"Rub Out the Words," letters from William Burroughs: "This place is sick, sick, sick. And disgusting"

Granta has published a selection of William Burroughs' letters online, presented with commentary by James Grauerholz and from the book edited by Bill Morgan. The Granta excerpts show WSB in contention with his family (to his society-member mother: "A rundown on some of the good burghers of Palm Beach would quite eclipse the Beatniks") and his contemporaries (to Paul Bowles: "Staying in Leary’s house. Enough food to feed a regiment left out to spoil in the huge kitchen by Leary’s over-fed, undisciplined children.")

 

The letters run from 1959, when Burroughs was living in Paris, to New York in 1974. The Granta excerpts zero in on WSB's kaleidoscope of drug experiences and their various scenes, some with awe, others with a snort of disapproval ("Unused TV sets, cameras, typewriters, toys, books, magazines, furniture, stacked to the ceiling. A nightmare of stupid surfeit. The place is sick sick sick. And disgusting," he complains in 1961 about Leary's house to Bowles in Tangier. "Like a good European, I am stashing away all the $ I can lay hands to with one thought in mind. Walk don't run to the nearest exit.")

 

Such cantankerous, back-biting behavior became a hallmark of Burroughs' image early on, so much so that in the letters it is difficult to separate the writer from his cranky persona. It was a trick of his craft he was good at, and he seemingly practiced it virtually non-stop until it became his actual voice. Referencing a 1959 article in Life magazine about the Beats to his disapproving mother, his style reaches some kind of rococo,demi-monde apogee of self-promotion: "In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me ... I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as The Wickedest Man Alive, a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley." ...

Presumably, Burroughs Sr. still sent 45-year-old WSB the $200-a-month allowance to practice his tea-drinking-from-a-skull vices. It was quite a bargain for Bill: the elder Burroughses were taking care of WSB's son Bill, Jr., after their son's 1951 William Tell party trick killed his wife Joan.

 

Here's an excerpt from the Granta selection. From the post-script it appears he'd patched up relations with his mother Laura and his then-ailing father. The duty of a family visit: "Of course," he writes, "I have to stay clean in Cambridge."

 

William S. Burroughs [New York]

to Brion Gysin [Paris]


pre-September 28, 1961


General Delivery
Newton, Mass.
USA

Dear Brion:


 

The scene here is really frantic. Leary has gone berserk. He is giving mushrooms to hat check girls, cab drivers, waiters, in fact anybody who will stand still for it. However Gerald Heard and your correspondent have taken a firm stand. We both refuse to take any more mushrooms under any circumstances. Heard is certainly the most intelligent and well intentioned person connected with this deal. He gave a great talk at the symposium about LSD and paranoid sensations. The last barrier: PANIC! To God Pan. I managed to do all right too, fortified by two joints and the whole symposium came off very well.

Burroughs, 1959

Michael [Portman] wants to come here now and I have written to dissuade him. Let me explain that I really put in a lot of overtime on that boy and thought I had managed to separate him from his deplorable connections. Then something happened and there he was with a cold sore and I lost my patient and my patience as well. I'm not complaining but I have been under considerable pressure trying to sort out and assess hundreds of conflicting reports and demands pleasing no one of course so maybe I goofed. In any case he is now in an impossible condition. Imagine having Eileen Garrett, Mary Cooke, Old Lady Luce in the same room with you. It is absolutely intolerable and I don't propose to tolerate it.

 

Otherwise the situation here is not too bad. At least I have room to work and there is much to be said for American conveniences. I can get good food out of the ice box and take a bath and wear clean clothes at least. Seems to be plenty of pot around NY and nobody worries about the heat. Its like they all have the fix in. Of course I have to keep clean in Cambridge. Flying back on Sunday. Please write what your plans are. I wish you could arrange to come here. Like I say NY is really a great scene and a goodly crowd is there. And more expected momentarily. Please write.


 

Love,
Bill


 

P.S. Very pleasant visit with the family.

Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, edited by Bill Morgan, published in the U.S. by Ecco Press, and in the UK by Penguin.

Ferlinghetti at 97: "Democracy is increasingly defined as successful capitalism."

The thing is, you could say, “I thought you were an anarchist.” The trouble is, we can’t afford anarchism today -– which sounds like a cop-out. But it’s not -– we can’t afford capitalism, either. We can’t afford unrestrained capitalism, just like we can’t afford unrestrained anarchism. In fact, unrestrained capitalism is the ideal of the Free Trade movement and the whole Republican policy in this country. Democracy is increasingly defined as successful capitalism . . . which is not necessarily so. Thinking the unthinkable, you could say that unrestrained capitalism is a form of anarchism! [laughs] Or, you could say that it’s anarchism carried to greedy extremes. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2001, "Real Conversations No. 1")

 

At an age when most old lions are past roaring, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still rattling the cages. He was interviewed in 2001 as part of a collection called  "Real Conversations, No. 1",  four in-depth interviews centering on art and politics with musicians Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, and Billy Childish. Ferlinghetti seems to be the odd man out here, but republished ten years on in 2011 by V. Vale's RE/SEARCH publications and considering the tidal wave of events since then, it's astounding how these interviews -- with Ferlinghetti in particular -- still resonate with contemporary issues. 

Depending on your point of view you'll find Rollins, Biafra, and to a certain extent Billy Childish, insightful or exasperating in their politics, but its hard to miss the passion in their arguments. Ferlinghetti, by far, takes the longest view of events past and present, and suggests solutions (some new, some old), sounding the most conservative by comparison. 

 

Many will consider these four exchanges as nothing more than preaching to the already converted, but in this political season they take on the character of voices crying in the wilderness.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti published 60 years of his travel journals in 2015, and is preparing a sort-of autobiography, To the Lighthouse, prodded by his longtime literary friend Sterling Lord. Here's an excerpt from the 2015 Guardian article about Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013):

... Ferlinghetti, who at 94 is known as one of the last living connections with the Beat generation, sold the journals to Liveright Publishing, part of WW Norton, via Jack Kerouac's literary agent Sterling Lord, the New York Times revealed. Covering 1950 to 2013, and including travel journals and notebooks, the books tell of Ferlinghetti's travels to Cuba during the Castro revolution, to Africa, Haiti and Mexico, to Franco's Spain, Soviet Russia and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, as well as the time he spent in Italy and France.

They will be brought together and published in September next year as Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013), said the New York Times, and will shed "as much light on Mr Ferlinghetti's political passions as on his relationships with the Beat writers", also covering his encounters with major writers such as Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda.

"It shows a much more political Ferlinghetti, a voice for the poets of dissent," editor Robert Weil told the paper. "It is hardly just the Beats. It's a real engagement with much of the 20th century, although there are portraits of the Beats that we've never seen." The deal also included two out-of-print travel books by the author, 1970's The Mexican Night and 1984's Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre. ...

[Top: 2012 photo of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from Bohemian.com] 

Ayn Rand's heartwarming advice for the lovelorn: "true love is profoundly selfish"

Contemplate the myriad forms of love: from the always-intriguing website Letters of Note, here's a heartwarming, personal response from Ayn Rand to a lovelorn letter-writer, who wrote asking the meaning of a sentence in The Fountainhead.

And by "heartwarming" I mean obtusely, ideologically, and entirely Objectivist, in the way only someone who took her own ill-formed ideas of "rational self-interest" entirely too much to heart.

By 1948, the former Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum was a successful novelist, screen-writer and (in 1947) had already been a "friendly witness" for the House Un-American Activities Committee. A film version of The Fountainhead, with a screenplay written by her and starring Rand's own choice of Gary Cooper as ideology-driven architect Howard Roark, was in the making. She had a developing circle of friends that included economist Ludwig von Mieses (currently the libertarians' favorite go-to-guy for free-market capitalism), who pointedly called the writer "the most courageous man in America." She loved it.

By the time she published the thousand pages of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Rand's megalomania was on full display: in one contemporary interview she referred to herself as "the most creative thinker alive." Reminiscent of Alexander the Great who wept because he had no new worlds to conquer, Rand then fell into a severe depression that may have been aggravated by her use of prescription amphetamines.

She recovered her stride. As time went on her admirers surrounded her in cult-like reverence as Rand expressed opinions on a wide range of topics, including literature, music, sexuality, even facial hair. Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers -- not to mention the scrawling of "Who is John Galt?" in the men's rooms of a thousand college-town bars.

This single-minded adulation badly warped her own wobbly opinions: at one point she remarked that in the history of philosophy she could recommend only "Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand."

But in 1948, all that lay ahead. The Fountainhead, written in 1943, had become a wildly popular fiction of romance, media manipulation ... and blowing up your own compromised building in swooning self-interest to personal vision. Who better to ask for an explanation of romantic love than Ayn Rand?

May 22, 1948

Dear Ms. Rondeau:

You asked me to explain the meaning of my sentence in The Fountainhead: "To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I."

The meaning of that sentence is contained in the whole of The Fountainhead. And it is stated right in the speech on page 400 from which you took the sentence. The meaning of the "I" is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person.

A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.

The usual (and very vicious) nonsense preached on the subject of love claims that love is self-sacrifice. A man's self is his spirit. If one sacrifices his spirit, who or what is left to feel the love? True love is profoundly selfish, in the noblest meaning of the word — it is an expression of one's highest values. When a person is in love, he seeks his own happiness — and not his sacrifice to the loved one. And the loved one would be a monster if she wanted or expected such sacrifice.

Any person who wants to live for others — for one sweetheart or for the whole of mankind — is a selfless nonentity. An independent "I" is a person who exists for his own sake. Such a person does not make any vicious pretense of self-sacrifice and does not demand it from the person he loves. Which is the only way to be in love and the only form of a self-respecting relationship between two people.

Ayn Rand

Jack Kerouac, born March 12 1922: "c'mon now, Marlon, put up your dukes and write!"

Kerouac would have been 92 today: "I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

In 1957, Jack Kerouac wrote the letter, shown above, to Marlon Brando. Kerouac's approach to the 1950's most volatile actor was a pitch to Brando's ego: a buddy-buddy tone that takes on Jack's big ideas about remaking the American film industry itself with Brando's help -- much like he would write that The Dharma Bums would bring Buddhism to America in a letter to Gary Snyder in 1958.

The Brando letter was Jack's star-struck attempt to bring his words to the big screen after the unexpected success of On the Road. Kerouac was desperate to capitalize on the incredibly positive reaction, and wanted Brando to buy the rights to the movie adaptation, and then play the part of Dean Moriarty opposite Kerouac's own onscreen portrayal of Sal Paradise. 

Kerouac's dream casting never happened, and Brando never responded. Here's the letter, posted at Letters of Note.

Jack Kerouac

1418½ Clouser St 

Orlando, Fla 

Dear Marlon

I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it. Don't worry about the structure, I know to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give perfectly acceptable movie-type structure: making it into one all-inclusive trip instead of the several voyages coast-to-coast in the book, one vast round trip from New York to Denver to Frisco to Mexico to New Orleans to New York again. I visualise the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak. I wanted you to play the part because Dean (as you know) is no dopey hotrodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I'll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I'll show you how Dean acts in real life, you couldn't possibly imagine it without seeing a good imitation. Fact, we can go visit him in Frisco, or have him come down to L.A. still a real frantic cat but nowadays settled down with his final wife saying the Lord's Prayer with his kiddies at night...as you'll seen when you read the play BEAT GENERATION. All I want out of this is to able to establish myself and my mother a trust fund for life, so I can really go roaming around the world writing about Japan, India, France etc. ...I want to be free to write what comes out of my head & free to feed my buddies when they're hungry & not worry about my mother. 

Incidentally, my next novel is THE SUBTERRANEANS coming out in N.Y. next March and is about a love affair between a white guy and a colored girl and very hep story. Some of the characters in it you know in the village (Stanley Gould etc.) It easily could be turned into a play, easier than ON THE ROAD. 

What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of "situation" and let people rave on as they do in real life. That's what the play is: no plot in particular, no "meaning" in particular, just the way people are. Everything I write I do in the spirit where I imagine myself an Angel returned to the earth seeing it with sad eyes as it is. I know you approve of these ideas, & incidentally the new Frank Sinatra show is based on "spontaneous" too, which is the only way to come on anyway, whether in show business or life. The French movies of the 30's are still far superior to ours because the French really let their actors come on and the writers didn't quibble with some preconceived notion of how intelligent the movie audience is, the talked soul from soul and everybody understood at once. I want to make great French Movies in America, finally, when I'm rich...American Theater & Cinema at present is an outmoded Dinosaur that ain't mutated along with the best in American Literature. 

If you really want to go ahead, make arrangements to see me in New York when you next come, or if you're going to Florida here I am, but what we should do is talk about this because I prophesy that it's going to be the beginning of something real great. I'm bored nowadays and I'm looking around for something to do in the void, anyway—writing novels is getting too easy, same with plays, I wrote the play in 24 hours.

Come on now Marlon, put up your dukes and write!

Sincerely, later,
(Signed, 'Jack Kerouac')

"Letters to the editor, wearing a bowtie": the literary wars in Poetry magazine

Given all the time in the world, the astounding amount of reading you could do would still leave gaps in your education. That's why I enjoy reading letters in small magazines like Poetry. By reading -- glancing, really -- through the "Letters to the Editor" section, I get to witness the workings of entire literary universes, many of which I have no critical knowledge. That may indeed be my loss, but how vast is the knowledge of my ignorance!

And fun, too. There are mighty storms, no small tempests, raging in the simple black-and-white type of this small magazine, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe (first publisher of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land") and currently edited by Christian Wiman. There is titanic struggle in the give-and-take of letters on every page: the opposing schools of thought, the defender and the challenger of the writer (and reviewer) in question. Seldom do I see such erudite name-calling in such well-chosen words as in the "Letters to the Editor" section of Poetry magazine.

If one wasn't reading carefully, one could be hurt by the flying bouquets and brickbats being tossed about, and never know it. Up where the air is thin, I get the giddy feeling of learning much more than I should ever know about the clockworks of poetry. Without more ado, and without further comment:


My experience with Zbigniew Herbert is, I suspect, much like the majority of readers who have struggled over the years simply to find the work of this great poet. The narrative detailed by Michael Hoffman in the May issue of Poetry ("A Dead Necktie") is reminiscent of my own. ... For all our similarities in our background as readers, however, I feel confident that Herbert's long-time advocates will find less agreement with Hoffman's vituperative review of Alissa Valles's new translation of the Collected Poems. ...
(Todd Samuelson, Houston TX)

I applaud Michael Hoffman's review of Alissa Valles's Zbigniew Herbert translations. What he says supports my own dismay, but more importantly I think it's a masterpiece of literary reviewing -- highly intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful. ... I also learned a great deal about translation from reading a review by someone so intimately familiar with the process himself. ... If there were a Pulitzer for reviews, I think this should get it.(Sharon Bryan, Clinton WA) 

Michael Hoffman describes the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert:"There was a novelty, a surprise, an unpredictability, an ongoing untangling as one read ... The poem remade itself -- squeezed itself as out of a tube -- before one's very eyes. It is like reading something still wet, not set, not combed."In my opinion, Michael Hoffman is also describing the prose of his essay. Incomparable!(James R. Wilson, San Francisco, CA)

Hoffman reminds us that we can no longer take for granted Seamus Haney's assessment of Herbert in translation -- that "what convinces one of the universal resource of Herbert's writing is just this ability which it possesses to lean, without toppling, well beyond the plumb of its native language."(Jeff Frank, Plainfield NJ)

... But now I find in the May issue a lengthy review of a translation of the Collected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert, and that review was written by someone who says (nonchalantly? shamefacedly?) "I can't ... read Polish," while at the same time he has the chutzpah to assert that two Polish Nobel laureates are "of, as I see it, manifestly lesser gifts and importance." ... I hope that in the future you will be able to find reviewers who, if not linguistically competent, are at least modest enough to realize their limitations.(Elias L. Rivers, Coral Gables, FL)


I know Michael Hoffman about as well as he knows Polish, which is to say, in translation; but I do know Peter Dale Scott ... if Hoffman doesn't know who Peter Dale Scott is, it's not because his work is obscure, nor obscurred. ...(Joshua Weiner, Washington, DC)


Writing not only as an avowed fan of Morri Creech's Field Knowledge, but also as a graduate student of comparative literature frightened to death by the paths that criticism and poetry have taken over the last few decades, I cannot help but respond to Ange Mlinko's discussion of Creech's new book. ... Mlinko is not only a voice from the stands speaking in unison with all that is current and cliched in the realm of both poetry and criticism, but her response is an absolutely shocking display of what she herself is criticizing. She has responded to an "old fashioned text" by citing the most old-fashioned of artists. Ashbery is her paradigm of contemporary poetry? Who else could be more canonical? ...(Dafydd Wood, Austin, TX)


Although I liked the idea of two critics from two different schools of poetry arguing over books, your recent staged battle between David Yezzi and Ange Mlinko fell into that same old bloated diatribe. Before even reading it, I had a feeling it would be one Language poet fighting with one "traditional" poet, and, of course, Yezzi didn't like the experimental Girly Man and Mlinko thought the Hecht-like Creech was too boring. If I had a nickel for every time I heard this argument, I wouldn't have to beg for fellowships. It seems to me that what this boils down to is just the right to say "I told you so" in a hundred years. Maybe Charles Bernstein will survive the ages, maybe Morri Creech will -- who knows. At the moment it may be fun to argue about it, but this debate just seemed like a "Letters to the Editor" section, wearing a bowtie.(Jordan Rome, Yonkers, NY) 


All of the excerpts above appeared in the September 2007 issue of Poetry magazine.

"L’Amour Avait Passé Par Là" (Frank O'Hara)

"L’Amour Avait Passé Par Là"
(Frank O'Hara)

Yes
like the still center of a book on Joan Miró
blue red green and white
a slightly over-gold edition of Hart Crane
and the huge mirror behind me blinking, paint flecked
they have painted the ceiling of my heart
and put in a new light fixture
and Arte Contemporaneo by Juan Eduardo Cirlot
and the Petit Guide to the Musee National Russe
it is all blankly defending its privacy
from the sighing wind in the ceiling
of the old Theatre Guild building
on West 53rd Street
near the broken promises of casualness
to get to the Cedar to meet Grace
I must tighten my moccasins
and forget the minute bibliographies of disappointment
anguish and power
for unrelaxed honesty
this laissez-passer for chance and misery, but taut
a candle held to the window has two flames
and perhaps a horde of followers in the rain of youth
as under the arch you find a heart of lipstick or a condom
left by the parade
of a generalized intuition
it is the great period of Italian art when everyone imitates Picasso
someone has just pushed me into the Po
in Ann Arbor the grass has turned brown in the sun
here there are repercussions and warnings in the wet night
a catalog of idiocies and fears dictates a letter
and it is signed Frank
but I don't have to mail it
yet

8/19/59


The New York Times has a recent Op-Ed piece that makes it plain Mayor Bloomberg's Greenwich Village isn't the place for romantic poets, star-crossed lovers, or starving artists: the space that once was the Cedar Tavern will soon be a beauty salon. 

History recedes quickly in the rear-view mirror: of course, New York hasn't been the place for cheap rents and cheap thrills for quite some time now. Yet a beauty salon in the space once occupied by the Cedar Tavern, a second-generation location of the original Cedar Bar, marks the end of a certain creative era. Frank O'Hara's invocation of The Cedar in his 1959 poem seems even more distant now. 

In the Times article "Bye-Bye Bohemia" the writer Lee Siegel mentions Frank's bittersweet lines about the Cedar, then comments:

". . . But despite the Cedar’s mix of people, despite its risqué interracial mingling, not everyone in that golden-seeming age enjoyed the underworld atmosphere, or benefited from it.

Recounting how the painter Milton Resnick challenged Pollock to “step outside” after the latter accused Resnick of being a “de Kooning imitator,” Andy Warhol wrote: “I tried to imagine myself in a bar striding over to, say, Roy Lichtenstein and asking him to ‘step outside’ because I’d heard him insulting my soup cans. I mean, how corny.” 

O’Hara, who was gay, was appalled by the hatred of gays he found there. In a play O’Hara wrote with the bisexual painter Larry Rivers, Pollock swaggers into the Cedar and in a booming voice calls O’Hara and Rivers “those fags.” 

And despite the number of female painters accepted into the Cedar’s ranks — Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Hedda Sterne — being a woman amid all that tortured macho posturing could be unbearable. Krasner, Pollock’s wife, rarely went to the Cedar. “I loathed the place,” she said. “The women were treated like cattle.” 

Even some of the Cedar’s male habitués would just as soon have lived without it. For Mark Rothko, it was a place where you ran into “the ambitious egotist out for grabs,” he said. “I do not go to the Cedar Bar.” . . .

The "corny," romantic bohemian life with its battles and egos still goes on in New York these days -- with a higher pricetag, of course. Yet looked at from a distance of decades, how immediate life and art came together then: after Frank missed Hartigan at the Cedar, he recognized "L’Amour Avait Passé Par Là" as a kind of apology, and mailed her the poem along with this note the following day.

Endless history always repeats, especially on the real estate records of the island of Manhattan; Siegel remarks a little ruefully, if not necessarily with regret, on the fate of the original Cedar Bar: That legendary crowd — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell — debated, boozed and brawled in the dark booths at the Cedar Bar, located on Eighth and University until 1963, when the cherished watering hole was destroyed to make way for a new apartment building.

(Reproduction of Frank's poem and letter from Deep Space Daguerrotype.)

Kerouac to Brando, 1957: "c'mon now, Marlon, put up your dukes and write!"

In 1957, Jack Kerouac wrote the letter above to Marlon Brando. Kerouac's approach to the 1950's most volatile actor was a pitch to Brando's ego: a buddy-buddy tone that takes on Jack's big ideas about remaking the American film industry itself with Brando's help -- much like he would write that The Dharma Bums would bring Buddhism to America in a letter to Gary Snyder in 1958.

The Brando letter was Jack's star-struck attempt to bring his words to the big screen after the unexpected success of On the Road. Kerouac was desperate to capitalize on the incredibly positive reaction, and wanted Brando to buy the rights to the movie adaptation, and then play the part of Dean Moriarty opposite Kerouac's own onscreen portrayal of Sal Paradise. 

Kerouac's dream casting never happened. Brando never responded.

Jack Kerouac1418½ Clouser StOrlando, Fla
Dear Marlon

I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it. Don't worry about the structure, I know to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give perfectly acceptable movie-type structure: making it into one all-inclusive trip instead of the several voyages coast-to-coast in the book, one vast round trip from New York to Denver to Frisco to Mexico to New Orleans to New York again. I visualise the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak. I wanted you to play the part because Dean (as you know) is no dopey hotrodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I'll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I'll show you how Dean acts in real life, you couldn't possibly imagine it without seeing a good imitation. Fact, we can go visit him in Frisco, or have him come down to L.A. still a real frantic cat but nowadays settled down with his final wife saying the Lord's Prayer with his kiddies at night...as you'll seen when you read the play BEAT GENERATION. All I want out of this is to able to establish myself and my mother a trust fund for life, so I can really go roaming around the world writing about Japan, India, France etc. ...I want to be free to write what comes out of my head & free to feed my buddies when they're hungry & not worry about my mother. 

Incidentally, my next novel is THE SUBTERRANEANS coming out in N.Y. next March and is about a love affair between a white guy and a colored girl and very hep story. Some of the characters in it you know in the village (Stanley Gould etc.) It easily could be turned into a play, easier than ON THE ROAD. 

What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of "situation" and let people rave on as they do in real life. That's what the play is: no plot in particular, no "meaning" in particular, just the way people are. Everything I write I do in the spirit where I imagine myself an Angel returned to the earth seeing it with sad eyes as it is. I know you approve of these ideas, & incidentally the new Frank Sinatra show is based on "spontaneous" too, which is the only way to come on anyway, whether in show business or life. The French movies of the 30's are still far superior to ours because the French really let their actors come on and the writers didn't quibble with some preconceived notion of how intelligent the movie audience is, the talked soul from soul and everybody understood at once. I want to make great French Movies in America, finally, when I'm rich...American Theater & Cinema at present is an outmoded Dinosaur that ain't mutated along with the best in American Literature. 

If you really want to go ahead, make arrangements to see me in New York when you next come, or if you're going to Florida here I am, but what we should do is talk about this because I prophesy that it's going to be the beginning of something real great. I'm bored nowadays and I'm looking around for something to do in the void, anyway—writing novels is getting too easy, same with plays, I wrote the play in 24 hours.

Come on now Marlon, put up your dukes and write!

Sincerely, later,
(Signed, 'Jack Kerouac')

"Rub Out the Words:" letters from Burroughs: "This place is sick, sick, sick. And disgusting."

Granta has published a selection of William Burroughs' letters online, presented with commentary by James Grauerholz and from the book edited by Bill Morgan. The Granta excerpts show WSB in contention with his family (to his society-member mother: "A rundown on some of the good burghers of Palm Beach would quite eclipse the Beatniks") and his contemporaries (to Paul Bowles: "Staying in Leary’s house. Enough food to feed a regiment left out to spoil in the huge kitchen by Leary’s over-fed, undisciplined children.")

The letters run from 1959, when Burroughs was living in Paris, to New York in 1974. The Granta excerpts zero in on WSB's kaleidoscope of drug experiences and their various scenes, some with awe, others with a snort of disapproval ("Unused TV sets, cameras, typewriters, toys, books, magazines, furniture, stacked to the ceiling. A nightmare of stupid surfeit. The place is sick sick sick. And disgusting," he complains in 1961 about Leary's house to Bowles in Tangier. "Like a good European, I am stashing away all the $ I can lay hands to with one thought in mind. Walk don't run to the nearest exit.")

Such cantankerous, back-biting behavior became a hallmark of Burroughs' image early on, so much so that in the letters it is difficult to separate the writer from his cranky persona. It was a trick of his craft he was good at, and he seemingly practiced it virtually non-stop until it became his actual voice. Referencing a 1959 article in Life magazine about the Beats to his disapproving mother, his style reaches some kind of rococo,demi-monde apogee of self-promotion: "In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me ... I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as The Wickedest Man Alive, a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley." ...

Presumably, Burroughs Sr. still sent 45-year-old WSB the $200-a-month allowance to practice his tea-drinking-from-a-skull vices. It was quite a bargain for Bill: the elder Burroughses were taking care of WSB's son Bill, Jr., after their son's 1951 William Tell party trick killed his wife Joan.

Here's an excerpt from the Granta selection. From the post-script it appears he'd patched up relations with his mother Laura and his then-ailing father. The duty of a family visit: "Of course," he writes, "I have to stay clean in Cambridge."

William S. Burroughs [New York]

to Brion Gysin [Paris]


pre-September 28, 1961


General Delivery
Newton, Mass.
USA

Dear Brion:


The scene here is really frantic. Leary has gone berserk. He is giving mushrooms to hat check girls, cab drivers, waiters, in fact anybody who will stand still for it. However Gerald Heard and your correspondent have taken a firm stand. We both refuse to take any more mushrooms under any circumstances. Heard is certainly the most intelligent and well intentioned person connected with this deal. He gave a great talk at the symposium about LSD and paranoid sensations. The last barrier: PANIC! To God Pan. I managed to do all right too, fortified by two joints and the whole symposium came off very well.

Burroughs, 1959

Michael [Portman] wants to come here now and I have written to dissuade him. Let me explain that I really put in a lot of overtime on that boy and thought I had managed to separate him from his deplorable connections. Then something happened and there he was with a cold sore and I lost my patient and my patience as well. I'm not complaining but I have been under considerable pressure trying to sort out and assess hundreds of conflicting reports and demands pleasing no one of course so maybe I goofed. In any case he is now in an impossible condition. Imagine having Eileen Garrett, Mary Cooke, Old Lady Luce in the same room with you. It is absolutely intolerable and I don't propose to tolerate it.

Otherwise the situation here is not too bad. At least I have room to work and there is much to be said for American conveniences. I can get good food out of the ice box and take a bath and wear clean clothes at least. Seems to be plenty of pot around NY and nobody worries about the heat. Its like they all have the fix in. Of course I have to keep clean in Cambridge. Flying back on Sunday. Please write what your plans are. I wish you could arrange to come here. Like I say NY is really a great scene and a goodly crowd is there. And more expected momentarily. Please write.


Love,
Bill


P.S. Very pleasant visit with the family.

Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, edited by Bill Morgan, will be published in the U.S. by Ecco Press, and in the UK by Penguin.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "the bleakness of corroding despair"

My dear fellow clergymen,

... You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.

We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored" when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of "Mrs." when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. ...

Martin Luther King was assassinated April 4, 1968. The "Letter From The Birmingham City Jail" was a response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) and handwritten by Martin Luther King on April 16, 1963. It was then slipped out of the jail, turned over to his assistants on the outside, typed, copied, and widely disseminated to various organizations and individuals as an "open letter" in order to generate public support for Dr. King and his civil rights activities.

"Dear Assen Poop": the lost art of letter writing

A good friend has started a collection of fountain pens. He has ten so far, those ancient instruments that require filling up with ink and which can put indelible stains on one's seersucker sleeve. I'm only assuming he hasn't adopted such sartorial splendor as of yet. If he does, I'll be the first to tell him he's carrying things a bit too far.

His decision to take pen in hand, though, is understandable. There's a permanence to the ink-written page that the vagaries of cyberspace can't yet match: if there's a there, there, it can be accessed and downloaded, but it can't be tear-stained as a letter.

I wish him great success, and look forward to his future musings. I certainly hope his new avocation leads my friend to enjoy new ways of personal expression. I was certainly amused to read his post-script, tacked on the very last line as an afterthought: "Do you read all those books you list on your blog?"

Well, it is the blogger's unfortunate curse to appear as though he does nothing but read, or report on nothing but what consumes him; I've been to math and IT websites that appear to be nothing but equations and problem-solving that leave me mystified. Reading literature, like understanding math, is years' worth of cumulative effort, and leaves a lasting impression, like layers in a rock formation worn by river water.

So much of writing is submerged in effort no one sees, and then, once a book is published, in the personal connections a writer makes with the reader. Larry McMurtry, author and screenwriter (The Last Picture Show, Hud, Lonesome Dove) once suggested -- facetiously, but what a concept! -- that novels ought to come packaged like DVDs are now, tricked out with extras: drafts of scenes, rejection letters from publishers and wickedly demoralizing letters from lovers and friends, unsolicited advice from well-meaning strangers, editor's disagreements, different endings, false starts.

It would mark the total deconstruction of the novel: read the published version of what the author actually succeeded in finishing, and then be amazed that the thing ever got written in the first place.

William Carlos Williams & Ezra Pound, Rutherford, N.J., June, 1959

Disagreements and arguments: A collection of an individual's letters can trace the personal and artistic development of a writer, and his friendships. Here's the first selection from The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, which he wrote to his mother in 1902, when he was 19 and in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania: "Today, Sunday, it has rained continuously. I went to church today for the first time at the Y.M.C.A. here in the college ..."

Of course the best art of literary letter writing depends on the familiarity between writers, and when two egos clash the results can be a spectacle for the unsuspecting reader fifty or more years on. During World War II, Williams was incensed to hear of Ezra Pound's broadcasts from Rome, during which the Fascist-supporting poet would start a sentence by stating "as my friend Doc Williams of New Jersey would say ..." Florence, Williams's wife, feared for the poet's safety.

In November, 1956, the good doctor's pique at the politics of Ezra Pound led him to lob the following missile at the icon of twentieth century poetry. Pound, who as a supporter of Mussolini during the war was found incompetent to face trial for treason in the U.S., was then incarcerated at Washington's St. Elizabeth's Hospital from 1946 to 1958. Williams wrote:

 

Dear Assen Poop: Don't speak of apes and Roosevelt to me -- you know as much of the IMPLEMENTATION of what you THINK you are proposing as one of the Wops I used to take care of on Guinea Hill. YOU DON'T EVEN BEGIN TO KNOW what the problem is. Learn to write an understandable letter before you begin to sound off. You don't even know the terms you're using and have never known them. At least you have found a man in ZWECK 2 (ward) who is conscious of the DIFFICULTIES and who, unlike you, has an intelligent understanding of those difficulties and how to present them.

You're too damned thickheaded to know you're asleep -- and have been from the beginning. You are incapable of recognizing what you mean to present and and to hide your stupidity resort to name-calling and general obfuscation. Do you think you will get anywhere that way -- but in jail or the insane asylum where you are now? Mussolini led you there, he was your adolescent hero -- or was it Jefferson? You still don't know the difference.

... But you personally do write poems that are at best supremely beautiful. I'm afraid that for the moment I'll have to let it go at that. I'll go on reading what I can and when a glimmer of brilliant exposition comes through the fog of your verbiage I hope I will still be alive to recognize it.

When Williams died, in 1963, Pound sent a brief note from his home in Italy: "For you he bore with me sixty years. I shall never find another poet-friend like him." I hope my letter-writing friend takes Williams' bracing precedent to heart, and has the fortitude (and good sense) to address me as "Dear Assen Poop," should I fall out of his favor. It would be quite an honor.