“Hello, Bill,” he croaked.
“Hello, Bill,” I echoed.
“Where did you get that manuscript of The Wild Boys?” he asked.
“From Gerrit Komrij.”
“Who’s that?” He cried out with exasperated incredulity.
“He’s Maurice Girodias’ agent in Holland.”
“You mean Maurice gave you permission to publish it?”
“Well, not exactly,” I sputtered. Even back then, Burroughs and I had known each other a long while, over a decade. We had first become acquainted in 1960 and in 1961 at the now famous, albeit then deeply shabby “Beat Hotel” on rue Git le Coeur in Paris, had seen each other in New York at his loft on Centre Street and also often in England, and he had generously given me manuscripts to publish in other magazines I edited, The Insect Trust Gazette(USA) and International Times (London).
“Your book came up at a dinner party. I asked to read the manuscript and Maurice gave his agent, this Komrij, permission to give it to me. I took it on my own to publish it,” I admitted. “Out of admiration for your work, Bill. I wasn’t trying to harm you.”
“I know. I know,” he said. “It’s just that I have a contract with Girodias and want to get out of it. He owns all the foreign rights but must have individual permission from me, or my agent. This might be the loophole I can use.”
~
We left it at that, but more conundrums were to follow. Of course. Maurice was one of those who send out missive multiples. I got on the “copies to” list of a stiff and angry three paragraph one sent to William Burroughs. Authors denying the validity of a contract was something not unfamiliar to Maurice, and he started off with an account of the legal ploy being played out against him:
1. “When I met Anthony Gornall last week in London, he told me that the editor of Suck Magazine informed you that I was the one who authorized him to publish an excerpt from The Wild Boys in their last issue.”
This must have been a very garbled, self-serving re-accounting of the telephone conversation between Bill Burroughs and myself.
Then Maurice riposted:
2. “This is absolutely not true, and I met Jim Haynes two days ago in Paris who told me that he had been authorized to use that piece by yourself [Burroughs] and by Mike Sissons. He further confirmed that he had not obtained the manuscript itself from me or indirectly through Olympia.”
Everything was getting prolix. Who were Anthony Gornall and Mike Sissons, anyway? Lawyers and agents? Never met; never even heard of either of them, then or since! But that’s one great thing about working on a project with Jim Haynes. Deniability. Whenever it gets heavy, which it usually does, Jim can go in and calm down everyone with his good ol’ boy southern charm and make the absurd seem plausible.
Maurice petulantly perorated:
3. “I hope that this disposes of that small but unfortunate incident.”
~
Well, I never found out how this was resolved, whether or not Girodias and Burroughs kissed and made up or went their separate ways.
I did find out that in dealing with Bill Burroughs there would always be third mind agendas, and not for the first time, there would always be special requests supporting his interests while sacrificing mine. It had happened years before in London when in the late Sixties Bill asked me to ax an investigative article I had announced in International Times aiming to prevent the nationalization of culture, an exposé that would reveal private secrets of public interest about the insidious Lord Goodman, Britain’s most powerful unelected politician as chairman of the Arts Council and the prime ministers’ personal attorney and hatchet man. He and Harold Wilson’s Labour government wanted a total monopoly on the arts and they were prepared to use the full coercive power of the state to enforce this domination. Now was payback time, however. Burroughs owed Goodman substantial favors, big time. As I only later found out Burroughs had made a Faustian deal. He gained permission to stay in England in return for dropping his then lover Mikey Portman, and not seeing him again. Goodman was the godfather and trustee of this dissolute and spoilt young aristocrat, i.e. Mikey, and crucially also represented the Portman family whose assets included owning, since the 16th century, about one hundred acres of land in London north of Oxford Street. Bill seductively purred over the phone to me, not once, but twice: “Arnold Goodman is our friend.” On yet another occasion, also while editing International Times he phoned to offer me an article mildly critical of Scientology—only the week before he had, all of a sudden, appeared at the office on Betterton Street, off Drury Lane. He scared my secretary who thought this dour older man wearing a suit and tie must be the police. As usual, looking like a specter, Burroughs could have passed himself off as the demonic, misogynist Mr. Jones in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, or a doppelganger for the strange and imposing figure The 3rd Viscount Halifax. Bill was carrying a black case containing an E-meter looking for someone at an underground newspaper to Clear with the near impossible caveat, that they had not taken any drugs in the last thirty days. Scientology was Burroughs’ latest obsession with fads and fallacies in the name of science following his own apothegm: “Anything that can be done with chemicals can be done by other means.” At any rate, delightedly I scampered down to his flat on Duke Street St. James’s dodged the Reichian Orgone Accumulator in the hallway and picked up the manuscript. Then two days later he phoned again asking me not to print it since its lack of total obsequiousness might upset L. Ron Hubbard. These asperities diverted me in my green time and I found it difficult to place Bill Burroughs on the side that believes any challenges that contradict militant gray paradigms must be silenced, shunned, or demonized. Who controls control? Indeed!
Also, in dealing with Maurice Girodias there would always be hidden minefields, unresolved passions, booby traps, contracts and wills waved about by shrill solicitors who represented giant insects from another galaxy, absentee thought lords, lost manuscripts from Aubrey Beardsley and Frank Harris found in pumpkins, Czarist promissory notes, smooth assistants lurking in the background who want to find out everything you know for the price of a cheap Indonesian dinner, ghosts in the catalog, a never-ending concealment of revelations and revelations of concealment.
As much as I genuinely respected, even liked, both of these aesthetic outlaws and gentlemen rogues, the path they had taken and what they had accomplished, I was relieved, at the time, not to get more involved.
AT THE FAIR
More than two years later, Maurice and I had another encounter. Standing at the Suck booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was somewhat mesmerized by watching the surging waves of earnest crowds flow by under the harsh industrial neon light when all of a sudden Maurice was in front of me. A con man is someone who does you wrong, then forgives you for it. He greeted me in the most friendly manner. Maurice, fifty-four years old at the time, introduced me to his companion, a long-limbed, stunningly beautiful nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl whose sunny high yellow color and glossy black hair was set off by a skimpy haute couture fashion outfit of tan suede leather. He gave me a thirty-page pamphlet Between Books: A Manner of Press Release. At the bottom of the cover was printed “Maurice Girodias, Frankfurt Book Fair 1973”. Leading me off to the side, he placed his head close to mine, as if in a huddle, and asked in a near whisper:
“Do you know where I can get some hashish?”
Flipping his chin over his shoulder, Maurice explained:
“It’s for her.”
Then he leered. I had always thought “leering” was a literary conceit, a theatrical convention, a figure of bacchanalian fiction. But Maurice actually leered, and said:
“She wants some for us to smoke back in the hotel room.”
I put Maurice in touch with some German friends, read Between Books and published a large excerpt in the Last Suck. He must have figured out by now not to give me anything really good he didn’t want to see in print.
Between Books tells the bizarre story of his then thirty-four years in publishing, why he had no books at that year’s Fair, complete with vitriolic ranting against a host of adversaries (including a notable philippic against the France of De Gaulle, Malraux and Pompidou) and filled with collectible snippets of Maurice’s yin/yang–high philosophy and snake oil salesman spiel. Defending the so-called “sexual revolution”, and himself, against the slings and arrows of tendentious commentary, Maurice wrote:
“The books I published in the fifties, in particular Henry Miller’s, have opened the world to sexual freedom. The consequences of that revolution are immense, endless and continuously developing through more and more advanced stages, reaching more and more deeply into our knowledge of ourselves. The sexual liberation was necessary to restore a true vision of the human person, of the boundless riches of nature, and to permit the exploration of internal reality we hold in ourselves. The sexual liberation has brought back truth and authenticity, freedom and brotherhood. Without it the ecological revolution would not have been possible.”
At the end, he predicted:
“The terrifying acceleration of history brought us by technology can be overcome by a revolution of the mind, a poetic revolution. Politics are the enemy; they reduce everything to a false two-dimensional image of our needs and our fate. We need much more than that.
“It is on the level of the paramyth, of the philosophical dream, that we will find all the answers that we need. The blinding utopia! And I have no doubt that very soon the first examples of the new literature, of the new esoteric fiction, will appear and that it will immediately change the face of the world, by magic as it were.”
NO EXIT
During the next seventeen years people come and go talking about the Maurice show. Disillusioned with America he drifted back to Europe. He began to compose his memoirs under the title Une Journée sur la Terre. The first volume, L’Arrivée, and re-written as The Frog Prince, was published in France and America. A 110-page clothbound Olympia Press Bibliography was published in England. An interview with him appeared in Gargoyle, a magazine from Washington, D.C., edited by Richard Peabody, which mentioned Maurice had married an extremely wealthy woman of the high-class Cabot line of New England. Sometimes he could be convinced to signify and speechify before a small group of Parisian amatores liberum at the Village Voice Bookshop on rue Princesse. I saw him credited as having helped Michael Zwerin with translating Round About Close to Midnight: The Selected Jazz Writings of Boris Vian. Generally, Maurice was keeping a low profile. Doing more writing, they said.
Then in the summer of 1990, I received the news he had died. I remembered something Maurice himself had said about Mason Hoffenberg, co-author with Terry Southern of Candy. “Mason is dead,” he reluctantly admitted, “but he is not that dead.”
What better tribute can you give a person than to say they died at their post? Maurice died at his post. Massive heart attack, instant death, while giving an interview on French radio to promote Les Jardins d’Eros, the second volume of his memoirs.
~
I couldn’t make it down to Paris for the funeral but a correspondent wrote that Jim Haynes was there as was Michael Neal, the erotic bookseller and cataloguer, and a few others and that it was an exceptionally sad affair with nobody saying anything and unsuitable music. Too bad. Leaving the music to someone else, I would have declaimed a panegyric funeral oration. This Kaddish would have gone something like:
Hail Dionysos!
Here lies another immortal bawd,
Who chose the pen over the sword.
Now he’s played the next to last card,
His ashes are sowed all over the yard.
He came as one endowed with grace,
He brought advantage to this place.
