2009 was the 50th
anniversary of the publication Naked Lunch by Olympia Press in Paris. I wrote a
piece on the man’s time living in Chicago, and the effect of the city on
the writing of the book. The piece was published on the now-defunct official
site for the half-centenary celebrations, Nakedlunch.org, run by the still-extant www.realitystudio.org, the world’s top
Burroughs site. The piece was edited by Oliver Harris, the world’s top
Burroughs scholar. I am presenting it unedited here, because it may interest a
few people. It’s long, so I have broken into two pieces. The second bit is linked to at the end of this one. Hope you like it.
The Windy City where all wordwork lifechange
potentials are spread out in a vast unexplored market…
Chicago was a hugely important city in William
S Burroughs’ life; references to it appear all through Naked Lunch from start to finish, like lettering through a stick of
Blackpool rock (Note: Blackpool is an English seaside town that manufactures
sticks of hard candy with the city’s name running right through the center of
them). The first is on page four, with the strange tale of the ‘possessed’
‘shake man’ (i.e. an extortionist who impersonates a law enforcement officer)
the Vigilante. The narrator Lee is laying a bullshit con story on a ‘fruit’ he
encounters on the New York subway, feeding him a line of garbage patter to keep
him interested and then sell him some catnip instead of marijuana.
The story of the Vigilante (which the author would quirkily recycle for his piece in Esquire magazine about the 1968 Democratic National Convention The Coming of the Purple Better One, complete with cameo by ‘A.J.’) is telling, over-the top, funny and horrible at the same time. The narrator recounts how he was supposedly ‘working the fags in Lincoln Park’ as a shake man with the character in question, before the Vigilante went crazy and hanged three homosexuals (the first, but hardly the last, reference to hangings in the book from the Pope of the trope of the rope) before being arrested. Lincoln Park is a public park in Chicago. The Vigilante wouldn’t have to go far to bury his victims, because this place started its existence in 1843 as city cemetery before having all but one of the graves moved and being converted into a park in 1864.
The story of the Vigilante (which the author would quirkily recycle for his piece in Esquire magazine about the 1968 Democratic National Convention The Coming of the Purple Better One, complete with cameo by ‘A.J.’) is telling, over-the top, funny and horrible at the same time. The narrator recounts how he was supposedly ‘working the fags in Lincoln Park’ as a shake man with the character in question, before the Vigilante went crazy and hanged three homosexuals (the first, but hardly the last, reference to hangings in the book from the Pope of the trope of the rope) before being arrested. Lincoln Park is a public park in Chicago. The Vigilante wouldn’t have to go far to bury his victims, because this place started its existence in 1843 as city cemetery before having all but one of the graves moved and being converted into a park in 1864.
The Vigilante episode is an interesting one, an equal mix of con, trauma
and self-loathing from the narrator. Here he has literally become a Jack Black character and puts himself in a position of
strength here, as victimizer instead of could-be victim, of straight instead of
gay, but is still outed anyway when the Vigilante ‘wigs’. It reads like a true
story that Burroughs might well have heard (i.e. the bit about ‘fags’ being
‘worked’ in Lincoln Park, not the hangings or possession)(obviously) recounted
to him by a real shake man during his time in Mrs. Murphy’s rooming house and
underworld training ground.
The idea of a shake man targeting homosexuals would no doubt have been abhorrent to a man still trying to come to terms with his own troubling sexuality, and the threat of being outed by an extortionist would also have resonated with Burroughs. So he has turned this loathsome criminal practice into a hyperbolic horror story, and is fascinating and traumatizing a homosexual from his own societal level (after all, nobody but one from the same strata would recognize the clothes and look and poise and demeanor of an ‘Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit’ – and Burroughs himself was once an ad exec), now life-experienced and playing the gutter-mutter junkie nutter raconteur for the ‘straight’ gay man he is talking to as once the Chicago lowlife would have done to him, laying shocking stories on him as much for sport as anything else. They would have known what type of person he was because, let’s face it, his background would have come through loud and clear in no time at all. He’s giving the subway man a ride through the underground he never envisaged before getting on the train, a chilling thrilling vicious vicarious glimpse into a shady junkie netherworld of crime and punishment and madness.
The idea of a shake man targeting homosexuals would no doubt have been abhorrent to a man still trying to come to terms with his own troubling sexuality, and the threat of being outed by an extortionist would also have resonated with Burroughs. So he has turned this loathsome criminal practice into a hyperbolic horror story, and is fascinating and traumatizing a homosexual from his own societal level (after all, nobody but one from the same strata would recognize the clothes and look and poise and demeanor of an ‘Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit’ – and Burroughs himself was once an ad exec), now life-experienced and playing the gutter-mutter junkie nutter raconteur for the ‘straight’ gay man he is talking to as once the Chicago lowlife would have done to him, laying shocking stories on him as much for sport as anything else. They would have known what type of person he was because, let’s face it, his background would have come through loud and clear in no time at all. He’s giving the subway man a ride through the underground he never envisaged before getting on the train, a chilling thrilling vicious vicarious glimpse into a shady junkie netherworld of crime and punishment and madness.
The rest of the Vigilante material added to the Outtakes section of the Restored text doesn’t add much to the section. Its inclusion seems arbitrary (we are never told in this text why the sections chosen were used) and adds even more geographical confusion to an already vista-kaleidoscopic picture: it mentions Jane Street, which is in New York, then mentions Hyde Park in Chicago, and Venice in Europe, so we’re never quite sure where we’re at. But that’s true of the rest of the book anyway, so it’s no real problem.
I visited one of the intersections mentioned in this section in Naked Lunch, North and Halsted (another intersection mentioned in the Outtakes section, Dearborn and Halsted, does not actually exist). The intersection, like Mrs. Murphy’s building, has changed beyond all recognition since the days when the Exterminator cruised Chicago inflicting his campaign of frightened scuttling pest genocide. And it may change even more, if the Borders there (which, yes, did have a Burroughs section and couple of copies of Naked Lunch) closes down due to falling sales as has been predicted. They are always rebuilding the city.
The writer casts a cold anthropological eye over the state of Illinois (and also Missouri) in general – “miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of Peru.” You don’t get the idea that this is the sort of thing the Illinois Bureau of Tourism would want to hear! On P136 there is a mention of the National Electronic Conference in Chicago. This was actually a real, now-apparently-defunct conference (with the word ‘Electronics’ in the name misspelled by the author) but I could find no real information about it on the net (though a selection of stuff covered from the 1975 conference, chosen at random, included bioinstrumentation, communication theory, and time division multiplexing, so you can get an idea how much of a laugh riot it would have been to attend – and also why the writer would have been interested in and mention it) and never got back a reply email when I approached two apparent co-sponsors of it, so I can’t say much more than it is a typically Burroughsian melding of fact into fiction during the text.
The writer casts a cold anthropological eye over the state of Illinois (and also Missouri) in general – “miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of Peru.” You don’t get the idea that this is the sort of thing the Illinois Bureau of Tourism would want to hear! On P136 there is a mention of the National Electronic Conference in Chicago. This was actually a real, now-apparently-defunct conference (with the word ‘Electronics’ in the name misspelled by the author) but I could find no real information about it on the net (though a selection of stuff covered from the 1975 conference, chosen at random, included bioinstrumentation, communication theory, and time division multiplexing, so you can get an idea how much of a laugh riot it would have been to attend – and also why the writer would have been interested in and mention it) and never got back a reply email when I approached two apparent co-sponsors of it, so I can’t say much more than it is a typically Burroughsian melding of fact into fiction during the text.
And of course Burroughs’ old vermin-slaying vocation gets numerous
mentions through the book (this one from P171):
“They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did
exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in
yellow pyrethrum powder (“Hard to get now, lady…war on. Let you have a
little…two dollars.”) Sluiced fat bedbugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical
hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of
human babies. Wouldn’t you?
My
present assignment: Find the live ones and exterminate.
Not the bodies but the “molds,” you understand – but I forget that you cannot
understand.”
By 1959 the Chicago infiltration is complete and Burroughs sees himself in 1942 Chicago exterminator terms as part of his artistic persona, his job to wipe out the written word and see what lies behind and beyond.
And it was Chicago that would ultimately help launch Naked Lunch onto the unsuspecting public. In the spring and autumn 1958 issues of the University of Chicago literary magazine Chicago Review, student Irving Rosenthal published segments of the book. It was the autumn publication of The Rube that drew the eye and ire and fire of a Chicago gossip columnist and got the winter issue, which was to include more from NL, suppressed by the university.
By 1959 the Chicago infiltration is complete and Burroughs sees himself in 1942 Chicago exterminator terms as part of his artistic persona, his job to wipe out the written word and see what lies behind and beyond.
And it was Chicago that would ultimately help launch Naked Lunch onto the unsuspecting public. In the spring and autumn 1958 issues of the University of Chicago literary magazine Chicago Review, student Irving Rosenthal published segments of the book. It was the autumn publication of The Rube that drew the eye and ire and fire of a Chicago gossip columnist and got the winter issue, which was to include more from NL, suppressed by the university.
Rosenthal and five other student editors resigned in protest and started
their own magazine to publish the verboten verbiage, Big Table. The U.S. Post Office in Chicago seized several hundred
copies of the first printing of 10,000 for obscenity, and the ACLU brought a
federal case (which they eventually won in 1960) against the Post Office. But
in the meantime Maurice Girodias, of the legendary French visionary
sexploitation publication house Olympia Press, got wind of the controversy and
got a complete Naked Lunch manuscript
thrown together in two weeks to capitalize on the court case controversy,
finally publishing it in late July 1959 with the rest of it all being literally
literary history.
SEMINAL SEMANTICS ANTICS
In 1939, the 25 year-old William Seward Burroughs traveled to Chicago for the first of two hugely important trips there that would permanently alter his views on life and literary art. The place basically spun his head around like Regan’s in The Exorcist, only without the crucifix masturbation or pea soup vomiting.
The then-wannabe-writer’s initial journey
from St. Louis was made in response to having read the 1933 epic tome Science And Sanity: An Introduction to
Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski. This was a general semantics (a
field invented by Korzybski, and totally different than semantics) book that
posited an end to Aristotelian blacknwhite either/or thinking, i.e. if a thing
is not one thing it must be another, ignoring possible multiplicities of
meaning. This way of thinking, to Korzybski, dangerously simplified thought and
linguistics expression, building structural flaws into word-representation of,
well, pretty much everything.
The man, a bald dapper multilingual Pole of aristocratic stock from a family who had been mathematicians, scientists and engineers for generations, gave lectures in general semantics to the public. He started every lecture by pounding on a table and saying “Whatever this is, it is not a table!” This was not a comment on the Ikea-alike quality of late-30s mass-produced American furniture compared to sturdy Eastern European-manufactured craftsmanship. Rather, what the aristo cat was trying to correctly get across was that a word is not actually the object it represents, but something quite different; ‘the map is not the territory,’ as he put it in a smart cartographic aphorism.
Eager to be disavowed of any outdated notions he had about dining furnishings, Burroughs traveled to Chicago to hear 35 hours’ worth of general semantics seminars, paying $40 (worth around $1300 unskilled wage today, so it was no cheap thing) for the privilege of doing so. He stayed in room 371 of the YMCA (no definitive documentation exists to know if he was the inspiration behind the famous kitsch-bitch Village People song) and was among a class of 38 eager young eggheads who attended the lectures in the autumn of ‘39.
El Hombre Invisible’s application form/passport to exciting unknown word-worlds for the Korzybski event, reproduced here for the first time anywhere, shows, amongst other things, his occupation as ‘student,’ that he became interested in the subject matter through reading Science And Sanity, and that he is ‘interested in the interrelations of language and cultures.’ What it does not show, however, is the fact that he has edited his marital status to ‘single,’ conveniently neglecting to mention his sham marriage-of-Nazi-inconvenience in Athens to the German Jew Ilse Klapper in July 1937, to help her escape extermination and to come to America. Guess it just slipped his mind.
A net search of some of the more unusual
names of Burroughs’ classmates on the roll-call sheet, again shown here for the
first time on the net, throws up some interesting characters:
Ralph Moriarty deBit became a Gnosis
teacher, was taught ‘Ageless Wisdom’ and was renamed ‘Vitvan’ (Sanskrit for
‘one who knows’) to aid him credibility-wise in his guru guise; after all,
would you want to be taught the
Timeless Secrets of Life by somebody named Ralph?
Samuel I Hayakawa was an English professor and politician elected to the Senate in 1976. There he also founded US English, the political lobbying group who want to make English the US official language. Burroughs would probably have not been particularly appreciative of this sort of attempted linguistic colonization.
Wendell A Johnson (an ironic use of an
iconic Burroughs-used name, for reasons that will become apparent in later
years) messed up the lives of 22 orphan children in Iowa in 1939 by conducting
the so-called ‘Monster Study.’ This was an experimental speech pathology
program where Johnson and a grad student of his taught the unfortunate children
to stutter through negative speech therapy. Filthy bastard. Guess he hadn’t quite gotten the
hang of the ‘cure not cause’ aspect of speech pathology at that point. Or maybe
he was trying to keep himself in business.
https://www.learning-history.com/monster-study-stuttering-experiment/
But you get the general idea. We’re really only interested in Burroughs here, but the names I was able to verify show a high degree of linguistic ability and intelligence in general; interesting how many of them went on to become teachers and politicians and so forth. A great group photograph from the seminar, also reproduced here, shows the unsmiling Burroughs (front row, second from right) sitting moody and broody in a Tom Wolfe-like white suit in the front row to the left of the man whose words would change his life and word-outlook forever, clicking with him and helping to unpick any literary and linguistic preconceptions studying English at Harvard had hardwired into his haywire head.
https://www.learning-history.com/monster-study-stuttering-experiment/
But you get the general idea. We’re really only interested in Burroughs here, but the names I was able to verify show a high degree of linguistic ability and intelligence in general; interesting how many of them went on to become teachers and politicians and so forth. A great group photograph from the seminar, also reproduced here, shows the unsmiling Burroughs (front row, second from right) sitting moody and broody in a Tom Wolfe-like white suit in the front row to the left of the man whose words would change his life and word-outlook forever, clicking with him and helping to unpick any literary and linguistic preconceptions studying English at Harvard had hardwired into his haywire head.
The Institute for General Semantics
opened in Chicago in May 1938 at 1330 E. 56th Street. Before that
for three years Korzybski had been giving lectures at colleges round the
country. A year after opening, the Institute moved one block west to 1234 E. 56th
Street. In a strange deranged controversy that the magical-thinking Burroughs
would surely have appreciated, a critic of Korzybski claimed that the man was
actually a covert numerologist and implied that the skinheadscratching
Count(er) had had the number of the building changed to get a ‘magical’
6-consecutive-number address.
Burroughs himself might have agreed in the cretinous critic’s misinformed view of the Institute’s address change, or the fact that some students referred to the place as the ‘magic house,’ because the lectures (for which he scored perfect attendance, though seminar notes apparently indicate he was quiet and kept himself to himself) certainly cast a spell over him that would last from 1939 right up until his death nearly (12345) 6 decades later. As he wrote in an entry in his book Last Words: The Final Journal of William S Burroughs, dated February 1, 1997:
‘Many come under the primal law of the
physical plane: duality.
White or black. Good or evil.
That is – as Korzybski, founder of general semantics, pointed out – “either/or thinking.” Instead of “both/and” –‘
That is – as Korzybski, founder of general semantics, pointed out – “either/or thinking.” Instead of “both/and” –‘
Still recounting the Count’s theories 58
years later? That’s what you call making an impressive impression on the
impressionable.
But what exactly was it about general semantics that appealed to the young Burroughs, invading and taking over his fevered fertile mind just as surely as Korzybski’s native country was being attacked by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the second last day of the seminar? Well, as has long been noted, the man was, in part, out to try and combat the proto-spin-doctor media (inhu)manipulating of his uncle Ivy Lee, the father of the modern public relations campaign and PR man for Hitler in America in the 1930s. With that poison ivy itch to scratch, the embryonic scribe would be looking for all the ammunition he could find to ‘sever word-lines’ and break down psychological control mechanisms, striking out at his uncle’s media-machine-masturbating machinations.
But what exactly was it about general semantics that appealed to the young Burroughs, invading and taking over his fevered fertile mind just as surely as Korzybski’s native country was being attacked by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the second last day of the seminar? Well, as has long been noted, the man was, in part, out to try and combat the proto-spin-doctor media (inhu)manipulating of his uncle Ivy Lee, the father of the modern public relations campaign and PR man for Hitler in America in the 1930s. With that poison ivy itch to scratch, the embryonic scribe would be looking for all the ammunition he could find to ‘sever word-lines’ and break down psychological control mechanisms, striking out at his uncle’s media-machine-masturbating machinations.
He probably naturally gravitated towards
Korzybski as a left-of-field challenging word-rebel, some parts (more
specifically the non-Aristotelian meaning-concept) of Science And Sanity reverberating and resonating with certain
nascent thoughts and theories of his own. Also, for someone who was not, umm, entirely rooted in reality, unmooring words from their consensus meanings
and scattering their sense to the senseless communication winds would have been
a liberating thing. Studying under somebody taken seriously, like Korzybski,
would have given somewhat scientific credibility and vindication to some of his
own personal outlandish flights of word-fancy, in both his own eyes and those
of his eyebrow-raising confused parents. Also, he probably figured that Harvard
had told him how to study words and what they were – now he could un-study them (kicking against the
know-nothing know-it-all staid college pricks) and what they supposedly were to raise and open new
word-vistas to him, Zen brain-training-razing.
Or maybe he just had it bad for bald
Polish aristocrats. I guess we’ll never fully truly know.
Burroughs’ first Windy City trip also
brought prescient flashes of another worldview-shaping invasion of a different
kind that would shape the rest of his life when it came along 12 years later; a
larval entity waiting for a live one, patiently feeling for his psyche with
fingers of rotten ectoplasm. As he put it in the February 1985 introduction to Queer:
“In
1939, I became interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics and went out to see someone
in the Department of Egyptology at the University of Chicago. And something was
screaming in my ear: “YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!” Yes, the hieroglyphics provided
one key to the mechanism of possession. Like a virus, the possessing entity
must find a port of entry.
This occasion was my first clear indication of something in my being
that was not me, and not under my control.”
Putting aside the fact that the voice Burroughs heard might have been a
campus security guard warning off a non-student, what the beleaguered man is
talking about here is, of course (for those of you familiar with Burroughs),
the Ugly Spirit, the evil entity that he believed possessed him and made him
kill his wife Joan in Mexico on September 6th, 1951. 46 years later
on he was sitting imposing a retrospective subjective understanding of his
feelings on visiting the University of Chicago, a mere couple of blocks from
the Institute of General Semantics, trying to figure out where it first started
to go wrong and the life-rot first started to set in, thinking that the spirit
was pushing him away from some key to exorcising it and making it exit him
before he even knew it ‘existed.’ As he put it, again in the Queer intro:
“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
I
personally look upon the ‘Ugly Spirit’ excuse as a psychological self-defense
mechanism a la ‘the Devil made me do it’ to help Burroughs get out of bed every
day without wanting to kill himself. It’s understandable. I suppose if you are
going to live for 46 years after drunkenly shooting someone in the head during
something as frivolous and idiotic and insane as a game of ‘William Tell,’ you
had better have some way to explain it to yourself that does not involve
personal responsibility at the bottom of it. Because that would mean you were a
murderer, not just a spirit-puppet, and involve a lot of self-examining; a
painful thing indeed, were you even up to it or able to undertake it in the
first place. Then again, he did have
an exorcism done by a Navajo shaman towards the end of his life, so he
obviously believed this possession rubbish on some level.
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/dont-hide-the-madness-william-s.-burroughs-in-conversation-with-allen-ginsberg
I think part of the reason the writer stayed wasted out of his face for decades was, amongst other reasons, to avoid the pain of what he had done (and his apparent sexual molestation when he was four by his nanny’s boyfriend); I also think that anybody who wants to destroy past methods of communication and artistic representation which represent a thread linking them to their old self has a vested interest in avoiding thinking about the past, and in believing it can be superceded or even destroyed. But Burroughs was only (sort of) fooling himself, and lying about his pre-ballistics-accident artistic status, because he sent a paper he had written to Alfred Korzybski (unfortunately unavailable to me for this article) in 1940 for perusal.
This shows he was trying his hand at writing long before any supposed Ugly Spirit ‘pushed’ him into it; indeed, he already had invented his signature character Dr. Benway in the short 1938 collaboration Twilight’s Last Gleamings with his friend Kells Elvins. Whatever he sent Korzybski will remain forever tantalizingly unavailable (Gleamings?), but the still-in-existence letter to the Pole (which I have not seen either) includes a note by the Count calling Burroughs ‘tragically disturbed’ and noting that he recommended that the errant pupil attend another seminar. You always hurt the one you love. And was that, sadly, ever true in the case of William S Burroughs.
http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/dont-hide-the-madness-william-s.-burroughs-in-conversation-with-allen-ginsberg
I think part of the reason the writer stayed wasted out of his face for decades was, amongst other reasons, to avoid the pain of what he had done (and his apparent sexual molestation when he was four by his nanny’s boyfriend); I also think that anybody who wants to destroy past methods of communication and artistic representation which represent a thread linking them to their old self has a vested interest in avoiding thinking about the past, and in believing it can be superceded or even destroyed. But Burroughs was only (sort of) fooling himself, and lying about his pre-ballistics-accident artistic status, because he sent a paper he had written to Alfred Korzybski (unfortunately unavailable to me for this article) in 1940 for perusal.
This shows he was trying his hand at writing long before any supposed Ugly Spirit ‘pushed’ him into it; indeed, he already had invented his signature character Dr. Benway in the short 1938 collaboration Twilight’s Last Gleamings with his friend Kells Elvins. Whatever he sent Korzybski will remain forever tantalizingly unavailable (Gleamings?), but the still-in-existence letter to the Pole (which I have not seen either) includes a note by the Count calling Burroughs ‘tragically disturbed’ and noting that he recommended that the errant pupil attend another seminar. You always hurt the one you love. And was that, sadly, ever true in the case of William S Burroughs.
Inviting the tragically disturbed back to hang out with us again is not
exactly the methodology most of us
would apply to them, but I suppose it would have been good for business had the
man under discussion turned up again. The tormenting totally mental paper
he sent his mentor, and the fact he had already collaborated with Jack Kerouac
by 1944 on the 2008-published And The
Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, make a mockery of Burroughs’ claims to
the post-shooting art-driven psychic self-defense that made him write Naked Lunch and his other works after
it, but aren’t nearly as
self-dramatizing-and-mythmaking. Interesting to note that the massively
headspinfluential scribe would carry his interest with Egypt forward to his
last major full-length novel, 1987’s The
Western Lands, which represents an exploration of the Egyptian afterlife.
Indeed, at one point in his life he tried to teach himself how to write
hieroglyphs, doing some artwork involving them in the 1960s with Brion Gysin,
but ultimately gave them up as too cumbersome and complex and laborious. So
hieroglyphs (his examination of them tied in with how Korzybski theorized about
using pictures instead of words to avoid meaning-confusion) and possession were
inextricably interlinked in his under-supposed-invasion psyche basically for
the rest of his life.
Stamp collecting probably would have been an easier option.
Having just had his pre-Chicago worldview slomo-decimated, Burroughs traveled back to New York to study anthropology at Columbia University, where he had already taken psychology courses (probably in an attempt to sort out his screwed-up head) in 1938, the eternal student trying to find his life-niche – or sensibly avoid working life for as long as possible. Here he met Jack Anderson, the man who had the dubious honor of having the unstable writer-to-be cut the tip of his finger off for him. An anti-intellectual, Anderson would sneer “Is that what Count Korzybski says?” when Burroughs would bring up some high-falutin’ theory that interested or obsessed him, which once again says something about the Count’s influence on him – and something about Anderson’s intimidation in the face of intellectual discussion.
Van Goghing back to his hometown of St. Louis to recover from the finger-fuck episode, Burroughs soon found working as deliveryman for his parents Mote and Laura Lee (who had just been published by Coca-Cola with her Flower Arranging volumes) not to his liking, so he headed back to Illinois again and got high in his pre-morphine-daze days by getting himself a pilot’s license at the Lewis School of Aeronautics in Lockport, which is 30 miles southwest of Chicago. He evidently liked the idea of avian warfare, but his romantic dreams of Luftwaffe-engaging nimble cumulonimbus ballistics ballet were, alas, not to be.
Burroughs got his pilot’s license flying Piper Cubs. His avian
experience stuck in his mind for more reasons than one. As he recounts in the Word section (which was material cut
from the original Naked Lunch
manuscript) of the 1989 short piece collection, Interzone (with parenthesis his): (Note: When your reporter was
learning to be a pilot, this young cadet of an angel dive on this old gash in a
field. Her run instead of flop when he buzz her, he cut her head off with the
wings. The commandant’s press agent referred to “this horrible case.”)
The never-to-fly-again pilot lived in Chicago for a few months during a fairly uneventful visit and saw one of an analyst, applying for officers’ training programs in the military but, being flatfooted and nearsighted, he wasn’t considered a good bet for aerial (or indeed any) warfare, being turned down by all the armed services.
In the summer of 1942 the grounded writer was called up for WWII as an infantryman. He went to Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, but thought he was more suited to being officer material and didn’t like being treated as a (sniff) common grunt. He asked his much-loved mother for help in getting out of the army in his demeaning menial capacity (bet many of the men without money there wished they could pull such strings). She contacted a Washington neurologist who got him out on a civilian disability discharge, reasoning that the self-mutilating man wasn’t right for the military. You might have thought that his finger-chopping episode demonstrated his willingness to draw blood and marked him as primo soldier material, but apparently not.
Burroughs went to Chestnut Lodge, a psychiatric facility outside Washington, for a three-day evaluation, but didn’t want to spend a year there, as he was told he may potentially have to. He then went back to Jefferson Barracks to await discharge for a few months and met a Windy City native Irishman called Ray Masterson, who told him that jobs were plentiful back in his hometown because of men being drafted.
Link to part two:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2020/01/chicago-calling-william-s-burroughs-in_22.html
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2020/01/chicago-calling-william-s-burroughs-in_22.html
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