With William Burroughs Page 4

  BOCKRIS: Is there anyone in particular who influenced your work?

  BURROUGHS: I’d say Rimbaud is one of my influences, even though I’m a novelist rather than a poet. I have also been very much influenced by Baudelaire, and St.-John Perse, who in his turn was very much influenced by Rimbaud. I’ve actually cut out pages of Rimbaud and used some of that in my work. Any of the poetic or image sections of my work would show his influence.

  MALANGA: Are you very self-critical or critical of others?

  BURROUGHS: I’m certainly very self-critical. I’m critical of my work. And I do a great deal of editing. Sinclair Lewis said if you have just written something you think is absolutely great and you can’t wait to publish it or show it to someone, throw it away. And I’ve found that to be very accurate. Tear it into small pieces and throw it into someone else’s garbage can. It’s terrible!

  MALANGA: Do you have a lot of secrets?

  BURROUGHS: I would say that I have no secrets. In the film The Seventh Seal the man asked Death, “What are your secrets?” Death replied, “I have no secrets.” No writer has any secrets. It’s all in his work.

  MALANGA: In an article by your son that appeared in Esquire you were quoted as saying, “All past is fiction.” Maybe you could explain this further.

  BURROUGHS: Sure. We think of the past as being something that has just happened, right? Therefore, it is fact; but nothing could be further from the truth. This conversation is being recorded. Now suppose ten years from now you tamper with the recordings and change them around, after I was dead. Who could say that wasn’t the actual recording? The past is something that can be changed, altered at your discretion. [Burroughs points to the two Sonycorders facing each other that are taping this dinner.] The only evidence that this conversation ever took place here is the recording, and if those recordings were altered, then that would be the only record. The past only exists in some record of it, right? There are no facts. We don’t know how much of history is completely fiction. There was a young man named Peter Webber. He died in Paris, I believe, in 1956. His papers fell into my hands, quite by chance. I attempted to reconstruct the circumstances of his death. I talked to his girlfriend. I talked to all sorts of people. Everywhere I got a different story. He had died in this hotel. He had died in that hotel. He had died of an OD of heroin. He had died of withdrawal from heroin. He had died of a brain tumor. Everybody was either lying or covering up something; it was a regular Rashomon [reference is to the Japanese film in which everybody gives a different account of the story; even the dead man who they bring back with a medium tells a completely different story] or they were simply confused. This investigation was undertaken two years after his death. Now imagine the inaccuracy of something that was one hundred years ago! The past is largely a fabrication by the living. And history is simply a bundle of fabrication. You see, there’s no record this conversation ever took place or what was said, except what is on these machines. If the recordings were lost, or they got near a magnet and were wiped out, there would be no recordings whatever. So what were the actual facts? What was actually said here? There are no actual facts.

  Burroughs being photographed by Warhol for a portrait at The Factory while a Wharholed Franz Kafka looks on discerningly. Photo by Bobby Grossman

  MALANGA: IS ESP something that has helped you in your writing?

  BURROUGHS: Yes, I think all writers are actually dealing in this area. If you’re not to some extent telepathic, then you can’t be a writer, at least not a novelist where you have to be able to get into someone else’s mind and see experience and what that person feels. I think that telepathy, far from being a special ability confined to a few psychics is quite widespread and used every day in all walks of life. Watch two horse traders. You can see the figures taking shape … “Won’t go above … won’t go below.” Card players pride themselves on the ability to block telepathy, the “poker face.” Anybody who is good at anything uses ESP.

  Interrupting Bill again, Lou asked him which one of his books was his favorite.

  BURROUGHS: Authors are notoriously bad judges of their own work. I don’t really know …

  Reed claimed that he had gone out and bought Naked Lunch as soon as it was published. He then asked what Burroughs thought of City of Night by John Rechy and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, adding that these two books couldn’t have been written without what Burroughs had done.

  BURROUGHS: I admire Last Exit to Brooklyn very much. You can see the amount of time that went into the making of that book. It took seven years to write. And I like Rechy’s work very much too. We met him out in L.A. Very pleasant man, I thought; we only saw him for about half an hour.

  Reed asked whether Rechy had read Burroughs.

  BURROUGHS: I didn’t ask him, no.

  Changing his tack radically, Lou said he’d heard that Burroughs had cut his toe off to avoid the draft.

  BURROUGHS [chuckling]: I would prefer to neither confirm nor deny any of these statements.

  Lou then wanted to know why Bill had used the name William Lee on Junky.

  BURROUGHS: Because my parents were still alive and I didn’t want them to be embarrassed.

  Reed asked whether Burroughs’ parents read.

  BURROUGHS: They might have.

  Reed told Bill that he felt Junky was his most important book because of the way it says something that hadn’t been said before so straightforwardly. Reed then asked Bill if he was boring him.

  BURROUGHS [staring blankly at the table]: Wha …?

  THREE SPEECHES

  ALLEN GINSBERG: I nominated William Burroughs for membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, of which I’m a member, but I don’t think he was accepted. So apparently the establishment still hasn’t fully accepted him, although he is Supreme Establishment himself as far as literature: I think he’s one of the immortals; he’s had an enormous effect on succeeding generations of writers directly, and indirectly through my work and Kerouac’s work in terms of his ideas, his ideologies, his Yankee pragmatic spiritual investigations. But directly—more importantly—through his own spectral prose. I think Burroughs should get the Nobel Prize. Genet never got it. Obviously Genet deserves it. Just Burroughs and Genet themselves are really two contenders for world honors.

  MILES: William is a writer who has gone through a long period of addiction and survived. He spent twelve years as a drug addict and is one of the few people who have ever been able to really transform it into something solid, and use it. It really enabled him to understand a control system, and when he applied his understandings of the control systems to literature, which is essentially what he did, and what Brion helped him to do by introducing him to the cut-up technique, for instance, he automatically entered into a public field of information, exposing control systems, which is what politics has been all about, the CIA, and word addiction and everything else Bill talks about, so his actual art and his literature have been about subjects which transcend literature and move out into everyday political experience as experienced by our generation, but not by his generation, oddly enough, which is why he’s so important to the underground press and people like that. He is still probably the most relevant writer alive. He has that extraordinary combination of elements in his background which makes him that. He’s able to transform things, and that’s why people respond to him. He also has that cynical funny angle like Céline that appeals to a certain type of person who has taken a lot of drugs maybe. He’s actually a humorist to a lot of people who transcend the superficial level of a lot of present-day humor that we get fed on. William is probably the funniest person you can come upon. As a writer, I think he’s in a very crucial phase right now. He’s obviously always going to be important, but he hasn’t achieved the kind of success that he deserves. His career parallels Kerouac’s in this respect. His early books are really significant but no one realized that until about six years later. Then he got really famous and kept on writing. But Kerouac’s later books
weren’t as good. I think Bill’s capable of better than that. He could grow to produce something that is better than Naked Lunch. I don’t think William ever needs to justify himself as a writer. He’s written a lot. He hasn’t just written Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. William’s had an absolute rebirth since he came back to the States. He’s a very different person now, much more confident in his position as some kind of literary celebrity and I think it was moving back to New York that enabled him to do that. Shortly after he went back he told me, “It’s really good, but one standing ovation is enough.”

  Andrew Wylie with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs at the Bunker, after he became their new literary agent, giving both Ginsberg’s and Burroughs’s careers a significant boost, New York City, 1986. Photo: Victor Bockris

  Certainly of the Beat Generation, Bill was the one that no one was ever able to put tabs on, because his approach was always so very different. For a start, Burroughs was in a funny kind of way openly gay. Even Allen’s gayness was different. His was a kind of proselytizing, campaigning gayness, whereas Bill’s was very different. Bill was always the absolute antithesis of what the society was doing, which is why he stayed out of America. He couldn’t have made it here. Allen could make it. William went through a lot of very heavy times. Don’t forget most people thought he was dead when he arrived back in the States. They thought he and Kerouac had just snuffed.

  BURROUGHS: To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know. Allen Ginsberg’s opinions, his writings, his works, and his outspoken attitudes towards sex and drugs, were once fully disreputable and unacceptable and now have become acceptable and in fact respectable. And this occasion is an indication of this shift in opinion. You remember it was extremely unacceptable once to say that the earth was round, and I think that this shift whereby original thinkers are accepted is very beneficial both to those who are accepting them and to the thinkers themselves. Somerset Maugham said that the greatest asset that any writer can have is longevity, and I think that in another ten or fifteen or twenty years, Allen may be a very deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize.

  DINNER WITH LOU REED: NEW YORK 1979

  BOCKRIS: Was Kerouac the writer you felt closest to in your generation?

  BURROUGHS: He encouraged me to write when I was not really interested in it. There’s that. But stylistically, or so far as influence goes, I don’t feel close to him at all. If I should mention the two writers who had the most direct effect on my writing, they would be Joseph Conrad and Denton Welch, not Kerouac. In the 1940s, it was Kerouac who kept telling me I should write and call the book I would write Naked Lunch. I had never written anything after high school and did not think of myself as a writer and I told him so. I had tried a few times, a page maybe. Reading it over always gave me a feeling of fatigue and disgust and aversion toward this form of activity, such as a laboratory rat must experience when he chooses the wrong path and gets a sharp reprimand from a needle in his displeasure centers. Jack insisted quietly that I did have talent for writing and that I would write a book called Naked Lunch. To which I replied, “I don’t want to hear anything literary.” During all the years I knew Kerouac I can’t remember ever seeing him really angry or hostile. It was the sort of smile he gave in reply to my demurs, in a way you get from a priest who knows you will come to Jesus sooner or later—you can’t walk out on the Shakespeare Squad, Bill.

  BOCKRIS: When did you write Naked Lunch?

  BURROUGHS: In the summer of 1956 I went to Venice and made a few notes there, and then I had this trip to Libya. I went to the American Embassy there and said, “Well, how can I get out of here? All the planes are full, can I just get on a train?”

  Burroughs takes aim with Polaroid Big Shot,

  New York City, 1982.

  “Oh no,” they said, “you have to have an exit permit.” And so I went around. I remember going to this courtyard with porticos around and looking for some official who was supposed to do this and he wasn’t ever there. In fact, he did not exist, as I came to suspect. So finally somebody told me, “Listen, just get on a train and leave.” That’s what I did, and when I got to the Moroccan border the French guard sort of looked at my papers, but I was leaving, see, and he didn’t want to make a fuss so he just stamped it and said, “Go ahead,” and I was back in Morocco. I could have been sitting around for months waiting for an exit visa according to the American Embassy: “Oh, you have to have this. It would be very inadvisable to leave without it. We couldn’t help you …” So it was just at this time that I sat down and I had lots of notes that I’d made in Scandinavia, Venice, and Tangier previously, and started writing, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I’d usually take majoun every other day and on the off days I would just have a bunch of big joints lined up on my desk and smoke them as I typed. I was getting up pretty early; I’d work most of the day, sometimes into the early evening. I used to go out and row in the bay every day for exercise. I had this room for which I was paying, God, $15 a month for a nice room on the garden of the Hotel Muneria there with a big comfortable bed and a dresser and a washstand and everything, with a toilet just around the corner. When Jack came to Tangier in 1957 I had decided to take his title and much of the book was already written.

  BOCKRIS: When you were writing then, did you have any intimation of the effect it might have?

  BURROUGHS: None whatever. I doubted that it would ever be published. I had no idea that the manuscript had any value. I was terrifically turned on by what I was writing.

  BOCKRIS: Did Kerouac have all his experiences so he could write about them?

  BURROUGHS: I’d say that he was there as a writer, and not as a brakeman or whatever he was supposed to be. He said, “I am a spy in somebody else’s body. I am not here as what I am supposed to be.”

  BOCKRIS: Is that what ultimately made him unhappy?

  BURROUGHS: Not at all. It’s true of all artists. You’re not there as a newspaper reporter, a doctor or a policeman, you’re there as a writer.

  BOCKRIS: He seemed to lose contact with people, so that he ended up …

  BURROUGHS: All writers lose contact. I wouldn’t say that he was particularly miserable. He had an alcohol problem. It killed him.

  BOCKRIS: When was the last time you saw him?

  BURROUGHS: 1968. I had been at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and Esquire had placed at my disposal a room in the Delmonico Hotel to write the story. Kerouac came to see me, and he was living at that time in Lowell. He had these big brothers-in-law, one of whom ran a liquor store, and they were shepherding him around. He was really hittin’ it heavy, because he got another room in the hotel and stayed overnight, and he was ordering up bottles of whiskey and drinking in the morning, which is a practice I regard with horror. So I talked to the Greek brothers … you know … “Terrible he’s hittin’ it like this and not doing any work …” That was the last time.

  BOCKRIS: Did you have much conversation?

  BURROUGHS: Well, he’s hittin’ it heavy. That was when he went on the Buckley show, and I told him, “No, Jack, don’t go, you’re not in any condition to go.” But he did go that same night. I said, “I’m not even going to go along.” Allen Ginsberg went. It was, of course, a disaster. Jack and his in-law brothers left the next day. That was the last time I ever saw him. He was dead a year later. Cirrhosis, massive hemorrhage.

  Lou Reed seemed extremely interested in Kerouac and wanted to know why he had ended up in such bad shape, sitting in front of a television set in a tee shirt drinking beer with his mother. What had happened to make Kerouac change?

  BURROUGHS: He didn’t change that much, Lou. He was always like that. First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a tee shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a tee shirt drinking beer with his mother.

  Addressing Bill as Mr. Burroughs, Lou asked if Kerouac’s books were published because h
e had slept with his publisher. He wondered if that happened a lot in the literary world.

  BURROUGHS: Not nearly as much as in painting. No, thank God, it is not very often that a writer will have to actually make it with his publisher in order to get published, but there are a lot of cases of young artists who will have to sleep with an older woman gallery owner or something to get their first show, or get a grant. I can definitely assure you that I have never had sex with any of my publishers. Thank God, it has not been necessary.

  DINNER WITH MAURICE GIRODIAS, GERARD MALANGA, AND GLENN O’BRIEN: BOSTON 1978

  MAURICE GIRODIAS: I like Bill Burroughs very much. He is about the nicest person I have ever met in this literary game. He is a very naive man. There is something naive about him that explains a lot of the mythological strangeness that is attached to his image and reputation.

  BOCKRIS: What were the circumstances of your publishing Naked lunch?

  GIRODIAS: Allen Ginsberg brought me the first manuscript of Naked Lunch in 1957. He was acting as Burroughs’ friendly agent. It was such a mess, that manuscript! You couldn’t physically read the stuff, but whatever caught the eye was extraordinary and dazzling. So I returned it to Allen saying, “Listen, the whole thing has to be reshaped.” The ends of the pages were all eaten away, by the rats or something.… The prose was transformed into verse, edited by the rats of the Paris sewers. Allen was very angry at me, but he went back to Bill, who was leading a very secret life in Paris, a gray phantom of a man in his phantom gabardine and ancient discolored phantom hat, all looking like his moldy manuscript. Six months or so later he came back with a completely reorganized, readable manuscript, and I published it in 1959. Burroughs was very hard to talk to because he didn’t say anything. He had these incredibly masklike, ageless features—completely cold-looking. At this time he was living with Brion Gysin and Gysin would do all the talking. I’d go down to Gysin’s room and he would talk and show me his paintings and explain things. Then we’d go back to Burroughs’ room and all three of us would sit on the bed—because there were no chairs—and try to make conversation. It was really funny. The man just didn’t say anything. I had my Brazilian nightclub and the first time Burroughs came there—it was soon after I met him—I was in the cellar giving an impromptu lesson in the tango to one of John Calder’s assistants who came over every summer for these tango lessons. I’m down there with her alone when Burroughs suddenly comes down the stairs and he says: “Girodias … I don’t want to disturb anything at all that’s going on down here, but …” It turned out the Beat Hotel had been raided and he’d been busted for possession of some hash or something and he wanted my help. He kept saying: “These French cops …” After I published Naked Lunch, I published a book of his every six months. The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded. I never had much editorial conversation with him, actually none. He’d just bring in the manuscript and I’d knock it out. I think he was doing it to pay the rent. He really needed the money.