazy locutions, lolled on the tongue or uttered peremptorily, called upon and duly passed around almost thoughtlessly through so many mouths over so many years — saves a lot of time, of course, and they even appear to have the quality of maxims, pithy and self-evident truths casually remarked, but repartee they decidedly are not. The voices are ostensibly cutting down on the “waste paper” of getting from A to Zee, but look again at this aphoristic shorthand, this proverbial telegraphese — it says nothing, and then it just gets a whole lot worse, saying the nothing that is being said.

Infecting

Sailor doesn’t like the word “agent,” he says he prefers “vector,” and he means the word in the sense of a mosquito or a tick which transmits disease from one person to another, or from an animal to a human. Everything he says or signals, whispers or touches is part of his desire to spread the infection, to disseminate the disease — to get inside a host and consummate truly biological, micro-organic, blood-sucking communion. The richness of language and the verbal pyrotechnics of Naked Lunch are at the service of repulsion and fear, opening up the word wound, the language lesion — like the punctum described by Barthes, the element which “breaks away from the scene,” the word which is a stab wound, a cut, a hole, the thing which seizes you and injures you. Words linked to invasion, possession, poison, lust, and disgust are deployed and scattered throughout — shame, filthy, massacre, fuck, cunt, cock, jism, asshole, castrate, murder, spurting, ooze, sucking, tumor, purulent discharge, sick, slime, squirt, festering . . . These words are the base material which reveals the pestilence of language as it is spread mouth to mouth — pass it on. It’s what Lawrence Lipton described in 1959 as the “oral revolution against the Geneva Code . . . ritual words for . . . the Jazz Canto art form,” even if this necessitated “a lot of filty words without literary merit.” Authorial advice on terrible and fantastic diseases is itself suspect, ersatz, and those word vaccinations and handy hints on psychic self-protection just won’t take — if there are words of healing in this book, they are hard to find. Whatever the nature of the infection, there is no cure for the condition of being verbally poisoned and Burroughs means it literal, he’s a signed-up Korzybzkian who knows that inoculation by word is doomed — to stick with his tropes, the vaccine is so powerful it boosts the full-blown language disease. In perfect, deadly circularity, the words turn upon those who utter them, and Burroughs’ writing seems locked into its own self-referential oral fixation and verbal contamination, relentlessly voicing disgust at the speech act whilst repeatedly auto-infecting.

Mutating

Breaking open his pen, the Sailor cuts open a lead tube inside the pen — it releases a “black mist,” a “black fuzz” upon which he feeds, his mouth undulating on a long tube. The stuff hidden inside the writing implement — the pen/is — ejaculates ectoplasmic ink and inhaling that orgasmic emission, “a silent pink explosion,” sucking it in through his mouth, will fix the Sailor for a month, fueling his dead junky whisper as it recycles broken reminiscences and elliptical, endless junk talk, hitting on a boy. Sailor operates and communicates on a number of levels and he has laughter “like a bat’s squeak” which vibrates through the human body — the Talking Asshole and the Sailor both have the ability to operate on a literal “gut frequency,” getting deep inside the body of the listener. Elsewhere Sailor makes flat dead statements of meaningless fact of the kind employed by Iris and Bill Gains and by the conference speaker who adopts “a flat shop-girl voice” — the voice literally falls flat, but it’s one of the Sailor’s stock devices when he’s feeling around for the right vocal pitch and in any case it exemplifies his world-weary, seen-it-all-kid, cynical operator mode. Sailor will use whatever it takes to break and enter the next host party, shilling his fugazi to some patsy, and these husks of thought, these dry distillations and laconic observations, are strategic — take it or leave it, see I got nothing to hide, or so he seems to say, or says to seem. He’s the procurer as under-executioner, a Tantalus in a dirty overcoat, and he has the liar’s bait down pat, too pat — even when he tells it like it is, he’s suspect. In Naked Lunch the mouth is always the locus of distaste and disgust, the cavity from which language stems — and the mouth itself shoots out on a long quivering tube, an undulating feeder with a life of its own, the rapine mouth on a laryngeal, intestinal stalk, as in the case of the Sailor, or Willy’s “blind seeking mouth” which “sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm.” Counterparts are the long slug which “undulates” out of the orifice of Lee’s right eye and writes on the wall in slime, and Doc Scranton’s anus which moves around the street on several feet of intestine “like a blind worm.” Mouths break their physiological limits, driven by appetite and lust, sprouting sex organs grown through undifferentiated tissue, mutating and prosthetically extending, verbal concupiscence become body-sucking consumption.

Gesturing

The Sailor’s voice may also be understood as signed — spelled out in gestures as if for the deaf, his raps and reminiscences visually telegraphed through touch and finger and hand gestures like those of the 19th century Neapolitan poor who used the gestural communication of ancient pantomime to sign words like “fuck off,” “cunt,” “cash,” “idiot,” “beg,” and “cunning.” Sailor is a member of the basso populo, the low life who would employ a signing code for criminal purposes, a language which Joe and Sailor understand perfectly — “Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug.” Burroughs would later posit the idea that writing came before speech and he may have known the Egyptologist Joseph Barois’ belief that the origins of language were dactylogical, that hand and finger shapes and gestures and their drawn equivalent signs were the proto-phonetic letters of the spoken alphabet. Burroughs’ interest in hieroglyphic writing, in the use of picture language to communicate mystical and transcendent thinking was already established before the writing of Naked Lunch, but he was familiar also with the “hieroglyphic” communications of the junky and criminal “brotherhoods” and understood that hand gestures form a silent coded language, as loaded and threatening and as dirty as spoken words, a potent vocabulary communicated by initiates in secret. Gesture and touch are silent and dream-slow in Naked Lunch, and like Freud’s analogy of dream interpretation and the decipherment of hieroglyphs, latent meaning is traced out by a finger — the tactility of the speaker who touches as he speaks is replaced by touch alone, while gestures are both ritualised and technologically functional, so that “Benway traces a pattern in the air with his hand and a door swings open.”

Touching

The Sailor’s spoken voice moves like Benway’s from “remote and blurred” to “loud and clear,” but Sailor really likes to communicate by touch, placing a finger “on the dividing line below the boy’s nose” or putting a finger “on the boy’s inner arm at the elbow,” or “feeling along the boy’s vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger” — the junky’s touch is slow, proprietorial, creepy. Sailor’s spoken words are as tactile as they are oral, physically traced, indelibly printed on the brain — “His hands moved on the table, reading the boy’s Braille.” It’s dictation by touch — a finger-tapping tattoo, morse code vibrating into the psyche. Sailor’s not alone. We see Lee “dreamily caressing a needle scar on the back of Miguel’s hand, following the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh.” Fats, too, “feels for the scar patterns of junk.” The junky “feels around” when taking a shot, and this exploratory tactility seems to drive the characters’ dreamy, invasive touching. The Shoe Store Kid palpates the mark with slow fingers, “feeling for him” like Blind Pew, while the President is fixed through touch — “we make contact, and I recharge him.” The touch is both erotic and predatory, physical intimacy is feared but may be necessary, for a while — “All personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process.” The commandante takes the letter that Carl hands him and whispers “through it, reading his lips with his left hand,” and he taps the table with one finger while he hums — orality and tactility are interwined, words are felt, and touch is read. The German doctor touches “Joselito’s ribs with long, delicate fingers” but those “long, delicate fingers” are suddenly transformed into “dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt,” real junky fingers. Doctors and junkies put their hands on the body — “Read the metastasis with blind fingers” — checking out the spreading tumour with their special knowledge and shared expertise. “Fingers” is Doc Shaffer’s affectionate moniker and the German doctor is “seedy and furtive as an old junky” — both have the psychic touch, and Sailor even picks up the feel of a score from the door of the trap where the stuff is stored, he touches “the door gently, following patterns of painted oak . . . iridescent whorls of slime.” This touch is as sinister and fatal as The Word (the divine rational principle of truth) — which in Naked Lunch has the power to cut off fingers.

Haunting

It is as if a personal signatory voice has left its traces in the interstices of this palimpsest, inscribed with a haunting particularity, an intense feeling of wonder and profound sadness which transcend the book’s rhetorical devices, a fragile humanity which the reader can easily pass over in the riot repertoire and vaudeville fireworks of the author’s otherwise splenetic, messy show. Burroughs’ own readings of the text and especially his Benway incarnation, mean that we hear the text to a degree through his own relished performances of it, but at certain moments we can pick up on something quite different coming through the noise overload and asinine chatter, a voice which is not at all performative, a voice we know from earlier Burroughs texts — wistful, nostalgic, tender and melancholy, which registers a moment of quietude or regret, a moment of serenity which seems to occur off-set, the unattended moment out of time. The moon floats in a blue sky, a warm spring wind turns cold, it’s a cold spring morning with plaintive leaves turning in the wind, everything is slow and serene as the snow begins to fall, and these scenes are haunted and voiced by “a ghost in the morning sunlight,” his memory diorama disappearing like his physical being in light. Like the “plaintive boy cries” of Joselito, Paco, Pepe and Enrique whose voices, redolent of innocence and loss, “drift in on the warm night,” this distant voice is carried through the maelstrom, the voice of someone from way back when, he was so young then, and it was so many years ago — and then it all came down.

San Francisco Art Institute, 20 November 2009

Professor Harris did not give this talk in person but sent a PowerPoint and mp3 audio file. You can listen to the talk by downloading the mp3 (13.8 MB).

I’d like to begin by thanking Peter Maravelis and Jonah Raskin for inviting me to join in tonight’s events and to the San Francisco Art Institute for hosting them — I just wish I could be with you in person and not as a disembodied voice and this snapshot taken on my last visit to the city about 18 months ago.

We’re here to mark the half-century of Naked Lunch, one book that has no need to lie about its age. And it’s been a wonderful six months for such celebrations, which started back in July in Paris, the city where Naked Lunch was first published, with four days of events including the book launch of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays which I co-edited with Ian MacFadyen. Since July, the celebrations have moved westwards with several events in England, and then in Lawrence, Kansas, Chicago, New York, Iowa City and now, finally, the Paris of the Pacific…

As for Naked Lunch itself, as I said, this is one book that simply does not seem to show its age. In these barbarous and apocalyptic times, Burroughs’ book is still as relevant as ever — still as appalling and as inspiring, as beautiful and as ugly, as funny, as prophetic, and as perplexing. But we know all this, and I don’t want to spend the next few minutes only talking in clichés. Instead, I want to tell a particular part of its back-story, a history of its coming into being that is specifically relevant to the event taking place right here right now… To some, much of it will be familiar, but I hope there will be something new in it for everyone.

Philadelphia, Chicago, Peoria, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City, Istanbul, Sioux Falls, East St Louis, Kansas City, Malmo, Tangier, Houston, Lake Charles, Tamuzanchale, Butte, Cuernevaca, Taxco, Edinburgh, Gibraltar, Yokohama, Teheran, Addis Ababa, Shanghai, Esmeraldas, Helsinki, Seattle, Capetown, Zanzibar, New York, the Hague, Aleppo, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Paris, Lexington, Cairo, Mecca, Los Angeles, Timbuctu, Stockholm, Cincinnati, Pasto, Venice, Dallas, Beirut, Texarkana, Tierra del Fuego, Panama City, David, Darien, and Madrid — not to mention Cunt Lick, Texas, and Interzone — in order of their appearance, these are the towns and cities Burroughs names in Naked Lunch — and San Francisco is not among them.

Now of course, Naked Lunch is closely associated with a number of specific places:

Working backwards from Paris, where it was first published and where Burroughs lived in the so-called Beat Hotel while he completed the manuscript and assembled the book — to Tangier, where he lived for four years while writing the great bulk of it — to Mexico and Latin America where he gathered key ingredients of his lunch in the early 1950s — back to New York City, where he had lived in the mid-’40s and where the opening and closing scenes of the narrative are set.

It’s a simple biographical fact of life that Burroughs never set foot in San Francisco until the mid-1970s — although at one crucial point he was California-bound. That was in the fall of 1954 when Burroughs left Tangier intending to move in with Allen Ginsberg, who had just settled in North Beach. But since Burroughs was obsessed with him at that time, this was the very last thing Ginsberg wanted. And, because Ginsberg was the only reason Burroughs was heading west or returning to America in the first place, he never made it further than New York City. Instead, Burroughs returned to Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch, whose routines — those comic-grotesque tours de force like the Talking Asshole — emerged out of the love-sick letters Burroughs mailed back to Ginsberg, an ocean and a continent away.

In other words, had Ginsberg not put Burroughs off coming to San Francisco, had Burroughs not been forced to write at long distance and in the absence of the reader he desired, then Naked Lunch would never have been written at all — certainly not in the form as we now know it. . .

But the connection between the city and the book isn’t only defined by negatives and absence. Indeed, on one important occasion, it was defined by a kind of fantasy presence:

This is the Spring 1958 issue of the Chicago Review, which printed what would, a year later, appear as the opening pages of the book published as Naked Lunch. The little magazine history of part-publication is as complicated as it is interesting and significant, but this was the first true part of Burroughs’ book to be published, and, as you can see from the cover, as well as the Chicago connection — as the place of publication — and the New York connection — as the setting for this opening part of the text — there is a San Francisco connection, since Burroughs is billed top of a list of Ten San Francisco poets that included Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure.

To which the only possible response would seem to be — wrong! Burroughs wasn’t a poet and he had nothing to do with either San Francisco or the poetry Renaissance then under way. Allen Ginsberg may not have been a native, but he lived in the city, wrote in the city, and read out the first draft of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery. Likewise, Kerouac was an Easterner but he also wrote about the Bay Area, and did enough to deserve having an alleyway named after him adjacent to City Lights — but Burroughs, as would so often be the case, did not belong in such company, did not fit, and the connection is way off the mark.

However, in Spring 1958 there WAS an important bridge between Burroughs and San Francisco in relation to Naked Lunch.

First of all, Michael McClure read the section that appeared in Chicago Review and that April reported to Ginsberg that he liked it “very, very much. It is so great I have new eyes now.”

McClure was so impressed, a couple of months afterwards he offered a part of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch manuscripts to Wallace Berman, which is how Semina came to publish a passage from the “Have You Seen Pantapon Rose?” section.

Also in Spring 1958, just a few days before McClure was enthusing over the Chicago Review material, Burroughs wrote, from Paris, to offer Lawrence Ferlinghetti first crack at Naked Lunch.

Well, not exactly first crack actually, since Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press had already turned a manuscript down. In fact, Ferlinghetti had been waiting impatiently for some time, worrying that Grove Press or New Directions would skim the cream off it, but when he saw what Burroughs sent him this Spring of 1958 and suggested he use — a selection of about 60 pages, barely a quarter of the published book — he turned it down. Why?

Because, as he put it in a reply to Ginsberg that May: no bookseller would dare to distribute “the flow of junk and jizzom.” Allen Ginsberg — who had been the middle man in this, as he had been in so much involving Burroughs’ writing during the 1950s — wrote back to say that he and Burroughs had made selections to water the text down and get by the censor, but still Ferlinghetti was un-persuaded. A month later, he said that trying to publish it would be “sure premeditated legal lunacy.”

Six months further on, Ferlinghetti had another chance to publish a different selection of material from Naked Lunch -– again, about 60 pages, this time the contents of the banned Winter 1958 issue of Chicago Review — and again he turned the chance down.

The obscenity just wasn’t worth the court case, and of course, having lately gone through the “Howl” trial, the publisher of City Lights Books was in a good position to know.

So far, so negative: it looked like San Francisco just didn’t dig Burroughs enough and vice versa. And although Maurice Girodias would change his mind in the summer of 1959, and would exploit the succès de scandale caused by the magazine part-publication of Naked Lunch, Ferlinghetti stuck by his guns.

Right or wrong, that decision decisively shaped the book we know by default. And that’s because the final form of Naked Lunch was a matter of timing — and had it been taken on by a different publisher or simply been assembled a little earlier or a little later, the text of Burroughs’ unstable, constantly changing work-in-progress would have ended up quite differently.

However, the relation between Naked Lunch and San Francisco isn’t just the story of near misses and missed opportunities — for Ferlinghetti was drawn to a very particular part of Burroughs’ material:

Writing in June ’58, he singles out what he identifies as the Visionary Yage City or the Composite City — as at the heart of everything.

Far from coincidentally, this would also be the section that Robert Creeley saw as the centre of Naked Lunch — in 1959 regretting there wasn’t more of it that made the final cut, having helped get a key part of this material published in 1957 in Black Mountain Review:

As should be clear from the heading under which it was published — “Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” — this material overlapped what would become two separate books: Naked Lunch in 1959 and, four years later, The Yage Letters.

Burroughs defined the Amazonian hallucinogen as “space-time travel.” These two elements would be so central to Burroughs — the visionary dimension, and the movement in all directions through space and time — and they’re particularly fascinating with regard to both Naked Lunch and its San Francisco connection for two reasons.

Firstly, the Composite City vision goes together with a composite text —

quite literally, as we can see from sections of Burroughs’ extraordinary “Yage” manuscript held at Stanford University: Here we can see the actual cutting and pasting of multiple manuscript pages and their recombination and transformation. Burroughs recognised the visual and material dimension to what he was doing, as we can also see from these —

composites of photographs he took in South America, which set the precedent for the photomontages he made at the time of completing Naked Lunch — another composite of manuscript pieces. I’ll come back to the relevance to San Francisco of this key notion of the Composite Text in just a moment.

Secondly, there is Burroughs’ idea of the Composite City which was originally defined as part New York, part Mexico City and — crucially for what I’m talking about — “part Lima which I had not seen at this time”. This Composite city goes together with the composite text — the text created from multiple materials and sources — and with the visionary promise of the hallucinogenic vine itself, since those who take the drug are — as Burroughs noted in the same letter — reputed to see visions of cities to which they have never been: prophetic, future cities.

San Francisco was not a part of Burroughs’ Composite City but it is absolutely fitting that some of the major poets then based in the Bay Area — Ferlinghetti, McClure, and Creeley — should have responded so enthusiastically to this specific material in Naked Lunch, rather than, perhaps, to the junk and the jizzom. This is not to minimize the importance of heroin and homosexuality to Burroughs’ book, but rather to play up the vital poetic centre of it — the lyricism at its visionary core — which — as Allen Ginsberg would repeatedly say when pushing his friend’s work during the 1950s — was on a par with anything in the visionary poetry of Rimbaud or St John Perse.

Here indeed we see Burroughs in fall 1953, while staying with Ginsberg in New York, reading the just published edition of St. Perse’s WINDS or VENTS while they worked together on editing Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript.

Well, the point I want to make is simply this: that even though Naked Lunch didn’t get published 50 years ago by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, but was printed 5000 miles away in Paris by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, and even though Burroughs didn’t even come to the city until the mid-1970s and didn’t imaginatively include it within his book’s visionary geography, nevertheless San Francisco did recognise and embrace the poetic, visionary heart of Naked Lunch — a dimension too often overlooked.

The connection would be fixed in print in 1963 when City Lights did publish The Yage Letters — which I had the privilege of re-editing just a couple of years ago, a project requiring many wonderful hours of archival work in the collections of Berkeley and Stanford.

And finally, one last, rather more roundabout, but entirely Burroughsian connection, which brings me back to the title of my talk: the Frisco Kid, he never returns –

This is not a reference to the 1930s film starring James Cagney, set on the old Barbary Coast in the days of the Gold Rush, nor anything to do with the 1970s book about life in North Beach by Jerry Kamstra.

No: a year after City Lights published The Yage Letters, a short Burroughs piece appeared entitled “Composite Text.” This was published in the first issue of Bulletin from Nothing —

a magazine printed in San Francisco by Charles Plymell and featuring work from, among others associated with City Lights, Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu. As Jed Birmingham, an expert on Burroughs’ little magazine history, has commented, in this issue, “Burroughs had made himself a home in the experimental literary scene in San Francisco.”

And as if delivering a cryptic message, resonant in a peculiarly Burroughsian poetic way, one of the key recurrent phrases in Burroughs’ Composite Text is none other than — The Frisco Kid, he never returns

And so, while you might say that Burroughs never returns to Frisco because he was never there in the first place, at the same time it seems absolutely right for the curious absence-in-presence that was the key to his writing of Naked Lunch fifty years ago and, I think, to our experience of reading it ever since. Like Burroughs himself, Naked Lunch keeps on never returning, keeps on luring us back to see new visions, with new eyes, and yet somehow always remains a haunting and elusive presence … a ghost in daylight… The Frisco Kid, he never returns . . . And on that note, I take my bow … Happy birthday Naked Lunch and thank you, San Francisco!

Columbia University, 9 October 2009

Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and fence-straddlers…. I’d like to start with a series of thanks: to Gerald Cloud, Librarian for Reference and Research, for organising today’s talks here at Columbia, and for curating, together with colleagues at the Butler Library, the excellent exhibition up there; to Michael Ryan, Director of the Rare Books and Manuscript department, for so warmly embracing the idea of putting Columbia centre-stage in these anniversary events, which we first discussed some two years ago; and to the organisers of the other special events in the city this week — to Keith Seward for arranging and hosting the terrific evening of readings at the St. Marks Poetry Project on Wednesday; to Marvin Taylor for arranging the panel discussion at the Fayles Library yesterday; and, looking ahead to the finale tomorrow, Regina Weinreich, of the School of Visual Arts, for a day of film-screenings and live performances. To all of them I tip my hat.

We’re here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. We all know the danger of 50th birthday parties — everyone pretending to be younger than they are — but the great thing about Burroughs’ book, one of the signs of what makes it so special, is that it has not aged, that it is still every bit as ferocious and as funny, as ugly, beautiful, offensive and original as it was half a century ago. It is certainly no coincidence that its year of publication, 1959, was itself a special year — indeed, according to the title of Fred Kaplan’s recent book, it was The Year Everything Changed. Kaplan runs through the scientific, political, and artistic milestones and landmarks that made 1959 a turning point in modern history: from Castro’s revolution in Cuba, to the development of the birth control pill and the microchip; from the opening of the Guggenheim Museum or the release of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, to the publication by Grove Press of the uncut Lady Chatterly’s Lover and (although not strictly a “landmark” and so not in Kaplan’s book) my own personal favourite, the release just a couple of weeks after Naked Lunch came out of Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful North by Northwest.

What I especially like about Hitchcock’s film is the way it identifies, with a light but biting comic touch, Modern Man as a Mad Avenue Man, a cipher all at sea and on the run in a world of images of his own making. Saul Bass’s great opening title sequence, perfectly scored by Bernard Hermann, show us a frenetic world of constant motion, a mass of geometric lines all crisscrossing into which we are chaotically plunged. And this is a reminder that Naked Lunch begins in similar fashion — plunging us into a fast-moving world with William Lee making a rube out of the “advertising exec type fruit” who holds the door for him as he boards an uptown A train from Washington Square Station. And of course Naked Lunch doesn’t only begin in New York City; it ends here, too, with the shoot-out of detectives Hauser and O’Brien in a hotel located at 103rd Street and Broadway, only a dozen blocks away from where we are right now.

But in the case of Naked Lunch we shouldn’t be too literal in how we think about its location in space and time, because this is a book we have to take on at an angle, obliquely. So, rather than going back 50 years, I want to start by going back more like 500, and travelling almost 5000 miles — to 1533 and Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors.

Warning Warning Warning

What do we see? The two ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII, and around them a scene of realistically painted objects, symbolising wealth and power, artistic, spiritual, and scientific progress, global exploration, and so on. This would be a fully coherent picture — a confident world confidently represented — if only we could ignore that… that thing … the disgusting, dirty stain, the unpleasant brown smear that cuts across the lower part of the picture, weirdly floating in a space of its own near their feet. This ugly slash is like an act of vandalism, gleefully mocking and violating the sober, confidently ordered realism of the scene. And what is this unwelcome and unsettling thing? The riddle remains until we turn away and look back with a sideways glance. Now, now that the figures and their setting are a blurry mess, all of a sudden we recognise the blot is … William Burroughs.

Of course, Holbein actually painted an anamorphic skull, but my point is we could say this is Burroughs; that he is the death’s head spoiling the group portrait of American literature, and Naked Lunch is a blot on the literary landscape, a stain on the canon of not only mainstream realist fiction but of postmodern fiction, too. Naked Lunch just doesn’t fit, is neither properly in nor out of the picture, neither comfortably inside the canon nor comfortably absent from it.

And if we take the skull analogy literally, we might say that Burroughs functions as a memento mori for literature as well as for life, and this is certainly how he has often been represented: think of his famous pose in Paris, around the time of Naked Lunch‘s publication, beside the word DANGER, or his appearance in Gregory Corso’s The American Express (1961) as “Mr D,” who stands for “danger, disaster, death!”

This is the urgent, polemical Burroughs, at its most emphatic in the title of a piece in My Own Mag from 1964: “Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning.” That same year, on the American publication of Naked Lunch, Marshall McLuhan saw Burroughs’ key role as admonitory, arguing that to criticise his books as books is “a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.”

But as well as taking it politically — and seeing Naked Lunch as a didactic wake-up call — we can also take the death’s head image poetically, or formally, in terms of the anamorphic distortion itself. In other words, on the one hand it’s a black joke against interpretation: when we do make sense of the stain, it turns out to spell (our) D-E-A-T-H. On the other hand, working out the meaning of the stain misses the point, for what the ugly mess in Holbein’s picture does is to call into question our ability to see, by forcing us to face the limitations of our comfortable, seemingly natural, standard point of view — a perspective that must rule out some essential truth (i.e., death) in order to remain an orderly, coherent picture.

So we might see this blot as a kind of hallucinatory vision in the tradition of Rimbaud, with his poetics of obscurity and his project to disorder all the senses. And while this blot may at first appear formless, the ugly opposite to form, if we change our point of view we come to recognise a different order of form. In the case of Naked Lunch, we can surely say that this is one of its functions: to wrench us out of a previously comfortable and innocent viewpoint to reveal what we couldn’t, or didn’t want, to see. “If man can see…”

Paradoxically, we now face the opposite but equal danger — for when we can see Burroughs clearly, when we have begun to make sense out of Naked Lunch while everything else seems stupid-looking, what we’ve lost is that very challenge to comprehension, the very physical disturbance and offence that defines the stain’s unsettling relation to the rest of the picture.

Naked Lunch is not just a stain, but to forget that it is a stain — an offensive spoiling of the official picture and of standard codes of representation — is as big a mistake as being unable to see that there is more to it. That is to say, we must not lose sight of the materiality of the text, a materiality that indelibly stains our senses. And this is where Dame Edith Sitwell comes in.

Genetic Myths

Sitwell joined in the famous TLS correspondence that followed publication of Naked Lunch by John Calder in Great Britain in 1963, at a time when Naked Lunch was dismissed as “literary sewage,” “merest trash not worth a second glance”: “Glug… glug. It tastes disgusting.” Such responses may have been entirely negative, but they were still properly visceral reactions to Burroughs’ visceral writing. In Sitwell’s put down: “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories.”

Sitwell’s nose, however, sniffs the junky as much as the junk, the dirty writer as well as his dirty book. That the two are effectively one is a reminder that, for the great majority, Naked Lunch is inseparable from William Burroughs. As with Kerouac and On the Road, the Biographical Fallacy reigns supreme — with all the obvious dangers of judging the book not in terms of the text in hand, but in terms of the man behind it. The book is seen as just a by-product of the writer’s life — or, for Edith Sitwell, his lavatory.

This takes us deep into Myth territory — into the endlessly circulated legends of how Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, which have over fifty years become as much a part of the novel as the text “itself.” In this area of mythmaking and mystification, Burroughs himself played a crucial part, most obviously in the “Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness” that has been an introduction to almost every edition of Naked Lunch, except the very first — the Olympia edition of 1959, which lacked this text — and the most recent — the restored edition of Miles and Grauerholz in 2003, which moved the “Deposition” to the back of the book.

The image of Burroughs as zonked out on junk, taking his “notes on sickness and delirium,” has either mediated readings of Naked Lunch or completely replaced it for the many who only know of the book, or who started it only to give up once past the “Deposition.”

The image of the stoned writer is, in its apparent repudiation of conscious authorship, a paradoxical assertion of the biographical author. But it is at one with the other key genetic accounts — the oft-repeated stories of Burroughs’ collaborations with Kerouac and Ginsberg in Tangier and of how Naked Lunch was assembled in a rush in Paris, the order of its parts resulting arbitrarily from how the printers at Olympia Press returned the galley sections to Burroughs.

What should we do about these genetic myths? One response would be to ignore them — to focus instead on the actual text of the book, and to stop looking beyond it to the man behind. In the “Deposition,” Burroughs therefore perversely reveals himself only to then insist, like the exposed wizard in The Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

The other answer would be to replace the myths with more accurate and detailed scholarly accounts, so that less people see Naked Lunch as the ravings of a junky or a random mess. But the situation is not so simple.

First, because the small print won’t take back what the big print giveth: the “Deposition” may have been moved, but the stable door has been bolted long after the horse ran away. And second, because the story of how Naked Lunch was written is a part of the story, and has been there from the very start, for a reason. Both the myths and a more scholarly material approach matter because they each answer to a genuine need. And that’s because it’s impossible to read Naked Lunch without some sort of genetic hypothesis, which is needed to hold together a book that seems constantly to spill off the page in all directions — as it redundantly tells us. Burroughs’ “Deposition” answers that question even before it has arisen, and, although his claim that the text consists of the author’s notes on junk sickness actually answers very little — if anything, makes the book that follows even more perplexing — it’s been good enough for most readers as a way to carry on.

The third reason why we should not just wish the myths away in favour of the “real” story is that the very notion of a definitive account is really a promise to explain away the text, to get rid of the stain by cleaning everything up, straightening everything out. We always insist on wanting answers, even though Naked Lunch ends by insisting that we’ll never get them, or at least not from Burroughs’ text: “No glot … C’lom Fliday…”

And the final reason is that we shouldn’t throw away any part of Naked Lunch, even ones parasitic upon it — which would include Burroughs’ own “Deposition” — without looking closely at it first. For this is the irony: although the genetic myths have promoted lazy readings of Naked Lunch, they themselves have been very lazily read — repeated a lot, but never closely examined. And so, before looking into Naked Lunch‘s manuscript history, let’s consider the mythic version of Naked Lunch‘s writing as told by that most potent mythmaker of them all: Jack Kerouac.

We begin with sausages — or to be more precise, “bolognas” — which feature in Kerouac’s account of helping Burroughs in Tangier, during spring 1957, turn his mess of writing into a manuscript. This is how Kerouac famously describes his collaboration with “Bull Hubbard” on “Nude Supper” in Desolation Angels (1965):

When I undertook to start typing it neatly double-space for his publishers … I had horrible nightmares … like of pulling out endless bolognas from my mouth, from my very entrails, feet of it, pulling and pulling out all the horror of what Bull saw, and wrote…

There are two things here. Firstly, Kerouac’s notorious nightmares arise not just from reading the text of Naked Lunch but from typing it — and not just from typing it, but from trying to do so “neatly double-space for his publishers.” That is to say, making it into a clean copy — which inevitably recalls all those legends of the manuscript’s disgusting physical condition: blood-stained, the ends of the pages eaten away by rats, etc. This is the context for Kerouac’s nightmares, the paradox of trying to accommodate Burroughs’ toxic writing to the needs of general cultural production, to make Naked Lunch fit for public consumption.

The second thing would be the bolognas themselves. Sausages are, of course, made of the very cheapest cuts, those parts of the animal that are better left unnamed — the otherwise unspeakable and unsalable body parts that make me glad to be a vegetarian. Kerouac’s point, in short, is that Naked Lunch comprises all that is impossible to swallow if you actually see what is on the end of your fork. No mere load of baloney, Kerouac’s sausages make a precise reading of the book’s title.

In fact, if we go back to the handwritten draft of this passage in Kerouac’s original diary — written from Tangier in spring 1957 — rather than take the (summer 1961) text of Desolation Angels — we see more. Calling Burroughs a “Nausea genius,” Kerouac originally dreamed he was “pulling out of my throat long great globs of undigested food wrapt in cold jellied fat.” This is even less appetising, truly nauseous, but again very precise at the verbal level. I don’t know how often Kerouac ever used the term glob, but the word appears several times in Naked Lunch, twice in the Talking Asshole routine — to which I’ll return — and again confirms Kerouac’s description as a direct and detailed response to Burroughs’ work-in-progress.

Kerouac’s vision of Naked Lunch as “undigested food” is also consistent with the speech he attributes to Burroughs just a few lines later in Desolation Angels, where Hubbard says: “I’m shitting out my educated Middlewest background.” This might be read as a kind of response to Edith Sitwell, in the sense that Burroughs’ shit is to be understood as not just his own but that of his culture.

This leads to — the Waring Blender. During the 1950s, increasingly sophisticated kitchen gadgets appeared in more and more American homes, and they also offered symbolic figures for cultural analysis. The blender appears significantly in a letter written to Kerouac, some eight months after his diary notes in Tangier, by James Laughlin of New Directions. Laughlin was writing to Kerouac regarding the problems of publishing Visions of Cody (the closest, for Kerouac, to those posed by Naked Lunch):

It is all part of the mania for pre-digestion which reaches its worst form in the Reader’s Digest. The publisher is supposed to become a kind of Waring Blender so that even adults won’t have to chew anything that is tough. It is all rather sickening.

Burroughs understood, and much of what makes Naked Lunch sickening is its refusal to chew the food for us… Equally, Burroughs’ work would need publishers who didn’t want to clean up what was necessarily dirty, blend to a paste what was hard to stomach — and he would find them in Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, aided and abetted by, among others, Irving Rosenthal, Richard Seaver, and, of course, Allen Ginsberg.

Naked Lunch literally includes this technology for making things easy to swallow, with a specific reference to a (Sunbeam) Mixmaster — American Housewife: “…and the Garbage Disposal Unit snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get under my dress…” More generally, Naked Lunch opposes the world of consumer commodities by being made of everything hard to stomach, and resists consumption formally by being all mixed up by that “Mixmaster” Burroughs, here conjoining and confusing technologies of waste disposal and food preparation in a typical gesture designed to disorient the reader.

Taking this theme one step further, in the same month Naked Lunch was published, in Moscow there took place the famous Kitchen Debate, when Vice President Nixon thought he had won the Cold War by trumpeting the American Dream as a triumph of domestic appliances. Significantly, Kruschev had Nixon’s number, lampooning him by asking; “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?” Such a brilliantly Burroughsian retort suggests Kruschev had just read Naked Lunch, echoing Burroughs’ line that “Americans have a special horror of giving up control”: “They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.”

This is also to fix on the central issue of Control, and takes us back to Kerouac in Tangier for the second part of his mythic account of how Naked Lunch was written — this time focusing not on his own typing up of the manuscript, but on Burroughs’ original writing of it.

From Dr. Mabuse To Doc Benway

… sometimes he’d whip out his pen and start scribbling on typewriter pages which he threw over his shoulder when he was through with them, like Doctor Mabuse, till the floor was littered with the strange Etruscan script of his handwriting.

This account of Burroughs writing Naked Lunch is well known, but it was not the first time Kerouac had described the writer at work, and, whether consciously or not, the earlier scene is echoed here. In May 1952, Burroughs was midway through writing Queer when Kerouac walked in on him in his Mexico City apartment, telling Ginsberg: “Bill was like a mad genius in littered rooms. He was writing.” It wasn’t only the litter that Kerouac carried over from the writing of Queer in Mexico to the writing of Naked Lunch in Morocco, but in more complex ways also the vision of Burroughs as “mad genius.” More immediately, we should note that “Etruscan” is, like “glob,” another specific term that turns up in Naked Lunch several times — twice in the repeated and resonant phrase, “doodling in Etruscan.” Again, we observe just how precisely and insightfully Kerouac echoed Burroughs’ manuscript in his account of its writing. But clearly the standout phrase is the name, Doctor Mabuse.

Easily missed, indeed always overlooked, the reference to Mabuse has a depth and breadth of significance quite alien to Kerouac’s often-parodied and apparently cartoonish picture of Burroughs the mad writer of Naked Lunch, littering the floor with scattered pages of his disarrayed manuscript.

Fritz Lang’s two great Mabuse films are richly complex, but in this context I want to highlight two or three points of intersection with Burroughs.

At the end of Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) Mabuse, the criminal genius, hypnotist and master of disguises, man of a thousand faces, goes insane, and the second film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), shows us what happened to him after a decade in the mental asylum under the care of Dr. Baum. Baum explains that after a long period of paralysis, Mabuse begins to make motions with his hand, gestures that imitate the act of writing — so they give him pen and paper and Mabuse begins writing, and doesn’t stop writing. At first, what he writes is “meaningless and confused”; then words appear among the scribbles, and finally text — thirty pages a day — until the floor of his asylum room is covered with pages of the stuff.

Clearly, this is the scene hinted at by Kerouac, the precise visual match connecting Mabuse and Burroughs in terms of automatic writing — which is how Burroughs himself regularly described his writing in his letters during the Tangier years, especially immediately before and after the 1957 visit of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and co.

Now, according to Burroughs’ “Deposition,” the notes apparently taken without memory were reports of “sickness and delirium.” Leaving aside the evident mismatch here — the “sickness” in Naked Lunch is less of the body and more of the body politic — what about the content of Mabuse’s delirious writing? Dr. Baum explains that the master criminal is still plotting crimes — but these are not crimes for profit, but seemingly senseless acts designed to produce total chaos, panic, crisis. Mabuse’s notes add up to a manual of terrorist activities. Among the subversive strikes are attacks against banks and the currency system, the poisoning of water supplies, the spreading of epidemics.

The parallels here with Naked Lunch are surprisingly precise, with echoes in the project of Islam Inc., led by AJ, using Clem and Jody as double agents, and the whole idea of an ambiguous organisation, one whose goals are obscure other than to bring down the system by stirring conflict and spreading confusion.

However, this is only one half of it — no less fascinating than the content of Mabuse’s plans are the form they take. For what makes all this especially relevant is the way his acts are described in his writing and then carried out in the world: by a gang who never meet Mabuse face to face, but get their orders in a room with nothing in it but a curtain, behind which they hear the commands of “the man behind the curtain,” as he is always referred to.

There’s also a general parallel between Mabuse, the shadowy mastermind, and Burroughs, routinely mythologised — above all by Kerouac — as an enigmatic and shadowy figure, never really there, as strange as anything in his fictional world and so seemingly, in a reversal of cause and effect, himself a product of it.

Even more curiously, in Mabuse, when a disaffected member of the gang and his girlfriend go to the room to find and challenge the Man Behind the Curtain, they discover that there is no man behind curtain: just a cardboard cut-out and the technical apparatus for broadcasting text.

In Mabuse, the writer’s voice is always mediated, and instead of physical presence, direct expression, the film emphases transcription and transmission. Mabuse is kept alive through recordings that give voice to his writing, that transmit his message without revealing his identity — a process which carries on even after his death.

As the figure of a writer, Mabuse the man disappears into a writing machine, becomes a medium for the compulsive act of writing, while his words are doubly dictated: seemingly dictated to him as automatic writing, and in turn dictating to others what they must do. Again, there’s an echo in one of the most memorable lines in Desolation Angels, where Kerouac has the Burroughs character declare: “I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I haven’t got my orders clearly decoded yet.”

Like Burroughs’ “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” the “Testament of Dr. Mabuse” questions the presence of the author and the agency of authorship, and sees the legacy of His Master’s Voice as curiously independent of the man himself. In short Mabuse is a film about authorship, about our quest to find the Man Behind It All, and about how writing escapes the hand of the man who wrote it, to take on a life of its own.

I am reminded of a telephone interview from the late 1980s when Burroughs was asked how he saw the relationship between his public image, his body of work, and himself, the actual man — and Burroughs replied: “There is no actual man…”

Contrary to the standard reading of Kerouac’s mythmaking — as lazy, sensationalizing, mystifying accounts — it’s clear that his reference to Mabuse in Desolation Angels is informed by a complex understanding of both Naked Lunch and its authorship — but what of Burroughs himself? Although there’s no record of his ever referring to Lang’s films, the fact that Ginsberg as well as Kerouac cast him in a relation with Mabuse — Ginsberg in 1954 imagining a film to be made about Burroughs in the Mabuse style — makes it very likely Burroughs did know them. Then again, the point here is not source-hunting.

If we turn from Dr. Mabuse to Naked Lunch‘s most famous doctor, Doc Benway, the parallels are quite obvious — Benway, the master “manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems” and expert on “brainwashing and control” who terrorizes the population of Annexia and unleashes total chaos in Freeland.

However, it’s not the obvious parallels that interest me here, but the connections that go back to Kerouac’s invocation of Mabuse; that’s to say, links to authorship and the act of writing.

To begin with, what’s most interesting about Benway is that when we look for him in Naked Lunch, we find he is never really, never fully, there: his face “flickers like a picture moving in and out of focus” while his voice is “a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street.” Benway the doctor is, like Burroughs the writer, as absent as he is present: “I am never here… Never that is fully in possession…”

The most revealing point in Naked Lunch when Benway is absent when presumed present is when he speaks the text’s most famous routine: the Talking Asshole. Because on close inspection this routine about ventriloquism itself ventriloquises Benway — the multiple styles of speech, ranging from German maxims to Shakespeare quotations and antiquated Anglicisms, from hip talk to technical terms, are put in his mouth rather than expressing his “character.”

And if we look at the original letter from 1955 in which Burroughs wrote the routine, we can see there’s a material reason for this: originally, it had nothing to do with Benway — who was only added as its speaker when the routine was fitted into a new frame a year, possibly two years, later. As the original epistolary context makes clear, the routine had instead to do with Burroughs’ control over his own writing. In his letter of February 7 1955 (curiously, Burroughs misdated it 1954), the routine is framed first by Burroughs’ description of how he “smokes some tea” and sits down “and out it comes all in one piece like a glob of spit” — note the echoes of Kerouac’s account in Desolation Angels — and afterwards by the commentary: “It’s almost like automatic writing produced by a hostile, independent entity.”

Burroughs couldn’t be clearer that his routine is a parable of the act of writing. By giving this routine to Doc Benway, Burroughs makes a parallel between the political and creative paradoxes of control, and so invites the comparison to Mabuse.

Now of course, we might say that calling on Burroughs’ letters blurs the distinction between fiction and biography, published text and autobiographical context. However, that is not at all the case — and not just because of how important Burroughs’ letters were to the writing of Naked Lunch (the epistolary medium being the machine that produced his routines), but because the letter form itself was at one point the central structuring device of the novel.

Indeed, in 1955, Burroughs made the Talking Asshole routine as a letter a part of his text, as we can see in this manuscript page, a verbatim copy of the original letter, retyped as the work of William Lee. So at one point, Burroughs intended the routine to appear framed by the original letter context, inviting it to be read in terms of automatic writing and the paradoxical absence / presence of the conscious author.

In the book published in 1959 very little of such material would remain — what there is appears mainly in the “Hospital” section — and in retrospect it’s clear that Burroughs cut such material because, ironically, it looked fake, seemed self-conscious and indulgently literary, in the tradition of Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters.

The Composition of Naked Lunch

The letter format was a plan Burroughs abandoned, as he would all the various schema he sketched to hold his work together; but traces of each structure would survive, making Naked Lunch a palimpsest of materials and methods over a six-year period — and it’s this unlikely and unplanned mixing of schemas and sections that makes Naked Lunch more than the sum of its parts. That history of composition and restructuring has yet to be written, but my hope is that the next 50 years of interest in Naked Lunch will be able to build on an increasingly detailed manuscript history. Certainly, we now have one great advantage — far better archival access, thanks especially to the acquisition of the Burroughs Papers by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

The present task is to build from the ground up, starting with a chronology of Naked Lunch‘s composition so that we can answer such elementary questions as: which parts date from what periods during the six years Burroughs worked on it between 1954 and 1959, and how were these parts revised and reorganised?

Piecing the compositional history together from a combination of sources, some primary and others circumstantial, we arrive at some basic overall statistics, given here as percentages by year, of how much of Naked Lunch was written when. Perhaps the main surprise is to see how little new material — barely 15% — was written during 1958 and 1959 when Burroughs lived at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

Looking at it another way — from the point of view of each individual section within the structure of the published text (based on the Olympia edition) — we see something even more striking. Whereas the first eight and the last eight sections are a mixture of materials dating from all periods of composition, from 1955 to 1959, the middle eight sections — almost a hundred straight pages running from “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” to the “County Clerk” — all date from one single period, and were composed by Spring 1957.

Of course, these are crude models, and since the devil is always in the detail, no more than a point of departure. Now, within this history the single most important document is the one preserved here at Columbia University — the 200-page manuscript of “Interzone,” the one Kerouac, together with Ginsberg and Alan Ansen, helped type up in Tangier between February and June 1957.

There’s only time today to address the most elementary questions about how “Interzone” relates to the book published as Naked Lunch, but we should begin with one thing we know for certain: the sections did not belong in any particular linear sequence. That the running order changed and kept changing is evident from this document, reproduced as endpapers in the Restored edition — although the original at Columbia reveals even more clearly, from the use of pencil, green ink, and two types of blue pen, its multiple histories of revision by revealing this as the work of three different hands and four different occasions.

But the simplest question we need answering about the manuscript of “Interzone” is: how much of it ended up in Naked Lunch — or to put it the other way round, how much of the published book came from this manuscript?

Burroughs once said in conversation with Maurice Girodias that the manuscript he saw and rejected in 1958 was “not even approximately similar” to the book Olympia published in 1959. But precisely how different were they, and in which parts? A basic comparison of manuscript and text looks like this:

What this confirms is not just the percentage of material — 75% of Naked Lunch came from “Interzone” — but its organisation: and the fact that the centre all came from “Interzone” suggests there’s something wrong or at the very least misleading about the claim that the order of the sections was random, determined by the order in which they came back from the printers as galleys. Maybe so, but if so, then clearly the sequence they had been sent to the printer in the first place must have been far from random.

As I say, these are preliminary attempts to explore in detail a complex history. They indicate just how much is left to do, how little progress has been made since the work of manuscript and textual analysis started.

That work began, in fact, with this document, drafted by Allen Ginsberg to compare the “Interzone” manuscript with the 1959 edition. Since this was probably drawn up in either late 1959 or 1960, it shows that the work of analysis is effectively as old as the book itself — further confirmation, were it needed, of the instability of the text, no sooner published than already preparing to find a new form, a new shape.

This is a good place to end, since Ginsberg’s role in the writing and assembling of Naked Lunch was so crucial, and because his table, from 50 years ago, inevitably reminds me of this one:

This list I myself made, when I first came across the manuscript of “Interzone,” here at Columbia, in the old Rare Book and Manuscript reading room (room 800 on the third floor, if my memory serves), way back in 1984. In fact, it was October 1984, and I was here having just that month started my doctoral work on Burroughs — which makes this, to the very month, my silver anniversary as a Burroughs scholar, and it is a great personal honour to be here, 25 years later, among such company to give this keynote.

So, if you will indulge me, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the three Burroughsians I first met 25 years ago and to whom I owe so much. Firstly, Barry Miles, whom I met here in New York in October ’84, and whose scholarly and biographical research into Burroughs and the Beats provided wonderful work for myself and others to build on. Secondly, James Grauerholz, who did so much for Burroughs during the last twenty years of his life, and whom I first met out in Lawrence just before Thanksgiving 1984. James not only introduced me to William Burroughs and encouraged my research but has allowed me the extraordinary privilege of being able to edit Burroughs’ work. And finally, Ian MacFadyen, whom I met in London I think about a year later, and whose co-editing with me of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays is just the tip of a great iceberg of intensely shared Burroughsian passion. To Miles, James, Ian — a tip of my hat.

It seemed right to give Burroughs the last word, but I have to admit that I was looking in vain for a good punchline to tie it all up when, just before flying out here, a punchline found me… I only came across this a few days ago, on a French website: news that 2009 is not only the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch but the golden jubilee of the Institut Benway. Since the late 1950s this thriving medical business has specialized in developing prosthetic organs, products truly worthy of the Benway name, and celebrated now in a series of international conferences.

The Institut Benway is, alas, a fictional company, founded in 2004, the brainchild of Mael Le Mée, a French plastic artist and writer. His Institut is, I would say, a true measure of Burroughs and his Naked Lunch. The book may never be in the “canon” or embraced by the academy, it may remain ambiguously on the margins of “serious” criticism, but it continues to inspire humour that cuts like a drunken doctor’s scalpel. So, a tip of my hat to you, too, in the spirit of Doc Benway.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.

— William S. Burroughs, “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness”

When the topic of Burroughs and apomorphine arises in drug histories and biographies, it most commonly deals with the fact that in 1956 Burroughs took the apomorphine cure under the supervision of Dr. John Yerbury Dent and emerged a man reborn. The story goes that only after Burroughs overcame his addiction could he begin in earnest the work of transforming his Word Horde into Naked Lunch. The accepted tale about Burroughs and apomorphine ignores the fact that Naked Lunch had a form before the cure (“The real novel is the letters to [Ginsberg]”) and that major sections of Naked Lunch like The Talking Asshole routine were written a full year before the cure. After 1956 the apomorphine experience provided Burroughs with an overarching framework for Naked Lunch, but this would be a road not taken. In addition the road to recovery, if Burroughs truly ever walked that path, was a long and winding road. In fact, as the Deposition makes clear but as critics have ignored, Burroughs took the cure more than once between 1956 and July 1959, the date of Naked Lunch‘s publication. By 1958, he was nearly, if not completely, hooked on paregoric and shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch he would be implicated in a drug ring. The actual cure was a difficult experience (“The cure itself was awful” Letter to Ginsberg May 8, 1956) with side effects that lingered over a year later despite Burroughs’ assurances in retrospect that the apomorphine cure was quick and non-invasive. Yet the myth that the apomorphine cure effectively ended Burroughs’ struggle with drugs and jumpstarted Naked Lunch persists. Burroughs encouraged the development of just such a cover story in interviews and elsewhere, most famously in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” published as a preface to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch.

So what role did apomorphine play in this crucial period of development for Burroughs as a writer and individual? Why did Burroughs distort the facts regarding his experience with apomorphine, and why has that story remained unexamined for decades? Why has the “cure” in 1956 become the pivot on which Burroughs turned his life around? Why, however falsely, does the story of Naked Lunch begin at this point?

On one level, the development of this myth begins with Burroughs’ 1959 arrest on drug trafficking charges. Shortly after his arrest, Burroughs began work on the Deposition essay. In his letters of the period, Burroughs assured Ginsberg that the Deposition was sincere and represented his current beliefs on drugs and drug addiction.

“I am writing a short deposition with regard to Naked Lunch. This is essential for my own safety at this point: Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus, the manner in which it operates, and in the manner in which it can be brought under control. This is no act. I mean it all the way. Get off that junk wagon, boys, it’s going down a three mile grade for the junk heap. I am off junk in sickness or in health so long as we both shall live.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 11, 1959)

The Deposition contains an account of the cure and describes the role of apomorphine as an antidote to the “Sickness.” Ginsberg felt the Deposition went too far and wrapped up Naked Lunch too neatly. He also doubted the Deposition’s sincerity. Reading the letters of the period, one gets the sense that Burroughs protested too much in defending the Deposition as an accurate, honest account of his true feelings. By 1991, Burroughs retracted his statement that he did not remember writing the notes that became Naked Lunch. The con appears to be on, but as Oliver Harris demonstrates in The Secret of Fascination, generations of critics have been willing marks parroting the Deposition into the critical record verbatim. In some cases, they have even misrepresented the Deposition, in which Burroughs admits to backsliding into addiction after the cure. Apomorphine was far from the miracle drug that Burroughs made it out to be — and, as we will see, he also left out a key component of the history of its use. It all suggests that Burroughs’ championing of apomorphine as an effective cure may have stemmed, at least on one level, from a desire to portray himself as drug-free and thereby stay out of jail.

But there is more to the story of apomorphine and to Burroughs’ insistence of being clean than simple legal expedience. Burroughs felt the need to be drug-free before his trouble with the law in late 1959. As the letters demonstrate, Burroughs realized he was on the road to terminal addiction by late 1955. The depths of Burroughs’ despair and desperation were no con. The trip to London to seek treatment with Dr. Dent was necessary on the level of survival.

Yet the need to be clean was also closely tied to Burroughs’ strong desire to be a successful author published by the Establishment, i.e. corporate publishers. The letters from the mid-1950s are full of references to Burroughs’ desire to gain mainstream acceptance as a writer. At this time, Burroughs associated writing with respectability and social acceptance. By becoming a writer, Burroughs could redeem himself (for the death of Joan, for being a poor father, for not supporting himself financially) and give himself a place in society. Writing was a means to conform, and Burroughs felt the need to fit in strongly. The image of the opium-addicted writer held an allure for Burroughs from an early age. As he struggled with the form and content of Naked Lunch, however, Burroughs’ drug addiction not only hampered his ability to write, it also symbolized his sick creativity and his inability to write straight narrative and commercially viable material. Apomorphine, as a means of curing his drug addiction, was thus a way for Burroughs to free himself to write. In a sense, kicking drugs was a way of going mainstream and being respectable. First, the cure would facilitate the act of writing and then possibly open the door to writing of a less sick and more popular nature.

Apomorphine tied into getting straight in another, less obvious manner. In the early days of the 20th century, apomorphine was used by doctors as part of a treatment to cure patients of their homosexuality. In Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell mentions this fact in passing and suggests that Burroughs would have been aware of this aspect of apomorphine’s history. Burroughs never discussed it. In the Deposition, Burroughs states that historically the only use for apomorphine was as an emetic for poisoning. Not true, and given the fact that Burroughs was briefly a medical student and that he was intensely interested in medical history, the assumption that Burroughs knew apomorphine’s full history is not far-fetched. Currently, apomorphine is being used to combat erectile dysfunction (Uprima). Clearly, there is a strong sexual aspect to apomorphine’s history and its side effects. Apomorphine’s sexual component coupled with withdrawal symptoms must be an intense shock to the system. Burroughs ignored these elements of apomorphine in his published writing on the subject, but not in his letters.

Immediately following the apomorphine cure in London in 1956, there are several references in Burroughs’ letters to changes in his sex drive. In his first letter after the cure, Burroughs writes, “The thought of sex with anyone gives me the horrors… Last night went to a ghastly queer party where I was pawed and propositioned by a 50-year-old Liberal MP. I told him, ‘I couldn’t sleep with Ganymede now, let alone you.'” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 8, 1956) A week later Burroughs reports to Ginsberg, “Still no interest in sex.” I am unaware if apomorphine was used by doctors as an aversion technique to combat homosexual impulses, but in Burroughs’ case the apomorphine experience did lead to a type of sexual conditioning. In the months after the cure, Burroughs’ sex drive returned as did his sexual activities with “boys.” However, as the letters show, a heterosexual element in his sexual make-up surfaced at this point. Burroughs writes, “Still no interest in sex. I am physically able you dig, just not innarested. When I look at a boy nothing happens. Ratty lot of boys they got here anyhoo. Maybe when I come around to it, I want women.” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 15, 1956)

Over the next year, Burroughs underwent a period of intense sexual questioning. For example:

So suddenly a wave of sex come over me and I have a spontaneous orgasm strap my vitals. Now a spontaneous, walking orgasm is a rare occurrence even in adolescence. Only one I ever experienced before was in the orgone accumulator I made in Texas. And another thing. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It”s the new frisson, dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old character find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make the switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young cunt’s little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. He stumbled out in the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say, “who you think you’re kidding with the queer act. I know you, baby.” What it is as Allah wills… (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 15, 1956).

One might assume that this quote is another Burroughsian routine full of irony and black humor, but the references to heterosexual impulses in the letters are too numerous to discount as mere joking. Clearly just after his apomorphine experience, Burroughs experienced a crisis of sexual identity. It may not be possible to say whether this can be directly attributed to apomorphine, but apomorphine, sexual identity, and the form of Naked Lunch will all be interrelated by late 1957. Burroughs’ sexual questioning strikes me as very similar to the crisis Ginsberg experienced just before the breakthrough of Howl in 1955. Famously, Ginsberg met with his analyst and openly discussed his desire to live as a poet and more importantly as a gay poet despite his attempts to play it straight. Ginsberg’s analyst stated that nothing was stopping him. This advice encouraged Ginsberg on the path to sexual freedom and the poetic vision of Howl occurred shortly thereafter.

Similarly the feverish development of Naked Lunch occurred during a period of uncertainty regarding sexual identity. As Burroughs questioned his sexuality, Naked Lunch poured forth “like dictation.” In addition the desire to go straight sexually paralleled a desire to once and for all straitjacket Naked Lunch into the form and themes of the conventional novel. In early 1957, Burroughs was seriously examining his homosexuality. Burroughs writes,

All the etiology of my homosex and practically everything spill right out of me. Quotes from last night majoun high: “So what’s holding him up? — homosex orientation — Some old tired synapse pattern won’t go to its home like it’s supposed. There must be an answer, I need the answering device. I think I can arrange but it will be expensive. Modern Oedipus.” This give me an out already, I can put down the old whore and hump some young Crete gash heat my toga like the dry goods of Nexus, you might say Nexus had the rag on.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Jan. 31, 1957)

In late 1957, Burroughs examined Naked Lunch‘s form and determined to make yet another effort to conform and contain Naked Lunch. As a result, Burroughs developed The General Theory of Addiction. He writes, “At present I am working on Benway and Scandinavia angles, also developing a theory of morphine addiction… Incidentally, this theory resulted from necessities of the novel. That is scientific theories and novel are inseparable. What I am evolving is a general theory of addiction which expands into a world picture with concepts of good and evil.” (Letter to Ginsberg Sept. 20, 1957). The answer to Burroughs’ sexual and literary questioning was the General Theory of Addiction. This theory was tied to Burroughs’ sexual crisis and the form of Naked Lunch. Burroughs writes, “Briefly, the novel concerns addiction and an addicting virus that is passed from one person to another in sexual contacts. The virus only passes from man to man or woman to woman, which is why Benway is turning out homosexuals on an assembly-line basis.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Aug. 27, 1957)

The General Theory of Addiction derived directly from Burroughs’ apomorphine experience and related to the pioneering work of Dr. Dent, Anxiety and Its Treatment. “The Theory of Addiction is, incidentally, correct, in essentials. I received a letter from Wolberg, quote… ‘Particularly interesting is your theory about cancer and schizophrenia. I have made no study of this, but telephoned a friend who works for a large mental institution. He said the incidence of cancer among schizophrenics is appreciably lower than among non-schizophrenics.’ The importance of this one fact is immeasurable. My theory contains the key to addiction, cancer, and schizophrenia. I have not yet heard from Doctor Dent.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 19, 1957) Keep in mind this theory developed from “the necessities of the novel.” Even at this late date, Burroughs strongly felt the need to subject Naked Lunch to the restraints of the novel. The desire for literary form was also related to his desire to conform sexually.

In a key letter written on October 8, 1957, Burroughs sent along a copy of his General Theory of Addiction to Ginsberg. Burroughs writes:

I feel myself closer and closer to resolution of my queerness which would involve a solution of that illness. For such it is, a horrible sickness. At least in my case. I have just experienced emergence of my non-queer persona as a separate personality. This started in London where in a dream I came into room to see myself not a child but adolescent, looking at me with hate. So I said, ‘I don’t seem to be exactly welcome,’ and he say. ‘Not welcome!!! I hate you!’ And with good reason too. Suppose you had kept a non-queer young boy in a strait-jacket of flesh twenty five years subject to continual queer acts and talk? Would he love you? I think not. Anyhoo, I’m getting to know the kid, and we get on better. I tell him he can take over anytime, but there is somebody else in this deal not yet fully accounted for and the kid’s not up to deal with him, so I hafta stay around for the present. Actually, of course the kid and all the rest of us have to arrange a merger. A ver.

The concept and linking together of sickness and queerness related directly to Burroughs’ apomorphine experience. As this letter demonstrates, the emergence of his heterosexual personality started just after the cure in London. Soon after Burroughs felt himself cured of the Sickness, i.e. drug addiction, he sought to cure himself of his queerness. The time was ripe for Burroughs to conform, to get his life together, and to play it straight. Sickness and illness also refer to the sick, obscene nature of Naked Lunch and its failure to conform to the traditional novel form as well as Naked Lunch‘s troubling (for Burroughs) link to homosexual desire and obsession. The phrase “strait-jacket of flesh” creates a wealth of associations between madness, sickness, homosexuality / heterosexuality, and literary form. As Harris demonstrates, Naked Lunch germinated in Queer (Burroughs’ account of his obsession with Lewis Marker) and his letters to Ginsberg. Burroughs strongly felt the need to cover up those personal elements in Naked Lunch. According to Harris, the junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction did just that. It not only provided a form to the novel, it shifted the focus from homosexual obsession to drug addiction. In a sense, apomorphine provided a means to cure Naked Lunch of its queerness.

By April 1958, Burroughs instructed Ginsberg to include the Benway section and to exclude the theoretical material. In final publication, Burroughs abandoned the General Theory of Addiction framework for Naked Lunch but traces remain in the Benway section. As Harris demonstrates, the General Theory and the related “The Conspiracy” were Burroughs’ last attempts to straitjacket Naked Lunch into the traditional form of the novel. By late 1958, Burroughs realized that his desire to be a writer did not depend on toning down his radical experimentation in literary style and drug use. In fact, those elements were what made Naked Lunch a profoundly obscene masterpiece. Burroughs’ change of heart cannot be separated from his tentative success in getting selections of Naked Lunch published to wide acclaim in little magazines beginning in 1957 and onwards into early 1959. Yet the decision to tone down the elements of homosexual desire remained. On one level, this was achieved by eliminating references to the epistolatory origins of the novel. That said, the novel as published by Burroughs in 1959 was a radical one, as much anti-novel as novel.

Yet Burroughs’ troubles with obscenity laws in 1959, in addition to his problems with drug laws (discussed above), would lead to a reassessment of Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ re-insertion of apomorphine into the text. Burroughs strongly desired the publication of the complete Naked Lunch in the United States. Concessions had to be made to render Naked Lunch palatable to American courts and the reading public. The Deposition and to a lesser extent the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” serve this purpose. In a sense, Burroughs reintroduced the General Theory of Addiction into the novel. According to Harris, this paradigm completely overshadows the other more transgressive aspects of Naked Lunch, in essence de-radicalizing it, de-sexualizing it, and de-toxifying it. First, the Deposition de-radicalizes the text by providing a means to analyze and to interpret the book. Burroughs provides a blueprint (whether con or not) for critics and readers to approach the novel. In addition, the Deposition de-sexualizes the book by taking the focus off of the homosexual obsession that formed the basis for the novel. A framework based on drug addiction replaces the sexuality of the letter economy. In the various obscenity trials surrounding Naked Lunch, doctors testified that the novel presented an accurate portrayal of the junk / drug problem. With the introduction of apomorphine, Burroughs could not be accused of immorality since he provided a solution to the problem he presented. The book was no longer obscene but instead was a public service message on a major problem facing contemporary society. The account of apomorphine effectively cures the novel of its Sickness (queerness, obscurity, immorality, and drug abuse). In essence the novel itself undergoes Dr. Dent’s cure and emerges reborn.

As the opening pages of APO-33 Bulletin: a Metabolic Regulator make clear, the Deposition and other writings on apomorphine of the Naked Lunch era left a bad taste in Burroughs’ mouth. The accepted reason is that Burroughs did not make the case for apomorphine strongly enough, since he did not implicate law enforcement and the medical community in the blackballing of his miracle drug. That may be true, but I cannot help sensing that Burroughs also felt that these writings came on much too strong and revealed too much. In APO-33, Burroughs explains his failure regarding apomorphine as an overestimation of his popularity potential. In essence, Burroughs tried to be respectable and mainstream. He played to the audience, so he watered down his beliefs about apomorphine. Yet he also pandered to “popularity” in another manner. Burroughs altered and molded the popular perception of himself and his troublesome novel for the benefit of the legal system in drug and obscenity trials. Burroughs may have realized that these pieces discussing apomorphine attached to Naked Lunch diminished the diabolical power of his novel.

By 1965, the time to kow-tow to popular and legal opinion was over. By being the most notorious author in the world, Burroughs had paradoxically achieved an element of respectability. He was a financial and critical success. The legal battles were basically over. Maybe Burroughs felt apomorphine had to be rescued from the squares and injected with the radical spirit. In the work of the 1960s, apomorphine no longer just embodied and played a role in a junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction. It represented a new theory, but a theory grounded in process: the cut-up technique. As I demonstrated in my earlier column on apomorphine, the drug became symbolic of this experimental technique. Works like APO-33 returned to the radical nature of Naked Lunch. Radical in form and in process of composition. The apomorphine experience was no longer utilized as a straitjacket. Given its non-commercial and disorienting nature, Burroughs’ work of this period was once again considered unreadable and beyond the forces of readerly control. And for Burroughs, apomorphine once again became a cure, this time for the sickness of Language and the Word.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Read a lot of William Burroughs and soon enough you’ll find evidence of him everywhere. A sense of paranoia develops where everything becomes touched with the Burroughsian. Couple this fascination with a case of bibliomania and it can seem that Burroughs lurks on every page and hides behind every corner. Take John Ciardi’s book of children’s verse: Doodle Soup. When I worked in a used bookstore in the Washington DC area, signed copies of Doodle Soup turned up from time to time. Ciardi dedicated the book to his Aunt. The aunt got a hold of several signed copies of Doodle Soup which she would further inscribe to friends and family for Christmas gifts. Copies continue to find their way into rare bookstores. Talk about re-gifting. This book of light verse includes such gems as “Why Pigs Cannot Write Poems.” It reads as follows:

Pigs cannot write poems because
Nothing rhymes with oink. If you
Think you can find a rhyme, I’ll pause,
But if you wait until you do,
I’ll have forgotten why it was
Pigs cannot write poems because.

Of course, Ciardi is completely off the mark here. Poetically conservative critics, like Ciardi, have been labelling the Beat writers ignorant swine for decades. And that’s to say nothing of what feminist critics have labelled the Beats. In addition, as E.B. White documented in Charlotte’s Web, pigs have been poets for quite some time. The poem below was found in Wilbur’s (not Richard) uncollected writings.

I awoke with
a startled oink
hit by the sudden
realization, boink!,
that I am a mere
forty winks
from being turned
into sausage links.

Some pig! This poem failed to make the pages of Charlotte’s Web and cannot be authenticated. Possibly only a publisher, like Ed Sanders, unscrupulous enough to announce that he would publish anything would dare touch it. In any case, you could argue that Charlotte probably ghost wrote the poem anyway.

While working at the store, I became obsessed with Doodle Soup. One day I could not take it anymore and I bought a copy. It now sits on my rare book shelf, and it is one of the quirky items that fills out my Burroughs collection. Seemingly nothing could be further from the Burroughsian, but Doodle Soup in my paranoia fits in quite nicely right next to my Olympia Naked Lunch and my Big Tables. Madness?? Not really. As I said Burroughs is everywhere.

Ciardi graduated from Tufts University in 1938 and became a prominent member of a circle of poets who, like Robert Lowell, were centered in Cambridge/Boston, a place that dominated the immediate post-WWII poetry scene. Several of them were collected in the Mid-Century American Poets anthology of 1950. In a related side note, another practicioner of children’s verse, X.J. Kennedy, also had ties to Tufts. Kennedy taught there in the early 1960s and my father took his course as an undergraduate English major. According to my father, Kennedy often brought poets from the Cambridge circle into the classroom for reading and discussion. Readers of a certain age are probably very familiar with Kennedy without even knowing it. There is a good chance that Kennedy introduced you to poetry. Kennedy edits several Introduction to Poetry textbooks used in high schools and colleges across the United States. The textbooks indoctrinate young readers into a rather conservative reading of poetic tradition. With the rise of New Formalism, these books have come back into favor. This theme of instructing the young in acceptable literature and protecting them from the disreputable comes into play with Naked Lunch and Ciardi. By the way, try reading the anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg for a healthy counterbalance to the established literary tradition.

In the 1950s Ciardi served as poetry editor for the Saturday Review, a weekly magazine. The magazine is largely forgotten now, but in its heyday, it was a rival to the New Yorker as an example of the literary mainstream. To be published in the New Yorker and Saturday Review was to make it to the big leagues as a writer. This is not to say that it was the only game in town. Take the Cambridge of Lowell and Ciardi. Shortly after mid-Century an alternative scene developed. Cid Corman of Origin, Jack Spicer, Joe Dunn of White Rabbit Press, Stephen Jonas, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley formed the core of the Boston Renaissance of the mid-to-late 1950s. The term Renaissance links Boston to a similar literary awakening that was occurring at the same time in San Francisco. Spicer and Blaser were members of the earlier (and largely overlooked) Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s that made the much more publicized San Francisco Scene possible. Of course, Burroughs has Boston ties. As a graduate of Harvard, Burroughs was one of the elite gone to seed. A Satanic figure, Burroughs fit in with a host of degenerate angels who revolted against the kingdom of heaven. In the literary world, that kingdom was academic verse and the tenets of New Criticism. Ciardi was one of the elect.

That said, Ciardi was also one of the first literary men, and maybe the first in print, to recognize Naked Lunch as a “masterpiece.” As editor of Saturday Review, Ciardi wrote an account of the Big Table obscenity trial that included a review of Big Table #1’s contents, ending with a positive review of Naked Lunch. The tie to Burroughs and the quirky value of Doodle Soup becomes more clear. The review was entitled “The Book Burners and Sweet Sixteen,” and it ran on June 27, 1959, a full month before Olympia Press published what Ginsberg thought was to remain published in Heaven. Get a copy of William S. Burroughs At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989 edited by Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg. This collection gathers book reviews and other critical responses to Burroughs’ work over three decades. Like the collections of Burroughs’ interviews, this book is an invaluable resource. “Sweet Sixteen” opens the book after a very good introduction by the editors. Matt Theado’s The Beats: A Literary Reference is another essential book. It contains several other Beat-related pieces printed in the Saturday Review, including an abridged version of “Sweet Sixteen.”

In the introduction to At the Front, the point is made that the early critical reception of Burroughs revolved around legal questions. As a result, Burroughs and Naked Lunch had to demonstrate a moral purpose. As I have argued in my Kulchur piece, this is unfortunate, since robbing Burroughs and Naked Lunch of their obscenity and their offensiveness lessens them both in my mind. Readers get robbed as well. To me, the sensation of being shocked and offended is very invigorating. I relish that feeling of shock that accompanied my first reading of Naked Lunch.

Ciardi would be associated with Naked Lunch years after his article. It should be noted that Ciardi’s Wikipedia page fails to mention Ciardi’s pivotal role in the reception of Naked Lunch. The section on Naked Lunch from Ciardi’s review appeared on the dust jacket flap to the Olympia Press version of Naked Lunch. The strange reference to Dante and vulgar language on the flap comes from the fact that Ciardi translated The Divine Comedy and was an expert on the Italian writer. Ciardi was asked to defend Naked Lunch at the Big Table trial. He declined at that time, but he did speak on behalf of the novel during the Boston trial that followed the book’s release by Grove Press. Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg also appeared on the stand to give their two cents. Burroughs stayed clear of the trial. No doubt it was determined that his reputation would precede him and would cloud the issues at hand with questions of murder, homosexuality and drug abuse.

Ciardi’s presence mirrored the presence of Mark Schorer on behalf of Howl nearly a decade earlier. Schorer was a noted academic at the University of California. He wrote the definitive biography on Sinclair Lewis a few years after the Howl trial. If Schorer represented the San Francisco literary establishment, Ciardi served the same purpose in Boston. He had been an esteemed member of the Cambridge poets. In fact, it is interesting that it was in Boston that Naked Lunch went on trial. The phrase “Banned in Boston” has become a cliché. The city’s Puritian tradition makes Boston ever watchful of any type of obscenity. In vulgarity, Naked Lunch would seem offensive to that tradition, but more interesting to me is the fact that Burroughs and Naked Lunch challenged the literary tradition that eminated out of Boston not just in the 1650s (Purtians) or 1850s (Trancendentalists), but in the 1950s.

I admire Ciardi for stepping to the plate and defending Burroughs and Naked Lunch. The book was an assault on the literary establishment he represented, but clearly Ciardi saw a greater danger in the obscenity trials surrounding the novel. That danger was censorship and the oppressive nature of entities like the post office that supposedly protected for the public good. The end of Ciardi’s review reads, “In matters of art, what is official is always inhuman. Neither the barbarians of the Book of Regulations nor the barbarians of sweet-sixteen have any business between the minds of a serious writer and a serious reader. Nor can they be tolerated there. All censorship is a disaster that begins in ignorance and seeks to culminate in demagoguery. No occasion in the turbulences of a complex but still hopefully democratic society calls for stronger language in rebuttal. A curse on all of them as faithless men. Or worse, as men who have subverted faith to expedience. There can be no compromise with the book burners. There is only the duty to hold them in disgust, and hope that they can be made to understand the scorn of freer and better men.”

In Ciardi’s distrust of the official, the then-recent McCarthy hearings come to mind. I can easily see his horror of the book burners. Heine wrote: “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” The Holocaust was only a decade in the rear-view mirror. But I am particularly pleased with Ciardi’s distrust of the Sweet Sixteen mentality. The restriction of the freedom of adults in the name of protecting children infuriates me and this manuever has been used by forces of control as a means to extend their influence seemingly forever. It upset Ciardi as well and it makes me appreciate his book of children’s verse, Doodle Soup, all the more. Doodle Soup may be child’s play for Ciardi, but his appreciation for literature, including Naked Lunch, is not. It is serious play.

It is strange how a book and a poet on the surface so removed from Naked Lunch can relate to it with such force and complexity. As a result, Doodle Soup belongs on my shelf next to my Olympia Naked Lunch. This sense of paranoia that surrounds Burroughs is part of Burroughs’ charm for me. Maybe the entire post-WWII era is Burroughsian. Remember: just because he is invisible does not mean he is not there.