William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin | TIME

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin

TIME

New York City, USA: C Press, 1965

26 pp., 8.5 x 11”, saddle-stitched

Edition of 1000

"The reputation of an underground author is a fragile thing” wrote Time magazine in November, 1962. "For example, it had been assumed for years that Henry Miller was unprintable but highly readable. Then Grove Press, merely by publishing his Tropics, proved that Miller is unreadable but highly printable. A reading of Naked Lunch, the grotesque diary of William Burroughs’ years as an addict, suggests that no such drastic deflation will occur with him.”

The anonymous and deeply mean-spirited review, titled "King of the YADs”1, went on to accuse Burroughs of being an ex-junkie, of murdering his 28 year old wife Joan Vollmer, and of cutting off one of his fingers to dodge the draft. 

While the first two are a matter of public record, Burroughs sued for libel. The magazine refused to settle, and Burroughs won in court. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, he was awarded a paltry five pounds and five shillings in compensation. Apparently the judge thought little he had too little a reputation to be damaged. 

Denied the opportunity to read his prepared statement in court, Burroughs instead focused his grudge on this publication three years later.  

“The imbalance of power between a mass publication and an avant-garde pamphlet like TIME is self-evident,” wrote S. E. Gontarsk, in Burroughs Unbound. "Still, Burroughs pursued the personal settling of scores on an imaginary level and as a creative engine within the limited circle of a like-minded audience. The idea of contamination and of the influence through contiguity used in his appropriation of Luce’2 media formats has its roots not only in Burroughs’ fascination with newspapers but also in his early experiments with photography.”

The staple-bound publication approximates the size of Time Magazine, and uses an altered cover of the offending issue [see below]. The top half is reproduced faithfully, but the bottom is obscured by a drawing of a landscape with a figure in the foreground, over which is superimposed the author's name in capital letters. Below this is a list of cover prices for Time magazine in various countries around the world. 

Burroughs is credited as designing the cover himself, perhaps an early example equating the Cut Up writing method, with its visual art grandparent the collage. 

Brion Gysin introduced Burroughs to the Cut Up technique that he popularized, though his contributions here seem to be limited to a four-page spread of line drawings. Both believed that the Cut Up technique had mystical and magical powers, including time travel: "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”. Burroughs famously declared that “Language is a virus from outer space”, a parasite to fight against. 

Similarly, Burroughs had some McLuhanesque theories about medium and message, and believed that the column format of periodicals was intentionally sinister. Sixty years later, his paranoid skepticism of the news media is now shared by the general public, with seven in ten Americans now declaring they have “not very much” confidence in journalism (36%), or “none at all” (34%).

In his essay Ten Years and a Billion Dollars 3 Burroughs wrote: “You can see how easy it is, if you own a newspaper, to start slipping in non-existent events; this has been and is being done all the time — by Time especially, in fact. Starting with being a week ahead, they literally write the news before it happens; which is why they print so many false statements that they have to retract. And so you get a retraction from them — how many people read the retraction compared to the number who have read the falsified story?”

The masthead of TIME lists (along with a declaration that "There are no typographical errors in this edition”) the four variations from within the edition of a thousand:  "This first printing appears in 4 editions: 4 copies hors commerce4; 10 copies numbered A-J, hardbound, each containing an original manuscript page by Burroughs and an original drawing by Gysin, signed by both; 100 numbered and signed copies ; 886 copies in a trade edition.”

TIME was produced as the fourth title from poet Ted Berrigan’s C Press. Joe Brainard was the art director and poet Ron Padgett served as project editor. 

Padgett recalled later that "Burroughs was pleased with the result, but, given his characteristic reserve, he didn’t gush. Throughout the project he was cordial, polite, somewhat old-fashioned in his formal good manners. Brion Gysin was equally polite but a bit warmer in his demeanour." 

The trade edition originally retailed for $1.50. It now sells for about five hundred dollars a copy. The signed edition of a hundred sells for three and six times that amount, depending on condition. 

Many Burroughs scholars believe that the key to understanding his employment of the Cut Up technique is best studied here, not the better known Grove Nova trilogy of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, which is also known as the Cut Up trilogy. 

"A 1962 piece on the Beats and Naked Lunch had suggested he was a jailbird who had done time for murdering his wife; he sued and won, but received only negligible damages. In 1965 Burroughs took that 30 November 1962 copy and collaged it to make his own copy of Time.

This kind of creative defacement was very current due to the Situationists, for whom it was a major technique known as ‘détournement’. Burroughs’s work has a number of intersections with the Situationists, notably in his sense that reality is constructed as a movie and we have to ‘Storm the Reality Studio’; this compares with Debord’s ideas of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (which also led to Baudrillard’s dictum that the Gulf War was really a movie). These ideas were ‘in the air’ at the time, and Burroughs pre-dates Debord in book form, but there are earlier links between Burroughs and the Situationists through Scots writer, junky and theorist of insurrection Alexander Trocchi, who knew both Burroughs and Debord, and the British Situationist Ralph Rumney, who knew Gysin. Gysin referred to his lost book Memoirs of a Mythomaniac as a ‘detourned autobiography’, and Burroughs’s Time can be seen as a detourned copy of Time magazine: similarly, the aggressive use of cut-ups is also a form of detournement, alongside their more surreally creative aspect.”

- Phil Baker, William S Burroughs, Critical Lives

1. YADs refers to "Young American Disaffiliates". The article begins "The Young American Disaffiliates (they used to be called beats, but nothing stays simple) have not done well.”  The unattributed author is referring to Burroughs and other Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac. The term "Young American Disaffiliates” does not seem to appear elsewhere, anywhere.  

2. Henry Luce was an American magazine publisher who founded Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. He was known as one of "the most influential Americans of his day”. Luce also experimented with LSD, before it was illegal. 

3. The Burroughs essay “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” was later collected in The Adding Machine (1985), but was originally published in a magazine: Crawdaddy, the September 1975 issue. 

4. Hors commerce translates from the French as “before business.” An hors commerce print was used as the color key and printing guide to insure consistency of the print run. A Printer’s Proof [or PP], essentially.