1. Miles describes Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to William Burroughs the reader in 1943:
“Bill showed them his library. Most of the books they had never heard of. Bill explained that he had a scientific approach to reading, which was both functional and pragmatic: ‘I read each book for a special purpose,’ he told them. ‘For instance, I read Chas Jackson’s Lost Weekend to see what alcoholism is like. I read for information.’ He told them he read Rimbaud for his description of the derangement of the senses, and both Rimbaud and St.-John Perse for ‘the foreign perfume, the juxtaposition of strange experience and the images of cities glittering in the distance.’ Burroughs particularly liked the T. S. Eliot translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase, which had a dry, St. Louis edge to it that he could appreciate.
Bill had books on parlor tricks, card games and formulas, boxing, jujitsu, an Egyptian Grammar, Kovoor Behanan’s Yoga: A Scientific Evaluation, a volume on hypnoanalysis, and Abrahamson’s Crime and the Human Mind, but the literature and poetry were what particularly interested Ginsberg. It was here that he and Jack discovered Kafka’s The Castle, Cocteau’s Opium, Louis Ferdinand Celine’s Journey To The End of the Night, Baudelaire’s Poesies, and Blake’s poems. Blake was not much studied in the United States at that time, but Burroughs thought him a ‘perfect poet.’
There was a copy of the works of Shakespeare with marked passages; Burroughs was much given to quoting from him. Also on his shelves were a Louis Untermeyer poetry anthology, The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter van Tilburg Clark, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, The Folded Leaf by WIlliam Maxwell, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Nabokov on Gogol, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch, who came to be Burroughs’s favorite author, plus a number of John O’Hara novels and a collection of Raymond Chandler and other crime writers.
Burroughs’s library was to have an enormous impact on both Allen and Jack. Allen went so far as to note down a list of titles on a yellow pad. When they left, Burroughs gave them each a gift. Jack received a copy of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and Bill gave Allen an old red clothbound Liveright edition of Hart Crane’s Collected Poems. Allen had never heard of Hart Crane, but he was later to be one of the lesser influences on ‘Howl’.” From Ginsberg A Biography by Barry Miles. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1989. pp. 47-8.
2. Phillippe Mikriammos: You read a lot of science-fiction and have expressed admiration for The Star Virus by Barrington Bayley and Three To Conquer by Eric Frank Russell. Any other science-fiction books that you have particularly liked?
WSB: Fury, by Henry Kuttner. I don’t know, there are so many of them. There’s something by Poul Anderson, I forget what it was called, Twilight World. There are a lot of science-fiction books that I have read, but I have forgotten the names of the writers. Dune I like quite well. BL, pp. 273-4.
3. “One of Burroughs’s sources for The Wild Boys was a science-fiction work by Poul Anderson called The Twilight World. The way he adapted other writers’ materials can be seen in the following example:
Twilight World: ‘The boy was small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged, under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, straight-lined and delicately cut, but the huge blue eyes were vacant.’
Wild Boys: ‘A dead leaf caught in Audrey’s ruffled brown hair.’
Twilight World: ‘The point of origin was named as St. Louis, Missouri, and the date was just prior to that recorded for the outbreak of the final war.’
Wild Boys: ‘The old broken point of origin, St. Louis, Missouri.’” LO, p. 466.
4. “There were two important sources for the material appropriated for the cut-ups that went into The Wild Boys. The first was Twilight World, by Poul Anderson:
‘A world that may be literally just around the corner from us... World War III newsflash...There are reports of strange mutations of the human species... A physical and mental examination of these freaks is being undertaken at the present time...
The other is the story ‘The House by the Water’ in The Fourth Ghost Book, edited by James R. Turner, which was a source for Audrey and the Dead Child. In both cases I experienced a cold tingle of recognition, wrote Burroughs, ‘I was waiting there in someone else’s writing.’ (Burroughs’s own emphasis.)” Miles, pp. 180-1.
5. ITEM 1 FROM FOLIO NUMBER 65 - Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive:
“The use of cut-ups and fold-ins with other writers is illustrated by these pages of mixed narrative and cut-ups. Wherever possible I will give the references as to source of cut-up material and since some of this material is from obscure sources, I will include in the archives the actual books when I still have them.
One of the sources is a book I do not have. This book concerns a comic strip that is coming true in present time, set on the fringes of a lonely galaxy a million light years away. The techniques described in this comic strip are actually valid and the strip is being acted out. But the strip was thirty years ago. Nobody can remember the title or the author so they can’t find the strip and find out what will happen next. I will endeavor to see that this does not occur again.
I do have to hand two sources for the material in this file and for cut-up material that went into the published edition of The Wild Boys and they accompany the file.
One is Twilight World by Poul Anderson... ‘A world that may be literally just around the corner from us... World War III newsflash... There are reports of strange mutations of the human species... A physical and mental examination of these freaks is being undertaken at the present time...’
A description of the boy Alaric slotted in with a dream picture of my own on which the dead child sequence in The Wild Boys was based. In the dream I saw the boy standing under a dusty tree in Mexico with a vacant look in his eyes...
‘I was waiting there pale character in some one else’s writing...’ Twilight World page 27... ‘He knew that his son was looking at him as if trying to focus to remember who the stranger was...’ page 28... ‘The boy small for his 14 years, lean and ragged. Under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, straight-lined and delicately cut but the huge light blue eyes were vacant...’
‘A dead leaf caught in Audrey’s ruffled brown hair...’
Twilight World Page 127... ‘The point of origin was named as St. Louis Missouri and the date was just prior to that recorded for the outbreak of the final war...’
‘The old broken point of origin, St. Louis Missouri.’
Another source for Audrey and the Dead Child is The Fourth Ghost Book, edited by James R. Turner, Pan Paperbacks... The House By The Water, page 229.
‘The boy might not have been more than 12 years old, yet his ease of manner was remarkable in one so young. He was an attractive lad, lightly built and finely boned with hair the color of pale straw and eyes like forget-me-nots. His smile held, I though a hint of lazy mockery or perhaps of challenge, even of appeal. His long legs were scarred with sores and he wrote the customary native rope-soled slippers...’
Page 231... ‘There,’ he said, ‘There is my father’s house.’
Page 231... ‘The boy did not speak again.’
Page 237... ‘My father’s house. Enter.’
Page 241... ‘A rough piece of stone bearing the boy’s name...’ ‘Peter John S...’
1892-1904
‘The death of a child long ago.’
In both cases I experienced a cold tingle of recognition.
‘I was waiting there in some one else’s writing.’
June 18, 1972.
Audrey Carsons, the Dead Child, John Hamlin, like all my characters are made up of dreams, photographs, cut-ups and fold-ins with other writing.
Another source for Audrey, John Hamlin, the Frisco Kid, the Dead Child, derives from the writings and legend of Peter Webber. I picked up traces of this legend in Tangier and Paris but I never met Peter Webber who died at the age of 21. Everyone who knew him told a different story of his death rather like Rashmonon. His papers fell into my hands and I made a number of cuts from them and pasted bits of letters and typescripts into scrap-books. Here in this file are the surviving fragments in an envelope sent me by my father years ago.
‘My father’s house. Enter.’ (...)
There are many cut-ups with Peter Webber and they have been collected here.’”
pp. 160-1.
6. In Cities of the Red Night we see the Audrey character sitting at a typewriter. There is a bookcase to his left and we see some of the books. The library highlights Audrey’s personality as well as his interests. By transfering his own knowledge to Audrey, Burroughs has limited the character to a certain mindset but also given him personality and character traits within 2 sentences and placed him in a time that would have taken another writer an entire book to touch on.
“Audrey sits at a typewriter in his attic room, his back to the audience. In a bookcase to his left, we see The Book of Knowledge, Coming of Age in Somoa, The Green Hat, The Plastic Age, All the Sad Young Men, Bar Twenty Days, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Adventure Stories, and a stack of Little Blue Books.” COTRN, p. 329.
The stack of Little Blue Books refers to the Little Blue Books edited and published by E. Haldeman-Julius. There were more than one-thousand Little Blue Books published between
1919 and 1948. There were novels, shortened novels, manifestos, philosophical tracts,
early self-help guides, poetry, and classic literature. Many were texts that couldn’t be found
elsewhere, while many were reprints of classic stories making available to the public and the young William Burroughs everything from the travels of Marco Polo to books about germs, and
terrorism in France. Burroughs mentions that he read books by Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, and Remy de Gourmont in the Little Blue Books. The following is a list of most (if not all) of the titles published by E. Haldeman-Julius by those three authors: Guy de Maupassant: Love and Other Stories, Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories, The Piece of String and Other Stories, The Necklace and Other Stories, An Artist's Wife and Other Stories, A Night in Whitechapel and Other Stories, Room Number Eleven and Other Stories, The Man With the Blue Eyes and Other Stories, The Clown and Other Stories, A Queer Night in Paris and Other Stories, Madame Tellier's Establishment and Other Stories, A Wife's Confession and Other Stories, DeMaupassant's Short Stories, and The Tallow Bull. Anatole France: The Majesty of Justice, The Human Traged, Epigrams of Love, Life and Laughter, The Wisdom of the Ages and Other Stories, Five Women and the Grand Passion, The Woman Who Inspired Fatal Passion, and Merry Tales of Childhood. Remy de Gourmont: A Night in the Luxembourg, Passion Stories of Many Hues, Brightly Colored Tales of Love's Desires, The Prosituted Woman, Philosophic Nights in Paris and Epigrams.
The Book of Knowledge remains a mystery to me, there are just too many books that it could
be. Probably the Encyclopedia set similar to The World Book series.
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead was a landmark anthropological/ pscychological study of primitive youth. This was Mead’s first book and was written when she was twenty-
three years old. She takes a Freudian psychosexual look at primitive society through the
eyes of a Samoan girl. Some believe that her work was discredited by a fellow called Derek
Freeman. But, her work here is more interesting for its mention alongside the other titles.
An essential reference in the study of Burroughs’ Audrey and the wild boys, primitive sexuality, and its 1928 publication sets a nostalgiac 1920’s stage which Burroughs
recalls fondly here.
Bar-20 Days by Clarence E. Mulford was also released later as Hop Along Cassidy’s Private
War. The creator of the classic western character, Hop Along Cassidy, published this
one in 1911. Obviously, an early favorite of Burroughs.
All the Sad Young Men was an early Fitgerald short story collection originaly published in 1926.
The Green Hat by Michael Arlen as well as The Plastic Age by Marks were both classic
portraits of youth and the roaring twenties. Adventure Stories, Weird Tales, and Amazing
Stories were popular pulp magazines from the 20’s and 30’s printing everything from war
stories, to science-fiction, and one Adventure Stories magazine actually contained an article
on Wilhelm Reich and the orgone accumulator. All of these books and magazines are relics
of the past, of the twenties and Burroughs childhood, as you already know dim jerky far away.
7. “There are certain writers that come readily to mind, like Scott Fitzgerald and others less famous such as Joseph Hergesheimer and Michael Arlen. Then there’s John Dos Passos. (...) of these writers I look at often again, Joseph Conrad comes to mind... (...) I used different styles in my texts. There are fragments of Conrad and also in the style of Conrad. I also borrowed from Graham Greene and a number of other writers such as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett...” BL, p. 408.
8. John Tytell: “Allen Ginsberg told me one way you definitely influenced both Kerouac and him was with books you suggested that they read, that he had no introduction to modern literature and you gave him Hart Crane and Auden and Eliot and other books, Kafka; you gave Kerouac Spengler.
WSB: And perhaps Celine.” BL, pp. 248-9.
9. Allen Ginsberg describes the books given to him by WSB in A Burroughs Compendium. “Kafka, Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Blake, Rimbaud, Yeat’s A Vision, Cocteau’s Opium, Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Auden, Hart Crane, and Eliot, and Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation.
10. “I’ve read the works of course, of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. (...) Well, among the modern writers. I’ve always found H. G. Wells to be one of the best, C. S. Lewis is another who interests me very much. In That Hideous Strength and Out of the Silent Planet I found many parallels with my own concepts. And among other moderns, Mr. Ballard and Mr. Moorcock in England, Mr. Arthur C. Clarke, Mr. Sturgeon, of course. Another writer that I think very highly of is Mr. Eric Frank Russell, I thought his book Three To Conquer was exceptionally realistic. Some science-fiction manages to convince and some does not. That certainly did. And also, he is another writer who has developed ideas quite similar to my own, the whole idea of virus invasion from the planet Venus is one that I have been very much preoccupied with in Nova Express, Ticket That Exploded, and other novels.” BL, pp. 82-3.
11. There are a number of women writers whom Bill considers highly, among them Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Bowles, Dorothy Parker, Eudora Welty, Isabelle Eberhardt and Colette.” Victor Bokris, WWB, p. 42.
12. One of Burroughs’s routines involve Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire. Burroughs discusses how to uncover past lives. Probably reading book by Ted Andrews (LL Section). Imagines himself in 1830's Paris. LW, p. 31.
13. “I’d say Rimbaud is one of my influences, even though I’m a novelist rather than a poet. I have also been very much influenced by Baudelaire, and St. John Perse, who in turn was very much influenced by Rimbaud. I’ve actually cut out pages of Rimbaud and used some of that in my work. Any of the poetic or image sections of my work would show his influence. (...) A writer who I read and reread constantly is Conrad, Joseph Conrad. I’ve read practically all of him. He has somewhat the same gift of transmutation that Genet does. Genet is talking about people who are very commonplace and dull. The same with Conrad. He’s not dealing with unusual people at all, but it’s his vision of them that transmutes them. His novels are carefully, very carefully written.” BL, p. 441.
14. “Artists usually choose the work, and compromises are usually unfortunate. Hemingway’s life posed a deadly threat to Hemingway as a writer, moving in a wildebeest at a time. ‘I have just fired a shot!’ said Baudelaire turning from an 1870 barricade, intoxicated by his accomplishment. ‘Ah yes, the artist so longs to be a man of action.’ ‘To fire at least one shot is it not?’ WWB, pp. 193-4.
15. “His favorite books, which he carried around with him, included Pareto and Spengler, Cocteau’s Opium, a copy of Baudelaire, a paperbacked volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (later) W. B. Yeats’ A Vision.” -Allen Ginsberg, from “Junky: An Appreciation” pp. 380-1. AGDP
16. In a frustrated letter to his mother, WSB places himself in a literary magical tradition: “I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as the wickedest man alive, a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley (...) And remember the others who have held the title before... Byron, Baudelaire, people are very glad to claim kinship now.” WSB in LO, p. 320.
17. Conrad Knickerbocker: “Nova Express is a cut-up of many writers?
WSB: ...Wait a minute, I’ll just check my coordinate books to see if there’s anyone I’ve forgotten- Conrad, Richard Hughes, science-fiction, quite a bit of science fiction, Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Here’s one, The Star Virus. I doubt if you’ve heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls ‘Deadliners’ who have this sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltor, and I began to find Deadliners all over the place. The story has a fishpond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always interested in gardening.” BL, pp. 68-9.
18. “I wonder about (the) future of the novel, or any writing.
Where is it going, or where can it go?
After Conrad, Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett, St.-John Perse, Kafka, James Joyce-”
LW, p. 204.
19. “-so what keeps an applicant in there?
Those moments: The Thief’s Journal, J. Joyce, Beckett. The potentials.
So now look at the rejects-
So now look at the faces of Hell: faces of great evil, hatred and despair, cut off from the light.
It’s a utility. Can be cut off.
Why? Hummm.” LW, p. 212.
20. “Beckett and Genet I both admire without reservation. They’re both incredible writers, I think. And, of course, Genet is not, nor does he pretend to be, a verbal innovator. He is in the classic tradition, and there is another writer who, using the classic tradition, certainly seems to escape the imprisonment of words and to achieve things that you think could not be achieved in words.” TJ, p. 55.
21. “Phillippe Mikriammos: Isn’t it a bit striking that a major verbal innovator like you has expressed admiration for writers who are not mainly verbal innovators themselves: Conrad, Genet, Beckett, Eliot?
WSB: Well, excuse me, Eliot was quite a verbal innovator. The Waste Land is in effect a cut-up, since it’s using all these bits and pieces of other writers in an associational matrix. Beckett I would say is, in some sense, a verbal innovator.”
BL, pp. 273.
22. Jean-Francois Bizot: “Who are the writers who have influenced you?
WSB: Jean Genet (...) I also have been influenced by a number of writers that I’ve read to one degree or another: Joseph Conrad, Joyce, Celine, Cocteau, Beckett, Malcom Lowry...” BL, p. 135.
23. When asked by Gerard Malanga, do you have a favorite contemporary writer whose works you go back to from time to time, WSB responds:
“Well, yes. There’s Genet, Beckett. Those are the only two I can think of immediately.”
BV, p. 203.
24. “Genet was a great person, an incredible person. He and Beckett were the two twentieth- century novelists who would definitely last.” LO, p. 606.
25. “I would think of Beckett in the same way as Genet, as a writer that I admire very much. I’ve read probably everything Genet has written. He’s a very great writer (...) With Beckett I like the early novels best, like Watt and Malone Dies...” BL, p. 259.
26. “You have to be careful what you say about your literary colleagues. I am not too much of a reader, unfortunately, and when I read I tend to read science-fiction, so I can’t really speak with too much authority. I’ve read Mailer’s early work The Naked and the Dead, which I thought was a very fine novel; Bellow’s Dangling Man which I enjoyed. I thought that Capote’s earlier work showed extraordinary and very unusual talent, which I can’t say for this In Cold Blood, which it seems to me could have been written by any staff editor on ‘The New Yorker’. TJ, p. 54.
27. “It’s very rarely that I find a best-seller that I can read - I read Jaws and I read The Godfather. The best writer of best sellers that I can think of is Forsyth - he’s quite good.”
CWWB, p. 119.
28. “It Belongs To the Cucumbers: On the Subject of Raudive’s Tape Voices.” by WSB. From the Sources: Peter Bender: Voices From The Tapes. Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, “Your Tape Recorder a Tracking Station for Paranormal Voices” from The Handbook of Psychic Discoveries. Konstantin Raudive Breakthrough. TPNI
29. “On the dresser of his room sat a European transister radio, several science-fiction paperbacks, and Romance, by Joseph Conrad; The Day Lincoln Was Shot, by Jim Bishop; and Ghosts In American Houses, by James Reynolds.” - Conrad Knickerbocker. BL, p. 60.
30. Marginalia: “William Burroughs’ Bookshelf”
“Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West
Wilhelm Reich
Dashielle Hammett
Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater
The Mayan Codices
Jean Genet
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Joseph Conrad (especially Lord Jim)
Count Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski
Philip Wylie
Robert M. Lindner’s Rebel Without a Cause
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
Jack Black’s You Can’t Win
Denton Welch”
There is no given source for this information. BOBG, p. 150.
31. “Some characters are found in other writers’ work: Burroughs, in his later books, is not just influenced by Denton Welch but uses some of his characters. Similarly, Salt Chunk Mary in The Soft Machine is taken directly from Jack Black’s You Can’t Win, whereas Clem Snide is clearly a parody on the work of Raymond Chandler (...) Texts by other writers are also appropriated in a manner now defined as post-modernist, including sections from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s A Diamond as Big as The Ritz, Lawrence Durrell’s Clea, and Henry Kuttner’s Fury. Burroughs’s copy of Fury was inscribed on the title page: ‘References from this book in Ticket That Exploded. This book also covers a general area to Soft Machine and the South American sections of Naked Lunch. July 4, 1973.’” Miles, pp. 148-9.
32. From Yves Le Pellec interview with Allen Ginsberg, August, 1972.
Ginsberg discusses Burroughs’s influence on himself and Jack Kerouac in the Columbia days.:
“He was reading a lot of books that we didn’t know about and so we took our reading from him. He had Kafka’s Trial, Cocteau’s Opium, he had (Oswald) Spengler’s Decline of the West which influenced Kerouac enormously in his prose as well as his conception of Fellaheen, he had Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, so that was like a preliminary western version of the later oriental teaching of the difference between concept and suchness, between word language and actual event- he had Rimbaud’s Season In Hell, Blake which I picked up on, he had A Vision by William Yeats, a sort of gnostic analysis of history and character, he had Celine’s Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit... If you take all these books, it takes one year or two to read them through seriously and get them all together. Burroughs had studied English and archeology at Harvard and his preoccupations were anthropological. He was interested in Kwakiutl Indian potlatch ceremonies, which I had never heard of before; in the berdache, American Indian shamanistic transvestite figure; in the psychology of apes; in primitive mind; he was interested in the psychopath as R. D. Laing is now interested; in the crude sense that the psychopath has a certain freedom of mental corruption that the so-called normal person doesn’t have. So Burroughs was primarily a master of gnostic curiosities and in his approach to the mind he had the same yankee practicality and inquisitiveness as his grandfather who had invented the adding machine. (...) He was exploring the Reichian orgone therapy.” AGSM, pp 291-2.
33. “Before they left Burroughs lent them about a dozen books- including Kafka’s The Castle, Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, Rimbaud’s Collected Poems, Cocteau’s Opium, Yeats’ A Vision, Spengler’s Decline of the West, and works by Celine and Blake. He also showed them some Mayan codices and discussed the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Vico. All these sources contain imaginative schemata for ordering civilization. Vico’s circular theory of history for example, had served as the philosophical framework of Finnegans Wake. Tremendously ambitious, rational and intuitive compasses of human culture, these works sprang from the confidence that mind could conquer matter, and they must have inspired as much optimism in the novitiates as the serene analyzed eye of Burroughs himself. (...) Burroughs continued to help Jack appreciate Shakespeare and other classic writers like Pope, while exposing Jack to lesser-known but equally powerful innovators like Pierre Louys.” On Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to Burroughs and his library. MB, pp. 134-5.
34. On Kerouac and Ginsberg’s visit to WSB’s place described by Morgan: “Burroughs was friendly, and loaned them books from his library: Kafka, Blake, Cocteau’s Opium, the cyclical historians Vico and Pareto, Hart Crane’s Collected Works. Allen had never heard of Hart Crane and thought of Burroughs as an essential supplement to the education he was getting at Columbia... He pointed out a passage in the preface of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which said that with the culture declining, ‘therefore, young man, take to the slide rule rather than the pen, take to the microscope rather than the brush.’” LO, p. 112.
35. “It’s not very far from the notion that WIlliam Burroughs laid on Kerouac in 1945 when he gave him a copy of Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, the basic foundation work in general semantics. When Kerouac and I first visited Burroughs, he physically gave us his library: Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Jean Cocteau’s Opium, Rimbaud’s Season In Hell and Illuminations, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience., Kafka’s Castle. Among others I remember the big huge volume of Science and Sanity.” Allen Ginsberg. AGDP, p. 368.
36. “Writing for film is quite different from any other form of writing. It is unlike writing a novel,
although at first glance it may seem the same. George Bluestone quoted D. W. Griffith as
having said: ‘The task I’m trying to achieve is above all to make you see.’ and Joseph Conrad,
in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), stated, ‘My task which I am trying
to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel- it is
before all to make you see.’ However it is quite a different kind of seeing. When you read a
novel - that is if the writer is good - you are seeing a ‘film,’ but you are seeing it in your own
mind. There’s quite a difference between seeing it on the screen and seeing it in your mind.”
DP, p. 283.
37. “ ‘Dreams and memories... cannot be adequately represented in spatial terms... (A film’s)
spatial devices... cannot render the conceptual feel of dreams and memories. The realistic
tug of the film is too strong... Proust and Joyce would seem as absurd on film as Chaplin would
in print.’ (Bluestone, pp. 47-8, 63.) That quote is from George Bluestone. He’s got some very
sensible things to say in other connections, but this is a dogmatic, purely arbitrary opinion
as to what films can and cannot do.
Bluestone also talks about the problems of turning a novel into a film, beginning with the
difference between the imaginative seeing that you experience in a novel and the seeing of an
actual visual image in a film. As you read a noveland see the action of the novel you are not in
the purely passive position of a viewer. In performing the act of reading, you are also
performing the mental act of translating what you read into pictures, words, sounds, and so on.
And, of course, different readers will see different pictures and will have different concepts
of the characters in the novel. But once the novel is on the screen, whoever the viewers are,
they’re all seeing the same movie with the same actors. Of course, there’ll be some
differences in what the viewers notice or what interests them, but they are seeing the
same movie. And they do not need to use their imagination to perform any act at all; they
need only sit there and watch the screen. So, says Bluestone, the act of reading a novel
involves symbolic thinking, which is peculiar to imaginative rather than visual activity. (...)
Now, I would say that, more accurately, reading novels and watching films involve different
and incompatible types of visual activity. (...) It’s visual activity in both cases, but the two
activities are quite incompatible. A film aspires to provide maximum distration.
Citing Virginia Woolf’s statement, ‘All this, which is accessible to words, and to words alone,
the cinema must avoid,’ Bluestone goes on to claim that ‘the rendition of mental states
cannot be as adequately represented by film as, by language.’ (Bluestone pp. 21, 47.) Well, you
have to avoid rendering mental states or else find an adequate way of representing them;
otherwise, you’re going to end up with a debacle like the film version of The Great Gatsby. (...)
The whole charm and point of this novel lies in the prose, which is not really translatable.
I don’t say it’s impossible, but a way hasn’t been found to translate passages like the end of
The Great Gatsby into film terms.” DP, p. 295.
38. “Fiction characters, will be a series - for example, ‘solid’ characters like Councillor Mikulin, in Under Western Eyes. What a film that could make. And the French Naval Officer in Lord Jim; unique characters like Jane Bowles and Denton Welch; fraudulent characters like the Major in Adventure; and the revolting Virginian.” LW, P. 86.
39. “I wonder about (the) future of the novel, or any writing.
Where is it going, or where can it go?
After Conrad, Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett, St.-John Perse, Kafka, James Joyce-
Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles- these two in a special category of doing one thing very well. With Paul a sinister darkness like underdeveloped film.
With Jane? How do her characters move about, and what can motivate them. But really it’s just too special to formulate.
What is left to say?
Oh, I forgot Graham Greene. The Power and the Glory.
And Hemingway?
Maybe there is just so much ‘juice,’ as Hemingway calls it- and not quite enough to get him in with the select: Joyce [etal.].
‘Not quite enough, Papa. You kill yourself from vanity, self-inflation, and when the balloon is ruptured-’
He knew he was finished:
‘It just doesn’t come anymore.’
He just wasn’t there anymore.
Back to writing-’revenons a ces moutons.’
Maybe there just isn’t any more to say, on the basic truth level.
Conrad said a lot of it in Under Western Eyes and Lord Jim- And Genet, on the Spanish Coast- I can feel his hunger, going down by the docks where the fishermen would throw him a fish maybe, which he cooked over a brush fire and ate without salt.
Why go on?
‘The tram made a wide U-turn and stopped. It was the end of the line.’
Paul Bowles, end of The Sheltering Sky. Sky. Sky.
I can’t even write the word ‘sky’. I guess I feel.
Why go on?
LW, p. 204.
40. “(....)Another big influence is Conrad - Joseph Conrad. Paul Bowles is also something of an influence. Have you read The Sheltering Sky? Of course, Jane- Jane Bowles- is the best writer. She didn’t write much; she had a terrible writer’s block, so her whole complete works could be contained in one book. She was a very great writer. Somewhat related, somewhat similar to Denton Welch. There is nothing special that happens, but she manages to make it very interesting. Did you read Nightwood by Djuna Barnes? Here’s another very good female writer, Carson McCullers. A good writer who’s been very much neglected is Julien Green. He did some very good stuff in the supernatural genre, which is one of the more difficult of all genres. Let’s see- I like some of Graham Greene, but when you’re read one you’ve read them all. What about Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry? Cheri and Fin De Cheri: all the Colette books are very good, I think, short stories...” BL, p. 581.
41. “Burroughs nodded, and said he liked the kind of writer whose style you could recognize in a few words. He could recognize Jane Bowles in one sentence, he said, in the story about the man who ran an alligator farm, ‘but there was no security in the alligators.’ A recognizable style, however, was not neccessarily good writing- look at Dryden, who had written the most breathtaking conceit in the English language when he commented on Lord Hasting’s small pox: ‘Each little pimple had a tear in it to wail the fault its rising did commit.” LO, p. 603.
42. “Lots of writers have influenced me, particularly Denton Welch, and also Conrad, Graham Greene, Kafka, Paul Bowles. D. H. Lawrence - THE PLUMED SERPENT. So I’ve got all these influences. Other authors are an important part of a writer’s input. Some of them may be good and some of them may be trash, but there’s a continual input from that sort of reading.” CWWB, p. 168.
43. “Well I will not turn back (even if I could): ‘Let it come down-’.” (“The first murderer’s reply to Banquo in Macbeth, act 3, scene 3, which was also the title Paul Bowles had used for his Tangier-set novel. Burroughs may have been thinking also of Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, whose last section is prefaced with this quote from Franz Kafka: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’”) From Harris footnote. LWSB, p. 411.
44. “...how much of automatic writing is really automatic? The Surrealists started things off, but only Artaud stayed with it. Breton became a pope, hanging out in the salons and spending his time writing letters of excommunication. Tzara was a true innovator. It was his idea to write a poem by drawing words out of a hat. Why not introduce chance into writing following the game-theory of Neumann and Morgenstern, as it’s done in military strategy or economics?” BL, p. 136.
45. “There is a swamp. Cats and dogs about. A writing project involving a story from a book. Many pictures to illustrate the book. But I wonder about the writer of the story,
‘Doesn’t he have a copyright?’
The lavishly illustrated book contains five short stories. The story we have chosen is the longest, but considering the pictures, not very long. The word ‘Mother’ appears in the title, and there is a reference to The Temple by Stephen Spender. Long walk from one end of the swamp to another.
Is this the Slough of Despond from Pilgrim’s Progress?” ME, p. 64.
Two literary references at least in this selection from My Education. The “Slough of Despond” is first encountered in The Pilgrim’s Progress in a dream by Christian, p. 22.
46. Photograph of WSB looking at one of his cats on the top of a bookshelf. Approximately 40 books can bee seen on his shelves as well as a few journals & magazines. 12 of the books are pages out. 8 of those are mass market paperbacks, 1 trade paper and three hardbacks. The only other books that I can identify are Le Beaute Du Diable by Roland Villeneuve and The Way of the Animal Powers by Joseph Campbell (maroon spine color, one volume), the Milton volume of the Great Books Collection (green cloth edition), Hostage to the Devil (tradepaper) by Malachi Martin, one hardback copy of Communion by Whitley Strieber and Until You Are Dead by Frederick Drimmer in mass market paperback. The other 22 books remain elusive. Of those identified, 3 do not appear in the Lawrence library catalogue: Le Beaute Du Diable, The Way of the Animal Powers, and the Great Books Milton. Photograph by Jose Ferez Kuri. From El Gato Por Dentro (The Cat Inside) by WSB. Translated and with photographs by Jose Ferez Kuri. Mexico: Editorial Diana, 2000. Last picture in book.
47. From the WSB foreword to Guilty of Everything by Herbert Huncke: “Guilty of Everything stems from the picaresque tradition of The Satyricon and The Unfortunate Traveler: a series of adventures and misadventures that befall a protagonist who is so immersed in the process of living that moral conceptions are irrelevant. The same protagonist reappears as the existential anti-hero of Camus’s The Stranger: a being motivated by survival in an alien and often hostile environment.” (p. vii.)
48. “Read it... Real point of the book, which the author does not make, is that Slovik was shot
for telling the truth: ‘I would run away again.’ Generals are nourished on bull shit. It’s
their natural food. Slovik refused to give it to them- an existential martyr. Very much like
The Stranger of Camus. All this is implicit. The author has no talent and no insight.”
LAG, p. 65. Burroughs is discussing The Execution Of Private Slovik by William Bradford Huie.
49. “Actually, I place myself squarely in the picaresque tradition, traced by The Unfortunate Traveler, one of the first picaro novels, written by Thomas Nashe in 1594, Satyricon by Petronius, and of course, Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. In the picaresque tradition, it’s simply a question of one or more protagonists that keep moving on, for the sake of a real or imagined voyage, during which they meet up with a certain number of adventures or misadventures- more often the latter.” BL, p. 401.
50. On his work being within the picaresque tradition: “It’s almost classical picaresque. A picaresque novel is very simple. It may take the form of a journey, like the Unfortunate Traveler; but it’s really a series of misadventures, many of a horrific and often humorous nature, that the protagonist encounters. Celin’es Journey to the End of the Night is an example.” CWWB, p.105.
51. "He began to talk about the writers who had influenced him- Kafka, Joyce, Eliot, Durrell, Celine, Rimbaud..." BL, p. 53.
52. “Even Naked Lunch could be described as science-fiction, though it was simply a development of the themes I see running through all my novels. One of these I would describe as the picaresque theme and that you can trace through Thomas Nashe and Celine, of course, who was not generally recognized as a writer of picaresque novels. When I read Celine, he immediately struck me as being very funny. But the critics talked about his cry of despair. They seemed to have missed the point entirely.” BL, pp. 52-3.
53. “...Many of the writers I admire are not verbal innovators at all, as you pointed out. Among these I would mention Genet and Conrad; I don’t know if you can call Kafka a verbal innovator. I think Celine is, to some extent. Interesting about Celine. I find the same critical misconceptions put forth by critics with regard to his work are put forth to mine: they said it was a chronicle of despair, etc. I thought it was very funny. I think he is primarily a humorous writer. And a picaresque novel should be very lively and very funny.” BL, pp. 273-4.
54. “Nihilism, unrelieved despair and negation, misanthropy, pessimism’- very much the same set of cliches that greeted Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey To The End of the Night, which to my mind is a very funny book, in a picaresque tradition stretching back to Petronius and to The Unfortunate Traveler by Thomas Nashe. I have always seen my own work in the light of the picaresque- a series of adventures and misadventures, horrific and comic, encountered by an anti-hero.” WSBAF, p. 266.
55. “PM: What other writers have influenced you or which ones have you liked?
WSB: Oh, lots of them: Fitzgerald, some of Hemingway. The Snows of Kilimanjaro was a great short story.
PM: Dashiell Hammett?
WSB: Well, yes, it’s of course a minor genre, but Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are in that genre, and it’s not realistic at all. I mean the idea that this is the hard- boiled, realistic style is completely mythological. Raymond Chandler is a writer of myths, not of reality at all. Nothing to do with reality.” BL, pp. 273-4.
56. “Eric Frank Russell is one of the best. He’s dead. Three To Conquer - out of print - is a very good book by Eric Frank Russell. But really I can just name the few good science-fiction books that I have read - there are not very many. There’s something by Suzy McKee Charnas called Walk To The End of the World. - Eric Frank Russell - Allen Dean Foster does a good one every once in a while. Some of them are at least entertaining. But by and large I read what are called, come under the heading of mystery I suppose.” CWWB, p.119.
57. On the classes WSB took at Harvard: “He liked Whiting’s Chaucer course, and George Lymann Kittredge’s famous Shakespeare course, which he audited (...) Kittredge assigned hundreds of lines of Shakespeare to learn by heart, which Burroughs, with his photographic memory, can still recite.
T. S. Eliot gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures that year, one of which Billy attended. It was on the Romantic poets, whose excesses Eliot found deplorable (...) Although disagreeing with his thesis, Billy found Eliot’s talk humorous and well presented. (...)
One course that had a permanent influence on him was on Coleridge and taught by John Livingston Lowes, the author of The Road to Xanadu, a study of the genesis of Coleridge’s work, in which he established the connection between drugs and creativity. Most of Coleridge’s poems with the possible exception of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, had been composed under the influence of opium, and were in fact opium visions. Lowes called Coleridge’s work ‘an abnormal product of an abnormal nature in abnormal conditions.’ (...) Lowes quoted that other great addict-writer, Thomas De Quincey, on the effects of opium: ‘Opium gives and takes away. It defeats the steady habit of exertion; but it creates spasms of irregular exertion. It ruins the natural power of life. But it develops preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power.” LO, pp. 57-8.
58. “I think Proust is a very great writer. Much greater writer that Cocteau or Gide. I was in the army hospital in the process of getting discharged. And because of the bureaucracy it took four months for this to come through, so I had the time to read Remembrance of Things Past from start to finish. It is a terrifically great work. Cocteau appears as a minor poseur next to this tremendous work of fiction. And Gide appears as a prissy old queen.” WWB, p.14.
59. From the WSB introduction to Flowers In The Blood by Latimer and Goldberg: “Cocteau likened withdrawal symptoms to the spring flow of sap into the trees. And the author Thomas De Quincey wrote: ‘Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to die, and during the whole period of diminishing opium I had the torments of a man passing from one mode of existance to another. The issue was not death but a sort of physical regeneration, and a restoration of more than youthful spirits.’” RR118.
60. “He devoured Milton and Wordsworth, and studied Chaucer! He took George Lyman Kittredge’s famous Shakespeare course during which he was required to memorize hundreds of lines from Shakespeare, most of which he can still remember and which still pepper his speech. He also studied Coleridge and De Quincey, who interested him very much...” Miles, p. 29.
61. “Denton Welch, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, St.-John Perse... a wide gamut of writers.” CWWB, p. 150.
62. “If I should mention the two writers who had the most direct effect on my writing, they would be Joseph Conrad and Denton Welch...” WWB, p. 22.
63. “Right now I’m rereading all of Conrad. He’s the greatest novelist who ever lived, far and away. You can see a lot of Conrad in my recent work, and Graham Greene, too.” BL, p. 671.
64. On influence: “Most directly, Denton Welch, who nobody’s ever heard of. He was an English writer who died quite young at thirty-one in 1948, and a lot of his books are out of print. He only wrote five. Audrey Carsons, one of my characters, is Denton Welch. I use his style quite frequently and consciously, and I find it very easy to write in his style. The other influences would be Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad.” LIW, p. 20.
65. “Writers tend to be possessed by one central theme that is basic to all their work. Graham Greene, the bad Catholic on a mission (The Heart of the Matter) he doesn’t believe in, whose bumbling kindness produces disastrous results. Conrad Corruption- Outcast of the Islands corruption of sexual infatuation, Lord Jim corruption of cowardice.” WSB from the introduction to Terry Southern’s Flash and Filigree.
66. WSB in the dj blurb for Bradford Morrow’s Come Sunday: “Come Sunday resists classification. There are affinities with Kafka and with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
67. Lord Jim. "As to what life may be worth when the honor is gone..." "(French Naval officer in Lord Jim. One of the great characters of fiction) And look at the others by Conrad: Councillor Mikulin from Under Western Eyes, the Nigger ‘Wait’ from Nigger of the Narcissus. All touched with [the] hand of creation.” LW, P. 16.
68. “Leads me to an old project- favorite passages.
Interview in Under Western Eyes between Councillor Mikulin and (one of those Russian names).
Talk between Marlowe and the French Naval Officer in Lord Jim.” LW, p. 224.
69. “Maybe there just isn’t any more to say, on the basic truth level.
Conrad said a lot of it in Under Western Eyes and Lord Jim-” LW, P. 204.
70. Conrad Knickerbocker: “Nova Express is a cut-up of many writers?
WSB: Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers people haven’t heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There’s Kerouac. I don’t know, when you start making these fold-ins and cut-ups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. But what he’s doing is classical French prose. He’s not a verbal innovator. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story, ‘They Just Fade Away,’ is a fold-in (instead of cutting, you fold) from Lord Jim. In fact, it’s almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim. Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. For exercise, when I make a trip, such as from Tangier to Gibraltor, I will record this in three columns in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened. I arrived at the air terminal, what was said by the clerks, what I overheard on the plane, what hotel I checked into. The next column presents my memories; that is, what I was thinking at the time, the memories that were activated by my encounters; and the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. I have practicaly a whole novel alone on my trips to Gibraltor. Besides Graham Greene, I’ve used other books. I used The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea on one trip. Let’s see, and Eliot’s The Coctail Party; In Hazard by Richard Hughes and I’m reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier, so I note that down in the margin. Or I’m on a boat or a train, and I’m reading The Quiet American. I look around and see if there’s a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, there’s a quiet sort of young American with a crew-cut drinking a bottle of beer. It’s extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasn’t an albino in the room. He wasn’t a gunman. Who else? Wait a minute, I’ll just check my coordinate books to see if there’s anyone I’ve forgotten- Conrad, Richard Hughes, science-fiction, quite a bit of science fiction, Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Here’s one, The Star Virus. I doubt if you’ve heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls ‘Deadliners’ who have this sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltor, and I began to find Deadliners all over the place. The story has a fishpond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always interested in gardening.” BL, pp. 68-9.
71. "Francis Macomber and Lord Jim: courage lost. They both bolted. Courage regained: Death." Reference to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim & Ernest Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". AM, p. 38.
72. “Lord Jim, yes. But I’ve read probably everything of Conrad’s. Under Western Eyes influenced me very much. There’s a whole chapter in Naked Lunch, where Benway is interrogating Carl, that is quite concsiously modeled on the interview between Mikulin and the protagonist - I forget, it was another Russian name.” LIW, p. 20.
73. “You don’t think of the audience when you’re writing. You think of perhaps an individual audience. For example, when Conrad wrote Lord Jim he had no idea that his hero would be taken up by Fitzgerald and become The Great Gatsby. They’re the same person, the same person that can only exist in the prose of the writer. Therefore no movies can be made of Lord Jim or of The Great Gatsby because they only have this vicarious existance in the prose of the writer.” LOKA 2, p. 174.
74. “I am reading The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. Rereading or simply reading for the first time. Conrad establishes a meaningful relation between man and the surrounding elements - cities, jungles, rivers, and people- that science categorically denies. However, this relation is tenuous and must constantly be re-created. What he brings to the page is creative observation. I am reading the storm section in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’:
‘...Waiting wearily for a violent death, not a voice was heard; they were mute, and in somber thoughtfulness listened to the horrible imprecations of the gale... The sky was clearing, and bright sunshine gleamed over the ship. After every burst of battering seas, vivid and fleeting rainbows arched over the drifting hull in the flick of sprays. The gale was ending in a clear blow, which gleamed and cut like a knife...’
At this point I stopped reading and looked out at the dreary landscape, without a touch of grandeur or spirit. Now I had moved the bookmark forward at random, to get it out of the way, and when I resumed reading I was reading the fire passage in Youth, and I had read a full paragraph before I realized that something was amiss. Looking out the window, I saw smoke and fire in the distance to my left. This was a grass fire, which I suppose has something to do with the crops.” ME, p. 78.
75. George McFadden and Robert Mayoh: “You’ve stated before that you like both Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Don’t both authors believe in a universal duality?
WSB: Graham Greene does because he’s a Catholic, and everything with him is written from that viewpoint. I like Conrad a lot better that Greene; I think Conrad is a much more profound writer.
(...)
M & M: In The Job interviews, when you evoked the name of Mr. Jones, ‘Opium Jones,’ did you have in mind the Mr. Jones of Conrad’s Victory?
WSB: Yes, that was the one I definitely had in mind.” BL, p. 268.
76. “One of my favorite writers is Joseph Conrad, who is certainly in the classic tradition; and he’s done some quite remarkable books in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford, which are very little read now. I’d mention The Inheritors and Romance, and there are passages where he does seem to be escaping from words, or going beyond words, in a quite conventional, quite classic narrative form.” TJ, pp. 54-5.
77. “Conrad’s done some quite remarkable books in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford which are very little read now. I’d mention The Inheritors and Romance. There are passages where he seems to be escaping words or going beyond words, in a quite conventional, quite classical narrative form.” WWB, p.84.
78. “Dion Fortune wrote a fairly good book, Psychic Self Defense. It’s not a bad book- old fashioned- but there’s some good tips in there. How to know when you’re under psychic attack, what to do about it and so on. There are quite a few- that’s a fairly good one. There’s something by David Conway called Magic: An Occult Primer. That’s a very good book.” BL, p. 561.
79. “Much of what I read is medical and science magazines, medical horror novels, books like Coma and Brain-I enjoy those. These are the books that really show where we’re going. I thought the David Rorvik book, In His Image, about cloning was interesting.” BL, p. 577.
80. “I hardly even know their names. Just the titles. I read a lot of ghost stories. A few of those are good. Let’s see, I read a very interesting book called The Contaminant about a plot by the CIA to put cancer-producing agents in food they exported to Russia. Just a whole category of stories along those lines. I read all plague and epidemic stories. I’ve read THE Coma.” CWWB, p. 119.
81. Review of 3 books from pp. 39-43... This book review of three books (The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson), Bloodworld by Lawrence Janifer, and The Farm by Clarence Cooper) consists of WSB using these books as examples of how the virus mechanism operates. From Acadamy Series: More Or Less.
82. “I suddenly went a bit sour on The Last Don. It happens, reading along to the climax- then... loose interest. With the Crichton book, they were about to abduct the hero to Tokyo.
Not that the denouncement is so predictable, I just don’t care- like energy leaked out of the book.” LW, p. 132.
83. Ted Morgan on NE: “Another purpose of the cut-ups is to show that nobody owns the language, and there are many references to the words of other authors, among them e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot.” LO, p. 425.
84. “All Frederick Forsyth books, as well as being best-sellers, are also interesting as the final antithesis of the psychological novel. In The Day of the Jackal, the killer is always seen from the outside. You never ever find out what he’s thinking, what motivates him. You’re getting as far as you can from Crime and Punishment. You just see the outside. And science- fiction, this is a very difficult genre in which to achieve any plausibility at all-that it ever could have happened anywhere.” BL, pp. 580-2.
85. “In The Writer and the Screen (1973), W. P. Rilla discusses some of the time tricks that are
in use today (...) Some precise experimentation could be carried out on the relationship of
dreams to film. Swain writes, ‘the effective story fools audiences by its use of desire and
danger to manipulate tension in the viewers. It poises them for action and then relaxes them
according to a preplanned pattern.’ (Swain, p. 79)” DP, pp. 304-6. Burroughs goes on to explain that the brain waves are similar watching a film to brain waves during REM sleep:
“Researchers are already capable of stimulating the brain electrically, as shown by Jose
M.R. Delgado in Physical Control of the Mind. (1969). By stimulating certain areas of the
brain, scientists can create anxiety, hatred, pleasure, sexual desire, or what have you.” DP,
p. 307.
86. Barry Miles describing the books in WSB’s house in Lawrence, KS: “Books are double stacked on the shelves and in piles: Basic Stick Fighting for Combat, Deadly Substances, Firearms of the American West, How To Kill, Vol. V, Life History and Magic of the Cat, The Complete Book of Cats...” MILES, p. 3.
87. “Speak of old frauds, Hemingway takes precedence-
The two most atrocious conceits in the English tongue:
‘Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wail the fault its rising did commit.’
Dryden, ‘On Lord Hasting’s Smll Pox’-
in this corner.
‘The hole in his forehead where the bullet went in was the size of a pencil at the unsharpened end. The hole in the back of his head where the bullet went out was big enough to put your fist in (it), if it was a small fist and you wanted to put it there.’
Papa Hemingway - in this corner.” LW, p. 226.
88. “I wasn’t really in modern literature, but Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Fitzgerald, of course.” KATB, p. 15.
89. On The Third Mind: “The idea for the title came from a book called Think and Grow Rich, which said that when you put two minds together there is always a third mind. It was also a reference to a line by T. S. Eliot, ‘Who is the third that walks beside you?’ which referred to the hallucination of two Arctic explorers, who imagined that a third person was with them.” LO, p. 551.
90. “ ‘The Waste Land’ was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in ‘The Camera Eye’ sequences in U.S.A.” BL, p. 66.
91. “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 who walks beside you?” TTM, p. 25. The two internal quotes are as follows: “No two minds ever come together...” from Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. “Who is the third...” from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
92. “Phillippe Mikriammos: What other writers have influenced you or which ones have you liked?
WSB: Oh, lots of them: Fitzgerald, some of Hemingway. The Snows of Kilimanjaro was a great short story.” BL, pp. 273-4.
93. “But whether they give their characters long speeches or short, writers need something called ‘an ear for dialogue.’ John O’Hara had it; F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t and neither did Ernest
Hemingway. Having an ear for dialogue simply means that the writer keeps his ears open and derives much of his dialogue from what people actually said at some time in his hearing.”
DP, p. 286.
94. “No, no, no. Two sentences. ‘Honour lost. Honour regained.’ Exactly the same as - have you read ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ by Hemingway? Well, that’s a short story. It’s ‘Bravery lost. Bravery regained.’ It’s an old, old formula. Of course, some novels just won’t break down like that. And just because you can get a novel into one sentence doesn’t at all mean you can make a film out of it. You can get The Great Gatsby into a couple of sentences, but you can’t make a film out of it. What is this about? ‘Poor boy loses girl. Poor boy tries to get back girl, which results in tragedy.’ ‘Poor boy loses girl to rich man, and tries to get her back. Does get her back for a brief interlude, and then there is a tragic denouement because he’s trying something that isn’t going to work- he’s trying to put back the clock.’ And so on. But this isn’t film material because it’s all in the prose, in Fitzgerald’s prose. That’s where Gatsby exists. They resorted to the very awkward device of the voice-over, which has been used repeatedly in films, but this is just not a viable device. (...) ...there is prose that you just can’t get into film, like the end of The Great Gatsby. (...) ...you remember the end of The Great Gatsby, that’s one of the famous scenes in English prose, like the end of THE DEAD by Joyce, the famous ‘snow falling faintly- like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ There’s no way you can put that effectively into film. I mean, you can show snow, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. And the same way with the end of The Great Gatsby. And all they could do was a voice-over. Sometimes one works, sometimes another doesn’t. But in no sense has the film medium superseded the written word.” BL, pp. 580-2.
95. “...such ‘classics’ are, generally speaking, bad films that don’t even make money, like The
Great Gatsby. That’s what happens when Hollywood sets out to make a classic.
The Informer is much better on the screen that it is as a novel. The film version is actually,
of course, a new creation developed under Ford’s direction. The same is true of The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948). After seeing the film, I read the book, and the book just
doesn’t come up to the film.” DP, p. 300.
96. “I read mostly popular books- airplane reading, I call it. I read everything that Frederick Forsyth writes. I just read the last Graham Greene, The Human Factor. I read a lot of assorted fiction, horror stories, that sort of thing. I’ve read Stephen King’s The Shining. (...) Yes, I think it’s very good. (King’s writing) In fact, I’m doing a sort of literary conversation with him at New York University.” LIW, p. 20.
97. “Of course, a conventional finale can be redeemed by a last-minute twist that the audience
doesn’t expect. Frederick Forsyth is good at that. I just read his novels The Day of the Jackal
(1971), Dogs of War (1974), and The Odessa File (1972), and they all had little twists at the
end that redeemed rather conventional windups.” DP.
98. WSB at Los Alamos: “Bill sought refuge in the works of Anatole France, de Maupassant and Remy de Gourmont, and in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” MILES, p. 28.
99. On reading as a child: “I took refuge in Haldman Julius’s Little Blue Books, read Anatole France, De Maupassant, Remy de Gourmont... ‘Simone, aime feuilles mortes?’ Dorian Gray, of course...” WSB, p. 74.
100. “I have book of Klee’s work and writing. Terrific. The pictures are literally alive. Have Genet’s Journal of a Thief in English, and have read it over many times. I think he is one of the greatest living writers of prose. Dig this: He is being fucked by a big negro in the Sante Prison: ‘I shall be crushed by his darkness which will gradually dilute me. With my mouth open, I shall know he is in a torpor, held in that dark axis by his steel pivot. I shall gaze over the world with that clear gaze the eagle loaned to Ganymede.’ The translation is not bad except for the dialogue. He translates into outmoded U.S. slang, I mean nobody now talks like this: ‘I’ll drill somebody for just a little loose cash.’ Terrible, why not leave the French argot and explain meaning?” LAG, p. 113.
101. “I read all the SF I could get my hands on. As I remember, there were some good stories in Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, though I can’t remember who wrote them. The best of them seem to have dissapeared without a trace. You don’t find much really good SF because it’s very hard to write; there just aren’t many writers who have the imagination and know-how to make you believe this or that could actually ever take place, so you’re lucky if you find more than a few good sentences in an SF novel. Every now and then you find a whole good paragraph, or even a chapter. I think Eric Frank Russell is pretty good. His Three To Conquer is still one of the best virus books I’ve come across. So is Henry Kuttner’s Fury. There’s some sword and sorcery stuff by Fred Saberhagen that I like. H. G. Well’s best works still seem to hold up. But I read all those adventure stories and western stories, science-fiction, the Little Blue Books, all that stuff.” SWG, pp. 46-7.
102. “Now suppose you had all the works of some writer and could only take some with you, which would be the first you’d throw away? I would get rid of For Whom The Bell Tolls, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Green Hills of Africa, and Death in the Afternoon. In Across the River he was writing himself close, but not good-- not good at all. It is just about the worst of Hemingway’s books.” ROCF, p. 6. The first essay in this collection devoted to Burroughs is by WSB and is called “Creative Reading”. It is not the same essay as the one published in The Adding Machine under the same name. This piece includes some of the same material and incorporates more material from other essays written about the same time. Most of essay is devoted to Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway.
103. “Now I found some of his earlier work, like The Snows of Kilimanjaro - I think is a great story. When we get things like Green Hills of Africa, Across the River and Into the Trees, his image has taken over there. And finally there’s nothing in there, in the work but Poppa Hemingway. The image, the whole matter of image I think is a very dangerous thing for a writer: too much image.” BV, p. 207.
104. “Short stories are frequently made into films, take two examples of really horrible adaptations: Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ (1936) and ‘The Killers’ (1927). Just
as I blame Christ for the atrocities committed in his name, so I blame Hemingway for
letting Hollywood butcher his work so that he could go around shooting animals and catching
marlins. Now, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ to my mind one of the better stories in the
language about death, has a great ending: a phantom plane and the pilot pointing toward the
snows of Kilimanjaro. And what happens in the film? A real pilot flies in with penicillin. Boy!
It was the worst film ever based on one of Hemingway’s works. ‘The Killers’ is a beautiful
short story but simply is redundant as a film. Exactly enough information is conveyed in the
story; in the film, the question of why the killers are after the former prize-fighter is simply
not interesting - it’s sort of tacked on.” DP, pp. 299-300.
105. “So how does one face death head on?... without flenching and without posturing- which is always to be seen as a form of evasion, worse than flinching, because covert, for the man who flinches and runs away, like Lord Jim and Francis Macomber, there is hope. But not for him who sticks out his chest and wraps himself in a flag, a Gallic shrug from the French Naval Officer in Lord Jim, one of the great characters of fiction: ‘Parbleu, il s’en fuge, mais il a laisse’ son cadaure en place...’
‘He has run away but left his carcass behind.’
‘Intrigue’ parce cadavre?’
‘Intrigued by that corpse?’” ME, p. 119.
106. “Whether it’s the media or their impression of me they’ve gathered from my writing, anyone, I think, will tend to have a certain image imposed on them which may not have anything to do with what is actually there. I also feel that for a writer to be a novelist, he doesn’t have, by nature of his profession, a clear-cut image of himself or a clear-cut image in general. If he cultivates his image too much his work will suffer. For example, a perfect case in point is Hemingway. His determination to act out what I might call the least interesting aspects of his own work. And to do everything that his characters could do and do it well limited and eventually crippled his work, down to shooting and fishing and all that. I feel that his work suffered from that. So, finally you get the image of Papa Hemingway which took over more and more. I think The Snows of Kilimanjaro is one of the best stories in the English language on the subject of death. In his later years the image of Papa Hemingway took over-struggling with some noble marlin, dropping a wildebeest sweet and clean with a spine shot at three hundred yards, fucking the beautiful young Countess across the river and into the trees. Now off on another silly safari, his image led him to Kilimanjaro, Hemingway suffered brain damage as Papa butted his way out.
Involvement with his own image can be fatal to a writer. Was it Yeats who said every man must choose at some point between his life and his work? Artists usually choose the work, and compromises are usually unfortunate. Hemingway’s life posed a deadly threat to Hemingway as a writer, moving in a wildebeest at a time. ‘I have just fired a shot!’ said Baudelaire turning from an 1870 barricade, intoxicated by his accomplishment. ‘Ah yes, the artist so longs to be a man of action.’ ‘To fire at least one shot is it not?’ Stein lifts his hand from Lord Jim.” WWB, pp. 193-4.
107. “Miggy, who later married Mort, remembers Billy at the Community school as withdrawn, unable to make friends, living in a dream world. He was known for taking books home, she said. Actually, Billy had been very slow to read. His parents thought there was something wrong. Then all at once he started. His father often read to him-Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Moby Dick, Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, with its never-to-be-forgotten encounter with the octopus.” LO, p. 32.
108. “...you remember the end of The Great Gatsby, that’s one of the famous scenes in English prose, like the end of The Dead by Joyce, the famous ‘snow falling faintly- like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ There’s no way you can put that effectively into film. I mean, you can show snow, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything.” BL, pp. 580-2.
109. “At one point science fiction was brought up and what followed was a verbal list of various popular books and writers of the genre: Most of Burroughs’ replies were: ‘Don’t like it- Couldn’t make it through- Don’t like his work’ and so on. He went on to say: ‘I’ve just about given up on science-fiction’ and ‘I can’t tolerate anything whimsical’. He did have favourable words for Doris Lessing, the 1947 novel, Fury, by Jenry Kuttner and the sword and sorcery book Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagan.” John Bassett interviewing WSB at Naropa Institute. Printed in MKA, p. 24. Book misprints Henry Kuttner as Jenry Kuttner.
110. “Reading Asylum, by (Patrick) McGrath: ‘She brushed at a wasp that was buzzing around her glass.’ Excellent detail to put reader there. Hard to ignore a wasp. No pun intended. He’s on the same wavelength as John Le Carre. Quite skillful. (Talk about ‘damning with faint praise.’)” LW, p. 92.
111. “Well, I’ve felt a considerable number of parallels with Mr. C. S. Lewis, that is his concept of - I believe he calls it The Bent One - is very similar to my Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin. That is, the evil spirit that he feels to be in control of the Earth. And also the conspiracy in That Hideous Strength was very similar to many of the conspiracies, ideas of conspiracies, that I develop in Nova Express. BL, p. 83.
112. WSB in his blurb for For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri: “For Bread Alone is in the picaresque tradition of the Satyricon and The Unfortunate Traveler: one god-damned thing after another.”
113. “ ‘The snow was general all over Ireland... like the descent of their last end, on all the living and the dead’
(Get Dubliners and quote it right.)
‘I know the trick,’ the old terrorist cackles.
Under Western Eyes.
‘Sad as the death of monkeys.’
Anabasis
Remember the death of the monkey in Toby Tyler and the Circus.” LW, p. 206.
114. “Pick up book I am reading, called Manhunter, about U.S. Marshalls, and this phrase leaped out at me: ‘The plot sickens.’
Takes me to Petronius and Trimalchio’s feast:
‘Ibat res and summen nauseam.’
‘The thing was becoming perfectly sickening.’
‘Trimalchio now deep in the most vile drunkenness.’” LW, p. 243.
115. “Reading Denial of the Soul, by Scotty Peck, M.D. Very sound. Very good.
Like The Last Don - so many dictums of the old Don hit my home.
He believes in God. Me too.
He says:
‘Everybody is responsible for everything they do.’
Yes, indeed.
And denial of responsibility is pandemic- read Truman Capote’s ‘Shut a Final Door’ for the terminal stage of such denial.
He says:
‘Never kill a policeman.’
Brion Gysin said exactly the same words in room 32, 9 rue Gitle-cover.” LW, p. 153.
116. From the WSB foreword to The Hombre Invisible. Atticus Books Catalogue Eight, 1981: “The fold in method gives the writer literally infinite extension of choice. Take for example a page of Rimbaud folded into a page of St. John Perse (two poets who have much in common). From two pages an infinite number of combinations and images are possible. (...) I have made and used fold ins from Shakespeare, Rimbaud, from newspapers, magazines, conversations and letters so that the novels I have written using this method are in fact composites of many writers.”
117. “Start with Trimalchio’s feast in Petronius.
The Unfortunate Traveler.
Fury by Kuttner.
The Siren Web and the Happy Cloak-
Roderick Random, the doctor, drunk out of his mind, lopping off limbs at a great rate.
(...)
The fact that something is quoted from someone else or somewhere (else) gives it a magical gloss, the portentous found-object.
If (it) can be found, a woodcut of Baudelaire on hash. (...)” LW, p. 224.
118. From the WSB blurb on David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: "...the same voice that was heard in Villon's Paris, in the Rome of Petronius, pick up his book and listen."
119. “Who the fuck is ‘Ernest Vail’- the novelist in The Last Don?
‘The greatest American writer?’... a ‘national treasure,’ no less.
There isn’t any such, even an approximate. Who? Bill Gaddis? No, there isn’t any to come close to Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Genet, Beckett- Look! Nada! Nothing. Not even a Kerouac.
I win by total default.
‘It just doesn’t come anymore.’ - as Hemingway mourned and groaned in his last darkening years.
Ultimately, he had no inner fortress, no protection. He never realized that there is always an enemy, or we would not be here. Of courage.
‘On this checker board of
Nights and Days...
Hither and thither moves
and checks and slays and
one by one back in the closet lays.’
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” LW, 134.
120. “I admire Last Exit To Brooklyn very much. You can see the amount of time that went into the making of that book. It took seven years to write. And I like Rechy’s work very much too. We met him out in L.A. Very pleasant man, I thought; we only saw him for about half an hour.” WWB, p.18.
121. “(...) After reading Communion and Breakthrough by Whitley Strieber, I became seriously interested in alien landings and abductions. I visited him and his secretary and reading the “Communion Newsletter”, I was convinced that the aliens, or whatever they are, are a real phenomenon. The abductions, in several accounts, involved sexual contacts. Indeed, that would seem to be their purpose.” ME, p. 121.
122. “I’m also very interested in all of these space aliens- their flying saucers, and all that. In 1989 I went to see Whitley Strieber, who’s the author of a book called Communion and Transformation which they made into a film- about experiences with ‘the visitors’, as he calls them. They’re really sporadic. But I’m convinced that he’s telling the truth, no doubt about it. All the people living around him all say, yes, they have seen these things, but they don’t want to talk about it. He puts out a Communion Newsletter with thousands and thousands and thousands of accounts. So I’m convinced that it’s a real phenomenon. I’d just like to see some myself, that’s all...” BL, pp. 773-4.
123. “...look at Wells and he’s adventure oriented: The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and all that. He was a great influence on SF at it’s earliest, along with Jules Verne, of course, The Voyage to the Moon, where they lived inside the moon, the insect creatures- that’s quite a story.” AWG, p. 47.
124. The People’s Almanac’s Book of Lists #2 lists Burroughs’s top ten favorite novels.
1. The Process Brion Gysin
2. The Satyricon Petronius
3. In Youth Is Pleasure Denton Welch
4. Two Serious Ladies Jane Bowles
5. The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles
6. Under Western Eyes Joseph Conrad
7. Journey to the End of the Night Louis Ferdinand Celine
8. Querelle de Brest Jean Genet
9. The Unfortunate Traveller Thomas Nashe
10. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald.
This list was published in 1980, and gives no source for the information other than to state
that it is a Book of Lists exclusive. BOL2, pp. 229-30.