23
wife, working on the “Freelandia” section of
his book, satirizing what he felt was the op-
pressive sterility of Scandinavian socialism.
Kerouac’s novel On the Road, written six
years earlier, was finally published in the
U.S. by Viking Press at this time, and the
book caused an immediate literary sensation.
In this context, with Ginsberg’s Howl already
asuccés d’estime, Burroughs set his literary
sights higher than before. Ginsberg, visiting
Paris, offered Burroughs’ book to Maurice
Girodias, whose censorshipdefying, English-
language Olympia Press seemed a likely pub-
lisher; but Girodias refused to deal with the
tattered manuscript. When Burroughs re-
turned to Tangier in September 1957, he
learned that Kiki had been stabbed to death
in Madrid by a jealous lover, and that Bill
Garver had died in Mexico of malnutrition
and drug abuse. In January, Burroughs went
to Paris to meet Ginsberg, and he took a
room in the hotel where Ginsberg and
442/1780
22
Orlovsky, and the young New York poet
Gregory Corso, were staying, at no. 9, rue
Git-le-Coeur: the “Beat Hotel,” as it later
came to be known.
Paris in 1958 was the beginning of Bur-
roughs’ annus mirabilis. He was writing
steadily on Naked Lunch. With Ginsberg and
Corso as his companions, he met Marcel
Duchamp and Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
among other notable figures. After Ginsberg
left Paris that summer, Burroughs continued
to spend time with Corso, who introduced
him to a brilliant, eccentric distant cousin of
the Rothschild banking family, a wheelchair-
bound neurasthenic named Jacques Stern.
Together they built up a new drug habit, and
in October, Burroughs and Stern went to Dr.
Dent’s clinic in London for the apomorphine
cure. In the course of this trip, they had a
falling-out, a rift which was not repaired for
two decades.
443/1780
23
Lawrence Ferlinghetti had declined Bur-
roughs’ chaotic manuscript, but the poet
Robert Creeley, an editor at Black Mountain
Review, published a portion of it in March
1958—a month before Irving Rosenthal and
the University of Chicago students who ed-
ited the Chicago Review planned to publish
more excerpts. The Chicago group reaped
the whirlwind when a local conservative
journalist raised such an outcry that the next
issue of the Review, which included chapters
from Naked Lunch, was impounded by uni-
versity trustees. Widespread resignations
from the magazine followed, and Irving
Rosenthal and his associates independently
published the material in the first issue of
Big Table a year later.
Brion Gysin moved into the Beat Hotel in
November 1958. He had lost his Tangier res-
taurant the year before, in a tangle with
some early members of the Scientology cult.
Now Gysin was painting and exhibiting in
444/1780
23
Paris. Ginsberg later commented that he
found Gysin “too paranoid” when they met in
1961, but Burroughs was becoming progress-
ively more paranoid in his worldview, and
Burroughs and Gysin soon became insepar-
able. Gysin had attended the Sorbonne, and
his work had first been exhibited with the
Surrealists in 1935 in Paris. He knew his way
around Paris, he knew “tout le monde,” and
with his unequaled gift as a raconteur, Gysin
propelled Burroughs to a new plateau of in-
dependence and competence. Together they
formed a “third mind.”
In April 1959 Burroughs ventured back to
Tangier, but he was quickly in trouble with
the authorities, due to information given up
by a small-time English thief of Burroughs’
acquaintance named Paul Lund. After Mo-
rocco’s independence in 1956, there were
outbursts of nationalistic frenzy and xeno-
phobia in the streets. Burroughs made his
way back to Paris within the month. In
445/1780
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25
Chicago, Big Table 1 was finally published,
but again Burroughs’ work and the magazine
that printed it were impounded, this time by
U.S. postal authorities. Judge Julius Hoff-
man ruled that Naked Lunch was not ob-
scene, and the magazine was released in the
United States in June 1959 with an aura of
literary scandal. Maurice Girodias now
changed his mind about that “ratty junky,”
and he sent his emissary, the South African
poet Sinclair Beiles, over to the Beat Hotel to
ask if Mr. Burroughs could deliver a finished
manuscript of Naked Lunch within ten days
for publication by The Olympia Press.
Burroughs and Gysin took up the chal-
lenge; with Beiles’ help, they were sending
marked-up pages to the typesetters daily and
receiving typeset galleys as they went along.
The book’s final sequence was mostly de-
termined, at Beiles’ suggestion, by the “ran-
dom” order in which chapters had been fin-
ished
and
sent for typesetting; but
446/1780
23
Burroughs would later pose the paradox:
“How random is random?” In any case, the
book was at press that same month, and in
stores in Paris by August 1959. By now, the
Beat Hotel was a thriving international
young-hipster meeting-place. Burroughs and
Gysin were pushing the limits of cannabis in-
spiration and paranoid genius, and Bur-
roughs had begun to make drawings and col-
lages with cursive and typewritten texts,
photos, drawings, and magazine pictures.
The American poet Harold Norse was also
at the hotel, and hung out with Burroughs
and Gysin. Around the time Naked Lunch
was published, Norse introduced Burroughs
to someone who would remain with him for
six years: a nineteen-year-old, reddish-
brown-haired Briton named Ian Som-
merville, who was studying at Cambridge in
England and working at the Mistral Book-
shop in Paris for the summer. Sommerville
had a natural gift for mathematics, audio
447/1780
27
engineering, photography, and computers,
all talents that he later shared with Bur-
roughs in their collaborations. For the mo-
ment, though, Sommerville was just helping
Burroughs kick a codeine habit. It was the
first love affair that Burroughs had dared to
undertake since his romantic failures with
Marker and Ginsberg.
After Burroughs survived a court appear-
ance in Paris on a trumped-up drug conspir-
acy charge, he was visited in October 1959 by
photographer Loomis Dean and writer David
Snell. They were working on a story about
the Beat “revolution” for Life magazine, and
they made a lasting impression on Bur-
roughs: he saw them as mouthpieces and in-
siders from the world of the Insect-manipu-
lated Control media of the Western world:
“LIFE
TIME
FORTUNE
INC.”
The
Burroughs-Gysin “third mind” needed a
manifesto for action within this shared
worldview, and that same week, Gysin
448/1780
23
discovered a principle of random text manip-
ulation: he was cutting a matte for one of his
drawings when his Stanley knife sliced
through some pages of the New York Herald
Tribune underneath the matte, revealing
new, seemingly meaningless phrase combin-
ations that, as a former Surrealist, Gysin re-
cognized as art. Gysin demonstrated the
technique to Burroughs, and they quickly ad-
opted the “cutup method” as a revolutionary
approach to writing.
When Naked Lunch was edited in 1959, the
previous draft, called Interzone, was ripped
apart and reassembled by Burroughs with
Gysin and Beiles. The published version con-
tained most of the routines and “journals,”
but very little remained of the “WORD” sec-
tion. That manuscript survived, however,
and was discovered by Barry Miles in 1984,
in the Ginsberg collection at Columbia
University. When Burroughs and I edited the
Interzone collection four years later, we
449/1780
23
combined the material published in Early
Routines (Cadmus Editions, 1981) with a re-
vised version of the “WORD” chapter from
the 1958 Interzone manuscript. The new In-
terzone was published by Viking in 1989.
“International Zone” is a travel piece that
Burroughs wrote for magazine submission;
the character he calls “Brinton” is clearly
himself, and gives an idea of his assessment
of his own persona at this point in his life.
Also here are excerpts from “Lee’s Journals,”
including an early statement of Burroughs’
radical artistic prolegomenon. Written partly
in Tangier’s Benchimal Hospital, where Bur-
roughs was undergoing a cure for his
Eukodol habit, the “Journals” portray his
state of ultimate dejection and lostness, his
bravado and his still-wicked humor.
In one bravissimo passage, Burroughs
writes, from Benchimal: “God grant I never
die in a fucking hospital! Let me die in some
louche bistro, a knife in my liver, my skull
450/1780
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