Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Burroughs’ ambitions amounted to nothing less than an attempt to uproot and transform Western concepts of personhood and language, if not personhood and language themselves, to produce a new emancipation proclamation for the twenty-first century. Inevitably, in his last novel, The Western Lands, he judged his attempt a failure, but he also noted that even to imagine success on so radical a scale was victory. By the time of his death, Burroughs was recognized as one of the major American writers of the postwar era and he had become a formative influence, even a cult figure, for several generations of the young, leaving his mark on punk rock, performance art, and independent film.

  When Norman Mailer shared a podium with Burroughs at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1984, he found him an impossible act to follow. The kids loved him, Mailer noted with some envy; they laughed uproariously at his every line. They knew he was “authentic.” The critic Lionel Abel thought that Burroughs and his Beat colleagues had established the “metaphysical prestige” of the drug addict and the criminal; though modern skepticism destroyed the belief in transcendence, the human “need for utterness,” not to be denied, had found its satisfaction in “trans-descendence.” In a cameo role in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), a movie about young addicts in Seattle, with his dead-white poker face, dark, quasi-clinical garb, and low-pitched, deliberate, nasal intonation, Burroughs is clearly an iconic apparition from the underground, the hipster as Tiresias, the master of “the crime,” as he described it in Naked Lunch, “of separate action.”

  Burroughs was never comfortable with the “Beat” label. In a 1969 interview with Daniel Odier, while acknowledging his close personal friendships with several of the Beat writers, he remarked that he shared neither their outlook nor their methods. Kerouac believed that the first draft was always the best one and emphasized spontaneity above all else; Burroughs counted on revision. He used the word “beat” sparingly and literally, to mean “no fire, no intensity, no life,” while Kerouac and Ginsberg said it meant “high, ecstatic, saved.” Unlike Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Gregory Corso, whose entire careers can be seen as part of the Beat movement, Burroughs belongs to another literary tradition as well, that of the avant-garde novelists headed by Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, John Barth, and Don DeLillo. His affinities with their direct forebears, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway in particular, are defining ones; for all his innovations, he is visibly carrying on the work of high modernist irony, as Kerouac and Ginsberg most decidedly are not, and this fact may account for the willingness of the American critical establishment to grant Burroughs a more respectful hearing than it has yet accorded his Beat peers.

  Nonetheless, the affinities between Burroughs and the Beats are stronger than those he had with any other group. When he first met the much younger Ginsberg and Kerouac in 1944, he instantly took on a mentor role, handing Kerouac a copy of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, with an instruction to “EEE di fy your mind, my boy, with the grand actuality of fact.” Ginsberg said that while Columbia University (where both Ginsberg and Kerouac had been students) taught them about “the American empire,” Burroughs instructed them about the “end of empire.” As John Tytell has pointed out, their pathway to “beatitude” sprang directly out of his “nightmare of devastation.” In Tangiers in 1955, as Burroughs began the work that would become Naked Lunch—a book that Kerouac named and that he and Ginsberg helped to type and revise—he wrote Kerouac that he was trying to do something similar to Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” project, whose guidelines Kerouac had written out in 1953 at Ginsberg’s and Burroughs’ request; Burroughs was writing “what I see and feel right now to arrive at some absolute, direct transmission of fact on all levels.”

  Kerouac’s extended, astute, funny, and loving portraits of Burroughs as “Will Dennison” in The Town and the Country (1950) and “Old Will Lee” in On the Road not only served as advance publicity for Naked Lunch, but by Burroughs’ own admission helped to elaborate the persona he adopted. In his essay “Remembering Kerouac,” Burroughs said that Kerouac had known Burroughs was a writer long before he himself did. Over the course of his long life, Burroughs had other seminal, creative friendships and partnerships, most notably with the avant-garde artist Brion Gysin. Yet in some not altogether fanciful sense, Burroughs became what Kerouac and Ginsberg had first imagined and recognized him to be.

  The novelist Joyce Johnson, a friend of Kerouac’s, claims that the Beat Generation “has refused to die.” Unlike the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s headed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway which, within a decade, as the “Jazz Age” gave way to the Depression, was decisively repudiated by its own members, the Beat movement continues even today, a half century after its inception, sustaining its veterans and attracting new members—those for whom the respectable is synonymous with boredom and terror, if not crime, who regard the ongoing social order as suffocating, unjust, and unreal, who believe that honesty can still be reinvented in a world of lies and that the answers, if there are any, lie not in the political realm but in the quest for new forms of self-expression and creative collaboration across all traditional class, race, and ethnic boundaries, in fresh recuperative imaginings of ourselves and our country, in physical, spiritual, and metaphysical explorations of roads still left to try. “What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” Kerouac asked.

  Burroughs deconstructed the word, but he never abandoned it; it was, after all, his “fragile lifeboat,” the “mainsail to reach the Western lands.” Though he turned to painting as his main artistic outlet and published no novels after 1987, he continued to write, as Kerouac and Ginsberg had, up to the very day he died. If he had never been known as a Beat writer, if there had been no Beat movement, his avant-garde experiments in form, his wit, his mastery of language would ensure his inclusion in college courses on the post-WWII narrative. But it is his talismanic power to beckon and admonish his readers, to reroute their thoughts and dreams, that has made him widely read outside the academy as well as within it, and this is what he shares with his Beat companions and no one else, certainly not with the reclusive Thomas Pynchon or the at times grotesquely overexposed Norman Mailer. Like Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs is there yet elsewhere. He, too, practiced literature as magic.

  The uncannily perceptive Herbert Huncke, a hustler, homosexual, addict, and writer, was the fourth seminal figure of the first Beat circle. Initially, he had been troubled by Burroughs’ coldness. On one occasion, however, when Burroughs passed out drunk in his apartment, Huncke saw a different man. Awake, Burroughs was “the complete master of himself,” Huncke wrote in The Evening Sun Turns Crimson (1980), but asleep, he seemed a “strange, otherworld” creature, “relaxed and graceful,” touched with a mysterious beauty, “defenseless and vulnerable . . . lonely and as bewildered as anyone else.” At that instant, Huncke said, “a certain feeling of love I bear for him to this day sprang into being.” At moments, Kerouac glimpsed in Burroughs “that soft and tender curiosity, verging on maternal care, about what others think and say” that Kerouac believed indispensable to great writing. Burroughs was a Beat writer because he, too, wanted to decipher what he called the “hieroglyphic of love and suffering,” and he learned about it largely from his relations with other men.

  In the age that coined the word “togetherness” as a synonym for family values, the Beats, each in his own style, mounted the first open, sustained assault in American history on the masculine role as heterosexual spouse, father, and grown-up provider. In the midst of the Cold War crusade against all deviations from the masculine norm, in the era that could almost be said to have invented the idea of classified information, they openly addressed homosexuality, bisexuality, and masturbation in their work, declassifying the secrets of the male body, making sexuality as complex as individual identity, and pushing their chosen forms to new limits in the process.

  Though Kerouac did not consider
himself homosexual, he had intermittent sex with Ginsberg throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. Ginsberg and Burroughs had also been lovers, and their deep and steady friendship outlasted their physical affair. Shortly before his death from cancer on April 5, 1997, Ginsberg telephoned Burroughs to tell him that he knew he was dying. “I thought I would be terrified,” Allen said, “but I am exhilarated!” These were his “last words to me,” Burroughs noted in his journal; it was an invitation a “cosmonaut of inner space,” in his favored phrase of self-description, could not fail to accept. He died four months later.

  Some of Burroughs’ last journal entries were about Allen and “the courage of his total sincerity.” Though Kerouac’s self-evasions had strained Burroughs’ patience long before Kerouac’s death in 1969, he always loved the passage in On the Road in which Kerouac spoke of feeling like “somebody else, some stranger . . . my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” Burroughs, too, knew what it was to be “a spy in somebody else’s body where nobody knows who is spying on whom.” In The Western Lands, Burroughs imagined a new kind of currency, underwritten not by gold or silver but by moral virtues and psychological achievements. Rarest of all are the “Coin of Last Resort,” awarded those who have come back from certain defeat, and the “Contact Coin,” which “attests that the bearer has contacted other beings.” Finally, love between men was simply love, and love, Burroughs wrote in his journal the day before he died, is “What there is. Love.”

  Selected Bibliography

  Abel, Lionel. “Beyond the Fringe.” Partisan Review. 30 (1963): 109–112.

  Burroughs, William S. “Final Words.” The New Yorker. (August 18, 1997): 36–37.

  Fiedler, Leslie A. “The New Mutants.” Partisan Review. 32(1965): 505–525.

  Huncke, Herbert. The Herbert Huncke Reader. Ed. Benjamin G. Schafer. New York: William and Morrow Company, 1997.

  Johnson, Joyce. “Reality Sandwiches.” American Book Review. 18 August-September (1997): 13.

  Kazin, Alfred. “He’s Just Wild about Writing.” The New York Times Book Review. (December 12, 1971): 4, 22.

  Kerouac, Jack. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–1946. 1968; rpt., New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

  Knickerbocker, Conrad. “William Burroughs: An Interview.” The Paris Review. 35 (1965): 13–49.

  McCarthy, Mary. “Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.” William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–1989. Ed. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991: 33–39.

  McLuhan, Marshall. “Notes on Burroughs.” The Nation (December 28, 1964): 517–519.

  Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. 1988; rpt., New York: Avon Books, 1990.

  Siebers, Tobin. Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism. New York: Oxford, 1993.

  Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.

  Tytell, John. Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1976.

  Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

  editors’ note

  The editor’s selections from William Burroughs’ writings are arranged chronologically, for the most part. Source citations are by book title and chapter title (if any) and include some embedded subheadings, following the author’s text. All selections from novels begin with the first pages of the full book, and end with the last pages of the book; the author’s sequence is followed. Collections of shorter pieces are grouped according to the title of the published collection, and the title of each piece is given. When a titled chapter or passage from a novel is not presented in its entirety, this is indicated in the table of contents and in the heading of the passage. Where the chapters of a book are neither numbered nor titled, cuts are indicated by a double line-space. In The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, chapter numbers and section titles are omitted in favor of a listing of first lines from the selected passages, to offer a reader a map of the works.

  THE NAME IS BURROUGHS

  the name is burroughs

  by james grauerholz

  William Seward Burroughs (II) was born a few years after the beginning of “the American Century,” descended from two respectable upper-middle-class families, one of which would give its name to a great American company. His hometown of St. Louis was a city old and large enough to incorporate the traditions of the Eastern seaboard while serving as the jumping-off point for the American West. He was a child of privilege and destiny—but it was not a destiny that his ancestors or his peers could have foreseen, or even imagined.

  Burroughs’ paternal grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, was an indefatigable inventor best known for perfecting the adding machine. As a young man in Auburn, New York, after the Civil War, Burroughs worked as a bookkeeper—a job that in those times was done by hand—and after seven tedious years as a copyist, he became obsessed with the idea of a mechanical device that would make handwritten accounts obsolete. In 1880, aged twenty-three years, Burroughs moved to St. Louis for its warmer climate. With Joseph Boyer, he formed the American Arithmometer Company four years later, but it took six years more to perfect his invention. Thereafter the company prospered, but the inventor’s health was failing; tubercular at thirty-nine, he moved to Citronelle, Alabama, and died there two years later, in 1898. The loyal Boyer renamed the firm the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and moved it to Detroit. He placed an imposing obelisk in St. Louis’ Bellefontaine Cemetery, over Burroughs’ grave in the family plot, with the inscription: “Erected by his associates as a tribute to his genius.”

  William Burroughs’ father, Mortimer, was the second of the inventor’s four children, and the only one to hold on to a few shares when the company offered to buy all the family’s inherited stock. Mortimer, then only thirteen, displayed an acumen that was confirmed when he finally sold the stock three decades later, in 1929, just three months before the Crash. His brother, Horace, became addicted to morphine, and committed suicide in 1915; his eldest sister Jenny wandered drunk on the streets of St. Louis and vanished in Seattle; and his youngest sister, Helen, married and moved to Colorado. The Burroughs family disintegrated; the “Burroughs millions,” with which William Burroughs would often complain that Jack Kerouac, in his novels, had unhelpfully invested him, never existed. And yet the Burroughs company loomed large in American cyberbusiness during the 1950s and 1960s, with its own skyscraper in New York, and the legend had an inevitable credibility for many years.

  Mortimer graduated at M.I.T. and returned to St. Louis. In 1908, he married an elegant, ethereal St. Louis woman of twenty named Laura Lee—a debutante who was tall and thin, much given to seeing ghostly apparitions and reading meaning into all seeming happenstance. The daughter of an eminent Methodist minister, the Rev. James Wideman Lee, Laura used crystal ball and Ouija board to contact the spirits of the departed. She had a gift for flower arranging, and authored three illustrated promotional booklets of floral arrangements for the Coca-Cola company in the 1930s. Laura Lee’s brother, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, had graduated Princeton at the turn of the century, and he (and his contemporary Edward L. Bernays) invented what is now called “public relations.” Ivy Lee was an interesting and roguish character, who worked to polish the public images of such disparate figures as John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Adolf Hitler. He lived in New York in high style, and was a public figure of his time, mentioned in the newspapers and even in a popular song of the twenties. By the early thirties his work for Germany’s ruling National Socialist Party had brought him to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and a few months after testifying before HUAC in 1934, he died of complications from a brain tumor—before he could see what the Nazis would unleash on the world.

  Mortimer and Laura’s first child, Mortimer Jr., was born in 1911, after which Burroughs père was known as “Mote,” to distinguish him
from his son, “Mort.” Three years after Mort came along, William Seward Burroughs II was born at home, on February 5, 1914, at 4664 Pershing Avenue in the Central West End of St. Louis, near the city’s vast Forest Park, in a redbrick house which Mote had ordered to be built for his family on a tree-lined street secluded behind wrought-iron gates. After six years at the private Community School, Billy was sent to the John Burroughs School (named after the American naturalist and wildlife conservationist, no relation to Burroughs’ family), in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue Woods, in Clayton, Missouri. In 1926, when Billy was twelve, the Burroughs family moved to a new house at 700 South Price Road, nearer to the school. His classmates were other members of the white upper class—most of them from families wealthier, in fact, than Burroughs’ own. Their teachers were well paid, and their curricula were based on the classical education by which these scions-in-waiting were to be prepared for social and business leadership. Most of the male graduates of the Burroughs School went on to Ivy League colleges, as did Burroughs himself.