Naked Lunch and New York
“After I became addicted in New York in 1944, things began to happen…”
Naked Lunch begins in or perhaps underneath New York in a Greenwich Village subway station (”vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train…”). The “last” chapter, “Hauser and O’Brien,” is situated in the Hotel Lamprey, an imaginary way station on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. These two locales bookend William Burroughs’ masterwork, frame it as a story about New York. The city is a persistent point of reference (”Istanbul has more heroin junkies than NYC”). It is in New York cafeterias that heroin addicts wait for their dealers and in a New York nightspot that A.J. performs his outrages (”On opening night of the New York Metropolitan, A. J., protected by bug repellent, released a swarm of Xiucutils.”). Naked Lunch even transports one incident that really occurred in Paris, as Oliver Harris has shown, to a New York location. What was it about the city that was so important to Burroughs?
Certainly Burroughs had spent formative, critical years in what has long been America’s largest city. He lived primarily in Manhattan from 1939 - 1946, occupying a series of apartments in Greenwich Village and on the Upper West Side. (See this Google map for exact locations.) It was in the streets near Washington Square and in the blocks surrounding Columbia University that he formed important bonds with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joan Vollmer. He served summonses to far-flung boroughs during his brief stint as a detective and then returned to Manhattan to undergo psychoanalysis on therapists’ couches. He ate at the Harvard Club then slummed through junk neighborhoods, picking up his first habit — the ur-addiction — and the criminal argot that he would deploy with such force in his writing.
Joe Gould, a post-war Greenwich Village character… Naked Lunch: “And the fruit is thinking: ‘What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark’s about this one.’ He’s a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould’s seagull act…” (Photo from Collier’s, 29 Nov 1947)
However, it was not at the Chelsea Hotel, as the uninformed sometimes state, that Burroughs wrote “the endless novel which will drive everybody mad” (Allen Ginsberg). Except for a brief visit in the autumn of 1954, during which he stayed at the enormous St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, Burroughs was not in New York while writing the fragments and letters that ultimately became Naked Lunch. New York was in Burroughs, though. While in Mexico, he wrote about the city in Junky. While in Tangier, he wrote about it in Naked Lunch. In both books he included real-life New Yorkers such as Phil White (aka The Sailor) and Bill Garver (aka Bill Gains). No doubt it was New York and not St Louis that furnished the urbanity of the “city feller” (”dressed kinda flashy” and toting “a RX for a mason jar of morphine”) who appears at the rural County Clerk’s office.
Just what sort of New York is it that Naked Lunch describes? By and large its Gotham resembles the Composite City. It is a network of itinerant spaces — hotels, lunchrooms, street corners, parks, subways and stations — linked by an underground river of heroin. There is an almost complete lack of Big Apple landmarks. There is no Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, or Radio City Music Hall. The United Nations, whose flagship East River headquarters was not completed until 1950, merits one mention in Naked Lunch: “Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums…. shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances.” (Burroughs situated another mini-routine at the United Nations — “The plague break out in the lobby of the U.N.” — in the “WORD” manuscript omitted from Naked Lunch.) There is also a passing reference to the Brooklyn Bridge, seen from what was likely the vantage point of the apartment that Burroughs briefly rented on Henry Street.
Burroughs’ New York was not the place found in tourist brochures. It was rather like the “Letter from Tangier” he wanted to write and sell to some glossy magazine. Even if it began with concrete places or images, he seemed unable to prevent it from devolving into routines. For example, in 1947 he took a boyfriend, Jack Andersen, to a room in the Taft Hotel on 7th Avenue. A house detective burst in, found the two naked in bed, and proceeded to upbraid Burroughs (”Didn’t anyone ever kick the shit out of you?”). It’s an event that Burroughs reworks multiple times in Naked Lunch.
A House Dick with cigar two feet long sticks his head in through the wall: “Have you got a menagerie in here?”
Sex with a replica is strictly forbidden and almost universally practiced. There are queer bars where shameless citizens openly consort with their replicas. House detectives stick their heads into hotel rooms saying: “Have you got a replica in here?”
And of course the Hauser and O’Brien chapter begins with the two detectives waltzing into William Lee’s hotel room with a pass key. The reader gets the sense that this paradigm — the permeability of doors and walls — was a traumatic memory from New York that Burroughs kept finding new ways to express even in Tangier.
If that specific memory was difficult, however, it did not tarnish Burroughs’ overall view of New York. After his 1954 visit, he wrote something of a love letter not just to Ginsberg but to Gotham, stating “I really can’t make it in U.S. anymore. Only in N.Y., which is something special and not pure U.S.” To a Gothamite, the words strongly evoke “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, / It’s up to you, New York, New York.” Burroughs wasn’t quoting the Frank Sinatra hit, which wasn’t composed until the 1970s, but by then he had returned to the city and was indeed making it.
(Text: Supervert)
