Interzone Read online

  WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

  Interzone

  Edited by James Grauerholz

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction by James Grauerholz

  I. STORIES

  Twilight’s Last Gleamings

  The Finger

  Driving Lesson

  The Junky’s Christmas

  Lee and the Boys

  In the Café Central

  Dream of the Penal Colony

  International Zone

  II. LEE’S JOURNALS

  Lee’s Journals

  An Advertising Short for Television

  Antonio the Portuguese Mooch

  Displaced Fuzz

  Spare Ass Annie

  The Dream Cops

  The Conspiracy

  Iron Wrack Dream

  Ginsberg Notes

  III. WORD

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Interzone

  William Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, into a prominent St Louis family. His paternal grandfather and namesake was the inventor of the modern adding machine and his maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was one of the founders of modern public relations. In work and in life Burroughs would turn this family inheritance against itself as part of a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape these conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug user, Burroughs left his homeland in 1950, and soon after began writing; by the time of his death, he was widely recognized as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His books include: Junky, Queer, Naked Lunch, the ‘cut up’ trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express), The Wild Boys, The Third Mind, The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine, Interzone, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945–1959 (edited by Oliver Harris), a final trilogy of novels (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands), and The Cat Inside, My Education, and Last Words. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris and London, Burroughs returned to America in 1974, later settling in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died on August 2, 1997.

  Introduction

  William Burroughs has always presented interesting challenges to his editors. Throughout his career he has often rejected the concept of linear composition or narrative. Moreover, much of his significant work was written in times of great personal disarray and tossed off in various directions, especially to friends in correspondence. He is also one of the great recyclers in literary history, a programmatic one—in the creation of his powerful language mosaics, Burroughs will use whatever materials are at hand. The scattered circumstances of his literary efforts are reflected in the scattered provenance of much of Burroughs’ archival material. In the long run, there will be plenty of work for the critics and the textual scholars of Burroughs’ work to perform as they begin to unravel the tangled history of Burroughs’ works: published, unpublished, and perhaps yet to be discovered.

  This volume, however, may be described as a product of the medium run. This book was conceived as a response to the news in 1984 that the original manuscript of Interzone, the working title of the book that, in somewhat different form, was to become Naked Lunch, was rediscovered among Allen Ginsberg’s papers at Columbia University. It was soon apparent that the Interzone manuscript did contain unpublished material of great value and interest. The Burroughs of the Interzone period was a man breaking through into unexplored literary territory.

  The same is true of writings leading up to that breakthrough. Many of Burroughs’ texts from the period between the completion of his novel Queer and the beginning of Interzone/Naked Lunch (roughly 1953–58) have seen publication only in fugitive ways: included, sometimes in fragmentary form, in larger works or in various collections of uncertain duration and availability. Much else of value has remained in manuscript form until this time. Until now, the reader or critic wishing to understand how the precise, laconic and deadpan writer of Junky and Queer transformed himself into the uncompromising prophet and seer of Naked Lunch has had to piece the puzzle together from multiple sources, with several crucial pieces missing. Interzone has been compiled with the intention that readers may now be able to see that transformation take place in the course of one volume.

  William Burroughs was almost thirty-nine years old when he departed Mexico City for the last time, in January of 1953. He left behind him the shambles of his life until that age: a St. Louis childhood and Harvard education, followed by a miscellany of odd jobs in Chicago and New York. In 1944 he had first become addicted to heroin; in that same year he met Allen Ginsberg at Columbia. These two circumstances would have a profound effect on his development as a writer.

  As Burroughs’ legal difficulties from his addiction mounted, he was obliged to move on from New York: to East Texas, New Orleans, and finally Mexico City, while Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac remained in New York, giving rise to an ample correspondence, which in turn led directly to Burroughs’ discovery of his writing talents. Ginsberg enjoyed the intelligence and humor of Burroughs’ letters from the far-flung precincts of Louisiana and Mexico, and he continually encouraged Burroughs to consider himself a writer.

  A forged-prescription arrest had precipitated the departure from New York, in 1946; in New Orleans a 1949 marijuana arrest had put him through the rigors of heroin withdrawal in a jail cell; and although at first blush he found the liberal mores of Mexico much to his liking, in time the abuse of drugs and alcohol led to the careless, accidental death of his wife, Joan Vollmer, on September 6, 1951. A drunken pistol game of William Tell in an apartment above the Bounty Bar ended in tragedy for both.

  In the spring of 1950, after about six months in Mexico City, Burroughs had begun writing a first-person account of his experiences in the junk world, which he entitled Junk. Ginsberg’s friend Carl Solomon had interested his uncle in publishing such an account as an Ace Books paperback, and a contract was signed in July 1952. The book appeared as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict a year later. Not included in this text was the second part of the original book, entitled Queer, which was begun in the spring of 1951. (Junkie was re-edited, with censored passages restored, and republished as Junky by Viking Penguin in 1977; Queer was finally published by Viking in 1985.)

  As Queer relates, Burroughs was infatuated with a young American boy called Allerton and took him along on a trip to Ecuador in a fruitless search for yagé, a reputedly telepathic drug. He returned to Mexico City only days before the fatal incident. During the course of the novel, the protagonist, Lee, develops and elaborates an absurdist form of soliloquy known as the “routine,” in his constant attempts to capture and hold Allerton’s attention under increasingly difficult circumstances. This “Tom Sawyer handstand meant to impress the work’s blaue Blume, Eugene Allerton,” as Alan Ansen* describes it, takes on a life of its own, even as Allerton is drifting away from Lee.

  As Burroughs recounts in “Lee’s Journals” (page 63), he was often “possessed by a wild routine…. These routines will reduce me to a cinder.” Such intensity naturally sought a human outlet, and as Allerton became emotionally distanced, and with Joan gone, Burroughs’ friendship with Allen Ginsberg took on greater significance. After giving up on Allerton and Mexico City in late 1952, he made a visit to his parents’ home in Palm Beach, Florida, and from there departed for Panama and the headwaters of the Río Putumayo in Colombia. Not two weeks after reaching Panama City, he wrote the first of what would be many “letters from the road” to Ginsberg, retailing his travels and adventures in a hilarious mixture of amorous anecdotes and anthropological essays.

  Burroughs returned to the U.S. in August 1953, and after a month in Palm Beach, he returned to New York fo
r the first time in six years. Junkie had now been published, and although it was hardly considered a literary event at the time, this encouraged him to go on with his writing. He stayed on East Seventh Street with Ginsberg, whose constant interest and warm responses to the stream of “yagé letters” had endeared him to Burroughs, far beyond anything he had felt for Ginsberg before. They worked together on a revised transcription of Burroughs’ letters from the yagé trip, but Burroughs’ dream of finding in Ginsberg the “perfectly spontaneous, perfectly responsive companion” (Ansen, ibid.) was frustrated by Allen’s lack of interest in a sexual relationship.

  In early 1954 Burroughs sailed for Rome, Athens and eventually Tangier. He continued to woo Ginsberg during the middle fifties, entirely by correspondence, except for a memorable visit that Ginsberg and his new lover, Peter Orlovsky, made to Tangier in 1957. In his letters from the time of the visit, Ginsberg writes that he scarcely recognized “the new Bill Burroughs.” By then Burroughs had almost completed the transition from suitor-correspondent to literary creator, which resulted in a profusion of manuscripts that he referred to in toto as Interzone. In these four crucial years, 1954–57, Burroughs had been transformed into a writer.

  As he had done with Junky and the handful of more or less finished stories that Burroughs sent from Tangier to him in New York, Ginsberg assisted in the editing of the early drafts of Interzone. While visiting in 1957, he retyped portions of the raw manuscripts, as did Jack Kerouac and Alan Ansen, and they each proposed different chapter sequences. The best account of their attitudes toward the work at that time can be gleaned from Alan Ansen’s pioneering and perceptive essay in Big Table in 1959, “Anyone Who Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death,” collected in his 1986 Water Row Press booklet.

  In April 1958, on Ginsberg’s referral, Burroughs submitted a draft of Interzone to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books (by now the publishers of Ginsberg’s Howl), but it was not accepted. Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris also turned down the book. Ginsberg sent eighty pages of Burroughs’ work to Irving Rosenthal, editor of the Chicago Review, but when University of Chicago authorities objected, Rosenthal published an issue privately as Big Table, No. 1 in the spring of 1959. Included were ten episodes from Interzone, which was by then called Naked Lunch, at Kerouac’s suggestion. Within a few months, Girodias had published the novel in France. The rest is literary history.

  What remains of these early writings, between the period of composition of Junky and Queer and the publication of Naked Lunch? The letters from South America during 1953 were finally edited, with letters added from Ginsberg’s own 1960 trip to Peru in search of yagé, and responses from Burroughs, and this book was published as The Yagé Letters by City Lights in 1963. A short collection of stories, journals and letter fragments was edited for publication in 1982 by Jeffrey Miller’s Cadmus Editions in Santa Barbara, in a small edition now out of print, under the title Early Routines. A large surviving group of letters to Ginsberg was also published in 1982, under the eponymous title Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953–1957, by Full Court Press; this volume, also now out of print, is a valuable companion to the present Interzone.

  Many of these 1950s writings are fragmentary in nature; in many cases, pages that began as letters to Ginsberg were not sent but condensed and retyped together with other material; the letters that were sent included long patches of work in progress. Therefore the lines between “letters,” “journals” and “writings” are blurred, at least as regards the manuscript material that remains available from the period. And Burroughs’ papers have had a harrowing voyage to the hands of today’s scholars: what exists from the period (mostly at Columbia University, Arizona State University and the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the author’s own collection) is jumbled and incomplete, and many other manuscripts remain in uncooperative private hands at this writing. So what is included in this volume has been determined, in part, and fittingly enough, by random factors.

  One of the hallmarks of Burroughs’ style is the reappearance of many phrases and images throughout his work. This is partly the result of Burroughs’ multifarious memory, partly due to the chaos of his manuscript drafts, and partly inherent in the nature of the “cut-up” technique. This “repetition,” or self-appropriation, may even at times be unintentional, but overall it unites the whole of Burroughs’ work and lends a kaleidoscopic quality to the writing—and what is a kaleidoscope but a device to reassemble endlessly the same particles? As if anticipating modern atomic physics, his world model is that of an indeterminate universe of endless permutation and recombination. Finding the conventional novel form inadequate to this task, he deconstructs and ransacks it, so that his form is as reflective of twentieth-century life as his content is predictive of it.

  “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” is often cited as Burroughs’ first attempt at writing; it was written in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1938, with the collaboration of his childhood friend Kells Elvins. The thirteen-page manuscript at Arizona does not appear to be the original but a reconstruction from memory at some later point, when Burroughs was using a typewriter with the Spanish inverted exclamation point, hence probably in Tangier. The author has written that the piece was inspired by the sinking of a ship, the Morro Castle, in 1935, and this rollicking, exploding fantasy pointed the way toward his eventual literary destination. Much shorter versions of it have appeared throughout his writings, most notably in Nova Express (Grove, 1964); this is the fullest version yet published.

  “The Finger” is an account of how Burroughs deliberately cut off the last joint of his left little finger, in New York during 1939, partly in an attempt to impress Jack Anderson, a young man with whom he was preoccupied. This chilling episode gives a rare glimpse of Burroughs’ emotional state at that time. In a letter to Ginsberg from Tangier, apparently written in 1954, he mentions having sent the story to Allen to see if it could be sold for publication; so it was probably written soon after his arrival in Tangier.

  “Driving Lesson” is a quasi-autobiographical account of an incident from 1940, during Jack Anderson’s visit to Burroughs in St. Louis. It seems to have been written during Burroughs’ Mexico stay but was in any case rewritten and sent to Ginsberg sometime in 1954. In a letter of August 18, 1954, Burroughs wrote: “As regards that story, you might try placing it, I don’t know just where”; and again, August 26: “I rewrote the story about the car wreck with Jack A.” In The Wild Boys (Grove, 1971) and Port of Saints (Am Here, 1974; Blue Wind, 1980), the car has become a Duesenberg, and Jack is “the new boy, John Hamlin,” “a mysterious figure from a parallel dimension”; the crash itself takes on the magical power of time travel.

  “The Junky’s Christmas” dates from Mexico or early Tangier days, and is set in New York in the 1940s. Danny the Car Wiper is a young junky trying desperately to score on Christmas Day. His experiences are written in a straightforward third-person narrative style, somewhat reminiscent of Truman Capote’s. This sentimental story was the basis of a later, and much different, story: “The Priest, They Called Him,” published in the London Weekend Telegraph in 1967 and collected in Exterminator! (Viking, 1973). Burroughs has written several “Christmas stories” over the years, but never again in this style.

  “Lee and the Boys” appears to have been written in the Tangier period. The untitled story begins in manuscript on a page with paragraphs also found in an April 1954 letter to Ginsberg. Although it has an indeterminate ending, it is worth reproducing here for its remarkably straightforward and detailed self-portrait of Burroughs’ daily life in Tangier at that time. We see him scoring his drugs, shooting up and sitting down to work on a “letter to Ginsberg,” and then receiving his boyfriend KiKi for an evening’s diversion. His emotions about the boys of Tangier are heartbreakingly felt, and his bravado has a tremulous edge.

  “In the Café Central,” also from this time, is a very funny sketch of the social scene in the Socco Chico, written w
ithout much of Burroughs’ trademark exaggeration. The claustrophobia of Tangier’s small-town feel, at least among the expatriate queer set, comes across vividly.

  “Dream of the Penal Colony” is labeled in manuscript “Fall of 1953,” which suggests it was written in New York at the beginning of Burroughs’ stay with Ginsberg. Its point of departure is the first paragraph of the passage in Queer where Lee and Allerton are staying in a chilly hotel room in Quito, Ecuador: “That night Lee dreamed he was in a penal colony. All around were high, bare mountains…. He tightened the belt of his leather jacket and felt the chill of final despair.” In the novel, Lee gets up and crawls into Allerton’s bed, shaking with cold and junk sickness. The parallel suggested is between Allerton and Ginsberg, objects of Burroughs’ affection and desire, and if this fragment was actually not written until after work on Queer stopped, in late 1952, the compositional intention toward Ginsberg is even clearer. But the boy in the story is modeled on Allerton, and the author paints a harsh picture of his own manipulative, changing moods and importuning routines.

  “International Zone” was written in a deliberate attempt to achieve a magazine sale, via Ginsberg. The name of the piece refers, of course, to the quadripartite administration of Tangier, divided between the U.S., French, Spanish and English sectors. On January 12, 1955, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg: “When I don’t have inspiration for the novel [Interzone, then in progress], I busy myself with hack work. I am writing an article on Tangier. Perhaps New Yorker: ‘Letter from Tangier.’ ” Again, on January 21: “I wrote an article on Tangier but it depresses me to see it even. It is so flatly an article like anybody could have written.” On this point the author was mistaken; the language and style are distinctively his own. Here, between sociological information and analysis, are several incisive portraits of the habitués of the Socco Chico, and a snapshot of Burroughs’ own image of himself on that set.