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under the leadership of James Grauerholz, has done a terrific job putting out revised editions as well as previously unpublished material including correspondence, journals, and “lost” works.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

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

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

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

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

A rap of
sound
A.

turns
Urns back O
Our lots con
the   time to you

change
no mat
desires
Arrival of////

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#20 – The Exterminator by Auerhahn Press (1960). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

In 1958 on the cover of the Spring issue of Chicago Review, William Burroughs headlined a list of “Ten San Francisco Poets.” At the time, Burroughs had never been to San Francisco nor did he consider himself a poet. Contemplate. While thinking about this Beat koan, which I do rather often (and in case you think I am weird in that regard, note that Oliver Harris has mused over it as well), I am always reminded about how much I love the alternative publishing scene of California, particularly that of San Francisco, from the late 1950s into the 1960s. For my money — and, well, collecting is how I spend most of my money besides on cigars and beer #addictivepersonality — the Mimeo Revolution began on the West Coast. The Mimeo Lexington and Concord occurred at the printing facilities of the Waldport internment camp during World War II, where conscientious objectors shot off the publications of the Untide Press in the face of the official camp organ Tide Press. The alternative press has always gone against the current and opposed current events. Things exploded into an all-out media war in 1957 in the wake of the Howl trial and publicity surrounding On the Road with the publication of issue two of Evergreen Review. Despite what the Chicago Review suggested, at no time was Burroughs a part of any of this, nor was he included in the great SF mimeos of the late 1950s, like Beatitude or Jack Spicer’s J. For example, no matter how much I would have loved Burroughs to have crossed paths with Spicer bibliographically, it was not to be. Maybe Rainer beer and eukodal do not mix. The two men would surely have hated each other, if only because Spicer hated everybody, particularly those, like Burroughs, who represented privilege.

Nor did Burroughs appear in the publications of White Rabbit Press or Open Space, two of my favorite alternative publishers on the West Coast. Well, that is not completely true: Stan Persky of Open Space parodied Burroughs and Yage Letters. But the exception proves the rule. Burroughs was not welcome by many in San Francisco. His dark humor and paranoid vision did not socialize well with a poetry infused with crisp sunlight and fresh sea air. Think Gary Snyder or Philip Whalen. The reaction to Burroughs was like that to The Velvet Underground when they accompanied The Plastic Exploding Inevitable in the City by the Bay in 1966. Yet Burroughs and The Velvets were prophets of doom. By the late 1960s, speed and heroin would wreak havoc on a California counterculture once based on pot and LSD. And remember, before the publication of Yage Letters, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights wanted nothing to do with Burroughs and declined to publish Naked Lunch when it was offered to him back in the 1950s. Again this makes my point all the more clear: Burroughs was not a San Francisco Poet and those poets generally did not want his company. As with Spicer, the feeling was no doubt mutual.

So Burroughs was not a San Francisco Poet except for that gloriously odd moment in 1960 when he suddenly and awkwardly was. I am talking about the publication of Burroughs and Gysin’s The Exterminator by Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press. For me, Auerhahn Press is the crème de la crème of the West Coast alternative presses, so it is a California dream to see Burroughs included on Haselwood’s backlist. That said, it was a bit of a nightmare for Haselwood. Like many readers, Haselwood was blown away by Naked Lunch and he offered to publish anything Burroughs sent him based on that initial enthusiasm. Expecting more Dr. Benway, Haselwood received the manuscript for The Exterminator instead, which is an admittedly odd jumble. In essence a cut-up manifesto, it is Burroughs at his most Dada and in it, as in Minutes to Go, which was published in the same year, Burroughs reads like, you guessed it, a poet. At first glance, Burroughs may not seem like a San Francisco Poet, such as Duncan, Ferlinghetti, or Everson, but if as Burroughs would say, you take a broader view, Burroughs fits right in what was going on in California Art circles: junk art, assemblage, collage, and proto-Pop.  

If Haselwood was crestfallen when he read the manuscript Burroughs and Gysin sent, the Don Quixote and Sancho of the cut-up could not be more optimistic. In their eyes, The Exterminator was going to be a bestseller and the start of a profitable relationship with Haselwood. Burroughs and Gysin were not just high on themselves or something else in thinking this. Again their optimism goes back to California Art in some ways. Junk art, assemblage, collage and California Pop were, in 1960, about to explode on the public consciousness. The 1961 Art of Assemblage show at MOMA showcased in lavish fashion precisely the techniques of montage, collage, and assemblage that Burroughs was incorporating into his writing. More importantly for Burroughs and Gysin, the art of assemblage, which was being practiced from Paris to LA, was selling in galleries and to institutions. In this light, it becomes understandable how Gysin and Burroughs could say with a straight face to Dave Haselwood of Auerhahn Press that The Exterminator would “catch on commercially” or how the Dream Machine would hit the mass market. A lava lamp or pet rock for expanded consciousness. For a brief period, in the early 1960s, the climate of the art market made such pipe dreams possible.

It was not to be. The Exterminator was a huge failure commercially, although it had a second printing, and to this day it remains largely forgotten and unread. Alastair Johnston in his Auerhahn bibliography viewed it as a mistake and lapse in judgment on Haselwood’s part:

[A] typographic lapsus: The Exterminator by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose innovations in prose have seldom been paralleled in the typography of their books. Haselwood does approach the coranto immediacy of the later Brion Gysin Let The Mice In (Something Else Pres, 1973, designed by Graham Mackintosh), though Exterminator strikes out towards an oversize Olympian paperback. The running commentary in Grotesque points up the blackness of the text, however the unletter-spaced Cloister capitals detract from the appearance; the murky Venetians indicate Haselwood’s Kelmscott tendency.

How I would love to see an essay on Burroughs’ typography!! Wonder if there is enough there to make a go of it. According to Johnston, probably not (although Burroughs apparently believed that “letterforms would go back to hieroglyphs, similar to the ancient Egyptians“). In any case The Exterminator deserves to be read, but even if one chooses to ignore it on that level, it should still capture one’s attention as an object and as an example of quality printing. Although again some like Alastair Johnston disagree, I find The Exterminator to be one of my favorite items from Auerhahn Press. I absolutely love the cover design and the use of color. Internally it is typographically interesting, if confused. The use of a text header would be recycled by Richard Aaron in his catalog five twenty years later.  

As Johnston points out, The Exterminator is a paperback in the tradition of Olympia Press, which means just about everything to me. This brings us to one of the central tenets of William Burroughs collecting. Paperbacks are always more desirable than hardcovers. The first five or six A items of Burroughs’ bibliography are must-haves not so merely because of their contents, great has they are, but because they are paperbacks published by alternative presses. The rise of the Mimeo Revolution parallels the Paperback Revolution and the brief ascendance of the independent bookstop. For me, hardcovers are tainted by ties to corporate publishing and in collecting, as with restaurants, the corporate is to be avoided at all costs. Like all that is great in art, the paperback is disposable, recyclable, useful and ephemeral. Yet not so much like fast food, as farm to table. The best of Burroughs’ bibliography is in this vein. The Auerhahn Exterminator is located at the high end of the paperback spectrum: the fine press of the Mimeo Revolution. The best collectibles belong not on bookshelves or sequestered in the climate controlled backrooms of institutional libraries – although that is always where they end up and die – but in the knapsacks and back pockets of hitchhikers who follow Kerouac on the road. They should be pulled out and enjoyed on road trips, not read in reading rooms. Hardcovers are designed by focus groups and in corporate boardrooms; the design of paperbacks are created on the fly next to mimeograph machines and letterpresses. Of course this is a myth as there is nothing more corporate than the mass market paperback, but some myths, like the myth of an endless frontier in America and its illusionary atmosphere of creative freedom and free speech are too just good and too pure to let facts get in the way. The best Auerhahn publications can be appreciated both on the road and on display. Dave Haselwood was a Pecos Bill of alternative publishing, a larger-than-life figure, and although neither pure poetry nor from San Francisco, his Exterminator feels right at home as a highspot of 1960s Left Coast publishing. And as such it demands pride of place in my book collection.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Published by Auerhahn Press in 1960, The Exterminator is one of the forgotten texts of Burroughs’ bibliography. Roughly 1000 copies were printed in the first edition, and I would gather that few of even the most dedicated Burroughs fans have ever read it. Many people get this slim volume confused with the more common Exterminator! Readers who go beyond Naked Lunch and Junkie are probably familiar with Exterminator! as the book is currently in print and often turns up at chain stores such as Borders. This makes sense as Exterminator! heralded Burroughs’ tentative steps into the world of mainstream publishing. The book was issued by Viking in 1973. Not surprisingly, this title is rather conservative in form, content, and packaging when compared to the radical experimentation in independent publishing venues of the preceding decade. It is basically a short story collection.

If The Exterminator is a forgotten text, Dave Haselwood is something of a forgotten publisher. His Auerhahn Press aspired to join high-quality printing with experimental writing. Building on the solid foundations of Circle, Ark and the printing work of the refugees from the Waldport Camp, like William Everson, printing in San Francisco exploded after the so-called San Francisco Renaissance of the mid-1950s. Joe Dunn and later Graham Mackintosh ran White Rabbit Press. Robert Hawley began Oyez Press in 1963. A year later, Donald Allen started the Four Seasons Foundation. Little magazines, like Semina, Open Space and J Magazine flourished. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Haselwood’s press was a shining light in this vibrant San Francisco publishing scene. His books were beautifully done and according to some expensive. Andrew Hoyem cut his teeth working with Haselwood on Auerhahn Press titles in 1961. Yet time has dimmed the glimmer of Auerhahn Press. Somehow printers, like Hoyem and Mackintosh, have become household names in printing circles, and the legacy of Haselwood gets relegated to the shadows, rarely to be seen or heard from, like the bird from which the press takes its name.

How can this be possible when you take into consideration the titles and authors Haselwood published? Auerhahn began with John Wieners’ The Hotel Wentley Poems in 1958. Right off the bat the press printed a landmark work in post-WWII avant poetry. In addition, from the beginning Auerhahn had a signature look and feel. I love the cover photograph by Jerry Burchard. It reminds me of Charles Rotmil‘s cover of Bob Thompson for Kulchur 2. In fact, Haselwood had a way of publishing what became iconic cover images. This might be because Haselwood had the good sense to utilize the talents of Wallace Berman, Robert LaVigne and Bruce Conner. The covers of Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras and Philip Lamantia’s Narcotica are amazing. These are some of the most recognizable photos by Berman. If you didn’t get it for Christmas, get Wallace Berman’s Photographs. It came out late last year on the heels of the excellent Wallace Berman and his Circle. Do yourself a favor and get both. They are fantastic.

In addition to multiple works by McClure and Lamantia, Haselwood also published books by Philip Whalen, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Jack Spicer, and William Everson. After Auerhahn folded, Haselwood continued to publish wonderful titles under his own imprint, Dave Haselwood Books, including Apocalypse Rose by Charles Plymell and Indian Journals by Allen Ginsberg.

Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press has singlehandedly attempted to keep Haselwood and his incredible backlist in the spotlight. Johnston published a bibliography of Auerhahn Press in a beautiful edition. The look of the volume really does Haselwood and Johnston proud. The accompanying text is a treasure trove of information on Auerhahn. Go out and get a copy. While you are at it, pick up Poltroon’s White Rabbit Bibliography and the Zephyrus Image Bibliography as well. These are essential reference works on the San Francisco small press scene in the post-WWII era. If you can dig up a copy, get a hold of Ampersand Volume 16 Number 1 as well. In this issue entitled Beat: A Dead Horse, Johnston interviews the reclusive Haselwood. The quotes from interviews and letters that follow come from the bibliography and Ampersand.

Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up volume was the eighth book published by Auerhahn Press. Haselwood put a little extra into it. The Exterminator can be considered Burroughs’ first fine press edition. In fact a limited edition of the book contained original artwork by Gysin. Roughly octavo-size but thin (only 51 pages) the book has a slight, ethereal quality. This is highlighted by the beautiful wrappers inscribed with Brion Gysin calligraphy in light green on front and back. The white and green covers are delicate, subject to staining and fading. Finding a copy in fine condition is a challenge.

As an object, I feel that The Exterminator is one of Burroughs’ most beautiful publications. Johnston remarks on the book’s typography: “Artistically a minor production Wobbly Rock… was followed by a typographic lapsus: The Exterminator by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose innovations in prose have seldom been paralleled in the typography of their books. Haselwood does approach the coranto immediacy of the later Brion Gysin Let the Mice In… though Exterminator strikes out towards an oversize Olympia paperback. The running commentary in Grotesque points up the blackness of the text, however the unletter spaced Cloister capitals detract from the appearance; the murky Venetians indicate Haselwood’s Kelmscott tendency.” I find the book to be visually arresting. I am reminded of Kyle Schlesinger’s essay on Creeley’s Typography. A similar essay on Burroughs might be in order, particularly about the mimeo publications of the 1960s, despite Johnston’s downplaying of the importance of typography in Burroughs’ work. Not all agree on the beauty of The Exterminator. Haselwood has some reservations about the typography. He states, “The little headlines at the top are all handset but the rest of it was set on a Linotype machine. But you can’t keep track of what is going on anywhere, it just keeps… like diarrhea.” But in his interview, Haselwood draws special attention to the Gysin drawings at the back of the book and admits “it’s worth getting for this part.”

Like many, Haselwood was quite fascinated by Burroughs. Unfortunately, this interest did not extend to the manuscript he received from Burroughs and Gysin. He states, “To tell you the truth I was pissed off that he sent me this manuscript, because I was a great admirer, and wrote to him — because I’d seen Naked Lunch in manuscript — I wrote to him and said I’m a great admirer, I’d met him many years before, and I thought I was going to get something really wonderful, and I got this and I’m afraid I don’t think it’s wonderful, even to this day.”

On the other hand, Burroughs and Gysin were giddy with excitement about the possibilities of the cut-up. The collaborators saw nothing but opportunity and even dollar signs. Haselwood states, “[T]hey thought they would be very rich and famous. Can you imagine, from a cut-up book. God, he must have really been out on smack somewhere at that point. These are almost impossible to read. It was impossible to typeset.” I always find it funny that Burroughs thought his least commercial writing was a potential moneymaker. Burroughs believed The Exterminator would “catch on commercially” and wondered if Auerhahn could handle it. Burroughs writes, “Do you have any connections with recording? Brion and I have both made tape recordings of material in Exterminator I and II. In fact, the repetitive poems could be jukebox sensation.” He thought they would be great on the radio.

As evidenced from the collected letters, Burroughs early on desired to be a bestselling author. He craved acceptance from an audience, be it the general public or, as Oliver Harris demonstrated, Ginsberg or Lewis Marker. This early need for affirmation and the desire to make it big never left Burroughs. These attitudes make Burroughs’ decision to do a Nike ad in 1994 perfectly understandable to me. From the beginning, Burroughs sought to sell out. On one level he never had the opportunity early on. On another level, no matter how hard he tried (and the letters show he tried repeatedly); he just could not write bestseller material. The Ugly Spirit kept getting in the way, as did his faith in the cut-ups. But like his grandfather, Burroughs was an entrepreneur. He wanted to make a buck. It was in his blood. Exterminator fever did not sweep the country although Burroughs received a small royalty check from Haselwood in 1961.

Yet the book must have been something of a success, because Haselwood reissued it in 1967 with much less beautiful wrappers. Missing are the white and green, replaced by a dark blue and red. In my opinion, the color change makes all the difference. Like the 1960 edition, there were 1000 copies in the second edition.

So what does this forgotten text tell us? The Exterminator presents Burroughs at the dawn of his most radically experimental period. The idea of Burroughs as a poet has largely gone unnoticed. This may be due to the rarity of the two key texts in question: Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. But in the time between the Olympia Naked Lunch and the Olympia Soft Machine (late 1959 to mid 1961), Burroughs appeared before the public as much as a poet then as a novelist. Remember Naked Lunch was unavailable in the United States as a complete novel. It remained in essence a short story published in little magazines like Big Table. In fact, The Exterminator was Burroughs’ first book in the United States since the 1953 Ace edition of Junkie. In the little magazine scene, Burroughs the poet is most obviously present in Semina IV, Locus Solus II, and Floating Bear 24. These publications had few readers, but those who received them were probably writers and artists. The Burroughs they would be familiar with would be as much a poet as a novelist. This may helps explain his appeal to, and presence in the publications by, First and Second Generation New Yorkers such as John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan. Of course, the poetic elements of Burroughs are beautifully apparent in Naked Lunch, and Burroughs’ interest and mastery of poetry continues into the visual (scrapbooks, three columns) and textual (the novels and shorter prose poems) cut-ups of the mid-1960s.

The Exterminator is a mixture of fiction, essay and poetry. Burroughs described it as a “cosmic opera. Like Gotterdamerung” with themes of junk, viruses and Caryl Chessman. To put a spin on Haselwood’s view, it is a glorious mess of several genres. The Exterminator serves as a transitional work from the poetic experiments of Minutes to Go to the form of the novel in the Soft Machine. It is also the foundation for the more ambitious cut-up works like APO-33, Time, The Third Mind, and The Dead Star. I feel that Burroughs and Gysin’s contributions really mesh well together in The Exterminator. I am reminded of the tagline to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch — “Exterminate all rational thought.” This thin book seeks to shatter the control of the Word. The book opens, “The Human Being are strung lines of word associates that control ‘thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions.’ Quote from Encephalographic Research Chicago Written in TIME. See Page 156 Naked Lunch Burroughs. See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines keep Thee in Slots..” Gysin’s permutation poems “Rub Out the Words” and “In the Beginning was the Word” fit in beautifully here as do his drawings that close the book. Burroughs’ interest in the possibilities of glyphs and hieroglyphics (like Pound’s with ideograms or Olson with the Mayans) as alternative forms of communication and representation becomes apparent here. Burroughs would return to this effect at the end of Olympia Press edition of The Ticket That Exploded where that book ends in silence represented by Gysin’s poem morphing into calligraphy (“Silence to say Goodbye”).

From the instant of its rediscovery by Gysin in September 1959, the cut-up technique was in a state of constant flux and rapid development. The work of Minutes to Go quickly overflowed and morphed into the work collected in The Exterminator. Like mercury, the material in The Exterminator refused to remain under Burroughs’ authorial control. The material kept coming and spilled into a possible second volume. Despite Burroughs’ optimism, The Exterminator was destined to be a one-shot deal.

Burroughs described The Exterminator as “Pure abstract literature.” Reading it now, the book feels remarkably current and fresh, like some of the experimental writing published today in the small press scene. Not surprisingly the cut-up technique is a major tool in the avant poet’s toolbox. Oliver Harris points out or suggests much of this in an article in Edinburgh Review Issue 114: “Burroughs is a poet too, really’: The Poetics of Minutes to Go. “ The quote on Burroughs as a poet comes from the 1966 Paris Review interview with Allen Ginsberg. Interestingly, Harris barely mentions The Exterminator. Not too surprising given the confusingly hybrid nature of the book and the more traditionally “poetic” sources, form, and content of Minutes to Go. Clearly, The Exterminator is in danger of becoming a lost work. Too bad in my opinion.

1962 Auerhahn Press Catalog

Auerhahn Press Catalog
Front
1962

Auerhahn Press Catalog
The Exterminator
1962

Auerhahn Press Announcement for The Exterminator
1962