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7.
The Watchers. Original manuscript, c. April 1961 + 3 TLS.
An expanded, unpublished version of Burroughs’ important essay, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”. Together with three typed letters signed to Conrad Rooks. Typed manuscript 9pp. (using a blue typewriter ribbon), with author’s holograph pagination and emendations in blue ink (approx. 27). An additional 1pp. typescript, titled “Rearrange The Word And Image to other fields than writing”, includes “a most important post script to The Watchers concerning a new application of the cut up method to photography”. The three letters (approx. 270 words in total) each concern the submission of Burroughs’ essay to Rooks’s projected magazine, and are dated between April 25 and May 16, 1961, written while he was living at the Villa Muniria, Tangier.
In the first letter (April 25, 1961), Burroughs writes: “Here is the manuscript of The Watchers… I must apologize for the sloppy typing but I have been working here under considerable pressure.” Burroughs wrote to Brion Gysin two days later, mentioning Rooks and enclosing a sample page of “The Watchers”. The “pressure” is referred to again in another letter to Gysin, dated May 8 (published in “Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974”). In it, he refers to the “considerable pressure here”, and warns him to “be careful with that fucking Prestonia” (an Amazonian hallucinogenic that had recently given him a bad trip; the pressure may also have related to the presence at Villa Muniria of Mikey Portman, an addictive personality whose mother, Lady Marjorie Portman, would, coincidentally, soon begin a relationship with Conrad Rooks). Burroughs also told Gysin that he is writing “an article on color lines for Conrad Rooks. Actually I think he is non compos mentis… Why don’t he get his ass back to NY and publish his so called magazine.” The title of the magazine for which “The Watchers” was intended is unknown (it was never published, as Burroughs later told Jean-Jacques Lebel), nor is it clear when Rooks first made contact with Burroughs; however, the promotional book for his 1966 film, “Chappaqua” (in which Burroughs featured as Opium Jones, the Symbol of Junk), states that “William Burroughs met Rooks in 1961 after carrying on a literary correspondence thru 1960”.
In the second letter to Rooks (dated May 6, 1961), Burroughs refers to “some illustrative drawing I hope you can reproduce”, and in the third letter (May 16, 1961) he states that “Brion Gysin is sending along some drawings to illustrate the text.” Finally, in the postscript (accompanying the third letter), he writes: “Particularly interesting effects are obtained by using color film. I enclose two examples of Collage Concentrate to show possibilities and extensions of the method as applied to photography.” Burroughs began experimenting with photo-collages and montages following his return to Tangier in March 1961, and started using colour photography shortly before May 16, the date of the third letter.
Burroughs’ essay, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”, first appeared in abbreviated form in “A Casebook on the Beat” (pp. 105-106. NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961). It was extended from six paragraphs to three pages in Yugen #8, its first magazine appearance (pp. 31-33. NY: 1962), and the same text was subsequently published over four pages in “The Third Mind”, (pp. 29-33. NY: Viking Press, 1978). The first four pages of the 9pp. manuscript here correspond to the four pages of this edition, but the manuscript’s final five pages, which consist of an extended cut-up text, plus the postscript, are unpublished anywhere.
Burroughs first gave a reading of “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” on November 24, 1960 at Cambridge University in a talk arranged by Ian Sommerville with his student group, the Heretics Society, less than two months before its first appearance in print. The manuscript is a much extended version, making thorough use of Gysin’s cut-up technique that by then had effectively become Burroughs’ own. “The Watchers” carries the subtitle “Inquire onward from state to doer. Watching you have They thought debarred - Cut from the Koran by Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin”. Its title derives from the concept of the guardian angel or watcher (raqib) in Islamic tradition, although the reason for Burroughs’ choice is unclear, since the first part had already been published as “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” in January 1961. It seems possible that Burroughs chose a different title for his essay’s intended appearance in Rooks’ magazine because it had been substantially expanded, and perhaps in order to differentiate one text from the other.
The manuscript’s unpublished sections demonstrate Burroughs’ deep immersion in the cut-up method, and were probably composed either just before or around the time of his initial work on the texts that were to become “The Ticket That Exploded”. They reveal his Rimbaudian ideas on colour separation, discovered while he was living in Cambridge during the last few months of 1960: “You can cut as you walk the streets of all your cities… Now look at the colors in the street… Pick out I all the red in the sweaters and flowers and signs. Now cut to O blue. U green - - E white newspapers white clouds - - A black store windows and so forth start with Rimbaud’s Color Of Vowels. You will find yourselves using color alphabet.” This colour-coded psychogeography is followed by the further suggestion to “Cut scenes from movies into your walk you can make a movie”, and continues in a dense, dream-like stream of Burroughsian mythology and imagery: “Lee The Agent of Hassan I Sabbah walked color lines silent as a fish through body rooms streets along newsprint Herald Tribune was weightless... Burning star tracks intersect Mr Bradly Mr Martin… Back seat dream streets drifting smoke - - Photo Falling - - Word Falling - - Break Through in Grey Room…”; and later, in less fragmented passages: “The Master had written books the letters in different colors and we learned his color alphabet and all gathered in the main court yard to read the books aloud pulling letters off the page as we chanted color notes to drum beats until the letters danced out into the sky and mist and the rising sun…”.
Two old horizontal mailing folds to each manuscript sheet, and minor handling wear to one letter, o/w Near Fine. This rare and important manuscript represents the first significant exposition of the cut-up method, a technique that would preoccupy Burroughs for the next ten years, and reveals a previously unseen example of its use in the unpublished final five pages.