The Humanity of the Machine

THE BEAT HOTEL

Acknowledging that the quality of love in Paris
Ah but our love is the first the best
But many have loved before us
Paris et ses amants merveilleux
Say you come unattached and even if you don't
And you want to be one or two of them
Unless Love the traitor
Do you want to be a lover in Paris?
Fall in love in Paris

One day Piero Heliczer and I got jobs selling The Paris Review. It was Nelson Aldrich's idea. They went like hotcakes. We'd sell out the current issue, then sell out the stock of back issues. He and his girl Olivia d'Hauleville and I would work the cafes on the Boulevard St.Germain and now and then spend an evening doing the Champs Elysées and Montmartre, and suddenly I had money. Instead of sleeping on benches and under bridges I was able to rent a room at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur. That was in 1958, and I was twenty-one. Soon Tove and I found each other in the Rue de Seine. The night she and I took a blanket and lay on the old city wall of Paris in the light of the full moon and courted Gregory Corso wrote on my door, "All's twig smear and cordury eggs." Later he used the twig smear in his poem "Marriage." Living in Paris was definitely low-tech, but with a lot of often protracted use of the simple mechanical system of a piston sliding in a lubricated cylinder. Tove and I moved into No. 28 where we lived for about a year and a half. The room was larger but dank, only a brief stripe of sunlight on the tile floor in the summer. We lived on my G.I. Bill and Tove's earnings cleaning house for an American SHAPE major who called his wife Pickle Puss. During the summer vacation months we'd sell The Paris Review and the New York Harald Tribune, and earn money making chalk drawings on the Pont des Arts. Tove was pregnant.

The Americans involved in the scene at the hotel had come from backgrounds having all of the technical amenities twentieth-century American society could offer. Yet we were happy with the conditions we had settled into in Paris.

An artist is never poor, as they say. But not many Americans who haven't experienced it know what French thrift is, and Madame Rachou was frugal. In the rooms there was lukewarm water in the faucets three times a week, and only a single dim light bulb. The first time Tove and I started our little portable record player the light went out. We had to pay more in rent for the slightly higher wattage Madame Rachou installed in the open-filament fuse on her switchboard downstairs. But we had unlimited, gratis use of the piston sliding in a lubricated cylinder.

There were typewriters to be heard at the hotel, mine was an Olivetti portable that belonged to Suzy Shawn, one of painter Ben Shawn's toothsome daughters. I was writing The Arboretum on it. But Bill Burroughs had the only tape recorder. I was living at the hotel when Naked Lunch was published by Olympia Press. He had written this novel, which was a sensation, using the tape recorder for his cut-and-paste technique. I remember his machine, the battered leatherette. I think he bought it at the fleamarket. I don't know if the Burroughs Corporation ever manufactured dictation devices. Be that as it may, in 1958 William Burroughs was not an old guy, the man was forty-four years old and there was nothing ginger-gimcrack about his using a tape recorder. It was advanced stuff. The device was a tool he required to do the kind of writing he wanted to do.

Meanwhile Naked Lunch has a leitmotif that may have been overlooked in the assessments, and that is the distancing from the anatomical human organism. This phenomenon was examined in a book by the German writer Paul Alsberg: Das Menschkeitsrätsel (Dresden 1922), quoted by Otto Rank. It concerns the development of man characterized as ever increasing elimination of the body, eliminated parts being replaced by a tool, a process affecting spiritual as well as technical achievements, the development of language, etc. This effort to eliminate the organism, to circumvent its functions through the use of drugs, for example, or through a machine, permeates Naked Lunch with an apotheosis in the housewife who objects when the kitchen appliance starts "getting physical." Many people, including many women, find it hard to believe that human beings procreate themselves the way they necessarily do, just like animals. This reluctance to accept the sloppy facts of human reproduction is part of our culture. It's in the first chapters of Genesis, and it's in Naked Lunch in the afterbirths and the trafficking in slunks, not to mention "Lucy Brandshinkel's cunt saignant" (note the masculine ending).

I wonder how many people who have read Naked Lunch are aware that Clem and Jody, the couple of characters who sell defective U.S. military gear to Third World governments, are persons Burroughs knew.

It's said that Francois Villon lived at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur. Up in the garret of the hotel, like a starving inventor making something that would go bang, Gregory Corso was writing BOMB. He had a few folio sheets of paper spread out on the floor and was putting the lines down mushroom cloud-shaped. It may be that in New York every Lower East Side apartment has a bathtub with two chickens and cheap electric power, but on the Left Bank in Paris the streets are plangent with philosophy. After writing BOMB Gregory split for Lappland, and Jonathan Kozol took over the garret. He had published The Fume of Poppies and was working on another novel . He and Herb Kohl arrived from Oxford, where they had done the unprecedented and dumped their Rhodes Scholarships for ideological reasons. That winter a couple of nights a week Herb Kohl, constantly combatting his asthma, would hold forth on Ludvig Wittgenstein up in Jon's room. We sat around on the floor under blankets as he read from the Tractatus and the blue and brown books, as the wind howled in the roofs and chimneys of Paris.

Now and then Tove and I would visit Jim and Gloria Jones in their nearby apartment. Jim was writing The Thin Red Line. It was interesting to see how this famous writer worked. He sat at the typewriter in a bare room for three hours every morning without brooking interruptions or touching drink and wrote finished copy. Jim would encourage me to read to him from the draft of The Arboretum. Later, when they were moving into their spread on Isle St. Louis, Gloria showed me the mammoth electric hot water heater in the bathroom, and explained that Jim wanted it because when he was writing From Here to Eternity he lived in a trailer and he had never had enough hot water.

There are some inventions that are remarkable for their sheer humanity. One of them is the telephone. Another is the bicycle. William S. Burroughs's use of the tape recorder to create literature was a remarkably human application of the machine. Recently, so as to process my typewritten notes on the computer, I bought a Hewlett Packard flatbed scanner with OCR software. The damn thing can read.

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