Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#15: Suck 5 & 6 (1971). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

“[C]omplete breakdown of censorship. There are shops all over town now where you can buy pictures of naked boys with hard ons step right up and take your prick displayed on the counter. And there is also a selection of home movies with the actors hard on the cover. What is different from movies like ‘The Men’ is that this is legal and therefore competitive. Instead of horrible looking Soho Jews there are beautiful kids jacking off etcetera. We could cut these movies in with the Cut Ups and show the result publically. We could cut the sex films in with newsreels and street shots and pop singers. How long this God sent opportunity will last I don’t know. No doubt our creeping opponents will try to crack down on ‘smut.’ If that happens we can put a protest riot in the streets.” William S. Burroughs, Letter to Antony Balch (Sept. 10, 1968)

“What news? The only sex-film quickie to make these days is a couple or two couples or four couples or sixteen couples fucking and I hear such are shown on the screens of NY every day, now. Also, gents entirely transparent clothing is available or, at least, has been shown by someone. How are you keeping up?” William S. Burroughs, Letter to Antony Balch (Dec. 9, 1968)

Hardcore pornography: What upstanding citizens saw as the work of the devil, Burroughs viewed as a gift from God. In my mind, one of the more WTF what-ifs of Burroughs’ entire career is what if Burroughs and Balch had made that “sex-film quickie” in 1968? As I will show below, in The Wild Boys and in a European sex paper, Burroughs wrote the script then he got stage fright faced with all the work involved. Apparently even Burroughs had his limits. Directing porno flicks was a horizon that he gazed upon longingly but which he did not tread beyond. But for just a moment think of it, a Burroughs gay porno/cut-up film that would have been shown in the sleaziest grindhouses of Time Square, or better yet, as an endless loop in a peep arcade. Burroughs as an experimental Toby Ross. What a mindfuck! If done right, if done at all, Burroughs would have taken his place with iconic underground porn auteurs like Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), Barbara Rubin (Christmas on Earth), and Andy Warhol (Blow Job and Blue Movie). Personally, I feel Burroughs deserves to be in their company already, based on the trilogy of PG cut-up flicks that he made with Antony Balch in the mid-1960s. These are important examples of underground filmmaking. Then again, I think Burroughs demands inclusion in any conversation of just about any creative form of the 1960s underground. Obviously literature, but also film, art (his scrapbook collages), sculpture (the Dream Machine), photography. As for dance, Burroughs sat that one out.  

Even if Burroughs did not make a porno, the Golden Age of porn of the late sixties through to 1980, when video began to take over the industry and the moral backlash initiated by the Reagan administration motivated a clean-up process in major cities like New York, received the gift that keeps on giving from the pornographic writing of Naked Lunch. The Naked Lunch trial was one of a long line of censorship precedents that culminated in the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Redrup v. New York, which legally protected written pornography in even its lowest and non-socially redeeming forms. After that ruling, the sewers overflowed and Time Square peep arcades sprouted like mushrooms in the shit pile, and the grindhouse theaters openly showed hardcore fucking of all persuasions in all types of innaresting arrangments, including live sex shows. So when you are watching David Simon of The Wire‘s latest show on the wildlife of the Deuce before The Lion King came in and Disneyfied Sodom, give some dap to Burroughs and AJ’s Annual Party for getting the party started.

I can think of no other major writer of the 20th Century with such a close relationship to pornography as Burroughs. Henry Miller comes to mind. Not surprisingly, porno mags are a crucial part of Burroughs’ bibliography. Sure, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski appeared in men’s magazines, but they just served as readily available outlets. For Burroughs, pornography is a major element of his theoretical and philosophical stance. Bukowski would scoff at the suggestion that his writing even had one. Bukowski’s obscenity was largely profit driven. He wrote dirty stories because the porno rags paid well and that is what readers wanted. Burroughs, on the other hand, wrote his own porno vision of the world, to which he felt audiences had cast a blind eye but nonetheless must be forced to acknowledge. For a sustained period, Burroughs used Mayfair, the British equivalent to Playboy, as a platform from which to disseminate his most radical and revolutionary ideas. Yes, Burroughs clearly took the Mayfair gig for the paycheck, but as his letters and interviews, such as The Job, suggest, Burroughs felt himself to be a pornographic prophet in this period. As Jaguar, another British mag of the period, asked concerning Burroughs: Pornographer or prophet? In true Burroughsian fashion, the answer is not one of either/or, but instead both/and.

Book collecting is also a perversion. A tolerated one to be sure. Collectors are looked upon with humor like the dirty old men of The Benny Hill Show. Good for a chuckle. Yet collecting is pure pornography. Just see how book collectors fondle and caress their books. How they gaze at them full of desire while undressing them of their dust jackets. Smelling deeply of their leather bindings. This is the world of fetish. There are elements of control and possession. Even rape. Many collectors kidnap their books from the world and lock them away forever. Book collecting can also be an expression of homosexual desire. (Burroughs collected guns, knives and canes.) In fact, it expresses the full range of sexuality. As such, the collecting of Burroughs men’s magazine appearances is the most meta of collections.

And I strongly recommend beginning collectors to walk on the wild side. First all, they are rather cheap when compared to Burroughs’ first editions and the rarer little magazine appearances. Digging around on the internet and at flea markets and yard sales (I remember rooting through trash cans during spring cleaning as a kid looking for old Playboys and Penthouses) can turn up these publications for under $30. Burroughs highspots include the large run of Mayfair titles from 1967 to 1970 (over 20 issues in all), which featured the monthly “Burroughs Academy Bulletin” column. Roy Pennington bootlegged several of these columns in his proto-punk zine, The Mayfair Acadamy More or Less, by his Urgency Press in 1973. A wonderful collectible in itself and another porn-related Burroughs highspot. Rest assured, we will see Roy again on this list. One of the more interesting Burroughs interviews appeared in a 1971 issue of Penthouse, which despite being reprinted in Burroughs Live, is worth getting in order to experience the interview in the context of its original release. Context is sometimes more important than content, which is why there will always be collectors searching out for first editions and first appearances rather than buying reprints and collected editions. Some items like Roy’s bootleg re-contextualize in interesting ways as they re-issue. The June 1961 issue of Swank contains one of the most significant Burroughs pieces in a porn mag or otherwise. I have written about “The Word” on RealityStudio before, setting out its importance in the publication and textual history of Naked Lunch. The same can be said for the three issues of National Screw from 1977, which provided the briefest of peeks at the hot action that would have been the complete illustrated Ah Puch Is Here by Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill.  

I would recommend getting these porn mags now, as they are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. Once again this is because this filth is being considered in terms of art and design. Vintage porno mags were all over the NY Book Art Fair at PS 1 this fall. As one dealer said to me as we were looking over a full spread of a woman taking a huge cock up her ass: “Screw hired some really great designers in the mid-1970s. The covers and layout were really good.” I am being serious here. Abrams, which has been publishing art books since 1949, put out in 2012 Sex Press: The Sexual Revolution in the Underground Press 1963-1979. Abrams has published similar books on the underground newspaper and the Punk press. In such circles as well as in academia, hardcore porn mags and films are being recognized as a crucial if problematic part of not just the sexual revolution but the larger cultural revolution of the 20th century.

Clearly in the early decades of the 21st, in the age of the internet and the digital revolution, society is going through a thorough pornification. Porn is big business and a force of technological innovation. (Brion Gysin stated that painting is fifty years ahead of writing. The same holds true for porn. For example, porn is at the cutting edge in exploring the possibilities of the digital revolution. The porn industry provides a case study into the trials and tribulations of monetizing the internet. It also provides a model for DIY archiving. Much of the history of pornographic film, particularly starting with the rise of video, is readily available on the internet, archived in free databases such as Pornhub or Tube8. Many of these videos were uploaded by amateur archivists and porn fans. Could such activities be a model for libraries and institutions on how to preserve and store not just new media artworks but also more traditional paper-based holdings? In any case, clearly it provides inspiration for developing archives and libraries outside of the institutional and, maybe even, corporate establishment.) The laws and mores of porn are seeping into the daily lives of the general population whether they are in contact with hardcore pornography or not. Elements of porn have taken over mainstream culture. Depictions of alternative lifestyles, like that of gays and transsexuals, which in the past could only be experienced through pornography, are now on magazine covers and TV programs everywhere. The Kardashians are the first family of porn and proof of pornography’s crossover.

Yet there was a time when pornography was tied not primarily to consumer culture but to revolution. Like with the counterculture, on the surface, the revolution in pornography seemed to have been all about hair. Making the pubic public. Feminist Germaine Greer proved herself to be a bushy haired streetfighter in the pages of Suck. But there was more to it than that. It was not about appearances but about taking action and about how you acted during the act of sex. In comparing Suck with Screw, Al Goldstein’s sex paper, Greer states:  

I would like to explain why I think SCREW . . . is counterrevolutionary. . . . SCREW is still into the whole tits and ass scene, you know? There’s no chance that SCREW could ever chance what I call the grammar of fucking because the sex with which SCREW deals is screwing and I’m not into screwing. The word means so many things. It means screwing up and screwing down and that’s not what you do with your cock and that’s not what you do with your cunt, you don’t really screw. People can’t believe that. They really think they are nailing something down. And I don’t think SCREW goes any way toward rescuing the people who take it – up the cunt or up the ass or in the ear – rescuing them from degradation or devaluation. . . . The trouble is that the women’s liberation movement doesn’t even see that SUCK IS doing something different because they can’t even see the difference between the semantics of sucking and screwing. People despise their sexuality so much. 

This was a time when pornography was as at home with the avant garde and the counterculture as with organized crime and skid row. This avant pornography seeped into the suburbs. I remember digging around in the closets of my home in the Drexelwood subdivision of Reading, Pennsylvania, as a teenager and finding a small stash of vintage smut. The Black Cat editions of Warhol’s Blue Movie and I Am Curious (Yellow) as well as Ralph Ginzburg’s hardcover mag, Eros, with its nude photos of Marilyn Monroe taken by Bert Stern just six weeks before her death. Today, these publications have become collectible, particularly the Warhol, which featured over 100 stills from the film. Visiting my parents in my twenties, I was discussing the Ginsberg obscenity trial with my stepfather, who remembered it distinctly as occurring in Philadelphia, not San Francisco, and it took me a while to realize that he was talking about the Ralph Ginzburg trial over Eros not Allen’s over “Howl”. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy indicted Ginzburg (maybe the Monroe photos put him over the edge) and Ginzburg was convicted in the District, Circuit and Supreme Courts. Ralph was sentenced to five years and actually served eight months. In Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese presents a scene where Travis Bickle takes Cybill Shepherd on a date to a porno movie at Times Square. The scene is supposed to demonstrate how disturbed Bickle is but I have always thought that the scene is not as crazy as it seems. In the early 1970s, porno movies, like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, were part of a date night for more curious (yellow) and adventurous suburban couples. Before AIDS, sexual exploration was not the exclusive domain of a promiscuous underground. Plato’s Retreat, a members-only sex club in New York City run by Larry Levenson, who happened to be a high school friend of Al Goldstein, catered to a well-to-do bridge and tunnel crowd of heterosexual couples and bisexual women. Its initial location was a former gay bathhouse where Bette Midler performed, but in its new incarnation gay men and sex amongst men were strictly prohibited. Only the hedonistic atmosphere of the former bathhouse remained.

This was also a time when a true skeptic like William Burroughs could watch a couple fucking on screen and think that the entire world was going to change. Sex was dirty and sick, just like the humor of Lenny Bruce. Suck: The First European Sex Paper was in on the joke. The paper was founded in Amsterdam in 1969 by Bill Levy, Heathcote Williams, Germaine Greer, Willem de Ridder, Susan Janssen, and Lynne Tillman. Suck co-hosted the Wet Dreams Festival, the first film festival devoted to pornographic films. Suck was as nasty a publication as there was at the time, but with a revolutionary spirit, creative layout and design. Suck also featured a sick, black humor that now has those in art and literature circles, like Abrams, placing the paper in the company of more artistically appreciated underground papers, such as IT and Oz, or punk zines, like Search and Destroy. Individual issues of Suck now approach $250 and a complete run is in the four figures.  

Burroughs appeared in Issues 5 and 6. While I recommend buying the entire run if possible, I have placed Suck 5 and 6 on my list. Suck 6: The Special Family Issue, like the Oz Kids Issue, crosses the boundaries of good taste into possibly the criminal. “Adults only, kids!” The issue is especially important considering the letters quoted above. Burroughs served as a judge at the Wet Dream Festival and in Suck 6 he provides “a new look at sex films” as well as a large selection from the then unpublished Wild Boys, presented as “Burroughs’ Blue Movie” along with explicit photos of twinks Mark and Johnny. Burroughs did not make his “sex-film quickie” but Burroughs’ Blue Movie in Suck 6 could be considered as a working script. As could “The Penny Arcade Peep Show/The Wild Boys Smile” selection from Suck 5.  

Clearly while writing The Wild Boys, Burroughs was more than causally interested in making a porno flick. The Burroughs collection at Arizona State contains much material relating to The Wild Boys, including items related to the proposed porno. The description of the material in the Arizona State archive is fascinating. What follows is courtesy of Alex Wermer-Colan and the archive.  

Box 8A Item 4

The Wild Boys Film Ideas and Correspondence [J:503]

This file contains a 2 page signed introduction and 16 page typed signed prospectus for the film of The Wild Boys and 7 page signed manuscript of various scenes for The Wild Boys film project, also signed by Burroughs.

The Wild Boys film project, as outlined by Burroughs in the introductions, was an attempt, with the help of Terry Southern, to make Burroughs’ novel into a film. The project was a failure: “In the spring of 1972 while I was in New York trying to sell The Naked Lunch film script I saw a number of hard core porn films including Fred Halsted’s LA Plays Itself and Sex Garage. This gave me the idea for shooting The Wild Boys as a hard core porn film. I met with Fred Halsted and discussed the idea with and gave him a copy of The Wild Boys . . . I then discussed the project with Terry Southern and we considered working together on the script . . . during the summer of 1972 Fred Halsted came to London and we discussed a number of alternative scripts. I finally decided the whole idea was impracticable both from a financial standpoint and from a standpoint of making a good film within our budget.”

Also included in this file are carbon copies of Burroughs’ letters to Terry Southern and Fred Halsted regarding the project. At the end of the file, the clippings for show times of Fred Halsted’s film in Time Square cut out of the New York Times, May 1972, are laid in.

All of the material contained in this file is unpublished and Burroughs’ plans for creating a film based on The Wild Boys are unknown outside this file. Preserved in the original maroon legal sized folder with title written in Burroughs’ hand in ink on the front cover and illustration pasted on the front cover by Burroughs. Also see Box 20.

Wild Boy Film Ideas folder – “As I have told you the first wild boy tribes were fugitive survivors from the Terror of Colonel Driss. The government denies that any terror occurred.”

Box 20

Drafts and Unpublished Film Manuscript of The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs [JACKSON 523, 526, 503], 1965

Item Descriptions: 55, 75, 78.

[523/525]: The Wild Boys (4 Files)

The first file contains the most important materials. This file contains the complete extant first drafts (1968-1972) of various passages from The Wild Boys. The MS consists of 92 pp. typed drafts, many of which bear extensive additions and alterations in the author’s hand in various colored inks, as well as several holograph pages. Because this entire MS is typed with an elite machine and is almost completely single-spaced, we estimate that it contains well over 175,000 words. Burroughs has signed various opening pages throughout the drafts and has also indicated which passages were ultimately used in the 1971 Grove Press edition of the novel. The subject matter in The Wild Boys may be seen as the final and successful extension of ideas originally essayed in The Revised Boy Scout Manual MS, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” MS, and Ah Pook is Here MS, all of which are contained in this archive.

This massive MS contains lengthy sections that were discarded by Burroughs in the final draft of The Wild Boys and which therefore remain unpublished. Preserved in the original maroon legal size folder with note in Burroughs’ hand in ink on front covers: “Wild Boy Overflow”.

Enclosed together with Wild Boy Film Ideas portfolio in cloth slipcase with Morocco label.

Second file. “Unpublished materials from Wild Boys also layouts and first drafts … old duplicates.” 14 pp of miscellaneous drafts of passages from The Wild Boys, mostly carbons. Notes in the author’s hand on orange file cover. Folio 22A.

Third file. “Wild Boys Hard Core Porn Movie and Chinese Bongsae Film Idea . . . Distinct file.” 26 pp. various sizes with a few holograph corrections, mostly carbon cut ups. Entirely unpublished material preserved in the original red folder with notes on front cover in the author’s hand. Folio 22.

Fourth file. “Wild Boys Film Notes Valuable.” This file contains numerous clippings and several pages of typed notes regarding The Wild Boys and used as source material for the film. Preserved in red folder with note in Burroughs’ hand on cover. Folio 35.

Reading The Wild Boys in Suck 5 and 6 pales in comparison to watching the fully realized film at Show World on the Deuce, but it was the closest Burroughs would ever get to being a porn director. A quick review of Burroughs in Suck: “It is Days of Rage meets Boogie Nights. Four spurting hard-ons.”  

by William Levy

“Numberless are the world’s wonders,
but none more wonderful than man.”
— Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

For over half-a-century whenever authors met talk would eventually come around to the maverick Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press. Did you or didn’t you? Did you or didn’t you hit him for money? Did you or didn’t you hear about what he had just published? Written. Done. Amazing really. Awesome. He seemed to internationally float about on some magic carpet surrounded by a suave fog both elegant and dangerous, ecstatic and ironic. For all the writers who claimed Maurice “ripped me off” there was an equal amount that used him. For every novelist like J.-P. Donleavy — who had a justifiable vendettic rage against Maurice and spent an enormous amount of time and energy pursuing it, finally buying back the rights to The Ginger Man at public auction — there were versifiers like Christopher Logue. Plagiarist or premature post-modern deconstructionalist? According to a rare bookseller’s catalog, Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks was “in fact, almost entirely lifted by Logue from G. Legman’s then recent The Limerick, from a copy borrowed and not even bought.”

In the 1950s, almost everything one wanted to read was published in Paris by Maurice. And banned. Lawrence Durrell, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, “Pauline Reage &/or Dominique Aury” aka Anne Desclos’ Story of O, Marquis de Sade, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Nabokov, Chester Himes, Alexander Trocchi, Terry Southern, “Akbar del Piombo” aka Norman Rubington, “Harriet Daimler” aka Iris Owens, Nikos Zorba the Greek Kazantzakis, “Wu Wu Meng” aka Sinclair Beiles‘ only novel Houses of Joy, Gregory Corso‘s only novel The American Express, Philip O’Connor’s Steiner’s Tour, Raymond Zazie dans Le Métro Queneau and Georges Bataille to name just a few. American graduate students earned their tuition by renting out reading copies to undergraduates of the books published by Olympia Press. So when I arrived on the Left Bank during the summer of 1960, having reached the age of my majority, the first thing I did, like so many others of my generation in search of meaning, was head for the bookstalls on the quays along the Seine to buy my Traveller’s Companions, green-covered copies of Henry Miller’s Tropics and William Burroughs’ dust-jacketed The Naked Lunch. I never expected Maurice and I would have our short season together. That was almost a decade later…

In a frenzied state, Heathcote Williams and I crashed a party being held at formidable dark and solid rooms in Fulham. We had just published the inaugural issue of Suck: The First European Sexpaper. Our mission was meeting Maurice who, we were told, would be there. There he was, a slender well-proportioned dapper mannequin, with slightly graying full carefully combed Napoleonic hair, inquisitive arched eyebrows drawing attention away from worried sad eyes and a modest smirk balanced between high drollery and fanaticism, immaculately dressed, as he invariably was, in English wool and French silk and linen.

Waving a copy of Suck in front of him like an umbrella, Heathcote pushed and shoved his way through a scrum of admirers surrounding Maurice, dragging me after him. We presented our mag. Maurice looked it over carefully. In a soft, low-pitched drawling voice, lightly accented, he pronounced:

“You will become rich and famous and see all the best jails in Europe.”

His prophecy was only one third right. The last third, as I educationally discovered. I was later to realize doing business with Maurice corroborated my first impression. Dealing with him was a rich delicacy like smoked eel, an acquired taste, delicious when consumed in small slices.

A Dinner

A year passed. Suck continued to appear and we had just put on the extravagant and successful Wet Dream Festival, as it turned out, the world’s first sex film festival. Our readers, and artists from all over the world, came together for days and nights of sin and cinema.

By then I had re-located in Holland. After dodging several raids of the police breathing heavily while looking for obscene publications, I had been caught, arrested, jailed and deported from Great Britain. Maurice had re-located in New York, having been forced to flee an increasingly priggish France, when I received his letter. “I will be in Amsterdam. Will you be there?” he asked. “The San Francisco Festival,” he went on enthusiastically, “was very interesting. I hope yours went well also!” Always building castles, he proposed: “Next year we must have twelve such festivals around the world, plus an international one to award an international prize.”

Maurice was staying at a small expensive hotel in Amsterdam South, an efficient charming place near the Concertgebouw. Before going to dinner, we met there for a drink, to share visions and have a business talk. Yes! We spoke about creating sex festivals everywhere, pulsing concupiscent vortices joined together — by vibrating ley lines — all over the world. How Olympia Press would publish Suck in America. Specific details of these shared redemptive enterprises were hammered out. We talked numbers. Calculated profit and fun and giggled quietly.

Just before we had to leave for the restaurant, I showed Maurice a book I had brought with me. For those that remember, then President Richard Nixon had appointed a four-star commission to investigate pornography. Finding it not difficult to find fact to support the obvious, they concluded in three-hundred and fifty pages that sexually explicit material was at best — like all art — a divine intrusion into human affairs and, at worst, innocuous clichés and kitsch: solitary masturbation being its predominant effect. Nixon, of course, denounced his own commission. But since, by law, the text of US government printed matter is un-copyrightable, an enterprising soul had made a lavish full-color Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970). Greenleaf Classics, Inc. of San Diego, Maurice’s sworn enemy, published it. Photos of sperm squirting on faces? Yes. Sucking? Yes. Fucking? Yes. Hetero and homo? Yes. Groups? Yes. S&M, B&D? Yes. Whips and chains? Yes. Animals? Yes. Children? Yes. Etc.? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Even underground cartoon strips salaciously ridiculing authority. The mind boggled. All the juice that-is-the-case was there ornamenting a dry summary written by civil servants, academics, clergymen and judges. Maurice looked through it. Humphed. Humphed again. Finally, he had to concede:

“It’s a brilliant job. Whoever did this is going to jail.”

And indeed, a voice foretold. A short time later I picked up an American magazine and saw a photo of Earl Kemp, the book’s editor, under arrest. He was handcuffed, each arm held by burly federal marshals who were shoving him into the back seat of a car. Later he received a prison sentence of one-year for “conspiracy to mail obscene material” yet luckily served only the federal minimum of three months and one day.

At the restaurant, we met our dinner companions. Joop, an amiable, jivy hustler. Tall, blond and wiry he seemed to be a pimp. Christiaan had a giant head only sparsely covered with hair, bulging eyes and identified himself as the owner/manager of Luxembourg’s most avant-garde bookshop. The third was Maurice’s Dutch agent for Olympia Press. Gerrit Komrij — who went on to become world-famous in Holland as the country’s poet laureate, or dichter des vaderland, an enormously popular and controversial acerbic literary man of the philosophical villain school — was then a jeunesse dorée, yet to be published poet, with a cherubic crooked face, like a slightly melted wax angel, and the measured alert manner of a Beatrix Potter mouse.

Maurice and Gerrit discussed business. Joop murmured all the while into Maurice’s ear, presumably about the corporal dramas he had on offer. Being the only one left Christiaan — a less than convivial companion — latched onto me. A linguistic xenophobe, his pet theory was that Luxembourgian wasn’t merely a dialect, but a separate language. His conversational technique was to lean on his bony elbows, thrust his phallic head forward across the table and speak loud in a pauseless monotone. Like all bores who have set pieces rather than anecdotes, he offered up one example after another of a veritable etymological lexicon of particular words whose morphogenesis was neither French nor German. I was thinking of the secret agent in Naked Lunch whose cover story was translating the Koran into Provençal and who would sometimes pull cover in company and go on for hours on the subject. And thinking how the fuck do I get out of this conversation when I found an opening.

Maurice and Gerrit seemed to be talking about something called The Wild Boys, a new book by William Burroughs. It hadn’t been published as yet; Maurice had the manuscript and was looking to sell foreign rights.

“Oh, I’d like to see that!” I exclaimed.

As the evening ended Maurice and Joop said goodbye and drove off together in the direction of the Wallen, the red light district, in pursuit of earthly delights. Christiaan disappeared along a canal into the mist-shrouded night reciting avant-garde poetry in Luxumbourgian. Gerrit and I walked to a nearby gay café, his choice, on the longer of the Leidse Side Streets to have a nightcap and exchange addresses and telephone numbers.

The Deals

Suck continued to appear. Among many other exclusives, we proudly gave first publication to chapters from The Wild Boys. Since sex and power are rarely far apart I considered it part of our program.

Along with Junkie. Naked Lunch, Ah Pook Was Here! and the essays such as “Electronic Revolution,” “Invisible Generation,” and the “Academy Series” in Mayfair magazine, I judged The Wild Boys to be a blueprint of Burroughs’ how-to-do-it ectoplasmic revelation of the algebra of need and control, of control mechanisms and controllists. Time is the enemy. It is in these works that Burroughs presents an animated unity, that is, the enabling myth or “illusion” is defined and valorized. How to extend levels of experience by opening doorways at the end of a long hall. (Stylists and the “cut/up or shut/up” fundamentalist tribe might want to argue for the inclusion of The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, the futurist, cyber/political space trilogy also all published originally by Olympia Press.)

About this time, I received the first of a series of Maurice messages.

Through my colleague Jim Haynes in Paris, I heard Olympia Press wouldn’t distribute or publish our mag in America. Something about Maurice’s American financial backer and partner being afraid to take the chance. Our first deal fell through but the possibility of cooperating on creating global lust celebrations was still on the table.

Distinguished books I saw published by Maurice during this period included Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane di Prima, Acid Temple Ball by Mary Sativa and The Amphetamine Manifesto by Harvey Cohen. Months went by. Then I received a long, panting letter from Olympia Press’s Park Avenue address. Talk of playing with a stacked deck! I felt like the not-innocent victim Lucien Chardon dit de Rubempre‚ being addressed by Balzac’s arch-tempter Vautrin. Filled with semicolons, hyphens and parenthesis, Girodias dealt a hand that also might be labeled “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Although Maurice had edited The Olympia Review (ground-breaking), The Olympia Reader (one of the most impressive anthologies of the Sixties — a decade of anthologies) and The Black Diaries; An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of Diaries and Public Writing (as politically and sexually relevant for troubled Ireland today as it ever was), most of his own writing was business correspondence. And it is in this context, as writing, that I offer up an example of how he used the epistolary form. Cloying, albeit with comity, he appealed at once to greed and idealism. It was an invitation, so to speak, to meet rich old ladies and, at the same time, to create a New Jerusalem.

“I’d like to discuss an idea with you which I feel might prove rewarding to both of us,” was his opening gambit.

“It seems doubtful that there will be a second San Francisco Erotic Film Festival, and I conceived the idea of starting an Olympia Yearly Festival in New York this coming October. But why not try to co-ordinate our efforts and work out jointly one single Festival?

“For instance… The Festival would take place in Amsterdam, where awards would be granted, but the films selected would first be shown in a preview, to take place in Frankfurt, throughout the Book Fair, and then, immediately after the Amsterdam Festival, the whole program would be sent to New York for a general presentation (and perhaps to other American cities); the entire package of films selected as entries would be exploited commercially wherever possible as a regular program; we (Olympia) would finance the entire operation (which would be very heavily publicized internationally), including, say, $5000 in awards — and in exchange we would retain all book or press and magazine rights, and 2/3 of the profit left by the commercial exploitation of the films selected for the Festival; all of this implying of course that the standards for selection should be made to exclude purely porno films, and should be governed, by valid esthetic guidelines as well as erotic ones (pretty much as happened at the San Francisco Festival). One last condition is that the Festival should be named after Olympia: But isn’t Wet Dream synonymous to Olympia Press, etc.?

“I think the entire thing holds together businesswise — and we could get together a very fine selection of films, by appealing to filmmakers from every place from San Francisco to Japan. But will you agree on the necessary middle-of-the-road policy, and are you ready to dashingly enter the world of business? So far as I am concerned, I see in this project a substantial profit to be made, plus some good publicity for my firm – but I also like the idea for all the possible developments it might lead to esthetically.

“And of course, if you feel that you don’t want to be bothered by that exploitative project and the pomposity of it all — never mind!”

What an absorptionist! Maurice was trying to swallow Suck. Just the way he had conjured the Merlin group in Paris during the Fifties. This was an offer we could refuse. Middle-of-the-roadism is a position I reject on the principle that anyone standing in the middle of the road is going to get struck down by traffic. From both sides.

Also a lot had changed since Maurice and I had last seen each other. Heathcote Williams’s schizotopia, the play AC/DC, was a smash hit at The Royal Court on Sloane Square, it won the prestigious Evening Standard Theatre Award, and he was about to go mad, commit himself to a lunatic asylum. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch had just been published. She was traveling around the world doing a super job of promoting it, as well as Suck, and was about to become over-exposed, lose her nerve, find herself in the very miserable and very false position of having to lie to protect her recently acquired status. Jim Haynes, our brand ambassador, was collecting statements of sexual liberation at the grand café La Coupole, every midnight, and negotiating with American publishers. I was writing The Virgin Sperm Dancer; the Ovidian story of a boy magically turned into a girl for one day only and her sexual awakening in Amsterdam. In addition, we were all preparing for our 2nd Wet Dream Festival. There was a publisher in Leiden who wanted to give a substantial advance for a book about our Festivals, and the only demand they made was insisting on getting invited to all (wink, wink) the parties.

We generally agreed that as soon as someone starts with the contrived premise of setting up a hierarchy of values between “porno” and “erotic” they are asking for trouble. It is a typical confusion between levels of meaning, or orders of abstraction, as Count Alfred Korzybski, who developed a non-Aristotelian system and theory of general semantics, would readily recognize. Like saying we want, for example, landscapes (a referent) but only those with the attribute of beauty, or ugliness (a sign). One characteristic is represented in the image itself, the other subject to a multiplicity of conscious and unconscious filters unique in each individual. Porno as a genre is always sexually descriptive in content, but may not be especially arousing. This is obvious. Erotic is always arousing, ecstatic. Yet only in the creator’s intention or in the effect on the viewer, not necessarily in the work itself. Eroticism does not require the carnal. One can imagine some people becoming sensually stimulated by an ashtray randomly filled with cigarette butts. Alternatively, falling into orgiastic spasms upon entering a post office and gazing at the official portrait of a queen or president. “I’d like three stamps and a package of Kleenex, please!” No one can fathom the absolute mystery of joy. Coming from the “love generation”, we believed, simply, that to write about love and exclude sex was a useless labor.

Besides our festival was called Wet Dreams and wet dreams are, by definition, spontaneous orgasms, dreams money can’t buy. We wanted the right to show films that were vulgar, sublime, comic and surreal as well as aesthetic. The performances as well as the sexual adventures and misadventures, the entelechies and epiphanies of the hundreds of people who came, were as important to us as the extensive film program.

Always the cavalier, however, Maurice had allowed us the opening to dismiss his proposal as mere bombast. We did.

A week later William Burroughs phoned from London.

“Hello, Bill,” he croaked.

“Hello, Bill,” I echoed.

“Where did you get that manuscript of The Wild Boys?” he asked.

“From Gerrit Komrij.”

“Who’s that?” He cried out with exasperated incredulity.

“He’s Maurice Girodias’ agent in Holland.”

“You mean Maurice gave you permission to publish it?”

“Well, not exactly,” I sputtered. Even back then, Burroughs and I had known each other a long while, over a decade. We had first become acquainted in 1960 and in 1961 at the now famous, albeit then deeply shabby “Beat Hotel” on rue Git le Coeur in Paris, had seen each other in New York at his loft on Centre Street and also often in England, and he had generously given me manuscripts to publish in other magazines I edited, The Insect Trust Gazette (USA) and International Times (London).

“Your book came up at a dinner party. I asked to read the manuscript and Maurice gave his agent, this Komrij, permission to give it to me. I took it on my own to publish it,” I admitted. “Out of admiration for your work, Bill. I wasn’t trying to harm you.”

“I know. I know,” he said. “It’s just that I have a contract with Girodias and want to get out of it. He owns all the foreign rights but must have individual permission from me, or my agent. This might be the loophole I can use.”

We left it at that, but more conundrums were to follow. Of course. Maurice was one of those who send out missive multiples. I got on the “copies to” list of a stiff and angry three paragraph one sent to William Burroughs. Authors denying the validity of a contract was something not unfamiliar to Maurice, and he started off with an account of the legal ploy being played out against him:

1. “When I met Anthony Gornall last week in London, he told me that the editor of Suck Magazine informed you that I was the one who authorized him to publish an excerpt from The Wild Boys in their last issue.”

This must have been a very garbled, self-serving re-accounting of the telephone conversation between Bill Burroughs and myself.

Then Maurice riposted:

2. “This is absolutely not true, and I met Jim Haynes two days ago in Paris who told me that he had been authorized to use that piece by yourself [Burroughs] and by Mike Sissons. He further confirmed that he had not obtained the manuscript itself from me or indirectly through Olympia.”

Everything was getting prolix. Who were Anthony Gornall and Mike Sissons, anyway? Lawyers and agents? Never met; never even heard of either of them, then or since! But that’s one great thing about working on a project with Jim Haynes. Deniability. Whenever it gets heavy, which it usually does, Jim can go in and calm down everyone with his good ol’ boy southern charm and make the absurd seem plausible.

Maurice petulantly perorated:

3. “I hope that this disposes of that small but unfortunate incident.”

Well, I never found out how this was resolved, whether or not Girodias and Burroughs kissed and made up or went their separate ways.

I did find out that in dealing with Bill Burroughs there would always be third mind agendas, and not for the first time, there would always be special requests supporting his interests while sacrificing mine. It had happened years before in London when in the late Sixties Bill asked me to ax an investigative article I had announced in International Times aiming to prevent the nationalization of culture, an expose that would reveal private secrets of public interest about the insidious Lord Goodman, Britain’s most powerful unelected politician as chairman of the Arts Council and the prime ministers’ personal attorney and hatchet man. He and Harold Wilson’s Labour government wanted a total monopoly on the arts and they were prepared to use the full coercive power of the state to enforce this domination. Now was payback time, however. Burroughs owed Goodman substantial favors, big time. As I only later found out Burroughs had made a Faustian deal. He gained permission to stay in England in return for dropping his then lover Mikey Portman, and not seeing him again. Goodman was the godfather and trustee of this dissolute and spoilt young aristocrat, i.e. Mikey, and crucially also represented the Portman family whose assets included owning, since the 16th century, about one hundred acres of land in London north of Oxford Street. Bill seductively purred over the phone to me, not once, but twice: “Arnold Goodman is our friend.”

On yet another occasion, also while editing International Times he phoned to offer me an article mildly critical of Scientology — only the week before he had, all of a sudden, appeared at the office on Betterton Street, off Drury Lane. He scared my secretary who thought this dour older man wearing a suit and tie must be the police. As usual, looking like a specter, Burroughs could have passed himself off as the demonic, misogynist Mr. Jones in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, or a doppelganger for the strange and imposing figure The 3rd Viscount Halifax. Bill was carrying a black case containing an E-meter looking for someone at an underground newspaper to Clear with the near impossible caveat, that they had not taken any drugs in the last thirty days. Scientology was Burroughs’ latest obsession with fads and fallacies in the name of science following his own apothegm: “Anything that can be done with chemicals can be done by other means.” At any rate, delightedly I scampered down to his flat on Duke Street St. James’s dodged the Reichian Orgone Accumulator in the hallway and picked up the manuscript. Then two days later he phoned again asking me not to print it since its lack of total obsequiousness might upset L. Ron Hubbard. These asperities diverted me in my green time and I found it difficult to place Bill Burroughs on the side that believes any challenges that contradict militant gray paradigms must be silenced, shunned, or demonized. Who controls control? Indeed!

Also, in dealing with Maurice Girodias there would always be hidden minefields, unresolved passions, booby traps, contracts and wills waved about by shrill solicitors who represented giant insects from another galaxy, absentee thought lords, lost manuscripts from Aubrey Beardsley and Frank Harris found in pumpkins, Czarist promissory notes, smooth assistants lurking in the background who want to find out everything you know for the price of a cheap Indonesian dinner, ghosts in the catalog, a never-ending concealment of revelations and revelations of concealment. 

As much as I genuinely respected, even liked, both of these aesthetic outlaws and gentlemen rogues the path they had taken and what they had accomplished, I was relieved, at the time, not to get more involved.

At The Fair

More than two years later Maurice and I had another encounter. Standing at the Suck booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair I was somewhat mesmerized by watching the surging waves of earnest crowds flow by under the harsh industrial neon light when all of a sudden Maurice was in front of me. A con man is someone who does you wrong, then forgives you for it. He greeted me in the most friendly manner. Maurice, fifty-four years old at the time, introduced me to his companion, a long-limbed, stunningly beautiful nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl whose sunny high yellow color and glossy black hair was set off by a skimpy haute couture fashion outfit of tan suede leather. He gave me a thirty-page pamphlet Between Books: A Manner of Press Release. At the bottom of the cover was printed “Maurice Girodias, Frankfurt Book Fair 1973”. Leading me off to the side, he placed his head close to mine, as if in a huddle, and asked in a near whisper:

“Do you know where I can get some hashish?”

Flipping his chin over his shoulder, Maurice explained:

“It’s for her.”

Then he leered. I had always thought “leering” was a literary conceit, a theatrical convention, a figure of bacchanalian fiction. But Maurice actually leered, and said:

“She wants some for us to smoke back in the hotel room.”

I put Maurice in touch with some German friends, read Between Books and published a large excerpt in the Last Suck. He must have figured out by now not to give me anything really good he didn’t want to see in print.

Between Books tells the bizarre story of his then thirty-four years in publishing, why he had no books at that year’s Fair, complete with vitriolic ranting against a host of adversaries (including a notable philippic against the France of De Gaulle, Malraux and Pompidou) and filled with collectible snippets of Maurice’s yin/yang — high philosophy and snake oil salesman spiel. Defending the so-called “sexual revolution”, and himself, against the slings and arrows of tendentious commentary, Maurice wrote:

“The books I published in the fifties, in particular Henry Miller’s, have opened the world to sexual freedom. The consequences of that revolution are immense, endless and continuously developing through more and more advanced stages, reaching more and more deeply into our knowledge of ourselves. The sexual liberation was necessary to restore a true vision of the human person, of the boundless riches of nature, and to permit the exploration of internal reality we hold in ourselves. The sexual liberation has brought back truth and authenticity, freedom and brotherhood. Without it the ecological revolution would not have been possible.”

At the end, he predicted:

“The terrifying acceleration of history brought us by technology can be overcome by a revolution of the mind, a poetic revolution. Politics are the enemy; they reduce everything to a false two-dimensional image of our needs and our fate. We need much more than that.

“It is on the level of the paramyth, of the philosophical dream, that we will find all the answers that we need. The blinding utopia! And I have no doubt that very soon the first examples of the new literature, of the new esoteric fiction, will appear and that it will immediately change the face of the world, by magic as it were.”

No Exit

During the next seventeen years people come and go talking about the Maurice show. Disillusioned with America he drifted back to Europe. He began to compose his memoirs under the title Une Journée sur la Terre. The first volume L’Arrivée, and re-written as The Frog Prince, was published in France and America. A 110-page clothbound Olympia Press Bibliography was published in England. An interview with him appeared in Gargoyle, a magazine from Washington, D.C., edited by Richard Peabody, which mentioned Maurice had married an extremely wealthy woman of the high-class Cabot line of New England. Sometimes he could be convinced to signify and speechify before a small group of Parisian amatores liberum at the Village Voice Bookshop on rue Princesse. I saw him credited as having helped Michael Zwerin with translating Round About Close to Midnight: The Selected Jazz Writings of Boris Vian. Generally, Maurice was keeping a low profile. Doing more writing, they said.

Then in the summer of 1990, I received the news he had died. I remembered something Maurice himself had said about Mason Hoffenberg, co-author with Terry Southern of Candy. “Mason is dead,” he reluctantly admitted, “but he is not that dead.”

What better tribute can you give a person than to say they died at their post? Maurice died at his post. Massive heart attack, instant death, while giving an interview on French radio to promote Les Jardins d’Eros, the second volume of his memoirs.

I couldn’t make it down to Paris for the funeral but a correspondent wrote that Jim Haynes was there as was Michael Neal, the erotic bookseller and cataloguer, and a few others and that it was an exceptionally sad affair with nobody saying anything and unsuitable music. Too bad. Leaving the music to someone else, I would have declaimed a panegyric funeral oration. This Kaddish would have gone something like:

Hail Dionysos!
Here lies another immortal bawd,
Who chose the pen over the sword.
Now he’s played the next to last card,
His ashes are sowed all over the yard.
He came as one endowed with grace,
He brought advantage to this place.