The Outlaw
The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs.
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them
out there making their moves.” So starts “Naked Lunch,” the touchstone novel by
William S. Burroughs. That hardboiled riff, spoken by a junkie on the run,
introduces a mélange of “episodes, misfortunes, and adventures,” which, the
author said, have “no real plot, no beginning, no end.” It is worth recalling on
the occasion of “Call Me Burroughs” (Twelve), a biography by Barry Miles, an
English author of books on popular culture, including several on the Beats. “I
can feel the heat” sounded a new, jolting note in American letters, like Allen
Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” or, for
that matter, like T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month.” (Ginsberg was a
close friend; Eliot hailed from Burroughs’s home town of St. Louis and his
poetry influenced Burroughs’s style.) In Burroughs’s case, that note was the
voice of an outlaw revelling in wickedness. It bragged of occult power: “I can
feel,” rather than “I feel.” He always wrote in tones of spooky authority—a
comic effect, given that most of his characters are, in addition to being
gaudily depraved, more or less conspicuously insane.
“Naked Lunch” is less a novel than a grab bag of friskily
obscene comedy routines—least forgettably, an operating-room Grand Guignol
conducted by an insouciant quack, Dr. Benway. “Well, it’s all in a day’s work,”
Benway says, with a sigh, after a patient fails to survive heart massage with a
toilet plunger. Some early reviewers spluttered in horror. Charles Poore, in the
Times, calmed down just enough to be forthright in his closing line: “I
advise avoiding the book.” “Naked Lunch” was five years in the writing and
editing, mostly in Tangier, and aided by friends, including Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac. It first appeared in 1959, in Paris, as “The Naked Lunch” (with the
definite article), in an Olympia Press paperback edition, in company with
“Lolita,” “The Ginger Man,” and “Sexus.” Its plain green-and-black cover, like
the covers of those books, bore the alluring caveat “Not to be sold in U.S.A. or
U.K.” (A first edition can be yours, from one online bookseller, for twenty
thousand dollars.) The same year, Big Table, a Chicago literary
magazine, printed an excerpt, and was barred from the mails by the U.S. Postal
Service. Fears of suppression delayed a stateside publication of the book until
1962, when Grove Press brought out an expanded and revised edition. It sold so
well that Grove didn’t issue a paperback until 1966.
As late as 1965, however, a Boston court confirmed a local
ban, despite testimony from Norman Mailer arguing the book’s literary merit.
(Another supporter was Mary McCarthy, who, in the New York Review of
Books, praised Burroughs’s “crankish courage” and compared “Naked Lunch” to
“a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an
independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer.”) A year later, the
Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed the ban, on the ground of “redeeming social
value,” a wobbly legal standard in censorship cases then and after. Thus
anointed, Burroughs’s ragged masterpiece brought to social notice themes of drug
use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti-authoritarian paranoia. Those
temerities and his disarmingly starchy public mien—he was ever the gent, dressed
in suits, with patrician manners and a sepulchral, Missouri-bred and
foreign-seasoned voice—assured him a celebrity status that is apt to flare anew
whenever another cohort of properly disaffected young readers discovers him. The
centenary of Burroughs’s birth, on February 5th, promises much organized
attention; an excellent documentary by Howard Brookner, “Burroughs: The Movie”
(1983), is about to be re-released.
Contrary to Kerouac’s mythmaking portrayal
of him—as Old Bull Lee, in “On the Road”—Burroughs was not a wealthy heir,
although his parents paid him an allowance until he was fifty. His namesake
grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, perfected the adding machine and left his
four children blocks of stock in what later became the Burroughs Corporation.
His son Mortimer—the father of William and another, older son—sold his remaining
share, shortly before the 1929 crash, for two hundred and seventy-six thousand
dollars. Mortimer’s wife, born Laura Lee, never ceased to dote on William;
Mortimer deferred to her.
Burroughs started writing at the age of eight, imitating
adventure and crime stories. He attended a John Dewey-influenced progressive
elementary school in St. Louis and played on the banks of the nearby,
sewage-polluted River des Peres. Miles quotes him recalling, in a nice example
of his gloatingly dire adjectival style, “During the summer months the smell of
shit and coal gas permeated the city, bubbling up from the river’s murky depths
to cover the oily iridescent surface with miasmal mists.” When Burroughs was
fourteen, some chemicals he was tinkering with exploded, severely injuring his
hand; treatment for the pain alerted him to the charms of morphine. He then
spent two unhappy years at the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School for boys, in
New Mexico, memories of which informed his late novel “The Wild Boys” and other
fantasies of all-male societies.
Burroughs was a brilliant student, graduating from Harvard
with honors, in English, in 1936. He sojourned often in Europe; in Vienna, he
briefly studied medicine and frequented the gay demimonde. He had become aware
at puberty of an attraction to boys, and had been so embarrassed by a diary he
kept of a futile passion for a fellow-student that he destroyed it and stopped
writing anything not school-required for several years. Later, in
psychoanalysis, he traced his sexual anxiety to a repressed memory: when he was
four years old, his nanny forced him to perform oral sex on her boyfriend. The
tumultuous experience of having his first serious boyfriend—in New York, in
1940—triggered what he laconically called a “Van Gogh kick”: he cut off the end
joint of his left pinkie.
After a short hitch in the Army, in 1942, Burroughs received
a psychiatric discharge. He then worked briefly as a private detective, in
Chicago, where, however, he enjoyed his longest period of regular
employment—nine months—as a pest exterminator. His delectable memoir of the job,
“Exterminator!,” the title story of a collection published in 1973, employs a
tone, typical of him, that begs to be called bleak nostalgia: “From a great
distance I see a cool remote naborhood blue windy day in April sun cold on your
exterminator there climbing the grey wooden outside stairs.”
The creation story of the Beats is by now
literary boilerplate. Burroughs moved to New York in 1943, along with David
Kammerer, a childhood friend who had travelled with him in Europe, and Lucien
Carr, an angelically handsome Columbia University student whom Kammerer was
stalking. Ginsberg, a fellow-student, was enthralled by Carr, and later
dedicated “Howl” to him. Kerouac, who had dropped out of Columbia and served in
the Navy, returned to the neighborhood in 1944. With Carr as the catalyst, and
Burroughs, whom Kerouac goaded to resume writing, a charismatic presence, the
Beat fellowship was complete.
Carr ended Kammerer’s pursuit of him late on the night of
August 13, 1944, by stabbing him and dumping his body in the Hudson River. (The
new movie “Kill Your Darlings” tells the tale in only somewhat embellished
fashion.) Burroughs then replaced Carr as the group’s mentor. According to
Miles, Kerouac and Ginsberg didn’t yet know that Burroughs was gay, and played
matchmaker by introducing him to Joan Vollmer, an erudite, twice-married free
spirit with a baby daughter, Julie, of uncertain paternity. Burroughs and
Vollmer became inseparable and, they believed, telepathic soul mates, but he
continued to have sexual encounters with men. In 1946, he started on heroin. (An
uncle, Horace Burroughs, whom he idealized but never met, was a morphine addict
who committed suicide in 1915, when the drug was legally restricted.) Vollmer
favored Benzedrine.
Postwar New York updated Burroughs’s trove of criminal
argot. He saw a lot of Herbert Huncke, a junkie and a jack-of-all-scams—whom
Ginsberg called “the basic originator of the ethos of Beat and the conceptions
of Beat and Square”—and other habitués of Times Square, whose doppelgängers roam
the fiction that he had not yet begun to write. In 1946, Vollmer became
pregnant. Burroughs, who could be startlingly moralistic, abhorred abortion; and
so a son, Billy, joined the family. Envisioning himself as a gentleman farmer,
Burroughs had acquired a spread in East Texas, where he cultivated marijuana,
though not very well. He drove a harvest to New York with Kerouac’s “On the
Road” icon, Neal Cassady—whom he disdained as, in Miles’s words, “a cheap con
man”—but it was too green to turn a profit. After a drug bust in New Orleans,
Burroughs jumped bail and settled in Mexico City. For three years, he took
drugs, drank, picked up boys, hosted friends, and cut a sorry figure as a
father. (With Vollmer also drinking heavily, the children’s lot was grim.) A
Mexican scholar of the Beats, Jorge García-Robles, details the louche milieu in
another new book, “The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico”
(Minnesota). He writes that Burroughs found the country “grotesque, sordid, and
malodorous, but he liked it.”
During those years, Burroughs also wrote his
first book, “Junky.” A pulp paperback published in 1953, under the pen name
William Lee, it recounts his adventures through underworlds from New York to
Mexico City. It features terse, crackling reportage, with echoes of Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The narrator’s first meeting with “Herman” (a
pseudonym for Huncke) isn’t auspicious: “Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed
out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast.” “Junky”
attracted no critical notice. Burroughs wrote two other books in the early
fifties that weren’t published until after “Naked Lunch.” “Queer”—centering, in
Mexico City, on one of his arduous opiate withdrawals and a frustrating romance
with a young man—saw print only in 1985. The most emotional work in a generally
icy œuvre, it was written around the time, in 1951, of the most notorious event
in Burroughs’s life: his fatal shooting of Vollmer, in a drunken game of
“William Tell.”
García-Robles and Miles agree in their accounts of Vollmer’s
death. At a friend’s apartment, she balanced a glass on her head, at Burroughs’s
behest. He had contracted a lifelong mania for guns from duck-hunting excursions
with his father, and was never unarmed if he could help it. He fired a pistol
from about nine feet away. The bullet struck Vollmer in the forehead, at the
hairline. She was twenty-eight. He was devastated, but readily parroted a story
supplied by his lawyer, a flamboyant character named Bernabé Jurado: the gun
went off accidentally. Released on bail, Burroughs might have faced trial had
not Jurado, in a fit of road rage, shot a socially prominent young man and, when
his victim died of septicemia, fled the country. Burroughs did the same, and a
Mexican court convicted him in absentia of manslaughter, sentencing him to two
years. In the introduction to “Queer,” Burroughs disparages his earlier work and
adds, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a
writer but for Joan’s death,” because it initiated a spiritual “lifelong
struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
García-Robles avidly endorses this indeed appalling consolation, casting Vollmer
as a sainted martyr to literature.
Miles relates that Burroughs had told Carr, after he killed
Kammerer, “You shouldn’t blame yourself at all, because he asked for it, he
demanded it.” Some of Burroughs’s friends, including Ginsberg, opted for an
analogous understanding of Vollmer’s death as an indirect suicide, which she had
willed to happen. Burroughs’s craving for exculpation eventually settled on the
certainty that an “Ugly Spirit” had deflected his aim. As a child, Burroughs had
been infused with superstitions by his mother and by the family’s Irish maid,
and all his life he believed fervently in almost anything except conventional
religion: telepathy, demons, alien abductions, and all manner of magic,
including crystal-ball prophecy and efficacious curses. For several years in the
nineteen-sixties, he enthusiastically espoused Scientology, in which he attained
the lofty rank of “Clear,” before being excommunicated for questioning the
organization’s Draconian discipline. And he furnished any place he lived in for
long with an “orgone accumulator”—the metal-lined wooden booth invented by the
rogue psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for capturing and imparting cosmic energy.
Miles begins “Call Me Burroughs” with a scene of a sweat-lodge ceremony
conducted by a Navajo shaman to finally expel the Ugly Spirit, in Kansas, in
1992. The heat and smoke caused Burroughs to ask to truncate the
proceedings.
Vollmer’s parents took Julie into their home, in Albany, and
she dropped out of her stepfather’s life. Burroughs sent Billy to be raised by
Laura and Mortimer, in St. Louis, and joined them, in 1952, after they moved to
Palm Beach, Florida. But he didn’t stay long; he set out to work on his third
book, “The Yage Letters,” a quest through the jungles of Colombia for a fabled
hallucinogen that, he had written in the last sentence of “Junky,” “may be the
final fix.” He found and duly lauded the drug, but the journey seems its own
reward, making for fine low-down travel writing. He needs a motorboat to take
him upriver:
Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor—they got it bolted to the porch—“buuuuurt spluuuu . . . ut . . . spluuuu . . . ut,” and you can’t sleep hearing the motor start and die all night and then it starts to rain. Tomorrow the river will be higher.
The book wasn’t published until 1963. In the meantime, two
volumes of a trilogy, “The Soft Machine” and “The Ticket That Exploded,” came
out, soon followed by the third, “Nova Express.” These were written largely in
London and Paris, between trips to Tangier, where Burroughs had lived for
several years, starting in 1954. They advanced his claim (with some precedents
in Dadaism and Surrealism) to literary innovation: the “cut-up” technique of
assembling texts from scissored fragments of his own and others’ prose. The
trilogy is a sort of fractured science fiction, telling of underground struggles
against forces of “Control”—the shape-shifting, all-purpose bête noire of
Burroughs’s world view. It is easier to read than, say, “Finnegans Wake,” but
hard going between such bursts of dazzle as the “resistance message”:
Calling partisans of all nations—Cut word lines—Shift linguals—Vibrate tourists—Free doorways—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room.
A second trilogy—“The Cities of the Red Night,” “The Place
of Dead Roads,” and “The Western Lands”—published between 1981 and 1987, reverts
to fairly normal narration, filled with scenes of sexual and military atrocity
in a succession of mythic cities. Its heroes include Hassan-i Sabbah, the
historical leader of a sometimes homicidal sect in eleventh- and twelfth-century
Persia. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah is supposed to have
said (and was so quoted by Nietzsche). The prose is nimble and often ravishing,
but marred by the author’s monotonous obsessions and gross tics—notably, a
descent into ferocious misogyny, casting women as “the Sex Enemy.”
The biography, after its eventful start, becomes rather like
an odyssey by subway in the confines of Burroughs’s self-absorption, with
connecting stops in New York, where he lived, in the late nineteen-seventies, on
the Bowery, in the locker room of a former Y.M.C.A., and, returning to the
Midwest, in the congenial university town of Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent
his last sixteen years, and where he died, of a heart attack, in 1997, at the
age of eighty-three. Miles’s always efficient, often elegant prose eases the
ride, but a reader’s attention may grow wan for want of sun. Most of the
characters run to type: dissolute quasi-aristocratic friends, interchangeable
boys, sycophants in steadily increasing numbers. Names parade, from Paul Bowles
and Samuel Beckett (who, meeting Burroughs at a party in Paris, denounced the
cut-up method as “plumbing”), through Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, to Laurie
Anderson and Kurt Cobain. Most prominent is Brion Gysin, a mediocre artist of
calligraphic abstractions. Burroughs met him in Tangier, in 1955, and bonded
with him in Paris at a dump in the Latin Quarter, known as the Beat Hotel, whose
motherly owner adored literary wanderers.
Gysin and Burroughs deemed each other clairvoyant geniuses.
They collaborated on cut-ups, extending the technique to audiotape, and foresaw
commercial gold for Gysin’s “Dreamachine,” a gizmo that emitted flickering light
to mildly hypnotic effect. It flopped. Burroughs took to making art himself,
especially after Gysin’s death, in 1986: he created hundreds of pictures, on
wood, by shooting at containers of paint. These have been widely exhibited and
sold. They are terrible. Burroughs had no visual equivalent of the second-nature
formality that buoys even his most chaotic writing.
Ginsberg comes off radiantly well in Miles’s telling, as a
loyally forgiving friend. He tolerated Burroughs’s amatory passion for him,
which developed in the fifties, as long as it lasted. Much of Burroughs’s best
writing originated in letters to the poet, who took a guiding editorial hand in
it. It was Ginsberg who hatched the title “Naked Lunch,” by a lucky mistake,
having misread the phrase “naked lust” in a Burroughs manuscript. (I think of
Ezra Pound’s editorial overhaul of “He Do the Police in Different
Voices”—Eliot’s first title for “The Waste Land.”) Ginsberg effectively
sacrificed his own literary development, which sagged after “Kaddish” (1961), to
publicizing his friends and, of course, himself. Burroughs disparaged his
puppylike attendance in Bob Dylan’s entourage. (Burroughs’s aloofness, like his
obsession with mind control, reflected memories of a reviled uncle, Ivy
Ledbetter Lee, a pioneering public-relations expert whose clients included John
D. Rockefeller and the Nazi Party.) But Burroughs liked his own growing fame. He
gave readings to full houses. Appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1981, and
in Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” in 1989, spread the popularity of his
gentleman-junkie cool.
The biography’s most painful passages
involve Billy, who both idolized and, for excellent reasons, resented Burroughs.
What might you be like, had your father killed your mother and then abandoned
you? In 1963, when Billy was sixteen, Burroughs, bowing to his parents’
insistence, briefly took charge of the troubled lad in Tangier. The main event
of the visit was Billy’s introduction to drugs, condoned by Burroughs. In and
out of hospitals and rehabs, Billy wrote three novels, of which the first,
“Speed” (1970), detailing the ordeal of amphetamine addiction, showed literary
promise. In 1976, father and son reunited at the Naropa Institute, in Boulder,
where Ginsberg and other poets had initiated a program in experimental writing,
and where Burroughs was teaching, with crotchety flair. Billy, who had received
a liver transplant for cirrhosis, engaged in spectacular self-destruction. Miles
writes, “Billy wanted Bill to witness the mess he was in; he was paying him
back.” Billy died in 1981, at the age of thirty-three. Burroughs seemed to
regret only that he had not sufficiently explained the Ugly Spirit to him. He
responded to his son’s death by varying his current methadone habit with a
return to heroin.
“Virtually all of Burroughs’s writing was done when he was
high on something,” Miles writes. The drugs help account for the hollowness of
his voices, which jabber, joke, and rant like ghosts in a cave. He had no voice
of his own, but a fantastic ear and verbal recall. His prose is a palimpsest of
echoes, ranging from Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (lines
like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are
Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and
Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way
through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming
phrases. His palpable influence on J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy
Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a
young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a
sound. It’s a cold thrill. While always comic, Burroughs is rarely funny, unless
you’re as tickled as he was by such recurrent delights as boys in orgasm as they
are executed by hanging.
Some critics, including Miles, have tried to gussy up
Burroughs’s antinomian morality as Swiftian satire. Burroughs, however, wages
literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that
anyone is responsible for anything. Though never cruel in his personal conduct,
he was, in principle, exasperated with values of constraint. A little of
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted” goes a long way for many readers,
including me. But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a
Hieronymus Bosch painting. When you have read Burroughs, at whatever length
suffices for you, one flank of your imagination of human possibility will be
covered for good and all.
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