The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  This is Burroughs’s description of “writing croakers,” doctors that used to write morphine scripts in the 1940s.

  There are several varieties of writing croakers. Some will write only if they are convinced that you are an addict, others if they are convinced that you are not. Most addicts put down a story worn smooth by years of use. Some claim gallstones or kidney stones. This is the story most generally used, and I have seen croakers get up and open the door as soon as I mentioned gallstones. I got better results with facial neuralgia after I had looked up the symptoms and committed them to memory. Roy had an operation scar on his stomach that he used to support his gallstone routine.

  There was one oldtime doctor who lived in a Victorian brownstone house in the West Seventies. With him it was simply necessary to present a gentlemanly front. If you could get into his inner office you had it made, but he would write only three prescriptions. Another doctor was always drunk and it was a matter of catching him at the right time. Often he wrote the prescription wrong and you had to take it back for correction. Then, like as not, he would say the prescription was a forgery and tear it up. Still another doctor was senile, and you had to help him write the script. He would forget what he was doing, put down the pen and go into a long reminiscence about the high class of patients he used to have. Especially, he liked to talk about a man named General Gore who once said to him, “Doctor, I’ve been to the Mayo Clinic and you know more than the whole clinic put together.” There was no stopping him and the exasperated addict was forced to listen patiently. Often the doctor’s wife would rush in at the last minute and tear up the prescription, or refuse to verify it when the drugstore called.

  Generally speaking, old doctors are more apt to write than the young ones. Refugee doctors were a good field for a while, but the addicts burned them down. Often a doctor will blow his top at the mention of narcotics and threaten to call the law.

  Doctors are so exclusively nurtured on exaggerated ideas of their position that, generally speaking, a factual approach is the worst possible.

  That’s a great sentence.

  Even though they do not believe your story, nonetheless they want to hear one. It is like some Oriental face-saving ritual. One man plays the high-minded doctor who wouldn’t write an unethical script for a thousand dollars, the other does his best to act like a legitimate patient. If you say, “Look, Doc, I want an M.S. [morphine sulfate] script and I’m willing to pay double price for it,” the croaker blows his top and throws you out of the office. You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.101

  Kerouac and I used to read these pages and say, “Burroughs is just so intelligent!” I didn’t know anybody around Columbia who was simply that factual, that intelligent, and I still haven’t met anybody that’s funnier than Burroughs. Not cynical, just observant, and no bullshit, with a very good, generous sense of humor.

  An early image that emerges in Burroughs over and over that comes through all of his writing began in the 1940s and is in this one paragraph. He’s describing kicking his habit.

  Almost worse than the sickness is the depression that goes with it. One afternoon, I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of empty bars and cafeterias and drugstores on Forty-second Street. Weeds were growing up through cracks and holes in the pavement. There was no one in sight.102

  That’s a great prophecy. It’s a very powerful image and recurs in Burroughs’s work. It comes from Burroughs and his wife visiting the Museum of Natural History in New York and reading Mayan codices like the Madrid Codex. Bill thought the Mayan codices [outlined] a system used by the priests to control the Mayan population. Burroughs was preoccupied with those because they were an undeciphered language, they were primarily visual, they seemed to hold the key to a lot of mysterious history. He had the notion [that] the Mayan empire abandoned some of their cities, leaving them intact. Just as if the people suddenly disappeared. Burroughs’s theory was that the Mayan priests had a secret language of their own and controlled the emotions and thoughts of the populace much as television controls the emotions and thoughts of the populace today. That specific emotions for specific days were outlined in the calendars and so it was like a psychological calendar of a manic depressive cycle or emotional cycle that the entire culture would go through at the same time with the priests controlling the calendars and the cycle of feeling. So the hieroglyphic language was a key to their control of your emotions.

  One of the most fascinating of the images in the codex, which goes throughout all of Burroughs’s prose, is an image of a man looking forward with a very intense expression. There is a small creature, like a monkey, on the back of his neck. In succeeding pictures in this hieroglyphic comic strip, the man’s expression becomes increasingly empty and vapid and robotic. The creature on the back of his neck grows bigger and bigger and begins to assume deeper and deeper proportions of intensity and clarity and intelligence and power and cruelty, until at the end the actual face of the man is withered and shrunken and empty and there’s this somewhat inhuman crustacean-eyed monster sitting on top of his head who’s taken over. Like a junk habit, or Burroughs’s own erotic perversity, or a control system, or television that has taken over.

  In the case of the talking asshole, a guy develops a ventriloquist act where he makes his asshole talk, but after a while he can’t stop his asshole from talking and it interrupts all the time, takes over, and finally the man gets into a fight with the asshole and the asshole [says] in the end it is you who will shut up. Finally the man does shut up, some kind of strange skin, strange membrane starts growing across his mouth and his face becomes depopulated and vacant. That’s the passage that says there was no more life in his eyes than in the eyes of a crab at the end of the stalk.

  This figures in with Burroughs’s idea of possession or the idea of cancer, a cell taking over and replicating itself endlessly at the expense of the host. The notion of entopathetic symbiosis, this symbiotic relationship which is antipathetic. The host is destroyed by cancer, parasitism, notions of bureaucracy slowly draining the energy out of the society or out of the individual. Notions of the drug habit, the habit being a virus with a symbiotic relation to the host. Even sexuality, the human virus. On the simplest level it means sexual obsession, junk addiction, perhaps homosexual obsession, cancer, and police bureaucracy taking over the host.

  These are partly parables of maturation, seen as victimage, seen with fear. It’s also partly a metaphor for thought control, but the controllers are also control addicts, whether it’s the CIA or Hitler or television or the Mafia or the White House or the Mayan priests or the narcotics bureau. They are the other side of the using addicts. Physically addicted in the sense that their livelihoods depend on the addicts, their entire system of physical economy depends on having a job controlling addicts and then moralizing about controlling addicts. They love addicts in that sense, [they are] parasites on the addicts, another virus intelligence that feeds on addiction.

  Finally junk itself as a virus, oddly enough. The junk virus, extending later on to the sex virus, sex as another addiction. Extended finally by Burroughs to language as an addiction, language itself as a control mechanism. The very word itself, “in the beginning was the word,” say the theists, trying to assert ultimate control over nature and human consciousness. Burroughs’s final revolution was “rub out the word.” Trace back along the word vine to find the source of control. Who started the whole maya, the illusion, and to what extent does language dictate to our sense of what we see, hear, smell.

  I saw that Burroughs’s honor among thieves was a lot more honorable than the mores and ethos of the people I was working with at the Associated Press. His estimate of human character was a lot more perceptive and generous than anything I heard in the center of mass communications of America.

  About “An Informer”:

  The worst of the lot was Gen
e Doolie, a scrawny little Irishman with a manner between fag and pimp. Gene was informer to the bone. He probably pulled out dirty lists of people—his hands were always dirty—and read them off to the law. You could see him bustling into Black and Tan headquarters during the Irish Trouble; in a dirty gray toga, turning in Christians; giving information to the Gestapo; the GPU, sitting in a cafeteria talking to a narcotics agent. Always the same thin, ratty face, shabby, out-of-date clothes, whiny, penetrating voice.

  The most unbearable thing about Gene was his voice. It went all through you. This voice was my first knowledge of his existence.103

  Dig the historical trip that Burroughs is on and the historical perception he has about a fink, a rat, an informer. “In a dirty gray toga, turning in Christians.” Burroughs’s specialty at Harvard was classical history. He had read almost every major work of history that there was on the Roman Empire, so his take on the American Empire is seen through the eyes of someone who has had a lot of exposure to the traditions of nineteenth-century scholarship looking at the decline of Rome. His interest in Spengler comes from that point of view as does his description of these characters. “In a dirty gray toga, turning in Christians.” I don’t know anybody who’s ever projected himself empathetically back to early Christian times and tried to visualize who the finks were who would turn in Christians.

  “Giving information to the Gestapo; the GPU, sitting in a cafeteria talking to a narcotics agent.” This is great. All the imagination is focused on sitting in a cafeteria talking to a narcotics agent. Someone with a “thin ratty face, shabby out-of-date clothes, whiny, penetrating voice,” someone who would inform on you, someone who’d turn you over to the law. There’s a great sense of honor through this book. Even when people were being dishonorable, at least they know it. We’re living in an era of informers in America. It’s simply contrary to basic human nature. One of the interesting things about Junkie is his take on informers and it extends throughout the rest of his books and later career.

  The most striking sentence in this book for me was when he was talking about taxi drivers in New Orleans.

  But a complex pattern of tensions, like the electrical mazes devised by psychologists to unhinge the nervous systems of white rats and guinea pigs, keeps the unhappy pleasure-seekers in a condition of unconsummated alertness. For one thing, New Orleans is inordinately noisy. The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is conglomerate and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.104

  That completely knocked me out. What an uncanny image, “the drivers orient themselves largely by use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly.” It’s that one thought which is a gem. That’s Burroughs the aristocrat, “You never know what sort of behavior to expect.” The St. Louis aristocrat comes through here as part of the tone. It’s one of the funnier elements.

  This also blew Kerouac’s mind when he saw that, it was such a perceptive sentence. It was the point where his prose was like poetry, something like Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis, translated by T. S. Eliot, which had been an influence on Burroughs. Perse wrote prose poetry in the style of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which has this kind of alert factual imagery that becomes poetry merely by factualness, or perhaps because the perceiver is so smart that he puts these unrelated facts together. It’s true in New Orleans, drivers use horns a lot, it is also true that bats orient themselves by little squeaks of radar, but for him to put that together took an anthropologist or a medical student, both of which were Burroughs’s specialties.

  What has he got to say about fags? As a homosexual, what is his relation to the whole sexual world? Here’s a take on a New Orleans gay bar, known in those days as a fag bar. This is a self-put-down, trying to avoid guilt by association.

  In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out on to the sidewalk. A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists’ dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.105

  He’s now in Mexico City looking for junk, looking for a connection. This is a preliminary sketch for another piece of prose, which Burroughs published after Junkie, his first piece of real high prose, like prose poetry, called “Interzone.”

  One day I was walking down San Juan de Letran and passed a cafeteria that had colored tile set in the stucco around the entrance, and the floor was covered with the same tile. The cafeteria was unmistakably Near Eastern. As I walked by, someone came out of the cafeteria. He was a type you see only on the fringes of a junk neighborhood.

  As the geologist looking for oil is guided by certain outcroppings of rock, so certain signs indicate the near presence of junk. Junk is often found adjacent to ambiguous or transitional districts: East Fourteenth near Third in New York; Poydras and St. Charles in New Orleans; San Juan de Letran in Mexico City. Stores selling artificial limbs, wig-makers, dental mechanics, loft manufacturers of perfumes, pomades, novelties, essential oils. A point where dubious business enterprise touches Skid Row.

  There is a type person occasionally seen in these neighborhoods who has connections with junk, though he is neither a user nor a seller. But when you see him the dowser wand twitches. Junk is close. His place of origin is the Near East, probably Egypt. He has a large straight nose. His lips are thin and purple-blue (like the lips of a penis).

  That’s an accurate description, it’s amazing. Nobody would think of actually writing that down except Burroughs. “His lips are thin and purple-blue (like the lips of a penis).”

  The skin is tight and smooth over his face. He is basically obscene beyond any possible vile act or practice. He has the mark of a certain trade or occupation that no longer exists. If junk were gone from the earth, there might still be junkies standing around in junk neighborhoods feeling the lack, vague and persistent, a pale ghost of junk sickness.

  So this man walks around in the places where he once exercised his obsolete and unthinkable trade. But he is unperturbed. His eyes are black with an insect’s unseeing calm. He looks as if he nourished himself on honey and Levantine syrups that he sucks up through a proboscis.

  What is his lost trade? Definitely of a servant class and something to do with the dead, though he is not an embalmer. Perhaps he stores something in his body—a substance to prolong life—of which he is periodically milked by his masters. He is as specialized as an insect, for the performance of some inconceivably vile function.106

  A very beautiful purple passage for a hard-boiled book of facts like Junkie. Pretty good. The book is a retrospective history of Burroughs’s five years as an addict and how he got into it, plus a little childhood recollection. Toward the end of the book there’s some curious writing that’s prophetic of later Naked Lunch writing.

  One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago when I lay in bed beside my mother watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves.107

  I always liked that paragraph, “train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves.” This is the essence of Burroughs, condensed down to little sharp nostalgic perfume. It’s also the essence of T. S. Eliot’s poetry.

  I went into the bathroom to take a shot. I was a long time hitting a vein. The needle clogged twice. Blood ran down my arm. The junk spread through my body, an injection of death. The dream was gone. I looked down at the blood that ran from elbow to w
rist. I felt a sudden pity for the violated veins and tissue. Tenderly I wiped the blood off my arm.

  “I’m going to quit,” I said aloud.108

  When I jumped bail and left the states the heat on junk already looked like something new and special. Initial symptoms of nationwide hysteria were clear. Louisiana passed a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. Since no place or time is specified and the term “addict” is not clearly defined, no proof is necessary or even relevant under a law so formulated. No proof, and consequently, no trial. This is police-state legislation penalizing a state of being. Other states were emulating Louisiana. I saw my chance of escaping conviction dwindle daily as the anti-junk feeling mounted to a paranoid obsession, like anti-Semitism under the Nazis. So I decided to jump bail and live permanently outside the United States.

  Safe in Mexico, I watched the anti-junk campaign. I read about child addicts and senators demanding the death penalty for dope peddlers. It didn’t sound right to me. Who wants kids for customers? They never have enough money and they always spill under questioning. Parents find out the kid is on junk and go to the law. I figured that either Stateside peddlers have gone simple-minded or the whole child-addict setup is a routine to stir up anti-junk sentiment and pass some new laws.