Acknowledgments
1. Audio Research Editions ARECD301, Liverpool, 2007.
Introduction
1. This account of Burroughs’s sweat lodge experience draws heavily upon the conversations that Allen Ginsberg held with Burroughs between April 17 and 22, 1992, immediately following the event, and are taken from a raw transcript of the tapes sent to the author by Ginsberg at the time. Some of the background and context is taken from the article “Exorcising Burroughs” by Allen Ginsberg in Observer Magazine, April 26, 1992.
2. WSB interviewed by Jim McMenamin and Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
3. WSB interviewed by Gregory Corso and Tom H. at the Naropa Institute, July 1984.
4. Morgan, tape 75 (labeled tape 74).
5. WSB on telephone to Michael Horovitz, Good Friday, 1992, in “Legend in His Own Lunchtime,” in Rupert Loydell, ed., my kind of angel: i.m. william burroughs, 62–63.
Chapter One
1. “Trip to Hell and Back,” WSB interviewed by Jerry Bauer in Trax (London), no. 6 (March 18, 1981).
2. T. S. Eliot to Marquis Childs, quoted in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 15, 1930, and in the address “American Literature and the American Language” delivered at Washington University, June 9, 1953, published in Washington University Studies, New Series: Literature and Language 23 (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953), 6.
3. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 42.
4. It appears that the street has subsequently been renamed, with the two private blocks, including where WSB was born, now called Pershing Place, and only the remaining public block called Pershing Avenue.
5. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 19.
6. Morgan, tape 1.
7. Abstracted from the psychiatrist’s report, Payne Whitney Clinic, New York, April 25, 1940, based on an interview with WSB’s mother. This entire section draws heavily upon James Grauerholz’s research in his paper, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood: The Untold Story,” also upon Morgan, tape 1.
8. James Wideman Lee, Henry W. Grady: The Editor, the Orator, the Man (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1896).
9. Morgan, tape 16.
10. Ibid.
11. This figure comes only from William Burroughs’s memory of family conversations and has not so far been substantiated.
12. “Morphia Victim, Son of Adding Machine Inventor, Is Suicide,” Detroit Free Press, March 8, 1915.
13. Morgan, tape 1.
Chapter Two
1. WSB, Naked Lunch, 89
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 15, 1953.
3. James Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood: The Untold Story” (ms.).
4. Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. From conversation with WSB.
5. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 276.
6. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time vol. 1, Swann’s Way (London: Vintage, 1996), 222.
7. Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood.
8. Morgan, tape 1.
9. WSB, The Cat Inside, 17.
10. Morgan, tape 2.
11. WSB, The Cat Inside, 18.
12. WSB, Last Words, 69.
13. WSB, My Education, 167.
14. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 107.
15. British slang later imported into the United States, usually as “shanks mare.” The shank is the part of leg extending from ankle to knee, thus walking.
16. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 19.
17. Morgan, tape 65 (labeled tape 64).
18. Interzone, 166.
19. Morgan, tape 2.
20. Ibid.
21. Vincent Price was born in 1911 and was in Mort’s year at school.
22. Morgan, tape 65 (labeled tape 64).
23. WSB, “The Name Is Burroughs,” in The Adding Machine.
24. Ibid.
25. WSB, “Prose on a distant wall,” unpublished ms., ca. 1972.
26. Ibid.
27. Morgan, tape 2.
28. Ann Russe Eaton (née Prewitt) to Ted Morgan, May 7, 1985.
29. Prynne Hoxie died in a car accident when he was eighteen in his freshman year at Princeton.
30. WSB, Cobble Stone Gardens, 9–10.
31. Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood.”
32. WSB, The Western Lands, 158.
33. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 46–74, 130–58.
34. Ibid., xiv–xv.
35. Ibid., 74.
36. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 227.
37. The Evangelische St. Paul Kirche in Defiance, built in 1906, was demolished in the twenties to be replaced by a new church.
38. WSB, unpublished journals, entry for November 15, 1991.
39. WSB, Port of Saints (Calder edition), 139.
40. Ibid., 142.
41. WSB, Interzone, 71.
42. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
43. T. S. Eliot, “Preludes 1.”
44. WSB, Last Words, 34.
45. The Woolworth Building was the world’s tallest building from 1913 to 1930.
46. WSB interviewed by Legs McNeil, Spin, October 1991.
Chapter Three
1. James Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood: The Untold Story” (ms.).
2. Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible.
3. WSB, unpublished journals, early eighties. Lon Chaney’s famous line.
4. WSB, My Education, 191–92.
5. WSB interviewed by the author, November 29, 1991, Lawrence, Kansas.
6. WSB, Last Words, 151.
7. WSB, “Do You Remember Tomorrow?,” Mayfair vol. 3, no. 8 (August 1968).
8. WSB, “St. Louis Return,” in The Burroughs File, 88.
9. Morgan, tape 2.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.; the cemetery was the Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Cemetery on Ladue Road.
13. Morgan, tape 6.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs’ St. Louis Childhood.”
17. WSB, “The Fall of Art,” in The Adding Machine, 62.
18. Morgan, tape 3.
19. Technically it is a char. The name comes from Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.
Chapter Four
1. Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography, 101.
2. Morgan, tape 3.
3. Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution, 1998, 65 (quoted in Kaplan, Gore Vidal).
4. WSB interviewed by Bill Rich, 1991. Burroughs Archives.
5. All factual details about Los Alamos in this section are taken from Vidal, via Kaplan, Gore Vidal.
6. Morgan, tape 3.
7. WSB, Last Words, 90.
8. WSB, “Literary Biography,” in Barry Miles, A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 75.
9. Ibid., 74.
10. Morgan, tape 2.
11. WSB, “Literary Biography,” 75.
12. Morgan, tape 16.
13. WSB, “Literary Biography,” 75.
14. Ibid., 74.
15. Max Putzel, letter, “Burroughs and guns,” Times Literary Supplement, July 24, 1992.
16. Morgan, tape 4.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 7, 1954.
18. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 15, 1956, in The Yage Letters.
19. James Grauerholz, “Research summary—SWG—8/16/105 re ‘Billy Bradshinkel’ and Prynne Hoxie.” Unpublished document.
20. Morgan, tape 3.
Chapter Five
1. Morgan, tape 3.
2. A range was opened beneath the stadium in 1933.
3. Morgan, tape 62 (labeled tape 61).
4. Morgan, tape 25.
5. Morgan, tape 2.
6. Morgan, tape 88.
7. Morgan, tape 39.
8. Ibid.
9. Morgan, tape 16.
10. Upon the death of his father in 1969 he became the Second Viscount Monsell. His sister Joan married the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
11. Morgan, tape 2.
12. WSB, introduction to Robert Walker, New York Inside Out (New York: Skyline, 1984).
13. Morgan, tape 16.
14. Locke-Ober, 3 Winter Place; Parker House, 60 School Street; Union Oyster House, 41 Union Street; Durgin-Park, 340 Faneuil Hall, all in Boston.
15. Morgan, tape 6.
16. Morgan, tape 35. Richard Stern remembers the name of the ferret being Jean des Esseintes, named after the hero of Huysmans’s À rebours because of its scent. Robert Miller supports this name. Burroughs remembers the ferret living in Adams House. Possibly there were two ferrets.
17. WSB and Allen Ginsberg in conversation, filmed by Obie Benz in December 1986 for his film Heavy Petting, in Judy Bloomfield, Mary McGrail, and Lauren Sanders, eds., Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey (New York: Persea Books, 1998).
18. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, NYC, 1974. From ms. transcript.
19. Morgan, tape 5.
20. Morgan, tape 38.
Chapter Six
1. WSB, Interzone, 77.
2. Morgan, tape 71.
3. Morgan, tape 6.
4. WSB interviewed by John Giorno in Gay Sunshine Interviews (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1978), 32.
5. Ibid.; the Dianabad was destroyed in the fighting between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazis during the liberation of Vienna on April 11–13, 1945.
6. WSB, Interzone, 124.
7. Sanatorium Hera, Löblichgasse 14. Burroughs was in room 78.
8. The Nuremberg Laws were announced at the annual Nazi Party rally held at Nuremberg in September 1935. In addition the law of March 7, 1936, deprived Jews of the vote and that of July 2, 1937, removed Jews from German schools and universities.
9. Morgan, tape 6.
10. Reik’s Masochism in Modern Man was not published until 1941, so Burroughs must have read Reik’s articles on the subject, as he was sure that he read Reik at this time. (Wilhelm Reich was not yet published in English nor easily available in German.)
11. Morgan, tape 22.
12. WSB in conversation with the author, London, ca. 1972.
13. Incorporated in Nova Express as “Gave Proof Through the Night.” The original draft was finally printed in Interzone in 1989.
14. WSB, “Literary Autobiography,” in Barry Miles, A Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 75–76.
15. Morgan, tape 7.
16. WSB, “Literary Autobiography,” 76.
17. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, New York, 1974. From ms. transcript.
18. Ibid.
19. Morgan, tape 70 (labeled tape 69).
Chapter Seven
1. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 21.
2. The Revised Oxford translation.
3. WSB interviewed by San Fleischer and Dan Turèll, Copenhagen, October 29, 1983.
4. They met on April 3, 1939, when Auden still lived with Christopher Isherwood in Manhattan.
5. The other two were with Ian Sommerville.
6. Morgan, tape 26.
7. WSB, “The Finger,” in Interzone, 15.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. Burroughs forgot to change his name to Lee in the story, leaving his own name in place. Burroughs has said that the facts in “The Finger” are accurate.
10. Morgan, tape 70 (labeled tape 69).
11. Burroughs entered and left Payne Whitney on the twenty-third, a number that was to have symbolic significance to him.
12. WSB, My Education, 146. Burroughs gives his age as twenty-four in the book.
13. Ibid., 147.
14. Morgan, tape 2.
15. Morgan, tape 7.
16. Marcel Proust’s description of Robert de Saint-Loup in In Search of Lost Time vol. 2, Within a Budding Grove (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 356.
17. Ibid.
18. Here I am taking a version of events told to me by Allen Ginsberg in 1985 and other times, as he understood them from his conversations with Lucien Carr over the years. There are other, differing accounts.
19. Morgan, tape 7.
20. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
21. Morgan, tape 24.
22. A young editor at Alfred A. Knopf recalling stories told by her grandmother.
23. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book, 37–38.
24. James Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago (1939–40; 1942–43; 1968)”, delivered on April 27, 2004, at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois, 7.
25. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, xvii.
26. Ibid.
27. Quoted in Dr. David Rioch to Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie, Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, May 27, 1942. Burroughs enrolled but later said he was drafted.
28. Morgan, tape 41.
29. Ibid.
30. WSB, Last Words, November 1996, 9.
31. Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago”, 10.
Chapter Eight
1. From abandoned early draft of The Naked Lunch.
2. I am indebted to James Grauerholz’s paper “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago (1939–40; 1942–43; 1968)”, delivered on April 27, 2004, at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois. The author had the pleasure of accompanying Grauerholz on his initial exploration of 1940s Chicago phone books and his journeys to the sites of Mrs. Murphy’s Rooming House and the Nueva Exterminating Company.
3. WSB, “Prose on a distant wall,” unpublished ms., ca. 1972.
4. Morgan, tape 7.
5. Ibid.
6. First-draft notes in Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, 258.
7. WSB, “The Fish Poison Con,” in Nova Express, 25; and as cut-up, 21.
8. WSB, Exterminator!, 9.
9. Ibid.
10. Barry Miles, In the Seventies, 131.
11. WSB, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, 172.
12. WSB, The Wild Boys, 76.
13. WSB, Exterminator!, 10.
14. Morgan, tape 7.
15. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 136.
16. Morgan, tape 2.
17. According to Chad Heap, professor of American studies and gay historian at George Washington University, in a letter to James Grauerholz, 2000, quoted in Grauerholz, “William S. Burroughs Tour of Chicago (1939–40; 1942–43; 1968)”, 23.
18. Ibid, 23; Grauerholz proposes that this may be the source of the “Frisco Kid” chapter in The Wild Boys.
19. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 20, 1955.
20. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads (Paladin edition), 150.
Chapter Nine
1. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
2. Allen Ginsberg in conversation with the author, New York, 1969.
3. Morgan, tape 10.
4. WSB, Last Words, 119.
5. Edie Kerouac-Parker, You’ll Be Okay, 122.
6. Ibid., 122–23.
7. WSB says pale blue, Edie Parker says brown.
8. Morgan, tape 10.
9. There were nine daily newspapers in New York at that time.
10. Edie Kerouac-Parker, You’ll Be Okay, 95.
11. Allen Ginsberg in conversation with the author, while touring all the apartment buildings with Beat connections in New York, 1985. Ginsberg may be mixing Joan up with Geraldine Lust, with whom Duncan Purcell did have an affair, according to Edie Parker.
12. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
13. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
14. Ibid., quoting Yeats’s “Among School Children,” IV.
15. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
16. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 1 (Troilus speaking).
17. The Royal Ballet was then called the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
18. Arthur Rimbaud to George Izambard, May 13, 1871: “Maintenant, je m’encrapule le plus possible. Pourquoi? Je veux être poète, et je travaille à me rendre Voyant: vous ne comprendrez pas du tout, et je ne saurais presque vous expliquer. Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens. Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu poète. Ce n’est pas du tout ma faute.”
19. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
20. Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 221.
21. Ibid.
22. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
23. Morgan, tape 10.
24. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 225.
25. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, “The better part of valour is discretion.”
26. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 237.
27. It entered the charts on June 22, 1944, and reached number 1.
28. They were reading the second, completely revised, edition of A Vision, 1937.
29. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 237.
30. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
Chapter Ten
1. “Pages from a Diary in 1930. III. Subject for a poem, April 30th,” in W. B. Yeats, A Vision and Related Writings (London: Arena, 1990).
2. Edie Kerouac-Parker, You’ll Be Okay, 130.
3. Ibid., 131–32.
4. The Henry Hudson Parkway, built by Robert Moses in 1934–37, only has entrances to the riverside at 72nd and 125th Streets. The traffic at 4:00 a.m. must have been quiet enough to climb the barriers and cross it.
5. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 249.
6. Morgan, tape 8.
7. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 248.
8. “Student Admits Killing Teacher,” New York World-Telegram, August 16, 1944.
9. “Student Is Held Without Bail on Slaying of Man,” New York Herald Tribune, August 18, 1944.
10. Celine Young to Jack Kerouac, October 1, 1944.
11. See my Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats for a complete bibliography of newspaper reports on the case.
12. Morgan, tape 10.
Chapter Eleven
1. Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, August 28, 1930, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, 1929–1931 (London: Hogarth, 1978), 205.
2. Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 59.
3. Morgan, tape 13.
4. Ibid.
5. “The Art of Fiction: Jack Kerouac Interviewed by Ted Berrigan,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 4th Series (New York: Viking, 1976).
6. Journal entry for November 16, 1944, quoted in Ann Charters, Kerouac (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973), 1974.
7. Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 289.
8. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
9. Said while giving Kerouac a copy of the Charles Francis Atkinson translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
10. Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (New York: Dover, 1935).
11. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
12. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
13. Jack Kerouac, “Secret Mullings About Bill (Burroughs)” (from agency’s manuscript copy).
14. Morgan, tape 22.
15. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 22.
16. Jack Kerouac to Caroline Blake (née Kerouac), March 14, 1945.
17. Morgan, tape 10.
18. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 1.
19. Description by Huncke in Don McNeill, “Huncke the Junkie: Godfather to Naked Lunch,” Village Voice, September 21, 1967.
20. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 4.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 5.
24. Herbert Huncke’s various accounts of watching Burroughs take his first shot are, like many of Huncke’s stories, fabricated. Burroughs was alone and he did not have the syrettes with him at the first visit to Henry Street. He undoubtedly witnessed Burroughs shoot up later.
25. Herbert Huncke, quoted in Barry Gifford and Lee Lawrence, Jack’s Book, 52.
26. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 6.
27. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 9, 1977.
28. Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 364.
29. Morgan, tape 10.
30. Kerouac, The Town and the City, 364.
31. Allen Ginsberg, lecture at Brooklyn College, February 9, 1987.
32. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 11.
33. Ibid., 13.
Chapter Twelve
1. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 16, 1977.
2. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 14, 1977.
3. Morgan, tape 10.
4. Ibid.
5. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1987.
6. Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, September 6, 1945.
7. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1987.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, June 8, 1945.
10. Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, 292–93; confirmed by Allen Ginsberg in conversation.
11. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 16, 1977.
12. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1987.
13. Ibid.; see also Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, 175.
14. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 14, 1977.
15. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
16. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture given June 16, 1977.
17. Jeffrey Scott Dunn, “A Conversation: Ginsberg on Burroughs,” Pennsylvania Review (Fall/Winter 1987): 48.
18. Herbert Huncke interviewed by Stewart Meyer and Mel Bernstine, Newave vol. 1, no. 5 (April 1981).
19. Jack Kerouac to Al Aronowitz, New York Post.
20. Huncke interviewed in Newave.
21. Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders/Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1948).
22. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
23. Told to the author by Allen Ginsberg, standing in front of 419 West 115th Street, on February 21, 1984.
24. Morgan, tape 16.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. WSB, Last Words, 57.
28. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
29. Herbert Huncke, The Evening Sun Turned Crimson, 95.
30. WSB to Bockris-Wylie, 1975 (from ms. transcript).
31. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 34.
32. Ibid., 35.
33. Reported by Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs.
34. WSB, The Soft Machine (Olympia edition), 158–59.
35. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
36. Morgan, tape 10.
37. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 19, 1952.
38. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 1951.
39. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
40. Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (Flamingo, 1995), 223–24.
41. Joan Vollmer to Edie Parker, January 1, 1947.
Chapter Thirteen
1. WSB to Billy Burroughs Jr., October 30, 1972.
2. Marianne Woofe to Ted Morgan, March 7, 1985.
3. WSB to Joan Vollmer, September 3, 1946.
4. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 88.
5. Burroughs remembers Elvins’s girlfriend being called Golden: “In Pharr that was Golden. I remember she was a beautiful girl, she looked like a model. Sort of long hair, I think she was not blonde but dark.” This was probably Elvins’s girlfriend in Huntsville, Texas.
6. Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, 30.
7. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 91.
8. Ibid., 92.
9. Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 24.
10. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 91.
11. Ibid., 59.
12. WSB, Interzone, 137.
13. WSB, The Western Lands, 105.
14. Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 36.
15. Ibid., 49.
16. WSB, Interzone, 152.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 10, 1955.
18. Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, 88.
19. Ibid.
Chapter Fourteen
1. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, January 9, 1947.
2. WSB, The Naked Lunch, 147.
3. This would be about 2,000–2,500 plants, roughly two hundred pounds of pot, still an enormous crop.
4. Herbert Huncke to Allen Ginsberg, March 1947.
5. Herbert Huncke interviewed by Steven Watson, Chelsea Hotel, March 12, 1995.
6. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads (Paladin edition), 183.
7. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 223.
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 11, 1947.
9. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, March 23, 1947.
10. Herbert Huncke, Guilty of Everything, 90–91.
11. Morgan, tape 12.
12. Ibid.
13. Morgan, tape 14.
14. Morgan, tape 12.
15. Ibid.
16. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1947.
17. Quoted in James Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, 7.
18. Herbert Huncke, The Evening Sky Turned Crimson.
19. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1986.
20. Morgan, tape 25.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 20, 1948.
22. Morgan, tape 71 (labeled tape 70).
Chapter Fifteen
1. Morgan, tape 13.
2. WSB to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, June 5, 1948.
3. WSB to Jack Kerouac, November 30, 1948.
4. WSB to Jack Kerouac, March 15, 1949.
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 18, 1949.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, November 9, 1948.
7. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 133.
8. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 60.
9. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book, 131.
10. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 10, 1949.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 16, 1949.
12. Gifford and Lee, Jack’s Book, 132.
13. Kerouac, On the Road, 129.
14. WSB, The Cat Inside, 47.
15. Gifford and Lee, Jack’s Book, 134.
16. Lu Anne Henderson quoted in Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos, One and Only: The Untold Story of “On the Road,” 64–65.
17. Kerouac, On the Road, 135.
18. Gifford and Lee, Jack’s Book, 136.
19. Kerouac calls Burroughs “Bull” and Joan is “Jane.”
20. Kerouac, On the Road, 132.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 18, 1949.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 30, 1949.
23. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 7, 1949.
24. WSB in conversation with the author, London, 1972.
25. WSB, “A Thanksgiving Prayer,” in Tornado Alley, 1989.
26. The financial information is all taken from James Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, 13–14.
27. Morgan, tape 10.
28. Ibid.
29. Morgan, tape 44.
30. Morgan, tape 53.
31. Ibid.
32. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 38.
33. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, April 13, 1949.
Chapter Sixteen
1. Morgan, tape 28 (labeled tape 27).
2. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 90.
3. Ibid., 89.
4. Burroughs had Allen Ginsberg’s copy, mailed to him by Allen’s father, Louis Ginsberg, after he himself had read it.
5. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 289.
6. WSB interviewed by James Grauerholz, 1974, quoted in Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, 145.
7. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 135.
8. WSB to Jack Kerouac, June 24, 1949.
9. Morgan, tape 10.
10. Morgan, tape 47 (labeled tape 44–46).
11. WSB to Jack Kerouac, September 26, 1949.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1949.
13. WSB to Jack Kerouac, November 2, 1949.
Chapter Seventeen
1. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 59th Chorus.
2. Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio (London: Collins, 1960) (originally titled The Sudden View, 1953), 66–67.
3. Joan Vollmer to Allen Ginsberg, October 31, 1949.
4. Ibid.
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 23, 1949.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 1, 1949.
7. WSB to Jack Kerouac, January 22, 1950.
8. James Grauerholz writes in The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, “Burroughs and Kerouac both misunderstood this man’s name as ‘Tercerero’—‘the third one’—but no such family name exists in Mexico, whereas ‘Tesorero’—‘treasurer’—is not uncommon.”
9. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 115.
10. Ibid.
11. Jorge García-Robles (with the collaboration of James Grauerholz), The Wild Shot: William S. Burroughs in Mexico (1949–1952), 34.
12. María was finally arrested on April 4, 1957, and given four years in jail. She died five months later on September 4, 1957, from cardiac arrest.
13. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 116.
14. Ibid., 118.
15. Morgan, tape 55.
16. Ibid.
17. Now called calle José Alvarado.
18. WSB to Jack Kerouac, September 18, 1950.
19. García-Robles, The Wild Shot, 38.
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 1, 1951.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 11, 1951.
22. Ibid.
23. WSB to Jack Kerouac, December 26, 1950.
24. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 11, 1951.
25. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 5, 1951.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 130.
29. Ibid.
30. Hal Chase interview transcription, Ted Morgan papers, Arizona State University, Tempe.
31. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 127.
32. Morgan, tape 17.
33. Morgan, tape 51 (labeled 49).
34. WSB, Queer, 77, and in conversation with the author, London, 1972.
35. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 24, 1951.
36. Ibid.; the first sentence was crossed out in the original.
37. Allen Ginsberg, As Ever: The Collected Correspondence, 64. See The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945 to 1959, Oliver Harris’s footnote, 85.
38. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, n.d. (May 1951).
39. Interview with Doña Marina Sotelo by Jorge García-Robles, July 25, 1991. Burroughs Archives, English translation, 13 and 9.
40. WSB, My Education, 31.
41. The name is possibly a combination of Eugene Brooks, Allen Ginsberg’s lawyer brother, whom Burroughs knew well as he sometimes stayed at 115th Street, and the Allerton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, Chicago, a 1923, twenty-five-story landmark whose sign towers over downtown and would have been well known to Burroughs.
42. Morgan, tape 20.
43. Ibid.
44. WSB, Queer, 96.
45. Ibid., 109.
46. Ibid., 109–10.
47. Lucien Carr interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
Chapter Eighteen
1. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 46.
2. For this and much of the other information in this section, I am grateful for James Grauerholz’s The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, which covers the subject in exhaustive detail.
3. Morgan, tape 47.
4. Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Interview with Healy, September 12, 1991.
5. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, New York, 1974 (from ms.).
6. WSB interviewed in Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
7. As reported by June Woods Overgaard, as told to her immediately after the shooting by Eddie Woods. Interviewed by Ted Morgan in 1985 and published in James Grauerholz’s The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
8. Eddie Woods’s recollection of Burroughs’s words as reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
9. Ibid.
10. Manuel Mejía interviewed by Jorge García-Robles, December 22, 1991.
11. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
12. Excelsior, September 7, 1951. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
13. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
14. La Prensa, September 7, 1951. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
15. Morgan, tape 40.
16. The final charges against Burroughs, as issued on November 15, 1951, by Judge Fernández, were as follows, as reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: “The complainant himself agrees that the legal exigencies are fulfilled insofar as the objective facts that refer to the death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, even if not to the subjective elements of the crime of murder, and in that which relates to the first assessment it is quite certain that the legal extremities of the crime of murder are proved, in terms of Articles 94, 96, 105, 106–121 and other relevant parts of the Code of Penal Proceedings, applicable in D.F. and the Territories. […]
“Basically, the facts that caused the arrest of William Seward Burroughs and the ruling of formal prisión consist of this: on […] September 7 [sic], the complainant was in the building 122 Monterrey, apartment 10, where his friend John Healy lived, and where— in company with the wife of the same complainant and other persons— they were ingesting alcoholic beverages; and that at a given moment, the complainant took out of his holster a pistol, pulling back the slide, and producing a shot that caused the death of the now-deceased lady.
“Basically, this is the version of the witnesses Edwin John Woods [and] Louis [sic] Marker, but the petitioner cannot hold himself out as proving the exclusion of responsibility which is referred to in Fraction X of Article 15 of the Penal Code; that is to say, that if an injury was caused, that it was by mere accident, with neither intention nor any imprudence, carrying out a legal deed with all due precautions.
“So in a way, those extremities can be shown, even accepting the version given by the aggrieved and the witnesses, for even though the test offered would be in the nature of discarding the intentionality in the commission of the punishable deed, there exists the possibility and probability that the death of the victim would have been due to an imprudencia, for the complainant ought to have recognized the state of inebriation in which he found himself— he, who took no precaution to [determine] if the weapon was loaded, nor pointed the barrel in a direction in which no damage could be caused.”
17. Ibid.
18. WSB to Jack Kerouac, December 20, 1951.
19. Diario Oficial de México, August 29, 1990.
20. Reported in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
21. Morgan, tape 12.
22. Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Howard Brookner, Burroughs film documentary, 1983.
26. Lucien Carr interviewed by James Grauerholz, October 11, 1999, in Grauerholz, The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs.
27. Morgan, tape 18.
28. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, New York, 1974 (from ms.).
29. Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and William Burroughs, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, Thalia Theater, Hamburg, program for performance opening March 31, 1990.
Chapter Nineteen
1. Morgan, tape 40.
2. Morgan, tape 47.
3. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 5, 1952.
4. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 3, 1952.
5. See Oliver Harris’s introduction to Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” published by Penguin in 2003.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 22, 1952.
7. WSB to Jack Kerouac [April 1952].
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 26, 1952.
9. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 114.
10. Ibid.
11. Morgan, tape 31.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, June 4, 1952.
13. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 15, 1952.
14. Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, May 10, 1952.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 23, 1952.
16. Ibid.
17. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 252.
18. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 13, 1952.
19. Ibid.
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 20, 1952.
21. A publisher’s royalty statement shows that 113,170 copies were sold before December 30, 1953. See Maynard and Miles, William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953–1973, 2f.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, early July 1952.
23. Morgan, tape 31.
24. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 18, 1952.
25. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, November 5, 1952.
26. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 6, 1952.
27. Jack Kerouac to John Clellon Holmes, December 9, 1952.
Chapter Twenty
1. “Trip to Hell and Back,” WSB interviewed by Jerry Bauer in Trax (London), no. 6 (March 18, 1981).
2. Ibid.
3. WSB, Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” 153.
4. Benjamin Ivry, Arthur Rimbaud (Bath, UK: Absolute, 1998).
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 10, 1953.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 19, 1953.
7. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 15, 1953.
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 25, 1953.
9. Christopher Isherwood, The Condor and the Cows, 46.
10. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 25, 1953.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 30, 1953.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 28, 1953.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Morgan, tape 13.
19. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 28, 1953.
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 15, 1953.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 22, 1953.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 30, 1953.
23. WSB, The Yage Letters, 38.
24. Morgan, tape 13.
25. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 12, 1953.
26. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 30, 1953.
27. WSB, The Yage Letters, 40.
28. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 151.
29. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 15, 1953.
30. Morgan, tape 12.
31. Ibid.
32. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 8, 1953.
33. Ibid.
34. Morgan, tape 12.
35. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, early July 1953.
36. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 10, 1953.
37. Ibid.
Chapter Twenty-One
1. Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 80–81.
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 21, 1953.
3. WSB, Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs, 145.
4. Ibid., 185–86.
5. Ibid., 183.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 8, 1953.
7. Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, September 1953.
8. Michael Harrington, “ ‘A San Remo Type’: The Vanishing Village,” Village Voice vol. 16, no. 1 (January 7, 1971).
9. Boris Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
10. See Edmund White, Genet, 586.
11. Morgan, tape 20.
12. WSB interviewed by Allen Ginsberg, in Burroughs Live: Collected Interviews, 807.
13. Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: A Biography, 155–56.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Wilhelm Reich, Cosmic Superimposition (Rangeley, ME: Wilhelm Reich Foundation, 1951), 50.
17. WSB, Queer, 36.
18. WSB, Interzone, 137.
19. Ibid.
20. The subject of a number of conversations with the author, Cherry Valley, NY, 1969–71.
21. Gay Sunshine, no. 16 (January 1973).
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 23, 1973.
23. Jeffrey Scott Dunn, “A Conversation: Ginsberg on Burroughs,” Pennsylvania Review, (Fall/Winter 1987): 41.
24. Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography, 156.
25. Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, February 21, 1953.
26. Morgan, tape 39.
27. WSB to Jack Kerouac, December 14, 1953.
28. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 24, 1953.
29. Ibid.
30. Alan Ansen [and WSB] to Allen Ginsberg, January 2, 1954.
Chapter Twenty-Two
1. Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans,” Vogue, December 1, 1940.
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 26, 1954.
3. Ibid.
4. Morgan, tape 15.
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 20, 1954.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 9, 1954.
7. WSB, “Some Memories, Unclarified drafts,” 1990 (unpublished).
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 9, 1954.
9. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 18, 1954.
10. David Woolman, Rebels in the Rif: Abd el Krim and the Rif Rebellion (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press), 1968.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 1, 1954.
12. Morgan, tape 31.
13. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 10, 1955.
14. WSB, The Naked Lunch, “Black Meat” section, 59.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 10, 1955.
16. Alan Ansen papers, in Ted Morgan papers, Arizona State University, Tempe.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 1, 1954.
18. Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Caves of Hercules, 33.
19. Morgan, tape 29.
20. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 174.
21. Brian Howard to John Banting, [March?] 1954. Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster, Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, 310.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 1, 1954.
23. Morgan, tape 43.
24. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 7, 1954.
25. Morgan, tape 25.
26. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 22, 1954.
27. Ibid.
Chapter Twenty-Three
1. WSB, Early Routines, 28–29.
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 15, 1954.
3. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 22, 1954.
4. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 11, 1954.
5. A British public school is what is known as a prep school or boarding school in the United States.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, June 16, 1954.
7. WSB, Naked Lunch, 280.
8. Morgan, tape 43.
9. WSB to Jack Kerouac, April 22, 1954.
10. Ibid.
11. WSB to Jack Kerouac, May 4, 1954.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 11, 1954.
13. Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassidy, [May 1954].
14. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 3, 1954.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 8, 1954.
16. Morgan, tape 41.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 10, 1954.
18. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 8, 1954.
19. WSB, Queer, 16.
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 22, 1953.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 26, 1954.
22. Ibid.
23. WSB, Interzone, 38.
24. WSB to Jack Kerouac, August 18, 1954.
25. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 18, 1954.
26. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 26, 1954.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Morgan, tape 15.
30. Harold Norse interviewed by Winston Leyland, in Gay Sunshine, no. 18 (June 1973).
31. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 18, 1954.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 30, 1954.
2. WSB to Jack Kerouac, September 3, 1954.
3. Alan Ansen papers, in Ted Morgan papers, Arizona State University, Tempe.
4. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1954.
5. Ibid.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 15, 1954.
7. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 7, 1956.
8. Possibly 62 Bab el Assa, place de la Kasbah.
9. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 21, 1955.
10. WSB, Interzone, 49.
11. Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Caves of Hercules, 84.
12. Morgan, tape 33.
13. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 197.
14. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 7, 1954.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 7, 1954.
16. Arthur Rimbaud, “The Bridges.”
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 6, 1954.
18. WSB to Jack Kerouac, December 7, 1954.
19. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 13, 1954.
20. WSB, Naked Lunch, 150.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 30, 1954.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 7, 1955.
23. As explained by WSB to Frank Zappa before the latter read the “Talking Asshole” routine at the Nova Convention, New York, December 2, 1978.
24. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 7, 1955.
25. WSB to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, November 2, 1955.
26. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, November 1, 1955.
27. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 17, 1955.
28. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 5, 1955.
29. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 3, 1955.
30. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 21, 1955.
31. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 7, 1955.
32. WSB to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, October 23, 1955.
33. WSB, The Naked Lunch, 48; WSB, Doctor Benway, 51–55.
34. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 23, 1955.
35. Ibid.
36. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 1, 1955.
37. WSB interviewed by Bill Rich, April 23, 1991.
38. Outtake “Coke Bugs” section of Naked Lunch, in the appendix of the revised text edition, 280.
39. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 20, 1957; WSB, My Education, 68.
40. WSB, Nova Express (Panther edition), 28.
41. Ibid., 32.
Chapter Twenty-Five
1. Outtake “Coke Bugs” section of Naked Lunch, in the appendix of the restored text edition, 280.
2. “Trip to Hell and Back,” WSB interviewed by Jerry Bauer in Trax (London), no. 6 (March 18, 1981).
3. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 8, 1956.
4. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 217, and My Education, 162.
5. WSB, Last Words, 3.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, June 18, 1956.
7. Ibid.
8. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 186.
9. Ralph Rumney, The Consul, 36.
10. Alan Ansen to Allen Ginsberg, n.d.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 13, 1956.
12. Ibid.
13. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 16, 1956.
14. Ibid.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1956.
16. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 16, 1956.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Morgan, tape 15.
21. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 29, 1956.
22. Paul Bowles, “Burroughs in Tangier,” Big Table (Chicago), no. 2 (1959).
23. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 29, 1956.
24. Gena Dagel Caponi, ed., Conversations with Paul Bowles, 88.
25. Paul Bowles, In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, 45.
26. Paul Bowles to Aaron Copland, February 1933.
27. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 9, 1954.
28. Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965 (New York: Henry Holt, 1977).
29. Paul Bowles, “Interview with Simon Bischoff, Tangier 1989–1991,” in Bischoff, ed., “How Could I Send a Picture into the Desert?”: Paul Bowles Photographs, 227.
30. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 16, 1956.
31. Morgan, tape 15.
32. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1956.
33. Ibid.
34. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 20, 1956.
35. William Lithgow, The Total Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations of Long Nineteen Years Travayles (1632).
36. Tahar ben Jelloun, Leaving Tangier, 33–34.
37. WSB, Naked Lunch, 102.
38. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 29, 1956. (“Surely a history for men, a song of strength for men, like a shudder from afar of space shaking an iron tree.” T. S. Eliot’s translation, Saint-John Perse, Anabasis, section 6.)
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Mohamed Choukri, In Tangier, 169–70.
42. Morgan, tape 31.
43. WSB, The Wild Boys, 140.
44. Morgan Bowles, tape 9.
45. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, December 20, 1956.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1. WSB, Interzone, “Ginsberg Notes,” 119.
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1956.
3. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 29, 1956.
4. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 23, 1957.
5. Paul Bowles, ms. in WSB archives.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 18, 1954.
7. WSB, Interzone, “Ginsberg Notes,” 119.
8. Colonel Gerald Richardson, Crime Zone, 162–63.
9. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1956.
10. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 23, 1957.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 13, 1956.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 14, 1957.
13. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 14, 1957.
14. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 31, 1957.
15. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 14, 1957.
16. Jack Kerouac to Malcolm Cowley, March 8, 1957.
17. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 315.
18. Ibid.
19. Morgan, tape 18.
20. Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 316.
21. Paul Bowles, “Burroughs in Tangier,” Big Table (Chicago), no. 2 (1959).
22. Iain Finlayson, Tangier: City of the Dream, 214.
23. Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 317.
24. Morgan, tape 15.
25. Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 320.
26. Morgan, tape 40.
27. This is in essence Paul Bowles’s recipe. Ian Sommerville told the author that Burroughs “used Paul’s recipe.”
28. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller, 144.
29. Morgan, tape 40.
30. Morgan, tape 31.
31. Morgan, tape 22; BBC Arena interview Bacon/Burroughs transcript.
32. Morgan, tape 18.
33. Morgan, tape 15.
34. WSB, Interzone, “Ginsberg Notes,” 126.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1. WSB, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, 25.
2. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 20, 1957.
3. Morgan, tape 10.
4. Morgan, tape 31.
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 20, 1957.
6. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 24, 1957.
7. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 28, 1957.
8. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 20, 1957.
9. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 8, 1957.
10. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 19, 1957.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, November 26, 1957.
12. Ibid.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
1. WSB on Mme. Rachou; interviewed by the author, Lawrence, Kansas, July 6, 1996.
2. WSB, “Foreword to Beat Hotel,” in Harold Chapman, The Beat Hotel.
3. Ibid.
4. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 255.
5. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, January 20, 1958.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, January 28, 1958.
10. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, February 24, 1958.
11. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 3, 1958.
12. This is a word made up by Gold for the book. Words such as “mark” and “grifter” were in common use in the carney world, and Burroughs either knew them from rolling drunks on the subway with Phil White, or read them in the extensive glossary appended to David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man and the Confidence Trick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940).
13. Herbert Gold, Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet, 132–33.
14. Gregory Corso to Don Allen, March 27, 1968.
15. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, February 24, 1958.
16. Ibid.
17. Graham Seidman, “Tales from the Beat Hotel’, August 7, 2003, http://www.litkicks.com/BeatHotel (accessed February 2012).
18. Baird Bryant, “Souvenirs of the Beat Hotel,” 2003, http://www.kerouacfest.com/currentpage/souvenirs.htm (accessed January 2012). In this text Bryant claims to have been introduced to Jack Kerouac by Allen Ginsberg in Paris, and gives sample dialogue, but Kerouac and Ginsberg were never in Paris together. Though Bryant and Burroughs did certainly know each other, his memoir should be treated more as a work of fiction than of fact.
19. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, February 24, 1958.
20. WSB, scrapbook started July 5, 1972, 126.
21. WSB, Port of Saints, 49.
22. WSB, Exterminator!, 40–41; J.S. is probably Jacques Stern.
23. Author interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel, September 17, 1998, Paris.
24. Ibid.
25. “Interview with Kenneth Tindall: From Bellevue to Lynaes; An Interview by Lars Movin,” http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/kenneth-tindall.html (accessed July 2012).
26. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, April 1, 1958.
27. Jean-Jacques Lebel interviewed by the author, Paris, September 17, 1998.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
1. Morgan, tape 20.
2. Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orlovsky, June 15, 1958.
3. Morgan, tape 20.
4. Jacques Stern interviewed by Victor Bockris and Stewart Meyer, November 5, 2001 (unpublished).
5. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 24, 1958.
6. Brasserie Lipp and M. Cazes inspired the “Chez Robert” routine in The Naked Lunch.
7. Morgan, tape 64.
8. Jacques Stern interviewed by Victor Bockris and Stewart Meyer, November 5, 2001 (unpublished).
9. Morgan, tape 20.
10. Morgan, tape 22.
11. Morgan, tape 64.
12. Saint-John Perse, Anabasis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949 [1938]), 47, 51.
13. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by the author, New York, 1985.
14. Ibid.
15. Gregory Corso to Don Allen, July 21, 1958.
16. Gael Turnbull, “Extracts from a Journal,” Mica, no. 5 (Winter 1962) (Santa Barbara, CA).
17. Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, June 26, 1958.
18. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, n.d. [July 1958].
19. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 24, 1958.
20. Ibid.
21. Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, June 29, 1963.
22. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 25, 1958.
23. Gregory Corso to Allen Ginsberg, October 8, 1958. “PG” is paregoric.
24. Ibid.
Chapter Thirty
1. Terry Wilson, “Brion Gysin: A Biography/Appreciation,” RE/Search 4/5 (1982) (San Francisco).
2. WSB, Last Words, 67.
3. Brion Gysin, “Points of Order,” in Terry Wilson, Here to Go: Planet R-101 (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1982), xv.
4. WSB, Early Routines, 34.
5. Felicity Mason, writing as Anne Cumming, The Love Quest, 16.
6. Brion Gysin, Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, 8.
7. Ibid., 10.
8. Brion Gysin interviewed by Terry Wilson in Here to Go: Planet R-101.
9. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 10, 1958.
10. Transcription of a 1959 conversation between Brion Gysin and WSB in Galerie Weiller catalog text for 1973 Brion Gysin show. Reprinted in 1976 in Soft Need, no. 9, and in the catalog to the Gysin show at the October Gallery, 1981.
11. Ibid.
12. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 10, 1958.
13. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, July 24, 1958.
14. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 10, 1958.
15. Brion Gysin interviewed by Terry Wilson in Here to Go: Planet R-101.
16. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, January 2, 1959.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. WSB, “The Algebra of Need,” in Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, 206.
20. WSB, The Naked Lunch (1959), 224.
21. Baird Bryant, “Souvenirs of the Beat Hotel,” http://www.kerouacfest.com/currentpage/souvenirs.htm (accessed January 2012).
22. Terry Wilson, “Brion Gysin: A Biography/Appreciation,” RE/Search 4/5 (1982) (San Francisco).
23. Morgan, tape 39.
24. Allen Ginsberg, “The Ugly Spirit,” WSB interviewed by Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco Review of Books and other places. Taped March 17–22, 1992, Lawrence, Kansas.
25. WSB, Queer, 133.
26. WSB, unpublished journal, January 2, 1984.
27. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 2, 1959. The suitcase and its contents are presumed lost. These were the early draft versions of the John and Mary hanging scenes in The Naked Lunch.
28. Morgan, tape 62 (labeled tape 61).
29. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, April 2, 1959.
30. As Néo-Codion.
31. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 18, 1959.
32. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, February 12, 1959.
33. Mack Thomas, Gumbo (New York: Grove, 1965).
34. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, May 18, 1959.
35. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, June 8, 1959.
36. Jacques Stern, The Fluke, Reality Studio, realitystudio.org/publications/jacques-stern/and-the-fluke/ (accessed February 2012).
Chapter Thirty-One
1. WSB, Last Words, 51.
2. Victor Bockris, “Information About the Operation: A Portrait of William Burroughs,” New Review 3, no. 25 (April 1976): 42–43; Brion Gysin interviewed by Rob LaFrenais and Graham Dawes, Performance magazine, no. 11 (1981) (London).
3. Quoted in Irving Rosenthal, “Editorial,” Big Table (Chicago), no. 1 (Spring 1959).
4. Albert N. Podell, “Censorship on the Campus: The Case of the Chicago Review,” San Francisco Review 1, no. 2 (1959): 73–74.
5. Ibid.
6. “Post Office Morals,” Nation 188 (May 30, 1959): 486–87.
7. Morgan, tape 19.
8. Morgan, tape 21.
9. “In Search of the Connection,” WSB interviewed by Nina Sutton, Guardian, July 5, 1964.
10. The latter not from The Naked Lunch but from “Fluck you, fluck you, fluck you,” a Tangier text dated March 31, 1964, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, no. 5, vol. 7 [sic] (September 1964): “A.J. arrives uninvited at the Countess di Vile’s bi-annual garden party in Civil War drag blue Union pants and Confederate grey tunic unsheathed his saber and with one stroke decapitated Dame Sitlong’s Afghan hound. The head bounces across the lawn snarling and snapping. A.J. lifts his bloody sword and the orchestra strikes up The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Cited by WSB as an example of A.J.’s outrageous behavior.
11. Alan Ansen to Allen Ginsberg, November 4, 1958.
12. Alan Ansen, “Anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death,” Big Table (Chicago), no. 2 (Summer 1959): 32–41.
13. Alan Ansen, untitled notes, in Ted Morgan papers, Arizona State University, Tempe.
14. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, late July 1959.
15. William Burroughs, “Témoignage à propos d’une maladie,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 85 (January 1, 1960): 82–92.
16. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, September 11, 1959.
17. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, October 7, 1959.
18. A vest.
19. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, n.d. [late July 1958].
20. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, August 24, 1959.
21. Le Festin Nu was subject to a resolution issued by the minister of the interior on July 9, 1964, imposing three conditions on its sale: it could not be sold to minors under eighteen years old; it could not be displayed for sale; no posters or advertising publicity were to be displayed. As a consequence it could only be sold “under the counter.”
22. Harold Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, 344.
23. Burroughs denied the oft-quoted story that Ian, up a ladder tidying books, dropped a book on his shoulder at the Mistral to strike up a conversation. However, the archives of the Mistral—now Shakespeare and Co.—include a document from Sommerville which suggests that this is how it happened.
24. Harold Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, 345.
25. Ibid.
26. WSB with Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, 50.
27. Brion Gysin, 1982. Typewritten document in the archives of William Burroughs Communications, Lawrence, Kansas.
28. WSB in conversation with the author, 1972.
29. Morgan, tape 51.
30. WSB, Last Words, 48.
31. WSB, The Soft Machine (1961), 15.
Chapter Thirty-Two
1. Betty Bouthoul, Le vieux de la montagne.
2. Brion Gysin, “A Quick Trip to Alamut,” Ultraculture Journal One.
3. Joseph von Hammer, The History of the Assassins (London: Smith & Elder, 1835), 234–35.
4. Literally means “rising of the dead.”
5. Hashish appears to have been taken as a beverage rather than smoked at Alamut.
6. Henri Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul, 1993), 95.
7. Joseph von Hammer wrote, “ ‘Nothing is true and all is allowed,’ was the groundwork of the secret doctrine; which, however, being imparted to few, and concealed under the veil of the most austere religionism and piety, restrained the mind under the yoke of obedience.” The History of the Assassins, 55.
8. WSB, The Western Lands, 203.
9. Barry Miles, William S. Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (2002 revision), 116.
10. Ibid., 116.
11. Morgan, tape 20.
12. WSB, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, and Sinclair Beiles, Minutes to Go, 63.
13. Ibid.
14. Beiles’s assertion in an interview that he took “all the pages and typed them up” is not true, as the original manuscript of Minutes to Go is in four different typefaces and paper stocks. In “Interview with Sinclair Beiles by David Malan, Yeoville, South Africa, January 1994,” collected in Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, eds., Who Was Sinclair Beiles?
15. “To settle a score with literature.”
16. WSB to David Haselwood, December 24, 1959, reproduced in A Bibliography of the Auerhahn Press and Its Successor Dave Haselwood Books Compiled by a Printer, 25.
17. WSB to David Haselwood, May 27, 1960, reproduced in ibid., 27.
18. Villiers, George, late Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal, 8th ed. (London: Richard Wellington, 1711).
19. WSB, The Job, 28.
20. Ibid., 29.
Chapter Thirty-Three
1. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 16, 1960.
2. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London vol. 2, 128.
3. WSB, unpublished journal entry for January 1, 1984.
4. John Howe interviewed by the author, London, November 9, 2011.
5. A British public school is what is known as a prep school or boarding school in the United States.
6. WSB to Jon Webb, August 21, 1960.
7. Author conversation with Michael Horovitz, October 2011.
8. Michael Horovitz, “Legend in His Own Lunchtime,” Times Saturday Review, May 23, 1992.
9. Hannah Gay, The History of Imperial College London, 1907–2007, 383; email correspondence with Dr. Hannah Gay, November 2011; email correspondence with Professor Bill Griffith, December 2011; conversation with Dick Pountain, November 2011; http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2011/July/TheEvansBalance.asp (accessed November 2011); M. L. H. Green, Dennis Frederick Evans. 27 March 1928–6 November 1990, Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org (accessed November 2011).
10. Christine Keeler, The Truth at Last, 231.
11. Sydney R. Davies, Walking the London Scene: Five Walks in the Footsteps of the Beat Generation, 33, and in conversation with Sydney Davies.
12. Kenneth Allsop, Scan, 21.
13. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 26, 1960.
14. Morgan, tape 24.
15. WSB, unpublished ms., April 30, 1983.
16. WSB, The Western Lands, 252.
17. Morgan, tape 62 (labeled tape 61).
18. Morgan, tape 34.
19. WSB to Brion Gysin, September 14, 1960.
20. WSB to Brion Gysin, August 4, 1960.
21. In conversation, 1972.
22. Brion Gysin, “Dream Machine,” Olympia, no. 2 (1962): 31.
23. John Geiger, Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted, 160.
24. Ian Sommerville to Brion Gysin, February 15, 1960, quoted in Gysin, “Dream Machine,” 31.
25. Brevet number P.V. 868,281.
26. Author interview with Christopher Gibbs, June 6, 2011, Tangier.
27. Michael Wishart, High Diver, 167–68.
28. WSB to Brion Gysin, October 21, 1960.
29. WSB, My Education, 32.
30. Steve Boggan and Paul Lashmar, “The Great and Not-So-Goodman,” Independent, January 18, 1999.
31. Christopher Gibbs interviewed by the author, Tangier, June 6, 2011.
32. WSB to Brion Gysin, October 21, 1960.
33. WSB, My Education, 151.
34. Ibid.
35. This is not true; there are many mountains in between.
36. Alan Govenar, The Beat Hotel, Documentary Arts (film documentary), 2011.
37. Jenni Ferrari-Adler, ed., Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, 219.
38. Felicity Mason, writing as Anne Cumming, Love Quest, 117.
39. John Gilmore, Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip, 148.
40. Ibid.
41. Daevid Allen interview, Scotsman, November 19, 2009.
42. “Daevid Allen: Magical Mystery Tour,” Magnet, http://www.magnetmagazine.com/1999/10/01/daevid-allen-magical-history-tour (accessed December 2012).
43. WSB to Allen Ginsberg, March 12, 1961.
Chapter Thirty-Four
1. Arthur Rimbaud, “Alchemy of the Word,” section II of “Delirium,” in A Season in Hell, 1873.
2. Unattributed front cover flap, The Soft Machine (Olympia edition). The ellipsis is in the original.
3. Allen Ginsberg to Lucien Carr, July 28, 1961 (misdated as June).
4. Entry for January 17, 1963, in Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, 155.
5. WSB, The Soft Machine (1961), 87.
6. Ibid., 89–90.
7. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 8, 1961.
8. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 13, 1961.
9. WSB, The Adding Machine, 12.
10. Historical precedents include the work of Piet Zwart between 1929 and 1934, who photographed close-ups of carefully arranged objects such as a pair of spectacles and a fallen leaf on an open newspaper (1934), or a coil of copper wire on a pile of business cards (1931). His pictures of lead typeface letters on a newspaper (1931) use strong shadow and are, at least superficially, very similar to Burroughs’s Tangier-period reversals and superimpositions. Possibly the earliest recorded example of the photographic record of a fugitive assemblage is “Unhappy Readymade”: in 1919 Marcel Duchamp, who was in Buenos Aires, instructed his sister Suzanne to attach a geometry book to the balcony of her Paris apartment to allow “the wind to examine it.” The elements turned the pages and tore some of them loose. The progress of its disintegration was recorded in photographs and in a painting by Suzanne Duchamp.
11. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 16, 1961.
12. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 28, 1961.
13. WSB to Brion Gysin, June 14, 1961.
14. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Invisible Spectator, 356.
15. John Hopkins, The Tangier Diaries, 1962–1979, April 1, 1963, 36.
16. Ted Morgan, Rowing Toward Eden, 98–99.
17. Author conversations with Burroughs, 1972–73; Morgan, tape 32.
18. Ned Rorem, Diaries, June 22, 1967.
19. WSB to Timothy Leary, May 6, 1961.
20. WSB, “Comments on the Night Before Thinking,” Evergreen Review vol. 5, no. 20 (September 1961): 31.
21. Author notes, taken from a published interview with Leary but source unknown.
Chapter Thirty-Five
1. Morgan, tape 61.
2. Allen Ginsberg in conversation with the author, ca. 1970 and 1984, for whole section.
3. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary History of the Beat Generation,” lecture number 18.
4. Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Caves of Hercules, 135.
5. Allen Ginsberg to Lucien Carr, July 28, 1961 (misdated as June).
6. Morgan, tape 20.
7. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Straight Hearts’ Delight, 104–5. Transcribed July 12 and July 16, 1961. Transcript uses spelling corrected by Ginsberg.
8. Allen Ginsberg to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, n.d. [1961].
9. Timothy Leary, High Priest, 215.
10. WSB to Timothy Leary, May 6, 1961; Timothy Leary, High Priest, 214–15; Timothy Leary, Flashbacks, 95.
11. Leary, High Priest, 215.
12. Ibid., 215.
13. Leary, Flashbacks, 96–97.
14. Leary, High Priest, 216–22.
15. Ibid., 223.
16. Morgan, tape 43.
17. Ibid.
18. Leary, Flashbacks, 100.
19. Ibid.
20. Leary, High Priest, 228.
21. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, 82–83.
22. Leary, High Priest, 231.
23. Pataphysics, October 17, 1989.
24. WSB, “Prisoners, Come Out” section of Nova Express, 10–11.
Chapter Thirty-Six
1. WSB, Nova Express, 18.
2. “To Write for the Space Age,” Michael Moorcock interviewed by Mark P. Williams, Reality Studio, December 8, 2008, www.realitystudio.org/interviews/michael-moorcock-on-william-s-burroughs (accessed July 2011).
3. Norman Mailer interviewed by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch, Mademoiselle, February 1961, 52.
4. Norman Mailer interviewed by Winston Bode, Texas Observer, December 15, 1961.
5. Alexander Trocchi in debate with David Daiches, August 21, 1962: “Scottish Writers’ Day,” Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, 1962.
6. Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times, 351.
7. John Calder, Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder, 207.
8. Morgan, tape 41.
9. Morgan, tape 49.
10. Brion Gysin interviewed by Jason Weiss, Paris, August 21, 1980, in Reality Studios vol. 4, 1982.
11. “Burroughs After Lunch,” WSB interviewed by Joseph Barry, New York Post, March 10, 1963.
12. The Ticket That Exploded (Olympia edition), 41; the same passage repeats in Nova Express, 50.
13. The Ticket That Exploded (Olympia edition), 81.
14. WSB in conversation with the author, London, 1972.
15. “Dressed for Tea,” WSB interviewed by W. J. Weatherby, Guardian, March 22, 1963.
16. Miles, Catalogue of the WSB Archive; Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 70.
17. Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 85.
18. Author interview with Christopher Gibbs, Tangier, 2012.
19. The Ticket That Exploded (Olympia edition), 102–3.
20. Typically, Antony Balch and Towers Open Fire receive no mention in Stephen Dwoskin’s Film Is: The International Free Cinema (1975); Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Film (1967); Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971 (1972); David E. James’s To Free the Cinema (1992); or P. Adams Sitney’s Film Culture anthology, despite the fact that Balch and Towers (and The Cut-Ups) anticipated many of the techniques of the new cinema and was far more avant-garde than most of the filmmakers discussed in those books. Perhaps future film scholars will correct the lapse and place Balch and Burroughs where they belong in the forefront of postwar avant-garde filmmaking.
21. WSB taped by Bill Rich, May 15, 1991.
22. Ibid.
23. “Burroughs After Lunch,” WSB interviewed by Joseph Barry, New York Post, March 10, 1963.
24. Evening Standard, March 29, 1963.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
1. Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 157.
2. WSB, The Third Mind, 107–8.
3. Morgan, tape 26.
4. William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth, 12.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. Morgan, tape 26.
7. Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 141.
8. William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth, 15.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 17.
11. The photograph, taken on November 9, 1963, appeared in the “Literary Tangier” feature in the September 1964 issue of Esquire.
12. Morgan, tape 26.
13. Ibid.
14. Morgan Bowles tape 19.
15. John Hopkins, Tangier Diaries, 43, 44.
16. WSB, The Third Mind, 107–8.
17. Morgan, tape 18.
18. Conversations with Ian Sommerville, London, 1968–69; conversations with Brion Gysin, London, 1972, 1974; conversation with Alan Ansen and Allen Ginsberg, New York, 1984.
19. The Floating Bear, no. 27 (1962). Burroughs had nothing in this issue.
20. WSB to Brion Gysin, February 4, 1964.
21. Chicago Review, issue 54 (vol. 17, no. 1) (1964), 130.
22. WSB, Last Words, 185; Burroughs is probably referring to Graham Wallace.
23. Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 157.
24. Ibid., 156.
25. Ibid., 153.
26. Ibid., 152.
27. Ibid.
28. Morgan, tape 18.
29. WSB, The Third Mind, 107–8.
30. Hopkins, Tangier Diaries, 77.
31. Ibid, 67.
32. Ibid.
33. WSB, Exterminator! (Corgi edition), 39. Mr. P is Paul Bowles.
34. Alan Ansen papers, in Ted Morgan papers, Arizona State University, Tempe.
35. Hopkins, Tangier Diaries, 56; Gary Pulsifer, Paul Bowles by His Friends, 60. Conversation with the author, 2012.
36. WSB, Nova Express, 11.
37. WSB interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker, Paris Review, issue 35 (Fall 1965), and in various collections.
38. Caused partly by Ansen’s affair with a redheaded Berber who supposedly later assassinated the grand rabbi of Tangier.
39. Cited in John Geiger, Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted, 189.
40. Conversation with Ira Cohen, New York, 1985.
41. “Who Is the Walks Beside You Written 3rd?,” in Darazt anthology, London, 1965.
42. “I Talk to the First Beatnik,” WSB interviewed by Susan Barnes, Sun, November 17, 1964.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
1. WSB interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker, Paris Review, issue 35 (Fall 1965).
2. Claude Pélieu, With Revolvers Aimed… Finger Bowls (San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts & Documents, 1967); Mary Beach, A Two Fisted Banana: Electric and Gothic (Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley, 1980).
3. C: A Journal of Poetry vol. 1, no. 9 (Summer 1964): 43–47.
4. C: A Journal of Poetry vol. 1, no. 10 (February 14, 1965): 70–71.
5. C Press books were published by Lorenz and Ellen Gude. Berrigan would certainly never have had enough money for such a professional print job.
6. The text was dated March 31, 1964, in Tangier.
7. “St. Louis Return,” Paris Review, issue 35 (Fall 1965).
8. “Transcript of Dutch Schultz’s Last Words,” in James D. Horan, The Desperate Years (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962), 185.
9. WSB to Ian Sommerville, February 16, 1965.
10. Ed Sanders, Fug You, 130.
11. WSB to Ian Sommerville, February 16, 1965.
12. WSB to Antony Balch, May 19, 1965.
13. WSB to Alan Ansen, February 27, 1964.
14. WSB to Ian Sommerville, April 12, 1965.
15. See Sanders, Fug You, 145.
16. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, 103.
17. Morgan, tape 34.
18. Ibid.
19. WSB to Ian Sommerville, July 28, 1965.
20. Morgan, tape 25.
21. Anslinger was in power from 1930 to 1962; before that he was assistant commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition.
22. Mayor John Lindsay was in office from January 1, 1966, to December 31, 1973.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
1. WSB, unpublished journals, November 21, 1982.
2. Interview with Christopher Gibbs, Tangier, 2011.
3. Ibid.
4. Morgan, tape 36.
5. Morgan, tape 15, tape 31.
6. WSB, untitled essay in the press kit for Chappaqua, 1967.
7. WSB to Brion Gysin, May 27, 1966.
8. Carl Weissner to Victor Bockris, in Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 8.
9. Bill Butler, “A Word Is a Word Is a Collage,” Guardian, November 27, 1965.
10. WSB to Claude Pélieu, November 10, 1966.
11. The British Board of Film Censors issued a “U” certificate to films that were suitable for children.
12. WSB interviewed by the author, Lawrence, Kansas, November 29, 1991.
13. The author of this book.
14. The author was present.
15. Ian Sommerville in conversation, London, 1966.
16. Harriet Vyner, Groovy Bob, 168.
Chapter Forty
1. WSB to Ian Sommerville, September 12, 1966; WSB to Ian Sommerville, September 15, 1966.
2. Morgan, tape 41.
3. WSB to Ian Sommerville, September 15, 1966.
4. WSB to Brion Gysin, August 1, 1966.
5. WSB to Brion Gysin, December 17, 1966.
6. Allen Ginsberg to Barry Miles, September 20, 1966.
7. WSB to Brion Gysin, October 13, 1966.
8. WSB to Mary Beach, July 28, 1967.
9. As this was not published in English until 1970, Burroughs must have read it in French, either in the magazine or the 1967 French edition.
10. WSB to Brion Gysin, December 23, 1966.
11. “Dressed for Tea,” WSB interviewed by W. J. Weatherby, Guardian, March 22, 1963.
12. WSB, The Soft Machine (Grove Black Cat edition), 26.
13. WSB, Last Words, 206.
14. WSB to Laura Lee Burroughs, November 21, 1966.
15. WSB, afterword in William S. Burroughs Jr., Kentucky Ham, 195.
16. WSB, The Western Lands, 253.
17. WSB to Brion Gysin, February 5, 1967.
18. WSB to Brion Gysin, February 8, 1967.
19. WSB, afterword in Williams S. Burroughs Jr., Kentucky Ham, 196.
20. WSB to Brion Gysin, April 15, 1968.
21. William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth, 25.
22. WSB, The Cat Inside, 69.
23. The dinner was held on December 16, 1966.
24. WSB to Brion Gysin, March 17, 1967.
25. WSB to Brion Gysin, August 21, 1967.
26. The author was present.
Chapter Forty-One
1. L. Ron Hubbard, Third Operating Thetan Level, “The Ring of Fire,” September 1967.
2. WSB, Nova Express, 170.
3. WSB, Ali’s Smile, 99.
4. Auditor, no. 32 (in-house Scientology magazine), 5.
5. Harold Norse, Bastard Angel, 415–16.
6. Morgan, tape 45, tape 28.
7. WSB, Last Words, 64.
8. WSB to Brion Gysin, August 19, 1968.
9. Ian Sommerville, in conversation with the author, 1968.
10. Morgan, tape 39.
Chapter Forty-Two
1. “The Coming of the Purple Better One,” in WSB, Exterminator!, 98.
2. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 25.
3. WSB to Brion Gysin, September 9, 1968.
4. See Jack Stevensen, Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Story of Häxen, the World’s Strangest Film, and the Man Who Made It (Godalming, UK: FAB, 2006); Benjamin Christensen, Häxen/Witchcraft Through the Ages, Tartan DVDTVD3758, 2007.
5. WSB to Brion Gysin, October 17, 1968.
6. Ibid.
7. WSB to Dr. Joe Gross, October 17, 1968.
8. WSB to Brion Gysin, November 5, 1968.
9. “Rolling Stone Interview,” WSB interviewed by Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone, May 11, 1972.
10. Ibid.
11. WSB interviewed by Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 44.
12. WSB, The Job, 17.
13. WSB, “The Discipline of DE,” in Exterminator!, 56.
14. “Journey Through Time-Space,” WSB interviewed by Daniel Odier, Evergreen 67 (June 1969).
Chapter Forty-Three
1. “In Search of the Connection,” WSB interviewed by Nina Sutton, Guardian, July 5, 1969.
2. Mick Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, 279.
3. Morgan, tape 1.
4. WSB, unpublished journal, January 2, 1984.
5. WSB, My Education, 147.
6. Ibid.
7. WSB to Billy Burroughs Jr., November 4, 1970.
8. Bockris, A Report from the Bunker, 27.
9. Charles Marowitz, “Expats’ Chicago: London, 1968,” http://swans.com/library/art14/cmarow108.html (June 2, 2008) (accessed June 2012).
10. Irving Wardle, “Conspiracy Trial Is Given as Drama,” New York Times, August 26, 1970.
11. B. A. Young, “Flash Gordon and the Angels,” Financial Times, February 17, 1971.
12. David Z. Mairowitz to author, 2005.
13. WSB, Evil River ms.
14. Bockris, A Report from the Bunker, 220.
15. WSB, Evil River ms.
16. Bockris, A Report from the Bunker, 120–21.
17. Morgan, tape 3.
18. Morgan, tape 38.
19. The Rolling Stones Chronicle, “1971: I Can’t Even Feel the Pain No More,” http://www.timeisonourside.com/chron1971.html (accessed November 2011).
20. Morgan, tape 3.
21. Ibid.
22. Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo, NY: Intrepid, 1971).
23. WSB, Last Words, 173.
24. WSB to Brion Gysin, October 22, 1971.
25. A conversation at Duke Street Saint James’s with an unknown visitor, taped by WSB, ca. 1972.
26. Cyril Vosper, The Mind Benders, 72.
27. The author was present at the meal.
28. WSB, The Job, 18.
29. WSB, The Place of Dead Roads, 177.
30. Morgan, tape 35 (labeled tape 34).
31. WSB to Paul Bowles, April 28, 1972.
32. WSB to Brion Gysin, n.d., draft in archives.
33. WSB to Brion Gysin, April 17, 1972.
34. Ibid.
35. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 112.
36. Morgan, tape 62 (labeled tape 61).
Chapter Forty-Four
1. Sometimes attributed to Floyd Starr of Albion College, Michigan, 1910.
2. WSB, unpublished journals, June 8, 1983.
3. Morgan, tape 39.
4. WSB, Port of Saints, 50.
5. Ibid., 143.
6. WSB in conversation with John Brady, taped by WSB, ca. 1972.
7. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 80.
8. Ibid., 40.
9. WSB interviewed by Bill Rich, April 23, 1991.
10. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 49–52.
11. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 38.
12. “The Rolling Stone Interview,” WSB interviewed by Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone, May 11, 1972.
13. David Bowie interviewed by WSB, Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974 (recorded November 17, 1973).
14. WSB to Billy Burroughs Jr., February 16, 1972.
15. WSB, The Western Lands, 110. “Cheney Walk” is correctly spelled Cheyne Walk, and is where Christopher Gibbs lived. “London Electric” was the London Electricity Board, known as the LEB.
16. WSB to Mack Sheldon Thomas, July 16, 1973.
17. Morgan, tape 39.
18. Morgan Ansen tapes.
19. WSB, Port of Saints (Calder edition), 148.
Chapter Forty-Five
1. Morgan, tape 42.
2. Daily News, October 30, 1975.
3. The most murders in one year were 2,605 in 1990; a decade later the number was reduced to 952, and at the time of writing, half that again.
4. Morgan, tape 40.
5. “Entretiens,” WSB interviewed by Gérard-George Lemaire, Colloque de Tanger 2, 260 (translated by Theo Miles).
6. Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (London, Faber & Faber, 1991), 85.
7. Correctly, “The wind that blows between the Worlds, it cut him like a knife.”
8. James Grauerholz interviewed by Ted Morgan, 1.
9. James Grauerholz, “Burroughs and Me” ms., February 26, 2004.
10. Morgan, tape 16.
11. WSB, The Job, 52.
12. “Burroughs After Lunch,” WSB interviewed by Joseph Barry, New York Post, March 10, 1963.
13. WSB interviewed by Jeff Shero, Rat, October 4, 1968.
14. WSB interviewed in NOLA Express, no. 61 (August 7, 1970) (New Orleans).
15. WSB interviewed in NOLA Express, no. 61 (August 7, 1970) (New Orleans) (taken from Jeff Shero’s two-part Rat interview).
16. Morgan, tape 40.
17. WSB to the author, London, June 1974.
18. Morgan, tape 40 (labeled tape 39).
19. Morgan, tape 54.
20. “The Invisible Man Returns,” WSB interviewed by Josh Feigenbaum, Soho Weekly News, July 25, 1974.
21. James Grauerholz to Allen Ginsberg, September 5, 1974.
22. WSB, “Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, and a Search for the Elusive Stairway to Heaven,” Crawdaddy, June 1975.
23. Morgan, tape 61 (labeled tape 59).
24. WSB, “My Punk Face Is Death,” in Unmuzzled Ox, no. 26 (1989) (from The Gay Gun, work in progress).
25. WSB to Paul Bowles, March 6, 1978.
26. Morgan, tape 14.
27. WSB, Retreat Diaries, [5–6][unpaginated].
28. WSB interviewed by Jim McMenamin in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 45.
29. Ibid., 6.
30. Morgan, tape 70 (labeled tape 69).
31. “There are mistakes too monstrous for remorse / To fondle or to dally with, and failures / That only fate’s worst fumbling in the dark / Could have arranged so well.” Edward Arlington Robinson, “Tristram.”
32. James Grauerholz to Brion Gysin, May 25, 1976.
33. Brion Gysin to James Grauerholz, May 30, 1976.
Chapter Forty-Six
1. William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth, 4
2. James Grauerholz to Claude Pélieu, July 13, 1976.
3. WSB, The Soft Machine, 56.
4. William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth, 154.
5. Landmark Preservation Commission, November 17, 1998, Designation List 299 LP-2028; Neil MacFarquhar, “Mansion and Old ‘Y’ Are Named Landmarks,” New York Times, November 18, 1998.
6. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Saturday, March 1, 1980, 266.
7. Robert McNamara was U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968.
8. Morgan, tape 10.
9. Quoted by James Grauerholz in his interview by Ted Morgan, transcript, 22.
Chapter Forty-Seven
1. “Mutation, Utopia, and Magic,” WSB interviewed by Arthur Shingles, Undercurrents, no. 48 (November 1981).
2. Morgan, tape 69.
3. Quoted from an unidentified source in Hardy’s obituary, http://www.ashejournal.com/eight/mclean.shtml (accessed December 2012).
4. Morgan, tape 50.
5. Morgan, tape 53.
6. Morgan, tape 54.
7. Morgan, tape 49.
8. Cabell Hardy, “Playback: My Personal Experience of Chaos Magic with William S. Burroughs, Sr.,” http://www.ashe-prem.org/three/mclean.shtml (accessed December 2012).
9. Morgan, tape 69 (labeled tape 68).
10. Ibid.
11. See Michael Walsh, “ ‘I Wrote Your Fading Movie’: The Films of Antony Balch and William Burroughs,” Motion Picture vol. 4, no. 1 (Summer 1991).
12. Gerard Pas, “How I Came to Know William Burroughs,” http://www.gerardpas.com/library/memoirs/burrough.html (accessed December 2012).
13. Sylvère Lotringer interviewed by Marcus Niski, Reality Studio, http://realitystudio.org/interviews/interview-with-sylvre-lotringer-on-the-nova-convention (accessed December 2012).
14. Brion Gysin to WSB, October 12, 1978.
15. “Trip to Hell and Back,” WSB interviewed by Jerry Bauer, Trax (London), no. 6 (March 18, 1981).
16. Rachel Wolff, “Bohemian Rhapsody: Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and the Secret Life of a Building on the Bowery,” New York Magazine, July 4, 2010.
17. Robert Palmer, “3-Day Nova Convention Ends at the Entermedia,” New York Times, December 4, 1978.
18. Ibid.
19. WSB to Gérard-Georges Lemaire, December 18, 1978. It is likely that the letter was mostly authored by James Grauerholz.
20. Victor Bockris interviewed by Dave Teeuwen, Reality Studio, http://realitystudio.org/interviews/interview-with-victor-bockris-on-william-burroughs (accessed December 2012).
21. WSB interviewed in Talk Talk 3.6, [October?] 1981.
22. Victor Bockris, A Report from the Bunker, 32.
23. WSB interviewed by Ray Rumor [Raymond Foye], Search & Destroy, no. 10 (1978).
24. Morgan, tape 61 (labeled tape 60). The words are taken from the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century Arab scholar from Tunis.
25. Ibid.
26. “Trip to Hell and Back,” WSB interviewed by Jerry Bauer, Trax (London), no. 6 (March 18, 1981).
27. WSB interviewed by Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 38.
28. Morgan, tape 24.
29. Allen Ginsberg to Barry Miles, October 8, 1979.
30. WSB, Cities of the Red Night, 206. Burroughs spells the Jakes title “Brac.”
31. Morgan, tape 61 (labeled tape 60).
32. WSB, Last Words, 16.
33. Morgan, tape 40.
Chapter Forty-Eight
1. Morgan, tape 75 (labeled tape 76).
2. Morgan, tape 13.
3. Morgan, tape 26, and all references to the letter.
4. Ibid.
5. Diconal, a painkiller.
6. Stewart Meyer, Book of Days (unpublished).
7. Stewart Meyer to Ted Morgan, “Stu Meyer Notes,” 3.
8. Morgan, tape 55.
9. WSB in conversation with Victor Bockris, 1977.
10. John Giorno, from the booklet accompanying The Best of William Burroughs CD box set, 1998.
11. Ibid.
12. Morgan, tape 40 (labeled tape 39).
13. Morgan, tape 61 (labeled tape 60).
14. Ibid.
15. William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth, 169.
16. Based on WSB, unpublished journal dated January 2, 1984.
17. Morgan, tape 26 (labeled tape 25).
18. Allen Ginsberg interviewed by Barry Miles, New York, 1985.
19. Burroughs had previously appeared on television a decade earlier in Britain with Dan Farson on January 8, 1964.
Chapter Forty-Nine
1. “An Ex-Junkie Exterminator,” WSB interviewed by Lynn Snowden, Guardian, April 25, 1992.
2. Morgan, tape 2.
3. Morgan, tape 62 (labeled tape 61).
4. Ibid.
5. WSB, Last Words, 158.
6. WSB interviewed by Duncan Fallowell, Time Out, September 24, 1982.
7. Morgan, tape 55.
8. James Grauerholz interviewed by the author, March 2012.
9. Frank Tankard, “William S. Burroughs: 10 Years After,” Lawrence.com, http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/jul/30/burroughs_student (accessed January 2013).
10. WSB, The Cat Inside, 23.
11. Morgan, tape 58 (labeled tape 57).
12. WSB interviewed by Jim McMenamin in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 51.
13. WSB, The Western Lands, 13.
14. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, 65.
15. Jeffrey Scott Dunn, “A Conversation: Ginsberg on Burroughs,” Pennsylvania Review (Fall/Winter 1987): 42.
16. Reported by Stewart Meyer in Book of Days (unpublished).
17. Ibid.
18. “William Burroughs and Brion Gysin,” WSB interviewed by Chris Bohn, New Musical Express, October 16, 1982.
19. From WSB interviewed by San Fleischer and Dan Turèll, Copenhagen, October 29, 1983.
20. “William Burroughs: Intellectual Gunman, Spectacular Junkie at Seventy Years of Age,” WSB interviewed by William Triplett, Washington Review, June–July 1984.
21. “The Devil’s Bargain: Two Interviews with William Burroughs,” WSB interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, November 22, 1983, Art & Text, no. 35 (Summer 1990).
22. “William Burroughs: Intellectual Gunman, Spectacular Junkie at Seventy Years of Age,” WSB interviewed by William Triplett, Washington Review, June–July 1984.
23. WSB interviewed by Michele Corriel, Cover, January 1988.
24. “Shooting Gallery,” WSB interviewed by Lucinda Bredin, Evening Standard (London), June 2, 1988.
25. Marcel Duchamp, Notes on the Large Glass numbers 83, 84, and 85, The Green Box notes, 1912–1918. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
26. Unpublished text, 1987.
27. Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, no. 5, vol. 9 [sic] (July 1965).
28. WSB, Painting and Guns, 10.
29. Ibid., 15.
30. Wayne Propst interviewed by Tom King, September 2010, http://ereview.org/2010/09/22/reality-my-way (accessed January 2013).
31. Morgan, tape 1.
32. Morgan, tape 3.
Chapter Fifty
1. WSB, introduction to Brion Gysin, The Last Museum, 8.
2. It has been suggested that it is in fact built from a Montgomery Ward house kit. Both companies destroyed their records, but it looks like a Sears house.
3. WSB interviewed by the author, Lawrence, Kansas, November 29, 1991.
4. WSB, The Western Lands, 79.
5. Frank Tankard, The Inner Circle, July 30, 2007, http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/jul/30/inner_circle? (accessed February 2013).
6. David Ohle, Mutate or Die: With Burroughs in Kansas (no pagination).
7. WSB, The Western Lands, 79–82.
8. WSB interviewed by San Fleischer and Dan Turèll, Copenhagen, October 29, 1983.
9. As witnessed by the author.
10. “Interview with William Burroughs,” by Jennie Skerl, Moody Street Irregulars (Winter–Spring 1981).
11. WSB interviewed by T. X. Erbe, East Village Eye, April 1984.
12. This was said to the author.
13. “An Ex-Junkie Exterminator,” WSB interviewed by Lynn Snowden, Guardian, April 25, 1992.
14. Pauline lost two fingers in an explosion using that flamethrower shortly afterward.
15. The manuscript of Queer had been raided in order to complete Junky back in 1953 and disappeared. For two decades there was no known copy. The manuscript was sold, along with Burroughs’s other archives, to Roberto Altman, who then sold them to the rare book collector Robert Jackson. During the transfer of ownership, a Xerox copy was made of the manuscript. See Oliver Harris’s introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of Queer for the full story of the manuscript.
16. The author of this book found the manuscript of Interzone described as an “enclosure” on the index card for a letter from WSB to Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the card catalog of the Butler Library of Columbia University. I made a photocopy and told Andrew Wylie about it—he was my agent at the time—saying that I thought it should be published.
17. WSB interviewed by Kurt Chandler and John Lehndorff, Sunday Camera (Boulder, CO), July 28, 1985. The incident involving the Mexican policeman was in fact in Junky.
18. WSB, Queer, 131–32.
19. WSB to Brion Gysin, January 30, 1985.
20. “An Ex-Junkie Exterminator,” WSB interviewed by Lynn Snowden, Guardian, April 25, 1992.
21. WSB, introduction to Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.”
22. WSB interviewed by James Fox, Sunday Times Magazine, March 22, 1987. 22. Saint-John Perse, Anabasis, 83.
23. WSB interviewed by Kurt Chandler and John Lehndorff, Sunday Camera (Boulder, CO), July 28, 1985.
24. Ibid.
25. WSB, The Western Lands, 252.
26. WSB to Brion Gysin, January 30, 1985.
27. WSB to Brion Gysin, October 12, 1985.
28. Brion Gysin to WSB, August 28, 1985.
29. Times (London), July 26, 1988.
30. Terry Wilson, Perilous Passage, 137.
31. WSB interviewed by Timothy Leary, Mondo 2000, no. 4 (1991).
32. WSB interviewed by Robbie Conal and Tom Christie, LA Weekly, July 19, 1996.
33. WSB interviewed by Kristine McKenna, September 13, 1990, in Burroughs Live: Collected Interviews, 722–23.
34. WSB interviewed by James Fox, Sunday Times Magazine, March 22, 1987.
35. WSB, The Job, 97.
36. Ibid., 116.
37. John Geiger, Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted, 309.
38. Ted Morgan’s interview with James Grauerholz, 1986.
39. WSB, introduction to Gysin, The Last Museum, 8.
40. “William Tells,” WSB interviewed by Legs McNeil, Spin, October 1991.
41. WSB, The Western Lands, 236.
42. Ibid., 198.
43. Ibid.
44. WSB interviewed by Richard Goldstein, College Papers, no. 1 (Fall 1979).
45. WSB interviewed by James Fox, Sunday Times Magazine, March 22, 1987.
46. WSB interviewed by Jim McMenamin and Larry McCaffery in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. Larry McCaffery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
47. WSB, The Western Lands, 25.
48. WSB interviewed by James Fox, Sunday Times Magazine, March 22, 1987.
49. Saint-John Perse, Anabasis, 10.
50. “Journey Through Time-Space,” WSB interviewed by Daniel Odier, Evergreen Review vol. 13, no. 67 (June 1969).
51. WSB, The Western Lands, 3.
52. Ibid., 74–75.
53. Ibid., 235.
54. Ibid., 42.
55. Ibid., 171.
56. Ibid., 37.
57. Ibid., 40.
58. Ibid., 63.
59. Ibid., 134.
60. Ibid., 45.
61. Ibid., 258.
Chapter Fifty-One
1. Denton Welch, In Youth Is Pleasure, 128.
2. WSB, Word Virus, 413.
3. “Shooting Gallery,” WSB interviewed by Lucinda Bredin, Evening Standard, June 2, 1988.
4. See WSB and Philip Taaffe, Drawing Dialogue (New York: Pat Hearn Gallery, 1987), a transcription of a dialogue recorded while they drew pictures together on February 1, 1987.
5. WSB interviewed by the author, November 29, 1991.
6. “William S. Burroughs: Afterlife,” WSB interviewed by Eldon Garnet, Impulse (Toronto), February 25, 2008.
7. Ibid.
8. “Entrance to the Museum of Lost Species,” in the catalog to WSB’s show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, December 19, 1987–January 24, 1988.
9. Ibid.
10. “Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.” Pablo Picasso, source unknown.
11. From a letter written at Castle Boisgeloup (Winter 1934), quoted in Richard Friedenthal, ed., Letters of the Great Artists: From Blake to Pollock (London, Thames & Hudson, 1963), 257–58.
12. WSB interviewed by the author, November 29, 1991.
13. Ibid.
14. WSB interviewed by Simone Ellis, Contemporanea, no. 23 (December 1990).
15. “Shooting Gallery,” WSB interviewed by Lucinda Bredin, Evening Standard, June 2, 1988.
16. WSB interviewed by Kristine McKenna, Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1996.
17. Gus Van Sant, author essay, Random House website.
18. Gus Van Sant interviewed by Alex Simon, Venice magazine, December 1997.
19. Gus Van Sant interviewed by Scott Tobias, March 5, 2003, A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/articles/gus-van-sant,13800 (accessed February 2013).
20. Raymond Foye to Ted Morgan, Morgan papers, “79. Wm Seventies. Raymond Foye.”
21. Marcus Ewert, “In Bed with Burroughs,” http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/jul/30/bed_burroughs (accessed October 2013).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. WSB, My Education, 99.
26. The 1821 opera of the same name by Carl Maria von Weber, with a libretto by Friedrich Kind, is based on the same story.
27. WSB, “George Schmid,” in the program for The Black Rider, Hamburg, March 31, 1990.
28. WSB interviewed by Klaus Maeck, Kozmik Blues, 9–15, special William Burroughs issue, 1990.
29. ftp://nmedia.net/pub/old/wsb/black-rider.html (accessed January 2013).
30. These artworks are reproduced in the book Paper Cloud Thick Pages (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin International, 1992).
31. WSB, Paper Cloud Thick Pages (not paginated).
32. WSB interviewed by Victor Bockris, fall 1990.
33. WSB, My Education, 101.
34. Ibid.
35. WSB, Last Words, 81.
Chapter Fifty-Two
1. Morgan, tape 14.
2. Ira Silverberg, Everything Is Permitted, 15.
3. Chris Peachment, “A Trip to the Interzone,” Independent on Sunday, June 30, 1991.
4. Morgan, tape 23.
5. WSB to the author, Lawrence, Kansas, 1991.
6. See the interview with Tom Peschio, Reality Studio, http://realitystudio.org/biography/hikuta (accessed January 2013).
7. Frank Tankard, “The Inner Circle,” July 30, 2007, http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/jul/30/inner_circle (accessed January 2013).
8. Jim McCrary, “Remembering William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg,” Beats in Kansas: The Beat Generation in the Heartland, http://www.vlib.us/beats/mccrary.html (accessed January 2013).
9. Interview with David Ohle, Lawrence Journal-World, September 28, 2006, http://www2.ljworld.com/chats/2006/sep/28/david_ohle (accessed January 2013).
10. Jim McCrary interviewed by the author, March 2013.
11. Ibid.
12. WSB, My Education, 185.
13. James Grauerholz in WSB, Word Virus, 412.
14. Tom Peschio interviewed by the author, March 2013.
15. “The War Universe,” WSB interviewed by Raymond Foye, Grand Street, no. 37 (1991).
16. WSB interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, June 10, 1991, 21c magazine, http://www.21cmagazine.com/William-S-Burroughs-Matter-of-Lemurs (accessed January 2013).
17. Ibid.
18. “The Return of the Invisible Man,” WSB interviewed by James Fox, Sunday Times Magazine, March 22, 1987.
19. WSB, My Education, 108.
20. “An Ex-Junkie Exterminator,” WSB interviewed by Lynn Snowden, Guardian, April 25, 1992.
21. WSB, My Education, 173.
22. WSB, The Western Lands, 165.
23. WSB, My Education, 25.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. Ibid., 101–2.
26. Ibid., 129.
27. Ibid., 47.
28. Ibid., 131.
29. Kurt Cobain, Journals (New York: Riverhead, 2003), quoted at Reality Studio, http://realitystudio.org/biography/william-s-burroughs-and-kurt-cobain-a-dossier (accessed January 2013).
30. Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (New York: Hyperion, 2002), quoted at ibid.
31. Carrie Borzillo, Nirvana: The Day-by-Day Eyewitness Chronicle (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000), quoted at ibid.
32. Martin Clarke, ed., The Cobain Dossier (London: Plexus, 2006), quoted at ibid.
33. Christopher Sandford, Kurt Cobain (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1996), quoted at ibid. (accessed January 2013).
34. Fresh Sounds FS 201.
35. WSB interviewed by LA Weekly, July 19, 1996.
36. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, line 63.
37. WSB, Last Words, 146–47.
38. Wilborn Hampton, “Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70,” New York Times, April 6, 1997.
39. WSB, Last Words, 177.
40. Perhaps the light bulb was a reference to Bob Dylan’s famous 1965 London press conference in which he carried a huge light bulb and advised the press, “Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.”
41. Tom Peschio interviewed by the author, March 2013.
42. “Ever See Burroughs in Person?,” Reality Studio, http://realitystudio.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5&start=15 (accessed January 2013).
43. José Ferez in a recorded conversation with the author, London, 2000.
44. Online and in the booklet accompanying The Best of William Burroughs box set, which, as an authorized release, gives the reader the impression that the texts in the booklet are also approved by the Burroughs estate.
Endwords
1. Gerard Malanga, “William Burroughs, an Interview by Gerard Malanga,” The Beat Book vol. 4 (California, PA, 1974), 100, 102.
2. Published as Love and Napalm: Export USA by Grove in the United States.
3. William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired 13.07 (July 2005).
4. David Sinclair, “Station to Station,” Rolling Stone, no. 658 (June 10, 1993) (accessed June 2013).
5. Jon Savage, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” in Martin Roth, ed., David Bowie Is Inside (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2013), 103.
6. Double Bill (Toronto), nos. 1–4 (1993–94).
7. “W. S. Burroughs Alias Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police,” WSB interviewed in Friends, no. 5 (April 14, 1970).
8. “Back to Dig the Home Scene” WSB interviewed by Dickson Terry, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, [January] 1965.
9. WSB, Last Words, 167.
10. Ibid., 244.
11. Interview with the author, March 2013.
12. WSB, “Some memories, unclarified drafts” (unpublished).