The Adding Machine: Selected Essays Read online

  When I was in high school in the 1920’s, anybody expressing doubts about our treatment of the Indians, capital punishment, the natural inferiority of blacks, the abomination of being a flit* or a dope fiend, would have been shunned by his schoolmates as a dangerous radical or practitioner of the hideous vices he defended.

  Yes, quite a change, and quite a few points gained for the M.O.B.ists: virtual abolition of censorship, decriminalization of pot, gay rights, and segregation issues at least out in the open and a lot better than they were forty years ago, and a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. This trend towards sanity has brought the last-ditch dedicated shits out into the open, screaming with rage. Victimless crime, the assumption that what a citizen does in the privacy of his own dwelling is nonetheless someone else’s business and therefore subject to denunciation and punishment, is the very lifeline of the right virus. Cutting off this air line would have the same action as interferon, which blocks the oxygen from certain virus strains.

  M.O.B. opponents cling to the victimless-crime concept, equating drug-taking or private sexual behaviour with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one’s own business is recognized, the whole shit position is untenable, and Hell hath no more vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.

  The Reverend Braswell, in the Denver Post: ‘The United States shouldn’t be forced to accept perverted sexual practices under the guise of human rights. I refuse to say we are dealing with human rights, we are dealing with sexual perversion. Speak out against these filthy dreamers. The Civil Rights Act is national suicide. The God of this Universe, He doesn’t change. God’s attitude to wrong is the same since Adam. The Bible classifies homosexuality along with murder, stealing, inventions of evil ruthlessness and God hatred. Homosexuality is an abomination to God and should never be recognized as a legal human right any more than robbery or murder.’ And a letter to the Editor: ‘We should reform the marijuana laws by making them tougher. President Carter’s proposal to scrap Federal laws relating to marijuana is shocking.’

  One is tempted to seek a total solution to the shit problem: Mass Assassination Day. M.A.D. Slaughter the shits of the world like cows with the aftosa. Then we’ll all feel a lot better. ‘It was like being cured of clap after twenty dripping years,’ a survivor reported... Perhaps we could accomplish the salubrious work with a virus designed to attack the already occupied RIGHT centers in the brain, inflaming and irritating these centers so that the target, muttering and finally screaming imprecations, dies in convulsions of Tightness. It was known as Righteous Fever; old men need it special.

  Here’s an old fuck in his British club, writing a letter to The Times demanding the restoration of capital punishment and the whipping post and recruitment of all layabouts and ‘hippies’ into a labor battalion — suddenly he bares his teeth and shouts at the top of his voice: ‘BLOODY HIPPIES!’

  Shocked faces look up from newspapers as he falls to the carpet, kicking and spitting blood, his pants steaming with urine and excrement.

  ‘Well now the Reverend he preaches up a pretty strong sermon and that’s all right up to a point, but folks want to go home and eat lunch ... so when he gets on about the sinners in Hell, how their very bowels burst open in the fire throwing hot shit all over each other, “wallowing in their own boiling filth” as he put it, Old Man Brink got up and said “I think we’ve heard about enough of this, Reverend.’”

  ‘But the Reverend is bellowing out the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

  ‘“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored —”

  ‘He shits in his pants and spits blood ten feet, and everybody sees his pants is sticking out in front all indecent and the Sheriff says “He must be an abomination from the Bible to pull these scandals,” so we burned the Church with the Reverend in it.’

  Probably the most effective tactic is to alter the conditions on which the virus subsists. That is the way various manifestations of the RIGHT virus have disappeared in the past, as in the Inquisition. Conditions change, and that virus guise is ignored and forgotten. We have seen this happen many times in the past forty years. With the RIGHT virus offset, perhaps we can get the whole show out of the barnyard and into Space.

  Footnote

  * Flit’ was a 1920 word for a queer. Since Flit was also an insecticide, such pleasantries as ‘Quick Henry, Navarro!’ made the rounds.

  Les Voleurs

  Writers work with words and voices just as painters work with colors; and where do these words and voices come from? Many sources: conversations heard and overheard, movies and radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, yes, and other writers; a phrase comes into the mind from an old western story in a pulp magazine read years ago, can’t remember where or when: ‘He looked at her, trying to read her mind — but her eyes were old, unbluffed, unreadable.’ There’s one that I lifted.

  The County Clerk sequence in Naked Lunch derived from contact with the County Clerk in Cold Springs, Texas. It was in fact an elaboration of his monologue, which seemed merely boring at the time, since I didn’t know yet that I was a writer. In any case, there wouldn’t have been any County Clerk if I had been sitting on my ass waiting for my ‘very own words’. You’ve all met the ad man who is going to get out of the rat race, shut himself up in a cabin, and write the Great American Novel. I always tell him, ‘Don’t cut your input, B.J. — you might need it.’ So many times I have been stuck on a story line, can’t see where it will go from here; then someone drops around and tells me about fruit-eating fish in Brazil. I got a whole chapter out of that. Or I buy a book to read on the plane, and there is the answer; and there’s a nice phrase too, ‘sweetly inhuman voices’. I had a dream about such voices before I read The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett, and found that phrase.

  Look at the surrealist moustache on the Mona Lisa. Just a silly joke? Consider where this joke can lead. I had been working with Malcolm McNeil for five years on a book entitled Ah Pook is Here, and we used the same idea: Hieronymus Bosch as the background for scenes and characters taken from the Mayan codices and transformed into modem counterparts. That face in the Mayan Dresden Codex will be the barmaid in this scene, and we can use the Vulture God over here. Bosch, Michaelangelo, Renoir, Monet, Picasso — steal anything in sight. You want a certain light on your scene? Lift it from Monet. You want a 1930’s backdrop? Use Hopper.

  The same applies to writing. Joseph Conrad did some superb descriptive passage on jungles, water, weather; why not use them verbatim as background in a novel set in the tropics? Continuity by so-and-so, description and background footage from Conrad. And of course you can kidnap someone else’s characters and put them in a different set. The whole gamut of painting, writing, music, film, is yours to use. Take Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and give it to your heroine. It happens all the time anyway; how many times have we had Romeo and Juliet served up to us, and Calille grossed forty million in The Young Lovers. So let’s come out in the open with it and steal freely.

  My first application of this principle was in Naked Lunch. The interview between Carl Peterson and Doctor Benway is modelled on the interview between Razumov and Councillor Mikulin in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. To be sure, there is no resemblance between Benway and Mikulin, but the form of the interview, Mikulin’s trick of unfinished sentences, his elliptical approach, and the conclusion of the Interview are quite definitely and consciously used. I did not at the time see the full implications.

  Brion Gysin carried the process further in an unpublished scene from his novel The Process. He took a section of dialogue verbatim from a science fiction novel and used it in a similar scene. (The science fiction novel, appropriately, concerned a mad scientist who devised a black hole into which he disappeared.) I was, I confess, slightly shocked by such overt and traceable plagiarism. I had not quite abandoned the fetish of originality, though of course the whole sublime concept of total theft
is implicit in cut-ups and montage.

  You see, I had been conditioned to the idea of words as property — one’s ‘very own words’ — and consequently to a deep repugnance for the black sin of plagiarism. Originality was the great virtue. I recall a boy who was caught out copying an essay from a magazine article, and this horrible case discussed in whispers... for the first time the dark word ‘plagiarism’ impinged on my consciousness. Why, in a Jack London story a writer shoots himself when he finds out that he has, without knowing it, plagiarized another writer’s work. He did not have the courage to be a writer. Fortunately, I was made of sterner or at least more adjustable stuff.

  Brion pointed out to me that I had been stealing for years: ‘Where did that come from — “Eyes old, unbluffed, unreadable?” And that — “inflexible authority?” And that — “arty type, no principles.” And that — and that — and that?’ He looked at me sternly.

  ‘Vous etes un voleur honteux .. . a closet thief.’ So we drew up a manifesto .. .

  Les Voleurs

  Out of the closet and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. All the artists of history, from cave painters to Picasso, all the poets and writers, the musicians and architects, offer their wares, importuning him like street vendors. They supplicate him from the bored minds of school children, from the prisons of uncritical veneration, from dead museums and dusty archives. Sculptors stretch forth their limestone arms to receive the life-giving transfusion of flesh as their severed limbs are grafted onto Mister America. Mais le voleur n’est pas pressé — the thief is in no hurry. He must assure himself of the quality of the merchandise and its suitability for his purpose before he conveys the supreme honor and benediction of his theft.

  Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons as it creates. Vive le vol — pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

  Beauty and the Bestseller

  If your purpose is to make a lot of money on a book or a film, there are certain rules to observe. You’re aiming for the general public, and there are all sorts of things the general public just doesn’t want to see or hear. A good rule is never expect a general public to experience anything they don’t want to experience. You don’t want to scare them to death, knock them out of their seats, and above all you don’t want to puzzle them.

  There are certain bestseller formulas. For example, something that the movie-going or reading public knows something about and about which they want to know more: the Mafia, how a hotel is run, what happens in General Motors, in TV, advertising, and in Hollywood.

  Now, if they don’t know anything about a subject, no matter how good it looks it won’t look good to them. I had learned this years ago raising winter vegetables in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. There are three main areas for winter vegetables: California, Florida, and the Rio Grande Valley. If the tomatoes freeze in one area or better still, in two areas, it boosts the price of tomatoes in another area. There was this one farmer who had practically the only parsnips on the winter vegetable market, and he thought he had a fortune. But it turned out they were so rare that the ordinary housewife didn’t want to buy them. She had forgotten what a parsnip looked like and didn’t want to contact any such unknown winter vegetable. So there’s such a thing as being too rare.

  The other formula is the menace, the challenge posed by the menace and the final resolution when the menace is fully dissipated.

  The menace can be an epidemic, an enemy about to spray nerve gas on New York City or poison the water supply, or even a revived prehistoric monster. But here you have to be very careful; the general public won’t want to be really frightened or shaken up too much, just a little bit. The horror film formula involves a measure of extortion: you’re paying not to see something that’s really horrible, you are paying to see Willard’s nice rats and not to see rats eating the genitals off a screaming infant.

  So we combine these two formulas for a sure-fire hit.. .

  The set is a biological warfare center. What goes on behind these walls? See what I mean? We are taking the reader right past the MP’s at the gate, into Top Secret Classified areas. Bitter staff rivalries and intrigues — the lady virologist who loves Doktor Hester, who has eyes for the FBI lady who pretends to be a receptionist... Here is a staff meeting where Professor Steinplatz denounces as nonsense Doktor Hester’s Anthrax 38: ‘It is time we got so out from the barnyard.’ Doktor Hester has other projects; he bides his time.

  Now here’s the beginning: Louie the Light opens his beady black eyes and looks cautiously around the room. He stands up groggily and looks at a door in front of him. He shivers, remembering an occasion when with his sex centers inflamed by electrodes he had started through that door towards a stunning albino with pink eyes. Just as he touched the door an agonizing shock twisted his lean body as a blinding light shone straight into his pleasure-dilated pupils. After that he couldn’t see for five days during which he was given no food. It was Doktor Hester who named him Louie the Light from the number of lights to which he had been exposed.

  Footsteps. Key in the lock. Louie conceals himself behind a centrifuge. Voices... ‘So now Doktor we will see your so interesting Wilhelm Hester Virus 23, nein?’ No one notices a grey shadow as it streaks down the hall.

  Louie the Light can hardly walk by the time he reaches Highway 97. LIGHTS! He squeaks with terror. The next second a tire flattens him into a bloody blob, his fear-dilated eyes, long yellow teeth and curled tail looking up at the mud guard. Louie has seen the light. Ten minutes later, the driver (subsequently identified at St. Vincent’s Hospital as Walter Winch, travelling X-ray equipment salesman) is in a gas line at Broadway and 23rd Street.

  Meanwhile, in Doktor Hester’s laboratory, Professor Steinplatz points dramatically to an empty cage. ‘Where is this wondrous rat? This Louie the Lighted?’

  Doktor Hester turns pale. He realizes with appalling clarity that he has made one of the great goofs of history, besides which Verdun, the invasion of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, the Dardanelles, are but grains of sand on a vast radioactive empty beach. Within days Virus B-23 rages through the cities of the world like a topping forest fire.

  Newscaster: ‘Virus B-23 is one of the most contagious diseases ever to appear on this planet and it shows such an ability to mutate that a physician can never be sure he is dealing with a case of B-23 until the hideous terminal symptoms supervene: an accelerated putrefaction accompanied by sexual frenzies, the victim rotting and performing obscene acts before the horrified eyes of his friends and family. In the end the victim disintegrates, giving off sepia puffs of noxious yellow vapours and deadly spores that infect anyone in the vicinity — and the people running from centers of infection spread the plague in concentric circles.’

  At this point we start selling the movie rights. It can be a twenty-million dollar spectacular or it can be a low-budget winner shot right in the germ center ... ‘I feel terrible about the whole thing,’ says Doktor Hester on TV. So finally the virus is brought under control, leaving bizarre mutations in its wake, some quite favorable — so that Doktor Hester becomes a hero of the virus. He gets together with the lady virologist and they realize there is something, well, wrong about what they have been doing. ‘I guess we were just caught up in the rat race like everyone else and lost our moral compasses.’ Their fingers creep together... ‘Bill and I, well, we’re going to devote the rest of our lives to ecology.’ A naked mutant streaks by at fifty miles an hour taking twenty feet in a stride.

  ‘Nice hopeful ending. What’s wrong with it, K.E.?’

  ‘Just about everything is wrong with it, B. J. You think nice Book-of-the-Month-Club ladies on the East Coast want to read about people like their own neighbor
s falling apart at a cocktail party and exposing themselves right in front of the Bensons, the Bradfields and the Johnsons? Is that your idea of mass appeal?’

  ‘Well the kids will dig it. We could angle in some poignant love stories — you know the scene in the hospital where she is dying of B-23 . . . it’s more dramatic than leukemia you see ...’

  ‘Such a thing as getting too dramatic B.J.’

  ‘Well of course we don’t bring on these scenes of terminal B-23 until the last reel. That builds up suspense and everybody wants to see the terminal stages just like they want to see the monster in a horror flick. So we bring on the monster which of course has given us the mutants and we end on a quiet nostalgic note ... empty cities, nice gardens, very few people. Plenty of time, plenty of room, and plenty of everything for everybody. It’s what everybody wants. Doktor Hester and the lady virologist decided it was all worth it for the fertilizer alone, for the corpses have laid down a vast, compost heap from which com, wheat, potatoes, beans, peppers and broccoli will spring in lush profusion. Back to the Garden of Eden... what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Folks aren’t going to like the way you got there B.J. You think the reader wants to be fertilizer to feed a bunch of freaks? They won’t buy it B.J. I tell you, they just won’t buy it. “So it should grow from my coffin?” snaps the Director when we show him the script. Can’t we have a decent epidemic? Why, we could end up with an X rating. Putrefaction is enough already and will cost us heavy in special effects .. .’

  ‘Well think about The Devils... sexual possession among the nuns ... and the Exorcist... it’s breaking all records.’