Mentored by a Madman

The William Burroughs Experiment

A. J. Lees

• Publisher: Notting Hill Editions
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781910749845
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

A fascinating personal account by one of the world's leading neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Lees journeys to the Amazonian rainforest in search of cures, and through self-experimentation seeks to find the answers his patients crave. 'The inevitable comparison with the late, great Oliver Sacks is entirely just.' - Professor Raymond Tallis

1

– Synchronicity –

On October 5 1982, whilst I was preparing for an interview for the most senior position of my career, William Seward Burroughs entered a Liverpool that was still tense after the Toxteth riots. A small promotion tucked away in the Echo was the only public announcement:

A MAN OF INFLUENCE

Waiting for the man? William Burroughs, divine mentor, legend etc., whose books have influenced people like Lou Reed, Patti Smith, David Bowie and many others comes to Liverpool tonight for a rare reading of his works. Time 7-30pm. Be there early or the cult following will get all the seats.

Geoff Ward, a young university lecturer in English Literature, was there to welcome his hero at Lime Street Station with a gift of a bottle of vodka. Burroughs was polite but there was no small talk. Ensconced in the Adelphi Hotel, Burroughs idly turned the television on and sat immersed in a documentary on lemurs. His penumbral presence sucked the oxygen from the room and created an echo chamber. He had fallen out of the world into himself and was almost invisible, dematerialised but for the cold-blooded glow of his eyes. As the afternoon dragged on, an aromatic whiff of weed floated down the long, empty second-floor corridor. His large entourage including one man making kerpow noises with an imitation gun, ignored the insistent knocking on the door by a chambermaid dressed in full burlesque attire.

That evening Burroughs did a signing at the Atticus bookshop on Hardman Street. He was courteous and eager to socialise. A scally handed him a Tarzan comic, which he autographed without blinking an eye. He complimented the management on a terrific display that included issue 4/5 of Re/Search magazine in which he featured on the front cover. Inside was an article in which he talked about his advanced ideas about the social control process. He then walked over to the Conference Hotel accompanied by James Grauerholz, John Giorno of Dial-a-Poem fame, ex-Warhol disciple Victor Bockris and Roger Ely, one of the organisers with Genesis P-Orridge of the Final Academy, a series of events featuring Burroughs that had taken place at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and the Hacienda Club in Manchester.

The deliberately chosen cheap and neutral venue situated on Mount Pleasant had recently hosted the Liverpool finals of the Miss Caribbean contest. About a hundred and fifty arty punks sat in silent anticipation. Ward, who had described the events of the day to me, plucked up courage to ask Burroughs what he felt about dying, to which the tortured response had come: ‘Well it’s a step in the right direction’.

The ‘happening’ began with poetry readings by Adrian Henri of the Liverpool Scene, Geoff Ward and Jeff Nuttall, one of the first Englishmen to champion Burroughs in My Own Mag in the sixties. These understated, low-key British performances were followed by a full-on bellowing rendition of ‘Just Say No to Family Values’ by the American performance poet John Giorno.

Then Burroughs got up. ‘Can you all hear me?’ he drawled in his funereal voice. He began by reading extracts from his new book, The Place of Dead Roads. He explained that a ‘Johnson’ was a harmless person who kept his word and honoured his obligations, minded his own business and would not stand by to watch innocent people die. He was the polar opposite of a ‘Shit’ – a sanctimonious hypocrite who craved power and tried to enforce his harmful viewpoint on others. Shits comprised about one fifth of the American population and were responsible for all that was wrong in the world. He next introduced his protagonist, the gunslinging gay junky Kim Carsons whose mission was to organise the Johnson family into a worldwide space programme. Carsons was a morbid, slimy youth of unwholesome proclivities with an insatiable appetite for the extreme and the sensational who adored ectoplasm and crystal balls. He stank like a polecat and wallowed in abomination.

Burroughs next launched into a folkloric text related to his experiences in the Lexington Narcotics Hospital. The ‘do rights’ were sycophantic inmates who had acquired good bedside manners and who pretended they had made their peace with Jesus and the star-spangled banner in a cynical attempt to squeeze more dope from their gullible doctors.

He concluded the reading with an extract from ‘Twilights Last Gleamings’, a story he had written together with his childhood friend Kells Elvins, in which the first mention of Doctor Benway appears:

Dr. Benway, ships doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel.

‘Perhaps the appendix is already out doctor?’ The nurse said. Appearing dubiously over his shoulder, ‘I saw a little scar.’

‘The appendix already out!’

‘I’m taking the appendix out!’

‘What do you think I’m doing here?!’

‘Perhaps the appendix is on the left side doctor that happens sometimes you know!’

‘Stop breathing down my neck I’m coming to that.’

‘Don’t you think I know where an appendix is?’

‘I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard.’

Burroughs’ performance was animated, polished and wickedly humorous despite the fact he had been smoking dope all day and drinking red wine and vodka since late afternoon. He had travelled sideways into myth and backwards into history to reveal contemporary phantoms. He released an atom-deep sensation of otherworldliness on a Liverpool scene.

On the same day Burroughs arrived in Liverpool for the first and only time, I was successfully appointed to the post of Consultant Neurologist to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square and University College Hospital in London. I had toed the line, avoided making powerful enemies and had endeavoured to develop a dignified uniformity with my fellow man. Despite my retiring and solitary nature, a flair for clinical research had carried me home. I also had a wife and two small children that helped to falsely reassure the interview panel that I was unlikely to be a deviant or subversive. I was relieved not to have lost out to opponents that I considered less deserving, yet the burden of responsibility that came with this new office filled me with fear. I had now joined the Establishment and would find it much harder to challenge authority.

William Burroughs had been my dark angel and cultural guru since our intersection at medical school and Liverpool was the eternal city of my childhood that I could never leave behind. The events of October 5, 1982, were a concatenation and became an expression of a deeper intuitive order.

As I had gone through my training I had learned to treat the person not the disease. William Osler’s words ‘Ask not what disease the person has but rather what person the disease has’ had become my modus operandi. I had come to understand the importance of the nuanced explanation, the calm gesture and the reassuring smile. I had observed my patients’ varied responses to their treatment and grasped the mystery of the therapeutic process.

I tried as best I could to enter into my patients’ mode of thought. I avoided at all costs saying to them, ‘I understand how you feel’. Many of my decisions were now based on informed guesses, hunches and imaginings; exploratory acts motivated by a passion to do good and quite independent of scientific knowledge. Unconscious wisdom, know-how and rules of thumb all played a part in my doctoring. I looked at the wider picture and when I felt it appropriate I self-experimented to obtain answers. I did my best to relieve suffering and preserve health but most of all I wanted to find new cures.

From now on, William Burroughs would be my guiding lamp. He was Dr Henry Jekyll warning me about hubris, the power of imagery and the dangers of regulation. I needed to verify, refute and establish the validity of everything I did in relation to the sour smell of nervous disease. Every effect had its cause and there was no such thing as a coincidence. There was no turning back. I was hooked on unreality.

2

– Doctor Benway –

An encyclopaedic knowledge of redundant ports and a passion for grasses and trees contrived to launch me on a career in medicine. My schoolboy geography did not revolve around mountain ranges or capitals but focused on entrepôts like Manaus where rare flowers waited in boxes to be dispatched to Liverpool. I liked to focus on those spaces on maps marked terra incognita and small mysterious islands like Terceira in the Azores. My history reading glossed over battles, treaties, and the lives of England’s monarchs but focused on the lives of the great naval explorers like Álvaro Cabral and Amerigo Vespucci. These adventurers who had made journeys into the unknown became my honorary ancestors.

A year after I had passed my GCE O-level examinations I was asked to attend for interview at the London Hospital Medical College in Whitechapel. The train journey from Leeds took me past arable land alive with fluttering peewits, cooling towers and northern ings littered with the feathers of mutilated swans. At the Kings Cross depôt I entered the zigzag of underground corridors and stairs that led me to the Tube.

I was now in an after world of perpetual solitude, another level down, above the tombs with nothing to worry about. The Underground train doors closed shut and we careered through endless echoing darkness, drawing in air before finally breaking cover in the Whitechapel cutting. I felt like a diminutive package in a canister being sucked through an airless system of pipes.

I alighted on Platform 4, climbed the wide flight of stairs and walked across the overhead bridge that linked the station’s islands to the booking office. Rows of market stalls with the bluster of Jewish costermongers greeted me on the Whitechapel Road. ‘Blame it on the Bossa Nova’ (the dance of love) by Eydie Gormé, was blasting out from Paul’s for Music. Across the road emblazoned on a large yellow brick building below a huge clock with its round stone bezel and ashen face were the words ‘The London Hospital’. In the anaemic sunlight I stared up at the attic where Joseph Merrick, ‘The Elephant Man’, had first found peace.

I climbed the stairs to the hospital, walked through its imposing colonnade and past the forecourt full of parked Daimlers and ambulances. At the lodge in the front wing, the dapper head porter pointed me in the direction of a short flight of stairs that led to the Board Room. A middle-aged woman dressed in a prim blouse told me to take a seat outside the door. I rehearsed again the extracts I had memorised from the College prospectus. The London Infirmary, later to become The London Hospital, had been founded by six businessmen in the Feathers Tavern in 1740, primarily for the relief of all sick merchant seamen. It had later become the first voluntary hospital to offer a teaching course of lectures as well as an apprenticeship. According to my mother, who had thoroughly researched the hospital’s credentials, diseases of the poor and exotic maladies common in lascars were its particular forte.

After a short delay I was ushered in by the secretary and asked to sit on a hard backed chair without arms. I explained to my ten genial inquisitors that for the last three years I had kept diaries of garden birds and had learned the importance of accurate observation and precise recording through contact with learned men in the Leeds Naturalist’s Club. As the interview was drawing to an end, I raised one or two chuckles from the committee when I told them that ‘The London’ was my first choice because of its proximity to the docks. The chairman, Dr John Ellis, then stood up and thanked me for attending. As I left the room I could see two of the committee members smiling conspiratorially.

In less than a minute I was back out on the Whitechapel Road under a clay white sky. I slipped down the stairs of the Underground as if it was a ship’s ladder. On the way back to Kings Cross, I started to enjoy the contingencies between the train stopping and the doors opening. The noise of a passing car on the other line recalled Atlantic breakers. The slamming of the doors sounded like a giant wave of surf rolling down the platform. I was in deep and a long way from shore.

Two weeks later my parents received a short note informing them I had been offered a place on the proviso that I didn’t flunk my A-levels. None of the doctors and surgeons on the panel had asked me if there were doctors in the family, whether I played rugby for the school first team, or if I could recall whether stethoscopes and nurses had featured in my childhood play routines. My destiny had been sealed in less than half an hour but for now I could keep my distance and return to the neutrality and beauty of nature. I kept returning to the Liverpool Landing Stage to look out at that exotic grey horizon. The Manaus riverboats haunted my dreams.

I arrived back in Whitechapel eighteen months later on October 4, 1965 to begin my apprenticeship. My year was composed of a mix of public school and grammar school entrants from all over the United Kingdom but only seven out of the eighty were women and there were no black students. In his welcome address, the Dean informed us that we were here to study medicine and that from now on our lives would be dedicated to the prevention, cure or alleviation of human disease. Medicine was a calling, not a business. He hoped that we would all live up to the high traditions of our chosen profession and represent ‘The London’ with honour and trustworthiness. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto – ‘I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human foreign to me’ was the hospital’s motto.

On my third day, I lined up in embarrassment with Lampard, Lashman, Lawford, Lewin and Lupini by the side of the last dead body on the row of cadavers. A smell of rancid sickliness tinged with the pungency of fixative turned our stomachs. Our corpse was a man called Wolynski, portly, with a gargantuan head and sparse body hair. His name tag stated that he had died of natural causes nine months earlier. I imagined he must have been a Polish seaman who had collapsed in a boarding house down by the river. He was a stunning figurine waiting to be vandalised. My first cut into his swollen arm revealed a morass of deathly beigeness devoid of the gliste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by James Grauerholz
• Preface
• 1: Synchronicity
• 2: Doctor Benway
• 3: Magic Bullet
• 4: Looking for Clues
• 5: Hanging Out with the Molecules
• 6: The Speed Laboratory
• 7: Contraband
• 8: Crushed Hopes
• 9: Rainforest Science
• 10: Breakthrough
• 11: The Junk Vaccine
• 12: Hooked on the Medicine
• 13: The Bladerunner
• 14: Yagé Trip
• 15: Altamirage
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibliography
• About the Publisher
• Other titles from Notting Hill Editions
• Copyright