The Adding Machine Read Free Page B

and once dripped blood all over Paul Bowles’ first edition of One Arm by Tennessee Williams.
    In 1956 I went to London and took the apomorphine cure with Doctor John Dent. Naked Lunch would never have been written without Doctor Dent’s treatment. The cure completed, I spent the summer with Alan Ansen in Venice. It was during this summer that A.J.’s Annual Party took shape and the gondola scene was written. Some of the Border City material was also written at this time and the concept of Freelandt evolved. Here too I disgraced myself by getting drunk at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo.
    I left Venice in late August and went to Tripoli, arriving in time for the Suez Crisis and a general strike. The American Consulate wasn’t at all helpful and still less so in Algiers, where I got stuck on my way back to Tangier with all planes booked solid for three weeks and had to wire home for money and left by train without the necessary permits against advice of the Consulate. I was in Algiers for about a week during the war and used to eat lunch in a milk bar that was later bombed. There are a number of references to this incident in later writings.
    Back in Tangier in September of 1956, I settled in a room on the garden at the Villa Muniria. For the first time in my life I began writing full-time and the material from which Naked Lunch was later abstracted and a good deal of the material that went into The Soft Machine and The Ticket that Exploded was produced at this time. Often I would take a notebook to dinner with me and make notes while I ate. During this period I was making mahjoun every day.
    Between 1956 and 1958 I saw a number of visitors in Tangier. Jack Kerouac was there in 1957, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in the same year. Alan Ansen made several trips to Tangier and helped me type the manuscript. In 1957 I made a trip to Scandinavia and wrote some of the Freelandt section for Naked Lunch in a cubicle room in Copenhagen.
    In 1958 I moved to Paris and took up residence at no. 9, rue Git-le-coeur on the recommendation of Allen Ginsberg who was living there with Peter Orlovsky. I had a suitcase full of manuscripts with me, but Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press had rejected the first version of Naked Lunch. Other rejections from American publishers followed, and I was again losing interest in writing.
    It was Allen Ginsberg who insisted that I send some short extracts to The Chicago Review which was then edited by Irving Rosenthal. The Big Table issue followed. One morning in room 15 at 9 rue Git-le-coeur I received a visit from Sinclair Beiles, whom I had known previously in Tangier. He was working for Girodias, who, after seeing the Big Table issue, now wanted to publish Naked Lunch. He wanted a complete manuscript in two weeks. With the help of Brion Gysin and Sinclair the manuscript was finished in two weeks and a month later the book was published,
    In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin showed me the use of cut-ups. Minutes to Go and Exterminator! followed Brion Gysin also demonstrated the use of cut-ups on the tape recorder and my subsequent experiments with tape recorders, carried out in Paris, London, Tangier, New York, all date from that summer.
    In the fall of 1959 I moved to London and stayed in the Empress Hotel at 25 Lillie Road, which was to be my headquarters for the next year and a half. By the spring and summer of 1961, I was back in Tangier in my old garden room at the Villa Muniria, and it was here that I first started making photo-montages. This happened after a bad trip on DMT, which is described in The Night Before Thinking ... the sensation of being in a white-hot safe. The following day, a sudden cool grey mist came in from the sea and covered the waterfront and I spread some photos out on the bed with a grey silk dressing-gown from Gibraltar along with several other objects and I photographed the ensemble. During that summer I made many of these montages in different ways and combinations. Ian