The Cut-ups from Miles' Burroughs

Hassan-i-Sabbah himself was a member of the Nizari lsma’ili sect who held to the doctrine that Qiyanrat-the Resurrection, the day of judgment, the fifth fundamental belief of Islam-~-has already come, thus obviating all their religious obligations. They could drink wine, use cannabis,‘ have sex during Ramadan, and neglect their prayers. The historian Henri Corbin described the doctrine of Qiyamat as “nothing less than the coming of a pure spiritual Islam, freed from all spirit of legalism and of all enslave ment to the law, a personal religion of the Resurrection which is spiritual birth.”6 But this was secret knowledge, only imparted to Masters and Fel~ lows, the Dais or emissaries, who were initiated into all the grades of the secret doctrine. For the vast majority of his subjects, Hassan was rigid in his imposition of the strictest Islamic laws.7 The word “assassin” is a derogatory term, derived from hashishi, used by Hassan’s opponents to trivialize the assassins’ beliefs as being mere cannabis dreams.

That everything was seen to be illusion-“nothing is true”-meant that everything was permitted, a phrase seized upon by Burroughs and Gysin as a summation of the philosophy of Hassan~i-Sabbah. (It was used by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1880.) Burroughs used it as a trope, along with Hassan’s name, cutting it up and giving it many shades of meaning. Decades later, in The Western Lands, he was to confess that perhaps his approach to Hassan-iLSabbah had been faulty and that, “with a carry-over of Christian reflexes,” he had used Hassan’s name “like some Catholic feeling his saint medals.”

2. Cut-Ups

Around lunchtime on the first of October 1959, Brion Gysin was in room 25 of the Beat Hotel, cutting mounts for some drawings, slicing through the mat boards with his Stanley knife and simultaneously slicing through the pile of old copies of the New York Herald Tribune he was using to protect the table. When he finished, he saw that where the strips of newsprint were sliced, they peeled back and the words on the next page showed through and could be read across, combining stories from different pages. He found some of the combinations so amusing that the people in the next room knocked on the door, concerned that he was having a hysteria attack. Burroughs had been to lunch with two reporters from a magazine and on his return, Gysin excitedly showed him his discovery. Bill agreed that the results were amusing, but immediately recognized its importance as a technique and pronounced it to be “a project for disastrous success.” He could see that cut-ups literally enabled you to “read between the lines” and find out what the newspapers were really saying.

Together they began experimenting, initially with the magazines in Gysin’s room: the Saturday Evening Post and Time. They picked the best word and phrase combinations and used the results as poems, but quickly became frustrated by the mundane words at their disposal. They began Placing the strips of newsprint on texts by Rimbaud and Shakespeare and the results showed a marked improvement. As Burroughs said, “A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images-real Rimbaud images--but new ones. [. . .] Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of Vision consequently expands.” He recognized the importance of good source material. “I could see right away all the possibilities of cut-ups, where you have one image, you can have six out of that. What cuts up well are images, so you take Rimbaud and start cutting it up you get all sorts of quite good Rimbaud. We made a number of experiments, cut up my own texts, cut up other texts, cut up the Bible and Shakespeare and the classics, cut up experiments.”

Cut-ups held an obvious appeal for Burroughs, whose work was already fragmented. The Naked Lunch, with its lack of narrative or character development, its episodic presentation and random order of chapters, has sometimes been mistaken for a cut-up text even though it was written before their discovery. Burroughs was well aware of the idea’s antecedents: Eliot’s The Waste Land, the first great cut-up collage; Tristan Tzara’s poems made from words pulled from a hat; the “Camera Eye” sequence in USA by Dos Passos. Burroughs said, “I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.”

Slicing lines of text from articles was cumbersome and they quickly Progressed to an easier system. A page of text from a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or a letter was simply cut into four sections. The margins were trimmed off and the sections were moved against each other until a likely Phase or sentence was found. This was typed out on a new sheet of paper. ilk process was repeated for as long as it produced interesting new word combinations. They went through Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Life magazine features, whatever came to hand, and typed out anything that might their eye. They did not paste up the juxtaposed pages; there was no point. In cutting the pages with scissors, some words were cut in half and could be combined to make not just new phrases but new words: cut words.

There were many different methods of cutting text, but they all had one thing in common: they introduced a random juxtaposition of text; to give new word combinations. Only those lines of literary interest were typed up on a separate page. Sometimes Burroughs would only get one 0, two lines from the combinations offered and move on to another. These new pages might themselves be cut up, removing the material even further from its source.

Naturally they wanted to share their discovery with everyone, and soon Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles were engaged in cut-ups as well. Beiles had been persuaded to move to the hotel by Gysin, who thought that he really belonged there, with them, after his sterling work on getting The Naked Lunch into print. Corso was torn between his desire to be part of the experiment and join in the enthusiasm and excitement it was causing, and his core belief in the power of the muse. His contribution consisted mostly in cutting up the work of others: letters from friends, a poem by Allen Ginsberg, a stanza or two of Shelley. When the results of these initial experiments in cut-ups were published as Minutes to Co, Corso dissociated himself from the other three contributors, writing, “I join this venture unwillingly and willingly. Unwillingly because the poetry I have written was from the soul and not from the dictionary; willingly because if it can be destroyed or bettered by the ‘cut-up’ method, then it is poetry I care not for, and so should be cut-up. [. . .] to the muse I say: ‘Thank you for the poesy that cannot be destroyed that is in me’-for this I have learned after such a short venture in uninspired machine-poetry.”

Sinclair Beiles took the opposite path and cut up his source texts-articles from the Observer, Life, Encounter-again and again until they had such a density as to be bereft of meaning. The arguments between the four of them became so intense that Beiles, who was already in a mentally fragile state, had to sometimes leave the room to throw up. His mother later accused Burroughs of driving her son mad. Beiles has given two similar accounts of what appears to be a conscious imitation of Tristan Tzara’s pulling words out of a hat: “The four of us got together in Gysins room. We cut up bits of books and put them in wooden bowls. We then extracted piece after piece and put them together. The result was Minute to Go.” As this is his memory of his involvement, there must have been at least one experiment of this type.


The first extension of the cut-up method was when Brion Gysin applied it to tape recordings. They read aloud texts taken from poems and news\ paper articles and recorded them. Then the tape was rewound and new passages were cut in at random. Where these cut-ins occurred the old words were wiped off the tape and replaced by the new ones, often giving some interesting juxtapositions. Burroughs wrote, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not simply get random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I’ve made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a news‘ paper or in a book, or something that happened. To give a very simple example, I made a cut-up of something Mr. Getty had written, I believe for Time and Tide. The following phrase emerged: ‘It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.’ About three years later his son sued him. Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”

Nixonland

By Rick Perlstein
He contained his raging ambition in the discipline of debate. That Was his father’s influence; the surest way to Frank’s heart (though there was never really any sure way) was through skill at argumentation. Frank loved to argue, sometimes to the point of driving customers from the store. The son received his first opportunity to argue competitively 1n the fifth grade, and his father, the sixth-grade dropout, did the research, obsessed with seeing his son whip others with words. When Dick joined the high school debate team Frank attended every meet. Dick won often. The coach bemoaned his ‘ability to kind of slide around an argument instead of meeting it head on. ”Sometimes he broke the rules outright.

As a schoolboy he hadn’t a single close friend, preferring to Cloister him. self up in the former church’s bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a hoe Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked Upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. (“I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said ‘hello,”’ a reporter later observed.) The seventeen year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, “seemed resigned to its exclusion.” So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians wore shirtsleeves. “Beans, brains, and brawn” was their motto. He told them orthogonion -basically, “at right angles” --meant “upright,” “straight shooter.” Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.

The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface. jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight? that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspeetacular-silent~majority The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the ISO-pounder was the team’s tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon’s unceasing grit and team spirit, nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.

Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap about campus,” dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, “the man least likely to succeed in politics.” They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.

Ever-expanding circles of Orthogonians, encompassing all those who ever felt their pride wounded by the Franklins of the world, were already his constituency. Richard Nixon at their center, yet apart, as their leader. The circle could be made to expand, Richard Nixon might have realized even then. Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren’t always really so powerful at all, Franklin “power” often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics.

and

Nixon marked it well: in the fever swamps of the Red Scare, fears of sexual and political irregularity were deeply intertwined. Hints of sexualized threat suffused his Senate campaign. He promised chivalry: “I am confronted with an unusual situation. My opponent is a woman. . . . There will be no name-calling, no smears, no misrepresentations in this campaign” (which he was apparently admitting were par for the course in campaigns involving men). Then he promptly broke his pledge. Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas’s Franklin credentials, Hollywood chapter, came partly through her husband, the handsome, mustachioed leading man Melvyn Douglas. Though from the sound of Nixon’s campaign you would think she was married to Alger Hiss. “Pink right down to her underwear,” he called her, as if she were Elizabeth Bentley. That was hard to forget. So were the five hundred thou1 sand flyers Nixon sent out that tied Douglas to Representative Vito Marcantonio, a backbencher who represented an East Harlem district that was one of the poorest in the nation. The mailer, sent out on pink paper, dubbed him “the notorious Communist party-line Congressman from New York” and said Helen Gahagan Douglas “voted the same as Marcantonio 354 times.”

Nixon himself had voted “exactly as” Marcantonio had in the triple digits himself. Douglas tried to point this out. It didn’t matter. The explanations were complicated. The smear was simple. The more Douglas tried to wriggle free, the more she sounded like-Alger Hiss. Just as she was supposed to. On the stump, Nixon intimated the stakes: the Russians were on the verge of attacking the West Coast through Alaska, aided and abetted by a domestic fifth column, ordered by Moscow to start “a reign of terror if we ever cross swords with Russia”--power-plant sabotage, food contamination, seizing arsenals. Maybe, just maybe, he hinted, this graceful and well-spoken Helen Gahagan Douglas had something to do with that fifth column. This was not the time for nuance.

Soon enough, she wounded herself by her own hand. “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness,” ran the headline of her full-page response ad. She thought she was playing good cards. She was actually handing another pot to Nixon. Now he could play his favorite role: the wounded innocent. Helen Gahagan Douglas had voted 354 times with Vito Marcantonio. And here she was citing Scripture to call him a liar-just like that Dean Acheson.

It was the thinnest of gruel. But deciding to pull one lever in a voting booth instead of another is not necessarily a thick decision. Richard Nixon repeated his calumnies and repeated them and repeated them until they stuck: “Don’t Vote the Red Ticket, Vote the Red, White, and Blue Ticket.”

and

The people who knew it was a hustle-Ambassador Harriman’s people‘

were flummoxed. A nickname was coined right around this time to describe these sorts of folks, afflxed specifically to the man who was taken as their greatest tribune, Adlai Stevenson: eggheads. There weren’t all that many telee visions in America then, though the number of sets was growing exponen~ tially, as part and parcel of America’s postwar economic boom. These were the types who took pride in themselves, already, for not owning them. They knew enough to realize that the television commercials that exploited the cuteness of puppies were the most fiendishly effective ones. A Nixon asso~ ciate would later characterize them as an effete corps of impudent snobs. They did not View themselves thus. They saw themselves as the guardians of American decency. Liberals now hated Richard Nixon. He had hit them where it hurt. “Dick Nixon,” as one especially astute columnist observed of the Checkers Speech in its immediate wake, “has suddenly placed the bur~ den of old-style Republican aloofness on the Democrats.” A Stevensonian liberal could be defined as someone who quailed at that very thought-and even more, who panicked to the point of neurosis at the possibility that it was shared by 99.6 percent of Richard Nixon’s audience. The whole business enraged them. It also helped define them: right then and there, hating Richard Nixon became a central part of the liberal creed.

“The man who the people of the sovereign state of California believed was actually representing them,” the Sacramento Bee editorialized, was actually “the pet and protégé of rich Southern Californians . . . their subsidized front man, if not their lobbyist.” This “kept man,” chimed in the N ew Republic, was bamboozling people who were not rich into believing that he was their tribune. The pundit Walter Lippmann called it “the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear. . . . With all the magnification of modern electronics, simply mob law.” The in-house hLimorist of Stevensonian liberalism, Mort Sahl, suggested a sequel. Nixon could read the Constitution aloud to his two daughters. Pat, his devoted

helpmeet, could sit within camera View, gazing lovingly upon him while

knitting an American flag. Liberal intellectuals were betraying themselves in a moment of crisis for

liberal ideology. They saw themselves as tribunes of the people, Republicans

as the people’s traducers. Liberals had written the New Deal social and labor

legislation that let ordinary Americans win back a measure of economic secu

rity. Then liberals helped lead a war against fascism, a war conservatives opposed, and then worked to create, in the postwar reconversion, the consumer economy that built the middle class, a prosperity for ordinary laborers unprecedented in the history of the world. Liberalism had done that. Now history had caught them in a bind: with the boom they had helped build, ordinary laborers were becoming ever less reliably downtrodden, vul~ nerable to appeal from the Republicans. The pollster Samuel Lubell was the

‘rxt to rewogni e it: “The inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have s iftexl from those of getting to those of keeping.“

Their liberal champions developed a distaste for them. One of the Ways it manifested itself was in matters of style. The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created. in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator-public-relations-driven politicians who catered to only the basest and most sentimental emotions in men. Who resembled in certain formal respect...the fascists who’d won power most effectively with. as Adolf Hitler bragged, a radio microphone. Now came the boob tube, “a vast wasteland,” as Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant Newton Minow would later say, when he became FCC chair. A working class that was no longer poor, but seemed so much poorer in spirit. And its tribunes: men like . . . Richard Nixon.

That a new American common man was emerging who, thanks to men like Nixon, thought he could be a Republican-to liberals this idea that the “comfortable” class associated with Richard Nixon was a class of victims was enraging. “We do not detect any desperate impoverishment in a man who has bought two homes, even if his Oldsmobile is two years old,” huffed the New York Post.

(Oldsmobile: here was a word to linger on. Not a stylish car. Kind of tacky even if it was expensive-maybe even tackier because it was expensive. Kind of common. Though not in an Aaron Copland, “Fanfare for the Common Man,” sort of way. A Richard Nixon kind of car.)

In 1950 Nixon’s campaign took out ads promising “Electric clocks, Silex coffeemakers with heating units-General Electric automatic toasters-silver salt and pepper shakers, sugar and creamer sets, candy and butter dishes, etc., etc.,” to everyone who answered “Win with Nixon!” when his or her phone rang. Richard Nixon was now the poster child for this deranged new politics of mass consumption. It felt divorced from any mature and reasoned and logical analysis of who really ran things in society, who were the real economic beneficiaries, how power really worked, elite liberals thought. This was a new style of political demagoguery, a kind of right-wing populism, almost. This hucksterism. Hadn’t Richard Nixon worked as a carnival barker as a boy in Prescott, Arizona? Hadn’t the organizer of the Committee of 100, an advertising executive, proclaimed, upon discovering Richard Nixon in 1946, “This is salable merchandise! ”P They would laugh at Nixon’s line from the so-called Kitchen Debate with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 19593 “There are some instances where you may be ahead of us, for example, in the development of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer’ space; there may be some instances in which we are ahead of you-in color television.

After Checkers, to the cosmopolitan liberals, hating Richard Nixon, congratulating yourself for seeing through Richard Nixon and the elaborate Political poker bluffs with which he hooked the sentimental rubes, was becoming part and parcel of a political identity.

And to a new suburban mass middle class that was tempting itself into Republicanism, admiring Richard Nixon was becoming part and parcel of a political identity based on seeing through the pretensions of the cosmopolitan liberals who claimed to know so much better than you (and Richard Nixon) what was best for your country. This side saw everything that was most genuine in Nixon, everything that was most brave-who saw the Checkers Speech for what it also actually was, not just a hustle but also an act of existential heroism: a brave refusal to let haughty “betters” have their way with him. They were no less self-congratulatory than the liberals.

Call the America they shared-the America over whose direction they struggled for the next fifty years, whose meaning they continue to contest even as this book goes to press, even as you hold it in your hands-by this name: Nixonland.