mon semblable

The Boston Trial of ‘Naked Lunch’

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Boston, Mass., once the scene of such famous censorship trials as those involving Forever Amber, God’s Little Acre, and, more recently, Tropic of Cancer, again attracted a distinguished gathering of literary luminaries on January 12, 1965, when “A Book Named Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs” found itself the defendant in Boston Superior Court before Judge J. Hudson. 1The witnesses who testified on behalf of Naked Lunch included Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, John Ciardi, Paul Hollander, Gabriele B. Jackson, Norman Holland, Stanley E. Eldred, John B. Sturrock, and Thomas H. Jackson. The attorney appearing in behalf of the book and its publisher, Grove Press, Inc., was Edward de Grazia, assisted by Daniel Klubock. As we go to press the court has still to hand down its decision. What follows are excerpts from the testimony of Mr. Mailer and Mr. Ginsberg, concluded by a statement from Mr. de GRAZIA.

(…)

THE COURT: You have some notes?

MAILER: I have some notes.

THE COURT: You may.

MAILER: Well, in these notes, I said——

THE COURT: Incidentally, when did you draw up these notes?

MAILER: I wrote them on Sunday. I have written about William Burroughs before; and I wrote about him in Esquire two years ago, I think, a year and a half ago. But I felt I didn’t want to even look back at that. The remarks were complimentary, but I felt I wanted it freshly. If you wish I can give this to you?

Q. Go ahead, Mr. Mailer.

A. William Burroughs is in my opinion—— whatever his conscious intention may be—— a religious writer. There is a sense in NAKED LUNCH of the destruction of soul, which is more intense than any I have encountered in any other modern novel. It is a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity. What gives this vision a machine-gun-edged clarity is an utter lack of sentimentality. The expression of sentimentality in religious matters comes forth usually as a sort of saccharine piety which revolts any idea of religious sentiment in those who are sensitive, discriminating, or deep of feeling. Burroughs avoids even the possibility of such sentimentality (which would, of course, destroy the value of his work), by attaching a stringent, mordant vocabulary to a series of precise and horrific events, a species of gallows humor which is a defeated man’s last pride, the pride that he has, at least, not lost his bitterness. So it is the sort of humor which flourishes in prisons, in the Army, among junkies, race tracks and pool halls, a graffiti of cool, even livid wit, based on bodily functions and the frailties of the body, the slights, humiliations and tortures a body can undergo. It ;s a wild and deadly humor, as even and implacable as a sales tax; it is the small coin of communication in every one of those worlds. Bitter as alkali, it pickles every serious subject in the caustic of the harshest experience; what is left untouched is as dry and silver as a bone. It is this sort of fine, dry residue which is the emotional substance of Burroughs’ work for me. Just as Hieronymus Bosch set down the most diabolical and blood-curdling details with a delicacy of line and a Puckish humor which left one with a sense of the mansions of horror attendant upon Hell, so, too, does Burroughs leave you with an intimate, detailed vision of what Hell might be like, a Hell which may be waiting as the culmination, the final product, of the scientific revolution. At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind. Nowhere, as in NAKED LUNCH’S collection of monsters, half mad geniuses, cripples, mountebanks, criminals, perverts, and putrefying beasts is there such a modern panoply of the vanities of the human will, of the excesses of evil which occur when the idea of personal or intellectual power reigns superior to the compassions of the flesh. We are richer for that record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of NAKED LUNCH. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is t r as a nation for possessing an artists stronger as a nation. Who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. And I would add, and so warrants all, perhaps.

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