With William Burroughs Read online

  Burroughs smiles for the camera in the BBC Chelsea Hotel documentary directed by Nigel Finch, New York City. Photo: Victor Bockris

  BOCKRIS: Have you ever taped television?

  BURROUGHS: Lots of times. I had tapes of television shows, then I did all these experiments of putting the soundtrack of one television show onto another similar one and people would come in and it would take ten minutes before anyone realized there was anything wrong if the programs were at all similar. Say the soundtrack of one western on another, they work uncannily well. There’s a shot just where it should be and so on. Then there’ll be a moment and people will say wait a minute there’s something wrong there. But it has taken fifteen or twenty minutes before someone has realized this is not the soundtrack that went with that particular program. It’s very amusing.

  A LETTER FROM CARL WEISSNER: MANNHEIM, WEST GERMANY 1974

  In 1966 I was living at l-3a Mühltalstrasse, Heidelberg, West Germany, in a room about the size of a 3rd-class passenger berth of an Estonian saltpeter freighter on the Riga-Valparaiso run. On June 6, at precisely 8.20 P.M., there was a knock on the door. I opened the door and for a fraction of a second before the hall light went out I caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, about 52 years of age, black suit black tie white shirt w/ black needle stripes black phosphorescent eyes black hat. He looked like Opium Jones.

  “Hello,” he said in a voice hard and black as smoked metal.

  “Hello, Mr. Burroughs,” I said. “Come in.”

  He had come from Paris where he had worked on the soundtrack of Chappaqua, with Conrad Rooks. He took three or four steps and stood by the narrow table in front of the window. He put his hands into his pockets and in one smooth movement brought out two reels of mylar tape and put them on the table.

  “Got your tape recorder?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s compare tapes.”

  We played his tapes, then some of mine. Nothing was said. Except at one point he stopped his tape, wound it back for a second or two, and played it again. “You hear that?” he asked. “…‘wiring wiring’… It’s the voice of a friend of mine from the south. Haven’t seen him in twenty years. Don’t know how his voice got on there.”

  Then we put a microphone on the table and took turns talking to the tape recorder switching back and forth between tracks at random intervals. We played it all back and sat there listening to our conversation:

  “The other veins crawl through mine,” he said. Adjusting his throat microphone. Breathing heavily in the warm anaesthetic mist that filled the old Studio.

  “Mind you take film. I want to see that. Grammars of distant differential tissue.

  “Agony to breathe here.

  “Muy alone in such tense and awful silence and por eso have I survived.

  “Echoes of sticky basements. From Lyon to Marseilles. Fossil flesh stormed the exits.

  “Carl made words in the air without a throat without a tongue. Vestigial penis figures to the sky now isn’t that cute?

  “Yes that’s what makes a real 23 as the focus snaps like this & you are actually there.

  “Junkie there at the corner flicking empty condoms H caps KY tubes?

  “Now what I was telling you about the Police Parallele. The Manipulator takes pictures for 24 hours. His eyes unbluffed unreadable.

  “His face melted under the flickering arc lights. Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for.”

  At approximately 1.30 A.M. Mr. Burroughs took a cab to the Hotel Kaiserhof. At approximately 1.36 the receptionist handed him the key to his room. It was the key to room 23.

  DINNER AT BURROUGHS’ APARTMENT: BOULDER 1977

  BOCKRIS: When you were writing Naked Lunch you told Jack Kerouac that you were apparently an agent from some other planet who hadn’t gotten his messages clearly decoded yet. Has all your work been sent from other places and your job been to decode it?

  BURROUGHS: I think this is true with any writer. The best seems to come from somewhere … perhaps from the nondominant side of the brain. There’s a very interesting book I mentioned earlier called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. His theory is that the first voices were hallucinated voices, that everyone was schizophrenic up till about 800 B.C. The voice of God came from the nondominant side of the brain, and the man who was obeying these voices, to put it in Freudian terms, would have a superego and an id but no ego at all. Therefore no responsibility.

  This broke down in a time of great chaos, and then you got the concepts of morality, responsibility, law, and also divination. If you really know what to do, you don’t have to ask. Jaynes’ idea was that early men knew what to do at all times; they were told, and this was coming from outside, as far as they were concerned. This was not fancy, because they were actually seeing and hearing these gods. So they didn’t have anything that we call “I.” Your “I” is a completely illusory concept. It has a space in which it exists. They didn’t have that space, there wasn’t any “I” or anything corresponding to it.

  BOCKRIS: Is human nature to blame for …

  BURROUGHS: Human nature is another figment of the imagination.

  BOCKRIS: What do I mean when I say human nature?

  BURROUGHS: You mean there is some implicit way that people are. I don’t think this is true at all. The tremendous range in which people can be conditioned would call in question any such concept.

  BOCKRIS: There seems to be an alarmingly large number of meaningless words polluting our language.

  BURROUGHS: The captain says, “The ship is sinking.” People say he’s a pessimist. He says, “The ship will float indefinitely.” He’s an optimist. But this has actually nothing to do with whatever is happening with the leak and the condition of the ship. Both pessimist and optimist are meaningless words. All abstract words are meaningless. They will lump such disparate political phenomena as Nazi Germany, an expansionist militaristic movement in a highly industrialized country, together with South Africa and call them both fascism. South Africa is just a white minority trying to hang on to what they got. It’s not expansionist. They’re not the same phenomena at all. To call both fascist is like saying there’s no difference between a wristwatch and a grandfather clock.

  BOCKRIS: Do you think what appears in newspapers, on television, and in daily intercourse is quite meaningless?

  BURROUGHS: Absolutely, because they’re always using such generalities. There is no such entity as Americans, there’s no such entity as “most people.” These are generalities. All generalities are meaningless. You’ve got to pin it down to a specific person doing a specific thing at a specific time and space. “People say …” “People believe …” “In the consensus of informed medical opinion …” Well, the minute you hear this, you know if the man can’t pin down who he’s talking about, where and when, you know you’re listening to meaningless statements.

  The consensus of medical opinion was that marijuana drove people insane. Well, we pinned Anslinger down on this. All he could come up with was one Indian doctor who stated that he considered the use of marijuana grounds for incarceration in a mental institution. Therefore it was proven that marijuana drove people insane. One should always challenge a generality. Police Chief Davis of Los Angeles wrote a column on pornography. He says, “Studies have shown that pornography leads to economic disaster.” What studies? Where are these wondrous studies?

  BOCKRIS: In your new novel, Cities of the Red Night, you write about body transference.

  BURROUGHS: I’m convinced the whole cloning book was a fraud, but it’s within the range of possibilities: and there’s no doubt that what you call your “I” has a definite location within the brain, and if they can transplant it, they can transplant it. In fact, what these transplant doctors are working up to is brain transplants.

  BOCKRIS: Have you had any out-of-the-body experiences?

  BURROUGHS: Who hasn’t?

  BOCKRIS: I’m not quite sure wha
t they are.

  BURROUGHS: I’ll give you one right now. You’re staying where?

  BOCKRIS: The Lazy L Motel.

  BURROUGHS: What does your room look like?

  BOCKRIS: Standard motel, double bed, rust-colored rug and …

  BURROUGHS: You’re having an out-of-the-body experience. Right now you’re there.

  BOCKRIS: I was standing in the middle of the room looking around it.

  BURROUGHS: That’s good, isn’t it? But dreams are also, of course …

  BOCKRIS: Have you ever dreamed that you were someone else?

  BURROUGHS: Frequently. I looked in a mirror and found that I was black. Looked down at my hands and they were still white. This is quite common. It’s usually someone I don’t know. I look at my face and it’s quite different, and not only my face but my thoughts. I’ve come in in the middle of someone else’s identity and feel usually quite comfortable with the person I’ve become.

  BOCKRIS: Often I find when I tell a lie it becomes true. I say to someone, “Well, no, I’m awfully sorry I can’t come over tonight because I’m going to see so and so,” and I actually end up going to see so and so, but it wasn’t true at all when I said it.

  BURROUGHS: I’ve had that happen lots of times.

  BOCKRIS: I’ve become more careful what lies I tell.

  BURROUGHS: Talking about writers who write things that actually happen, take Graham Greene. I went to Algiers during the Algerian war in 1956. All the planes were jammed with people trying to leave and I couldn’t get out. I was staying in this dumpy hotel, and I used to eat every day in this Milk Bar which had big jars of passion fruit, various banana splits, all kinds of juices and little sandwiches; there were pillars made of mirror all around. About a week after I left, a bomb exploded in that Milk Bar and there was this terrible mess. Brion [Gysin] was there very shortly after the bomb exploded and he later described the scene. People were lying around with their legs cut off, spattered with maraschino cherries, passion fruit, ice cream, brains, pieces of mirror and blood. Now, at approximately the same time this happened, Graham Greene was writing The Quiet American in Saigon, and he described an explosion in a Milk Bar in almost exactly the same details. So, years later when I was reading the book and came to the Milk Bar explosion scene, I said, “Uh oh, time to duck,” because I knew exactly what was going to happen.

  DINNER WITH NICOLAS ROEG, LOU REED, BOCKRISWYLIE AND GERARD MALANGA: NEW YORK 1978

  BURROUGHS [talking about Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock]: It’s a good book. It’s got a strange shape. He’s suddenly saying you’re a bad Catholic. That’s a very good book.

  NICOLAS ROEG: I’m interested by your liking Brighton Rock. It is an overlooked book in literature. Hands up those who read Brighton Rock? Excellent! Go to the top of the form. And stay there till I come for you.

  BOCKRIS: What’s that one about?

  BURROUGHS: It’s about boys—seventeen-year-old boooooooiiiiiyyyysss. With razor blades strapped on their fingertips or something. I never got into that razor blade thing exactly … Do you know a writer named Denton Welch?

  ROEG: Who was that?

  BURROUGHS: He was sort of the original punk, and his father called him Punky. He was riding on a bicycle when he was twenty, and some complete cunt hit him and crippled him for the rest of his life. He died in 1948 at the age of thirty-three after writing four excellent books. He was a very great writer, very precious.

  ROEG: Punk is a very good word. It’s an old English word. Shakespeare used it and it originally meant prostitute. In fact, it used to appear in the forties in the movies. I guess it must have different connotations in America. I love the subtle differences in the language. Americans are able to cut it down and make it much slicker. Where we say lift you say elevator. Where you say automobile we say car.

  Lou Reed came in with his Chinese girlfriend and some guitarists, sat down and immediately launched into a playful attack. He told Burroughs that he’d read his great essay called Kerouac in High Times and asked why he didn’t write more stuff like that.

  BURROUGHS: I write quite a lot.

  Reed wondered whether Bill had written any more books with a straight narrative since Junky.

  BURROUGHS: Certainly. Certainly. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, for example. And my new novel, Cities of the Red Night, has a fairly straight narrative line.

  Peter Beard, Nicolas Roeg, and William Burroughs at my apartment after their conversations. Photo by Bobby Grossman

  I got up, went across the room and returned with a copy of The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Reed asked if it was an opera.

  BURROUGHS: No man, no. You don’t know about the last words of Dutch Schultz? You obviously don’t know. They had a stenographer at his bedside in the hospital taking down everything he said. These cops are sitting around asking him questions, sending out for sandwiches, it went on for 24 hours. He’s saying things like, “A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim,” and the cops are saying, “C’mon, don’t give us that. Who shot ya?” It’s incredible. Gertrude Stein said that he outdid her. Gertrude really liked Dutch Schultz.

  BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Do you know where Genet is now?

  BURROUGHS: Nobody knows. The people who know him just don’t seem to know where he is. Brion knows him very well. I thought he was one of the most charming people I ever met. Most perceptive and extremely intelligent. While his English is nonexistent and my French very bad, we never had the slightest difficulty in communicating. That can be disastrous. You get a real intellectual French type like Sartre, the fact that I didn’t speak French would just end the discussion right there.

  BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Where’d you meet Genet?

  BURROUGHS: I met him in Chicago at the convention.

  BOCKRIS-WYLIE: What was he like? What was he wearing?

  BURROUGHS: He was wearing corduroy trousers and some old beat up jacket, and no tie. For one thing he’s just completely there, sincere and straight-forward. Right there is Genet. When people were chased out of Lincoln Park, there was a cop right behind Genet with a nightstick and Genet turned around and did like this, “I’m an old man.” And the guy veered away, didn’t hit him. There were more coming up, so he went into an apartment at random, knocked at a door, and someone said, “Who’s there?” He said, “MONSIEUR GENET!” The guy opened the door and it turned out he was writing his thesis on Genet.

  BOCKRIS-WYLIE: How do you feel about Cocteau? Proust?

  BURROUGHS: I think Proust is a very great writer. Much greater writer than Cocteau or Gide. I was in the army hospital in the process of getting discharged. And because of the bureaucracy it took four months for this to come through, so I had the time to read Remembrance of Things Past from start to finish. It is a terrifically great work. Cocteau appears as a minor poseur next to this tremendous work of fiction. And Gide appears as a prissy old queen.

  BOCKRIS: I understand you met Céline shortly before he died?

  BURROUGHS: This expedition to see Céline was organized in 1958 by Allen Ginsberg who had got his address from someone. It is in Meudon, across the river from Paris proper. We finally found a bus that let us off in a shower of French transit directions: “Tout droit, Messieurs …” Walked for half a mile in this rundown suburban neighborhood, shabby villas with flaking stucco—it looked sort of like the outskirts of Los Angeles—and suddenly there’s this great cacophony of barking dogs. Big dogs, you could tell by the bark. “This must be it,” Allen said. Here’s Céline shouting at the dogs, and then he stepped into the driveway and motioned to us to come in. He seemed glad to see us and clearly we were expected. We sat down at a table in a paved courtyard behind a two-story building and his wife, who taught dancing—she had a dancing studio—brought coffee.

  Céline looked exactly as you would expect him to look. He had on a dark suit, scarves and shawls wrapped around him, and the dogs, confined in a fenced-in area behind the villa, could be heard from time to time barking and howling. Allen asked if they ever killed anyone
and Céline said, “Nooo. I just keep them for the noise.” Allen gave him some books, Howl and some poems by Gregory Corso and my book Junky. Céline glanced at the books without interest and laid them sort of definitively aside. Clearly he had no intention of wasting his time. He was sitting out there in Meudon. Céline thinks of himself as the greatest French writer, and no one’s paying any attention to him. So, you know, there’s somebody who wanted to come and see him. He had no conception of who we were.

  Allen asked him what he thought of Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Michaux, just everybody he could think of. He waved this thin, blue-veined hand in dismissal: “Every year there is a new fish in the literary pond.

  “It is nothing. It is nothing. It is nothing,” he said about all of them.

  “Are you a good doctor?” Allen asked.

  And he said: “Well … I am reasonable.”

  Was he on good terms with the neighbors? Of course not.

  “I take my dogs to the village because of the Jeeews. The postmaster destroys my letters. The druggist won’t fill my prescriptions.…” The barking dogs punctuated his words.

  We walked right into a Céline novel. And he’s telling us what shits the Danes were. Then a story about being shipped out during the war: the ship was torpedoed and the passengers are hysterical so Céline lines them all up and gives each of them a big shot of morphine, and they all got sick and vomited all over the boat.

  He waved goodbye from the driveway and the dogs were raging and jumping against the fence.

  BOCKRIS: Who else do you read?

  BURROUGHS: A writer who I read and reread constantly is Conrad. I’ve read practically all of him. He has somewhat the same gift of transmutation that Genet does. Genet is talking about people who are very commonplace and dull. The same with Conrad. He’s not dealing with unusual people at all, but it’s his vision of them that transmutes them. His novels are very carefully written.