Pic3k not Dead
| A1 | Freddie | 2:54 |
| A2 | Novembertag | 3:38 |
| A3 | Blinder Passagier | 3:28 |
| A4 | Verkauft | 2:35 |
| A5 | Allein Zu Haus | 3:52 |
| A6 | Madchen Vom Andern Stern | 5:24 |
| A7 | Auf Die Dacher | 2:08 |
| A8 | Badewannen-Krimi | 4:17 |
| B1 | Gaudenz Meint | 4:20 |
| B2 | Der Lange Mann | 4:32 |
| B3 | Seemann | 3:26 |
| B4 | Zeig Flagge | 3:49 |
| B5 | Zeig Flagge (Ende) | 1:27 |
Hank O’Neal is a photographer well known for his jazz and portrait photography. He collaborated with Berenice Abbott for many years, and also befriended many of the writers of the Beat generation. His portraits of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and others can be seen on his web site.
Abrams/Image will be publishing a new book of his photographs entitled Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade 1974-1983. The book chronicles the development of the gay pride parade in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The book includes a never-before-published preface by William Burroughs, and many of the photographs in the collection were captioned by Allen Ginsberg.
In advance of Gay Day‘s publication in Spring, 2006, RealityStudio sent some interview questions to Mr. O’Neal. He was kind enough to take the time to answer them.
RealityStudio: How did you come to know Burroughs?
O’Neal: In early 1984 Allen Ginsberg told me that William Burroughs was coming to New York for a week of celebrating his 70th birthday. He was looking for a place to stay and did I know of anything. I suggested that if he’d like, Shelley (my soon to be wife) would be happy to turn over our floor at 830 Broadway to William and his pals and we’d camp out at her uptown apartment. This seemed to work for William and I first met him the day he moved into my house for a week. He arrived on 4 February (Saturday) and was here until 10 February.
RealityStudio: Burroughs was himself an artist as well as a writer. Did you have discussions with him about visual aesthetics, techniques, principles, etc? Do you recall the substance of any of those conversations?
O’Neal: William had a terrific visual sensibility but in 1984, William was not as active as a painter in the early 1980s as he became later in the decade, i.e. 1988 – 89. We had no conversations about visual aesthetics.
RealityStudio: Was Burroughs an influence in any way on your photography?
O’Neal: I had been taking photographs for some while when I met William and the extent of his influence was that he became a subject of many of the pictures.
RealityStudio: Your forthcoming book of photographs, Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade 1974-1983, contains previously unpublished captions by Allen Ginsberg and a preface by Burroughs. Was this project prepared a long while ago and delayed for some reason?
O’Neal: Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade 1974-1983, which Abrams/Image will publish in June 2006 contains about 150 previously unpublished photographs, as well as 125 previously unpublished poetic captions for the photographs by Allen Ginsberg. William wrote the preface shortly after he became aware of the project when he stayed at 830 in February 1984. He saw some of the pictures and thought it was a terrific project. The book was seriously delayed because of outright hostility from many publishers to the project in 1984. All of us had other projects and we just moved on. I was aware the time would come when these photographs with Allen’s captions and William’s preface would become widely accepted and that time has now come. Abrams/Image is very excited about the book and plans to publicize it widely.
RealityStudio: You’re best known for your work with musicians. What was your interest in shooting the Christopher Street Parade?
O’Neal: In 1972 I built a recording studio at 173 Christopher Street. In those years the parade formed in my front yard, the wide stretch of Christopher Street between Washington and West Street. Walker Evans had once told me he started out taking pictures in his back yard, so I didn’t see anything wrong with taking pictures in my front yard. It was visually very interesting, full of energy and good times, an ideal project. Berence Abbott used to always tell me to get a good project and work on it. This seemed like a very good one and I pursued it until 1983.
RealityStudio: Do you recall Burroughs and Ginsberg being interested in the parade? Did they ever march in it?
O’Neal: I don’t believe Allen or William ever marched in the parade. They never mentioned it to me and I’m pretty sure Allen would have as he was captioning the photographs.
David Britton and Michael Butterworth are the founders of Savoy Books. To call Savoy a publishing house is rather like calling Charles Manson a criminal — it’s correct but it fails to account for so much more. A frequent contributor to New Worlds magazine, Butterworth established himself at a young age as an important figure in the “New Wave” of science fiction that also included J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and others. Britton became notorious for his first novel, Lord Horror, which earned him a distinction that even Burroughs failed to acquire: it became the first literary work banned in Britain since Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and thus landed Britton in jail. While Burroughs had been in jail a number of times, it was never because of his writing.
In 1979 Savoy Books was prepared to publish a uniform edition of works by Burroughs when it was subject to a series of police raids that temporarily forced it into bankruptcy. The project was scuttled, but Britton and Butterworth never lost their tremendous admiration for Burroughs. A few days after his death in 1997, the two gave an interview to Sarajane Inkster describing their visit to the Bunker, Burroughs’ abode on New York’s down-and-out Bowery. Now they expand on that interview to commemorate the 2008 publication of Horror Panegyric. A collaboration between Savoy Books and Supervert, creator of RealityStudio, Horror Panegyric features an enthusiastic analysis of the Lord Horror novels, excerpts from the hard-to-find books themselves, and a timeline of Lord Horror productions including books, comics, and CDs. The hardcover book may be purchased from Amazon, and the text is also available in its entirety at supervert.com.
An interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth at the Savoy Offices, 12th August 1997, ten days after Burroughs’ death. Conducted by Sarajane Inkster and originally published on Savoy’s web site.
On 23 May, 1979, Michael Butterworth and David Britton of the Manchester publishers Savoy Books took the opportunity to visit William Burroughs. They met him at The Bunker, his home on the Bowery, New York, before he moved to live in Kansas. The publishers were staying in Manhattan, en-route to the American Booksellers Association Trade Exhibition in Los Angeles. Michael Butterworth’s note book records the visit briefly with the barest facts:
NOON — William Burroughs, 222 The Bowery, between Prince St. and Spring St., on The Bowery. (Google Map) Call first by phone before knocking. We to make offer to his London Agent for Cities of the Red Night and arrangements to discuss The Job and Dutch Schultz. [Verbatim text from Michael Butterworth’s 1979 American Notebook.]
Ostensibly their intention was to discuss with Burroughs a Savoy line of his work. However, although the meeting went well, the venture was ill-fated.
As of writing, the company has recently emerged from 20 years of persecution by the Manchester police and city authorities. Unknown to them in 1979 — the time of their visit to the Bunker — they were soon to be dealt a body blow. Returning to England, after successfully contracting to publish the paperback edition of Cities of the Red Night, Savoy was hit by the first of three big raids. (Two other raids, in 1989 and 1990, concerned the publication of their novel Lord Horror and various graphic works.) Led by “God’s Cop” Police Chief Constable James Anderton, this raid was a co-ordinated simultaneous swoop on their main retail and publishing premises, and almost achieved the intention of shutting down their company. It was the culmination of many smaller raids. In total, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock were seized and not returned, including Savoy-published titles by Samuel Delany, Charles Platt, and Jack Trevor Story. At the same time, an unrelated action by the Times Mirror Organisation in America dealt a body blow to the publishing house New American Library. This had a knock-on effect on Savoy’s distributor-publishers, New English Library, who went into liquidation. Savoy was forced into temporary bankruptcy in 1981, and in 1982 David Britton was jailed — the first of two jail sentences connected with his publishing which he had to endure. Savoy lost Cities to another publisher.
Butterworth and Britton’s other agenda worked out well — they met one of their literary heroes, one of the great people of the 20th Century.
I asked them for their memories of that meeting.
David Britton: My memories of William Burroughs at that date are mixed up today with the images you see of him on film. You know — “Did I really meet him, or was it the dream celluloid Burroughs who sat opposite drinking tea?” However, I do remember thinking that the Bunker was definitely an extension of Burroughs’ personality. Burroughs added ambience to the place, which was an old gymnasium — the sort you would see depicted in gangster films set in the Brooklyn of the ’30s, where Pat O’Brien plays the honest priest, and all his young punks are working up a sweat in the gym — Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, etc. You could just see Burroughs as the Daddy, The Bowery Daddy, and the Dead-End Kids as his private street gang. Even their name sounds like one of his creations.
There was a flight of long stairs up to the Bunker which was a long room with a couple of side-rooms and a kitchen. I remember the “john” — a partitioned-off area with a row of old-fashioned tiled urinals, which had the sort of sleazy sex connotations you would expect of Burroughs’ living quarters.
Michael Butterworth: The Bunker was in a run-down low-rise area of stores, bars and light industry, very like Ancoats in Manchester, only busier. On the ground floor was what seems in my memory to be a used furniture store selling tall cabinets and cupboards, or wardrobes. It had open iron security gates, and was the general entrance to the building. I can’t remember how we got upstairs, or who met us to show us up. It may have been Burroughs. Possibly we walked up after calling on a door entry system. I remember Burroughs brewing us tea. During the meeting there was the sound of typing coming from a small side-room — probably his companion, James Grauerholz, who was also his secretary and manager. It was Grauerholz who — with Allen Ginsberg — did so much to help gain establishment respectability for Burroughs. It would figure, because at this time Victor Bockris was being allowed to make introductions between Burroughs and celebrities like Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Nicolas Roeg, Andy Warhol, and Tennessee Williams. [Bockris was the author of With William Burroughs, A Report From the Bunker, 1981, Seaver Books, New York.]
Inkster: How did you arrange your meeting with Burroughs?
Butterworth: We phoned Burroughs before we called round to see him. We told him that we were interested in doing the UK paperback edition of Cities of the Red Night, which he was still working on. At first he wondered why we wanted to see him rather than his London agent. I said we would do this, but we would still like to meet him as we were in New York and could show him our titles, and explain to him what type of company we were. On reflection, he probably realised that we were looking for a slender reason to meet him, and he very kindly allowed us his time. Yet we were seriously interested in publishing Cities, which we thought was his best novel since The Naked Lunch. We also told him that we seriously intended to make available new paperback editions of harder-to-get works like The Job and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. We were planning for these to be in uniform editions, if we could, and this seemed to please him. When we got back home we contracted with John Calder, his UK hardback publisher, to do the paperback edition of Cities. This was to have been the first title in what we saw as a Burroughs line, which could establish Savoy as a major publishing company.
Britton: We offered what was for us a high advance of £10,000, and were surprised when it was accepted. For someone of Burroughs’ calibre, it was a low figure. It made us wonder what other publishers had offered, what they thought he was worth. He never did earn a vast amount of money, despite what people think. When he was in England he was reported as saying that he was earning what the average plumber would earn.
Inkster: How much time did you spend with him?
Britton: It’s hard to recall how long we were with him. (Records show no more than about 2 hours). We’d brought with us a selection of our titles. I can remember discussing The Savoy Book with him. This is a collection of fiction and graphics which we’d just put out. It had such writers as M John Harrison, who worked for us at the time, and Harlan Ellison. We’d published Harlan’s book, The Glass Teat, and were going to see him next, to discuss further titles with him at his home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. Our good friend Heathcote Williams was in there… and artists such as Jim Leon, who had illustrated for Oz magazine. It was a showcase collection for Savoy. We would also probably have left with him titles like Charles Platt’s The Gas, Delany’s Tides of Lust, Michael Moorcock’s The Golden Barge, Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, and Henry Treece’s Celtic tetralogy. We discussed Harry Clarke, the Irish artist, who Burroughs knew of. Clarke illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination — which suggests that we also talked about Poe. At the time we were contemplating doing a book of Clarke’s colour and stained glass work…
Inkster: Was there any sense of the atmosphere at the Bunker being “contrived” in any way?
Britton: No — not at all. It was very definitely a home, first and foremost. The place was very clean, and pleasing to the eye, with no sense of the dereliction of the streets outside. It was open-plan and so from where we were sat we could see across the room to the kitchen area, where he made us tea. Burroughs dealt with everything, and he knew his way about. We saw no one else. He was the perfect host.
Butterworth: There were no windows. It was where Burroughs lived, slept and worked — like a bunker. But it was strange because you were actually upstairs, on the first floor. We sat on one side of a longish table, with him facing us, constantly smoking thin cigarettes. He was very polite and well dressed in a light suit. He looked and behaved exactly as you would expect from his public profile, but his formality broke and he became genuinely interested when he came across one of Dave’s illustrations. The picture, from The Savoy Book, was called “A Fortnight on Calvary: Don’t Put Me Down Like All the Other Fish.” It has a weird alien landscape, in which are two figures. The main figure was Count Sublime Hubris, one of the characters who later appeared in Lord Horror, imperiously tall, black, and dressed in finery, like Little Richard, but with an exposed cunt. The other was also black, but winged, small and naked, and fierce, with a very large hard-on, sucking on a tube which has been fed into the Count’s vagina. It made Burroughs chuckle, and he asked who had drawn it.
Inkster: Were you nervous about meeting someone who was obviously so important to you?
Britton: Yes, it was nerve-wracking, and easier that we had been a pair visiting him.
Inkster: How much did this meeting with Burroughs mean to you?
Butterworth: It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. As a writer he had had an altering effect on me — after coming across his work I was not the same person. He opened my mind to possibility more than any others except other greats like Rabelais, or Lautréamont or Bosch. He was by far the most important person I have met or probably will ever meet. I regret that we took no pictures, but that was what everyone else was doing, which was not the Savoy style. Savoy was a calling card that allowed us to legitimately meet people we admired, like Burroughs, Gerald Scarfe or Burne Hogarth. At the time, that was enough.
Britton: There was something magical about meeting him. I thought of him as a sorcerous “Tinkerbell” — and some of his inspiring talent might just dust off. Mr Burroughs was Chaos Magick incarnate and, like the best oneiric spells, your memories of what was said and done are fractured. Just the “distant wonderland” of it all stays with me. It was a very important moment in our lives.
Inkster: Can you think of anyone else to compare him with?
Britton: Ironically, despite his anti-drug stance, Frank Zappa comes immediately to mind. Particularly the early Zappa, who had a similarly cynical turn of mind and cold intelligence. It goes without saying that Burroughs was the greater, original artist. Andrea Dworkin has his passion, though her obsessions are elsewhere. It’s difficult to think of Burroughs having any peers. To me, he never seemed to quite fit with the Beats, nor with later contemporaries like Vidal, Mailer, Bellow or Updike. They were writing about the present, but Burroughs was “leaking in” the future for us: which will be alien. His mindset was genuinely alien, his mental umbilical chord was cut off from the rest of humanity, and he could articulate that discord within himself with the most powerful of visions. Burroughs had opened himself up, fallen into hell and climbed back out again. There are no other living writers capable of sustaining such visions. He was a mutant product of those strange decades, the ’30s-’50s. They gave him a primitive quality denied to later generations of writers — who are urban, literate in computers and technology, but lacking his connections with the fleshy and sinister.
Butterworth: I can’t compare him with anyone except, strangely, considering what Dave has just said, in a small way to Don Van Vliet — Captain Beefheart — with his ability to draw so directly on experience to make art. Burroughs’ work is so different to what went before. No one today has his idiosyncratic genius. He has had such a diverse effect — on literature, music, films, and electronic culture. Whatever detractors say of him — that he is misguided, lightweight, or whatever — will only serve to confound all the more, as his influence is seen to continue to grow, particularly now that he is dead. He is a hybrid genius, a great poet of the technological age, and a great satirist… and to some a spiritual leader.
His best poetic writing, especially his depiction of things gone, in broken, fragmented images — a yearning for the absolute, and at the same time an intense sadness or grief for man’s inability to attain ‘something’ lost — produces an acute nagging pain inside me. It is like the worst love sickness, a terrible ache in the stomach, a feeling of fragility. I sense his loss, his fear. I pick it up off him like a worrying parent does off a child. Of course, if his writing did just this, that would not make it great. What makes it great is the way he is able to use this peculiarly intense emotion to describe reality, unbearable beauty and awfulness of the universe, of distant galaxies as well as the human life processes.
Inkster: And now that he is dead?
Butterworth: His death — his final editor — only intensifies everything he has written. What he has recorded between 1914 and 1997 is truly awe-inspiring, and has had an effect on the way we perceive things and how we communicate these things ourselves — his is a way of seeing humanity in all its pain and humour that cannot be reversed.
A great deal of my writing which I most identify with is not written out of any sort of objection at all, it’s more poetic messages, the still sad music of humanity, simply poetic statements. If I make a little bit of fun of Control with Dr Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, they say, “This dark pacifist who’s paranoid, who’s motivated completely by rejection of technology.” This is a bunch of crap. [From an interview with Victor Bockris.]
To me, death was something that Burroughs always seemed to face head on.
Butterworth: Burroughs wrote a novel as long ago as 1970 called Ah Pook is Here, which is about him trying to come to terms with his death. "Ritual and knowing the right words," he says with dry humour, is no solution to the problem. Death can come on the unprepared suddenly, like a "forced landing, or in many cases a parachute jump ". Far better, he writes, to know your landing site — where and how you are going to die — in advance. Cultivate a mindset of "alert passivity and focussed attention". When he finally came in to land on the far shore across the sea of his life, I hope he landed exactly where he planned, give or take a few yards.
Email interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth, 2008
RealityStudio: Michael, you published with the seminal New Wave magazine of the late 1960s, New Worlds. Did Burroughs have an influence on you and the other writers working at New Worlds?
Butterworth: The general atmosphere of New Worlds was imbued with Burroughs. Burroughs was living in London in the 1960s, of course. Not only did Michael Moorcock promote him in the magazine, JG Ballard also did. Michael was one of the main supporting contributors to the ‘Ugh!’ correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement, and on his travels made a habit of bringing Maurice Girodias titles into the UK before they were available here. He and Charles Platt promoted authors like myself (Michael wrote about me in an introduction that I “sprang full-grown from the head of William Burroughs!”). He even wrote an experimental science fiction novel called The Deep Fix, with a character called Seward. Then there were the New Worlds parties, at least two of which were attended by Burroughs. These could be “star”-studded events. At a celebrated one Mike introduced William to Arthur C Clarke, and apparently they got on well.
It was a very heady time. New Worlds is hardly ever mentioned in books on the UK 60s’ scene, not even in surveys by Miles (whose Indica Books was just around the corner from the NW offices), but to a small group of people it is the most influential magazine of the last 50 years. To me, one of the younger writers, thoroughly corrupted by cut-ups and unable to read linear prose, and used to having work rejected, the magazine seemed to be tailor-made to fit, and appeared just at the right moment. When it finished, many of us were left directionless, a condition compounded by the disillusion felt by the ending of the 60s.
RealityStudio: You didn’t cross paths with Burroughs at any of these parties?
Butterworth: I went to several of the parties, unfortunately not the ones Burroughs attended. I lived too far away to go to more than a few, and only learned afterwards in agonised constriction that Burroughs had been to the ones I missed. Jimmy Ballard attended some, so it’s very likely he met him there.
My memories (as a 20-year-old) of Ballard are frustrating. I didn’t know what to say to him, even though he was there in front of me at a party and was talking to me and only me. By the time I met Burroughs I was twelve years older and had brought Dave as cover, so got slightly more out of that. Regardless of what you manage to take away intellectually, you get something else off these great people. As Andy Warhol once said, it’s best you DON’T KNOW THEM in any way, because that way they still have an aura to touch you with.
RealityStudio: Jed Birmingham has written extensively of Burroughs’ contributions to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. Were you aware of Nuttall, his zine, or other small-press ventures?
Butterworth: The small press Burroughs and Burroughs-related pamphlets and books I managed to buy over here were got mainly from a bookshop called Compendium, in North London, and visits there were rationed because of distance (200 miles from Manchester).
That Burroughs regarded the small press magazines as his saviours makes sense of something that happened to me around the same period. I was about 17 or 19 (1964 – 1966), and co-editor of a new college magazine to be called “Top Drawer.” Imagine my surprise when I wrote to Burroughs to get a contribution — and very promptly received one, a kind of permutation! Alas, I dropped out of college, and so far as I know that was the end of the magazine. Youthful stupidity prevented me from keeping a copy of the contribution to run in a later, then unenvisaged, Concentrate or Corridor. (Zines produced by Butterworth — ed.) What an irony for me, then! Burroughs was routinely contributing to Nuttall in Leeds, Nuttall’s home town, where Nuttall was a teacher, only thirty miles away from where I was based, and may have regarded the North as fertile ground. For many years it worried me that he may have wondered what happened to my magazine. Very likely he forgot about it. But somewhere out there, is an unaccounted Burroughs contribution, perhaps lying forgotten in a top drawer….
RealityStudio: As Englishmen, did you find the language of Naked Lunch difficult?
Britton: On its initial reading it gave me no sense of confusion. As a front-row kid of the 1950s, I was well versed in Americana, serials, dime novels, B-movie noir, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, American comics and of course that great universal binding blanket, American (50s) rock’n’roll. And Lash LaRue, the rebel cowboy, a creature from the Place of Dead Roads if ever there was. This cultural exchange, as you know, worked in reverse, when America picked up (a decade later) on The Who, the Beatles and the Stones, all reselling a warped mirror image back to America. Now that smells like teen spirit to me.
John Lennon, for instance, had pretty much the same sensibilities that we had. He supped on Larry Williams and hard-sold songs like “I Am the Walrus” with its children nursery rhyme-like lyrics (“Yellow belly custard, green snot pie, dead dogs’ giblets, green cat’s eye”) which was a song we all sang in the playground. Like much of Lennon’s work, it was taken directly from working class culture, as is Meng & Ecker. Once you’ve got Bo Diddley down your neck, Niggaz With Attitude are no problem. Compton is much like Miles Platting, Manchester.
Willie Burroughs’ take on sexuality was the infusion that threw me, not the language. But when eclectic prose and sex conjoin they conjour a powerful brew. There will never be another book as talismanic as Lunch. The world is now too small a place.
Butterworth: Did I find Naked Lunch difficult because of the slang and American 50s’ patois? Yes. I had a father who forbade television and American comics. Unlike Dave I grew up in a more sheltered middle class culture. Also, in terms of books and film I was drawn to sf and horror and westerns, rather than to crime and hard-boiled books. So when I came to read Naked Lunch in my late teens, apart from it lifting my head off I found it perplexing and mysterious in equal measure; its strange words increased its awesome imaginative power. Eg, “I can feel the heat closing in.” Now I had no idea to what “heat” referred. The way Burroughs said it, it seemed like a metaphysical alien radiation of some kind — which of course it was also; the way Burroughs used words, they had multiple meanings. Then words like “lush” and “roll.” I knew they were not being used “correctly.” Encountering them, I didn’t at first question these strange words, but as I read through Naked Lunch I imbued them with “tonal” meanings, much as I had done in my early and mid-teens encountering Poe’s Victorian prose. Eventually, of course, I began to use the slang glossary Calder had helpfully supplied for English readers. Gradually, over the months, after I’d read and seen more, I “wised” up. Knowing what the words mean did not decrease the book in any way.
Language, and what Burroughs did with it, fascinated and shocked me more than the sex. I first read about him in the Times Literary Supplement, after encountering a passing reference about a writer who was cutting-up writing. My initial reaction was that this was a cheap way of proceeding. In fact it outraged me. Dave (a Catholic) was more shocked by the sex. (Around this time he was probably taking Little Richard’s homosexuality on the chin — a revelation which outraged working-class kids who saw the American rockers as heroes; the very last thing they wanted to hear was that he was queer.) One good thing my father DID do for me (but for the wrong reasons) was to send me to an eccentric Quaker English boarding, where, among many other things, I encountered male sex. It was a mixed progressive school, so all kinds of sex was going down, but the girls and boys slept in different wings in the houses. Though I had lived a more limited cultural life, Burroughsian sex, at least, did not come as such a shock. Though the way Burroughs mixed it did. Overall Dave and I are agreed that Burroughs’ mix of graphic sex, literary experimentation and imagination was explosive.
RealityStudio: Cut-ups clearly influenced the “concentrated” writing you (Michael) were doing for New Worlds. Dave, did they also influence the later Lord Horror novels in any way? Much has been said about the transposition of an anti-gay speech into Lord Horror, but there are numerous other passages (especially in Motherfuckers) that seem to imply the technique.
Britton: Lautréamont and the surrealists used a form of cut-up that’s more applicable than Burroughs to the Lord Horror book. Ernst would cobble together illustrations from Victorian art books to gain entry into a mysterious absurd world. That always seemed more useable to me than Burroughs’ method, which as you know influenced people like David Bowie in a more productive way.
My own preference is thieving from a whole range of texts. Am always on the lookout, and collect cheap books with eclectic subject matter — fiction or fact. I will nose out this pirate stuff like a shark turning over a coral reef. Sometimes I lift paragraphs, with slight changes, which you’ve astutely noticed. Not only Motherfuckers, but every Lord Horror spin-off has this weirdness inserted like a deviant germ. A flowering of disease that makes the whole thing shake and shimmy. The ingredients of the soup again. Carefully chosen spices — a bit out of fiction, a bit out of a voodoo book, a cookery book, a botanical book, a bit of Cotton Mather, pieces of some really obscure pulp writing, and so on. The way certain authors write sentences will appeal to me, and I’ll lift them and drop them into the narrative stream. Hopefully I get the “fit” right, but if I don’t I’ll at least get something interesting. Like Topsy, it just keeps on growing.
RealityStudio: Naked Lunch was considered an unpublishable book, and yet Burroughs’ market had been primed by Kerouac and Ginsberg. Savoy’s market may have been primed by your bookstores and by other bits of alt culture, like rock and roll. But otherwise your books seem to have just careened into consciousness.
Butterworth: When you say that Burroughs’ market had been primed by Kerouac and Ginsberg and that our market has been primed by our “bookstores and by other bits of alt culture, like rock and roll”, this is it in a nutshell, and puts the finger on the probably insurmountable difficulties of inventing an entirely new market possessing such a degree of eclecticism — the length of time of the undertaking, the very real likelihood of failure. Once we’re no longer around to plough money, time and energy in, the shebang comes to an undignified and unnoticed stop.
Michael Moorcock (1939-) has always been a politically and culturally engaged writer who has been generous in his support of authors from several generations, from diverse backgrounds and with quite different interests including close associations with J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Andrea Dworkin. Moorcock is a highly prolific novelist, with over a hundred novels and edited collections to his name; as his friend and fellow Londoner Angela Carter puts it, Moorcock “can gleefully give you all the formulae for every kind of story there ever was, because he’s tried and tested all of them” (introduction to Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle, Colin Greenland, 1991).
In the mid-sixties it was, in the words of Colin Greenland, “Michael Moorcock and the writers he gathered about him [who] were [most] conscious, even self-conscious about science fiction, its symbolism, its immediacy, its responsibilities, and above all its possibilities” (The Entropy Exhibition, 1983). Between 1964 and 1971 Moorcock edited New Worlds SF Magazine and continued to be involved in the later New Worlds quarterly format and anthology collections. In addition to genre fiction he has produced a number of state-of-the-nation novels, most notably Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000), as well as an historical epic sequence set between the first and second world wars dealing with conflict, social upheaval and the Holocaust: Byzantium Endures (1981), The Laughter of Carthage (1984), Jerusalem Commands (1992) and The Vengeance of Rome (2006). He has also written reviews and political commentary for a variety of publications including The Guardian newspaper, The Spectator magazine and The Index on Censorship. While, as an example of Moorcock’s political and cultural thought in the Thatcher-Reagan years, his polemical essay The Retreat From Liberty (1983, Zomba Books) gives an impression of the era from a firmly egalitarian perspective which still offers useful insights for charting the political path of left and right in British politics for those considering our current political climate.
For Moorcock creative boundaries have always existed primarily to be negotiated, breached and redefined fluidly, and more than other writers of his generation Moorcock has crossed and re-crossed the constructed boundaries of published fiction. One of the key voices by which Moorcock defined his intention to bring new meaning to literature through both generic and avant-garde modes of writing was the distinctively ironic one of William S. Burroughs. The following interview, conducted by email, gives some indication of the breadth of his cultural interactions and shows why he is such an instrumental figure for a number of contemporary British writers. In it he responds in some depth regarding the interactions of his own ideas with those of William Burroughs and the quite different impressions and impacts that promoting Burroughs work in the UK had from his observations of others and that of himself and his friends such as Barrington J. Bayley and J.G. Ballard.
Mark P. Williams: What was the first Burroughs text you read? What was happening around you at the time? What was your immediate response to the writing in terms of its styles and themes?
Michael Moorcock: To be honest, I don’t remember too clearly. I assume I was in Paris because it was the Olympia Press edition of The Naked Lunch, almost certainly. I know I was very frustrated with modern fiction and genre fiction and was looking for a kind of fiction which somehow related to my own life and experience. Certainly, the Beats didn’t do that for me any more than Waugh. I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.
I suspect that when I got to Paris I was more than ready for a dose of Burroughs. No doubt that’s where I picked up NL, shortly after it was published. Breath of fresh air. It was joyous absurdism which somehow spoke directly to me. A tremendous high. I couldn’t have been happier to have found it, even though I was pretty out of it by then and wound up being picked up by the cops in the Tuilleries and taken to the British Consulate, who put me, for some reason, in the bridal suite of the Madeleine (still not having given me anything to eat — I got my first meal, a hot dog, bought for me by someone I met on the boat home — and promptly threw it up, I’d not eaten for so long!). I must have picked up the book at George Whitman’s shop, which in those days was called Le Mistral and which is now called Shakespeare and Co, after George bought some of Beach’s lending library. As I recall George took a few books off me — no doubt those I’d read on, as it were, the road — in exchange. I came back to London full of enthusiasm. It was an inspiration. I didn’t hope to write like Burroughs, but his writing somehow confirmed what I’d been trying to do.
MPW: Both your writing and Burroughs at this time would fall under what Jeff Nuttall described as “Bomb culture” (Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968), a peculiar reaction to the uncertainties and contradictions revealed in the post-1945 era, which he identifies particularly with the atom bomb.
How much do you feel that the specific cultural circumstances of the mid-to-late-1960s, particularly in the Ladbroke Grove area, are reflected in the appeal of what Mary McCarthy calls Burroughs’ novel of “statelessness?”
Moorcock: Jeff was a bit older than me. I didn’t react much to the bomb. I wasn’t scared of it, maybe saw it as a useful symbol (see my editorial in the New Worlds which carried Behold the Man) and though I sort of went along with friends in the Ban the Bomb movement, I knew it wouldn’t be banned and rather relished the idea of it. I did see it as a way of keeping the peace. I shared this view with Ballard and Barry [Barrington] Bayley, the two writer friends I saw regularly and with whom I had most in common. Ballard had been liberated by the Bomb, as had [Brian W.] Aldiss, another friend. Ballard from the Japanese civilian camp and Aldiss from having to begin the invasion of Japan. I think I was born a little too late to worry. I had enjoyed the excitement of the V-bombs, the majority of which fell in SW London, where I lived, and had always felt slightly let down by peacetime. Few of my close friends gave much of a crap about the bomb. We understood sensibilities had changed and that we needed a new kind of fiction to deal with it, but we didn’t lose much sleep except, maybe, during the Cuban crisis. But even there our attitude was sort of elevated. I was more focussed on discovering a new kind of urban fiction.
I like the notion of the “stateless” novel and indeed you could argue I was looking for a form like that. Cornelius certainly reflects that. A novel which looked for a new form of identity? McCarthy was arguing from a more academic, conventional point of view. I was more practical, I think, in that I was trying to reclaim the “literary” novel for a general public, through sf. Burroughs, Bayley and Ballard all had an interest in taking certain ideas from sf for their own uses, as I did. So we were trying to marry popular and, if you like, elitist art, in much the way Michael Chabon and his Bay Area friends are trying to do today. I did assume Burroughs to be a writer with an audience amongst sf readers, for instance. It turned out that the sf audience, like the audiences for any genre fiction (including the middle-brow “modern” or even “modernist” novel) is deeply conservative and pretty much addicted to generic conventions. Repetition is what it needs, not innovation.
I was generally disappointed by what was offered as literary experiment (by the likes of B.S. Johnson for instance) which just seemed like the mixture as before presented in modified forms. Few were working on finding new forms for the novel. Apart from what we were doing in New Worlds (that is, Ballard’s “condensed novels,” Bayley’s weird notions) I didn’t see much which tried to match Burroughs. We looked back a bit to [Boris] Vian, [Alfred] Jarry, [Ronald] Firbank and a few other absurdists, but found little other than Burroughs in fiction to inspire us. The counter-culture frequently seemed a bit of a wank — a lot of middle class boys being allowed to say fuck a lot. Little sense of attacking the infrastructure and re-inventing it. Although we shared printing facilities, sometimes even editorial staff, with the likes of Oz and IT, we found most of the stuff a bit naive and even irritating.
Contrary to the general impression, few of us used drugs for inspiration and while I had a lot in common as far as music and lifestyle were concerned, most of the others didn’t. I was of my time. I had grown up playing blues, being in early R&B bands, getting into what are now called “prog-rock” bands, reading a bit of sf, so I had that in common, too, but most of what I did was pragmatic “experiment.” There wasn’t a lot of theory discussed. Ballard was a little warier of attacking the literary establishment, though privately he had nothing but contempt for the work it was producing. He was more willing to hang out with the likes of Kingsley Amis and Co and more of their age and class, while I was happy to plunge into the counter-culture lifestyle, work for the magazines, take part in the odd demo and so on, but the rhetoric often got up my nose, I have to say. Burroughs had much the same attitude to mine and in some ways we had more in common, though he really enjoyed meeting Arthur C. Clarke when I introduced them!
MPW: How well did you know Jeff Nuttall? Did you encounter his My Own Mag –which he describes as being designed to “counteract the optimistic refusal of unpleasantness” through “nausea and flagrant scatology as a violent means of presentation” (p. 151, Bomb Culture)?
Nuttall was on the mailing list of Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma documents; did you encounter these avant-gardist texts yourself? Was it just a question of your being around the same loosely affiliated groups of people such as the bookstores Better Books or Indica or Unicorn?
Moorcock: Knew them all, but thought most were bullshit artists. That’s the truth of it, though I liked Jeff. Got My Own Mag regularly. Supported some of the “alternative” stuff but I was using girly mags like Golden Nugget to promote Burroughs and others in the “real” world, as I saw it. Rather irritated by the likes of MOM.
Too much theory, not enough practice for us. We tended to produce fiction and sometimes poetry or even non-fiction and see how it ran. Theory followed, if at all. We were nearly all working writers — Ballard, myself, [Langdon] Jones, [Barrington] Bayley and so on — and weren’t too easy around grants and academies. Just how it was. I did get all that stuff but passed it on to others mostly. Lot more beer involved with Jeff than suited me.
We were puritanical snobs for the most part. Trocchi, like Heathcote Williams, was tiresome personally. They tended to cultivate us I suspect because we represented a wider public they wanted to reach.
I wasn’t at that Edinburgh conference [the 1962 International Writers’ Conference, at which Burroughs spoke and because of which Burroughs was made famous]. I was probably still writing comics then.
I avoided them for the most part, just as I refused offers to teach and so on. I felt there was only one way to teach — by example or through publication. It was important to us that New Worlds had regular newsstand distribution. Apart from Ballard getting involved with Ambit, after his failure to edit Science Fantasy (!), we didn’t have that much to do with the lit mags. [Thomas] Disch was more eager to appear in Transatlantic or Paris Review, but I was never attracted in that direction. Did stuff for Ambit only because Jimmy [Ballard] asked me to.
MPW: Where did your views of 1960s culture and counterculture gel most with and/or differ from those of Burroughs on a personal level?
Moorcock: I don’t think we had much in the way of differences. He, like us, was interested in taking conventions and ideas of sf and making them work in modern fiction. We saw sf as a way of making contemporary fiction better able to confront contemporary issues. We were happy to interact with the counter culture, but were not wholly of it, if that makes sense. Burroughs, Ballard, Bayley and self all had our own agendas as writers. We didn’t see ourselves as part of a movement. We were trying to make our own stuff work. Absurdism was part of that, of course. We were generally a bit older than most of the guys doing IT, FRENDZ and so on. These people were mostly enthusiasts, publicists, journalists. We were almost equally inspired by Borges, in looking for ways of addressing literary problems. Magic realism became another method or group of methods, of course. But my Cornelius books had only certain fundamentals in common with Ballard’s “condensed novels” or Burroughs’s cut-ups.
MPW: Burroughs must’ve had something of a complex image already built up in your mind when you met him. How did you find him? And what are the circumstances of your introducing Burroughs to Arthur C. Clarke? It certainly sounds like a potentially formidable meeting.
Moorcock: I met Burroughs through John Calder, I think. Bill was a bit formal. I was a little disappointed, to be honest, because Bill was more laid back than I was at the time, being very engaged with confronting the world, whereas he was more detached and amused by it. I already knew Arthur since I was a kid. We’d always got on well. (See my memoir of Arthur in The Guardian).
How I introduced them was simple. I was persuaded to hold a party at which Judy Merril could meet some of the people she was enthusiastic about. So I did. Arthur and Bill came to the party — there were, of course, a lot of other writers and artists etc. there — and I introduced them.
MPW: You have mentioned practice as the most important impulse behind the innovations of the 1960s — yours and those of your contemporaries – was this how you promoted Burroughs at the time, as an experimental practitioner?
Moorcock: As someone showing the way, yes.
MPW: There were strongly worded debates between the writers and the modes of more experimental writing you included in New Worlds and some members of the established audience. They seem to boil down to the question of artistic value (or of the values promoted through art). You have described to Colin Greenland (ICA Guardian Conversations) how you felt at the time that a significant part of this audience had a fundamentally conservative attitude: was a writer like Burroughs a help or a hindrance in effecting a positive change in attitude? Or did it signal a change of audience?
Moorcock: Genre audiences are always conservative — including the audience for the modern literary genre exemplified by the likes of Ian McEwan and the average Booker [Prize] contender. I thought I could persuade an sf audience to look at things less conservatively and by and large I was proven wrong. I succeeded with some readers, but my policy was to run relatively conventional fiction in with unconventional fiction, in the hope of familiarising readers with newer stuff. I’d succeeded in changing attitudes on Tarzan and helped do it on Sexton Blake, so knew you could familiarise conservative readers with new stuff — but, of course, we were trying to bring them around to really different stuff and that proved harder. In the end we did have a readership, drawn largely from the counter culture, but we hadn’t brought a huge number of genre fans with us.
MPW: It seems from reading texts like Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, to name two notable examples, that the editorial policy you pursued in New Worlds was very much concerned with extending the kinds of experimental praxis that Burroughs was working with. How much was Burroughs discussed at the time in comparison with such work?
Moorcock: Quite a bit. We all knew Burroughs. Norman more from the US. Barrington Bayley was definitely inspired by him. Ballard and I were less affected by the style, I think. I tried to produce a few “bridge” stories, trying to coax readers over to Burroughs, such as The Deep Fix.
MPW: I would like to conclude on a slightly more speculative note:
A recently published critical anthology entitled Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004) suggests that the practices of Burroughs’ writing have explored or provided groundwork for new ways of theorizing the contemporary globalized world economy. From your own practical written experiment and exploration, do you feel that it is time to re-think our views of the function of literature taking cues from Burroughs? Do you personally find that he has further practical lessons for the contemporary writer?
Moorcock: Well, given the sheer absurdism of “Reaganomics” I think Burroughs did a great job of anticipation. In fact I said as much today on the appropriate bit of my website [see Moorcock’s Miscellany].
As far as Burroughs’s “practical lessons” go, I think any great visionary writer provides us with all kinds of lessons, since he’s going to be infinitely interpretable. As for me, it’s been a long time since I took much in the way of clues from Burroughs but the function of good literature for me has always been to confront received wisdom and I’d say Burroughs’s work certainly continues to do that. You’ve caught me at a time when I’m rediscovering realism, rather than absurdism, so I’m not very focussed on Burroughs at this precise moment. Burroughs is good for thinking about broad ideas but not so good for thinking through ideas concerning observed character. Of course, his instincts were good, so he’s always a good observer in many ways. But at the moment, I’m reading a lot of Balzac, for instance, and am not in much of a Burroughs mood! Another few months, and that might well have changed, of course. Generally, though, Burroughs must always have practical lessons for the contemporary writer.
MPW: In a less linear way I would like to consider Jerry Cornelius against a specifically Burroughsean backdrop.
I think he is a wonderful character, or, as M. John Harrison says, rather, a technique, with myriad applications, including cultural commentary and satire. Although, as you say, the books where he appears only have particular commonalities with those of Burroughs, Jerry himself (or himselves) seems to be the fulfilment or culmination of something that Burroughs was reaching towards with, for instance, the Nova Mob: he acts as something of a “coordinate point” for your fiction.
Moorcock: Certainly for much of it. Perhaps Mrs Cornelius is even more of a coordinate point! Like her, Jerry’s a character as well as a technique. As I said in an introduction, I think to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, at some point Jerry became a real boy. I think Burroughs appealed to me because, like me, he was inclined to create characters who personified certain qualities. Moliere and the Commedia did the same, of course. I didn’t really learn this from Burroughs but I was encouraged to develop the ideas from reading him. Jerry searches for identities, ways of coping in the shifting sands, if you like, of modern times. I’m not sure Burroughs has such a character, apart from himself. It could be that this hangover from modernism (found in Kerouac for instance) held him back from creating a character like Jerry. He tried to find a useful “self” rather than an “other.” Several of the least successful JC stories by different hands also show a similar attempt to turn Jerry into the author (in Jim Sallis’ for instance, which otherwise have considerable merit).
In passing, I always thought Charles Forte was an influence on Burroughs and wonder how much [J. W.] Dunne of An Experiment with Time (an influence on myself, Bayley and others) meant to Burroughs! [RealityStudio: Dunne meant quite a bit to Burroughs. He referred to Dunne in several interviews, including the conversation with Simone Lazzeri Ellis, and discusses him in a number of works, most notably The Third Mind, the essay “Immortality” in The Adding Machine, and the introduction to Charles Gatewood’s Sidetripping.]
MPW: Does it seem like a fair comparison to label Jerry as partly “Burroughsean”? Have others who borrowed Jerry (such as M. John Harrison or Norman Spinrad) made similar comparisons while appropriating him?
Moorcock: Not really. I don’t think Harrison was ever much of a Burroughs fan. Spinrad was, but it was Burroughs’ style and language which really fired him up. Spinrad’s ear was tuned to the street — specifically to the NY street — as mine was tuned to the London street. We were also interested in political language. Burroughs, like Hammett, for instance, taught us to listen. Burroughs pointed us to ways of using our own observations. We sometimes borrowed his rhythms and methods, but I don’t think we borrowed his specific language much. It comes back to what I said earlier about Burroughs being an inspiration more than an influence. I habitually created characters as exemplary figures from Elric on — frequently conflicted or ambiguous characters who could move easily between Law and Chaos, as it were. Seeking a personal position, a bit of firm ground which didn’t shift under us. I found it in Kropotkin, I suppose. I don’t think Burroughs really did that. Maybe his centre was his junk. Not an unfamiliar centre.
MPW: Was your own return to the Western genre (such as Kit Carsons) in your Metatemporal Detective and Corsairs of the 2nd Ether books at all coloured by Burroughs’ Red Night / Western Lands trilogy, particularly The Place of Dead Roads?
Moorcock: No. I have to admit I haven’t read that trilogy. There are very few writers I’ve read in their entirety. I was influenced only by boyhood reading, of my interest in Western mythology, which was one of my main reasons for moving to Texas. I wrote westerns and features about the west for Tarzan Adventures, long before I found Burroughs! That was all part of my revisiting (in 2nd Ether and MD) boyhood influences like Clarence E. Mulford, author of the Hopalong Cassidy books.
MPW: And finally, how would you as a writer explain the impact and import of someone like Burroughs to new readers today who might discover him for the first time?
Moorcock: I would hope Burroughs would act as inspiration to a new generation discovering him, as I did, on their own. Of course, I remain a publicist for Burroughs and he is certainly quite as relevant to modern times as he was to 45 years ago. Like all great writers, Burroughs is always relevant to changing times but I would argue that he is particularly relevant to a readership which has witnessed, in high relief, the rapacity of business and the authoritarian tendency of government. His borrowing, from Bayley, of the “star virus” metaphor must also be especially meaningful!
Burroughs’s vision of society, his absurdist take on it, is likely to win him a considerable number of new readers today who are questioning the accepted wisdom of the past thirty years, just as we were questioning the received wisdom of the years leading up to the sixties. I’m finding, I think, receptive ears amongst newer readers. Maybe we’re even on the brink of some sort of genuine spontaneous renaissance, as we were around the time Kennedy was elected? Obama might act as a similar symbol. Let’s hope he survives a lot longer than Kennedy! And we could certainly do with some fresh vitality in modern popular music!
Mark P. Williams has studied at the University of Hull and the University of Warwick and is in the process of completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia on “fantasy and the body politic in contemporary genre fiction” looking at the work of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville.
He has contributed papers to conferences on Science Fiction, globalization and literature, millennial fictions, the literary canon, the literary response to 9/11, and co-organised a conference on Michael Moorcock at Liverpool John Moores.
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