Studs Terkel in 1975, in his WFMT studio in Chicago, interviewing Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs continues from here
ST: Resuming the conversation with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who are participating this Friday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art in a reading. They’ve been here for several days, and I’m sure that..
AG: The amazing thing is, you see, we’ve never read together before.
ST: It’s the first time?
AG: So this trip to Chicago, where we’ve been reading around, (is) first time for us.
ST: And it’s Friday night at the Poetry Center of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is at 237 East Ontario Street, and it begins at, at eight o’clock or so.
AG: Right.
ST: Eight o’clock. And then, I suppose there’ll be questions from the audience, too, if need be.
AG: I don’t know what we’ll do.
ST: But it’ll be open.
WSB: Yes.
ST: It’ll be – I know what an exhilarating evening, it has to be that. You were saying about readings. Bill, is there something, Allen was saying something earlier that there was something in Naked Lunch or another of your writings that was appropriate for (a) lunchtime reading, really.
WSB: Well, yes, I could read that “Bradley the Buyer“.
AG: Yes. That’d be interesting. Do you have that here?
WSB: I think I do.
AG: Yeah, we’re gonna check that out.
ST: He also has Exterminator!, Exterminator! here.
AG: That’s the most recent book.
ST Is Exterminator! published in America yet?
AG: Yeah, that’s..
ST: Calder & Boyars , it was Viking here?
AG: Well, Viking published Exterminator! in the United States, didn’t it?
ST: And here’s..
WS: I was an actual exterminator in Chicago in 1942.
ST: You were, you say. You did work as an exterminator?
WSB: I worked as an exterminator in Chicago.
AG: He was in Chicago. That was a great glory when I first met him, (part of his) mythology.
WSB: If you like I can give you a little quote here
ST: Oh sure
WSB:…from the article that I wrote for Esquire – Saturday, August 24th, 1968.
AG: And then you came back in from the…
[Editorial note – audio of Burroughs’ quote from “The Coming the Purple Better One” is not immediately available. However see below for a classic rendition]
AG: When I first met Bill in New York, he’d just come from Chicago where – I’d never met a literary person who had actually been working, you know, like anonymously in some far city suffering the pangs of unrecognized ego working in like a trade like extermination. It was sort of almost a Shakespearean notion. We were all reading Jean Genet, or Celine, Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s “Journey..”
ST: “Long Day” – no, not “Long Day”, Journey through the End of the Night (Editorial note – Journey to the End of Night )
AG: Yeah, and that was, it fitted into that sort of literary tradition. Henry Miller.
WSB: Well, yes, I consider myself very much in the picaresque tradition, the picaresque tradition. Just a rather series of incidents, rather horrific and that the..
ST: And funny, too,
WSB: Yes .. .that the protagonist goes through. Ah, in the tradition of The Unfortunate Traveller, which is one of the very early novels. And certainly Celine is in that tradition.
ST: And I remember as a kid, I (still remember)] reading that book, Journey to the End of the Night, I’m still haunted by a guy named “Robert”, there were two, there was..
AG: Robinson.
ST: Yeah, there were two figures, I mean there was this guy and his alter ego. Remember that, this as..
AG: Kerouac loved (it)..
ST: …as though the demon was pursuing this guy.
WSB: Exactly.
to be continued – and concluding – tomorrow