DINNER WITH CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: NEW YORK 1976
BURROUGHS: My first visit to Berlin was two months ago. I’d never seen it before. I went there for a reading with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag. I saw the Wall. The area between the East and the West is populated by thousands of rabbits. And we also went to see Beckett, who was living in the Academy of Art Building. He was in Berlin to direct one of his plays.
ISHERWOOD: Has Beckett been directing his plays for a long time?
BURROUGHS: Beckett almost always directs his plays. He feels he’s the only one competent to do it. According to his English publisher, John Calder, he’s really a brilliant director. I’ve never seen what he’s directed. Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Professor Hollerer, Fred Jordan, and your reporter, through the mediation of John Calder, were granted a short audience, or visit, with Beckett at the Berlin Academy of Art. We went to see him about 5:30 in the afternoon. He received us graciously in his rooms overlooking the Tiergarten. We had brought along some liquor. The large duplex apartment was very austerely furnished. The conversation was polite and desultory. It was a very decorous meeting.
BOCKRIS: Does Beckett like a drink?
BURROUGHS: I think he had a drink of what we had, yes. I know Beckett’s reputation as a recluse. Often this means—as in the case of Howard Hughes—fear of other people. This is certainly not at all true of Beckett. He seems simply to inhabit a realm where other people are not particularly necessary. He obviously hasn’t any need to relate to anyone. This is immediately obvious. It’s just where he’s at, where he’s written himself into, this rather strange inhuman position, but that’s the way he is. He’s polite, but it’s obvious he wants you out of there in about twenty minutes. His manner was cool and precise. He was very thin, very trim, dressed in a turtleneck sweater and a sports jacket. Beckett seemed in very good health. He is seventy but looks much younger. We stayed twenty minutes. It was time to go—shook hands, said goodbye.
DINNER WITH SUSAN SONTAG AND MAURICE GIRODIAS: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: Were you at that famous meeting with Beckett in Berlin?
SONTAG: I was indeed. Why has it become a “famous meeting”?
BOCKRIS: William has told me the story so many times and I was intrigued to see how accurate his account is.
SONTAG: Beckett is probably the only person I ever really wanted to meet in the adult part of my life. I was very pleased to be in his presence. I felt and feel a general reverence for him.
BOCKRIS: How long were you with him for?
SONTAG: We were there for about [turning inquisitively to Burroughs] …
BOCKRIS: No, don’t ask him. It’s your account I want to hear.
SONTAG: It seemed very long, too long. When you were with Beckett you felt you didn’t really want to take up too much of his time, that he had better ways of using his time than being with us. It all started like this: we were staying in this picturesque hotel in Berlin and Allen Ginsberg said, “We’re going to see Beckett, c’mon,” and I said, “Oh, William and you are going, I don’t want to butt in,” and he said, “No, c’mon, c’mon,” and we went. We knocked on the door of this beautiful atelier with great double height ceilings, very white. This beautiful, very thin man who tilts forward when he stands answered the door. He was alone. Everything was very clean and bare and white. I actually had seen him the day before on the grounds of the theater of the Akademie Der Kunst. Beckett comes to Berlin because he knows his privacy will be respected. He received us in a very courtly way and we sat at a very big long table. He waited for us to talk. Allen was, as usual, very forthcoming and did a great deal of talking. He did manage to draw Beckett out asking him about Joyce. That was somehow deeply embarrassing to me. Then we talked about singing, and Beckett and Allen began to sing while I was getting more and more embarrassed.
BOCKRIS: Bill says Beckett made you feel as if you would be welcome to leave as soon as you could.
SONTAG: He didn’t actually throw us out.
BURROUGHS: Oh, the hell he didn’t! See, I have an entirely different slant on the whole thing. In the first place, John Calder said, “Bring along some liquor,” which we did. I know that Beckett considers other people different from him and he doesn’t really like to see them. He’s got nothing particular against them being there, it’s just that there are limits to how long he can stand being with people. So I figured that about twenty minutes would be enough. Someone brought up the fact that my son was due for transplants, and Beckett talked about the problem of rejection, about which he’d read an article. I don’t remember this singing episode at all. You see Susan says it seemed long, it seemed to me extremely short. Soon after we got there, and the talk about transplants, everybody looked at their watch, and it was very obviously time to go. We’d only brought along a pint and it had disappeared by that time.
SONTAG: Allen said, “What was it like to be with Joyce? I understand Joyce had a beautiful voice, and that he liked to sing.” Allen did some kind of “OM” and Beckett said, “Yes, indeed he had a beautiful voice,” and I kept thinking what a beautiful voice he had. I had seen Beckett before in a café in Paris, but I had never heard him speak and I was struck by the Irish accent. After more than half a century in France he has a very pure speech which is unmarked by living abroad. I know hardly anybody who’s younger than Beckett, who has spent a great deal of time abroad who hasn’t in some way adjusted his or her speech to living abroad. There’s always a kind of deliberateness or an accommodation to the fact that even when you speak your own language you’re speaking to people whose first language it’s not and Beckett didn’t seem in any way like someone who has lived most of his life in a country that was not the country of his original speech. He has a beautiful Irish musical voice. I don’t remember that he made us feel we had to go, but I think we all felt we couldn’t stay very long.
BURROUGHS: I talked to a number of people about the art of psychic bouncing, of psychically getting rid of someone. One way is to see their image, fix it clearly in your mind, then you put it firmly outside the door, and I saw an able practitioner do it once in Paris. This guy suddenly said, “Oh, Jeez, I’m gonna have to go.” He could hardly get out of the room.
BOCKRIS: Did you feel that psychic push? That Beckett had “placed” you outside the room?
BURROUGHS: Everybody knew that they weren’t supposed to stay very long. I think it was ten minutes after six that we got out of there.
SONTAG: I know people who claim to feel extremely comfortable with Beckett.
BURROUGHS: I was at a previous meeting with him in Paris in 1959 in which there was quite a bit of antagonism between us.
BOCKRIS: How did that happen?
MAURICE GIRODIAS: I had the idea to arrange a dinner between Burroughs and Beckett with myself as the host in the thirteenth-century cavernous cellars of my Brazilian nightclub. There were also a couple of lesbians, and Iris Owens, who is always very lively and quick-witted. Neither of them said a word the whole evening.
BURROUGHS: I’d evolved the cut-ups, which Beckett didn’t approve of at all.
SONTAG: Is he familiar with your work?
BURROUGHS: Oh yes. He gave me one of the greatest compliments that I ever heard. Someone asked him, “What do you think of Burroughs?” and he said—grudgingly—“Well, he’s a writer.”
SONTAG: High praise indeed.
BURROUGHS: I esteemed it very highly. Someone who really knows about writing, or say about medicine says, “Well, he’s a doctor. He gets in the operating room and he knows what he’s doing.”
SONTAG: But at the same time you thought he was hostile to some of your procedures?
BURROUGHS: Yes, he was, and we talked about that very briefly when we first came in during the Berlin visit. He remembered perfectly the occasion.
SONTAG: Do you think he reads much?
BURROUGHS: I would doubt it. Beckett is someone who needs no input as such. To me it’s a very relaxed feeling to be around someone who doesn’t need me for anything and wouldn’t care if I died right there the next minute. Most people have to get themselves needed or noticed. I don’t have that feeling at all. But there’s no point in being there, because he has no desire or need to see people.
BOCKRIS: How did you feel when you left that meeting?
SONTAG: I was very glad I had seen him. I was more interested just to see what he looks like, if he was as good-looking as he is in photos.
BURROUGHS: He looked very well and in very good shape. Beckett is about seventy-five. He’s very thin and his face looks quite youthful. It’s really almost an Irish streetboy face. We got up and left, the visit had been, as I say, very cordial, decorous …
SONTAG: More decorous than cordial I would say. It was a weightless experience, because it’s true, nothing happened.
BURROUGHS: Nothing happened at all.
SONTAG: I remember that Allen was carrying on like a puppy. Beckett responded. He’s curiously passive, and if someone had been very aggressive and pushy he probably would have responded to that, but if no one wants to do that he’s not going to help it in any way, it’s really up to you, isn’t it?
BOCKRIS Do you think you’ll ever see him again?
SONTAG: No.
BOCKRIS: Why not?
SONTAG: Why?
BURROUGHS: There’s no likelihood that I will ever see him again.
SONTAG: It’s interesting when you say that he doesn’t need any input. That’s true. There are no references in his work, nothing that appears from outside.
BURROUGHS: Because most writers do. For example, I get a lot from reading, I get a lot from newspapers, but with Beckett it’s all inside, I don’t think he needs that sort of thing at all.
SONTAG: I wonder if he has many books. I would think not.
BURROUGHS: I didn’t see any while we were there, but those of course were temporary quarters.
SONTAG: People who are involved in books always manage, even on a trip, to accumulate some.
BURROUGHS: That’s true. I saw no books.
DINNER WITH FRED JORDAN: NEW YORK 1980
JORDAN: You wrote a piece about the visit to Sam Beckett in Berlin.
BURROUGHS: I didn’t write anything. This is getting to be the local Rashomon. Everyone has a completely different story.
JORDAN: Sam was in Berlin at the time, rehearsing Endgame in German. John Calder was in Berlin at the same time and I had lunch with John, Susan and Allen. I think you were there too.
BURROUGHS: When Allen asked Susan bluntly if she was dying of cancer?
JORDAN: Yes. Allen turned to Susan and said “You’ve got cancer, right? How you doin’?” and she said, “Okay.” “How’s your love life?” “Very good,” said Susan, “I’m getting more propositions than ever.” John Calder wanted to meet me the next day at five. I told John that I couldn’t because I was seeing Beckett. Allen then turned to me and said, “You’re seeing Sam? Can I come along?” “Sure,” I said, “why not?” And Susan said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to see Beckett.” “Come along,” I said, and before we knew it there were six of us going to see Beckett. The following afternoon when Sam opened the door to all these people he looked a bit surprised. I remember Allen talking to him about whether Joyce wrote songs, and Sam’s answer to be that he did. Allen asked Beckett, “Can you sing one for us?” Do you remember when he sang that song, which turned out to be an English version of a Schubert song?
BOCKRIS: How long were you there?
JORDAN: For an hour.
BURROUGHS: Do you remember anything else that Beckett said, or anyone said?
JORDAN: Allen kept the conversation up with questions about Joyce. He then asked Beckett what he was doing in Berlin. Allen was the most active interlocutor, but it was getting darker and darker, and there was no light in the room.
BOCKRIS: Why no light?
JORDAN: There was a light, but Beckett didn’t turn it on.
BURROUGHS: Quite a signal, I think. Do you remember any direct exchanges between Beckett and Susan Sontag?
JORDAN: Afterward she said he was the sexiest man she had ever met. I don’t remember any exchange between them.
BURROUGHS: I think this is a terribly interesting exercise. A number of people saw someone on a sort of momentous occasion and each has a different version of what happened.
JORDAN: Do you remember how he was dressed?
BURROUGHS: He had on a turtleneck sweater, a very hard flat kind of tweed sports jacket, it looked thorn-resistant, not the furry kind, and some kind of slacks. On his feet I have an impression of sandals.
JORDAN: Had you known him before you saw him in Berlin?
BURROUGHS: I met Beckett once in Girodias’ restaurant in Paris.
JORDAN: Was that the time when, apparently, you explained to Beckett the cut-up method and he responded by saying, “But, but that’s plumbing, that’s not writing!”
BURROUGHS: Oh, yes, he was quite upset by the whole thing. “You’re using other people’s words!” he said at one point. I said, “Well, the formula of one physicist is after all available to anybody in the profession.” When I saw him in Berlin I reminded him that “I think we’ve met before, Mr. Beckett.” And he said, “Yes, in Maurice Girodias’ restaurant,” and I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I remember it very well.” That was my opening exchange.
BOCKRIS: Had the Paris meeting been standoffish, had the conversation dribbled to a close?
BURROUGHS: John said we were both really pretty much drunk at that point, so it just trailed off into amnesia …
DINNER WITH LOU REED: NEW YORK 1978
In our last dinner with Lou Reed, he confronted Burroughs with the rumor that he was purported to be a very cold person, capable of murder. He asked Bill if he had any comments.
BURROUGHS [short silence]: I neither deny nor confirm these rumors, Lou. It doesn’t do any good to deny them anyway. Last week Robert Duncan told me a story. According to him, I was walking along the banks of the Seine with Beckett in Paris discussing random and vicarious murder and Beckett said, “If it’s random it’s not murder.” I said, “Sam” (as I suppose I would address him if I were walking along the banks of the Seine with Beckett—never having walked anywhere with him I don’t know), “this is not correct at all and I will prove it to you,” at which point I am supposed to have pulled out a pistol and shot a passing clocharde, throwing her body into the Seine. Then Sam and I walked on.
Lou asked Bill if Beckett had actually worked for Joyce as a secretary.
BURROUGHS: He did for a while, yes. In fact it is obvious that Watt is all about his apprenticeship to Joyce. It was an apprenticeship more than anything else—the master telling the pupil how to do it—but he had to handle a good deal of typing and secretarial work too.
Lou asked if Bill thought a pupil could do better work than his teacher.
BURROUGHS: In this case, I believe so. I think the whole body of Beckett’s work is wider in scope than Joyce’s.