Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Page 6

  In Chicago, Burroughs associated with thieves and young veterans. He plotted to stick up a Turkish bath and ambush an armored truck, but both schemes failed. He was an employee-dishonesty investigator for a short time, but for the most part he worked as an exterminator—a job he later employed as a metaphor in his work. Burroughs also found a new analyst, whom he consulted for eight months. The Chicago period is a stage in Burroughs’ romanticized life amidst “the criminal element” which began with his reading of You Can’t Win.

  At first, Kammerer’s fixation on an idealized image of Lucien appeared to Burroughs as a psychological affectation, comparable to wearing a monocle. Burroughs amused himself by endlessly analyzing “the affair” privately with Kammerer, like characters in an André Gide novel. They were an unholy trinity of high-spirited adventurers; their pranks and escapades got Burroughs thrown out of his rooming house, and culminated in an ambiguous suicide attempt by Carr, whereupon Carr was brought home to St. Louis by his parents.

  When Carr enrolled at Columbia University, Kammerer followed him to New York. In the summer of 1943, so did Burroughs, taking an apartment at 69 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, half a block from Kammerer’s place. He found work briefly as a bartender and a process server, but with his parents’ allowance, he had no real need to work. Kammerer did some teaching and janitorial work to get by. A salon grew up around the Kammerer-Carr friendship, in Dave’s Morton Street flat, with other Columbia students coming to sit at Dave’s feet as he held forth. Lucien was the star pupil; his intellectual and physical fearlessness, and his beauty, drove David Kammerer mad.

  In late 1943, in his Columbia dormitory, Lucien Carr met a fellow student named Allen Ginsberg, who introduced himself. Carr took Ginsberg down to Kammerer’s apartment, where Ginsberg met Burroughs for the first time. In early 1944, Carr took Burroughs to meet a former Columbia student of his acquaintance, a high school football prodigy from Lowell, Massachusetts, named Jack Kerouac. Now the “Beat troika” was complete: a bourgeois, Communist-raised Jew from Paterson, New Jersey; a proletarian Catholic from a Massachusetts mill town; and a patrician Wasp manqué from St. Louis, gateway to the West—but the other two Missourians, Carr and Kammerer, were the center of the action. While Carr’s bold ideas inspired Ginsberg and Kerouac (both wrote copiously of the ongoing melodrama in their journals), Burroughs remonstrated with Kammerer to get over his growing obsession.

  In March 1944, Burroughs commenced another psychiatric analysis, this time with Dr. Paul Federn. In his case notes, Federn dubbed Burroughs a “Gangsterling”—a “wanna-be” gangster. His patient’s other life, however, revolved around the apartments of two young college women, Joan Vollmer and Frankie Edie Parker, who were as unconventional as the young soldiers, sailors, and students who circulated around them in their salons at two addresses near Columbia, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Again, Lucien Carr had provided the introductions, and Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac began to spend time with Vollmer and Parker and their friends. David Kammerer, whom Carr was now avoiding, became ever more desperate.

  Ginsberg and Kerouac drank eagerly from the fountain of wisdom they found in this strange, erudite older man: William Burroughs, at the ripe old age of thirty. He gave them “reading lists” of classic work, such as Rimbaud, Swift, Spengler; but he himself was still under the influence of Jack Black and, latterly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose “hard-boiled detective” style would manifest in his early writing. Burroughs was inclined to feel that he understood psychology as well as, or better than, the psychiatrists for whom his parents were paying, and he commenced a “lay analysis” of Ginsberg and Kerouac; these sessions went on intermittently for nearly a year. Burroughs quickly “diagnosed” Kerouac’s abnormal attachment to his mother, and intuited Ginsberg’s sexual ambivalence. In fact, Ginsberg’s early infatuation with Burroughs can be seen as a transference toward the older man, who listened so acceptingly and made such penetrating comments. But Burroughs was not attracted to Ginsberg physically, and in any case there was no seduction.

  Inevitably, Dave Kammerer’s obsession with Lucien Carr led to a final confrontation, late one night in mid-August 1944 in Morningside Park, near the Hudson River. Kammerer had taken his pursuit of Carr to unprecedented lengths, and on this night he reached the climax of his desperation. Carr, in profound confusion and provocation, and perhaps in simple self-defense, stabbed Kammerer repeatedly with a Boy Scout knife. He weighted the body and sank it in the Hudson. Carr ran for guidance to Burroughs, who advised him to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, and then to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of Kammerer’s eyeglasses. Two days later, Carr turned himself in, and—after pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter “in defense of his honor”—he was sentenced to Elmira Reformatory, where he served two years with good behavior.

  The Kammerer manslaughter was a shock to the circle of friends. Kerouac and Burroughs were both charged as accessories in the crime, which brought unwelcome attention to Burroughs from his parents; he returned to St. Louis with his father, who had come to New York to post bond. Kerouac’s father refused to bail out his son, so Kerouac married Edie Parker, his Columbia girlfriend, whose affluent parents were willing to help. He and Edie went to live with her parents in their hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan; within a few months, Kerouac returned alone to New York.

  In the fall of 1944, Burroughs convinced his parents that he needed to go back to New York to continue his psychoanalysis. On his return, he was referred by Dr. Federn to Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who practiced hypnotherapy and narcotherapy, and who shared Burroughs’ interest in the criminal mind. Under hypnosis on Wolberg’s couch, Burroughs produced seven or eight submerged personalities, including a prissy English governess, a redneck tobacco farmer, a stoic old Negro, a mystical Chinese peasant savant, and a raving idiot, restrained in chains. Meanwhile Burroughs continued his amateur analysis of Ginsberg and Kerouac, who were still reeling from the death of Kammerer and the imprisonment of Carr.

  Joan Vollmer was an attractive, cynical, and daring young woman in her early twenties, from upstate New York. With a little matchmaking from Ginsberg and perhaps Kerouac, Vollmer and Burroughs had become intellectually and emotionally linked, and their relationship graduated to sex by the spring of 1945. Eyewitnesses speak of the uncanny contact of their two “keen intelligences”; when Burroughs and Vollmer experimented with telepathic games, the results were eerie. The affair with Joan may also have been the first time Burroughs could feel self-assured with a woman.

  By the summer of 1945, Burroughs was living with Vollmer and her two-year-old daughter, Julie, in their apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac had begun writing a quasi-fictional account of the affair between Carr and Kammerer, a work he called “I Wish I Were You.” After completing an unsatisfactory short draft, he showed it to Burroughs, and soon they were working together on a new version, which they called “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”—after a line from radio personality Jerry Newman’s deliberately scrambled newscasts. The war in Europe had ended in May, and by the time Kerouac submitted the “Hippos” manuscript to the Ingersoll & Brennan literary agency that fall, the war in Asia was over, too—thanks to the Manhattan Project and a place called Los Alamos. Burroughs was still in touch with Ilse Klapper, whose comment on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was: “It is unbelievable what a shit we are in.”

  The “Hippos” manuscript—dated “August 1945”—was retyped by Kerouac, a fast and accurate typist, and his is the only handwriting on the typescript. The chapters are marked to show their alternating authorship, and the pages attributed to “Will Dennison” clearly are in Burroughs’ voice. The passage here, attributed to “Dennison,” is the first chapter of the novella. “Mike Ryko” is Kerouac, “Phillip Tourian” is Carr, and “Ramsay Allen” is Kammerer. Dennison’s mention of “my old lady” presumably refers to Joan Vollmer, and “Agnes O’Rourke” appears to be one of the lesbians from Kammerer’s Greenwich Village circle
. The “Pied Piper Bar” was the West End, a hangout for Columbia students and a frequent watering hole for the group. From Kerouac’s later correspondence, we know that no publishers took an interest in the “Hippos” manuscript in the mid-forties—and indeed, it is not very well written, overall. Moreover, Carr objected to the exploitation of his troubled story by his two friends, and the manuscript was stashed away by Kerouac and forgotten. It turned up at the offices of Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, in the early 1970s. The jejune text cannot be published as a serious novel, but “Hippos”—and the earlier draft—will undoubtedly be published, with biographical commentary, someday.

  The first section of this book begins with an excerpt from Burroughs’ own “literary autobiography,” written in 1972 after he had reviewed thousands of his own pages for an archive-sale project. “The Name Is Burroughs” is taken from a short piece written in the mid-1960s, which Burroughs grafted onto the beginning of the longer 1972 text to create a chapter for The Adding Machine (1986). In this selection, Burroughs recaptures some of his earliest themes; for example, Lord Cheshire, stranded on an ice floe near the Pole with the others starving around him, lies bravely to Reggie as he gives the boy the last of his lime juice—“Yes . . . I’ve had mine. . . .”—an act of self-sacrifice that will recur in Burroughs’ 1954 short story “The Junky’s Christmas” and again in 1971, in “‘The Priest,’ They Called Him.”

  Burroughs also refers to the sentimental effect of his childhood reading of The Biography of a Grizzly, written and illustrated by Ernest Thompson Seton in 1900, which ends with the noble, aged bear “Wahb” feebly slinking into “Death Gulch, that fearful little valley where everything was dead, where the very air was deadly”—there to await his death. In these notes, Burroughs is openly chagrined at his earliest writing attempts. Indeed, there is something—as he tells us—painful about them, or strained, as if a young man were trying on masks, looking for one that would fit.

  from the adding machine

  THE NAME IS BURROUGHS

  The name is Bill Burroughs. I am a writer. Let me tell you a few things about my job, what an assignment is like.

  You hit Interzone with that grey anonymously ill-intentioned look all writers have.

  “You crazy or something walk around alone? Me good guide. What you want Meester?”

  “Well uh, I would like to write a bestseller that would be a good book, a book about real people and places . . .”

  The Guide stopped me. “That’s enough Mister. I don’t want to read your stinking book. That’s a job for the White Reader.” The guide’s face was a grey screen, hustler faces moved across it. “Your case is difficult frankly. If we put it through channels they will want a big piece in advance. Now I happen to know the best continuity man in the industry, only handles boys he likes. He’ll want a piece of you too but he’s willing to take it on spec.”

  People ask what would lead me to write a book like Naked Lunch. One is slowly led along to write a book and this looked good, no trouble with the cast at all and that’s half the battle when you can find your characters. The more far-out sex pieces I was just writing for my own amusement. I would put them away in an old attic trunk and leave them for a distant boy to find . . . “Why Ma this stuff is terrific—and I thought he was just an old book-of-the-month-club corn ball.”

  Yes I was writing my bestseller . . . I finished it with a flourish, fading streets a distant sky, handed it to the publisher and stood there expectantly.

  He averted his face . . . “I’ll let you know later, come around, in fact. Always like to see a writer’s digs.” He coughed, as if he found my presence suffocating.

  A few nights later he visited me in my attic room, leaded glass windows under the slate roof. He did not remove his long black coat or his bowler hat. He dropped my manuscript on a table.

  “What are you, a wise guy? We don’t have a license on this. The license alone costs more than we could clear.” His eyes darted around the room. “What’s that over there?” he demanded, pointing to a sea chest.

  “It’s a sea chest.”

  “I can see that. What’s in it?”

  “Oh, nothing much, just some old things I wrote, not to show anybody, quite bad really. . .”

  “Let’s see some of it.”

  Now, to say that I never intended publication of these pieces would not be altogether honest. They were there, just in case my bestseller fell on the average reader like a bag of sour dough—I’ve seen it happen, we all have: a book’s got everything, topical my God, the scene is present-day Vietnam (Falkland Islands!) seen through a rich variety of characters . . . How can it miss? But it does. People just don’t buy it. Some say you can put a curse on a book so the reader hates to touch it, or your book simply vanishes in a little swirl of disinterest. So I had to cover myself in case somebody had the curse in; after all, I am a professional. I like cool remote Sunday gardens set against a slate-blue mist, and for that set you need the Yankee dollar.

  As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

  I can divide my literary production into sets: where, when and under what circumstances produced. The first set is a street of red brick three-story houses with slate roofs, lawns in front and large back yards. In our back yard my father and the gardener, Otto Belue, tended a garden with roses, peonies, iris and a fish pond. The address is 4664 Pershing Avenue and the house is still there.

  My first literary endeavor was called “The Autobiography of a Wolf,” written after reading The Biography of a Grizzly. In the end this poor old bear, his health failing, deserted by his mate, goes to a valley he knows is full of poison gas. I can see a picture from the book quite clearly, a sepia valley, animal skeletons, the old bear slouching in, all the old broken voices from the family album find that valley where they come at last to die. “They called me the Grey Ghost. . . . Spent most of my time shaking off the ranchers.” The Grey Ghost met death at the hands of a grizzly bear after seven pages, no doubt in revenge for plagiarism.

  There was something called Carl Cranbury in Egypt that never got off the ground. . . . Carl Cranbury frozen back there on yellow lined paper, his hand an inch from his blue steel automatic. In this set I also wrote westerns, gangster stories, and haunted houses. I was quite sure that I wanted to be a writer.

  When I was twelve we moved to a five-acre place on Price Road and I attended the John Burroughs School which is just down the road. This period was mostly crime and gangster stories. I was fascinated by gangsters and like most boys at that time I wanted to be one because I would feel so much safer with my loyal guns around me. I never quite found the sensitive old lady English teacher who molded my future career. I wrote at that time Edgar Allan Poe things, like old men in forgotten places, very flowery and sentimental too, that flavor of high school prose. I can taste it still, like chicken croquettes and canned peas in the school dining room. I wrote bloody westerns too, and would leave enigmatic skeletons lying around in barns for me to muse over . . .

  “Tom was quick but Joe was quicker. He turned the gun on his unfaithful wife and then upon himself, fell dead in a pool of blood and lay there drawing flies. The vultures came later . . . especially the eyes were alike, a dead blue opaqueness.” I wrote a lot of hangings: “Hardened old sinner that he was, he still experienced a shudder as he looked back at the three bodies twisting on ropes, etched against the beautiful red sunset.” These stories were read aloud in class. I remember one story written by another boy who later lost his mind, dementia praecox they called it: “The captain tried to swim but the water was too deep and he went down screaming, ‘Help, help, I am drowning.’”

  And one story, oh very mysterious . . . an old man in his curtained
nine-teen-twenties Spanish library chances on a forgotten volume and there written in letters of gold the single word “ATHENA.” . . . “That question will haunt him until the house shall crumble to ruins and his books shall moulder away.”

  At the age of fourteen I read a book called you Can’t Win, being the life story of a second-story man. And I met the Johnson Family. A world of hobo jungles, usually by the river, where the bums and hobos and rod-riding pete men gathered to cook meals, drink canned heat, and shoot the snow . . . black smoke on the hip behind a Chink laundry in Montana. The Sanctimonious Kid: “This is a crooked game, kid, but you have to think straight. Be as positive yourself as you like, but no positive clothes. You dress like every John Citizen or we part company, kid.” He was hanged in Australia for the murder of a constable.

  And Salt Chunk Mary: “Mary had all the no’s and none of them ever meant yes. She received and did business in the kitchen. Mary kept an iron pot of salt chunk and a blue coffee pot always on the woodstove. You eat first and then you talk business, your gear slopped out on the kitchen table, her eyes old, unbluffed, unreadable. She named a price, heavy and cold as a cop’s blackjack on a winter night. She didn’t name another. She kept her money in a sugar bowl but nobody thought about that. Her cold grey eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next day, Johnny Law just happens by or Johnny Citizen comes up with a load of double-ought buckshot into your soft and tenders. It wouldn’t pay to get gay with Mary. She was a saint to the Johnson Family, always good for a plate of salt chunk. One time Gimpy Gates, an old rod-riding pete man, killed a bum in a jungle for calling Salt Chunk Mary an old fat cow. The old yegg looked at him across the fire, his eyes cold as gunmetal. . . ‘You were a good bum, but you’re dogmeat now.’ He fired three times. The bum fell forward, his hands clutching coals, and his hair catching fire. Well, the bulls pick up Gates and show him the body: ‘There’s the poor devil you killed, and you’ll swing for it.’ The old yegg looked at them coldly. He held out his hand, gnarled from years of safe-cracking, two fingers blown off by the ‘soup’. ‘If I killed him, there’s the finger pulled the trigger and there’s the tendon pulled the finger.’ The old yegg had beaten them at their own game.”