Soft Need 23

Udo Breger, Luzius Martin eds

Expanded Media Editions 2020: jim@aloesbooks.co.uk

Pb, 258pp, £69, ISBN 9783880300538

Like a giant fanzine, this extraordinary compendium is devoted to William Burroughs and his closest circle, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville (his British partner who invented the Dream Machine, a simple strobe flickering at alpha wave frequency).

Soft Need is an irregular journal, and this one is not numbered 23 because there was ever a number 22, but because of Burroughs’s obsession with coincidences around the number 23 itself.

It is coincidentally fitting that its availability has been delayed until now by a virus – another Burroughs obsession.

There are about 100 items from almost as many people, including varied artwork, and what makes it impressive is the high quality of the central contributors such as Barry Miles, Alan Ginsberg, James Grauerholz and many others in the Burroughs world, and the inclusion of primary material with photographs, letters and striking reminiscences.

Editor Udo Breger vividly recalls visiting Burroughs and Gysin in the apartment building where they both lived, near London’s Jermyn Street, with a life-sized cardboard nude of Mick Jagger in the corner of Gysin’s room under a pink lamp, and later going with Sommerville to see the Dream Machine in his flat in Kensington.

Among a myriad odds and ends there is a 1960 mescaline invoice to Burroughs, living in Earl’s Court, from a mundane-looking firm in Slough; a letter from John Michell (who Ian Sommerville was lodging with in Bath) to say that Ian had just been killed in a car crash; and rare photos including atmospheric shots of Burroughs in the Beat Hotel.

The number of key players involved makes it feel clubby, but in a good way, like a gathering of the Burroughs tribe. Clearly done with a lot of love and respect, it is dedicated to the memory of Sommerville.

Rob James

★★★★★