Lucia Joyce, the harpy.

From Wiser's 30's:

C'est moi qui est l’artiste!” Lucia Joyce screamed into the telephone, hysterical over the ceaseless calls to congratulate her father after Ulysses was cleared of obscenity charges. The calls continued until Lucia took scissors and cut the telephone line. Later, when the line was restored, the constant calls again infuriated Lucia. C est moi, l’artiste!” she insisted, and severed the line once more. In the shadow of her father’s fame, Lucia Joyce was desperate for some notice as an artist of sorts. She had been a talented young student of dance until her mental instability forced her to abandon dancing. She was encouraged by her father to create a series of lettrines, ornate alphabet designs for Chaucer's ABC, which Joyce would pay to have This was a temporary distraction from her phobias and served as a form of therapy, 

Lucia often appeared to be lost in space, and a woman doctor seeing her in one of her trances remarked: “If I were the mother of James Joyce's daughter and saw her staring off into space that way, I'd be very concerned about her.” 

Nora was at first more concerned about finding a suitable young man for her daughter, but then she too began to fear the worst. On the occasion of Joyce's fiftieth birthday Lucia hurled a chair at her mother and narrowly missed. She had the paranoid conviction that Nora was responsible for the breakup of her romance with Samuel Beckett, when actually the romance had been all on Lucia’s side, and in her imagination. 

Lucia’s bizarre behavior and persistent melancholy became so obvious that hospitalization seemed inevitable, but Joyce would not hear of it. He followed up on whatever crank measures were suggested: ingestion of seawater was recommended. His patron Harriet Weaver recommended grapes, to which Joyce jocularly replied: “Thanks , . , [the grape] never had a more ardent disciple than I," When Lucia was twenty -five she received a series of injections meant to cure her “apathy," In 1935 Joyce decided to send his daughter to London for glandular treatment with bovine serum. 
The symptoms of severe mental illness became evident to everyone but Joyce. That his daughter was depressed and subject to fits of hysteria he would admit-that she was insane he refused to believe. 
When she was an adolescent Lucia's outbursts could be considered (as Joyce did) teenage tantrums brought on by the awakening of sexual awareness, but now in her twenties the bizarre episodes increased and Joyce was inclined to attribute the unsettling pattern of behavior to female temperament, the inexplicable nature of Woman. “Subtile et barbare person, my daughter.” To Beckett Joyce confided the belief that Lucia's aberrant behavior must be due to an infection of the teeth. 

Except for those Swiss doctors who treated and performed operations on his eyes, Joyce distrusted the medical profession and was particularly disdainful of psychoanalysis. He characterized the two leading analysts in a letter to Harriet Weaver as “a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud).” He preferred to treat Lucia himself, and at home. In one instance he gave her four thousand francs to buy a fur coat: “I think that will do her inferiority complex more good than a visit to a psychoanalyst," 
“You've never really known your daughter,” Nora once bluntly informed him. 
‘Allow me to say," replied Joyce, “that I was present at her conception ” As if therefore he was qualified to know her troubled psyche. 
But did anyone know her? When she was a baby her father sang affectionate lullaby to her in Italian- now she sang lullabies to herself in any of the four languages she had picked up in her nomadic childhood. Sometimes Lucia stayed with Maria Jolas who described her as 'sweet and Ophelia-like"---it is uncertain whether the reference was meant to suggest Ophelia’s passive nature or her madness, or both. 
The writer Thomas Wolfe observed the Joyce family on a tour bus in Belgium and commented on Lucia: “The girl was rather pretty-I  thought at first she was a little American flapper.” Indeed, Lucia was what did not think of herself as attractive. She was self-conscious about a small scar on her chin and almost pathologically sensitive about strabismus that afflicted one eye and caused a slight squint. 

Nino Frank, Joyce’s translator of Ulysses into Italian, wrote: “On the Champs-Elysées one morning about 1933, I ran into Lucia, I had never seen her so pretty, so gay, so strangely tranquil, then I watched her move off with a lithe, startling light step.” 
Within a short time Frank learned from Joyce himself that Lucia was in a sanitorium. The day he had seen her so gay and tranquil: “She was at the threshold of madness.”

Books 4 and 5 of Middlemarch

From Chapter 36

Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakes and absurd credulity, he had found
perfect womanhood--felt as if already breathed upon by exquisite wedded
venerated his high musings and momentous labors and would never
affection such as would be bestowed by an accomplished creature who
interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts
true womanly limit and not a hair's-breadth beyond--docile, therefore,
with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and
transform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the
and ready to carry out behests which came from that limit. It was
Brassing, he saw a dinner-service there which struck him as so exactly
plainer now than ever that his notion of remaining much longer a
bachelor had been a mistake: marriage would not be an obstruction but a
furtherance. And happening the next day to accompany a patient to
nature of dinner-services. Furnishing was necessarily expensive; but
the right thing that he bought it at once. It saved time to do these
things just when you thought of them, and Lydgate hated ugly crockery.
The dinner-service in question was expensive, but that might be in the
(Certainly, this was reasoning with an imperfect vision of sequences.
then it had to be done only once.
"It must be lovely," said Mrs. Vincy, when Lydgate mentioned his
purchase with some descriptive touches. "Just what Rosy ought to have.
I trust in heaven it won't be broken!"
less sanctioned by men of science.)
"One must hire servants who will not break things," said Lydgate.
But at that period there was no sort of reasoning which was not more or
and


Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think
it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot
out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the
Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents--his suspicions that he
blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr.
was not any longer adored without criticism--could have denied that
reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into
they were founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong
account--namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected
This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly
this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and
like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a
knew, he added imaginary facts both present and future which became
companion who would never find it out.
prepared before Will Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what had
occurred since then had brought Mr. Casaubon's power of suspicious
impressions, were constantly at their weaving work. It would be quite
construction into exasperated activity. To all the facts which he
more real to him than those because they called up a stronger dislike,
Ladislaw's intentions, suspicion and jealousy of Dorothea's
a more predominating bitterness. Suspicion and jealousy of Will
unjust to him to suppose that he could have entered into any coarse
might be given to her ardent mind in its judgments, and the future
misinterpretation of Dorothea: his own habits of mind and conduct,
quite as much as the open elevation of her nature, saved him from any
such mistake. What he was jealous of was her opinion, the sway that
possibilities to which these might lead her.


and


What the opposition in Middlemarch
said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a
great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody
represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.
shall not be an originator; but there were differences which
Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,
Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the
Tankard in Slaughter Lane.
poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your
that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to
leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac" that he had wanted
who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with
to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street,
who had money in trust before her marriage--a poor tale for a doctor,
you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you
to the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare
were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what
was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion
was a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits
public-house--the original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop's--was
with their pitch-plaisters--such a hanging business as that was not
wanted in Middlemarch!
Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic
And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter
performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people altogether
the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put to
the vote whether its long-standing medical man, "Doctor Gambit," should
given up by other practitioners. But the balance had been turned
not be cashiered in favor of "this Doctor Lydgate," who was capable of
sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop's was an index.
against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons held that
this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal
course of the year, however, there had been a change in the public
recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors. In the A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of
threadbare, like old Featherstone's, had been at once inclined to try
Lydgate's skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided,
depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the
stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not
Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn
the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence.
that he might do more than others "where there was liver;"--at least
him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor's bills, thought
agreeably of opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him
the old practitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined
without stint if the children's temper wanted a dose, occasions when
to employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some considered
not feel obliged to accept a new man merely in the character of his
there would be no harm in getting a few bottles of "stuff" from him,
since if these proved useless it would still be possible to return to
the Purifying Pills, which kept you alive if they did not remove the
Middlemarch families were of course not going to change their doctor
yellowness. But these were people of minor importance. Good
without reason shown; and everybody who had employed Mr. Peacock did
like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a
successor, objecting that he was "not likely to be equal to Peacock."


But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars
enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to
of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden,
intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars beingnote of exclamation at the end. The cubic feet of oxygen yearly
whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have
swallowed by a full-grown man--what a shudder they might have created
in some Middlemarch circles! "Oxygen! nobody knows what that may
be--is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic? And yet there are
people who say quarantine is no good!"
One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense
of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the
drugs. This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive
distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with
counted on having the law on their side against a man who without
calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a
charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to
foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity;
and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though
subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation
not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the
long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.
character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if
their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out





and


Mr. Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more
than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation.
himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when
He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in
the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and
measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are
revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be
held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a
moment Mr. Bulstrode felt as if the sunshine were all one with that of
peculiar instruments of the divine intention. The memory has as many
moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. At this
and so was his own facility in expounding them.
far-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out
preaching beyond Highbury. And he would willingly have had that
service of exhortation in prospect now. The texts were there still,

Proust

"Monsieur is very much afraid of the scent of princesses"

-Proust's housekeeper barring aristocratic visitors to his bedside

More of the 1930's

The origins of perfumery contributed to his legend. Ingredients necessary to the amalgam were ambergris, taken from the inner ear of the Sperm whale, and musk, from the abdominal sac of the male musk deer of Lapland or the rare fatty substance extracted from a sac behind the testicles of the wild civet cat of Southeast Asia (after the captured beast was fed on bananas and slightly rotten fish entrails to flavor the secretion). 

Coty, and most modern of parfumiers, relied on compounds of crushed and liquefied flower petals, or their chemically blended resemblances, to accomplish the sorcery of aroma. 

Behind locked doors and sequestered with his collection of odoriferous plants from his native Corsica and from the flower fields of the Midi region of Grasse-rose petals, genét, lavender, mimosa reduced to elixir, to be combined with nutmeg or vanilla, citronelle or ginger, and in the ultimate stage submitted to a fixative of alcohol to prevent decay. . . Coty conjured his commodity of sensual essences. Seventy-five workers had toiled under the southern sun harvesting a ton of flowers petal by petal, distilled into a mere kilo of attar of rose or jasmine, at an equivalent of $240 per kilo. It was a tedious and intricate process, critical at every stage in the creation of a successful scent and the eventual voila! 

The first work Coty found in Paris was as un nez for the prestigious Guerlain firm, freelancing his own formulas on the side. Pioneers in the industry were the Guerlains, Jacques and Aimé, who in their day blended each bottle of perfume to satisfy individual client preference in the manner of a fashion salon draping a garment to measure (or rather like a pharmacist preparing drugs to individual prescription). Guerlain changed all that at the turn of the century by successfully promoting a “universal” perfume under the trade name Jicky. 

The ambitious Coty was said to have achieved an initial success by dropping a mason jar of his private blend on the floor of the department store Printemps, an aromatic spill that so excited women shoppers that they demanded the store stock Coty’s concoction. In any case the name Coty became known apart from his connection to Guerlain, which led to his dramatic move from Guerlain at 23 place Vendome to his own establishment directly across the square at 2 place Vendome. 

Following the trend of Guerlain’s success with Jicky, Coty marketed his own universal scent under the name La Rose Jacqueminot, “rose" for the cabbage rose that anchored his formula, “Jacqueminot” for a French general Coty happened to admire. 

To enhance the value of his expensive elixir, Coty presented each bottle of perfume in its own silk-lined casket like some precious gem, the bottle itself an Art Nouveau design by the famous glazier Lalique- but mindful of the middle-class market for his expensive essences, the flasks interior was reduced by thickening the glass, to make certain perfumes deceptively affordable. 

Having fulfilled his commercial ambitions (bolstered by founding his own banks to finance his expanding empire), Coty embarked on the acquisition of Parisian journals to attack his enemies on the Left and disseminate his turgid philosophy of the Right. His private army, Solidarite’ Francaise, was modeled on Mussolini’s Blackshirts-seldom paraded in public but prepared to “defend" the cause when called upon. Coty's rabble-rousing editorials were ghost-written, and the arts page reflected. his retrograde tastes with the employment of fellow xenophobe Camille Muclair as art critic for L’Ami du Peuple. Muclair wielded a vitriolic pen against “invaders" from outside the borders of France who had come to dominate Parisian art galleries; he railed against the mostly Eastern European and Russian expatriate painters and sculptors of l’Ecole Juive: Pascin, Kisling, Soutine, Chagall, Lipchitz, and, in mistaken vehemence, against “half-Jews like Picasso[l]” 

In a social climate where political ambitions could be fostered and fed by salon life-the typical Parisian salon having shifted from the original dynamic (or subterfuge) of promoting art and culture to a much more evident political stance-and although many upper-class Parisians were in accord with his Rightest perspectives, Francois Coty was too reclusive and distrustful to engage in political nourishment by way of a salon. He had run for office on only one occasion, and been elected Senator from Corsica, then was shown to have paid for the majority of votes cast in his favor (which was a time-honored custom among Corsicans, who were known to count even the dead as voters), and was removed from office. Coty possessed a mistress (more than one over the years), but not a mistress powerful enough to establish an entourage for his support, in the manner of the marquise de Crussol, whose salon promoted the policies and politics of her lover Edouard Daladier; or more notably that of Madame de Portes, whose lover Paul Reynaud was the centerpiece of attraction chez elle.

and
Frederick Worth had received the royal imprimatur of a sort when the Empress Eugenie broke with tradition allowing for the first time a foreigner (Worth was born in England) and a MAN to drape her
form and flesh. This was a daring novelty at a time when women Personally chose their fabrics, then engaged a trusted seamstress to fashion a garment a la mode. Thus Worth became the first true couturier in 
Paris. There was no question of impropriety of male dressmaker draping female client: Worth kept an inventory of dressmakers’ dummies like a waxworks museum, the mannequins modeled on the forms of each individual patron of the establishment, convenient to the infinite numv ber of fittings required. By Worth’s employ of inanimate mannequins, his fashionable clientele of stage and court-the comtesse Greffulhe, the actress Lillie Langtry, the empress herself-were spared the tediousness of pins and hems and last-minute stitches. The final execution was supervised by maitre Frederick himself, accompanied by his beautiful wife, Marie, in the manner of a society physician who discreetly includes his nurse in the examination room for that ultimate and intimate inspection. 

Inspired by Frederick Worth (actually an apprentice at the house of Worth for several seasons), Paul Poiret was the next male fashion designer to dominate the market for upscale adornment. Something of a fantasist and sensual eccentric, Poiret was convinced that he had been a Persian prince in another life and therefore he designed, and lived, according to his theory of reincarnation, with princely sumptuousness and abandon. He did, however release women from the hourglass cages of Madame Gringoire (corsetiere to royalty and the rich), whose whalebone straightjackets were de rigueur until Poiret appeared on the fashion scene. He emphasized the vivid fauve shades Matisse favored, and be dressed women in loose-fitting, free-flowing garments modeled on the ballet costumes of Léon Bakst for the Diaghilev ballet production of Mille et une nuits. Poiret’s wife was said to be endowed with wealth, but evidently not rich enough to sustain the fashion designer’s reckless extravagances; he went through her fortune, and several others, before ending alone in an attic (but an attic on the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Honoré) with a list of names pinned to the wall entitled: “Friends Who Have Not Helped Paul Poiret.” 

ONE WHOSE NAME would have been on the list of neglectful friends, or rather on a list of implacable rivals, was Gabrielle Chanel who eventually usurped the designer’s sovereignity. 

and

-Paris was the ideal setting for a reunion, an Operatic backdrop for an affair, so the mother contrived to bring the lovers together. Nabokov would later characterize lrina's mother as a "procuress.” 

Less romantic than the setting and circumstances of the affair was Irina's employment as a poodle trimmer for a coiffeur of pets but Russian aristocrats were reduced to ridiculous and desperate comprtr mise in the narrow Paris market for émigré employment. 

Vladimir had willingly allowed himself to be seduced, and eagerly continued the affair, though he was so stricken with guilt that he developed a disfiguring case of psoriasis. The émigré colonies in Paris and Berlin were in close touch, so it was not surprising that Vera began to receive anonymous notes in Cyrillic characters revealing Vladimir’s renewed liaison with Irina. When Vera did at last obtain an exit visa for herself and son Dimitri and could join her husband in Paris, she confronted him with the rumors of his adulterous affair. Vladimir denied everything. This only compounded his guilt and misery, for he dearly loved his wife and not, he realized belatedly, Irina. 

It was sometime during this period of frustration, remorse, and depression (though Nabokov thought it might have been during “a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia”) that he ventured to the Jardin des Plantes where he might contemplate the celebrated ape in the Left Bank said to be the first animal inveigled into producing a drawing that suggested human attributes. 

"The first little throb of Lolita went through me . . . the impulse had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype [of Lolita], a short story of some thirty pages long.” 

The drawing the ape had sketched in charcoal “showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” 

Middlemarch continued

Chapter 9

Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion. Everything

seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if shewould like an alteration. All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw nothing to alter. His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness had no defect for her. She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance. "Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which room you would like to have as your boudoir," said Mr. Casaubon, showing that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently large to include that requirement. "It is very kind of you to think of that," said Dorothea, "but I assure you I would rather have all those matters decided for me. I shall be much happier to take everything as it is--just as you have been used to have it, or as you will yourself choose it to be. I have no motive for wishing anything else." "Oh, Dodo," said Celia, "will you not have the bow-windowed room up-stairs?" Mr. Casaubon led the way thither. The bow-window looked down the avenue of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy to upset. It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery. A light bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf, completing the furniture. "Yes," said Mr. Brooke, "this would be a pretty room with some new hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now." "No, uncle," said Dorothea, eagerly. "Pray do not speak of altering anything. There are so many other things in the world that want altering--I like to take these things as they are.




and

Chapter 23

Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous, the Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though old manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible theoretically. Since then Mr. Garth had failed in the building business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and had been living narrowly, exerting himself to the utmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound. He had now achieved this, and from all who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service. Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs. Garth, and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her bread--meaning that Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage; in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall's Questions was something like a draper's discrimination of calico trademarks, or a courier's acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better off needed that sort of thing. And since Mary had been keeping Mr. Featherstone's house, Mrs. Vincy's want of liking for the Garths had been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fred should engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents "lived in such a small way." Fred, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to Mrs. Garth, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing ardor of his affection for Mary inclining him the more towards those who belonged to her.

and

Chapter 27

Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a third person; still they had no interviews or asides from which a third person need have been excluded. In fact, they flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothing else. If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time? Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr. Farebrother, were great bores, and Lydgate did not care about commercial politics or cards: what was he to do for relaxation? He was often invited to the Bulstrodes'; but the girls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and Mrs. Bulstrode's _naive_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable seriousness. The Vincys' house, with all its faults, was the pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Rosamond--sweet to look at as a half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man. But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss Vincy. One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when several other visitors were there. The card-table had drawn off the elders, and Mr. Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds) was in tete-a-tete with Rosamond. He had brought the last "Keepsake," the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting. Rosamond was gracious, and Mr. Ned was satisfied that he had the very best thing in art and literature as a medium for "paying addresses"--the very thing to please a nice girl. He had also reasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance. To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.










and










Chapter 31

He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long before he heard of Mr. Featherstone's demise. The felicitous word "demise," which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action. Considered as a demise, old Featherstone's death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff-box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity; and Mr. Vincy hated both solemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe struck about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real property? Mr. Vincy was inclined to take a jovial view of all things that evening: he even observed to Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution after all, and would soon be as fine a fellow as ever again; and when his approbation of Rosamond's engagement was asked for, he gave it with astonishing facility, passing at once to general remarks on the desirableness of matrimony for young men and maidens, and apparently deducing from the whole the appropriateness of a little more punch.

William Wiser's The Twilight Years

Paris in the 1930's
On Jules Pascin:
To draw unobserved he worked out a cramped method of preliminary sketching executed in his coat pocket on stiff paper with a pencil stub: his models remained unaware of being sketched.
He was seen passing the Cabaret du Neant, a name surely appropriate to his contemplations, non-etre, not to be... nothingness. Pascin deplored an evident decline of quality in the work of such painters as the Dutchman Van Dongen who had been one of the original Fauves (the Wild Ones) now grown tame and fashionable. Kisling too had discovered that his hollow-eyed portraits became appealing and collectible the larger and more sentimental the model's wistful stare. Decadence set in, what was once daring had become commercially chic.
and
Joyce and his friendship suffered a series of setbacks because of McAlmons lightminded flippancy in matters Joyce considered sacred and from an increasing disillusionment, (on McAlmon’s part), with the obeisance expected of the Joycean acolyte, Sylvia Beach considered that Joyce had “earned” this undivided devotion of his followers, but McAlmon in the 1930s began to stray. 

Joyce’s Irish sense of humor could condone such incidents as the stir McAlmon caused at the reading of Anna Livia Plumbelle, a lyric section from Joyce’s Work in Progress (Fiimegans Wake). The reading was held at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop since‘ the ALP section, as it was known in short, had been translated into French (already difficult enough in the original English) by Valery Larbaud and others, the audience, naturally, predominantly French literary dignitaries. McAlmon was a reluctant participant to what he considered a secular version of High Mass and at one point, as the audience sat in hushed reverence, McAlmon raised his hands, palms together, in a gesture of mock prayer. Immediately a Frenchman rose from his seat and slapped McAlmon’s face. It turned out that the Frenchman (Edouard Dujardin, who was said to have originated the technique of “interior monologue” Joyce had adapted so brilliantly in Ulysses) was not protesting McAlmon’s irreverence toward the séance but thought McAlmon was mocking his wife's thick ungainly ankles, about which he was sensitive to the point of obsession. 
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This was “Gala,” Elena Dimitrovna Diakanova, formerly married, the surrealist poet Paul Eluard. Known as “the surrealists’ muse“(}a Was the centerpiece in an uneasy ménage a trois with Eluard and painter Max Ernst, until Dali contrived a secret rendezvous with he, and overcame his lifelong impotency-according to his unreliable account in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalz’ at first sight. 

For this initial tryst, or grotesque encounter, Dali was wearing a silk shirt with the sleeves cut away to reveal armpits painted blue. He sported a dog collar of pearls, a pair of bathing trunks donned backwards, and a geranium behind his ear. Somehow this outlandish ensemble “on Gala’s heart-or appealed to her Russian temperament, or over. whelmed her as a result of the scent Dali had concocted from sheep dung boiled in fish oil flavored with essence of aspic. 

“I swear to you,” Dali swore to Gala, “that I am not ‘coprophagic." This was to account for the minutely detailed merde depicted in some of his paintings. “I consciously loathe that type of abberration . . . burl consider scatology as a terrorizing element, just as I do blood, or my phobia for grasshoppers.” 

Gala confessed to an obsession of her own, a death wish brought on by the instant, wanting suddenly to be slain by Dali’s hand, a desire that strangely coincided with the very thought of killing Gala that Dali himself had entertained.

DALI WAS THE leading exemplar of a movement to which Picasso only marginally subscribed. (Cofounder of cubism with Braque, Picasso now abandoned the group theory of art and was content to remain a school of one.) Picasso did, however, share his poetry with Breton and designed the very first cover for Breton’s surrealist journal. Minotaure. The mythical beast-a bull’s head upon a lusty male torso-became an iconlike motif in Picasso’s life and work, and immediately inspired a series of lithographs, drawing, and paintings. Evidently Picasso identified his own sexual nature with the man-beast symbol, a signature creature that appears repeatedly in his work. 

Minotaure as a journal, was not as doctrinaire as its Marxist-inspired founder, André Breton, and not all contributors to its pages were hardline surrealists (or Communists), Picasso for one, and certainly not Matisse. 
Surrealism evolved from the épater-le-bourgoeis antics of Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara, and Francis Picabia, when dada was the rage in Paris and “anything goes” attitudes directed or misdirected the dadaists. André Breton refined that movement into a more disciplined philosophy of Marxist thought combined with Freudian dream theory applied to experimental verse, “automatic writing," and later to modern painting. 

Cafe manifestos were drawn up; Breton was joined by poets Louis Aragon (whom Dali referred to as “a nervous little Robespierre“) and Paul Eluard in defining the cult's doctrine. Considering the controversial natures and individualistic bent of painters and poets, it is surprising that the surrealist alignment remained unbroken for as long as it did. Throughout the 1930s the movement represented the predominant fashion in artistic and literary experiment. Even when the alliance dissolved, in the way of all such previous isms meant to define succeeding stages of modern art (fauvism, futurism, expressionism, cubism“ number of painters persisted in the surrealist mode. At least in France, dream imagery and sexual symbolism continued to appeal long after surrealism as a movement had faded from the Paris scene. Faithful to the Freudian influence ever after were Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson, Max Ernst-and above all, Salvador Dali. 

In his Mainfeste du Surrealisme, Andre Breton described the surreal approach to art as purely psychic automatism--the absence of all control exercised by reason. But Breton’s doctrinaire insistence was responsible for many of the defections and dismissals. One must write and paint as Breton prescribed. Alberto Giacometti innocently returned to the use of models for his sculptures: “When I did that the surrealists considered it a reactionary activity or whatever,” and he was dismissed from the ranks because of a practice banned by Breton. The poets Aragon and Eluard broke with Breton on ideological grounds, refusing to adhere to Trotskyist principles Breton attached to surrealism-and the same shift in party line so disturbed René Crevel, author of La mot! 
dificile, that he committed suicide. Gertrude Stein pronounced the epitaph to surrealism: “They missed their moment of becoming civilized. . . . They wanted publicity, not civilization, and so really they never succeeded in being peaceful and exciting.” 

Miro abandoned the art scene in Paris to return to his native Spain and Magritte quit the Paris group to return to Brussels where he founded the Belgian branch of the movement. Dali, the young turk. outlasted the breakup of the fraternity to become surrealism personified. "C'est moi," he declared, "et moi seule," after being dismissed by Breton who called him “Avida Dollars," a witty and pertinent anagram on the name Salvador Dali. 

Burroughs

by Barry Miles

 A whole beguiling new world was opened up for Burroughs when he read You Can’t Win by Jack Black, the autobiography of a former burglar, drug addict, and railroad hobo published in 1926.. He had not known that such a life existed and was immediately intrigued. It’had such a lasting impact upon him that he was able to quote passages verbatim fifty years later. It 
was set in that forgotten era between the days of the Wild West and the development of the big metropolitan cities, between the death of Jesse James and the rise of Al Capone. “It fascinated me and I thought it would be great to be a burglar. I saw all these furtive seedy rooming houses....l got so much from that book, Salt Chunk Mary was one of his characters. 
The whole idea of the Johnson Family comes from there. He read and reread it, indulging in an adolescent nostalgic de la boue. longing for this other world of cheap hotels, smoky bars, pool halls, whorehouses, and opium dens, of cat burglars and hobo jungles. He wanted to be one of the Johnson Family, the good bums and thieves with a code of honorable conduct in direct contrast to the venal, corrupt, hypocritical behavior of people like Uncle Ivy or the parents of most of his friends. He became fascinated by gangsters and romanticized them. 

Bill continued to write stories, mostly lurid adventure tales of derring-do, gothic horror, or westerns that were read aloud in class. Sometimes he wrote more philosophical essays, such as his first published work, “Personal Magnetism,” which appeared in the February 1929 issue of the John Burroughs Review, about sending two dollars for instructions on “how to control others at a glance.” His interest in control systems appeared early on. 

The 1927 St. Louis tornado made a big impression on him. On Sepember 29, the sky turned black and green and Bill was standing in the entrance to the boys’ locker room when he saw a bolt of lightning strike the cornice of the school, knocking off bricks. The children ran through the corridors, screaming hysterically. Then the phone calls from concerned parents began, but no one in the school was hurt. In St. Louis itself the scene was very different; seventy-nine people were killed and over 550 injured. The fronts were torn off whole rows of buildings, leaving their interiors exposed, cars were flipped over, trees uprooted, telephone poles became javelins as the tornado cut a swath through the West End. 
It was left looking like a scene from a Great War battlefront, with houses reduced to rubble and tram lines twisted into bizarre sculptures. Tornadoes appear throughout Burroughs’s later Work, “usually with a frisson of sexual excitement.

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Bill, Joan, and the children moved to the Valley in April 1949 to sell Bill’s landholdings there. He and Kells had earlier combined their operation and Bill owned a share of the farm equipment as well as land. In May he sold his original fifty acres to Kells, but the family stayed on in Pharr until October, waiting to see how Bill’s trial was shaping up. Bill hated it there. “All the worst features of America have drained down to the Valley and concentrated there. In the whole area, there is not one good restaurant. The food situation could only be tolerated by people who do not taste 
what they eat.” He felt that the Valley was plagued by DOR, Wilhelm Reich’s “Deadly Orgone Radiation,” a negative debilitating energy that brought on depression and lack of vitality. “Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is---orgones, life force-that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. The Valley is the place where the new anti-life force is breaking through. Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. [. . .] The dying cell gravitates to the Valley.”
The notion of orgones came from Wilhelm Reich’s recently published The Cancer Biopathy, in which he argues that cancer is caused by an inability to discharge sexual energy. Reich calls it orgone energy, natural energy, the life force, cosmic energy, what Henri Bergson called élan vital, which exists everywhere in the atmosphere and in all living and dead matter. It can be concentrated and used to help relieve a stasis of energy in the body, and Reich manufactured a simple device known as an orgone accumulator in which the patient sat and absorbed life energy. Burroughs thought that anything that energized the body would be good for the after-effects of 
junk sickness. His approach to the orgone was essentially that of Bergson’s notion that "life is essentially a current sent through matter.” Reich’s ideas on the role of the orgasm in healthy functioning, an extension of Freud‘s theories, were seriously taken on board by New intellectuals (and elsewhere). Reich was a long standing member of the Freud seminar in Vienna, and his book Character Analysis on psychoanalytic technique was a standard work, so his ideas were carefully considered. Reich’s books were then extremely popular and people were hung orgone accumulators from Reich’s institute or building their own.Burroughs took exception to the amount of paperwork attached to renting an orgone accumulator, so in June he built his own in the yard behind Kell's house. The principle was very simple. Orgones are absorbed and retained by organic matter but pass freely through metal. A metal box with organic material on the outside will have a higher concentration of orgones inside than out because the layer of organic material will retard the escape of orgones from the box. The more layers of metal and organic material, the higher the concentration of orgones. Bill ordered sheet metal, wood, and a roll of rock wool. He told james Grauerholz, “Kells and I made it, and it was a sloppy job too. [. . .] We had some kind of jerry built but to start with and sloppily nailed sheet iron inside that. Then inside that we had another orgone box made out of an old icebox which you lowered down over yourself, and then we had a little accumulator made out of one of those jerry cans, we just covered that over in burlap and various stuff-we were getting three levels.” He felt it did him good: “My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal.” Kells and Bill’s accumulator was a popular new toy for the front porch set. Bill wrote Kerouac, “The gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he‘s a fucking genius.” From then on, whenever he was settled somewhere, Burroughs usually built himself an orgone accumulator. He had them in Tangier, London, New York, and Lawrence, Kansas. 

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“We were so drunk, Joan and I, we were driving these mountain roads. I was much too drunk to drive and so was she but she could at least steer. She had this polio-shriveled leg so that she couldn‘t work both the gas pedal and the brake, so I was lying on the floor of the front seat pushing down on the gas pedal and she had her one good leg on the brake and we would scream round the corners." They were drinking gin out of the bottle. Joan was yelling, “How fast can this heap go?” while in the backseat Allen cowered on the floor with Billy and Julie, absolutely terrified. 

They came to a river where the bridge was washed out. It was night, but fortunately somebody had put a bush in the road; otherwise they would have driven into the water. They managed to find a Mexican to help them push the car back on the road. Lucien remembered, “Allen took his pants off and got out to push. And suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared a lot of Mexicans to help push, and as they were helping to push, they stole Allen’s pants, along with all his money and whatever he had in there. They eventually reached Guadalajara and Joan met her connection. On the way back they decided to visit Paricutin, the new volcano in Uruapan that had lowered the level of Lake Taluca by twelve feet. Paricutin came up in a farmer’s cornfield in 1943, and Within a week was eight hundred feet high and had buried the land and homes of fifteen thousand people in fire and ash and lava. By the time Joan and party were there only the tops of the church spires could be seen. Lucien and Joan fortified themselves with more gin and drove out onto the lava field at night. “I can remember the car falling into crevices, and having to get it out with the jack and Joan saying, ‘Go on! Go on! Let’s get to the volcano,’ Lucien remembered. Finally they got within a mile of the eruption, but molten lava and rocks landing all around them and hitting the car roof forced them to turn back. 

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In March 1952. Bill told Allen that he had begun work on a new novel that could be seen as part two ot‘jimk or read complete in itself. He said Dennison was still the main character but he had shifted to third-person narrative. It was about his relationship with Marker, known in the book as AIlerton. He passed the time by writing and attending bullfights and cockfights. “I like my spectacles brutal, bloody and degrading.” In April, Allen Ginsberg finally persuaded Carl Solomon to publish Junk as an Ace paperback original for an eight-hundred-dollar advance; it was to be called Junkie, since the publishers thought Junk might be taken as a value judgment on the text. In 1977, Burroughs changed the spelling of the revised edition to Junky, which it has remained ever since. Now began months of prevarication and stalling on the part of Ace, who demanded to see the new material Burroughs was writing and to incorporate it into Junkie.

One complication came over Solomon’s suggestion that part two of the book be called Fag. Burroughs told Allen he did not mind being called queer: “T.E. Lawrence and all manner of right joes (boy can I turn a phrase) was queer. But I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a Fag. [. . .] That’s just what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us strong, manly, noble types and the leaping, jumping window dressing cocksucker. Furthechrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somewheres.”

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 Allen’s tenement window looked out over fire escapes and backyards with laundry lines strung from building to building, level upon level of metal stairs and wires all connected. Burroughs saw a woman reach out over the fire escape and start pulling in the laundry and conceived the futuristic city of Interzone, with its levels connected by a web of catwalks, boardwalks, and fire escapes, a great labyrinth of alleyways and passages, squares and tunnels, like a medina; a city so old that it had collapsed on itself and been rebuilt one building upon another, layer upon layer. Ashe described the idea to Ginsberg he gave the city a vibrating soundless hum, like insect wings and larval entities waiting to be born. The imagery of The Naked Lunch was being developed, in this case drawing heavily upon Arthur Rimbaud’s visions of cities in Illuminations, always one of Bill’s favorite books. Both Burroughs and Ginsberg later agreed that the “Interzone Meet Cafe” was the seed of The Naked Lunch. Allen’s role as the receiver of the long, intimate letters from Central and Latin America, and now as his confidant, collaborator, and editor in New York, had quickly led to an affair. Allen had been a teenager when they both shared the apartment in New York with Joan and had regarded Burroughs as his mentor, if not his guru. He was only nineteen when Burroughs left New York. As the result of their conversations his respect for Bill had grown and he was prepared to do anything he wanted. “I thought he was my teacher, so I’d do what I could to amuse him. In bed, Bill is like an English governess, whinnying and giggling, almost hysteric. [..] He liked to come while being screwed,” Ginsberg said. “Burroughs fell in love with me and we slept together and I saw a soft center where he felt isolated, alone in the world and he needed [. . .] a feeling of affection, and since I did love him and did have that respect and affection, he responded. I kinda felt privileged.” Ginsberg’s affection released a huge reservoir of pent-up feelings in Burroughs, to Allen’s great alarm and consternation. He said, “Bill became more and more demanding that there be some kind of mental schlupp. It had gone beyond the point of being humorous and playful. It seemed that Bill was demanding it for real. Bill wanted a relationship where there were no holds barred; to achieve an ultimate telepathic union of souls.”4 Ginsberg explained, “Schlupp for him was originally a very tender emotional direction, a desire to merge with a lover, and as such, pretty vulnerable, tenderhearted and open on Burroughs’ part.”

Burroughs’s concept of schlupping- the complete merging of soul mates into one entity-came from his close, and imaginative, reading of Wilhelm Reich, who saw that the point of the orgasm was to fuse the two orgone fields of the sex partners into one “orgonome”-to use Reich’s term-in an explosive, rejuvenating recharge of natural universal energy. Reich explained, “The sexual embrace, if abstracted and reduced to its basic form, represents superimposition and the bio-energetic fusion of two orgonotic systems. Superimposition follows orgonotic penetration. The pre-orgastic bodily movements and in particular the orgastic convulsions represent extreme attempts of the free orgone of both organisms to fuse with one another, to reach into one another.” It was not a question of one partner dominating the other; there was no invasion, no usurping the masculine status of the other person. The intention was schlupp, the complete fusion with the other person, “to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.” Burroughs didn’t want to become the other person, he wanted to fuse with the other person, the two of them making one. This is a common theme in Burroughs, particularly in the later writing where Mayan priests conduct various rituals to join two bodies. Of course complete schlupp was impossible, but a temporary flash of it was very desirable and partial occupation perhaps possible by cultural means. The flash of orgasm was when Bill was outside time and space. The orgasm flash where two orgone fields fuse into one is accomplished with no top and bottom, no domination or effeminacy, and Burroughs had always stressed that he saw his sex role as normal and male. “Like all normal citizens, I ejaculate when screwed without helping hand, produce a good crop of jissom, spurt it up to my chin and beyond. I have observed that small hard cocks come quicker slicker and spurtier.” This rather aggressive stridency suggests that Bill was not at all sure that “all normal citizens” did in fact come that way. There was also the matter of his small cock. “My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia.” Ginsberg thought that Bill’s small penis accounted for his obsession with guns, a
subject that many academics have mulled over. Years later, Ginsberg revealed all the intimate details of Burroughs‘s sex life.

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Burroughs told Ginsberg, “Ali is getting worried about his standing in the shoe-shine set. [. . .] He thumps his little scrawny chest and says ‘I am a man.’ Oh God! Such shit I could hear in Clayton, Mo.” He was unable to score for opium, and the marijuana he bought was rough and burned his throat. He told Allen, “I like Tanger less all the time.” (Burroughs always used the official French spelling: Tanger.) 
He didn’t know anyone at all. He had gone to Tangier, attracted by reading Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down and The Sheltering Sky, but Bowles was away and Burroughs was unable to find the supposed writers’ colony. His immediate reaction was to blame Bowles: “What’s all this old Moslem culture shit? One thing I have learned. I know what Arabs do all day and all night. They sit around smoking cut weed and playing some silly card game. And don’t ever fall for this inscrutable oriental shit like Bowles puts down (that shameless faker). They are just a gabby, gossipy simpleminded, lazy crew of citizens.”

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Paco was callow, guileless, he had no tact. When Alan Ansen visited Paco used to tease him by taking off his clothes and sitting in provocative poses, hoping to disconcert him so that he would give him more money. Alan and Bill both had sex with him. In the end Bill succumbed and allowed Paco to move in. It didn’t work, and two months later, by Christ.mas 1956, Bill told Allen, “Paco, this Spanish kid wind up buggin’ me like I throw him out already.” In fact it probably upset Bill a lot to have to do so. Sadly Paco, like Kiki, came to a horrible end. In September 1967, he visited Lourdes, where he robbed and murdered a taxi driver. When the police arrived, he committed suicide. Ansen found it extraordinary that he was in Lourdes, but Paco was a poorly educated Spanish boy, almost certainly Catholic, and therefore racked with guilt and remorse for his “sins.” He went with men out of necessity not desire, which must have caused him enormous conflicts. 

Moroccan prostitutes felt less guilt, although they were also forced into homosexuality by poverty, rather than out of sexual preference. In Moroccan society, to be called a zamel-to take the passive homosexual role- was the worst possible insult. Many of the boys refused to do it. Despite the formal disapproval of religious authority and the strict segregation of men and women in Muslim societies, the strong emphasis on virility leads adolescents and unmarried young men to seek sexual outlets with males younger than themselves It was not so much the action, “getting fucked 
that was disapproved of-this was often done from economic necessity. What was regarded as bad was enjoying it. 

Homosexuality is forbidden in Islamic law: “For the unmarried, one hundred lashes and exile for a year, for the married, one hundred lashes and stoning to death” (Sura IV:15), but “And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls” (Sura LII:24), and “They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders” (Sura LXXVI:19). In any case, the Moroccans always had a more relaxed attitude toward homosexuality than most other Muslim countries (or Christian ones). Long before the arrival of sexual tourism by westerners, as far back as 1632, the Scottish traveler William Lithgow reported that in Fez there were twelve thousand allowed brothels and “three thousand common stewes of sodomitical boyes. Nay, I have scene at midday, in the very market places, the Moores buggering these filthy carrions, and without shame or punishment go freely away.” 

Their friends and neighbors understood why they did it: they were poor and their families were hungry. Tahar ben Jelloun in Leaving Tangier quotes the concierge, in what is obviously Paul Bowles’ building, observing the predatory sex tourists who came to Tangier: “This I know that poverty-our friend poverty-leads us to some very sad places. People have to make do with life, that’s how it is, and me, I see everything but I don’t say everything.” This'was a Moroccan’s critical view of Paul and Jane Bowles. She continues, “They want everything, men and women from the common people, young ones, healthy, preferably from the countryside, who can’t read or write, serving them all day, then servicing them at night. A package deal, and between two pokes, tokes on a nicely packed pipe of kif to help the American write! Tell me your story, he says. I’ll make a novel out of it, you’ll even have your name on the cover: You won’t be able to read it but no matter, you’re'a writer like me, except that you’re an illiterate writer, that’s exotic!” A tough critique, but in the decade they were together, there would have been plenty of time for Bowles to teach Yacoubi how to read and write. 

As Bowles didn’t drink, Bill would either visit him at his new apartment in the Edificio San Francisco, at plaza de Navarra, overlooking the Spanish consulate, or they would sometimes meet in a café such as Mme. Porte’s Salon de The, in the rue du Statut around the corner from the Place de France, an establishment renowned for its pastries. In the morning men outnumbered women but in the afternoon it was the reverse. It has used as a headquarters by Abdelkhalek Torres, the popular Moroccan nationalist leader who appeared at 10:00 a.m. with his faithful acolytes, 
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That October Bill assured them, “Jack must not be afraid of Arabs. I am in the position to officially abolish fear. The chaos in Morocco is beautiful.”
Kerouac took a lot of persuading that he would be safe, and Bill had to Write a number of times to reassure him. In January he was still dithering. Bill wrote, “I will say it again and say it slow: TANGER IS AS SAFE AS ANY TOWN I EVER LIVE IN. I feel a chill of fear and horror at thought of the random drunken violence stalking the streets and bars and parks and subways of America. [. . ] ARABS ARE NOT VIOLENT. [. . .] They do not attack people for kicks or fight for kicks like Americans.”

Now that Bill had enough space, in January 1957 he began to build an orgone accumulator. He had been deprived of the benefit since he stayed with Allen in New York. He kept it in the garden of the Muniria and would sit in it, doubled up, smoking kif for an hour a day. Said Paul Bowles, “He kept after me to go out and sit in it. ‘Just sit there and you’ll feel different when you come out,’ he said. It was a bitter cold winter night, and I did, and of course I did feel different when I came out-I was shivering. The box was like a dog kennel-I’ll never know why he believed in that. Some people believe in astrology too. It doesn’t seem compatible with what one knows about science.”5 Strange stories circulated around Tangier about Bill’s orgone accumulator. In the summer of 1954 he had 
an amazing discovery." When he was high on kif and lying next to Klki his ideas came faster, and better than at other times. “It’s like he has some kind of orgone battery that tunes me in," he told Allen. “I have tried this many times. The difference is palpable. Trouble is I don’t feel W. and it isn‘t appropriate, to get up and write them down.” He did commit enough ideas to paper to be convinced of the theory. He reported glut “he is sort of a medium through which I get ideas.” 

Naturally Bill turned the whole thing into a routine: “One after the all” his boys were drained of their orgones and cast aside, dragging themselves about like terminal hookworm-malaria-malnutrition cases. 

“I don't know why, but I just feel sorta tired after I make it with that writing feller. . .”

Bill appears to have extended this theory-~that boys have an abundance of orgones~and attempted to store them, at least temporarily, in his orgone accumulator. The evidence comes from Colonel Gerald Richardson, the British chief of police, who wrote, “One of them was known as Morphine Minnie. He was an educated American, a remittance man, like so many of them. It was sometimes said that he was putting up a fight against the habit. I suppose many of them did. [. . .] Morphine Minnie certainly got up to some strange tricks. He had a large box specially made for him with holes punched in the sides: in appearance it was like a very long cabin trunk. On occasions he would induce a young boy to enter the box and lie down in it-fully clothed, I hasten to add-and he would put the lid back on. After he judged the boy had been in there long enough he would open up the box again, let the boy out and send him on his way. He would then get into the box himself, and lie down. When he later emerged, so far as I was able to understand it----and he was a strenuous advocate for the practice-he was supposed to be rejuvenated.” Clearly Richardson had not seen the device, as you sit in it, not lie down, but it helped confirm Bill’s reputation for eccentricity in the town. 

One of the revelations that came to Bill in his junk-free state was that he now found how emphatically he disapproved of stealing, or of any criminal activities, carefully distinguishing between criminal acts and illegal acts. He despised crimes against property and against the person of others. “And I used to admire gangsters. Good God,” he exclaimed to Allen. This was quite a profound change in position given his background in petty crime and association with Huncke, Phil the Sailor, Bob Brandinburg, and the rest.