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months earlier, John Calder had published a
relatively “safe” selection of Burroughs’ writ-
ings from Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and
Ticket, which Burroughs named Dead
Fingers Talk—again adding new emenda-
tions to the excerpts, creating slightly new
substates of the latter two novels. And in
December 1963, City Lights published The
Yagé Letters, which by now included a final
exchange of letters between Ginsberg, who
had reached the yagé highlands seven years
after his mentor, and Burroughs, who was
already becoming the literary seer of his cut-
up period.
Back in Tangier in February, Burroughs
turned his attention to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own
Mag, a mimeographed publication from
England, which featured Burroughs’ collaged
communiqués in twenty-one issues between
1964 and 1966. All was not quiet on the do-
mestic front, however; Sommerville was
picking up Arab men for sex, and as they
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were living in the Casbah, this flagrant activ-
ity brought on the opprobrium of their Arab
neighbors—especially the women, who
openly harassed them in the street. In May
1964, Burroughs finally began to earn a bit of
money from his books, and he and Som-
merville moved to a more gracious pent-
house apartment in the Lotería Building, in
downtown Tangier.
With an assignment from Playboy to re-
turn to his hometown of St. Louis, Burroughs
went to the Chelsea Hotel in New York in
December 1964. Sommerville wanted to ac-
company him, but he had visa problems;
these could have been overcome, but Barry
Miles, an eyewitness, suggests that Bur-
roughs was willing to walk away from his
growing ambivalence toward Sommerville. It
was a subtle abandonment, one that would
haunt Burroughs for a decade. He had little
time to ponder it, though, because in Janu-
ary he received word that his seventy-nine-
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23
year-old father had died suddenly in Palm
Beach. Burroughs went to Florida for the fu-
neral. Laura seemed to be bearing up fairly
well; the faithful Mort and his wife Miggy
would keep an eye on her, from their home
in St. Louis. Burroughs returned to New
York, and sublet a loft at 210 Centre Street.
In early 1965, Naked Lunch was tried in
Boston for obscenity. Burroughs’ supporting
witnesses included Allen Ginsberg, Norman
Mailer, and John Ciardi. In 1963 at the Beat
Hotel, Sommerville and Gysin had developed
a device that they called the “Dream
Machine”: a slotted, spinning cylinder that
was brightly illuminated from within, so
that, gazing into it, one experienced alpha-
wave “flicker” and mild hallucinations. Gysin
came to New York to join Burroughs and to
market the invention; the literary agent Peter
Matson met both of them at this time, and he
represented Burroughs for the next nineteen
years. The Dream Machine was a sensation,
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23
but no one wanted to manufacture a device
that could provoke seizures.
Burroughs’ reputation was already such
that he was the toast of downtown New York
in 1965. He made friends with a circle of
young painters around the emerging pop
artist Robert Rauschenberg, including David
Prentice. A cosmetics-fortune heir named
Conrad Rooks invited Burroughs to play a
deathly, top-hatted character in his avant-
garde film project, Chappaqua. Burroughs
was royally feted at parties and readings
thrown by such hostesses as Panna Grady, in
her apartment at the Dakota Hotel, and Wyn
Chamberlain, in his penthouse at 222
Bowery, an address which Burroughs would
make his own ten years later. Brion Gysin
was with Burroughs in New York, using his
diplomacy and charm to brighten all social
situations, and working daily with him on
their collaborative chef d’oeuvre, a text-and-
collage work that they called The Third
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23
Mind. Through Panna Grady, Gysin met the
poet John Giorno, a twenty-eight-year-old
Columbia graduate who would play a major
role in Gysin’s and Burroughs’ lives; Giorno
and Gysin became lovers.
Burroughs spent time with David Budd, a
painter from Sarasota, Florida, with a lively
circus-people background, whom Burroughs
had first met at the Beat Hotel in the late
1950s. Budd brought to Burroughs’ attention
the last words of Dutch Schultz, a New York
gangster who was shot down in Newark in
1935 and whose disconnected ramblings, re-
corded by a stenographer as he lay dying in a
hospital, were reminiscent of Burroughs’ cut-
up texts. This relationship led to a film pro-
ject in 1968, and Burroughs tried his hand at
a screenplay based on the gangster’s life
story, called The Last Words of Dutch
Schultz. This text was published in four dif-
ferent states: in England in 1965 by Jeff Nut-
tall in My Own Mag; in Boston, by the
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Atlantic Monthly, in 1969; in London by
Cape Goliard Press in 1970; and in New York
in 1975, by Viking. But the movie project
never took off.
Burroughs’ six months in the loft on
Centre Street were busy times. He collabor-
ated with Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett on
TIME (“C” Press, 1965), and again with Ed
Sanders, who published APO-33: A Metabol-
ic Regulator (Fuck You Press, 1965). Bur-
roughs’ collage book with Gysin, The Third
Mind, was unpublishable in its full-graphics
form at the time. (The original boards were
finally exhibited by the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art in their “Ports of Entry” ex-
hibition in July 1996—more than thirty years
after The Third Mind’s creation.) Burroughs
was also making “scrapbooks,” with input
from Gysin: usually not very large, these
hardbound journal-books were filled with
collaged images culled from the press, typed
and handwritten texts, drawings in colored
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23
inks, and so forth. From 1960 to 1976 he
made about two dozen such scrapbooks.
Burroughs also began to explore live per-
formance in the mid-1960s; he made several
public appearances in New York, sometimes
with Gysin. On a trip to Paris around this
time, Burroughs recorded his first long-play-
ing record, Call Me Burroughs, with Som-
merville; Gait Frogé, the owner of the Eng-
lish Bookshop, published a thousand copies
of the vinyl album in 1965, and the following
year it was released in the United States on
Bernard Stollman’s ESP-Disk label.
The end of Burroughs’ year in New York
was at hand. In September 1965, as Gysin
made ready to take John Giorno with him to
Morocco, Burroughs decided to return to
London to see what remained of his domest-
ic situation with Ian Sommerville. Immedi-
ately he faced a new visa hassle upon landing
at Heathrow, due to his growing media no-
toriety. Mikey Portman’s godfather, the
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chairman of the Arts Council, intervened
with the immigration authorities, but Bur-
roughs was obliged to quit England tempor-
arily, three months later. He went to Tangier
for a brief vacation with Gysin and Giorno.
It was the swan song of the Tangier scene:
Paul and Jane Bowles were still there, and
many others of the mid-fifties Tangerine set,
but most of them for only a little while
longer. On Christmas Day 1965, Jay Hazel-
wood (the longtime genius loci of the Parade
Bar, the HQ of the expat group) died in his
bar, of a heart attack. It marked the end of an
era: the “anything-goes” international crowd
was fleeing the now-Muslim Morocco. Bur-
roughs returned in January 1966—the midst
of the “Swinging Sixties”—to London, the
city that would be his home for the next eight
years.
660/1780
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
