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The Naked Lunch in My Life
- Southern Illinois University Press
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114 The Naked Lunch in My Life barry MILES I n 1960, when I first began to hitchhike up to London on weekends from my provincial art school, I usually stayed on the couch at the communal flat run by John Hopkins, who was then a photographer. Living in one of the rooms was Peter Wollen, who spent each afternoon and evening travelling to distant suburban cinemas to fill in gaps in his study of the cinema. He later wrote Signs and Meaning in the Cinema and became head of the UCLA Film School. One afternoon Peter came in, glanced around the living room, and announced, “This is such a cool pad, man. There’s always a fresh copy of Naked Lunch on the table.” And indeed there was. Anyone visiting Paris always smuggled a copy back with them, usually down the back of their shirt as the customs would always find and confiscate it if it was in their baggage or pockets. The book had a legendary status. It looked different from all other books: it was a paperback but with a dust wrapper; in England, only hardbacks had dust wrappers. And what a dust wrapper. British book design at the time was pretty dire: Gollancz still put cheap yellow wrappers on their books, intended to be thrown away; Faber used the same typography on every book and refused to even accept the existence of paperbacks, calling theirs “paper covered editions”; John Calder printed everything in obscure Iron Curtain countries on terrible paper with terrible jacket designs; Penguins were a uniform orange for fiction, green for crime, and so on. No one considered that the jacket should reflect, and act as an H_M Ch14.indd 114 3/30/09 12:37:02 PM The Naked Lunch in My Life 115 advertisement for, the content of a book. This jacket did, though it was only later that I learned that the glyphs were by the author himself. The Naked Lunch (all three Olympia titles, The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, took the definite article) had an uncompromisingly modern, yet somehow sinister cover. The orange-yellow lettering on a purple ground made a discord designed to jolt the eye, and all across the jacket were glyphs, like shorthand, or an unknown language beyond the point of intelligibility , demanding to be read. They continued all across the back cover where normally one might find a polite review from a weekly magazine, calligraphic writing like the drawings and paintings of Brion Gysin and Mark Tobey. The book’s cool quotient was enhanced by the notice inside the back flap: “not to be sold in the u.s.a. or u.k.”; so, not only banned but forbidden, even though Girodias obviously didn’t mean it. Also, the book had been known to make people throw up; this was a significant plus in terms of mythmaking: a book so powerful that it could cause a physical reaction. A woman visitor to Hoppy’s flat just made it to the bathroom in time but Jeff Nuttall, in Bomb Culture (1968), reported, “The Naked Lunch actually caused at least one unprepared square to vomit on the carpet” (108). Naturally, it showed how cool you were if you were able to read the book without flinching. It was like smoking pot without getting “the horrors.” Many of Burroughs’ early readers were marijuana smokers, and sections of the book would be read aloud, of an evening, to the accompaniment of much hysterical laughter. Sometimes, it would be five minutes before the reader could continue among the splutters and giggles. I heard about half of it read this way before I was finally able to secure a copy of my own, and there is no doubt that this colored my view of it. The Naked Lunch was the hippest, coolest book ever written, and for a seventeen-year-old art student, that was quite something to have on the shelf. Most, if not all of the book was written when Burroughs was under the influence of cannabis, and it is filled with pothead humor that becomes especially potent when the reader is also stoned. The myth surrounding the book came partly from the fact it was published by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press. The distinctive olive-green wrappers of their Traveller’s Companion series, of which The Naked Lunch was number 76, were associated with hard-core pornography in the minds of most young travellers, which...