Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
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Born in middle America in 1914, William Burroughs lived eighty-three years—far longer than anyone might have expected, in view of the dangers he courted throughout his life. In many ways, he was supernaturally fortunate, for despite many years of drugs and alcohol, he retained his lucidity throughout his life. He came of age during the “Roaring Twenties,” lived through World War II, actively participated in the cultural upheaval of the sixties, and witnessed the birth of the Space Age and the communications revolution of the late twentieth century. He lived in North and Central America, Africa, Europe, and England. He was a man for his times.
Burroughs was blessed with a strong constitution, but more than that, with the gift of prophecy—and he lived long enough to see many of his visions come true, and to know that his indelible point of view had put down deep roots in the cultural life of America and the Western world. His first book was published in 1953, when he was thirty-nine years old. Over the next forty-four years, he wrote some twenty novels, published hundreds of short pieces and essays, and left behind the materials for many posthumous works. A volume of Selected Letters (1945-59), edited by Oliver Harris, was published by Viking in 1993, and a second volume is projected to cover the period 1959-74. A memoir begun by Burroughs, which he called Evil River (from the St. John Perse line “My past was an evil river”), will be completed soon. And for the last year of his life, Burroughs was writing daily in bound-book journals, contemplating his own mortality; those texts were published in early 2000 as Last Words.
Word Virus is the culmination of a lifetime of writing. When I began working with William Burroughs in 1974, he had already created an immortal body of work. But the late 1960s and early 1970s in London were not a happy or fruitful time for Burroughs personally, and his return to America, after twenty years abroad, rejuvenated his career and gave him new energy. While Naked Lunch, written in Tangier and Paris, is an untouchable achievement, many critics have opined that the “Red Night trilogy,” which Burroughs wrote while living in the United States in the late 1970s and the 1980s, is deserving of consideration alongside his best work.
The idea of a “collected Burroughs” had been around for some time, but it was not until the summer of 1997 that Ira Silverberg and I finally approached the job of choosing a coherent selection from all of Burroughs’ published work. Providentially, we were able to show our work to William, in what turned out to be the last week of his life; so we know that he saw and approved the texts we have gathered here. With the exception of a six-page excerpt from the beginning of the legendary, long-lost Burroughs-Kerouac manuscript, “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” the Word Virus collection is made up entirely of already-published work. The selections were chosen with an eye to the author’s first use, and later development, of certain characteristic themes and images.
It is too early to write an authoritative assessment of the Burroughs corpus, and in these introductory passages I have tried to confine myself to the basic outline of his biography and some notes on the composition and bibliography of these pages. In my account of his life, I have relied heavily upon the research done by Ted Morgan, Barry Miles, and Peter Swales, among others, and upon my innumerable conversations with William and my reading of countless books and manuscripts. Inevitably, I will have erred in some places in this text, and that I do regret; but I believe mine is the most accurate chronology yet published. For this trade paperback edition of Word Virus I have carefully reviewed and extensively corrected many small errors in the earlier version of these essays, and I am indebted for their assistance with this task to Alan Ansen, William C. Cudlipp II, John Grigsby Geiger, Stewart Meyer, Barry Miles, Harold Norse, Stephen Ronan, William S. Schuyler, Richard Stern, and Peter Swales, among others. My special thanks go to Ira Silverberg and Daniel Diaz, for their patient encouragement and assistance during the initial half year of writing, which came so painfully soon for me after William’s death. As always, I sincerely hope I have done him justice.
Not content to hew to an exhaused modernism, which seemed to require a solitary, writerly “purity” in the lives of its practitioners, William S. Burroughs collaborated widely, and branched out into several other mediums. His work stands at the turning point between modernism and postmodernism, the movement of which he is usually now considered a founding, if unwitting, member. Working not only in writing per se, but also in art, performance, and multimedia collaboration, he developed a recombinant art method. Even as postmodern criticism reassesses the presumed indivisibility of the author, Burroughs foresaw this evolution with his lifelong resort to multiple authorship. Indeed, much of his work is nonliterary, in media that are inherently collaborative, such as record albums and films, so his embrace of artistic partnerships is an essential element of his creation. Throughout a career that crossed so many boundaries—between art forms sometimes considered mutually exclusive, and between the thoughts and language of real people and the speech that is “acceptable” in polite society—Burroughs created an oeuvre that is by no means strictly literary. And yet, through it all, he considered himself, foremost, a writer—and it is in his writing that we will find the cornerstone of the edifice that is Burroughs’ life’s work, and the keys to every part of it.
Outcast from society, and moreover self-exiled, a perpetual student and seeker, William Seward Burroughs created himself. Homosexual, insecure, wounded by childhood mistreatment, haunted by an Ugly Spirit, he summoned every force whose name he knew to guide him on his path toward “the only goal worth striving for”: immortality. And as his final writings show, on the long, hard journey to his own well-assured literary immortality, Burroughs finally glimpsed the meaning of human life: compassion for all life’s endless suffering, and for its inexorable end.
selected bibliography of current editions
WORKS BY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Arcade, 1993.
Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts. New York: Riverrun, 1982.
Blade Runner: A Movie. Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1979.
The Burroughs File. San Francisco: City Lights, 1984.
The Cat Inside. New York: Viking, 1992.
Cities of the Red Night. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.
Exterminator! New York: Penguin, 1986.
Ghost of Chance. New York: High Risk Books, 1995.
Interzone. Ed. James Grauerholz. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Junky. New York: Penguin, 1985.
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script. New York: Arcade, 1993.
My Education: A Book of Dreams. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1992.
Nova Express. New York: Grove Press, 1992.
Painting and Guns. New York: Hanuman Books, 1992.
The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.
Port of Saints. Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1980.
Queer. New York: Penguin, 1995.
The Soft Machine. New York: Grove Press, 1992.
The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1992.
The Western Lands. New York: Penguin, 1989.
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1992.
CONVERSATIONS AND LETTERS
Bockris, Victor, with William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Burroughs, William S. The Letters of William S. Burroughs. Ed. Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Burroughs, William S. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. Ed. Daniel Odier. New York: Penguin, 1989.
COLLABORATIVE AND ILLUSTRATED WORKS
Gale, Bob, and William S. Burroughs. The Book of Breething. Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1980.
Ginsberg, Allen, and William S. Burroughs. The Yagé Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1971.
Gysin, Brion, and William S. Burroughs. The Third Mind. New York: Viking, 1978.
Wilson, S.
Clay, and William S. Burroughs. Tornado Alley. Cherry Valley, New York: Cherry Valley Editions, 1989.
BIOGRAPHIES AND CRITICISM
Lydenberg, Robin, and Jennie Skerl. William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception 1959-1989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, a Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988.
Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Skerl, Jennie. William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.
Sobieszek, Robert A. Afterword by William S. Burroughs. Exh. cat. Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996.
* Postulate a biologic film running from the beginning to the end, from zero to zero as all biologic film run in any time universe—Call this film Xl and postulate further that there can only be one film with the quality Xl in any given time universe. Xl is the film and performers—X2 is the audience who are all trying to get into the film—Nobody is permitted to leave the biologic theater which in this case is the human body—Because if anybody did leave the theater he would be looking at a different film Y and Film Xl and audience X2 would then cease to exist by mathematical definition—In 1960 with the publication of Minutes to Go, Martin’s stale movie was greeted by an unprecedented chorus of boos and a concerted walkout—“We seen this five times already and not standing still for another twilight of your tired Gods.”
* Since junk is image the effects of junk can easily be produced and concentrated in a sound and image track—Like this: Take a sick junky—Throw blue light on his socalled face or dye it blue or dye the junk blue it don’t make no difference and now give him a shot and photograph the blue miracle as life pours back into that walking corpse—That will give you the image track of junk—Now project the blue change onto your own face if you want The Big Fix. The sound track is even easier—I quote from Newsweek, March 4, 1963, Science section: “Every substance has a characteristic set of resonant frequencies at which it vibrates or oscillates.”—So you record the frequency of junk as it hits the junk-sick brain cells—
“What’s that?—Brain waves are 32 or under and can’t be heard? Well speed them up, God damn it—And instead of one junky concentrate me a thousand—Let there be Lexington and call a nice Jew in to run it—”
Doctor Wilhelm Reich has isolated and concentrated a unit that he calls “the orgone”—Orgones, according to W. Reich, are the units of life—They have been photographed and the color is blue—So junk sops up the orgones and that’s why they need all these young junkies—They have more orgones and give higher yield of the blue concentrate on which Martin and his boys can nod out a thousand years—Martin is stealing your orgones.—You going to stand still for this shit?
* Deadly Orgone Radiation (W. Reich)—ed. note.
* Daniel P. Mannix, The History of Torture (New York: Dell, 1964).