shhh.... "Mary is strapping on a rubber p*nis...."
diane
Kerouac collection. This is where I hang out when I come to New York,
in the Berg Collection under a library lamp, wearing white cotton
gloves, poring over yellowed pieces of paper with notes written in
pencil or pen or on a typewriter:
For those of you who are offshore, I append the whole article below:
March 1, 2006
Public Library Buys a Trove of Burroughs Papers
By EDWARD WYATT
In Folio 110 of a meticulously constructed, voluminous personal
archive, William S. Burroughs offers a fanciful autobiographical sketch
that is part "Junky," part "Naked Lunch."
"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and
famous," he wrote in an unpublished essay that serves as a sort of
cornerstone for the archive. "They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon
smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in
Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy
and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hasiesh and
languidly caressing a pet gazelle. ..."
It is a comic, facile portrait of one of the triumvirate of Beat
Generation greats who, with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, defined
writing and critiqued contemporary culture beginning in the 1950's.
Burroughs has long been the least known of the three. But that is soon
likely to change.
The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has
purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg
Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will
make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac's literary and
personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the
Beats.
Burroughs is best known as the author of the hallucinogenic,
drug-addled novel "Naked Lunch," which was banned in Boston on
obscenity charges in 1962 and then, in a reversal, won a landmark
censorship ruling by the Massachusetts courts in 1966. His other books
include, among others, "The Soft Machine" and "The Ticket That
Exploded."
The Burroughs archive contains 11,000 pages of manuscript and
typescript material, including draft versions and notes for virtually
all of Burroughs's works through 1972, said Isaac Gewirtz, curator of
the Berg Collection. Most of the material in the archive from the
1960's and 70's has never been seen, except by Burroughs and his
contemporaries.
In addition, the archive includes typescripts and manuscripts for
numerous unpublished works, which Burroughs organized by date or
subject matter or whim into numbered folios, or folders; some 3,000
pages of highly personal literary and artistic correspondence,
collages, dream calendars, diaries, notebooks, more than 50 hours of
unreleased tape recordings and hundreds of photographs by and of
Burroughs, who died in 1997.
"This archive has really achieved legendary status among people who
follow the Beat writers," Mr. Gewirtz said in an interview in the
stately reading room that serves as home to the Berg Collection at the
library's landmark building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
"Of the tens of thousands of pages, only literally a handful have ever
been seen, and only a very few quoted from," he said.
The archive has had two previous owners besides the author: Roberto
Altmann, a collector from Liechtenstein who bought it from Burroughs
and who apparently never opened most of the cartons of material, and
Robert H. Jackson of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who with his wife, Donna L.
Jackson, is a noted book and art collector but who has allowed only
limited access to the archive. The library purchased the collection
from Mr. Jackson for an undisclosed amount. The contents will most
likely be available to researchers beginning early next year.
Though scholars have never seen most of the material, they were made
tantalizingly aware of its existence by Burroughs himself, who
published a descriptive catalog of the archive in 1973. Oliver C. G.
Harris, a professor of American literature at Keele University in
Staffordshire, England, who edited a collection of Burroughs's letters
published by Viking in 1993, said the material was the Holy Grail of
scholars of the Beat generation.
"My sense is that it will really change the picture of Burroughs that
scholars have known," Mr. Harris said, because that picture has been
based almost exclusively on Burroughs's work in the 1950's. Much of his
more avant-garde experiments, including most of his cut-ups - works
created by slicing typewritten text into fragments and rearranging it
to create a new narrative - came later, in the 1960's and 1970's.
"No one has really done a scholarly job on those periods because it was
not possible," Mr. Harris said.
Much of the archive sheds light on the relationship between Burroughs
and the others of the Beat generation, including Timothy Leary, Paul
Bowles, Gregory Corso, Terry Southern, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, of
course, Kerouac and Ginsberg.
Some of the material, particularly portions of Burroughs's
correspondence with Ginsberg, has been published elsewhere, but there
could well be undiscovered gems in the new material - like the 1959
letter from Ginsberg in which he refers to his work on a new poem about
his mother, "which is better than 'Howl.' " That new work became
"Kaddish."
"The archive is particularly interesting because Burroughs clearly
intended it to be read and absorbed as a work of art," Mr. Gewirtz
said. Handwritten notes by Burroughs adorn many of the folios of
written material, explaining the contents, and the author often added
collages of photographs, newspaper clippings or other media to the
folders.
The front of Folio 110, for example, contains a collage of photographs
of places relevant to the different periods of Burroughs's writing,
including Tangier; St. Louis, where Burroughs was born in 1914; and
Lower Manhattan, where he lived in the 1970's.
But while the organization of the material and brief descriptions of
the contents have been known since the publication of the descriptive
catalog in 1973, scholars could find new relevance in Burroughs's
choices.
"There are things from two different works sometimes jammed together in
a folio, either because they were produced that way or because
Burroughs wanted to show thematic similarities," Mr. Gewirtz said. For
example, Folio 5 includes a typescript of "The Wild Boys: A Book of the
Dead," published by Grove in 1971. But other fragments of "The Wild
Boys" are found, Mr. Gewirtz said, throughout the archive.
The third great collection of Beat materials, the Ginsberg archive,
resides not in New York but at Stanford University, which bought the
collection in 1994. In an interview that year with The New York Times
about the Stanford purchase, Ginsberg, who died in 1997, said he would
have been happier if his collection had ended up in New York,
specifically at the Berg, which he said passed on the purchase.
Mr. Gewirtz said that, of course, the library would have liked to
purchase the Ginsberg archive. But he said that Ginsberg wanted to
complete the sale quickly and that the library was unable to arrange
financing for a deal in time.
"It's one of the things that happens sometimes," he said, noting that
the Berg Collection includes a fair number of letters written by
Ginsberg. For now, the library is content with the Kerouac and
Burroughs archives, he said, adding, "This will be the place in the
world to come to study the Beats."