Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The good doctor has done it again. As a follow-up to Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment, Dr. Andrew J. Lees recently submitted an article entitled “William Burroughs: Sailor of the Soul” to the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. The brief abstract reads as follows: “In 1953, William Seward Burroughs made several important and largely unrecognized discoveries relating to the composition and clinical pharmacological effects of the hallucinogenic plant potion known as yagé or ayahuasca. Illustrations of Burroughs’ voucher sample of Psychotria viridis and his letter to the father of modern ethnobotany, Richard Evans Schultes, are published here for the first time.”

For some this might seem to be familiar territory as Oliver Harris trail-blazed this once unexplored academic terrain in his introduction to Yage Letters Redux, which Dr. Lees’ duly acknowledges. I cannot recommend Harris’ Redux enough. As I wrote in Operation Total Exposure:

I feel just the opposite about The Yage Letters Redux. Unlike the Ace Junkie, the first edition of The Yage Letters demanded to be revised and properly expanded. At a mere 63 pages, it was like a scrawny kid that everybody tries to bulk up with extra helpings of pasta. Until Oliver’s edition, the additions to the 1975 and 1988 editions were empty calories. Oliver puts meat on the bones. Muscle not flab. The added heft provides invaluable information and research that make The Yage Letters a cornerstone of drug literature along with Junky and Naked Lunch. Oliver’s introductions and appendices make you feel like you are getting your money’s worth. The general reader loves a bargain.

City Lights also makes a difference in its presentation. The book looks great; the cover design is smart and attractive. It supports and illuminates the text and Oliver’s research; it does not shout out demands. Unlike the Penguin Junky, Redux is not forced on the public as definitive. City Lights did not feel the need to press that issue. The superiority of the product would win out. Thus, Redux has become the definitive edition on merit not marketing. Grade: A+.

Given the level of research and detail in Redux, it seems logical to assume that Harris turned over every leaf in the Amazon but thanks to the staff at the Harvard University Herbaria and the Economic Herbarium of Oakes Ames of Harvard University, Dr. Lees provides a level of scientific geekdom and, yes, bibliographic detail, that delightfully adds ethnobotanical depth and local color to the story. Yet it is the bibliographic details that got me all excited; namely, the publication for the first time of Burroughs’ voucher sample (an undiscovered leaf!!!) and his letter to Richard Evans Schultes. Here is Dr. Lees’ paraphrasing of that letter:

Burroughs goes on to say in the letter that the voucher sample was collected from a two-feet-high bush in the locality of Pucallpa. He speculates that the leaves might contain an active drug or work as a catalyst or extractor, and asks Schultes if the plant might be the same as the one they had been shown together on Herr Fürbringer’s ranch near Mocoa. He also apologizes for the poor quality of the macerated specimen. In concluding, he asks Schultes to reply to him and enquires which the photographs taken of them together in Bogotá were available to view, signing off “As ever Bill Burroughs.”

I love the friendly nature of the letter, which begins “Dear Dick” and ends “As ever Bill Burroughs.” It is funny to think of Dick and Bill wandering through the Amazon together like two old college buddies. Years later, Dr. Schultes joked to younger colleagues that if he had known what Burroughs would later write he would have left him in the jungle. Burroughs himself had nothing but respect for Dr. Schultes and regretted deeply that the esteemed doctor never replied to his letter.

Dr. Lees’ article should be read in full. The images are much appreciated and. as I said above, the level of scientific detail is great fun and very informative, not exhausting or extraneous. Dr. Lees has been good enough to provide a link, which allows up to fifty free offprints of the article. Interestingly, Burroughs received fifty offprints for distribution of his own “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs,” published in January 1957, in the British Journal of Addiction. Looks like things have not changed much in the world of scientific publishing.  

Also for those interested in getting a copy of Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment, New York Review Books just issued it in the United States. Now I raved about the publication as offered by Notting Hill Editions, but New York Review Books is just as amazing in its scope of publications and statement of purpose. A little while back I read Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company in the NYRB reissue. You might remember Babitz playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp in 1963. Well, Babitz could also write the pants off many an LA scribe. Her books remain cult classics and NYRB specializes in making forgotten gems like Babitz’s available to readers. (I notice a theme here regarding bringing to light the previously lost.) I suspect Lees’ book will in time become a cult classic as well.

Here is a short Q & A on the Burroughs voucher sample and letter.

Can you briefly describe the holdings in the Economic Herbarium of Oakes Ames of Harvard University? 

The Economic Herbarium is a subdivision of the Botanical Museum at Harvard University founded in 1918 and which now contains more than 40,000 voucher specimens of cultivated and wild plants considered to be of direct value to mankind. A great many of the plants were collected by the orchid expert Oakes Ames’ student Dr Richard Schultes in the Amazon and Andes. Dr Schultes is “Doc Schindler” in The Yage Letters, a person William Burroughs met and travelled with in Colombia and greatly respected for his knowledge of ethnobotany. The herbarium can be visited by appointment and can be searched on the Botanical Museum’s specimen database

How did the Burroughs items get placed there and how did you rediscover them?

After his return from the Peruvian Amazon in 1953, Burroughs sent the voucher specimen depicted in my article in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs with a covering letter on October 16 to Dick Schultes from his parents’ home in Palm Beach. Schultes appears not to have had the opportunity to pursue matters at that time but had mounted it and labelled it as an example of Palicourea fastigiata, acknowledged Burroughs as the collector and written that the leaves were mixed with Banisteriopsis Caapi in ayahuasca. In 1973 Timothy Plowman, one of Schultes’ students, reclassified it as Psychotria Viridis. The clues to my research came from Oliver Harris’s introduction to Yage Letters Redux and his encouragement to look at Burroughs’ scientific exploits.

As a Burroughs obsessive how great a thrill was it to see these forgotten items?

Burroughs with his fortieth birthday approaching was making an attempt to become, to be seen as and to see himself as an accredited researcher, an aspiration that would continue until the publication of Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ work has become a source of intense scholarship and to find something which had not yet been included in the official archives gave me a frisson of pleasure.

What does it mean for Burroughs to be institutionalized in this manner?

It was not until Schultes’ presentation in 1967 in San Francisco that it became generally accepted that Banisteriopsis caapi alone had very weak hallucinogenic potential and it was the combination with other DMT rich plants like Psychotria viridis that gave ayahuasca its potent psychotropic effects. Schultes acknowledged Burroughs’ sample in his later writings but this was largely ignored in all the later literature on ayahuasca. I hope my article will ensure that Burroughs gets greater recognition for his ground breaking field work.

By Jed Birmingham

Dr. Andrew Lees is the anti-Benway but he learned quite a bit from the practices of the old croaker. And from William Burroughs too. In Mentored by a Madman: The William S. Burroughs Experiment, Dr. Lees merges travelogue, medical mystery and memoir to depict his coming of age as a neurologist as well as his personal explorations following in the footsteps of Burroughs as both scientist and writer. Burroughs’ work is a cornerstone of Dr. Lees’ library and, as he persuasively argues, others in the medical profession should find room for Burroughs on their shelves as well. Doubtless Dr. Lees’ account would have pleased Burroughs to no end and would have found a central place in his library too.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. Entertaining and enlightening, Dr. Lees succeeds in not just telling a great personal story but in providing new insights into Burroughs, extending the already vast and seemingly endless range of influence and importance of el hombre invisible. Along with Jim Pennington, Lees demonstrates that those outside the Burroughs Establishment have much to offer the Burroughs Community and general readers at large.

I would suggest purchasing the book from Notting Hill Editions directly. That press is doing very exciting work in injecting some green and ready into the essay form. Besides being well written, the book as a physical object is also proof that the ebook leaves much to be desired. 

Dr. Lees was kind enough to answer a few questions, which I hope will inspire you to add his memoir to your book collections.

I want to start off by saying how much I enjoyed your memoir. And by that I also mean as a physical object. I thought it was beautifully produced and well printed. It reminded me of a pocket medical handbook. Was that intentional?

Notting Hill Editions is a relatively new UK publishing house, which has set out to reinvigorate non-fiction essay writing in the English Language. All their books have the same broad design although I chose the black colour and the quote for the front cover. They have taken their cue from the vivid contribution of the short text to continental European culture. When my copy of Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment arrived I got high just admiring the cover, the foil blocking, the spot-colour dropped caps and folios. Touching the cloth, the case and the paper then created a state of ecstasy . 

Your memoir is filled with references to scholarly journals, books by botanists and explorers as well as, of course, the work of William Burroughs. What and who were your models and influences in writing the memoir?

My first influence was Richard Spruce, a Victorian botanist who discovered the principal plant ingredient of yagé. Richard Evans Schultes — Doc Schindler in the Yage Letters — was also inspired by Spruce and switched from medicine to botany at Harvard. I took the safe option and made a career of neurology but maintained my interest in natural history and often after a busy clinic yearned to escape to the freedom of the rainforest.

There is an uncanny inverse symmetry in my book, which I did not appreciate until it was finished. After leaving Harvard, Burroughs dropped out to become a psychonaut exploring inner space. When he was later asked what he would have done if he had not become a writer, he sometimes replied that he would have liked to have been a physician. Only at the age of 65 did I have the courage to try psychedelic plant medicines. Burroughs liked to imagine himself as a sort of voodoo healer but restricting his ministrations to his friends. 

I was interested to see that you interned at Salpêtrière in France, the legendary birthplace of neurology where Jean-Martin Charcot worked. As I understand it Charcot was one of the first scientists to incorporate photography — specifically serial photography, an early form of film — into his practice. At its beginnings, neuroscience was able to make use of a new and revolutionary medium. But what the hell happened? Why the conservatism now, such that a writer like Burroughs would be considered a madman?

Charcot is rightly acknowledged as the Father of Neurology. He perfected the systematic anatomo-clinical method which still underpins the clinical gaze. As part of his own self-exploration, he experimented with hashish as a medical student. In accusing Timothy Leary of being unscientific, Burroughs was inadvertently exposing the essential difference between neurology and psychological medicine. Neurology is a visual art and many of its fully established syndromes offer the possibility of spot diagnosis in the street without the need for the doctor’s bag. Charcot was one of the first physicians to realise the potential of photography in medicine and set up the world’s first department of medical illustration under the directorship of Albert Londe. Rather than simply observe and document, Londe often used the flash of his camera to startle Charcot’s patients into an unselfconscious performance of the symptom. In this way, the camera functioned not simply as a recording device, but also as a prod. Daguerreotypes of many of the cases on which Charcot taught in his Leçons du Mardi were published in La Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière. Charcot was also a talented artist illustrating his case histories and textbooks with his own sketches. His residents were expected to scrutinize the paintings of the Grand Masters in the hope of identifying examples of the syndromes he was describing in his clinic.

Speaking of Salpêtrière, why were you influenced by Burroughs instead of, say, Michel Foucault? Much of Foucault’s thought was born out of Salpêtrière and he died there.

I read Naked Lunch in 1967 as a medical student. I struck a Faustian bargain with Burroughs that allowed me to complete my medical studies and later search for cures for the shaking palsy. Burroughs in turn demanded I listen to what he had to say about doctoring and research. I did not read Foucault until quite recently but while agreeing with his notions that power and knowledge are used as a form of social control I found much of his writing opaque. It was if he was trying to blind me with philosophy. Burroughs was more accessible and got there first.

I greatly enjoyed your account of first coming into contact with Burroughs. A book could be published on these origin stories since first reading Burroughs is like a coming of age story or major turning point for so many people. Do you mind sharing yours?

Burroughs was one of the people identified on the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club album front cover that I’d never heard of, so I looked him up. At the height of the first Summer of Love, a medical student friend recommended I read Naked Lunch. The description of Benway’s behaviour reminded me of one of the surgeons at the London Hospital where I was training to be a doctor. Burroughs’ lurid urinal descriptions were also a helpful introduction to urology.

I am fascinated by the period of Swinging London in which you first experienced Burroughs and in which you first studied medicine. You describe your double life in the memoir. Can you go into some detail about what it was like at the time?

I think the zeitgeist at that time was “Nothing is true, everything is possible!” There was a feeling that a cultural revolution was needed and a determination that Europe must never go to war again. We believed that all the brutal neurodegenerations would be vanquished through scientific endeavour. Looking back the best thing that came out of the sixties was not psychedelic drugs or L-DOPA but the arrival of the oral contraceptive. For the first time people were able to live together without being forced into suffocating marriage.

Your memoir is filled with the names of all the scientists and doctors who proved instrumental in teaching you along the way. What have you learned from the good Dr. Benway?

 I always imagine Benway as urbane and self-confident — desirable qualities for a lucrative medical practice. He was also single-minded and driven by a hunger for knowledge for its own sake, not profit. These are characteristics he shared with many great medical scientists. Electrical brain stimulation — one of his favoured techniques — is now being assessed in the treatment of some forms of psychiatric illness while his research into a “talking asshole” and “de-anxietised man” anticipated genetic engineering and stem cell research. Benway’s desire to eradicate the world from phobias and anxiety is commendable. If he had possessed empathy and humanity perhaps he might have become a respected pillar of the medical establishment instead of a cold sadistic “Dr Mengele.”

Parallels between Burroughs and Benway have been drawn. As James Grauerholz wryly commented in his introduction to my book, “William’s friends will agree that it is undoubtedly very much for the best that he dropped out of his medical classes at the Universitaet Wien. Burroughs loved to imagine himself as a doctor, but surely, many future patients’ lives were spared by that lucky turn of events in Austria in 1936-7.” 

I was really happy to see a good portion of your book dealt with apomorphine. Burroughs felt it was something of a cure-all for society’s ills. What are your hopes for apomorphine?

One problem for apomorphine is its name — apo is classical Greek for “like.” Although apomorphine is synthesised from morphine by heating it with hydrochloric acid, its pharmacological effects are very different. Without the slightest justification it continued to be classified as a schedule II controlled substance in the State of California until 2010. This meant that it was considered to have an accepted medical value ( like morphine) and was also considered to present a high potential for abuse, that could potentially lead to severe psychological or physical dependence. The evidence for this designation was non-existent.

This may partly explain why Burroughs championing of the “junk vaccine” in America fell on deaf ears. In 1988 as a result of re-reading Naked Lunch, I had the hunch to resurrect apomorphine as a treatment for nervous disease. Following my research at University College Hospital that included self-experimentation, apomorphine eventually returned to the pharmacopoeia and is now widely used for the management of advanced cases of Parkinson’s disease in many parts of the world. Nevertheless a fear that it might have addictive potential has lingered and hampered its widespread uptake.

It is now understood that the chemical messenger dopamine is a key player in the neurobiology of substance dependence and that alcoholics and cocaine addicts have a reduced responsiveness to physiological dopamine release. Burroughs had hoped that a powerful orally active derivative of apomorphine with fewer adverse reactions would soon become available but this has not come to pass.

Several years ago I wrote an essay on Naked Lunch and apomorphine. I felt that apomorphine was only thought to influence Naked Lunch by helping him kick junk. Yet apomorphine has a whole history of use as well as side effects that I think alsp influenced Naked Lunch. What are your thoughts?

Doctor John Dent, Burroughs’ doctor in London, eventually came to the correct conclusion that apomorphine’s value in the management of alcoholism and narcotic addiction was not due to its aversive emetic effects but stemmed from a metabolic action on the back brain, which corrected the chemical dysregulation that induced craving and drug wanting. In 1967, a few years after Dent’s death, apomorphine was shown to be a powerful stimulant of dopamine receptors. 

Dent insisted that apomorphine had to be given continuously round the clock for 5-6 days to be successful and that morphine or alcohol should be tailed off in the first three days of in-patient detoxification. Single injections of apomorphine were useless. Dent also acknowledged that his 66% remission rate depended not just on the pharmacological properties of apomorphine but a holistic approach that required encouragement and emotional support. He encouraged Burroughs to write to cure his anxiety and hang-ups without the need for drugs.

When we carried out our clinical pharmacological studies in the 1980s that resulted in apomorphine gaining a licence for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease we realised that the mode of administration — continuous delivery by a pump as opposed to intermittent “shots” — greatly influenced the behavioural response of the patients. We found that continuous delivery was much more efficacious in smoothing out fluctuations in mood and motor performance (on-off effects). Interestingly we also observed in some Parkinsonian artists and writers renewed bursts of creativity, which made me wonder whether Burroughs’ statement that he would never have been able to put Naked Lunch together without his treatment in London with apomorphine had some scientific substance.

It thrilled me to see that your colleagues gifted you a copy of the Beach Books APO-33. In your memoir you talk about how Burroughs used the underground press of the Mimeo Revolution to stand up to not just mainstream corporate publishing but the pharmaceutical industry. You also express your disenchantment with the medical publishing apparatus and how it stifles creativity and dissent. What can the academic and medical community learn from the publishing practices of the Mimeo Revolution?

Medical publishing has become a massive business with electronic “predator” journals sprouting up every month. Many of these journals require the author to pay for the pleasure of having their articles published and to sign a form saying the copyright is handed over to the publisher. The peer review system is almost broken in medical science. Anonymity allows saboteurs to destroy unfairly competitors’ discoveries and copy the results. Ghost writing is used by many pharmaceutical companies and even some high-impact journals are susceptible to their influence in deciding whether a paper should be published. The open access movement in medical science and the use of Twitter and medical blogs may be a sort of “little mags” reaction to what is happening but as long as academic promotion depends on impact factors and H-indexes mainstream medical publishing by corporations, like Elsevier and Wiley, will rule.  

The Yagé Letters is a central text for you. It has led you on a journey of medical and personal exploration. Let me play devil’s advocate here for a minute. What are your thoughts on the negative influence of Burroughs’ Yagé Letters in terms of drug tourism and the exploration for pleasure and profit of exotic locales like the Amazon?

Burroughs was keen to try to collaborate with scientists whenever the opportunity arose (Schultes; Evans, the inorganic chemist in London; Grey Walter, the neurophysiologist in Bristol; and Dent his London doctor) but most of these men were not prepared to treat him as a co-investigator.  

In the rain forest even if he may have been hoping that yagé would help to straighten him out, his approach to its investigation was that of a freelance scientist. In New York before leaving for Colombia, he researched his subject and was disappointed by the small number of first-hand accounts of its psychopharmacological effects. He was also intrigued to learn that the CIA was investigating the drug as a way of inducing automatic obedience in suspected terrorists and dissidents. 

On arrival in Bogota he headed for the university to research the “vine of the soul” putting himself in the right place to meet scientists who could help his investigation (in this case Richard Schultes). In 1954 on his return from Peru, Burroughs sent Doctor Schultes a voucher specimen of Psychotria viridis, the nondescript shrub in the coffee plant family which contained dimethyltryptamine (DMT), stating that the hallucinogenic effects of yagé occurred when its leaves were mixed with Banisteriopsis caapi. This was 14 years before the mysteries of yagé were finally announced to the scientific world by Schultes. Burroughs wrote in his letters to Ginsberg that the medicine men varied the ingredients depending on what psychic effects they wanted to produce and that repeated yagé use led to a tolerance to the emetic and purgative effects that carried over for more than six months after abstinence. Burroughs also added descriptions of the plant mixtures’ effects on the mind based on his self-experimentation. 

The importance of yagé to Burroughs’ literary aesthetic has in my view been underestimated because of his repeated warnings about its danger and the many bad trips he experienced with psychedelic drugs. These particularly unpleasant reactions may have been due in part to the fact that his liver had been compromised by alcohol and narcotics. If anybody is to blame for ayahuasca tourism, I would point the finger much more at Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert than Burroughs.

One of my favorite chapters in your memoir was the Bladerunner chapter. Recently the medical industry has intruded itself into my life and Bladerunner: A Movie seems yet another example of Burroughs being right on point and ahead of the curve. Can you share your thoughts on Bladerunner?  

Bladerunner: A Movie, based loosely on physician and sci-fi writer Alan Nourse’s original book and nothing at all to do with the Ridley Scott movie, is one of Burroughs’ most interesting books from the perspective of doctors and was recommended to me by James Grauerholz. In the book Burroughs predicts the demise of totalitarian healthcare systems and anticipates the emergence of AIDS. Within a generation of these reforms, average life expectancy has soared to 125, and is leading to a disturbing rise in the incidence of hereditary disorders, “everybody would be diabetic or diabetes-prone by the late part of the next century.” New plagues of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease begin to emerge in the aged. A biomathematician predicts that the planet will soon be flooded with the worst samples of humanity with the lowest biological survival value. As a result of these changes by 2014 New York has become a world centre for underground medicine flourishing outside the medical establishment and the Government. I was reminded a lot of Ivan Illich’s condemnations of the healthcare business and the controlling power of doctors when I read it. When I enquired to James about this link he informed me that Burroughs had a heavily marked copy of Medical Nemesis in his possession.

I see you are associated with Kings College. I spent a semester abroad there just after Eric Mottram left. Mottram got the ball rolling on Burroughs Studies with The Algebra of Need and he definitely pioneered American Studies in the UK. Have you felt Mottram’s and Burroughs’ influence at Kings?

I have spent most of my working life at University College London, which is another separate part of the Federation of colleges making up the University of London. You are referring to a collaboration that we are doing with friends at Kings College London. Medical scientists are the last people to ask about what other people in their universities are doing and thinking. Most live in ivory towers and prefer the company of their scientific colleagues rather than mix with people on campus from arts faculties, which is a pity and partly why I have written this book. I think the “Beats” are of little interest now at British universities although many of Burroughs’ prophecies have come to pass without young people realising his prescience. Resistance to control and authority, which motivated the counterculture, seem no longer important issues, cynicism and acquiescence are new viruses.

I was cheered however that on a recent BBC television programme called University Challenge a question relating to William Burroughs was answered correctly by a Cambridge undergraduate.

On a personal note, it has become increasingly obvious to me that my attraction to Burroughs comes from an attempt to deal with anxiety. In addition reading and collecting Burroughs seem a means for me to activate the dopamine centers in my brain. Can you speak on the role of anxiety for Burroughs as well as your thoughts as a neuroscientist on collecting as an impulse?

Burroughs wrote well with a distinctive style from a young age and he also experienced spontaneous visions. I am sure he was correct when he wrote that narcotics stifled all creative output but his withdrawals after detoxification may have provided epiphanies in which he saw the world much more brightly. It is also possible that apomorphine reset his dopamine receptors and increased his motivation and drive. Although it is conceivable that his claim that apomorphine had cured him (which of course it hadn’t) was a ruse, Burroughs valued integrity in his friends. Dr. Dent seems to be one of the very few doctors he was treated by who gained his respect. Burroughs considered anxiety as the greatest scourge of twentieth century life and apomorphine’s sedative effects may have also been beneficial to him. It is also possible that his compulsive writing helped to reduce his anxiety levels and was a sort of occupational therapy. He frequently referred to the book Anxiety and its Treatment in which Dent had written that individuals with severe chronic anxiety were at greater risk for substance dependence than the rest of the population.  

Where do you think Burroughs is going to lead you next?

Burroughs’ yagé epistles introduced me to a different form of rainforest science than Richard Spruce, encouraged me to get away from concrete thinking, float in outer space, and run alongside a beam of light. They reminded me that clinical investigation should not be limited to institutions and that scientists must find new ways to regain the power to explore.

Hundreds of curious neophytes, some with depression, substance dependence, or biological addictions, now head for the Colombian and Peruvian jungles every week. Like Aldous Huxley I did not have the courage to take yagé until my autumnal years. My experience in Leticia with yagé allowed me to break down some restrictive boundaries and take more risks in my research. Self-experimentation, although denigrated as subjective and self-serving in many circles, has a noble and productive history in medical science and I will continue to advocate it to my students as well as research the possibilities of Banisteriopsis caapi as a potential therapy for Parkinson’s disease and depression. In collaboration with a medicinal chemist at Harvard called John Neumeyer who was also influenced as a young man by Naked Lunch I have also returned to Burroughs’ hope that new more powerful orally active apomorphine like drugs can be developed and brought into medical practice.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In Burroughs’ first appearance in Chicago Review in 1958, he is presented as a San Francisco poet. As Linda Richman would say, Burroughs was neither in San Francisco nor a poet, discuss. Well, to say the least, many poets in San Francisco were verklempt, particularly Jack Spicer and his circle. Spicer was a founding member of the San Francisco Renaissance when it was the Berkeley Renaissance in the late 1940s and he did not take too kindly to Ginsberg and company rolling into town to take over the Six Gallery space that he had developed. Spicer rightly saw that the San Francisco Scene as presented by Evergreen Review (Issue 2) was the creation of the New York media. Spicer hated nothing more than New York and all that it represented. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs were quite simply Yankees, a team the baseball-loving Spicer loathed.

In 1964, Stan Persky, a recent arrival from Los Angeles who quickly became a member of the Spicer circle, edited Open Space, a mimeo mag that spewed out 15 issues in only 12 months. Like Spicer, Persky lashed out at a number of literary targets in San Francisco from Donald Allen to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Nobody was spared in this deliciously malicious little mag as gossip rag. If you ever get a copy of Open Space — and that is doubtful since they are notoriously scarce (and deliberately so to frustrate attempts by collectors to accumulate complete runs) — be sure to have your copy of Kevin Killian’s and Lewis Ellingham’s Poet Be Like God, a literary biography of Spicer and his circle, on hand. Like J Magazine and a host of other Spicer-related mags, Open Space spread the gospel of Saint Jack to an incredibly limited cloister of initiates. Open Space is totally inside and exclusive, like the best of mimeo.

Issue One features a review of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg’s Yage Letters (see below). Burroughs becomes William Burros and it is clear the Spicer circle considered him a complete jackass. The review cuts like a stiletto. What comes across loud and clear in the review is that Persky, Spicer, and crew considered Burroughs and Ginsberg tourists exploiting not only South America, but also San Francisco. Ferlinghetti and City Lights was the American Express office for the interloping Eastern Beatniks, providing funds generated from the commercialization of the SF Renaissance as well as a kiosk for the dissemination of their propaganda.

The review also makes clear that Spicer fueled the muse with alcohol more than drugs. Spicer did not have to travel to Peru for yage when Gino and Carlo’s cocktail lounge down the street was providing the nectar of the gods that he preferred. Burroughs and the Beats were outsiders, carpetbaggers who would be denied the right to drink with Spicer no matter how much Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg tried to step up to the counter and sit-in.

Lager

William Burros and Allen Ginsberg, The Lager Letters (San Francisco, Baedecker Lights, 1963)

[Satirical review of The Yage Letters, which had been published by City Lights in 1963. The review appeared in Open Space 1, 1964.]

Mr. Burros has written the best travel guide for South America now available. This book would make a wonderful gift. It really tells you the kinds of things you’d want to know without a lot of crap about churches and liberator heroes: where the busses are, what the food is like, who you can talk to, where to get boys, etc. The only thing one is hard put to understand is why is there all this fuss about something called Lager, which, as best as I can understand, is something you could get in the Anxious Asp. I mean, why does he bother to give us all this dope when any normal man would be perfectly satisfied with grass or else one of those little sugar cubes the LSD people put out?

Of course, all these episstles were published in various avant-gargle mags a few years ago and Mr. G.’s histrionics are, as usual, completely unintelligible. I really tried through most of this to keep telling myself about Burros’ humanity, that the boys do matter to him, do have something to do with Eros, that the junk is more than a fixed thing — but after a certain point, despite his well-timed caustic sense of wit, one knows that it is hopeless, they’ve gone over the edge and it aint readable or poetry or love.

Reviewed by Graham Rae

“Tears are worthless unless genuine, tears from the soul and the guts, tears that ache and wrench and hurt and tear.” — William S Burroughs, Last Words

Let’s face it, the familiar picture of William S Burroughs now pretty much fixed in the public consciousness is of the wife-killing, hat-and-glasses-wearing junkie with the lust for teen boys, his gravel-rolled burr gutter-muttering obscene scientific and medical prophecies to a wasted cheering audience. It’s nowhere near the whole picture, of course, but why let truth come in the way of a good, easily graspable and marketable image?

What’s especially frustrating about this cliché is that it completely ignores the fact that Burroughs was a human being who lived a pretty dismal life — drug addiction, killing his wife, his son dying in his 30s — and treats him instead as a sort of circus freak-cum-alien with no human or redeeming qualities whatsoever. To this way of thinking Burroughs was just the two-dimensional Hombre Invisible, the middle class drug-crash writing mad prose as he strode and staggered purposefully and notoriously down the still-divided-as-to-his-worth annals of literary history.

The neglected human, feeling aspect of the writer is one that is brilliantly and sensitively examined in The Japanese Sandman by director Ed Buhr. This new 12-minute short film is based on the first letter in The Yage Letters, WSB’s fictional book of letters (see Oliver Harris’ authoritative introduction to the 2006 edition for more information on this complex epistolary hoax) supposedly sent to Allen Ginsberg from South America during WSB’s 1953 quest for the hallucinogen yage. This was the mythical “final fix” used by brujos to paint vivid neon prophecies in the humid conspiratorial jungle air, and Burroughs likely wanted it as some sort of panacea to take away the mental and emotional torment that followed his accidental killing of his wife in 1951.

The Japanese Sandman starts off with a faded jaded 38-year-old Burroughs sitting clattering away at his manual Royal typewriter, film noir monochrome mirroring his scarred internal palette. Words crack and rattle across a surrendering gray sky shaking the leaves of vitality-leeched palm trees as the drug-addict writer composes a screed part travelogue, part routine, part anthropology, part sociology, back to Ginsberg in the USA. Not shying away from its subject matter, the film details WSB’s adventures in Panama with drugs and booze and hookers, and it’s clear by this point in his life that he is a cynical, weary individual who has been through the existential wringer.

Buhr conjures up Panama through a judicious handful of interiors and a few tight exteriors, married with a sterling fast-paced editing job, fine crisp evocative cinematography, and a great bouncing soundtrack. John Fleck, the actor who plays Burroughs, does an excellent job mimicking the writer’s unmistakable atonal voice, looks like him and even has his facial tics and tremors down to a tee. Fleck has clearly done his homework, though it must be said he still has all ten fingertips, so there obviously was a limit to what he was willing to suffer for his art! He looks like he’s having fun with the role as he runs with it, and there’s not really a bad performance in the film.

When a shady Panama joint called the Blue Goose reminds him of a Prohibition-era roadhouse from his youth, Burroughs tells the poignant story of Billy Bradshinkel, a lover from his late teenage years. It’s at this point that lusty vibrant color footage supplants the dreary black and white and Burroughs’ internal horizons are seen to be lush and warm and happy. He rewrites their initial sexual encounter in a car and talks about their young naïve relationship before being crushed as they break up. A few months later the writer is left numb when he learns that Billy has died in a car crash. Here we cut back to contemporary Panama and Burroughs promising he has a “silo full of queer corn” like this to recount, but it’s obvious his off-hand glibness is a mask for real pain and sadness. As Oliver Harris notes, having this “routine” right at the start of the book is important for motivating the quest into the jungle to find Yage “as an escape from haunting memories of home, family and desire.”

The Japanese Sandman is a lean, fat-free film, very faithful to the original fake letter it is based on, easily compacting the complex, poignant subject matter into its short, lively running time. The title itself (the letter has none) derives from a line from an old 1920 song of that name, and the line Burroughs quotes from it — “Just an old second-hand man trading new dreams for old” — provides, as he says, the “theme song of story.” Ironically, the writer misquotes the song, replacing the original word “days” with “dreams” by accident or by design, which helps to make his point about remaking painful memories artistically into pain-free images.

A real, heartfelt, melancholic piece of work, The Japanese Sandman is a very welcome addition to the ever-growing list of projects inspired by Burroughs. Ed Buhr has talked of creating a full-length film made based on this material. Let’s hope he manages to get it together, because Burroughs could use a bit of humanizing now that the initial culture shock of his art has died down. There may be nobody better suited for the job than this fine director with his beautiful and inspiring could-be-feature trailer.

This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007.

I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured I am to be in present company. However, at the immediate risk of testing your hospitality, I want to read you a review of my latest publication — this new edition of The Yage Letters by William Burroughs — that begs the question as to whether it’s an honour I deserve.

“It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that Oliver Harris, a professor at a respectable British university, can devote his scholarly endeavour to the study of the life and works of William Burroughs, not as a case history of psychopathology, or as an example of how bad writing can sustain a large reputation among weak-minded intellectuals, but as if his literary output were worthy of serious consideration. A third of this volume is devoted to the professor’s minute and scholarly reconstruction of how The Yage Letters came to be published in its present form (we learn, for example, that one part of it was first published by the no doubt aptly named Fuck You Press), which is as if all the resources of biblical scholarship were utilized to explicate the provenance and deeper meaning of The Wind in the Willows. In an age of academic hyper-inflation, there is, it seems, no subject that does not find its scholar.”

(Antony Daniels, “All Bark, No Bite,” The New Criterion, November 2006, p. 77)

If this is funny, what exactly is the joke? Is it the reviewer’s blindness to the unarguable truth that William Burroughs is “worthy of serious consideration”? Or is it the assumption that textual scholarship is self-evidently the highest measure of taking a writer seriously, and so must be reserved for only those truly worthy of a place in the academy?

The question of status is a paradox. On the one hand, at this Symposium, William Burroughs is allowed to rub shoulders with the likes of Shakespeare, Malory, Jonson, and Jane Austen. On the other hand, within the Burroughs community, there is in fact a definite residue of ambivalence about bringing into such a respectable and venerable fold as textual studies a writer valued precisely for his status as an iconoclastic outsider, a black sheep in the literary flock. So, paradoxically, it’s some of his friends, as well as Burroughs’ enemies, who worry about the institutional respectability conferred by scholarly editing.

This paradox brings me to another, which is to do with that other key imprimatur of literary value — a place in the archive. Here, I’m thinking specifically of the acquisition, just over a year ago by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, of what is by far the largest and most important collection of Burroughs’ manuscripts, papers, and assorted material. The Berg’s acquisition would seem to contradict quite flatly the derisory tone of my reviewing nemesis, and of course, given the choice, I’m inclined to defer to the authority of the former. But the custodians of the archive exercise an interesting kind of authority, since it is necessarily driven by professional and economic self-interest. That’s to say, prestige in this context is always a conveniently two-way street.

For the housing of Burroughs’ archive in the Berg confers value on his literary worth, but at the same time the Berg claims an increase in its own value as a consequence. This at least is the opinion of Dr. Paul LeClerc, President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Public Library, who claimed that: “Burroughs’ archive is a fantastic addition to the Berg Collection and solidifies the New York Public Library’s position as the world’s leading center for the study of Beat literature”. And yet, in the very same press release, the Curator of the Berg, Isaac Gewirtz, hails the acquisition of Burroughs as a “fiercely sinister and corrosive” figure. Now, since he presumably doesn’t anticipate that Burroughs’ papers will corrode the other manuscripts he curates, there is an inescapable contradiction here in one of the guardians of the academy’s holy relics championing a toxic heretic — notorious not only for being a homosexual heroin addict who shot his wife playing a drunken game of William Tell, but also for making his books by cutting up his writing with a pair of scissors.

Unsurprisingly, my interest in the Berg’s acquisition of Burroughs’ papers is directly related to my past and, I hope, future, as a Burroughs scholar — and in the second half of this talk I am going to focus on the relationship between Burroughs’ manuscript history and the papers now held in the Berg. But before that I want to do two things: firstly, to sketch the outlines of a forthcoming project which is to explore what I call “the politics of the archive” — and, secondly, to return to the specifics of the Berg Collection by discussing the catalogue of Burroughs literary archive produced by the agent for its sale.

The politics of the archive sounds, and is meant to be, a very broad umbrella term, and it came to me when my thoughts began to shift from producing the next new edition to thinking about the very processes by which such editions become — or indeed do not become — possible in the first place.

So naturally, one of the key issues is ownership — the ways in which manuscript collections pass between various hands, from the author’s to agents to private collectors to those of university or public body curators.

Ownership in turn has clear implications for access — what constraints and limits are placed, whether by private collectors or institutions, under what conditions materials can be viewed, when and by whom. So access also includes the construction of collections, their housing, their cataloguing, and policies for managing the archive, whether local ones peculiar to a specific institution or those laid down by professional bodies.

Then there’s the issue of use — of what materials can be cited or published, and so on.

And finally, there are a whole series of issues related to how the constraints placed on access to and use of archival material impact on scholarship and, thereby, on a writer’s reception. This concerns not only the production of specific scholarly editions, but the interpretation of a writer’s entire literary history, which is necessarily determined by what texts are actually available at any given time. So the stakes are potentially very high for both those who house archives and those who want access to them.

And in this context, there arises what might be called a “diplomatics of the archive” — by which I mean the extreme tact with which we have to work — and speak about our work — in order to keep the archival doors open to us. Being even more necessary in print than in speech, this diplomacy entails, for example, the editing of the present paper for publication…

My sense — and here I am genuinely interested to hear from others — is that any scholar engaged in textual studies must be familiar with these issues, but that there’s been no broad study of the ways in which the archive operates. In the absence of such a study, it’s hard to contextualise one’s own experience, and I for one have no clear idea if the problems I’ve encountered are particular to me, or if the relationship between Burroughs’ archives and textual scholarship is not a special case but a commonplace.

Literary Status and Archival Ownership

Well, before turning to Burroughs’ textual history, I want to highlight two related issues arising from this — the sale catalogue of the Burroughs literary archive — a beautiful production put together and written by Ken Lopez, a noted rare book and manuscript dealer.

The two issues concern the relationship of literary status to archival ownership. As Lopez observes, up until twenty to thirty years ago the Beat writers — loosely including Burroughs — were “viewed with disdain by the literary and academic establishment”: “They were outsiders, and deliberately so, and the literary establishment returned the favor by treating them as such. As so often happens, private collectors became the repository for these works.” (Ken Lopez, William S. Burroughs Literary Archive, 2005, p. 6)

In recent years, all that has changed, however, and the archives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and now William Burroughs are, as Lopez notes, “among the most highly valued (in both dollar figures and sheer prestige)” by the very same academy that once shunned their work (19).

The other half of the story, which Lopez goes on to discuss, is the access — or rather, denial of access — during the time the Burroughs archive remained in private hands. In this case, since the archive was assembled in 1973, sold first to the Swiss-based dealer, Richard Aaron, and then in the early 1980s to an American owner, that means a thirty-three year period up until the sale last March. So that has been the situation for the whole of my professional life.

As Lopez puts it, “because the Burroughs archive has been in private hands all these years and not in a research institution, that access has been extremely limited. Various scholars have vilified Aaron and the others in print, labelling them as ‘uncooperative’. In reality, a private home is not a good place for conducting scholarly research […] and these complaints have been essentially misguided, confusing an awareness of an archive with an innate right of access to it.” (6)

I’ve quoted Lopez at length to show two things going on at once. Most obviously, there’s this claim that us scholars, just because we want to put the materials to use, delude ourselves if we think we have any rights to access — the other side of which is that millionaire collectors have a perfect right to prevent access solely by virtue of their bank accounts. Reading between the lines, you might realize that what’s going on here is actually a coded defence of the then-owner of the Burroughs archive, whose sale Lopez was negotiating. Now, if this cat could talk, what tales he could tell — but, for reasons of professional self-interest, I simply can’t. This is what I mean by the diplomatics of the archive…

The second issue raised by Lopez is, in a material sense, the most intriguing and, quite possibly, unique to William Burroughs as a writer. He says:

“As rich as Burroughs’ novels are […] they pale beside the archive, which is his actual work. As spinoffs or byproducts of that work, the books themselves seem almost desiccated in comparison to the main body of his work — this archive — like tree branches broken off of the main living, growing trunk.” (4)

Lopez could hardly up the ante any further: the archive not only as a vital secondary resource, a mother lode of raw materials that can be picked over to underpin the production of new texts and new understandings, but itself, as a totality, the Real Thing, the true creative product and therefore the true object of study and interpretation.

This is by no means snake oil or just sales talk, since Lopez bases his claim on a statement made by Burroughs that has been often quoted by his critics:

“In a sense,” Burroughs once said, “all my books are one book. It’s just a continuous book” (cited in Lopez, 3).

In claiming that the literary archive is this “one book,” Lopez builds on a central understanding about Burroughs’ working methods — namely, the constant overlap and interrelation of his manuscripts — that in turn accounts for the extraordinarily dense intertextuality of his writing. And equally important is the remarkable way in which, as a product of his working methods, the material history of Burroughs’ texts provides precise analogues for his central thematics.

Since this is the point I’m going to end on, I’ll briefly clarify what I mean. The most visible formal feature of Burroughs’ writing from Naked Lunch onwards is his version of a collage aesthetic, in which all the text’s units — whether narrative episodes or brief verbal fragments — coexist in dynamic and mobile juxtaposition. The result is a kind of haphazard montage that replaces the linear unities of realist, narrative temporality with a kaleidoscopic geography in which past and future, identities and places, dissolve and run together. To Burroughs, his texts were literally experiments in a kind of time travel and exploration of unmapped realities generated through textual recombinations.

If this striking formal feature embodies the central thematic of Burroughs’ writing — disrupting fixed and stable notions of reality — then both are determined by the way in which he embraced random factors to assemble his texts from manuscript fragments. Lopez’s claim for the archive plausibly identifies individual books as partial materializations of this larger ongoing project. As I say, I’ll come back to this idea in my conclusion.

“Definitive” Editions

Now, as a way into a brief account of my exploration of Burroughs’ early literary history, I want to pick up on another, related claim made by Lopez, concerning textual scholarship. Discussing Burroughs’ most famous novel, he writes:

“No one has seen the ‘definitive’ Naked Lunch — despite the recent publication of something called Naked Lunch: The Restored Text — because no one has had access to the complete Burroughs papers that were sealed over 30 years ago.” (3)

Putting these two claims together forms a natural bridge to my own work as a textual scholar, in which I have focused on the three novels that Burroughs wrote before Naked Lunch — a title that, for several years, he actually applied to this early trilogy. In what follows, I want to go into the broad outlines of the textual and publishing history of these three novels in order to think about both the “definitive” edition and its relation to the archive.

I begin with the term “definitive” in order to make a very simple point concerning the first and third of these early novels. The first of my re-edited editions had “definitive” in its subtitle — Junky: the Definitive Text of ‘Junk’ — while the second — The Yage Letters Redux — is trumpeted as such on the publisher’s web site. Since I was unhappy about Viking Penguin’s use of the term first time around, for the second book, I directly requested that it be avoided — especially since my introduction explicitly denied that “the re-edited text is now final and definitive”: “This is because the paradox true of all texts — that they are both fixed and flexible, defined in one form and context only to be redefined in another — is exactly what the historical record reveals so powerfully. Redux is part of that historical process, not its perfect conclusion” (xliv).

Needless to say, if you visit the web site of City Lights Books, you will find the “D” word is still up there today. And that’s because commercial publishers aren’t interested in editing theory; they’re interested in selling books. (Likewise, for their edition of Naked Lunch, Grauerholz and Miles were careful to avoid the term — although you might say that “restored” begs other questions — while the jacket blurb insisted on identifying the text as “the definitive version”.) The active agency of publishers is an important issue so far as William Burroughs is concerned, especially early on in his career — and is a story written in miniature in the very title of his first novel.

In 1950, he titled his manuscript “Junk”; in 1953 it was published as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict; in 1977 the “unexpurgated and complete” edition was published under the title Junky. Although the only title Burroughs ever wanted was the first — “Junk” — I lost the argument with Penguin’s marketing department, and the best I could do was to smuggle this into its subtitle. Unhappily, the “D” word rather undercut the point I wanted to make, which is why for The Yage Letters Redux, a text whose history is even more chequered and contingent, I laboured the point in the Editor’s Introduction.

My larger case is twofold. Firstly, that while Lopez’s claim about Burroughs’ “one book” oeuvre has some truth to it, on the one hand, it risks dehistoricizing his work, and on the other, the opposite is equally true — namely that each of Burroughs’ texts is radically plural, a cut-up of manuscripts, a composite of several distinct material histories, in which contingent factors, including the decisions of publishers, played a decisive role in determining content as well as title. And secondly, I want to argue for the importance of recognising this history because, as I’ve already suggested, it had a direct impact on both the thematics and methods of Burroughs’ writing.

The Textual History of Burroughs’ Early Novels

Now to clarify all this, I want to run through the manuscript and publishing history of this trilogy of short novels — whose re-editing I’m hoping to complete next year, now with the benefit of access to the Berg Collection.

To begin at the beginning, whereas the fact of Naked Lunch‘s complex genetic history is well known — albeit most often in the form of inaccurate myths — the first three novels Burroughs wrote have long been seen as straightforward, conventional autobiographical narratives.

Certainly, the compositional history seems to suggest a simple, linear sequence, as each text fictionalised a period of Burroughs’ recent experience one after another, during a four year period in which he lived in Mexico City:

The apparent tight linearity of this trilogy is, however, destabilized by the publication history, which scrambled the chronological order of its writing across four decades:

But there’s more to it than that, as we’ll see if we go through the manuscripts individually.

When it was published in 1953, Junkie looked, crudely, like this —

— where I’ve used dark blue to represent the narrative set in America, and purple for the narrative set in Mexico.

But the manuscript of “Junk” he finished in 1950 had almost none of this second narrative:

Since Burroughs scholars believed his original manuscript was lost, what happened wasn’t clear. My research established that this manuscript was in fact held at Columbia, while the missing material turned up among the Ginsberg papers at Stanford. Why it was added and where it came from tell us a good deal about the decisive part played by Burroughs’ publishers in determining the integrity of his texts.

For the reason Burroughs added a new final quarter to “Junk” — about 14,000 words, all set in Mexico — was because, in summer 1952, his publishers, Ace Books, told him to make it longer. And most of this material he cannibalized from the opening chapters of the new novel he had started writing, but which Ace did not want to publish, namely, Queer. Since this was written in the 3rd person, whereas “Junk” used the 1st, this required a good deal of rewriting but, since he was working to order and in haste, all sorts of small but significant contradictions crept in.

Although I was quite confident I had all I needed, to complete the editing of Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” properly required access to the only complete manuscript of “Queer” — but in 2003 that remained in private hands, so the new edition was published without it.

Now, if we turn to “Queer”: with its first two chapters removed to make up the last sections of Junkie, when a manuscript surfaced in 1984 — having been presumed lost for 30 years — its publishers, Viking, were faced with an even worse problem than Ace Books, since Burroughs never finished the manuscript and all that was left was a fragment too short to even call a novella. What to do? Well, same problem, same solution. So they raided an unused manuscript to make a new ending, which was duly added on for the publication of Queer in 1985 as an Epilogue. This, combined with a long Introduction Burroughs was required to write, added up to a full quarter of the whole book:

“Queer” (1952)

Queer (1985)

Even though this material is in the 1st person, not the 3rd, the new ending, entitled “Mexico City Return,” seemed to follow on perfectly from the end of “Queer”. Where that had Burroughs’ fictional alter-ego travelling from Mexico to South America, this has him travelling back from South America to Mexico. Since both are set in late summer, the gap in time between them seems a few weeks at most.

However, if we go back to the chronology of composition, there’s a striking parallel between summer 1951 and summer 1953. Sure enough, it turns out that the actual time gap was not two weeks but two years, because this material was written in 1953 to describe not Burroughs’ first trip to South America and back, but his second.

Which brings us to the next issue: where this epilogue came from. It turns out that it came from the third manuscript in Burroughs’ trilogy, “Yage,” which narrated his 1953 trip to South America. In fact, this was the ending of that original manuscript, but seems to have become separated from it when the rest of the manuscript was lost in the mid-’50s.

This in turn meant that, when “Yage” was published in 1963, the 1953 material was now so short it had to be combined with miscellaneous other letters and texts written in the 1960s.

“Yage” Ms. (1953)

The Yage Letters (1963)

Needless to say, as I was working on the new edition of The Yage Letters, I was aware that the Burroughs archive contained a manuscript that might possibly have been this long lost original from 1953. But, since access was not forthcoming — and couldn’t have been anticipated in the near future — the edition went ahead without it.

Now, to end with two final points. Firstly, back in late 1953, with Junkie published but no prospects for either “Queer” or “Yage,” Burroughs sketched in his notebook — due to be published later this year — a completely different arrangement of all the material he had written over the past two years. He thought of making a composite text out of six sections of material (including two short pieces which would have been written from scratch) that overlapped the end of Junky, all of “Queer,” and all of “Yage.”

Mexican Composite Manuscript

The result would have been to make one book based on Burroughs’ two journeys from Mexico to South America and back. If this had been published as the sequel to Junkie, then neither Queer nor The Yage Letters would have ever appeared.

But if this one book had come about, the result would have been a single, entirely coherent, linear narrative. It would therefore have contradicted the evolving thematic focus of these manuscripts and so undone Burroughs’ early steps towards his trademark collage aesthetic in which times, places, and identities escape their fixed location. The thematic direction of Burroughs’ writing at this point is summed up by his visionary, yagé-fuelled account of the “Composite City” that concluded “Yage” as published — a topographic fantasy space where “the unknown past and the emergent future meet” (Yage, 53) — and by the description of Mexico City that concluded Queer as published, in which the city is envisioned as “a terminal of space-time travel” (Queer, 131).

And this is why I think it’s hard to see Burroughs’ books as broken branches fallen from the tree of his archive.

For as actually published, Queer and The Yage Letters are radically composite works, each a mix of manuscripts put together only by a series of contingent histories: the end of Burroughs’ first novel had been lifted from the beginning of his second, while the ending of his second novel was taken from the end of his third, and of course since these cannibalizations took place over four decades and the novels were published out of sequence, the chronology of Burroughs’ potentially straightforward autobiographical narrative was, in effect, cut up.

The material contingencies of publication therefore modelled the very disruption of temporality that would inspire Burroughs to methodically cut up his manuscripts to make composite texts, and to speak of moving out of Time and into Space. He came to recognise this only in retrospect, at the time of assembling Naked Lunch — another haphazard, piecemeal composite production — but it confirmed the direction of his work, and his attitude towards publication, from then onwards.

Therefore, the one thing that the archive, as a work in itself, necessarily lacks, is the determining effect on Burroughs’ writing of the simple but material fact of publication. Hence the importance of representing, rather than repressing, the contingent manuscript histories of Burroughs’ novels through scholarly editions — always assuming that his literary output is indeed worthy of serious consideration…

San Francisco: City Lights 1963, one of 3,000 copies in wraps. Maynard & Miles A8a. Consisting mostly of letters written to Allen Ginsberg by Burroughs on his trip to South America in 1953, but including letters by Ginsberg as well.

_____ 1975, second edition in wraps, adds a new letter dated 10 July 1953.

_____ 1988, third edition in wraps, this edition has a shorter Introduction by Ginsberg.

_____ 2006, new “redux” edition edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris, bound in wraps.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The first edition of Yage Letters published by City Lights in 1963 is a slim and seemingly unassuming book. The cover has become famous and the book sells well, but it remains largely undiscovered territory to scholars. Only 18,000 words long and struggling to reach 68 pages, it was originally issued without an introduction or notes. In college, Yage Letters was presented as something of a curiosity; a playground upon which a few isolated professors interested in queer, racial, or political theory could tinker with ideas on tourism, colonialism, imperialism and the Other. The Sheltering Sky and The Heart of Darkness share similar themes. Later, I viewed the book as an ur-text in the psychedelic revolution published around the time of Stranger in a Strange Land, The Island, and the Psychedelic Review. (For an archive of the Review, see maps.org.) As a collectible, this collaboration between Burroughs and Ginsberg stood out as an essential Burroughs text, but not a prized possession that I often looked at or sought to learn more about.

Yage Redux and Oliver Harris’ upcoming essay for Postmodern Culture, “Not Burroughs’ Final Fix: Materializing the Yage Letters,” revolutionize my views on nearly every level. Redux roughly triples the size of the first edition, and I spent much of my time in the new introduction, notes, and appendices. As the review on RealityStudio makes clear, Harris researches and clarifies the scientific, cultural, and political history surrounding Burroughs and Ginsberg’s explorations into South America. Harris also demonstrates that a tremendous amount of editing and drafting went into creating the epistolary novel. The immediacy was carefully constructed. On that score, particularly interesting was Burroughs’ drafts for a Yage article that he hoped to publish in a mainstream magazine.

Yet for me, the highpoint of Harris’ work is his exploration into the role of the little magazine in the publication of Yage Letters. His research completely alters the manner in which I view the early Burroughs magazine appearances. As my columns to RealityStudio attest, I saw the magazine appearances of the late 1950s and early 1960s as divided into two camps: Naked Lunch related and cut-ups. The brilliance of Naked Lunch tends to blind readers and scholars to other aspects of Burroughs’ work, particularly in the early period. Harris makes this perfectly clear when he discusses “From Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” that appeared in Black Mountain Review 7. I always focused on the Naked Lunch part of that title and neglected the fact that the piece was part of the earlier written (but later published) Yage Letters. The July 10, 1953 letter which describes the Composite City is the twelfth letter of the “In Search of Yage” section in the second and third editions of Yage Letters. This letter is missing from the first edition. Burroughs cannibalized Yage Letters for use in Naked Lunch. Harris provides much information on the textual relationship between Naked Lunch and Yage Letters.

From the Naked Lunch related material, I tended to jump to Burroughs’ cut-up experiments culminating in the cut-up art books of Time and APO-33 of 1965/1966. As Harris points out in detail in his Postmodern Culture article and more briefly in Redux, I jumped over the important bridge between the Naked Lunch magazines and the cut-up appearances. That bridge in more ways than one was Yage Letters. Much of my time was spent studying Big Table 1, the Chicago Review, Kulchur 1, Semina 4 and Yugen 3. As stated previously, I considered Black Mountain Review as only a part of Naked Lunch. I viewed these magazines as keys to getting Naked Lunch into print and proof of the magazines’ importance in Burroughs’ publication history. This was a gross oversight causing me to minimize their importance. My focus on Naked Lunch ignored Big Table 2 and Kulchur 3 entirely, which printed eleven of the twelve letters comprising the “In Search of Yage” section in all editions of Yage Letters. In addition, I never concentrated on what was actually in Floating Bear issues 5 and 9 (the letter dated June 21, 1960 and “Roosevelt after Inauguration,” respectively) narrowing in on the cut-up aspects of issue 5 and the obscenity trial surrounding issue 9. City Lights Journal 1 (“Am I Dying, Meester?”) represented yet another cut-up. In essence, I overlooked the entire contents of Yage Letters that was published in little magazines before the first City Lights edition. If anything demonstrates the importance of the little magazine in the publication history of William Burroughs, it is Yage Letters.

Harris’ research takes this fact much further. By 1963, no manuscript of Yage Letters existed. Ferlinghetti relied on the little magazines in order to create the City Lights edition. In his Postmodern Culture article, Harris shows how each little magazine left its imprint on the Yage Letters text. Especially interesting is a close reading of the use of colons and commas in the opening addresses of the letters and their implications for a postmodern concept of editing and the text. Harris also shows how the format and editing process of Floating Bear resulted in a remarkably accurate presentation of the June 21, 1960 letter in Issue 5.

Just as Yage Letters bridges the gap between Naked Lunch and cut-up appearances in little magazines, the book demonstrates a shift in Burroughs’ writing technique. The “In Search of Yage” section shows Burroughs developing the routine style that would culminate in Naked Lunch. Letter writing is key to this process. “Roosevelt after Inauguration” leads to the Talking Asshole. The later sections of Yage Letters (the letter from June 21, 1960 and “Am I Dying, Meester?”) utilize and develop the theory of the cut-up. Gysin replaced Ginsberg as mentor and collaborator.

In between the routine and the cut-up lies the Composite City letter of July 10, 1953. In this letter that appeared in Black Mountain Review 7, Burroughs predicted the cut-up before Gysin sliced into the newspapers at the Beat Hotel. While not a true cut-up, the Composite City section reveals an interest in surrealist/Dadaist collage and montage techniques that along with the routine would shape Naked Lunch.

Harris’ work left me wanting more information on a couple of other early periodical appearances: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” in the British Journal of Addiction and the excerpt from Junkie in Man’s Wildcat Adventures. A discussion on Man’s Wildcat Adventures is not really relevant here, but Harris’ research into the mainstream aspirations of Burroughs in the 1950s leaves me puzzled as to how Junkie appeared in a fringe men’s magazine in June 1959. Possibly, Burroughs was so desperate for publication after the rejection of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press that he considered publishing anywhere, including starting his own (eventually aborted) magazine. Perhaps he needed money or maybe Ace sold the rights and it was out of his control. What are the implications of Junkie being published in a men’s magazine? For example, how did this marginalized appearance coupled with the pulping of the Digit edition of Junkie in 1957 affect Burroughs’ view of himself as an author and Junkie in particular? In any case, this forgotten magazine appearance demands further study.

The “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” (“Master Letter”) is more on point. A section of the “Master Letter” deals with Yage. Harris has painstakingly annotated this section showing where the material came from (the aborted Yage article in many cases) and where it went (Naked Lunch in some cases). This work and all mention of the British Journal of Addiction (except for a brief note to the appendices) fell to the editor’s pen. I think this is unfortunate. Given Burroughs’ desperation to see publication (as demonstrated by Harris), the Journal appearance (Burroughs’ second appearance in print) proves of major importance. The “Master Letter” addresses pertinent issues of Burroughs’ authorship (he signed his own name not William Lee or Willy Lee) and scholarship (Burroughs’s views on Yage and other drugs did in fact find publication in scholarly circles as early as 1957). Burroughs’ thoughts and feelings on the British Journal appearance as well as the “Master Letter”‘s reception by the medical community would be interesting. How does the “Master Letter” fit in with Burroughs’ reliance on letter writing in his creative process? How is the “Master Letter” related to Yage Letters and Naked Lunch? How does the “Master Letter”‘s eventual appearance in later editions of Naked Lunch as an appendix change critical and public perception of the Naked Lunch and the “Master Letter?” Many might be unaware of the circumstances and format of its original appearance. This inclusion in later editions dovetails with the editing and textual issues Harris explores in Yage Letters Redux and his article. Clearly, the “Master Letter” deserves further study.

Yage Redux and the Postmodern Culture article answer a multitude of questions, but like any great scholarship they generate a host of new ones. This work provides a ton of information on little magazines and changed my view of my collection. The introductions, appendices and notes give Yage Letters an added weight not merely in terms of size, but also in terms of significance to Burroughs and literature at large. But that significance, like the drug Yage, was always out there; somebody just had to search for it.

RealityStudio notes: Jed mentions Oliver Harris’ annotated version of the “Master Letter.” Professor Harris was kind enough to share one of his working manuscripts, a complex Microsoft Word document that he used to prepare the “In Search of Yage” section of Yage Redux. Copyrights prevent RealityStudio from publishing the entire document here. However, if you want some real insight into the sort of rigor and analysis that Professor Harris put into his work, here are a few images: 1, 2, 3.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I received an email from Oliver Harris, author of William Burroughs: The Secret of Fascination and editor of The Letters of William Burroughs. According to his research and the research of others, much of the information on my web site concerning photographs of Burroughs in New York and Peru is inaccurate. The information Harris provides is wonderful stuff. It is an insight into the type of scholarship we can expect from The Yage Letters Redux and The Latin American Notebook due out soon. See RealityStudio for an interview with Harris on these topics. Hopefully, other readers out there can add their opinions and knowledge to current or future posts. Please check out the link for the Ginsberg Trust. Possibly, Burroughs will get similar treatment in the near future.

Dear Jed,

Just looking at your very interesting site via its link to RealityStudio, and really enjoyed your caption to the photograph illustrating “William Lee.”

However… you’re mistaken about the date. This photograph, taken on Ginsberg’s camera (and presumably by Ginsy himself) dates from autumn 1953; it’s on the same roll and sequence as my favourite picture, the one of WSB in the Met with his Sphinx… Although the exact date is unknown — anywhere between September and December is possible — it’s definitely not ’45, and unlikely to be the Fag in the background… Equally, I think you may be mistaken about the subway station. Like you, I think it ought to be 103rd St and B-way, but Bill Morgan thinks otherwise (and he is pretty reliable). If you check out the Ginsberg Trust site, you’ll see the details they give for this image.

I hope this is useful — I get the impression you care as much about detail as I do, and therefore would prefer to be corrected rather than mistaken, even about little things. Then again, it does rather spoil a nice caption…

One other small query for you – on your page about The Yage Letters, you say that the photographs make you think of “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” but you don’t say why; so what is it about these poses that makes the link?? (By the way, I think you may be mistaken in saying that the picture of WSB with his gun was taken in Pucallpa in July; and with the other picture, I can say with confidence that it wasn’t — I did a lot of research into this one, and worked out that it was taken outside Mocoa in March, and taken by none other than Richard Evans Scultes…)

Oliver

P.S. RealityStudio notes: That doesn’t look like the 8th Avenue and 14th Street subway station to me. The signs there say 14th Street, not 8th Avenue, and the sign in the picture clearly says “Ave.” And it’s definitely not 103rd and Broadway, a location you might pick only because Burroughs mentions it in Junky. To me it looks like the 2nd Avenue station on the F line. The sign looks like it says “2nd Ave.” And compare these pictures of it: 1 and 2. The signs are obviously different but the station is similar. (Then again, many NY subway stations look like that.) This also would have been the nearest station to Burroughs when he lived on East 7th Street with Ginsberg.

It is an acknowledged paradox at the heart of William S. Burroughs’ work that his greatest books called into question how much they were even his. Whereas Samuel Beckett tried to eviscerate the novel from within — to “naughten” it, to borrow a term from Heidegger — Burroughs seemed to do the same to authorship as such. Friends and chance helped to assemble his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, from fragments he claimed not to remember writing. In the 1960s he advocated mechanical procedures, the cut up and the fold in, for composing literary works. Throughout his career he liked to collaborate with other artists. (You imagine teachers writing “plays well with others” on the report cards of young Bill.) And of course many of his works wouldn’t have seen the light of day without the early boosterism of Allen Ginsberg and the later support of James Grauerholz. It’s as though Burroughs himself were rather like the drug yagé: a source of brilliant visions unable to be realized without an added ingredient to potentiate them. Burroughs might have achieved little without the literary catalysts in his life: Ginsberg, Gysin, and Grauerholz. The three Gs.

Given that Burroughs established this approach — not the composition of books but the decomposition of authorship — early in his career, it is not alarming to see his books continuing to be revised since his death in 1997. First Grauerholz and Barry Miles issued Naked Lunch: The Restored Text in 2001, and then Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris published Junky: 50th Anniversary Definitive Edition in 2003. Now Harris presents The Yage Letters Redux, a rigorously edited, researched, and analyzed version of the book that earlier editions called an “epistolary novel” emerging from Burroughs’ 1953 trip to South America in search of the purportedly telepathic drug yagé.

Like the first two revisions, Yage Letters Redux makes minor corrections to the text and adds previously unpublished material in appendixes. Harris has been careful to document his work in notes — a scholarly virtue that should also have been maintained in the “restoration” of Naked Lunch, especially since it is clearly Burroughs’ most important creation. Unlike the first two revisions, however, Yage Letters Redux is the only book to emerge as practically a different work altogether. Try this experiment: read your old edition of Yage Letters, next read Harris’ introduction to the new book, and then read the rest of Yage Letters Redux. You’ll find that Harris has practically recast the entire book with his introduction alone.

To be clear, this is not an act of academic hubris but rather a scholarly achievement. Harris did a marvellous amount of research, one of whose jewels was the discovery of the diaries of Paul Holliday, a botanist who ran into Burroughs in 1953 and described him as a “tall, lank, droopy sort of person with a pessimistic streak for conjuring up all manner of fearful fevers.” Harris situates Burroughs’ adventure in numerous contexts, both literary and historical, and argues that Burroughs was not just a “comically underprepared” oaf lumping through the jungle but rather a serious if unconventional researcher. “It turns out,” writes Harris, that “in June 1953 Burroughs was making the most accurate classification to date — ‘Indeed, the first real botanical achievement in the scientific appraisal of ayahuasca since Spruce’s seminal work in the 1850s’ — since he was the first to identify the genus of the plant now more correctly classified as Psychotria viridis.”

This background is important to situate the work, but it is Harris’ research into the composition of Yage Letters that forces the reader to reconceive the book altogether. Based on a careful analysis of manuscripts, correspondence, and documents in City Lights’ archives, Harris discovered that this “epistolary novel” is more novel than epistle. “Contrary to all assumptions,” Harris writes, Yage Letters “did not start out as real letters or edited letters or any kind of letters at all.” Instead, Burroughs had originally made several attempts to draft a saleable article — similar to his later attempt to write a “letter from Tangier” for the slicks — which was eventually cut up into letters as a way of providing a loose framework for disparate material.

This is an amazing revelation. It has long been known that great chunks of Naked Lunch were extracted from Burroughs’ letters to Ginsberg. Now it emerges that the vast bulk of yagé “letters” were the opposite, a pseudo-correspondence distilled from an attempt at more purposeful prose. If the letter format had previously given readers the impression of immediacy, as though they were receiving Burroughs’ dispatches from the jungle, Harris’ scholarship forces them to reconsider the book as a carefully contrived literary work, one of whose aims was to provide an impression of immediacy. When transforming the aborted articles into “letters,” for example, Burroughs sometimes changed verb tenses to heighten the action.

The craft — hidden in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter — of Burroughs’ “correspondence” emerges clearly if you compare it to the few actual letters remaining in the book: Ginsberg’s 1960 letter recounting his own experience with yagé; Burroughs’ portentous, pretentious reply (bear in mind Burroughs was writing as a spurned lover); and Ginsberg’s brief 1963 letter addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” as though the sender were no longer sure of the person the recipient had become. Of these, Ginsberg’s yagé account is the only letter of substance, and it tends to remind you of meeting somebody at a party who regales you with some endless narrative of a drug trip. What could be more tiresome? After bearing with Ginsberg’s hallucinations, it is a relief and a pleasure to read Burroughs’ precise and laconic descriptions. In fact, only in contrast to Ginsberg does it occur to you that Burroughs writes very little about the cognitive effects of drug experience, usually conveying it through a list of physical symptoms instead: vomiting, numbness, disorientation. “I was hit by violent, sudden nausea and rushed for the door hitting my shoulder against the door post.” This detail — stumbling into the door — seems to say more about yagé than Ginsberg’s ravings about a “Nose-God.”

Ironically, while the yagé experience dominates Ginsberg’s letter, it is less the experience than the idea of yagé that seems to motivate Burroughs. Harris reminds readers that Burroughs’ narrative — which consists mostly of nothing special: getting drunk, waiting for airplanes that never arrive, coping with visa hassles, sitting in parks, picking up “boys” and tolerating their petty thievery — is “far more about the misadventures of searching than the finding,” and you wonder if this wasn’t true of Burroughs in general. He roamed the world, tried every drug, dabbled with crime, flirted with scientology, loved numerous men, boys, and even a few women. Was it all in pursuit of some “final fix,” as Burroughs put it? God’s Own Medicine? Certainly his books never seem to attain finality or fixation, even posthumously, thus leaving readers to undergo their own misadventures in seeking and finding. Perhaps this even helps to explain their appeal — what could be better than opening up this incredible new edition Yage Letters and discovering a practically “lost” or recovered book by a favorite author?