And there was Ian and I don’t want to talk about that. There are mistakes too monstrous for remorse to tamper or to dally with.1
Burroughs returned to London early in September 1965, saying that he was absolutely fed up with New York and that there was nothing of interest happening there. The fact that the Bureau of Narcotics was attempting to frame him only increased Bill’s belief that he was in the wrong place. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to bring Ian to New York, but the Americans would not let him in, so, as Bill said, “Things were drawing me away from New York more than back to London,” though he recognized that London at that time was cheap and a much more pleasant place to live.
When he arrived at Gatwick Airport, the customs agent limited his stay in the UK to one month, instead of his usual three months. Bill thought this was because of pressure from the State Department, which was already cracking down on beatniks and undesirables. He went straight to Lord Goodman, who knew the home secretary, Sir Frank Soskice. “Well, if they suspect you of drug smuggling, they shouldn’t let you in at all!” said Goodman. “Mr. Burroughs, give me your passport.” About a month later he returned it to Bill, saying, “Come as often as you want, stay as long as you want.” Goodman was a great fixer. In fact the final approval of Burroughs’s status as a resident alien probably came from Roy Jenkins, who took over as home secretary in December. It was Jenkins who later put a stop to attempts by the Obscene Publications Squad to prosecute Naked Lunch in Britain.
Bill moved into the Hotel Rushmore at 11 Trebovir Road in Earl’s Court, where Ian Sommerville had been living while Bill was in New York. The rooms were laid out like a ship’s cabin with a bed, cupboards, and shelves arranged for maximum efficiency. It was another hotel that began life as a porticoed Regency row house and was later converted into a rooming house. It was bought by Jeffrey Benson, an antiques dealer and interior decorator who was a close friend of John Richardson’s, the art critic. Benson didn’t know what to call it because it was so drab and ordinary-looking. Richardson had a musicologist friend named Robert Rushmore, whom Benson thought was the most boring person in the whole world, which gave Benson an idea. “It’s really drab, dear, just how drab can you get? The Rushmore, we’ll call it the Rushmore.”2 There was a circle of transvestites known as “the Maids” who all lived at the Rushmore. They were called Babs, Carlotta, and Scotch Agnes. There was no bar, but Benson ran a sort of salon in his parlor, featuring the Maids. Christopher Gibbs knew the Rushmore well. “Jeffrey Benson was always referred to as Madame. And Madame’s acquaintanceships were always very wide and varied. And Madame was always the same, in sort of half drag, very painted up, falsies. Very sure of what he thought was the best kind of life to lead.” One of the regulars at the salon was April Ashley, who in those days, before her operation, was known as Mental Mary. To Benson, Bill was an ideal tenant, being dignified, appreciative, and financially stable. For his part, Bill found the atmosphere congenial and of course he could bring boys back to the room. Christopher commented, “Bill had a good nose for what was going to be amusing, gamey, and something that was so ghastly that there was a ring of poetry about it. He got that. I always thought Bill had a very subtle antenna, apart from being a man of very considerable culture.”3
Ian Sommerville moved in with him, but it was not as simple as it might have seemed. Not knowing if Bill was ever going to return to Britain, he had found himself a new boyfriend, Alan Watson, from his hometown of Darlington in County Durham. Ian met him when he went home for a visit. Alan was thin, very camp, an artificial blond, constantly flicking back his hair and tossing his head, his sentences emphasized by raised eyebrows and pouted lips. Bill described him as a “100% swishy queen.” He worked as a cook at Scotland Yard, and was very good at it. The police loved him, and even though homosexuality was still illegal, they encouraged him to be as outrageous as possible. His normal outfit consisted of a pair of very tight trousers cut so low that they were little more than a pair of legs attached to a belt. He strutted around the canteen, hand on hip, throwing back his head, sometimes even dancing on the tables when the right policemen were there to urge him on. Bill disapproved highly of this consorting with the enemy, though he was pleased that Alan had a job. Ian was freelancing and installed the electrical wiring and lighting at the new Indica Bookshop and Gallery in September 1965, but was also borrowing money from Bill, Antony Balch, and Tom Neurath at Thames and Hudson, whom he knew from the Beat Hotel.
Burroughs recognized that it was entirely his fault that Ian was with someone new. Ian had wanted to join Bill in New York, but Bill hadn’t done enough to get him an entry visa. The U.S. embassy needed proof that he had money, but Bill didn’t send him adequate funds, even though he was doing well financially and could easily have afforded to. He told Ted Morgan, “The whole thing was my fault completely and I got exactly what I deserved. I could have done all sorts of things and I didn’t do them. In other words, the whole thing was my fuckup.”4 He quoted Charles Gallagher from Tangier: “Everybody always gets exactly what they want and exactly what they deserve in this life.” Bill felt that this was true: “It was certainly what I deserved. I fucked up. Look, man, you only get one chance in this life, and you don’t take it, it’s your fault. There are no excuses in this life, no excuses. You fuck up, you fuck up, and you pay for it. I relinquished and I tried to reclaim. It was gone. I’d lost.”
There had been a fundamental shift in the relationship. When they first got together in 1959, Bill was the master; he was in charge and had been so all the time they were in Tangier when Bill didn’t want Ian sexually and Ian wanted him. Now the situation was reversed. Bill desired him, but Ian wasn’t interested. Ian may have moved in, but Bill no longer had the upper hand. After a while, Alan Watson also moved in to the Rushmore, to a different room.
In December, Bill’s three-month entry permit expired, and rather than just go to Paris for a weekend, he decided to spend Christmas in Tangier with Brion. The visit was going well, when on Christmas Day, Bill felt a sudden wave of depression. Shortly afterward, someone came in and told them that Jay Haselwood, the owner of the Parade Bar, had just dropped dead. Bill had always liked him. “He was one of the lights of Tangier. There was something very special there.”5 Jay had gone to the bathroom and came back with sweat pouring down his face, looking terrible. He went into the restaurant kitchen and lay down on the floor and died of a heart attack. All the nights of heavy drinking combined with vigorous gymnastics each morning to try and bring down his weight had killed him. Leslie Eggleston took advantage of the confusion to steal 1,000 francs from Jane Beck’s purse.
On December 30, 1965, Jay’s funeral was held at the English church, St. Andrew’s, for which he had always provided “wonderful flower arrangements” for major feast days. It was very well attended: lots of waiters and past kitchen staff and, as Bill put it, “all the old biddies who used to drink there and that whole crew of old lushes.” The funeral was held on the same day as a little birthday party for Paul Bowles to which Bill and Brion were invited. Bill arrived immaculately dressed in funereal black with a tightly furled umbrella, peeled off his gloves, put them on the table, and said, “Well, Paul, you missed a very enjoyable funeral.” Bowles, as usual, didn’t know how to interpret Bill’s remark: “Was it a serious remark—some funerals are better than others—or was it we were very happy to see the end of that one? One didn’t know.”
Bill returned to the Rushmore and his increasingly rocky relationship with Ian, who still had Alan Watson firmly in tow and only granted Bill sex as a special favor. Part of the problem was money. Ian was out of work and Alan didn’t earn enough for a central London flat big enough for them both. Ian was now helping Bill with a series of tape recorder experiments, so they were together all the time while Alan was at work.
Some immediate help was at hand when Bill arranged for Ian to be hired as the sound engineer when the filming of Conrad Rooks’s Chappaqua moved to Paris. But Ian, wary from past experience of people like Rooks, refused to go until he saw the money in cash. It was delivered in a large black leather bag. Ian bought a new black business suit and a new tape editing block, and in March 1966 Bill and Ian set off for Paris, where Rooks had booked them into a cheap hotel on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts.
Bill was hired to help with the dialogue and perform in a skating scene at the Palais des Glaces skating rink, but although he thought he could skate, once on the ice he found that he could no longer remember how, and a double had to be found as Bill kept falling over. Alan Ansen, who had come to Paris for a week to watch, was much amused. Burroughs, for a fee, wrote the essay to accompany the Chappaqua press kit: “ ‘Glad to see you back Harwich, been away a while things have been tough here only stay in business because of you and it’s dangerous see?’ he throws back his cloak to show some ketchup stain smeared with the blood of old movies, goes into a prat fall… Death forgets his skating… ‘I’ll get my legs in a minute here,’ ‘We should live so long.’ ”6 Bill was in another scene set in a large mansion in Saint-Cloud that Rooks had rented to represent the Swiss sanatorium in the story. Bill played Death and appeared in a wheelchair and shot someone.
As far as Bill was concerned the whole thing was a complete fiasco, just a rich kid playing at being a filmmaker, giving people license to improvise, then coming down heavily on them when they did, arguing and screaming, thinking he knew better than the professionals. Ian couldn’t stand him, but Bill just watched with amusement. Relations between Rooks and the crew became so bad that many of them refused to continue working with him at any price and told him, sometimes quite forcefully, where to put his money. Bill made fifteen hundred dollars for three days of shooting: a whole day in New York, one day in Paris, and another in the Paris suburbs. The film, called Chappaqua, after a Quaker settlement in New York State, was released on November 5, 1967.
From Paris, Bill went to Germany to see one of his correspondents. The German writer and translator Carl Weissner began writing to Burroughs in 1965. Seeing that Carl was quick to pick up on his experiments with the cut-ups, Burroughs decided to visit him in Heidelberg.7 The visit formed the basis for a lifelong friendship, and Carl, who was able to write equally pungent German and English, went on to translate many of Bill’s books. Bill checked into the Hotel Kaiserhof, had dinner, then went to see Carl. Weissner was living at 1–3a Mühltalstrasse when Burroughs came to visit. Weissner later reported the visit to Victor Bockris. Weissner let Burroughs into his small apartment:
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. […]
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.8
In London, Bill continued with the three-column experiments and the scrapbook entries that had occupied him in New York and before that in Tangier. He told the Guardian newspaper in 1965, when he first returned from New York, “I spend most of my time editing and filing. […] For ten published pages there are fifty pages of notes on file and more on tape. I use a tape recorder, camera, typewriter, scissors, scrapbooks. From the newspapers and from items people send me, I get intersections between all sorts of things. […] They all tie up, there are connections, intersections.”9 From this material came The Wild Boys, Port of Saints, and The Job. His article explaining these experiments, “The Invisible Generation,” was published in International Times (IT), the new British underground newspaper. He wrote to his French translators and friends, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, “Have you seen International Times? I have given them an article on tape recorder experiments which should appear in the next issue and I hope to get a large number of people experimenting with tape recorders to turn up some results. Basic premise is, ‘what we see and experience is to a large extent dictated by what we hear and anyone with a tape recorder is in a position to decide what he hears, and what other people hear or overhear as well.’ ”10
When Burroughs returned from New York, he spent a lot of time with Antony Balch, who was just putting the finishing touches to The Cut-Ups. The film began life as Guerrilla Conditions, a twenty-three-minute silent documentary on the lives of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, filmed at the Beat Hotel in Paris, the Hotel Villa Muniria in Tangier, the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and the Empress Hotel in London. The earliest sequences were shot in Paris in 1961 and the latest in New York in 1965. After hours of conversation with Bill about cut-ups, Balch now had a very different idea about what he wanted to do with the footage. Using the same technique that Ian Sommerville had used in Tangier in 1964, he superimposed strips of negatives and had them printed, some positive, others as negatives. Sometimes three separate lengths of film would be superimposed. The triple and negative superimpositions were done last and included footage taken from other films, such as Bill Buys a Parrot, the 16-millimeter color short, shot in Tangier, which appears in black-and-white negative in The Cut-Ups. Antony then fed a print of the film onto four reels and had a lab technician assemble them, taking a twelve-inch section from each in strict rotation. Balch was not even there during the assembly. This was done with a print of the film because of the impossible grading problems presented by the master print, and an interneg was made from the finished result. The soundtrack was made by Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin, and Burroughs, using a line from a Scientology routine. Sommerville produced the permutated phrases to last exactly twenty minutes and four seconds, including the final “Thank you.”
The Cut-Ups opened at the Cinephone in Oxford Street, London, in 1966, and the manager, Mr. Provisor, had never had so many people come up to him to praise a film, or so many complain about it. Some members of the audience left during the screening claiming, “It’s disgusting,” to which the staff would reply, “It’s got a U certificate,11 nothing disgusting about it, nothing the censor objected to.” During the two-week run there were an unusually large number of articles, bags and coats, left behind in the cinema by the disoriented audience. After the first few days Antony shortened the film to twelve minutes because Mr. Provisor and his staff were exposed to it five times a day as well as having to deal with walkouts and Antony thought that was too much. There were fewer walkouts in the evenings, when a more appreciative audience attended. Balch always preferred the twelve-minute version. Burroughs was pleased with the result, which was very much an extension of his ideas:
There’s some things you can do with films that you can’t do anywhere else. You’ve got your section of time, you can do all sorts of things. You can slow it down, speed it up, run it backwards, all sorts of possibilities—cut it up—all sorts of things that you can do with it. It has that possibility and very little has been done, really, because Hollywood has never been experimental. For example, flashbacks were very common. Flashbacks started with W. D. Griffith [Birth of a Nation], but flash-forwards don’t occur until Alice’s Restaurant and Easy Rider. There you have it, the idea of flash-forwards didn’t occur to them. Flashbacks, slow-downs. There were some speed-ups in early films, just used as a comedy device, and slow-downs have been used mostly in death scenes like in Bonnie and Clyde, the fall from gunshot wounds, slow-down. But there are all sorts of things which remain untouched.12
Years later, Nicolas Roeg approached Balch and asked him practical questions about the use of cut-ups. He used them in his film Performance starring Mick Jagger. Most of his arbitrary cuts occur at the beginning.
Though Burroughs had a negative reaction to Timothy Leary’s projects in the States, he was initially supportive of Michael Hollingshead when he returned to Britain from Leary’s headquarters to open the World Psychedelic Centre at 25 Pont Street in Mayfair. Accordingly he attended a “Workshop in Consciousness Expansion” that Hollingshead organized on February 14, 1966, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at 17 Dover Street, where he had himself performed with Ian and Brion Gysin. Bill appeared on the panel together with Alexander Trocchi, Ian Sommerville, Ronnie Laing, George Andrews, and others. He was to appear at several such gatherings, but when it became obvious that Hollingshead was getting strung out on methamphetamine, Bill no longer visited Pont Street, knowing it was but a matter of time before the police arrived. He was correct in thinking this and Hollingshead went to jail, not for LSD but other, illegal, substances.
Ian’s accommodation problems were unexpectedly solved, at least for six months, in April 1966 when he was asked to become the in-house tape operator of a small private recording studio. Inspired by reading copies of Big Table and Evergreen Review borrowed from Barry Miles,13 co-owner of the Indica Bookshop, Paul McCartney decided to set up an audio equivalent: a monthly budget-price record album containing bits of interviews, backstage talk, and studio conversations with musicians recording new albums. A deal could be struck with the BBC to include bits of radio plays that people might have missed, and jazz musicians and poets would be encouraged to record their work. NEMS, the Beatles’ management company, and EMI, their record label, would organize pressing and distribution. The sticking point was where these things would be recorded and edited. Ringo had an apartment at 34 Montagu Square that he was not using because so many fans knew the address, so Paul rented it from him, but someone had to be there to operate the tape recorders and set up the microphones. Ian was the ideal person. A meeting was held at Miles’s flat with Paul, Jane Asher, and Ian. A lot of hash was smoked, Ian explained the principles of floating equations, and then Paul asked what equipment Ian needed. Ian passed him a list. “Fine,” said Paul. “Just get it and send the bill to me.”
Ian and Alan quickly moved into Ringo’s rock star apartment, the ground floor and basement, all gray watered silk wallpaper and smoked mirrors. Ian set up a pair of Revox tape recorders and a selection of microphones on stands. The problem was that no one knew about it, and they would have been inundated had it been made public. In the end, the two people to make the most use of it were Paul McCartney and Burroughs, who used the state-of-the-art equipment to the full, conducting a series of stereo experiments, masterminded by Ian. Sadly, these appear to have been lost.
Paul told Q magazine in 1986, “I used to sit in a basement in Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco […] doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello.” Paul and Bill got on well. Bill explained all about cut-ups and there was a lot of talk about pot, with Ian at one point accusing Paul of being “just an old pothead.”14 Rich talk from someone who used to stuff his pillow with marijuana leaves when he was in Morocco: “No twigs, just the leaves and flowers. It was as soft as feathers. That perfume is the best sleeping pill, man, you have such beautiful dreams and it is a joy to wake up to that smell!”15
Paul: “In our conversations, I thought about getting into cut-ups and things like that and I thought I would use the studio for cut-ups. But it ended up being of more practical use to me, really. I thought, let Burroughs do the cut-ups and I’ll just go in and demo things. I’d just written ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and so I went down there in the basement on my days off on my own. Just took a guitar down and used it as a demo studio.”
Burroughs: “The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Ian recorded his rehearsals so I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and prepossessing. Nice-looking young man, fairly hardworking.”
Paul: “William did some little cut-ups and we did some crazy tape recordings in the basement. We used to sit around talking about all these amazing inventions that people were doing; areas that people were getting into like the Dreamachine that Ian and Brion Gysin had made. It was all very new and very exciting, and so a lot of social time was taken up with just sitting around chatting.”
By this time, Bill had become a good friend of Robert Fraser’s, the art dealer. Christopher Finch told Harriet Vyner, Fraser’s biographer, “Robert was very much hanging out with Bill Burroughs at that time. Bill was living in London and over at Robert’s all the time. These times I was invited to Mount Street at least half the time Bill was there. He knew Robert well. He was a walking pharmacopoeia, so I assume Robert was using drugs in a very sophisticated way.”16
Robert’s flat at 23 Mount Street, on the third floor above Scott’s Oyster and Lobster Bar in the heart of Mayfair, was one of the “coolest” sixties pads in London. There were several large daybeds in silver lacquered wood with writhing marine beasts carved at each end and Italian black leather chairs with silvered backs made from interlaced branches. He used his apartment as an extension of his gallery: a blue Yves Klein sponge on a wire armature, a glass table filled with blue pigment, a Lindner, a Dubuffet, collages by Kalinowski. And all the time Robert circling the room, adjusting the lighting—Tiffany lamps, candles, and the latest halogen lights—changing the record—Booker T., Beatles, Stones—rolling joints—Nepalese temple balls, the best hashish—fiddling with lighters, followed by Mohammed, his Moroccan manservant, who silently filled glasses and was rudely ordered about by Robert. There was always lots to drink and even more to smoke.
Robert was a dilettante. According to Bridget Riley, Robert didn’t really help his artists: he arranged no outside exhibitions and gave them little in the way of art world contacts. He wasn’t concerned with developing their careers, only his own. But the biggest problem was that it was always very difficult, and frequently impossible, to get the money he owed them, so that most of them left him in the end because they were fed up with subsidizing his lavish lifestyle. He was charming, amusing, had a great eye, and was one of the coolest people in town, but if money was mentioned he would look startled and shy away.
In the mid-sixties, his flat was the place to be. There Bill would run into Tony Curtis, Tom Wolfe, John Paul Getty Jr., Andy Warhol, Anita Pallenberg, Francis Bacon, Ken Tynan, Donald Cammell, and of course, most of the artists that Robert showed at the gallery. A frequent visitor to Robert’s flat was filmmaker and self-styled black magician Kenneth Anger. Bill held him responsible for an incident of psychic attack. It occurred in the Renommé, one of the empty restaurants that Bill liked to frequent. Bill had gone upstairs to the lavatory, when he was suddenly hit by a wave of hostility. He leaned against the wall, gasping, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying!” At that moment the Yugoslavian owner came up the stairs and said something and the sensation disappeared. Bill returned to Brion and Ian, who were downstairs, and they said that after he’d left the table, suddenly the proprietor looked around, as if he had received a message, and quickly walked upstairs. “Of course, he knew,” said Burroughs. “He came up there because he knew something was wrong.” They had previously been at Robert Fraser’s house, and Kenneth Anger was there. Brion said, “Kenneth Anger, very definitely.” Bill agreed. Anger was noted for throwing curses all over the place, even threatening his best friends like the Rolling Stones.
Bill was earning very good money by English standards at the time. The notoriety surrounding Naked Lunch was producing royalties. In 1967, for instance, his Grove Press royalties were $44,458.56 after agent’s fees, which he had to pay in addition to 10 percent to Girodias. His gross income that year was £16,305 and 17 shillings ($45,654.00), which Michael Henshaw, his accountant, managed to reduce to £6,602, five shillings, and tenpence ($18,406) after “expenses.” The average income in Britain was £1,381 and in the United States that year was $7,300. In 1968 his gross was only £6,386 ($17,881) and his “profit” a mere £336 ($944). UK average income was £1,489 and U.S. average income was $7,850. In 1969, he grossed £11,629 ($32,559), of which, after expenses, he only made £5,088 ($14,246), but at a time when the UK average income was still only £1,607 and $8,550 in the United States. Of course his real expenses were negligible and by most standards he was quite wealthy. He could afford to get an apartment. After his Christmas 1965 visit to Tangier, he had written to Alan Ansen, “I was definitely depressed by Tangier. […] The bars are empty. I was glad to leave and in no hurry to return,” so Morocco was out. Having recently checked up on Paris and New York, and found them wanting, that left London, where he had friends and his on-off relationship with Ian. He had made his choice. There was a three-room apartment coming up in Antony Balch’s building, Dalmeny Court at 8 Duke Street Saint James’s, just around the corner from the Court of Saint James’s itself. It was £750 a year. He put his name down for it.