New York and London: The Olympia Press. [1971].
Inscribed and with an introduction by William Burroughs. "I'd rather read Winnie the Pooh".
One of only six uncorrected proof copies signed by William Burroughs. 213x175mm. Printed on recto only. ff. xv, 104. Brown wrappers, printed in black. In very good condition throughout. Half title has an inscription "I'd rather read Winnie the Pooh. Bradbury Robinson" which has then been crossed out in the manner of a Masson automatic drawing. Both the inscription and the scrawl are by William Burroughs who has signed the dedication leaf. Burroughs wrote the introduction which begins with the observation: "The old barriers are breaking down and we must now recognise as human anything that humans actually do".
Williams Mix certainly breaks down old barriers. It has a strong claim to being the strangest and most controversial novel of the late twentieth century. Taking its title from John Cage's short piece of experimental electronic music for eight simultaneously played magnetic tapes, Williams Mix is, as Bradbury Robinson, explains in his preface, "very largely a book of voices…In Williams Mix there is only one person: the different voices are different parts of his mind". Bradbury Robinson compares the writer to a composer, "a sound artist" and the way the voices of his novel jump around, suddenly appear and then fade away mirrors the fragmentary unsettled quality of Cage's work. Aside from aleatory music, Bradbury Robinson's other major influence is psycho-analysis (he is a Kleinian analyst). Of the Freudian "instinctual conflicts" and the Kleinian "moral conflict" he offers the "realisation that these structures, these conflicts are verbal. They are voiced". But Bradbury Robinson's voices are, as he says, "crying in the wilderness".
This wilderness is perhaps best described in William Burroughs's extraordinary introduction to Williams Mix - namely, "sexual attraction for boys under the age of puberty". This is the ostensible subject matter of the novel and it is, without doubt, difficult to see past it. But we should try. As Burroughs makes clear, the book is really about the pathetic desire, doomed to failure, to return to one's childhood, one's prepubescence. This "impasse", as Burrough's calls it, is the struggle between our past, present and future distilled into an acute psycho-sexual drama. "The boy kills Bradbury Robinson so he can grow up. Or Bradbury Robinson kills the boy so he will never have to grow up."
Williams Mix is also about the art of writing and "the music of language". These were subjects that preoccupied Bradbury Robinson and Burroughs during their long conversations at Burroughs's London flat in the early 1970s. Bradbury Robinson greatly admired the older man's work, regarding Soft Machine as "more or less, a continuous stream of poetry". On the face of it, theirs was a strange friendship. At the time, Bradbury Robinson was a young, just-out-of-Cambridge, prep school master with no interest in the druggy, Beaty, pop culture which was beginning to see Burroughs as one of its godfathers. True, both men shared a similar but not entirely overlapping interest in boys but what drew them together and kept them talking was experimental literature. "Burroughs would pull from his typewriter the page he was currently working on (Dutch Schultz or Port of Saints), hand it to me and say, Musical enough for you, Brad? And we would examine the writing as a musical score."
During an early meeting, Bradbury Robinson gave Burroughs a copy of his first novel (A Crocodile of Choirboys), extracts of which Burroughs had read in draft (when it was called Minor Incidents). Burroughs was impressed – "You're a writer…those are the exact words Beckett said to me – You're a writer!". Bradbury Robinson then asked Burroughs to write an introduction to his new novel – Williams Mix. A long and tortuous gestation followed. Burroughs recommended it to The Olympia Press. Olympia, short of money and nervous of the reaction to the "problematic" subject matter, turned it down although they did print six proof copies of this extraordinary and beautiful work of avant-garde, musical, prose-poetry.
The quotes from Burroughs and Bradbury Robinson are taken from https://www.beatdom.com/william-s-burroughs-c-j-bradbury-robinson-and-williams-mix/
which provides valuable insight into the relationship between the two men.
