What it was that Sir Ernest Shackleton's party encountered on their harrowing crossing of South Georgia is a question that has confounded historians, and inspired Sunday sermons for generations of true believers. The apparition—which the explorer called the Fourth Presence—impressed Shackleton as being not of this world. It made its appearance near the end of the explorer's grandly named Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16, an expedition which came perilously close to ending in mass disaster. The fact that it did not is the foundation of Shackleton's legend. The expedition's ship Endurance was trapped and then crushed by ice in the Weddell Sea even before he could embark on the attempt to traverse the Antarctic continent. The retreating crew made an escape from the ice in small boats to Elephant Island. Knowing there was no chance any search for the expedition would find them there, Shackleton decided to leave the majority of his crew behind, take a small boat, its seams patched with artist's paints, and risk the extreme perils of the ocean south of Cape Horn, “the most tempestuous area of water in the world,” in order to reach a whaling station on the British possession of South Georgia, 800 miles away.
After braving gales and freezing temperatures for more than two weeks, the six men arrived at South Georgia in the midst of a hurricane, the small boat driven ashore on the opposite end of the island from their destination. Leaving the others with the boat, Shackleton, Commander Frank Worsley, who had captained the lost Endurance, and Tom Crean, second officer, made an arduous 36 hour crossing of the ranges and glaciers of the island. They marched in moonlight and in fog. They ascended carefully, roped together, threading around crevasses and across snowfields. They had slender rations and went virtually without sleep. At one point, they stood on an ice ridge, uncertain of what was over the other side because of a sharp incline. With a bank of fog threatening to overtake them, they opted to plunge into the unknown. At that point, only they knew the whereabouts of all the other expedition members. Had they dropped to their deaths, the entire expedition might have been doomed. Instead, they placed their fate in Providence, and survived. During their traverse, Shackleton later reflected, “we three fellows drew very close to each other, mostly in silence.” They eventually shambled into the whaling station, barely recognizable as civilized men. Rescuers were dispatched to collect the others, and all of the Endurance's crew survived the ordeal. They were not untouched by the experience. “We had reached the naked soul of man,” Shackleton wrote in South, published in 1919.
In writing his narrative, however, Shackleton had struggled with something unspoken. Leonard Tripp, a friend and confidant, was present as the explorer tried to come to terms with it. Shackleton had tears in his eyes: “You could see that the man was suffering, and then he came to this mention of the fourth man.”1 Shackleton explained his struggle in South: “One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech,’ in trying to describe intangible things, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without reference to a subject very near to our hearts.” He revealed in the narrative that he had a pervasive sense, during that last and worst leg of his journey, that something out of ordinary experience accompanied them, a presence: “I know that during that long and racking march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” He had said nothing to the others, but then three weeks later Worsley offered without prompting: “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean later confessed to the same strange sensation.
Shackleton at first did not mention the Fourth Presence to anyone else, and the passage alluding to it, which Tripp heard him dictate, was omitted in the original draft of South, written by Shackleton in collaboration with Edward Sanders in Australia in 1917. The presence does, however, appear on a separate sheet of paper labelled “note” in another typescript of the manuscript. Apparently Shackleton initially withheld the passage, before deciding to include it in the final version of the manuscript. He did, however, allude to it during some of his public lectures. Recalled one person who attended a banquet in London given in his honor: “You could hear a pin drop when Sir Ernest spoke of his consciousness of a Divine Companion in his journeyings.”
Frank W. Boreham, in his 1926 book A Casket of Cameos, cites as “testimony concerning his Unseen Comrade” an account given by Ada E. Warden, who was present for a lecture by Shackleton given shortly before his death, in 1922. Said Warden:
After repeating the story of the appalling voyage in the open boat from Elephant Island to South Georgia, he quoted the words from the one hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me.” He repeated the words most impressively, and said they were a continual source of strength to him.2
So was the Fourth Presence, as the one listener at a Shackleton lecture surmised, the guiding, protective hand of the “Divine Companion,” and as Boreham declared, “the Son of God”? Or was it something of equal mystery, if not glory and power?
Boreham, a British writer and Baptist minister who lived much of his life in New Zealand and Australia, took Shackleton's use of Scripture as proof of his abiding Christian faith, and hence as a clue to the true identity of the presence. Boreham found support for his conviction in Daniel 3:24-5:
And Nebuchandnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his counsellors, Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, 0 king.
He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.
“Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.”
Wrote Boreham: “Flame or frost; it makes no difference. A truth that, in one age, can hold its own in a burning fiery furnace can, in another, vindicate itself just as readily amidst fields of ice and snow.” In either case the same conclusion applied, Boreham argued: “the form of the fourth is like the Son of God!”
So was the Fourth Presence, as the one listener at a Shackleton lecture surmised, the guiding, protective hand of the “Divine Companion,” and as Boreham declared, “the Son of God”? Or was it something of equal mystery, if not glory and power? In their accounts of Shackleton's expedition, historians have struggled with it, speculating that it was an hallucination, that the “toil (was) enough to cloud their consciousness.”3 The possibility was even raised that it was “an attempt on Shackleton's part to court publicity, at a time of national emotion, by producing his own ‘Angel of Mons.’4 This is a reference to the First World War legend that an angel had appeared in the sky during the British retreat from Mons during August 1914, safeguarding the British army. A journalist and writer of fantasy literature later said he had invented the angel. However, the writer Harold Begbie, who knew Shackleton and wrote an appreciation of the explorer in 1922, also authored On the Side of the Angels, which attempts to document that British soldiers believed that angels had appeared to them.
None of the men who experienced the Fourth Presence on South Georgia were ever definitive on the subject of their belief. In remarks made to Begbie, Shackleton remained ambivalent: “We were comrades with Death all the time, but I can honestly say that it wasn't bad. We always felt there was Something Above.” Shackleton clearly felt he had undergone a mystical experience, but did not elaborate. Begbie put it this way: “He was really profoundly conscious of the spiritual reality which abides hidden in all visible things.” A naval officer recalled Shackleton alluding to the presence during a conversation: “He attempted no explanation. ‘In religion I am what I am’ were his Vuords.”5 Whatever it was they encountered, it remained with them to the end. In one of his later lectures, Worsley, who died in 1943, referred to a party of four men making the crossing of South Georgia. Afterwards, his wife, Jean, pointed out his error. Worsley was stricken. “Whatever will they think of me,” he said. “I can't get it out of my mind.”6
T. S. Eliot described the phenomenon in Part V of The Waste Land, first published in 1922, the year of Shackleton's death:
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you. Gilding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or woman—But who is that on the other side of you?
“Whatever will they think of me,” he said. “I can't get it out of my mind.”
In his “Notes on The Waste Land,” Eliot wrote that the journey to Emmaus in the Gospel According to Luke serves as a theme in Part V of the poem, which he titled “What the Thunder said”. In Luke 24:15-17 two men on the road to Emmaus encounter a presence and do not recognize it as the risen Christ:7
And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about three score furlongs.
And they talked together of all these things which had happened.
And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.
But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.
When Jesus blessed and broke bread at dinner, the disciples finally did know him, but Jesus then vanished from their sight. In his “Notes” Eliot. however, added that the passage in question was also stimulated by an account of an Antarctic expedition, “I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's.” The poet was impressed by the idea that “the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” The tone of the account given in Eliot's poem is notably different, however, from Shackleton's published reference to a presence “very near to our hearts,” and instead evokes the idea that they were “comrades with Death.” Rather than inspiring a sense of the divine, one critic argued, “the visitation in the poem inspires a feeling of dread.”8
Shackleton confronted the phenomenon at a point of extremity on his geographic journey. The extra man, however, made another appearance in a radically dissimilar context; evidence, perhaps, that exploration is not confined to geographic expeditions—or even the physical world. In common with polar explorers, William S. Burroughs, the American novelist and junky, had a propensity to take incalculable risks. The author of Naked Lunch, a harrowing narrative of addiction, sought out extremity wherever it lay, and placed his literary endeavors explicitly in the context of exploration: “In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas ... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”9 It is significant, then, that Burroughs too encountered an unseen companion, and did so at the very point when his experiments with literature and drugs pushed the boundaries of physical and psychological tolerance. Burroughs called the phenomenon the Third Mind.
Burroughs had a long-standing interest in exploration. He had read explorers' narratives, among them Richard Halliburton's New Worlds to Conquer. He studied anthropology at Columbia University, Harvard University and at Mexico City College. Burroughs' own explorations did not cover the polar regions of the Earth, so much as the tropics of the mind, the source for literary imagination,
Burroughs called the phenomenon the “Third Mind.”
although he did also undertake geographic journeys. Burroughs' search for the telepathic-hallucinogenic drug yage—used by Amazonian Indians for finding lost souls—produced an epistolary account of his travels. Written to his friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg in 1953, Burroughs' correspondence was published ten years later as The Yage Letters. The use of epistolary as a device for documenting explorations can be traced as far back as Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1598. In style and in substance, The Yage Letters is a narrative of discovery. As with traditional exploration narratives, the title implies the goal, that is, the investigation of yage as a tool to reach the unknown. In his early critical examination of Burroughs's writing, Alan Ansen notes that “the actual discovery of the drug plays a relatively small part in the work; at the center are the anthropologist's field report and Burroughs' life in yage.” The goal is merely the tool through which the explorer finds what he is looking for along the
“A Colombian scientist isolated from yage a drug he called telepathine. I know from my own experience telepathy is a fact. I have no interest in proving telepathy or anything to anybody. I do want usable knowledge of telepathy.”
way. In South, Shackleton's goal was, of necessity, abandoned early on. What mattered was the journey, and ultimately his glimpse of the “naked soul.” Burroughs' narrative in The Yage Letters adheres to a similar form.
The groundwork for Burroughs's yage search was laid at the end of Junky, his first novel, published in 1953. In the book, he noted the drug is “supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity. A Colombian scientist isolated from yage a drug he called telepathine. I know from my own experience telepathy is a fact. I have no interest in proving telepathy or anything to anybody. I do want usable knowledge of telepathy.” Burroughs wanted to understand what others were thinking, but he also saw more practical applications for telepathic powers: “thought control. Take anyone apart and rebuild to your taste.” Usually a concoction of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi with secondary plants, yage is used by Amazonian Indians for its “meet your maker” powers, in order to achieve communion with surroundings, to incite visions of cities and places, and as a way of blurring the boundaries between this world and the next. The Ecuadorian geographer Villavicencio was one of the earliest explorers to write about yage, in 1858: “I've experienced dizziness, then an aerial journey in which I recall perceiving the most gorgeous views, great cities, lofty towers, beautiful parks and other extremely attractive objects; then I imagine myself to be alone in a forest and assaulted by a number of terrible beings from which I defended myself.”10 Some have also indicated that the often overwhelming purgative side effects are a form of purification. The hallucinations are visual, aural, sensory. These properties, together with the previously claimed telepathic powers, suggested to Burroughs that yage “may be the final fix.”11
In January 1953, while investigating yage at a university in Bogota, Colombia, Burroughs encountered Richard Evans Schultes, a Harvard University anthropologist and authority on hallucinogenic plants. Schultes told Burroughs he had tried yage: “I got colors but no visions.”12 To obtain the drug, Burroughs was advised to go down the Rio Putumayo. He traveled south to Mocoa, where he found a brujo, or medicine man, who prepared a weak yage extraction. Burroughs experienced vivid dreams in color and saw a composite city, part New York, part Mexico City and part Lima. “You are supposed to see a city when you take yage,” he wrote Ginsberg on 28 February. Burroughs next managed to attach himself to a cocoa commission expedition. In the company of the botanists, he made the connection with another brujo, around 70 years of age, with “a sly gentleness about him like an old time junkie.” The brujo incanted “yage mucho da,” or “yage give much” as he prepared the concoction. Burroughs drank about an ounce of the oily and phosphorescent liquid. Within two minutes of ingesting it, a wave of dizziness swept over him and the hut began to spin. There was a strange blue light. Sudden, violent nausea sent him rushing outside, he vomited, and collapsed, arms and legs twitching uncontrollably. He wrote: “Larval beings passed before my eyes in a blue haze, each one giving an obscene, mocking squawk.” He continued to vomit, and it later occurred to Burroughs that yage nausea is motion sickness of transport to the yage state. On 10 July he wrote his final letter from the region to Ginsberg. He described his ultimate yage experience, witnessing migrations, incredible journeys through geographic places, and finally “the Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.” From this city expeditions left for unknown places, with unknown purpose. It was, Burroughs wrote, “a place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum.”
Sudden, violent nausea sent him rushing outside, he vomited, and collapsed, arms and legs twitching uncontrollably. He wrote: “Larval beings passed before my eyes in a blue haze, each one giving an obscene, mocking squawk.”
Yage inspired a section of Burroughs' 1958 novel, Naked Lunch, which also bears many of the hallmarks of an explorer's account of a journey. As the writer Mary McCarthy noted, Naked Lunch recorded Burroughs' hallucinations “like a ship's log.” This is particularly true in the case of his description of the yage state:
“Images fall slow and silent like snow... Serenity... All defenses fall... everything is free to enter or to go out... Fear is simply impossible... A beautiful blue substance flows into me... I see an archaic grinning face like South Pacific mask... The face is blue purple splotched with gold... The room takes on aspect of Near East whorehouse with blue walls and red tasseled lamps... Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valley where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break shell of body) ...”
Largely compiled while Burroughs was living in a male brothel in Tangier, Naked Lunch additionally moves beyond fiction into the realm of exploration literature by including references to the matriarchies of the Bismarck Archipelago, and the social control system of the Mayan priestly caste—and scholarly notes and citations, including a reference to published accounts of Bang-utot, a sleep-erection related death occurring during a nightmare. It even has an appendix with scientific purpose, which was also published independently in The British Journal of Addiction, describing the effects obtained not only from yage, but other drugs. Such documents of scientific interest, from meteorological reports to anthropological observations, are an obligatory feature of exploration narratives: Shackleton's South included appendices on meteorology, physics and sea ice nomenclature.
Burroughs' published journals, essays, interviews, recordings and letters are filled with appearances by Gysin, whose theories, stories, and even biographical details appear irregularly in most of Burroughs' books after Naked Lunch.
Burroughs' explorations, which had evolved from his expeditions to the jungles of South America, to the exotica of Tangier, were finally, in arguably their most extreme manifestation, confined to his lodgings, and those of fellow traveler Brion Gysin, at a flea-bag hotel at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, Paris. Gysin, an artist and writer raised in Canada, was the second who made for the Third Mind. In what might be termed the final Burroughs expedition, their rooms became a center for nightly gatherings and bizarre occurrences. Their imaginations stoked with hashish, and other drugs including mescaline, Burroughs and Gysin began to experience shared hallucinations. Burroughs wrote Ginsberg to report he had been making “incredible discoveries in the line of psychic exploration...”13 On one occasion Burroughs looked into the mirror and saw himself change into a creature wearing a green uniform, his face “full of black boiling fuzz.” Remarkably, Gysin had also witnessed it “without being briefed or influenced in any way.” They sought a complete derangement of senses. Burroughs informed Ginsberg “I am in a very dangerous place but the point of no return is way back yonder.”14 The journeys inspired visual, aural, and sensory experiments, most notably in the use of cut-ups, an automatic writing technique where texts were sliced up then the words randomly reassembled. Burroughs considered The Waste Land to be the first great cut-up for using “all these bits and pieces of other writers in an associational matrix”15—not least of all Ernest Shackleton. Eric Mottram, in a 1963 critical study, argued “Burroughs admires, and recalls in his novels, T. S. Eliot of The Waste Land: in one sense his own work is a vision of a waste land.” Burroughs paid homage to Eliot by including the poem as raw material in his own cut-ups.
By pushing their experiments to the point of extremity, Burroughs and Gysin achieved a perfect state of what Gysin termed “psychic symbiosis.” Shackleton had remarked upon the sense of his party having drawn “very close” during the crossing of South Georgia. For Burroughs, Gysin had evolved from mere collaborator to a central point of reference in his work. In Last Words, his final journals which were published in 2000, Burroughs wrote “Whose biographer could I be? Only one person. Brion Gysin.” In many respects he was Gysin's biographer. Burroughs' published journals, essays, interviews, recordings and letters are filled with appearances by Gysin, whose theories, stones, and even biographical details appear irregularly in most of Burroughs' books after Naked Lunch. In Burroughs' book of dreams, My Education, Gysin appears in 22 of them. Evidence of a symbiant relationship could appear without warning. In a 1976 letter to Gysin, Burroughs wrote: “Did you see the color pictures of Mars and note similarity to your pink picture and read the inexplicable letters B/G that showed up on TV screen?”16 Burroughs owned a canvas by Gysin, painted long before photographs from Mars were transmitted by Saturn 11. The idea that Gysin had some precognition of the Mars photographs intrigued him. But more significant were the letters. Burroughs told the writer Edmund White, “You know they found stones on Mars that had the letters B and G on them?” They might have been Brion Gysin's initials, but White suspected Burroughs meant something else: “Burroughs and Gysin?”17
They decided to call the published account of their discoveries The Third Mind. In attempting to quantify the experience, Burroughs had discovered an explanation in an unlikely source: the concept of the “Master Mind” set out in Think And Grow Rich, a prototype of the self-help genre by Napoleon Hill. According to Hill, Andrew Carnegie built his fortune in part on the basis of the “Master Mind principle,” the premise being that the human mind is a form of energy, part of which is spiritual in nature. Hill wrote that when two people work in a state of perfect harmony and are set on attainment of a definite purpose, “the spiritual units of energy of each mind form an affinity, which constitutes the ‘psychic’ phase of the Master Mind.” Hill argued that a “friendly alliance of minds” can access “the sum and substance of the intelligence, experience, knowledge, and spiritual forces” of all participants. It is not merely an accumulation based on numbers, however, but a process which is accelerated by the creation of an additional intelligence. Noted Hill: “No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.” When recited by Burroughs, however, the reference is expanded to encompass both Hill and Eliot:
“Why am I here? I am here because you are here ... and let me quote to you young officers this phrase: ‘No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.’ Who is the third that walks beside you?”
The presence in Shackleton's expedition of one more member than could be counted was a phenomenon Burroughs and Gysin had both ultimately detected in their own explorations. Burroughs argued that when the experiments reached their culmination, “we were in the position of creating a third mind.” He used the idea in ‘Who is the walks beside you written 3rd’, an experiment in format published in Darazt magazine in 1965, which includes the line: “with reference to Mr. T. S. Eliot beside you ... This is the third lesson....” A passage in Burroughs' pamphlet APO-33 Bulletin A Metabolic Regulator, also published in 1965, reads: “young cop applied for that station a long time ago from The Third Man who else walks beside you?” Gysin also evoked the unseen presence by producing an artwork in which fragments of photographs of Burroughs and himself are merged to create an individual, as well as in a permutated poem. In the poem, Burroughs is transformed into the third:
Who is the third there walking beside you?
Who is the third there William Burroughs.
Who is there third the you walking beside
Who is there William Burroughs
Who is William Burroughs walking beside you? There
Who beside there walking the you
William Burroughs.
The Third Mind, published in 1978, was a compilation of their published literary experiments and theoretical articles, a narrative of their explorations, complete with maps in the form of 70 collages. In his introduction, Gerard-Georges Lemaire describes the intention of “Brion Burroughs and William Gysin”: The Third Mind, he writes, “is not the history of a literary collaboration but rather the complete fusion in a praxis of two subjectivities, two subjectivities that metamorphose into a third; it is from this collusion that a new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the silence.” Burroughs and Gysin explained the concept in an interview published in Rolling Stone:
Gysin: ‘when you put two minds together...’
“Why am I here? I am here because you are here ... and let me quote to you young officers this phrase: ‘No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.’ Who is the third that walks beside you?”
Burroughs: ‘... there is always a third mind...’
Gysin: ‘... a third and superior mind...’
Burroughs: ‘... as an unseen collaborator.’18
There are few similarities to be drawn between Sir Ernest Shackleton and William S. Burroughs, or for that matter the nature of their journeys—only that they both used exploration in their literature, they were both driven to the outré by their frustrations with the ordinary world, and indeed both had, as Shackleton put it, “pierced the veneer of outside things.” Both men were engaged in a manner of exploration which pushed them to the limits, and both reached the point of sufficient extremity to have shared a common delusion—if that is what it was—that they had acquired an additional unaccountable companion on their respective journeys, what Shackleton termed the Fourth Presence and Burroughs called the Third Mind. They are not alone in their apprehension. The extra man has appeared to others, always at a moment of transcendence. The presence has been encountered individually or communally. It has been attributed to many things: an hallucination caused by extreme physical exertion, hypoxia or drugs; a ghostly apparition; Death itself; a power created by people who have achieved “psychic symbiosis”; and a manifestation of the Divine Companion. In one respect, though, all who have experienced it are in agreement: that the intangible companion represents a real and portentous force. 
1 Leonard Tripp, memorandum for Dr. H. R. Mill, 1 March 1922; Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.
2 Shackleton was not the first polar explorer to find solace in those words. A Bible found on Kind William Island—the site of the 1848 Franklin expedition disaster—had the same words underscored.
3 Hugh Robert Mill, The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923).
4 Margery Fisher and James Fisher, Shackleton (London: Barrie, 1957).
5 Roland Huntford, Shackleton (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998).
6 Margery Fisher and James Fisher, Shackleton (London: Barrie, 1957).
7 Michael North (ed.) TS. Eliot The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contents and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).
8 Jarold Ramsey, ‘The Waste Land and Shackleton on South Georgia’ English Language Notes 8 (1970).
9 Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo: Beau Fleuve 2, 1971).
10 Cited in: Marina Jiménez, ‘Saving the vine of the soul’, National Post, June 9, 2001.
11 William S. Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin, 1977).
12 Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw (New York: Avon Books, 1990).
13 William S. Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg, n/d [1959]. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
14 Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel (New York: Grove, 2000).
15 Philippe Mikriammos, ‘The Last European Interview’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1984. Reprinted in Allen Hibbard (ed.) Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999)
16 William S. Burroughs, letter to Brion Gysin, 5 October 1976. Folder 358. Ohio State University Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
17 Edmund White, ‘Man Is Not a Mammal: A Visit with William Burroughs’, Weekly Soho News, 18 February 1981. Reprinted in: Allen Hibbard (ed.) Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999).
18 Robert Palmer, ‘Rolling Stone Interviews William Burroughs’, Rolling Stone, 11 May 1972.