Studs Terkel‘s 1975, interview with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs continues from here
ST: Since Allen has brought up the subject of mantras and the harmonium, that’s an early British, and later American, instrument – the idea of many cultures are involved. The impact of the East upon Western technology has also had an impact on your writings, hasn’t it, Bill? And Allen?
WSB: Well, certainly I think more impact on Allen’s writing than on mine.
AG: Oh, yes. Yes, I did indeed. Yes, I did, and I’ve been very much influenced by my experience there, by Moroccan music, and… the whole Arab, the whole Arab culture.
ST: Can I ask this question of Bill Burroughs? What is that led you.. this is a tough one, Bill Burroughs, St. Louis, of (a) rather wealthy background, IBM, yourself, led you, not simply to writing, but to that area, to that North African, quote unquote, exotic area, away from what could be a much more conventional life?
WSB: Well, the conventional life was actually not all that available to me. I graduated from Harvard during the Depression,when a Harvard degree meant very little. And while my grandfather was the inventor of the adding machine, my family got almost nothing out of it, so we were.. could never have been described as wealthy. And, by the time I went to North Africa, I’d already written this book, Junkie, and had the experiences that are described in there, and I was more or less, should we say, committed to writing. And I had read Paul Bowles’ books about Tangier, and it sounded like a very fascinating place, and I must say it fully lived up to expectations when I got there.
ST: I think Bill Burroughs’ book Naked Lunch….
AG: Bill had lived in Mexico also before for a little
WSB: Yes, I lived in Mexico for about three years.
ST: Naked Lunch was one of the earliest, one of the most vivid, was it not, description of the nature of dope on a guy, wasn’t it?
AG: Well, more and more the nature of addiction, but not really dope addiction, but power addiction.
ST: How? Go ahead.
AG: Money addiction..Petrochemical addiction. Control addiction as Bill develops it in his later, later work after The Wild Boys.
WSB: I was struck by some pictures of Nixon during the Watergate, and he looked just like a sick addict. This power falling away from him.
AG: Withdrawal symptoms?
WSB: Yes. And I’ve had Life (and) Time photographers describe to me the terrible withdrawal symptoms when their expense account was withdrawn!
ST: Wow! Aren’t we talking now about the connection, (remember the play of Jack Gelber?) – we’re talking about everybody has a connection. Nobody has an addiction with religion. When you say power. Power, of course, is the, perhaps the most powerful of all addictions.
WSB: Well, remember, the effect of opiates is to sort of encase you, to cover you, to protect you, and exactly the same power and money do exactly the same thing. And if that cover is withdrawn, then you’re.. you have the withdrawal symptoms, the extreme sensitivity.
AG: So I think more.. listening to Bill read at Northwestern University last night, I get more and more struck with a central metaphor of his work, which is that as he himself underwent the withdrawal symptoms from opium addiction and went through the psychological transformation to get clean, de-addicting himself, he also got a tremendous amount of insight into the very basic mechanisms of addiction in American society. And that’s the central metaphor of most of his work through Exterminator! and Wild Boys. [Allen tuns to William Burroughs] – Do you have any passages that you could read during the program, sometime that could exemplify that at all?
ST: As we go along..
WSB: I was just trying to think. You mean exemplify the nature of addiction?.
AG: Yeah, as it applies in American society outside of dope. I remember in Naked Lunch there is the great phrase that (goes, let’s see..) “selling is as much of a habit as using“.
WSB: Selling is more of a habit than using. [Editorial note -In Naked Lunch, Burroughs writes, “Selling is more of a habit than using,’ Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick“].
AG: ..And then there’s a further metaphor that the police, like the Drug Enforcement Agency, (such as the people that are now (May 1975) attacking Hugh Hefner), are precisely addicted, like junkies, to power, and to their power over other people in their power, to, to create paranoia in other people and to dominate other people. It’s like..
WSB: And also, it’s true with power that the more you exercise power, addiction that is, the deeper you get into it, the more difficult it becomes to get out of it because you will be exposed to all of the bad karma that you built up.
ST: In our very city, in our city at this moment, Richard J. Daley, perhaps is a.. if there were a flesh-and blood-metaphor, it is (a) stroke,(at) 72, but by God, he’s gonna show ’em! – and of course he did, you see..
AG : He’s gonna hang around ’til that happens!
ST: ..no matter what!, you see. The city could be destroyed, (it) doesn’t matter. It’s this addiction toward power is perhaps the most.. – You said will it sell, of course selling, too. We think of a tv commercial of course, I guess the most pervasive single phenomenon visually of our life.
AG: Well, conspicuous consumption itself is precisely that addiction to the over-accumulation and consumption of material junk around us
ST: Well, just as Bill Burroughs is haunted and is so eloquent and creative in describing addiction and power..
AG: Reading his passage there
ST: ..And you, yourself, and in your case, similar, (and yet from Paterson to different parts of the world, and listening to the harmonium and “OM)”, I suppose.. Am I assuming your attempt to overlay it with a certain peaceful.. that is, to make it non-aggressive, to make life non-aggressive..
AG; You know, Bill and I have known each other thirty years or more. Bill was my first guru, so to speak, or one of my first teachers, both literarily and psychologically. We met in 1944, Christmas in New York, and my intellectual development was really supervised by him when I was in school. And then he was in, so to speak, exile for many years in Europe. And I was holding forth here in Chicago but bearing a good deal of his basic ideas in mind because he influenced my development, and one of the first things he taught me was to de-addict myself from language – that language itself was an addiction, and that we were all addicted to a ticker-tape repetition of conditioned concepts and words running through our heads, determining our thoughts, feelings, and apparent sensory impressions even, so that I branched out into the study of Buddhism and mantra as sort of applications of examination of my own consciousness and clarification and cleaning up of my unconsciousness. So I practice silence or practice mantra as a way of blanking out, like “OM” sort of or “AH!“ purifies the speech, because it’s like a white sound that turns off all the other chattering and leaves an empty space to appreciate.
WSB: Well, it’s to be remembered that.. sound, words are actual painkillers, that they can, dentists can operate, and even minor surgery can be performed just with music through headphones.
AG: Or hypnotic, or hypnotic suggestion.
WSB: So that certainly one of the.. one of the basic mechanisms of compulsive verbalization is as a pain.. that it’s a painkiller. It is literally junk.
ST: That’s junk, too. That’s interesting. Language is junk.
AG: Right.
ST: Yeah, language as dope.
AG: So who controls the supply?
WSB: What if it comes compulsive?
ST: Now we come.. there’s a phrase “long ago..”
WSB: Who’s the pusher?
ST: Yeah, who controls – wait, who..
AG: You remember The Selling of the President, the selling of the concepts and images say of Nixon, or the role of the mass media in selling images and words to the public?, but that’s Bill’s expertise there
ST: So that’s interesting – who, who sells the language, who conditions you to think or use a certain phrase? And so this is interesting, language as junk. And so, in a way, Bill Burroughs played a role in de-addicting you from the use of what might be considered banal language, or the accepted traditional language, which is junk.
AG: Conditioned language.
ST: Conditioned
AG: Habitual language. Habit language, right, we got, language habit
WSB: Habit language, and above all, compulsive language
AG: Right, right.
ST: I was thinking, since you two speak of, you speak of early meetings, when Allen Ginsberg was here for the Big Table, Paul Carroll’s Big Table, under attack by the, by the Comstocks of our day.
AG: For the language, for the breakthrough of language
ST: For the use of language
AG: Precisely
ST: Several benefits. They…
AG: They were trying to control the language in Chicago in ’59.
ST: And this was 1959.
AG: Right.
ST: And you were here in the studio, another studio we had. You came with Gregory Corso and Orlovsky, Peter Orlovsky.
AG: Peter
ST: And now suppose we hear a part of that?
AG: Yeah, but I should say just before we..
ST: Why don’t..
AG: That the reason we came was that Chicago Review was going to publish the first large section of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch ever to be published in America, and that was being banned.
WSB: Or anywhere else.
AG: Or..
ST: Oh,
AG: That was the reason we came
WSB: First publication was at the University of Chicago.
ST: It was.
WSB: And that led, that led directly to the publication of the, of the novel in, by Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press in Paris in 1959. That is, he heard about this case, and that aroused in him…
ST: Oh, so Chicago then really played a role?
AG: Immense.
WSB: A vital role. A vital role.
ST: Become a landmark book.
AG: And the reason that Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso and myself came here was to give a big reading to raise money to publish the work under the title Big Table magazine when Chicago Review wouldn’t publish it.
ST: So this conversation we’re having in this March morning of 1975 is really a part of a continuity, isn’t it?
AG: Completely part of an old continuity that goes back from ’59, it goes up to ’68 to a tear- gas-filled lobby in Lincoln Park when we were still chanting “Om” and trying to get our language across.
ST: 59,‘ this was.. the phrase, (we’ll ask about Bill Burroughs’ contribution to this movement), “Beat Generation” was just new at the time, it had come into being, and we’ll hear Allen describing it in contrast to the previous so-called “Lost Generation.“ We hear this, this is “59
AG: Let’s hear what I said.
[Terkel plays recording from earlier interview]
“(So I’m)..saying, well, if the other generation was a lost generation, what would people be naming this generation? But it was just like a goofy conversation. It wasn’t a big, serious, formal, let-us-now-give-a-formal-name-to-a-generation (as if there is such a thing as “a generation”!).
ST: You won’t be cubby-holed in other words. I mean, this is just a label.
AG: Well, it’s a label that’s been picked up, but it is, it’s a, it’s actually quite a beautiful label. In a way. It’s poetically interesting. The remark is interesting. Kerouac said, “Well, this then would be a Beat generation, let’s say I, everybody’s, beat, everybody’s sort of worn down to a point where they’ll be able to receive God”.
ST: Well, let’s feel free in this, let’s make this a roundtable with Paul and Gregory and Allen.
Gregory Corso Peter. Peter.
ST: Peter, I beg your pardon. Peter Orlovsky.
GC: Peter Orlovsky is a Russian angel, he’s a Russian
ST: Russian angel in America.
GC: Yes, and he’s come to Chicago to save Chicago.
Studs Terkel: You’re coming to save Chicago.
Gregory Corso : unintelligible saving, it’s going to be saved here. There’s a great tensity here. We feel it.
ST: And you want to save Chicago.
GC: No, no, I don’t want
ST: No, no, but
GC: I want to see Al Capone’s old heritage. I really dig him, you know, I pay homage to him.
ST: You pay homage to Al Capone. Once upon a time there was an evangelist here named Gypsy Smith, who sought to save Chicago by parading down Chicago’s Red Light District year ago.
GC: Oh, but nothing like that. Nothing ostentatious like that.
AG: Naked?
ST: No, parade down naked, no, but on the subject of nakedness, that, we’ll come to that as we go along. Let’s dig further. Allen started, but with Gregory and
GC: Well, ask me
ST: Peter.
GC: See how I..
ST: Ask the question
GC: Don’t make me embarrassed
ST: And then it became a rather wild and very, very funny conversation. And the poetry came in, and Allen ended by saying, we asked about definitions of various things, and you were saying “Death is a letter that was never sent.”
AG: Yes. Actually, I was quoting a line of a poem that I’d written, saying, “Death is a letter that was never sent.” And I think Gregory said “Fried Shoes” as a definition of poetry, and, you know, a very odd thing, that was, this conversation and other conversations of that time was picked up by the, by Time magazine and sprayed around America, what was a somewhat ugly version of the conversations, which was actually quite charming, as we hear it now, but unconsciously, it penetrated to a lot of young people, and ten years later, in conversation with Bob Dylan, he told me that reports of these conversations that he’d read turned him on when in.. where he was in his little home
ST: Duluth, Minnesota [sic – Dylan was born in Duluth, then moved to Hibbing, Montana].
AG: That there were other people out there in America just like him! And so that was like a little inspiration for him to turn on to.
ST: (We) come again, don’t we, to something here, Bill, I get, I said, I use the word “continuity” earlier, there’s a flow, there is a flow, whether some trying to stem it or not, it continues. It goes on.
WSB: Yes, even by trying to stem it they often, particularly of course the media is very double-edged – that is, Time was allegedly very opposed to us, but certainly they did a lot to,.. to spread these concepts.
ST: As, as the word, well, a word that’s not used today, “Beat generation”, used then in ’59, I suppose the meaning has a.. it’s jazz word, a beat, jazz word. It’s also…
WSB: Well,
ST: ..,a word that has a feeling of tiredness, as being.. what else?
AG: I said in that conversation.. beat down in the sense of dark night of the soul, but then also opening the soul to receive God, which was my sort of crude terminology of those days. I would probably say now, leaving the soul open to the great spacious, uh, emptiness that we share..
ST: How did you..
AG: …or the silence that..
ST: There again we come to Bill Burroughs and yourself, Allen, you said he was one of your.. he was your earliest guru, and..
AG: I was camping a bit when I said “guru”, my old teacher friend here.
ST: I know, but he was an influence on you, an influence on you. (to WSB) How did you, become involved in what was called the “Beat Generation”? You were one of the seminal figures there?
WSB: Well, through my association with, with Allen, with Gregory..
AG: Kerouac
WSB: …and Kerouac. But I myself was in Europe from, let me see, about..
AG: Fifty-four?
WSB: Oh no..even that..
AG: Tangier, you were in Tangier, weren’t you?
WSB: Well..yeah.. From almost from 1950…
AG: It was a time that you were in New York with me in ’53 we put together The Yage Letters book that we..
WSB: That, I was here for about – or rather in New York – for several months at that time, and then I was out of the country while all this was going on while the reading started in the Village in New York.
ST: I’m thinking also..
AG: There was a great climactic reading was the one here in Chicago that got national attention, and that was all over your work.
ST: That was in all.. That was again 1959. By the way, the influence of Allen Ginsberg and Bill Burroughs is not simply American. It’s because there you were in different countries and there were tremendous events in which you took part in other countries.
AG: Occasionally, yeah, that I was involved with – in Prague, in 1965 on May Day, with a, during a time of thaw before the Russian tanks rolled in, simultaneous with the tear gas in Chicago in ’68. There was a thaw in Chicago – in Chicago? – In Prague!.
ST: That’s interesting. I remember Chicago was called Prague at the time. Prague ’68
AG: Well, the same things happening, like the student rebellions and the tanks rolling in. But I was part of, like. a student demonstration on May Day 1965 in Prague where I was elected the May King. They hadn’t had those May King central European elections, which is an old traditional thing, since the Nazi times, and then since the Communist times, and it was a thaw, and I was in Prague and so got elected, and got involved with a sort of a rock ‘n’ roll spiritual empire, and then expelled from Prague by the Communists, as I’d just been expelled from Cuba several months earlier.. and then wound up in London seeing Bill, at big parties with Bill, and Mick Jagger, and the Beatles, in the mid-‘Sixties in London.
ST: Now, I was thinking before we hear more readings from Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs from their work…
AG: Well, Bill found you, found a text there that we could use.
WSB: Well.
AG: About the control thing?
ST: Before that, let’s take a slight pause now here for what is known as the message and then we’ll return with a.. and also perhaps asking Allen, or Bill, particularly Allen, about art, his work, and life itself, and indeed politics, too. So we’ll return in a moment after this message.
to be continued