by Oliver Harris

Literary adaptations for the silver screen have always been a hit and miss affair, with some notable triumphs and many spectacular travesties. William Burroughs’ bête noire was The Snows of Kilimanjaro,which in 1952 ruined Hemingway’s short story about death by giving it a Hollywood happy ending. Whether the Beat field is especially cursed, I don’t know, but up until now you certainly can’t say it has been blessed. Not one of the films made from the holy trinity of texts written by the holy trinity of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs can be called a great success, despite good intentions, promising creative collaborations, and flashes of inspiration. And adaptations matter, despite what Burroughs famously said about David Cronenberg‘s 1991 version of Naked Lunch (via a quotation from James M. Cain, which he misattributed to Raymond Chandler): “My novels? Why, Hollywood hasn’t done anything to them. They’re still right there, on the shelf.” 

Burroughs’ hope for Naked Lunch was that readers “will judge the film as something quite apart from my novel, and that I may perhaps find some new readers thereby.” However, like many people, I can’t help seeing cinematic adaptations as “translations” of the original — and badly translated texts badly misrepresent them: if you have any French, try reading Le Festin nu; it’s awful. But Burroughs put his finger on the key questions: can you separate the two when reading one or watching the other? Does the film risk replacing the novel in the cultural imagination? Does the adaptation recruit more readers or does it mislead, confuse, or put them off altogether? 

And on top of the question of fidelity — does the film do the text justice? — there’s the problem specific to Burroughs of how to avoid confusing the man with the myth. The iconic image of Burroughs was forged early on from sensationalised portraits of a mad, bad and dangerous to know man of mystery in Kerouac’s novels and, with a hostile cutting edge, in the mass media. So, it’s more than that Keifer Sutherland was hopelessly miscast as Burroughs in Gary Walkow’s dreadful Beat (2000) or that Viggo Mortensen was unconvincing as Old Bull Lee in Walter Salles’ disappointing On the Road (2012). Peter Weller’s performance as William Lee/William Burroughs in Naked Lunch is the object lesson in what happens when the iconic image takes over, summed up by the film’s opening shot — which is not of the actor but of the shadow cast by his hat, which doesn’t just fetishise the trademark fedora but stands in symbolically for the long shadow of the mythic author that has mediated the popular reception of Burroughs’ work. 

Cronenberg reduced Burroughs to little more than signature visual props and a vocal mimicry that isn’t so much the dry deadpan drawl of the gentleman junky as just two-dimensionally lifeless. A frenzied, feverish text is not well represented by such a cool central performer. At least John Fleck’s Burroughs in Ed Buhr’s gem of a low-budget short, The Japanese Sandman (2008), adapted faithfully from The Yage Letters, is very funny, as is Ben Foster’s better-known imitation in John Krokidas’s entertaining Kill Your Darlings (2013), based on the real-life drama behind the Kerouac-Burroughs novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The last two instances suggest that the higher the expectation — as in the case of On the Road and Naked Lunch, and indeed Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl (2010) — the greater the let-down. Texts that are cultural landmarks as well as Beat classics create a burden of hopes that set a high bar for adaptation: minor works with more modest expectations may have more chance of making it. 

Skin Game

Such thoughts ran through my head as I anxiously took my seat along with two thousand others in the Royal Festival Hall for October’s London premiere of Luca Guadagnino‘s ravishing and remarkable adaptation of Burroughs’ novella, Queer. Although utterly different in most ways, the film has two important things in common with Kill Your Darlings. Both are based, one indirectly the other directly, on source texts that became legendary while remaining long unpublished: Hippos, written in 1945, not published until 2008; Queer, written in 1952, not published until 1985. And in the case of Queer, the adaptation has itself been long-anticipated, appearing almost 15 years after the much-rumoured project to be directed by Steve Buscemi based on Oren Moverman’s script. And second, both Kill Your Darlings and Queer made very surprising casting choices that involved celebrated actors known for one high-profile part playing against type: Daniel Ratcliffe, aka Harry Potter; Daniel Craig, aka Bond, James Bond. But there the similarities end, and while I had been faintly amused to see one Daniel take on the role of Ginsberg, I was much more anxious about seeing the other Daniel take on Burroughs. That’s because, when it came to Queer, the stakes were far higher — for Burroughs, for Guadagnino, and for me. We all had skin in this game.

Queer will never come close to the literary status or cultural reach of Naked Lunch, but the publication of Burroughs’ slight, incomplete early novella was a complete game changer. In a material sense, it had marked a turning point in his career as the keystone in a six-figure publishing contract that secured the future for the 70-year-old author after decades of precarious finances. And in terms of his development as a writer in the first place, the novel transformed our understanding by providing the missing link between the tight-lipped hardboiled reportage of Junky and the radical, riotous disarray of Naked Lunch. My own critical and scholarly work turned crucially on making the case for Queer, which became the driving force for William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination in 2003 and my revised edition of the novella in 2010. 

Putting Queer on the big screen represented, therefore, a unique opportunity to raise exponentially the profile of a work in which I had invested a great deal for over two decades. Ironically, that history made me the best and the worst possible viewer: desperate for it to measure up, could I watch this Queer without the other one always in mind, condemned to be the Man Who Knew Too Much to see the film on its own terms? Worse still — full disclosure — I had even more skin in the game having worked for Guadagnino as a research consultant, given feedback on a draft of Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay, and chatted with Daniel Craig about his role. Still, my investment was strictly professional, unlike the bond that united director and novelist. 

Annexing Annexia

You didn’t have to be an academic to recognise that Queer was by far Burroughs’ most nakedly personal work, one that revealed an inner torment about his sexuality shockingly at odds with the ice-cold image of the man. Far from being an old minor text, this was, in Ginsberg’s blurb, “a major work. Burroughs’ heart laid bare, the origin of his writing genius, honest, embarrassing, humorously brilliant, naked — the secret of the Invisible Man.” And for Guadagnino, too, Queer is his most personal film, as he has taken every opportunity to insist, the one closest to his heart going back to his reading the novel as a teenager. There’s an emotional chemistry here between two homosexual artists that suggested an utterly different take to the collaboration that produced Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, a film that has its admirers and a few good moments — shooting bug powder as “a Kafka high”; the Mugwump typewriters — but which for me got all the important calls wrong. Not only did it replace the vibrant energy, pace, colour, and savage humour of the original with a lethargic and morose dull brown sludge, and not only did it straighten out both the novel’s narrative disarray and Burroughs’ sexual identity (“homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had,” apparently), but it threw away the novel to create a kunstlerroman. As Timothy Murphy argued, by making everything into a metaphor for Burroughs becoming a writer — or rather, a fantasy of the writer-as-secret-agent — Cronenberg sealed his Naked Lunch off from any external reality or other significance. This was one reason why it had left me cold thirty years ago, and why the early frames of Queer might have had me worried.

Setting the scene in early 1950s Mexico, Queer opens with a slow pan across various objects: a bed, a typewriter, manuscript pages of Burroughs’ novel-in-progress, guns… Centipede jewellery and a sign for “Annexia” confirm that these are all references to Naked Lunch — but Cronenberg’s film rather than Burroughs’ original. Would the Italian director follow the Canadian’s path, and film not the novel but a story about its writing? That would at least be true to the facts, since the force of my reading of Queer was that the relationship between William Lee and Eugene Allerton is based on the writing and reading of the text, whose routines Burroughs had sent as letters to his reluctant lover, Lewis Marker, in spring 1952. And of course, as everyone knew — because this was the sensational story Burroughs told on the novel’s publication in 1985 — his turn to writing was linked to the reckless, tragic shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, that had taken place in Mexico City six months earlier. Egregiously, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch had put the shooting at the centre of his film’s fantasy. Guadagnino, it soon became apparent, would reference the shooting but, like the typewriter, it would be a brief allusion to facts on the ground, not the basis to his film’s fictional world. 

The clue to a very different trajectory lies in Queer‘s soundtrack. Whereas Cronenberg’s film was scored entirely by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman’s original jazz composition, Guadagnino’s Queer goes in the opposite direction. Supplementing Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno sounds, the film features some two dozen non-period songs, starting over the credits with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” More anachronistic hits by New Order (“Leave Me Alone”) and Prince (“Musicology”) and many others new to me established that the film was not interested in creating a self-contained mythology or recreating an historical period drama but in making bridges from the past into the present, playfully addressing the present — and doing so in part by a catalogue of Burroughs’ enduring creative influence on other artists, from David Cronenberg to Kurt Cobain. 

1950s Postcard

A tension between past and present is unavoidable given the ambiguous sexual politics at the heart of Burroughs’ novel, which made any adaptation seven decades on bold and risky. It would certainly be easy to misconstrue Burroughs’ Queer as a narrative of internalised Cold War homophobia and nothing more, missing the way Lee performs the part of the Ugly American as a critique of imperialism, holding up a dark mirror to the culture that demonised homosexuals and heroin addicts. Guadagnino could possibly have gone there, although it would have been impossible to retain the other side to Lee’s demonisation, which plays out through his many outrageously racist routines, anti-Semitic jokes, and self-loathing sex tourism humour. Instead of retaining these abject and abjecting fantasies, the film keeps only tasters and a brief exchange — when Lee refuses to pay a Mexican cabdriver the asking price — to indicate the colonialist entitlement of expatriate Americans. But if it looks as if it shies away from the novel’s difficult politics by redacting the routines that made Queer a dry run for Naked Lunch, that would be to miss the genius of the film, which is the way that Guadagnino translates a verbal performance into a visual one.

Even the few hostile reviewers have granted that the visuals of Queer are ravishingly gorgeous, observing that the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, its Thai DoP, “makes the fantasy sequences feel vital and real and the more realistic elements feel vaguely dreamy,” as one put it, while as another noted, the uncanny effect is like being taken inside an intoxicated Technicolour 1950s postcard Mexico. This unsettling poetic quality in the filming goes together with Stefano Baisi’s design that uses paintings, soundstages, mattes and miniatures to create a dreamlike effect. I’d spotted this aesthetic already in the screenplay, which featured several diorama models (“The diorama seems now something like the sets in Synechdoche, New York,” I had noted in my annotations, presciently as it turned out). The film therefore embodied my reading of Burroughs’ novel, which saw through its apparent realism — and remember: it is unique in his oeuvre for appearing to be the realistic narrative of a relationship — as a sham. Thinly fictionalising Burroughs’ real-life experiences of 1951, his Queer tried to pass itself off as realism, but it breaks down as his narrative falls apart together with his own identity as a coherent character. Accordingly, the film is set in a Mexico of the mind, a real-world geography reshaped by Lee’s agonising inability to engage with place or connect with people except through the all-consuming, shattering fantasies of his desire.

There’s a superficial similarity therefore between Guadagnino’s decision to film the Mexico City of Queer at the Cinecittà studios in Rome and Cronenberg’s filming of Tangier on a Toronto soundstage (although that was forced on him due to the outbreak of the first Gulf War). However, the unreal city of Queer is consistent with the tormenting isolation and instability of its central protagonist, evidenced in a scene early on when, with a TV on the wall tuned to hissing static, Lee sits in a bar and turns first monochrome and then semi-transparent while the sound of other drinkers fades out. The point is clinched shortly after when (in a scene faithful to the novel) Lee takes Allerton to the cinema to see Cocteau’s film Orphée: as a phantom arm reaches out to caress the object of his desire, we watch Orpheus on the screen-within-the-screen being led through to the other side of a mirror into what Cocteau called “the Zone.” And so, while Guadagnino’s film is meticulous historically in certain respects, it wasn’t shot on location and the artifice is played up so as to display, in the director’s own words, the “private reverie of a largely unreliable narrator. What’s universal about the story is its fidelity to raw feelings and the suffering this removal from the real world causes.”

Raw Feelings

I should have known better — how could I know the novel by heart and yet miss it? — but as much as I was ravished by the stylised visuals of Queer so was I floored by Daniel Craig’s interpretation of Burroughs’ persona, William Lee. From our video conference discussions, I knew Craig saw Lee as horny in an immature, adolescent kind of way, but still I wasn’t ready to see up on the big screen a version of Burroughs as a man of physical passion, an intensely sensual, sexy man. Hot and sweaty, muscular and naked, Craig’s Lee is a painfully vulnerable prisoner of love, a victim of his own insatiable desires. 

The fever dream of amour fou that takes over the opening third of Queer depends crucially on Lee’s relationship with Allerton, his reluctant lover. Reviewers seem divided between some who find it “never feels entirely believable” and others who say “their relationship is entirely believable” — an understandable division, given how hot and cold Allerton blows and how inscrutable he remains. I saw his illegibility — is he queer? Is he bicurious? Is he a capricious user? Is he indifferent to desire? Does he know what he is? — as a kind of mirror for Lee, a projection of his own inability to understand himself. But I had also always seen Allerton as essentially unworthy, a nobody — Burroughs’ novel paints him ambivalently — so that Lee’s obsessive pursuit is more obviously a fantasy in excess of the real, suffering the blinding self-delusion of love. But as played by Drew Starkey, Allerton here is not a ringer for Lee except perhaps as a romantically idealised version: whereas Craig gets more and more louche in the heat as his white linen suit gets sweatier and sweatier, Starkey remains neat and clean in his preppy clothes — pleated trousers, pressed shirts — and has the easy good looks of a male model. Like the Baked Alaska in Lee’s joke (taken verbatim from the novel), we see him as hot on the outside but cold on the inside. In contrast to Allerton, and playing off against the artifice of the unreal city, Craig’s raw sexual desire comes across as both totally authentic and masochistically tormenting. How long, as Burroughs would write in his final novel, “How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’?” 

Sympathy for the Devil

Daniel Craig’s brave, bold, and rightly lauded performance is, of course, as far removed as imaginable from the laconic cool icon of Peter Weller’s Lee. However, the more important contrast is not between the casting choices of Cronenberg and Guadagnino but within the performances of Craig himself. Like everyone else, I had seen the casting of Craig as very “interesting” — meaning: I had no idea how it would work. It would have been hard to predict his alternation of restless energetic masculinity (shown in the decisive way he moves or slams down his endless tequila shots) and vulnerable inner torment (shown chiefly in his eyes). His Lee is both cynically funny in his delivery of key lines and pathetic in his eagerness to please, as when giving Allerton an excruciating “old-world” bow (deriving from a line in the novel that gave rise to the title “Naked Lunch” via Jack Kerouac misreading the phrase “naked lust” from the manuscript of Queer). In short, Craig is unrecognisable to anyone who knows him from the role that defined his career, as the cool, suave, entirely superficial secret service agent, 007.

Craig’s star charisma and stellar acting elicit a compassion for Lee that makes an otherwise repellent character sympathetic and in turn humanizes Burroughs. The transformation of Craig from James Bond into William Lee now struck me as very carefully calculated. It wasn’t about giving Burroughs’ alter ego the kind of masculinity with which he identified (as I might have suspected). What it was about I found evidenced in the film’s two brilliant cameo performances, by Jason Schwartzman (hilarious as one of the gay characters in the Ship Ahoy bar) and Lesley Manville (even more hilarious as Dr Kotter, the cackling Annie Oakley botanist in the jungle who leads Lee and Allerton towards taking yagé). In each case the actors are simply unrecognisable. It’s all about transformation, the revelation of hidden depths and inner potentials. And what makes this eerily appropriate is that, in giving expression to a sexual and emotional depth suppressed by the iconic image of Bond, Daniel Craig also gave expression to precisely the inner turmoil of Burroughs that was on show in his early novella but which had been hidden for decades behind his own icy cool iconic image. 

Coincidentally — giving that word the significance it has in Burroughs’ world — Craig’s performance in Queer actually returned him to one of his own earliest parts, his breakthrough role in fact, when, 25 years earlier, starring alongside Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, he had played George Dyer, the disturbed lover taken up by the painter during the 1960s, in Love is the Devil (1998), John Maybury’s brutal, brilliant study of loneliness, creativity, and destructive inner demons. The twist is that, for Craig, the younger lover and older predator roles are now reversed. The connection between Bacon and Burroughs as radical queer artists and friends generates a typically Burroughsian point of intersection, one that confirms Craig’s casting is not a wildcard but his destiny, a match made in heaven. To use one icon to play another icon is one thing. To resurrect the actor’s own past as a way to annul the limitations imposed by his iconic identity, and to use that transformation to visualise a parallel transformation for the writer, exposing the queer man behind the cool junky secret-agent myth — it’s a remarkable thing.

Mysterious and Unsettling

Craig’s towering performance is sure to earn him nominations; but whether Queer as a whole wins awards may depend on how critics understand its hybrid, composite nature as a Guadagnino film. When I first learnt of the project, I anticipated as much: “If the director of Call Me By Your Name is ideally placed to do justice to the romance story of queer desire,” I wrote in a piece for the Allen Ginsberg blog, “the truly dark fantasmatic core of Queer will need the director of Suspiria” (his 2018 remake of an Italian horror movie). Mashing irreconcilable film styles and worlds together has naturally baffled reviewers, and the narrative structure doesn’t help, as Lee’s pursuit of contact through sex with Allerton in Mexico City segues into his pursuit of telepathy from taking yagé in the jungle — scenes which have no source in Burroughs’ novel and that are by turns comic and moving and viscerally psychedelic — until the film ends up in an abstract symbolic territory that channels David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. At one point, Joan makes a brief, very strange dream appearance which I didn’t understand at all, and that tempted me to ask the woman in the next seat in the auditorium for an explanation — since I had found myself sitting beside Ronia Ava, the Finnish actress who plays the part. I was held back by shyness and an acceptance of mystery as integral to the film.

Some reviewers got the point, but even those who think they don’t get it actually do when criticising Queer on the grounds that it “ultimately suffers from an identity crisis, leaving viewers puzzled by its intentions.” If you want a satisfyingly coherent, good-looking and well-made story with credible plot and character, you’re watching the wrong Guadagnino film of 2024: Challengers has been a commercial hit because it doesn’t leave inexplicable loose ends and internal contradictions, or combine beauty with horror and the poignant with the weird, or risk polarising its audience with uncertain shifts in tone and style and strange twists in structure. In 1952 Burroughs had left his novella unfinished because it was unfinishable; but then all his work lacks finish, in the double sense of polish and completeness. Seventy years later, its cinematic version adds an ending but remains open-ended, inconclusive, ongoing. What I love about Queer is therefore also what makes it a difficult film, a film that is queer in form as well as in content and name. “For the one thing that would make Queer untrue to its title,” as I put it myself in the 2010 edition of Burroughs’ novel, “would be to explain away all that makes it so mysterious and unsettling.” And that is why, enchanting and challenging in equal measure, the Queer of Luca Guadagnino does justice to the Queer of William Burroughs.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

An installment in The Visible Man: A Coffee Table Zine of Photographs of William S. Burroughs

What are you doing in the Fall of 2020? Need any vacation ideas? The European Beats Studies Network is planning a special conference on the cut-up in Paris and London in September of that year. Book your tickets now:

The conference looks to the future and will also be a major retrospective, featuring a triple book launch: a cut-up trilogy of incendiary pamphlets with expanded 60th anniversary editions of Minutes to Go and The Exterminator, and a never-before-seen handbook of guerrilla tactics assembled from recently discovered archival sources, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS.

Recently, Véronique Lane and Oliver Harris have been preparing a Baedeker of sorts for those looking to explore the Beats in France during their excursion to Paris in 2020. Harris has been working on the cut-up trilogy mentioned above as well as always finding new angles for scholarly pieces, one of which is an exciting essay providing the details behind the iconic Paris pics of Burroughs from 1959. In 2017, Lane wrote The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux. She also edited a special edition of l’esprit créateur (Vol. 58, No. 4 Winter 2018) on “French and Beat Literatures: A History of Mutual Appropriation, Reception, and Translation.”

Now mind you it ain’t fucking cheap to study abroad. French Genealogy is $110 in hardcover and about $40 in Kindle. For the budget conscious a paperback is due out for about $40 in April 2019. In order to take this trip you also have to be enrolled in the university it seems. From what I can tell, Lane’s journal is available on Project Muse, an institutional service. What are those travelling in economy, aka non-academia, supposed to do in this case? Do not get me started on the complete rip-off and sham that is scholarly publishing. It is somewhat frustrating to say the least. Membership has its privileges I guess. That said, I have been fortunate enough to have read some of Harris’ latest work. His latest essay on Paris 1959 will be published in Udo Breger’s Soft Need. Nice to see top-notch scholarly work in a little mag. It is what you would expect and I have no doubt that Lane’s work is just as well researched and insightful. So this stuff is definitely worth reading.

I can only offer you a cut-rate trip to 1959 Paris on Jolly Fats Weehawken. Lane and Harris are travelers and I am a mere tourist, but let me give you a peek at a lesser known, out of the way pic from Burroughs’ Paris years that I consider on par with the iconic shots of Burroughs discussed by Harris that you have all seen before. This is not Burroughs in the Danger Zone but it is forbidden territory all the same. Oliver Harris will take you to on a guided tour to the Académie française, but I will take you slumming to Le Sphinx Club. My favorite shot of Burroughs in Paris is from the 1960 Olympia Press Catalog featuring Bill the Stripper. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a collage. This all might seem incomprehensible on first glance but what is illegible is obscene and that seems somehow appropriate for describing this incredible Burroughs pic.

Read further installments in The Visible Man: A Coffee Table Zine of Photographs of William S. Burroughs

Registration now open for Paris and London

2020 will be the 60th anniversary of the first publications using the cut-up methods developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel in Paris. To mark this landmark in cultural history, we are organising CUT-UPS@60, an international Cut-Up Conference in London and Paris in September 2020.

Paris, keynotes: Udo Breger, Véronique Fanchette, Ken Hollings, Klaus Maeck, Jürgen Ploog, Rachel Stella, Terry Wilson

London, keynotes: Jordan Abel, Dodie Bellamy, Thurston Moore, Rudy Rucker, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky and Anne Waldman

With two days of events in each city, the conference will be a major multidisciplinary occasion to examine the past and explore the ongoing legacy of the connections that Burroughs’ work in particular made between artistic and social radicalism.

We envisage a series of talks, workshops, exhibitions, and performances in film and music (remix, sampling, mashup), literature and the arts (collage, chance), politics (détournement as ideology critique), sexual identity (therapeutic deconditioning), philosophy (deconstruction of language), social movements (participatory activism), the occult (divination, exorcism), and science (virus/genetic research).

The legacy of cut-ups goes beyond the A to Z of artists famous for using its methods, from Kathy Acker to John Zorn by way of Sinclair Beiles, David Bowie, Jan Herman, Harold Norse, Claude Pélieu, Jürgen Ploog, Carl Weissner, Terry Wilson, and we hope to see the literally cutting-edge new work being done in any field inspired by cut-ups, to bring together the unlimited potentials unleashed by the Stanley knife that Gysin put into Burroughs’ hands in Paris 60 years ago.

The conference looks to the future and will also be a major retrospective, featuring a triple book launch: a cut-up trilogy of incendiary pamphlets with expanded 60th anniversary editions of Minutes to Go and The Exterminator, and a never-before-seen handbook of guerrilla tactics assembled from recently discovered archival sources, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS. The new text, as fresh and ferocious as when it was created, reveals Burroughs the experimental artist and political radical at his most revolutionary.

And if you are planning your own events, please link up to make 2020 a cut-up year to remember.

Conference Organisers

Oliver Harris, Andrew Hussey, Davis Schneiderman, Alex Sharpe

For Further Information

Visit the CUT-UPS@60 page at European Beat Studies Network or contact Oliver Harris at oliverharris@mac.com

Download Operation Total Exposure (pdf)

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia Press, 1959.  

Oliver Harris’s personal copies. Location: Always within arm’s reach.

With the exception of Burroughs himself, nobody has thought more deeply and creatively about Naked Lunch than Oliver Harris. This includes Allen Ginsberg, who is closer to the text than anybody besides Burroughs. Unfortunately, Ginsberg did not use that unique access to creatively explore the text. His criticism, like much Burroughs scholarship, is a defense. Possibly it is Harris’s personal distance from the creation of the text and the author that allows him to read it so closely and with such imagination.

H.J. Jackson in her book on marginalia devotes a chapter to “Books for Fanatics.” As she writes: “[T]he book that has been chosen to protect and preserve the treasures of the owner’s spiritual life.” Harris’s annotated copy of Naked Lunch is holy book, journal, diary, and day book. In fact, Harris possesses 12 annotated copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch in his personal library. Each new project involving Naked Lunch requires a fresh, clean copy of the book in which to begin. This sparks images of Borges’ Library of Babel, an endless library filled with what on the surface appear to be identical objects. Yet each of Harris’s readings of Naked Lunch is different (even if as Harris admits much of the marginalia repeats from book to book and circles the same obsessive hot topics), just as the Oliver Harris who annotated them constantly changes and evolves. The Oliver Harris who read Naked Lunch in 1993 has disappeared forever, yet he has left his trace, like a fingerprint or Rorschach blot between the pages of Burroughs’ text. The pages of a book are an Interzone, a space between of total freedom and possibility.  

But most of all, Harris’s copies, every page filled with notes and colored inks, are a map: a map of Naked Lunch, a map of Interzone, a map of Burroughs’ and ultimately Harris’s worldview and inner life. On Exactitude in Science. Borges’s Library of Babel and Harris’s study / den have endless levels. Yet one level of Harris’ library contains his topographical maps that chart the layers of Naked Lunch. To say nothing of Harris’ unpublished novel featuring a character who maps Burroughs’ Tangier. Harris reveals Naked Lunch‘s unfathomable depths. He will never get to the bottom of it; thus his personal copies of Naked Lunch are likewise an endless novel, just as Burroughs intended.  

The Olympia Press Naked Lunch is also Harris’ briefcase, his accounting ledger, his textbook. He is a scholar and a teacher, and Naked Lunch is what he takes and where he goes to work. The intellectual capital invested in his annotated copies is immeasurable, just as the sum total of one’s life can never be measured or, maybe more accurately, can only be measured by infinitely varied means. Each of Harris’s copies of Naked Lunch are unique; yet through his scholarship, his map of Naked Lunch and Interzone has become the legend by which we interpret Burroughs’ most inaccessible mysteries, his hearts of darkness.

Atrophied Preface. Wouldn’t You?

They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates…

Naked Lunch. London: Corgi, 1974. Oliver Harris’s copy. Soft cover. 12mo. 286 pages. Annotations in pencil.

Return to the Library of Interzone

Part of the Hendrick’s Lecture Series, organised by The Last Tuesday Society, 19th November 2010

by Rona Cran

Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, situated unassumingly on Mare Street in Hackney, is a beguiling emporium of which William S. Burroughs would no doubt have approved. There are shrunken heads on sale, and sinister bibelots (a Doll of the Dead slumps in her coffin), and Hendrick’s gin is served in teacups. A foetal piglet slumbers on a cluttered shelf, a pair of Labrador testicles float nonchalantly in formaldehyde, and the majestic, taxidermed head of a warthog charges into the luridly painted room where tonight’s lecture takes place. The locale is marvellously apt: like Burroughs, it is “dreamy and innocent”, whilst also being “ravaged and vicious”, and the sense of double exposure explored by Oliver Harris in his dexterous introduction to the recently re-issued edition of Queer is made freakishly palpable by the sight of a two-bodied lamb encased in glass, as well as the bicephalous teddy bears on sale by the till.

Although the audience is, for the most part, diffident and dishevelled, this is not a coterie evening. The lecture is remarkably well-attended, a testament to the enduring magnetism of William Burroughs, and to the erudition and clarity of vision which Harris brings to the study of his work. Tonight’s discussion centres on the largely concealed production history of Burroughs’ first trilogy — Junky, The Yage Letters and Queer — and on the writer’s excruciatingly literal equation of his manuscripts with his own body.

Harris, a distinctive figure in trademark brown fedora, begins by positing Burroughs as Holbein’s anamorphic distortion in The Ambassadors: “without this ugly act of queer vandalism, American literature makes sense,” he argues, portraying him as an unsettling stain on several canons by inserting the figures of Updike/Bellow and Ginsberg/Kerouac into the painting. The ensuing analysis of Burroughs’ problematic relationship with publication pivots elegantly around a letter to Ginsberg dated April 1952, in which he writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” The joke marks the advent of the morally indifferent comic-grotesque routine that would become Burroughs’ trademark, appearing at this moment, Harris explains, due to the proposed merger of the manuscripts of Junk (as it was originally titled) and Queer.

Harris explores the “manuscript cannibalism” through which the trilogy came about using for his analogy the vaudeville trick uncomplicatedly known as “Sawing a Woman in Half.” We see Burroughs sadomasochistically playing both the part of the magician and the woman in the box, as he both courts and rails against contradictory editorial demands. The prevarications of the fledgling writer, coupled with his publisher’s querulousness, result in a vengefully strategic deconstruction of textual unity and writerly identity (the Lee of Junky is unrecognisable from the Lee of Queer). Whilst Burroughs’ later work moves from mosaic to cut-up, famously frustrating many readers, Harris repudiates the view that his early works are simple, realist texts, from which the writer veers wildly with Naked Lunch. Fascinatingly, each text in the trilogy is revealed to be a collage, and the corpus of his early work to be quite literally “a body in pieces.”

A Few Questions and Answers with the Editor of the New Edition of William S. Burroughs’ Queer

Though the first published edition of Queer was assembled from a mix of manuscript sources, it was done with the collaboration and blessing of the author. In crafting this new edition, which is a sort of remix of manuscript sources, how do you justify to yourself creating a text that would no longer have that authoritative input from the author himself? 

I’ve always been conscious of the trust shown in me by the Burroughs Estate in granting me the tremendous privilege of editing his work, and I go to great lengths to be as rigorous as possible. I’m also very cautious, often conservative, aiming to respect the line between “correcting” and “rewriting.”

But in terms of lacking Burroughs’ imprimatur, I would say this: that what has made researching the material history of his works, and then editing those works, so fascinating, is to find myself caught up in the same processes of collaboration and contingency that always shaped his writing. Everywhere you look, you see the hand of others or indeed the hand of chance, making key decisions for Burroughs. Now, although I wouldn’t cast myself as his “collaborator,” editing is a collaborative process, and I know there is a limit in trying to do “what Burroughs would have wanted” — because he himself did not see it that way. What I have tried to do is to make all my editions as transparent as possible when it comes to both the history of the materials I’m working with and my own editing.

This new edition of Queer puts the emphasis on the text written in the 1950s and seems to consciously defuse the attention-getting preface that Burroughs wrote in 1985. Can you clarify your reasons for wanting to deflect attention from the preface back onto the 1950s text?

I’ve written at some length about this in Secret of Fascination, because there’s no doubt that Burroughs’ 1985 introduction decisively shaped how Queer has been read — or perhaps, misread. I’m not especially interested in speculating about motives, but the effect of the introduction has certainly been to obscure the narrative by explaining it away — displacing a story of homosexual desire by the death of his wife, Joan. That’s why I felt the need to move the introduction and include it as an appendix — very much as Miles and Grauerholz did in their “Restored” edition of Naked Lunch with that book’s equally influential and equally suspect “introduction” by Burroughs. If the only value of my new edition of Queer is to make it easier for readers to really encounter the narrative — to experience it for what it is: “queer,” in every sense of the word — then I’d be satisfied. 

With the new Queer and with your previous edition of Junky, the texts actually seemed to become more Burroughsian than they had been when published by Burroughs. Do you worry about how your own image of Burroughs might shape the texts?

That’s an intriguing idea, that these works have become more rather than less Burroughsian, but I don’t see it that way myself. I guess it’s hard after a while, you become so insanely familiar with all the words that you can lose track of the overall feel, almost forget what it was that drew you in in the first place.

As for “my” image of Burroughs — I really don’t think I have one. I mean, I have images, plural, of him, but I find it hard to redact or reconcile them into one. That’s one reason why, if you look at anything I’ve ever written about him, you’ll see how much I avoid making generalizing claims and prefer to keep to the particulars. I wouldn’t need to do that if I felt confident I understood him; but then again, if I felt I understood Burroughs I wouldn’t need to keep working on him…

In what ways did editing Junky, Yage Letters, and Everything Lost influence your approach to this new edition of Queer?

It wasn’t really a question of “influence,” although certainly the earlier editing gave me confidence in my working methods and taught me some lessons. After all, with editing as with most things in life, you learn by doing. However, what really counted was my familiarity with the manuscripts and their incestuously tangled histories. In that sense, Queer really didn’t stand alone, and how I approached it was certainly shaped by what I had already done with the other manuscripts.

I suppose if I were to start over again, it would have made more sense to edit Junky, Queer, and Yage Letters all together, so that no decisions were made on each individual text without considering the others, rather than one at a time — but that’s not how publishing or editing work out.

You took a trip to Mexico a few years ago. Was this helpful while working on this new edition of Queer?

In terms of my research for Queer, going to Mexico was crucial. With a certain self-reflexive irony, I was following in Burroughs’ footsteps by seeing myself as an old-style gumshoe, piecing together clues and trying to figure out who did what and when.

So in September 2006 I began what you might call location scouting, looking to identify the locales in Burroughs’ work. I started with the very first scene in the novel, which is set in the “Amsterdam Avenue Park.” I’d long been fascinated by the description of this park in Queer, especially those “concrete benches molded to resemble wood” that Lee sits on. One morning I literally walked right into the park, which is in the Colonia Roma district, and found myself looking at one of these crazy benches. Later, I came across a faded photograph of Burroughs from that era, dressed in a battered suit and fedora and looking just like an old-time detective, and he is standing in that very spot, with some of those implausible pieces of park furniture in the background. One mystery solved.

Of course, putting yourself in the place of the author doesn’t offer any practical help whatsoever in editing a text — but it creates an emotional connection, a point of intuitive identification, and that can keep you going when the odds seem against you. And more generally, my couple of weeks in Mexico City were just so weirdly Burroughsian — to list the series of coincidences I had there would make you laugh; there’s no way you’d believe the half of them — and again, that is a sort of psychic supplement, a back-brain stimulus, that works away on a deeper level than deciding whether to change a comma into a period.

David Cronenberg had to confront a lot of questions about his own sexual identity when creating his film of Naked Lunch. Did you think that editing Queer would put you into a similar position?

Funnily enough, this was a question I raised right at the start directly with James Graeurholz — who, unlike me, is very knowledgeable about these areas of sexual identity and history. But he said (I paraphrase): being a straight man hasn’t stopped you doing a good job before, why should it now? 

If Ace had accepted Queer for publication as a sequel to Junky, how do you think that might have changed Burroughs’ writing in general? Would it have set him on a different path?

The trouble with the “what if” question is that once you ask one you have to ask others: what if New Directions had not rejected Junk, and so left it to Ace Books? Would it have appeared a much more literary text? And would the text of Junk have been published as Burroughs originally intended, before Ace steered him into cannibalizing Queer to make Junkie longer? In fact, the most intriguing plan back in 1952 was for Ace to publish Junk and Queer together in one book. Can you imagine the effect of that? If everything else in Burroughs’ literary history stayed the same, the impact of that double book as the precursor to Naked Lunch would have been utterly different to Junkie published alone.

As for whether Burroughs’ path might have been different, I don’t know. From one point of view, Burroughs was a driven man during the 1950s, fulfilling his destiny as a writer even if he didn’t always know it. From another, he diced with a dozen different fates and could as easily have faded out into an old bore under a potted palm in the Parade Bar in Tangier along with English colonels in crumpled sepia linen suits and a warm martini.

Around the same time as Burroughs was writing Queer, Allen Ginsberg was writing of obsessive love in “Green Automobile” and Jack Kerouac was writing about it too in The Subterraneans. Was obsession “in the air,” or did the works encourage each other somehow? It’s especially pointed in the case of Kerouac, given that Alene Lee was the subject of Subterraneans and later helped to type up Queer.

The question is perhaps more interesting than my answer, which is that I don’t really see a connection with Kerouac, although the parallels between Burroughs and Ginsberg in terms of obsessive desire are striking. And the other side of the cultural coin is just as interesting, if you consider the “official” version of love at that time, such as the Gene Kelley-Debbie Reynolds relationship in Singin’ in the Rain (released April 1952). What Burroughs says around that time about “the sex that passes the censor” giving away the “basic American rottenness” is very exact in recognizing what his culture repressed, and what, with a vengeance, his own writing would return…

It’s an incredible coincidence that you were in Lawrence, visiting Burroughs for the first time, on the very day that the first publication of the Queer was announced by the New York Times. Have you wondered what he would have thought of you re-editing it all these years later?

Oh, I don’t think he would have been that bothered. That’s not to say he didn’t care about his work — on the contrary, it’s hard to imagine a writer who took his work more seriously — but I think at a certain point he surrendered possession of it and let others finish it off. But as for the coincidence of being out in Lawrence that day, of course I didn’t know that at the time, but in retrospect it seems so right somehow.

By Oliver Harris

This is the written version of a talk given by Professor Harris at Columbia University on 16 September 2010. See also Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer.

In 1943, when Allen Ginsberg was a 17-year-old Columbia freshman and first met William Burroughs, he was impressed by Burroughs’ ability to shoot from the hip and come up with apposite quotations taken from Shakespeare. Allusions to “the Immortal Bard,” as Burroughs called him, crop up throughout his work and come surprisingly thick and fast in his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Here, we might recall, he cites the line from Macbeth (Act II Scene iii) that gives my paper its title: “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece” — referring to the bloody sight of King Duncan’s body. When Burroughs quotes the line in Naked Lunch, typically, he gives it a twist, to become: “Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.” 

In the mid-1960s, the British critic David Lodge claimed that, since Burroughs lacked “precise imaginative control” over his materials, Naked Lunch “seems to offer” this line as “an appropriate epitaph on his work.” It’s a glib put-down, but for now let’s accept that this line gives us the key aesthetic question begged by Burroughs’ work — whether it’s a masterpiece made or fucked by confusion.

To be sure, confusion is the most common state in which the work has left its readers — especially in comparison to Burroughs’ “first Naked Lunch.” That’s to say the trilogy to which, in late 1953, Burroughs originally applied the title “Naked Lunch” — texts published separately as: Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters.

These three early autobiographical works have not usually been read collectively — but we need to take them together if we’re to begin to understand how Burroughs went from these simple, seemingly realist texts written in the early 1950s to Naked Lunch by decade’s end.

But are they so simple? 

In comparison to the chaotic disarray of Naked Lunch, the texts certainly seem relatively straightforward, but their material back-stories turn out to be unexpectedly complex and to contradict the apparent simplicity of what’s visible on the page. Or rather, the back-stories make visible the contradictions within the text — contradictions we otherwise overlook or misinterpret. 

Equally, whereas from the very beginning a genetic mythology attached itself to Naked Lunch, very little was written about the material histories of these three texts, and what little there was turns out to be wrong — and this has significant consequences for interpretation. This is so most spectacularly in regard to The Yage Letters, whose 1953 epistolary section did not reproduce Burroughs’ authentic letters at all — as these wonderful cut-and-paste pages from a manuscript held at Stanford demonstrate. 

This is why it’s seemed important to me to make the material histories visible and put them to use in re-editing the texts — using my editions not only to offer a reliable text, but to bring out into the open the previously concealed processes of production. Each of my editions has therefore highlighted the genetic and editing back-stories — including that involved in my own work — with the paradoxical aim of confusing their apparent simplicity.

So, what are the confusions, and why do they matter?

Burroughs wrote his three manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” during a period of under four years, back to back between early 1950 and late 1953. But they were published out of sequence and spread over four decades: Junkie appearing in 1953, Queer in 1985, and The Yage Letters in 1963. They really couldn’t have been written any closer together or published much further apart.

More than that, this scrambling of chronology and delays in publication had a direct impact on the reception of the three texts — on how they have been interpreted. This is one reason why they’ve hardly ever been read as a trilogy, with the result that Burroughs’ literary history, the chronology of his development from one text to another, has been disguised and confused. But even more fundamentally, this disordering of the trilogy turns out to beg questions about production, since the publication histories of the three titles decisively determined the form and content of each text — and not just separately but collectively. 

As manuscripts, “Junk,” “Queer” and “Yage” display a distinct formal variety: “Junk” written in the first person, “Queer” in the third, and “Yage” appearing as letters. And yet, despite these basic differences in form, far from remaining separate, the three manuscripts became incestuously mixed up in the published texts due to the history of their editing. And this, especially in the case of Queer, is where the confusion really begins — although to get there we have to start from “Junk” (this is the title on the original manuscript held at Columbia).

Having begun it a few months after moving to Mexico City in fall 1949, Burroughs had written most of his first novel by December 1950. Burroughs was still tinkering with “Junk” when, in March 1952, he began “Queer.” That same month, Allen Ginsberg, acting as Burroughs’ agent, secured a contract to publish “Junk” with Ace Books, the pulp paperback house recently established by A. A Wyn. Having stalled while they looked at “Queer,” in early June Ace rejected it, and asked Burroughs to write an autobiographical preface to “Junk” and to make the narrative longer. 

They put him under such pressure that Ginsberg planned to do the expansion on Burroughs’ behalf — as we can see from his letter of June 12, 1952 —

reporting Ace’s request for 6,000 more words, and Ginsberg’s idea to use “Junk parts of Queer” plus Burroughs’ real letters to make a new ending. And we can also see, from this carbon (held at Stanford),

how Burroughs did this expansion by transposing third-person “Queer” material into the first-person for “Junk,” literally striking out “He” and replacing it with “I.” 

As a result of this manuscript cannibalism, an eighth of the Junkie published by Ace Books in spring 1953 had come from “Queer,” while “Queer” had lost almost a fifth of its material in the process. 

Although some have noticed the difference in the final chapters of Junkie, the most straightforward novel in the Burroughs oeuvre turns out to be a hybrid, or composite text — which is ironic, given its packaging as an Ace Doublebook, bound tête-bêche (that’s to say, head-to-toe) with the memoirs of a narcotic agent. That the prime agency driving the cutting up and mixing of manuscripts was not Burroughs but his publisher is a material contingency that grounds what would, in time, become a thoroughgoing critique of authorship. What most interests me, as an editor and a scholar, is to explore the emergence of that critique during the writing of Queer.

When Queer was finally published in 1985, readers would have immediately experienced a series of confusions about the text, if it hadn’t been for Burroughs’ long introduction — which, significantly, had been written at the request of Burroughs’ publishers, Viking, just as, thirty years earlier, Ace Books had asked for a preface to Junkie. Famously, the introduction dramatically tied the writing of Queer to Burroughs’ shooting of his wife, Joan, in September 1951. That disaster, added to what Burroughs says about the difference between writing on and off drugs, effectively pre-empted any questions readers might have about Queer — specifically, questions regarding the identity of its central character and the formal appearance of the narrative. 

For the Lee of Queer is completely unrecognisable as the Lee of Junky; from a cool, tight-lipped and distant reporter he has turned into a near-hysterical character who compulsively tells the most outrageous jokes. Lee seems, quite literally, to have become another person. And likewise formally, there’s been an abrupt shift in person — from Lee as the first-person narrator of Junky to Lee as a character in a third-person narrative — except this shift is then itself undone in the “epilogue,” which is narrated by Lee now in the first person, until, in yet another shift, the finale switches back into the third person. Confused? We certainly oughta be…

The shift in the epilogue from third- to first-person can only be explained by knowing the manuscript history. This shows that Queer‘s epilogue didn’t belong to “Queer” at all, but was written over a year later to conclude Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript and was only added for the 1985 edition. Obviously, clearing that up is essential from the point of view of textual interpretation. 

More revealing still is the question why this material was added. That in turn relates to the 1963 publication of “Yage” in The Yage Letters. For City Lights only published those parts of “Yage” that had already been printed in various little magazines, since the full manuscript — including what became the “Epilogue” to Queer — was not available. And so when Queer was edited for publication in 1985, this unused section of “Yage” was, like Burroughs’ long introduction, added to help make up for all the material that had been cut from Queer to add to Junkie in 1953. 

Or, to put this chain reaction another way: it was because Ace, City Lights, and Viking each required a longer text that Junkie gained parts of Queer, Queer gained parts of “Yage,” and “Yage” was mixed in with later texts to make up The Yage Letters. And that is how the manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” all turned into composite texts, curiously hybrid publications. 

Is this merely happenstance? Is there any more to it than an accumulation of the usual contingencies of publishing? Or is there something else going on to explain why none of the manuscripts of Burroughs’ first three novels were published in toto, and each came to have such confused and compromised textual histories? And if there is more to it, what might be the consequences for editing them?

I’m going to work backwards by considering first the two key structural options for re-editing Queer:

• First, to undo the history of cuts made in 1953 and additions made in 1985.
• Second, to complete the manuscript fragment in other ways.

The first option would have meant adding to Queer the nearly six thousand words cut for Junky and cutting the two-and-a-half thousand words that were added from “Yage.” This option would have had significant implications for the other two editions, of course; but equally, to undo the cuts made in 1953 and the additions made in 1985 would be to deny the agency of history, the passage of time, and the inevitable mutability of texts.

But principles don’t mechanically determine editing practice, and I tried out various experiments. One effort

restored the original opening of Queer, material that had been cut and pasted into Junkie. The effect of restoring it, however, was paradoxical, since it made Queer much less queer. That’s because these first pages — which we’ve already seen just a minute ago — starting from the line “One morning in April Lee woke up a little sick” — set up the rest of the narrative as the fall-out from Lee’s state of drug withdrawal. 

Now, this had clearly been Burroughs’ original intention. However, from an interpretive point of view, to clarify the text in this way would have honoured the author’s intention but have betrayed what the work became: Queer is, as its title promises, a confusing and unsettling text, and it was that identity which I felt bound to respect. 

The second structural option turned out to be just as problematic.

In 1985, James Grauerholz had already considered a range of ways to complete Burroughs’ rough and unfinished manuscript. These included constructing several new chapters and transposing the whole narrative into the first person. However, in the end he rejected all but quite modest interpolations of material, especially needed in the increasingly fragmentary final sections. I myself made some small insertions of newly discovered manuscript material, but concluded that the temptation to complete Queer, and the intractable difficulties of doing so, both pointed to the fact that Burroughs had not left it incomplete in 1952; rather, “Queer” was, in a conventional sense, incompletable. 

Why? Because what’s in play here is more than recognising the agency of history. That invites a social text-editing approach, respecting the authority of all textual collaborators — publishers, agents, and editors, from Ginsberg to Grauerholz — rather than seeing these as corruptions of the author’s presumed intentions. But what’s also at stake is recognising the very particular agency of Burroughs as an author and the model of textual integrity that went with it. And that’s why re-editing his work, especially re-editing Queer, is more than a matter of making a reliable text. 

On the contrary, establishing the material history of Burroughs’ writing is important not so much for producing an accurate base for textual interpretation, but as itself a basis to interpretation. This materiality would become visible on the page in the chaotic montage form of Naked Lunch and more radically still in the texts produced by his cut-up methods. But it emerges in the course of writing his first trilogy, and in what follows I’m going to explore in detail the materiality of Burroughs’ model of textual integrity by focusing on what I see as the turning point in his development as a writer. 

When Burroughs began writing “Queer” in early March 1952 he was very clear about it: “Novel could be part II of Junk,” he wrote Ginsberg on the 20th; “Same straight-forward narrative method as I used in Junk.” The plan was clear enough, but that’s not how it worked out. Queer may have started off “straight,” but it achieved its identity by going awry. 

The turning point comes a couple of weeks later when Burroughs responds to two requests from Ace Books — one to write the autobiographical preface for “Junk,” the other to combine his second novel with his first. This is April 14 1952:

As for publisher’s introduction, I would rather you wrote it as I want to give all my time to the second novel. I will send you a brief autobiographical sketch. Perhaps you can use some of it directly. I give you free hand there, as in making all arrangements. Incidentally I think Queer is excellent title. I personally think it would be a better idea to publish Queer as a sequel to Junk rather than together, but in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee. The financial arrangements are O.K., go ahead and …

Wait a minute! — “as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee”?? Where did that come from? In fact, that is the point: this sick joke comes out of absolutely nowhere — not only in this particular letter, but in the context of all the letters Burroughs had written up until this time. It has a sick humour that is trademark Burroughs, but there’d been nothing like it in his writing before. 

The gag is therefore doubly shocking — both on its own terms and as a sudden change in Burroughs’ style. It registers for the first time the appearance of his routine form, the comic-grotesque fantasies that spring up in Queer and will blossom like fleurs du mal in Naked Lunch.

But what about the torso gag itself? What exactly is Burroughs saying, and why would he identify himself with a sadistic serial killer? Historically speaking, he might be evoking the notorious Cleveland Torso Murderer of the late 1930s, or maybe the equally infamous Black Dahlia case from Los Angeles in 1947. More likely, I think, the tone of moral indifference here — “in this life we have to take things as we find them” — parallels the phrase son cosas de la vida, which will appear in Naked Lunch. There, it is attributed to Sobera de la Flor, who, in March 1952, just as Burroughs was starting to write “Queer,” went on a killing spree that took in the same Mexico City neighbourhood where Burroughs lived. I stress this connection because bloody violence that prompts a shockingly passive moral shrug of the shoulders is a key gesture in Naked Lunch — mainly associated with Dr. Benway — and, quite extraordinarily, it has its origins here, in Burroughs’ response to Ace Books’ plan for combining “Queer” with “Junk.” His gag seems wildly over the top, and confusing too, since it’s hard to see how a merger of two manuscripts could be figured as the brutal dismembering of a body.

What’s going on becomes clearer a week later, when Burroughs was about halfway through the writing of “Queer.” This is the single most important letter he ever wrote, I would say, a defining moment for the material history of his work. Here’s the opening paragraph of his April 22nd 1952 letter: 

Dear Al, I begin to understand the rift between publisher and author. The publisher’s demands are not only highly irritating but contradictory as well. For example, they don’t want to publish books separate or together so far as I can make out, and the question of person is confusion’s masterpiece. I quote: “Necessities preclude publishing book together one part in third person one in 1st”. I wonder precisely what person they expect Queer to be in? I feel as if I was being sawed in half by indecisive fiends who periodically attempted to shove me back together.”

I’ll come back to “confusion’s masterpiece” and Macbeth shortly, because there’s such a lot going on here:

• The “rift” between author and publisher
• The publisher’s contradictory demands 
• The relationship between the “Junk” and “Queer” manuscripts
• The confusion of first and third person narrative
• And finally, feeling sawed in half

On a first approach, this is a letter about practical matters involving the editing of manuscripts for publication, but mainly it is an acutely self-conscious reflection on authorship. Burroughs may have worked on “Junk” for over two years, but only now that he has a contract in the works from Ace Books, does he talk about himself as a soon-to-be-published author. He will end the letter asking Ginsberg to save his letters because “maybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” Right now, however, Burroughs is aware that he has no rep at all, and this is what underlies the “rift” between himself and his publishers.

In accusing Ace of making contradictory and confusing demands, Burroughs recognises the power relations between himself as the writer and Ace as the publisher. They are the ones with the power to make decisions — even the power to torment him by being indecisive. 

Once we stress the word — decision, indecision — we begin to understand what’s going on here. Etymologically, decision comes from the Latin decidere, combining the prefix de with the verb caedere, meaning to “cut.” To decide is to cut off, and the pun motivates the imagery of both the dismembered torso and the body sawn in half. In other words, the images in these mini-routines literalise Burroughs’ sense of the publisher’s power over him. But they do so in a very particular way — by equating his manuscripts with his own body — and this materiality is key to understanding the violence and pain in his first routines, and the polarisation of power relations they embody. 

This polarisation is evident in the contradiction between the images in the letter of April 14th and this of April 22nd, for Burroughs seems to identify with both the cutter — the psycho serial killer who wants to hack off limbs — and with the one being cut, the body sawed in half. To the extent that he is talking about the relationship between his two manuscripts, we have to ask: what does Burroughs himself actually want?

March 26, he writes to Kerouac: “the two stories are really complimentary and should go together.”

April 8, again to Kerouac: “The publishers […] want to publish both together as one novel. I would just as soon they go ahead and publish Junk separate.”

April 14, as we’ve seen, he tells Ginsberg, “I personally think it would be a better idea to publish Queer as a sequel to Junk rather than together.”  

April 26, “Look here, might as well just put these 75 pages on the end of Junk and publish as one novel.”

May 15, Burroughs mails Ginsberg a 59-page manuscript titled “JUNK OR QUEER” 

May 23, “Whatever arrangement is O.K. by me. If they want to put this 60 pages on the end of Junk to make one novel, O.K. Or I will go on with Queer.”

Whatever is actually Burroughs’ key response — he uses the word three times alone in his April 14 letter, writing Ginsberg “tell them whatever you think best […] whatever you decide is O.K. with me […] whatever you tell them I will deliver.”

Let’s just digress a moment to consider a case that couldn’t make for a more instructive contrast — namely Jack Kerouac, who in early May 1952 arrived in Mexico City to stay with Burroughs. On May 18, Kerouac responded to the same publishers who were at this time considering his manuscript of Visions of Cody. He writes to Ginsberg: “If Wyn or Carl [that’s Carl Solomon] insist on cutting it up to make the ‘story’ more intelligible I’ll refuse.”

Without wanting to be overly reductive, Kerouac believed in his work with a single-minded passion, and in refusing to accept cuts, he rejects the publishers’ power to force decisions onto him and to impose narrative intelligibility — their commercially-driven definition of aesthetic coherence. In the case of Burroughs, far from writing as if beyond or outside the context of publishing, he has no illusions whatsoever about his position, about all the compromises and economic determinations involved in getting a book to market. 

At the same time, while his publishers did indeed prevaricate about his two manuscripts, the confusion and the indecision that Burroughs attributes to them are really his own. He’s the one who doesn’t seem to know what he wants. 

When, on April 26, he considers combining his two manuscripts, he protests to Ginsberg, “Why the Hell can’t you shift persons in the middle of a book? So it hasn’t been done, well let’s do it.” This is a reminder of what the problem was all about: the shift in narrative person across manuscripts — clearly “unintelligible” so far as Ace Books was concerned. But Burroughs’ apparent decisiveness is asserted only to be immediately qualified: “Anyway I am going to present it third person. If they want to change it, all right, but I think the change would entail considerable loss.” 

Clearly enough, the plan to combine the first person “Junk” with the third-person “Queer” is not just a formal problem for Burroughs’ publishers. On the contrary, this plan to combine manuscripts is also a plan for a visibly divided self: not just two books in one, but in effect two persons with the same name in one book, split by the difference in narrative point of view. The result would therefore embody Burroughs’ own lack of single-mindedness, his own internal rift, which he has displaced onto Ace Books and literalised in the image of being sawed in half. 

In other words, Burroughs casts Ace Books as the unreasonable obstacle to his desire, as if otherwise he would get what it is he wants — when the truth is, what he wants is in a state of self-contradiction.

Interestingly, we can see this displacement of self-divided desire in Burroughs’ allusion to Macbeth. What makes the allusion especially revealing is that it appears in his turning point letter of April 22 as a revision that he then incorporated into a retyped second draft — the original is on the left, the revised draft on the right.

This is itself a crucial moment, for it was the first letter Burroughs ever redrafted in this way. As we can see from my transcription, the opening paragraph is extensively rewritten. This is the key line he struck through:

Personally I am so confused I don’t know whether to think in 1st or 3rd person at this point.

Personally Burroughs is confused about what person to think in… No wonder the line from Macbeth came to him and he substituted the phrase “the question of person is confusion’s masterpiece” — although we can immediately see how this substitution displaces the confusion away from his own person and onto his publishers. 

This confusion of person appears materially in the act of writing itself — for example, in this fragment from the first week of April, where Burroughs experiments with the first-person but mucks it up — again, I’ve glossed it since it’s not easy to read:

I stayed away from the Ship Ahoy for several days to give Allerton time to forget the bad impression he had undoubtedly made.

But this is not just a matter of confusing “I” with “he” when Burroughs writes — far from it. This is not an innocent slip; it’s loaded, and constitutes what Freud called a parapraxis. As the barely concealed psychoanalytical dimensions to Burroughs’ letter suggest, it’s about the confusion of identity in a much more fundamental sense.

To grasp this point, we have to return to how Burroughs quotes Macbeth in Naked Lunch, for now we can see how what’s going on in that passage grows directly out of Burroughs’ April 1952 writing. 

The line that misquotes Shakespeare appears in a comic-grotesque parody of Oedipal confusion — featuring “great big daddy” and “the old lady,” and a cut-up of Genesis with Freud (to make: “male and female castrated he them”) and which is dense with not only physical “cuts” but also a torso job on the mother’s body. As Burroughs’ rewriting of the Bard via Freud has it, God’s masterpiece — man — is thoroughly fucked up by sexual desire. 

But if desire is for Burroughs the basis to confusion, he sees it from a very specific point, one that is encrypted in the image of being sawed in half and its history as a stage act for magicians.

With its origins in Grand Guignol, English music-hall variety, and American vaudeville shows, the act was originally developed by the English magician Percy Thomas Selbit and then perfected and patented in the US by Horace Goldin. However, when Goldin first staged it in June 1921 for the Society of American Magicians at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway and 34th, he made one crucial mistake: the body he cut up belonged to a fellow dressed as a hotel bellboy. Goldin never made that mistake again, and since then the act has almost always been titled “Sawing a Woman in Half.” Or “Sawing a Lady in Half.”

I especially like the poster on the right, with its doctor and nurse in the background, playing up the danger of the act while turning it into a bogus medical procedure, a surgical operation — shades perhaps of Dr. Benway, played here by a blood-splattered Mr Burroughs.

Indeed, the image returns like this in the Benway section of Naked Lunch, where Rock and Roll Hoodlums “saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw.” It is an acutely gendered act of violence. (I love this image, with its Day of the Dead figures that make a Mexican connection back to Burroughs.)

So: as a torso murderer, Burroughs sadistically identified himself with a male slasher, but in the image of being sawed in half he masochistically identifies with the female victim: in other words, Burroughs puts himself in the box as a woman.

As an act of symbolic castration, being sawed in half represents the unequal power relations between Burroughs and his publishers that seem to feminise the writer. But the image also dramatizes what Burroughs dwells on most in his April 22nd letter, which is affirming his maleness as a homosexual. This need is in turn provoked directly by his publishers, as Burroughs reports the suggestion from Carl Solomon that his second novel be titled not “Queer” but “Fag.” This was Burroughs’ reaction:

“I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a fag. That’s what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us manly, strong, noble types and the leaping, jumping, window dressing cocksucker. Furtherchrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somweheres or publishers will swarm all over her sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass.” 

Like the image of being sawed in half, Burroughs’ own contradictions here — asserting his maleness on the one hand and taking on the very queeny, campy tones he despises on the other — materialise the case made by Jamie Russell in his book Queer Burroughs — which is that the historically rigid, binary “opposition of masculine/feminine, queer/fag, man/woman” produced “the gay subject as a schizoid cut-up.” So it’s not just that Burroughs puts himself in the box: sado-masochistically, he plays both parts at once.

Of course, this wasn’t actually funny at all, and the sick humour of Burroughs’ routines in Queer is both hilarious and excruciating. And it’s the pain that brings us back to Burroughs’ texts. 

Now, Queer is centred around Lee’s homosexual desire for Allerton, a thinly fictionalised version of Burroughs’ relationship with Lewis Marker. Lee’s fantasy of physically merging with Allerton, of slupping him as Burroughs puts it, reads like a dark parody of love in Plato’s Symposium. In fact, Aristophanes’ account of love as “the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole” suggests that behind Burroughs’ stage magician and torso killer stands Zeus, who sawed in two the originally rounded whole human being, and so condemned each to the pursuit of their other halves. 

But Burroughs didn’t need to read Plato to learn about love as lack; he felt it as pain. And one reason why the April 22nd letter was such a turning point for him is that here Burroughs reveals that Marker has deserted him: “I am deeply hurt,” he writes, with crushing understatement. In Queer itself, the emotional experience of feeling deeply hurt echoes this letter by consistently appearing in physical terms of the cut body — for example: “Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out toward the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief.” 

Most directly, the imagery here evokes the scene of Burroughs’ own real-life amputation — in which he cut off the end joint of the little finger of his left hand, during an earlier episode of abject, frustrated desire in 1939. The writing of Queer brought back previous traumas of desire, and it comes as no surprise that in his April 22nd letter Burroughs refers to having just written the short story later published as “The Finger.” Fictionalising this earlier episode, “The Finger” mockingly literalises the masochistic figure of Burroughs’ emotional pain: “It’s tearing me all apart. . . . So I hit on this finger joint gimmick.” 

In other words, Burroughs’ confusion about what he wants for his manuscripts, whether their textual bodies should be joined or separate, parts or wholes, shares exactly the same embodied imagery as the literalisation of desire. And if the textual and the sexual seem to be materially, physically one, the imagery also implicates the aesthetic and the economic. 

The implication of these two dimensions is clear from Burroughs’ comment on “The Finger,” which he offers in response to Ace Books’ request for the autobiographical preface to “Junk.” The story is “incomplete of course. What ya think I am, a hack?” 

Hack, which derives from “hackney” — a horse that was easy to ride and available for hire — has, since the days of Grub Street, denoted a writer whose pen is always for sale, a mere professional drudge who churns out commissioned work on time. And that is precisely how Burroughs casts himself in his powerlessness before Ace Books. In two letters — referring to “Queer” on May 23rd and to “Junk” on July 6th — he speaks openly about writing “on schedule” and “to order.” 

However, to hack is also to cut up, and by insisting that his story about the cutting off of one of his fingers is itself an incomplete textual body, Burroughs models a writing that refuses to give his publishers what they want, either aesthetically or economically.

Offering to give Ace Books his finger is clearly an obscene act of payback for publishers who feminise the writer by “sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass.” As for the preface itself, which Burroughs refers to as a “routine, like you see on the back flap,” he offers instead a queering of the writer’s life story, a parody that connects sexual identity and textual integrity via the power relations between author and publisher. Burroughs responds:

Now as to this biographical thing I can’t write it. It is too general and I have no idea what they want. Do they have in mind the “I have worked (but not in the order named) as towel boy in a Kalamazoo whore house, lavatory attendant, male whore and part-time stool pigeon. Currently living in a remodelled pissoir with…” etc.

As a resumé of Burroughs’ employment history and qualifications as a writer, this boasts that no job is too low for him; not merely a “hack,” he’s a whore. But if he feels screwed by his publishers, Burroughs again pays them back by screwing up the biographical portrait they demand — not only by the moral outrageousness of its content, but also by its form. Offering not a metaphorical whole but metonymic parts, he notes that these parts are themselves dis-orderly, mixed up and out of sequence — in other words, confused. But the confusion here is strategic, a deliberate deconstruction of the writer’s identity and the textual unity required by his publishers.

This moment marks the difference between the writing of “Junk” and the writing of “Queer”: He may have described Queer as a “queer novel using the same straight narrative method as I used in ‘Junk,'” but “Junk” achieved coherence and an appearance of closure. The writing of “Queer,” however, marks the breakdown of that method, its unravelling, under the destabilizing pressure of desire and the return — with a vengeance — of the repressed, in the form of jokes, dreams, slips of the tongue, and so on. 

Straight narrative goes awry in Queer because it cannot contain the extreme performances of Burroughs’ vaudevillian routines. Lee is not simply more talkative in Queer than he was in Junkie, he puts on, or rather is the medium for, over a dozen voices: a Mexican boy, a queer doctor, a Texas oilman, a bank president, a driller, his friend Winston Moor, a Vice Squad cop, an old Jew, a Tibetan Holy man and his acolyte, a German doctor, and an American consul… Lee turns polyphonic because the routine is a variety act, useless for coherent narrative but ideal for a quick-change show of vaudeville hoofers, ventriloquists, stand-up comedians, magicians sawing women in half with a two-man surgical saw… 

In conclusion, the shift from “Junk” to “Queer” marked by the appearance in April 1952 of the routine was a turning point in Burroughs’ writing — but what’s equally clear is that it arises as a moment of crisis and self-contradiction — as much the breakdown of a straight method as the choice of a queer one. This was not the end of the story, but its beginning.

“I have not decided on ending for second novel,” Burroughs had written in his torso letter of 14 April 1952, adding, “Perhaps the ending just hasn’t occurred yet.” Unable to decide, waiting on an outside agency, on some contingent circumstance to provide a cut-off point, Burroughs qualifies his desire for control and opens himself to chance — and in this way anticipates the long genesis of the “second” Naked Lunch published in 1959. 

There is, then, no either/or, requiring us to choose between the calculating intentional author or a writer lacking control over his materials. Far from being merely indecisive or confused, Burroughs in 1952 began to recognise that as a writer he was not a unified agent whose work could attain completeness, and the corpus of his writing is emphatically a body in pieces. 

But — and this is what’s most fascinating — his original routines about the dismembered body bring together his writing, his desire, and the material decisions of his publishing house editors. In effect, Ace Books externalised for Burroughs an unconscious dimension, an inner conflict, just as Burroughs himself internalised the commercial logic which dictates that writing for publication is not a unified act but a collaborative process involving contingencies and multiple, divided agencies.

Or to put this another way, if we pose the seemingly nonsensical question, “What do Burroughs’ manuscripts want?” we have here the answer in the very form of their material history. The proof that non-authorial agencies play the part of the work’s unconscious, the proof that, far from being unwanted foreign corruptions that messed up the manuscripts, on the contrary they in fact fulfilled the desire that Burroughs otherwise could not achieve — is simply this: that what Ginsberg referred to as “the Junk parts of Queer” do belong with Junky, and do not belong with Queer; and that the Epilogue taken from “Yage” does fit Queer, and does not fit The Yage Letters. 

To be clear: this isn’t simply to accept that in 1952 and 1985 the editors happened to make or bring about good decisions. Rather, in each case the cuts and additions that they led Burroughs to make internalised the contradiction that was necessary to complete the work. Thus, in the case of Queer, because Burroughs gutted most of the opening two chapters in which Lee withdraws from junk, he prevented this “straight” material from naturalising all that follows — from domesticating the narrative breakdown as reassuringly explicable. 

Likewise, at the other end of the text and thirty years later, the switch from third-person narrative to first-person in the Epilogue is precisely the formal discontinuity demanded by the history of the manuscript, while the finale — where the dream dimension takes over and Lee turns into the monstrous Skip Tracer and the narrative switches back into the third-person — turns out to be the narrative’s true destiny and the realisation of its desire.

And so to simply undo the cuts forced onto Burroughs’ early work would have been to restore an un-cut agency and a unity of intention that Burroughs did not have. Equally, it would have disguised the very material processes that, in the work that was to follow, Burroughs would himself put into the foreground, make visible on the page, as a critique of authorship and textual integrity.

Bringing the back-stories out into the open is therefore particularly relevant to re-editing Burroughs’ work, especially when what those back-stories reveal is contradiction and confusion. Needless to say, editors can’t avoid making definite decisions, line by line, word by word, accidental by accidental — which is why, at times, it’s felt as if I have been sawing Burroughs in half —

and at other times, vice-versa…

by Oliver Harris

Dismissed as Unreadable

The long and intimate association of William Burroughs with poets is well known: Ginsberg, most obviously, as well as Corso, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Leroi Jones, John Giorno, and so on. But to talk of Burroughs’ own material engagement with poetic form and poetics in relation to historical and contemporary practices — this can really only mean one thing: the cut-up project that began in Paris at the end of 1959. As well as brief encounters with old luminaries such as Duchamp, Peret and Tzara, this was the place and the context in which his activities would bring Burroughs in contact with George Maciunas’ Fluxus Group, the Domaine Poetique of Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin, the work of the Lettristes and poesie sonore. It’s easy to forget, but his first novel, Junkie, had been published as a pulp paperback on sale in rail stations only six years earlier. Now, to give just one example, Burroughs would find himself in print alongside John Ashbery, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia and Alice B. Toklas.¹

The enormously fertile and innovative period of the cut-up project has enjoyed a good deal of critical attention since Robin Lydenberg, in her ground-breaking study of 1987, complained that the “cut-up novels of William Burroughs have been dismissed without ever having been rigorously examined” (55). This was her starting point, “to demonstrate that these narratives, which many critics have dismissed as unreadable, offer new ways of reading and thinking” (xi). My point of departure is implied by Lydenberg’s revealing use of the terms “cut-up novels” and “narratives”: missing from Lydenberg, as from all the criticism that has followed, is the historical and material rigour that demands examination of the text that preceded the novels and their narratives; that is to say, the original manifesto and manual of the method, Minutes to Go (1960). Whether this is “unreadable” is open to question, since it remains the critically unread starting point of Burroughs’ cut-up project. It is also, and far from coincidentally, the text most materially invested with the poetry and poetics that gave Burroughs’ method its original identity.

What is at stake here? Why should Minutes to Go, a limited edition pamphlet of sixty pages, a work that had three authors other than Burroughs (Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso), and a text apparently so easy to overlook — why should it be brought in from the margins? In broad terms, there are two reasons.

First, as implied above, Burroughs criticism has taken a surprisingly conventional literary approach to a project conceived so radically in opposition to the conventions of literature. The analysis of Burroughs’ novel-length cut-up texts has been at the expense of his myriad shorter texts from the same era, texts that, taken together, amount to a comparable body of work and demonstrate a much wider range of collage-based experiments.² Even leaving aside his related work in other media — photomontage, collage scrap-books, tape-recordings, films — the effect of putting The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express centre-stage is to distort the history and scope of Burroughs’ experimental practices. Minutes to Go does not fit the critical frame because it inaugurated and belongs to another history, one characterised by publication of hundreds of short texts in dozens of small underground magazines — a history, in other words, where the material, the publishing contexts, and the means of distribution all coincided with the world of avant-garde poetry in general, and the postwar revival of collage-based techniques in particular. It’s tempting to invert critical history altogether and say that, far from being the acme of Burroughs’ cut-up work, the trilogy is in fact its aberration, because the truest realisation of the project lay outside the novel form. At the very least, we can say that it is hard to grasp the poetic identity of the cut-up project so long as Burroughs is approached, first and last, as a novelist.

Second, giving space to Minutes to Go is essential as a corrective to perhaps the most intractable and pervasive difficulty for Burroughs criticism, which is the relation of practice to polemic. That is, the claims Burroughs made for his cut-up methods invariably determine — and often substitute entirely for — close analysis of either the methods used or the variety of texts they produced. For criticism has also conjured up an abstraction fixed by a definite article by speaking of “the cut-up.” This temptation to generalise is, like the priority given to theory, a practical convenience that side-steps the difficulty of dealing with the multiple cut-up procedures that evolved over time, served different functions, and produced diverse results.

The upshot is that Burroughs criticism has in effect entirely reversed the historical priorities. After all, the essential fact of the cut-up enterprise from the outset was that this was an experimental method; “experimental in the sense of being something to do” (Third Mind 31). As Burroughs told Ginsberg shortly after publication of Minutes to Go: “Don’t theorize. Try it” (The Yage Letters 59). An experiment is also a process of trial and error whose outcomes are unpredictable and subject to revision — “an act the outcome of which is unknown,” as John Cage put it in the mid-1950s (13; my emphasis). This is why slighting the material basis of Burroughs’ methods and the text that first embodied them, hides from view both crucial historical origins and alternative potentials. Cited only to be passed over as quickly as possible, so that critics can discuss Burroughs’ theory or analyse his novels, the fate of Minutes to Go is the original instance and prime symbol of this reversal of priorities.

The most direct way to explore the poetics of Minutes to Go is to make good these shortcomings by focusing on the two names almost always cited together alongside the text: Arthur Rimbaud and Tristan Tzara.

Tzara Did It All Before

“At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater” (Third Mind 29). These opening lines from “The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin” (first published in January 1961), and others similar to them, have been endlessly quoted to establish a conscious historical line of descent and immediate context. The problem is not the inaccuracy of Burroughs’ account — the “rally” was actually a 1920 exhibition of Picabia’s paintings at an art gallery, not a theatre, was an event of Paris Dada, not the surrealists, and had there been a “riot” it would only have been one of many — but that it has closed off rather than opened up further investigation of its relevance.³

Now, within the text of Minutes to Go there are two references to Tzara. One is by Corso in his notorious “Post-script” that disowned his part in the cut-up project (“Tzara did it all before” (63)), and the other, which comes in the longer of his two polemical texts, is by Gysin, and is nearly identical to the lines from Burroughs cited above (“the Man from Nowhere . . . pulled words out of a hat” (42)). That Burroughs himself doesn’t mention Tzara in Minutes to Go — or in his one short text included in its immediate sequel, The Exterminator (1960) — is unsurprising, not only because he lacked Gysin’s agenda (Gysin promoted Tzara at least in part to settle an old score with André Breton), but given the specific nature of his contributions. Just over a third of Minutes to Go is attributed to Burroughs — but not “by Burroughs,” for (with the exception of one text, to which I will return) almost every word that appears above his name is itself attributed to other sources. Unlike Gysin, Burroughs did not juxtapose his first cut-up texts with any explicit polemical statement or set of instructions, and it would be another six months before he would publicly identify his method with Tzara’s and credit Tzara (rather than Lautréamont) with the maxim “Poetry is for everyone” (Third Mind 31). This delayed identification is a measure of the larger priority Burroughs gave to offering exemplary work over and above a theory of his practice or the practice of theory; the development of a cut-up poetics would follow from, be produced by, and closely resemble, the actual results of his methods.

What then of the texts themselves in Minutes to Go; do they confirm the prevailing view of the relation between Burroughs and Tzara, namely that “the cut-up begins as an exercise in negativity, as a kind of Dadaist destruction” (Lydenberg 48)? Following the formula of Tzara’s “To Make a Dadaist Poem” (“Take a newspaper. Take some scissors” (39)), as well as Gysin’s accidental re-discovery of the method forty years later, Burroughs worked specifically on newspaper articles, and used them as the basis for eleven of his sixteen texts. Significantly, even this subset is too heterogeneous in form to tell the methods of composition used, and the only certainty is that these texts could not all have been produced according to Burroughs’ own, much-cited “how-to” description. Four of these texts are set out as more or less continuous prose, the rest in stanzas of irregular length — and in one case (“FROM SAN DIEGO UP TO MAINE”) there is both a prose text and a reworked version set in stanzas. The stanza layout appears to imply a poetic intent, and an affinity with such previous uses of newspaper material as the “readymade” i-Zeichnungen and i-Gedichte texts of Kurt Schwitters; but I would argue that the details given of the source texts (“NEW CLUES TO CANCER CURES / Saturday Evening Post / October 31, 1959″ (18), and so on) redirect attention from the form towards the transformations of a specific content.

Indeed, while one text cuts up a recent article on the Beat Generation, and two cut up articles on juvenile delinquency, the other eight all rework articles on a single theme; the latest developments in cancer, gene, and virus research. We don’t need to know where Burroughs would take this material to see that the selection in Minutes to Go is recognisably strategic, indicating both that a predetermined set of issues preceded the indeterminate results, and that there must be a continuity between subject matter and methodology; if scientific material defines the most appropriate content of Burroughs’ experimental method, we might infer from this the scientific form of his experiment. Certainly, it would be difficult to advance precise textual interpretation or aesthetic evaluation of a piece like “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” (15):

Cancer tests… brown blood.. live babies.. proof of virus. vacine? Bio-control the London conference.. it was out sheep cattle and animals have wild system…. Blood time brown blood.

You could say that further interpretation is simply not possible; but the cumulative effect of such texts, enhanced by repetition of words and phrases across several of them, is still clear enough; to invite us to infer a calculated relation between language and the genetic code, twin deterministic systems subject here to systematic scrambling by the use of chance procedures. In this light, phrases such as “Cancer tests” and “wild system” take on meaning, but the closest Burroughs comes to making a direct statement to this effect in Minutes to Go — “In THEE beginning was THE word.. The word was a virus..” (59) — is still minimal and oblique. The conclusion has to be that texts such as “VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?” remain cryptic the better to exemplify a practice that must, in order to do its work, take priority over a fully coherent thesis. Or to put this the other way, a proselytising polemic, an authoritative statement of theory, would have pre-empted and therefore invalidated the logic of the methods themselves, and it was above all the methods that constituted the cut-up project.

What’s immediately apparent is how little Burroughs’ texts have in common with that of Tzara’s. In fact, the relation of theory to textual practice in Minutes to Go is precisely the reverse of that found in his “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” a set of instructions that actually preceded (by two months) publication of
his own exemplary text — an example that would remain the only one he ever produced according to his own method.⁴ Typical of both the Dada written manifesto and the épatisme of his own public manifestations, Tzara’s recipe for composing poetry flaunts a deliberate mismatch between practical steps and claims for the results: the material is to be selected according to the “length you want to make your poem,” not by its content, while the outcome, after gently shaking the cut-out words and transcribing them, is a poem that will prove you are “an infinitely original author of charming sensibility” (39). Tzara’s formula for making poetry out of newspaper clippings was an ironic, anti-aesthetic manifesto stratagem, a performance trick rather than a creative blue-print, whereas Burroughs produced multiple material examples of newspaper-based texts and fully intended that others do likewise. The creativity of these texts is not bound to the aesthetic criterion of quality,⁵ but nor are they “negativistic” in the vein of “Dadaist destruction”; operating in a clearly calculated thematic context and offered for practical use, their creativity functions according to experimental values of surprise, transformation, and discovery. Are these values scientific or poetic? As Ian MacFadyen argues, you could say that Burroughs produced scientific results from artistic intentions, but equally that “his scientism led to extraordinary artistic results” (33).

Burroughs’ use of chance factors was never an end in itself, as it was for Tzara, and was too pragmatic to be bound by rigid precepts (as, for example, automatic writing was for Breton) so that, while it was often a hit or miss affair, his experiments remained open, and committed to, enormous variation. Burroughs claimed that the results in Minutes to Go were presented intact, but the precise selection of the source material already pointed the way for his use of chance as a middle-term, opening up possibilities for further dialectical development that he would explore for the best part of a decade. Tzara, in short, had not done it “all before.”

Real Rimbaud Poems

“A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images — real Rimbaud images — but new ones” (Paris Review 154). As with Burroughs’ citations of Tzara, these lines, and others like them from “The Exterminator” and “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” have been routinely quoted without question, often even without context; without, that is, establishing the appeal and status of Rimbaud (for the Beat circle in postwar America, and in French avant-garde culture during the early 1960s), or the influence of Rimbaud on Burroughs’ work. In Minutes to Go, Rimbaud’s position is uniquely privileged, with three pages given over to two texts based on “A une raison,” taken from Les Illuminations. Before considering the significance of Rimbaud’s unique status here, one matched in Burroughs’ more polemical pieces, we have to ask what relation these texts demonstrate to Burroughs’ recycled claims that you can “recognize Rimbaud cut-up as Rimbaud” (Third Mind 71) and, “Cut Rimbaud’s words and you are assured of good poetry” (32). The answer is immediately apparent from the start of the first of the two texts in Minutes to Go (23):

EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD”

A rap of
Sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the time to you

From such fragments could anybody identify the source poem? Or recognise Rimbaud? Is this — good or bad — poetry at all? The absolute mismatch between Burroughs’ claims and the texts in Minutes to Go should prompt us to ask quite different questions: what is the relation between these cut-ups of Rimbaud and Burroughs’ cut-ups of newspaper articles? and what is the real significance of associating Rimbaud so emphatically with the cut-up enterprise?

The juxtaposition of these two texts with others created by cutting up newspaper articles might be taken as a statement about the equality of cultural materials, a position that has a long tradition in avant-garde collage-based work. But, while the cut-up Rimbaud poems do resemble the more fragmented of those based on newspapers, so asserting the basic materiality of language, there is a crucial difference. As with the newspaper cut-ups, both these texts end with a note that identifies the source text, but here it is followed by another line: “Words by Rimbaud, arrangement by Burroughs and Corso” (23). There are several things to say about this. Firstly, the term “arrangement” clearly denotes a design, the exercise of control, and so contradicts the assumption of materials presented entirely intact. Secondly, while the result is not offered as itself a poem, this description of creative process clearly maintains a distinction between the use of Rimbaud’s poem and anonymously authored journalism. More than that, it indicates a complex activity of collaboration: these are the only texts credited to two poetic practitioners, while Rimbaud is in effect recruited as a third collaborator (or a fifth, if you consider Minutes to Go as a whole). The result is a very particular act of hommage, one that has nothing to do with imitating Rimbaud’s style or creating “good poetry,” any more than it has with Dadaist destruction and the negation of poetry. Rather, it has to do with the cryptic invocation of a precise thematic relation and the practice of a particular poetics.

Identifying the source text as “A une raison,” Burroughs allows — invites — us to re-read the original in light of the new context he created for it, and vice-versa. The key line is clear at once: “Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps” (“Change our fate, overcome the plague, and begin with time”) (Rimbaud 246, 247). Now we can not only recognise the words but see the felicitous significance of the line “Our lots con” in Burroughs’ text. In “The Exterminator” he would make fully explicit this covert alliance between his method and Rimbaud’s revolutionary call to abolish reason and escape time by deconstructing the “con” of language: “See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines Keep Thee in Slots . . . The Word Lines keep you in Time . . . Cut the in lines” (Third Mind 71). Likewise in “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs invokes Rimbaud’s “colour vowels” (which he would use later in 1960 as the structural principle for the first edition of The Soft Machine) and his “systematic derangement of the senses” (32). However, the crucial fact remains that the cut-ups of Rimbaud’s poem in Minutes to Go do not themselves reproduce such a visionary poetics. The significance of this failure is twofold.

Firstly, as Burroughs must have known, Rimbaud was accorded a special place not only in Surrealist poetics but in historical definitions of collage, such as that given by Max Ernst: “Simple hallucination, in the words of Rimbaud . . . visual alchemy” (126). No coincidence that Gysin, who had worked with Ernst, should begin Minutes to Go with the words, “the hallucinated have come to tell you” (3), or that Burroughs should take the visionary figure literally by identifying Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens as the “place of mescaline hallucination” (Third Mind 32). However, Ernst also stressed that collage was an “alchemical composition of two or more heterogeneous elements” (Ernst 130; my emphasis); in other words, a technique that visibly combines disparate elements of diverse material origins. On this basis, the re-ordering of a single text does not qualify as a collage procedure. For the same reason, the line “Our lots con” cannot be said to function according to the collage principle of quotation as an act of abbreviated reference. Rather, as a cryptic phrase produced by the scissors, it signals one of the seductive pleasures of cutting up: the anticipation and discovery of messages, endowed with a magical potency or fetish quality precisely because they result from a mechanical procedure. The key feature is this private fascination of the “alchemical” act for the practitioner.

In short, the use of Rimbaud in Minutes to Go is determined by the value accorded the material activity of the method, by the process itself, rather than the reception of its products.⁶ Or as Burroughs put it, in his only use of the term “cut up” here: “ANYONE CAN RECORD WORDS — CUT UP your own hustling myself” (60). This emphasis — also integral to his claims for the therapeutic value of cutting up — was an essential ambition of the first-stage of experiment and was central to its promotion as an available method, one that could fulfil the maxim Burroughs attributed to Tzara: “Say it again: ‘Poetry is for everyone.’ Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place” (Third Mind 31).

This brings us to the second point, and to a conclusion. What Burroughs meant by being “in Rimbaud’s place” combined two quite different, even contradictory principles. If the first had to do with the material process of cutting up, as evidenced in Minutes to Go, the second had to do with the content and arrangement of the material, and would be demonstrated in his cut-up novels — texts that did, progressively and on a massive scale, fulfil the collage principle of combining and juxtaposing elements taken from diverse origins. This disposition is anticipated in Burroughs’ exceptional text, “REACTIVE AGENT TAPE CUT BY LEE THE AGENT IN INTERZONE.” This alone cites no sources, but familiarity with Burroughs’ work enables us to recognise lines from The Naked Lunch and other, at that time unpublished, manuscripts, which are cut up to produce a collage of phrases and images that approximates the density, rhythmic measure, and uncanny effect of déjà-vu characteristic of the cut-up novels.

Some six months after Minutes to Go, Burroughs would tell Ginsberg: “I find cut-ups most immediately workable on poetic prose image writing like Rimbaud, St. Perse and Your Correspondent.”⁷ What’s curious about this is that such an understanding ought to have been already clear to Burroughs, since he had achieved something very like it seven years earlier, in the “Composite City” section of The Yage Letters. A variation upon both the “Villes” of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and St. John Perse’s Anabasis, this phantasmagoria, which is motivated by the intense sensual derangement of yagé intoxication, is itself a composite text; for it not only reproduces the elliptical mosaics of imagery and long, densely rhythmic catalogues of Rimbaud and St. John Perse, but does so by recycling and transforming material that appeared earlier in Burroughs’ own text.⁸ As an exercise in “poetic prose image writing,” this was a model that Burroughs, in effect, went back to after Minutes to Go, now armed with a pair of scissors.

In Minutes to Go itself, “poetry” is not understood in terms of words on the page but as the “place” reached by a particular use of chance operations on pre-existing words, and this place is both unknown and where certain things can be seen, precisely because the outcome of the activity cannot be fore-seen. In sum, it was as a method, to be grasped by doing, not as a content to be understood by interpretation, that Burroughs both saw and demonstrated the relation of cut-ups to Rimbaud’s own definition of poetry: “I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses” (303).

While he worked intensively on his trilogy, Burroughs gave less attention to promoting his methods in terms of the practitioner’s active experience, which required simple techniques and short texts. With this shift came more poetic possibilities for the reader to experience, and in a sense the trilogy’s more complex effects were a response to that very shift, a solution to what one critic identified as the “problematics of reading cutups without actual cutup experience” (Géfin 95). The emphatic critical focus on Burroughs’ trilogy assumes that Minutes to Go was abandoned as a dead-end.⁹ But it would be well to recall the full context of John Cage’s definition of an experiment “as an act the outcome of which is unknown”; “providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure” (13). The verdict that Minutes to Go was a false-start misunderstands the evolutionary logic of Burroughs’ procedures that started in 1960, experimental procedures based on trial and error, repetition and variation, multiple functions and provisional results.

Five years later, Ginsberg observed that, since “a page of his prose is as dense with imagery as anything in St. John Perse or Rimbaud,” you could say that “Burroughs is a poet too, really” (Paris Review 320). Ginsberg therefore anticipated the fate of the poetics that cut Rimbaud up with Tristan Tzara, since, like everyone else after him, he was not thinking of Minutes to Go.

Notes

1 Burroughs’ text, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” appeared alongside pieces by these and other poets in the “cut-up” issue of C magazine (February 14 1965), 1.10.

2 For one of the very few articles to analyze such texts, see Skau. Even Laszlo Géfin, who contextualizes cut-up methods within historical collage practices, fails to deal with any specific texts.

3 Gérard-Georges Lemaire identified Tzara as one of cut-ups’ “distant ancestors” (Third Mind 14); Noëlle Batt has observed that “the two moves are decisively differentiated on the one hand in terms of the spirit in which they were undertaken, and on the other hand in terms of the productive power they demonstrated” (14; my translation); and Barry Miles notes that “the circumstances were entirely different” (196) — that these are the most rigorous engagements in Burroughs criticism suggests the scale of the problem.

4 In fact, Tzara had recently practiced similar chance cannibalizations, but applied to his earlier symbolist poetry and done with the aim of negating its poetic and personal expression. See Browning.

5 Jeff Nuttall, who published many of Burroughs’ short newspaper layout texts in the mid-1960s, specifically presented them defined against the “aesthetic frame of reference and intention” that determined “the classic cutups of Tzara and Schwitters” (“Nut Note on the Column Cutup Thing,” My Own Mag, 15 (April 1966), 15).

6 Writing to the publisher of The Exterminator, in July 1960 Burroughs even proposed a variant of the cadavres exquis of the Surrealists (“Perhaps a game would do it. Like, say four people each write a page on any subject comes to mind. Then cut and rearrange. With squared paper and the cut lines drawn you dig.”), further evidence of the priority given to soliciting practice, over and above consumption of Burroughs’ own results (Burroughs to David Hazelwood, July 26 1960 (University of California)).

7 Burroughs to Ginsberg, September 5 1960 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

8 For a more detailed analysis, see my William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003).

9 On this basis, you might as well say that the trilogy failed, since Burroughs published some two hundred short texts between Nova Express in 1964 and his next novel, The Wild Boys in 1969. Given the nature of his experiments, short texts were better suited to the cut-up project, so that Burroughs’ constant revisions of his trilogy — three titles, but six different editions — can be seen as a rather desperate attempt to apply this very logic to his novels.

Works Cited

Batt, Noëlle. “Rupture et déplacement dans l’oeuvre de William Burroughs.” Revue Française d’Études Américanes 1 (April 1976): 12-21.

Browning, Gordon Frederick. Tristan Tzara: The Genesis of the Dada Poem, or from Dada to Aa. Stuttgart: Akaemischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1979.

Burroughs, William. Interview with Conrad Knickerbocker. The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 143-174.

— The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963; 1975.

Burroughs, William, Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso, and Brion Gysin. Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities, 1960.

Burroughs, William, and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. London: John Calder, 1979.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars, 1971.

Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting.” In Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970: 118-34.

Géfin, Laszlo. “Collage, Theory, Reception, and the Cutups of William Burroughs.” Literature and the Other Arts 13 (1987): 91-100.

Ginsberg, Allen. Interview with Thomas Clark. Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1967. 279-320.

Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1987.

MacFadyen, Ian. “Machine Dreams, Optical Toys and Mechanical Boys.” In Flickers of the Dreamachine, ed. Paul Cecil. Hove: Codex, 1996: 21-48.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Skau, Michael. “The Central Verbal System: The Prose of William Burroughs.” Style 15 (1981): 401-14.

Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: John Calder, 1977.

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!