Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Bill’s best friend was his first cousin Prynne Hoxie, Aunt Alice’s boy, who lived nearby on Hirshman Avenue and went to the Community School. Prynne was the same age and his constant companion.29 They had a secret cry with which to identify themselves: “Woo woo whoop!” They would often go to Forest Park and fish in the pond and liked to walk along the slippery grassy banks of the River des Peres to watch for the turds to drop into the brackish yellow water from the numerous sewer pipes that lined its banks. When one shot out they would yell, “Hey looky! Someone just did it!” The River des Peres was then little more than an open sewer. Burroughs wrote, “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. I liked the smell myself.”30

  The River des Peres flooded in August 1915, killing eleven people, destroying a thousand homes, and sweeping away three bridges. The Jefferson Memorial Building became an island in a sea of bobbing sewage. In 1919, in a scene straight out of Burroughs, during the second week of the municipal opera’s maiden season, the River des Peres again overflowed its banks, and a surging wave of fetid effluent swept into the outdoor theater, damaging the stage and routing the audience and cast of Michael William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl. The audience scrambled for the exits screaming and shouting. A bond issue was finally passed in 1923, and over the next few years the river was buried in a twenty-nine-foot-wide, twenty-three-foot-high cement sewer pipe.

  In 1919 Bill’s father bought forty acres of land on the south side of the Missouri River two miles south of the small hamlet of St. Albans, about thirty miles due west of the Central West End. He built a holiday cabin there for the family. A single-line railroad connected St. Albans with St. Louis, with a stop at Kingshighway and Audubon, a short walk from Pershing Avenue, so their country place was within easy commuting distance. In a few short miles the urban sprawl and pollution of St. Louis gave way to trees. The train approached St. Albans through thick woodland, sometimes skirting the Missouri, then passed over Tavern Creek on a high trestle before reaching the hamlet. Many of their neighbors had places there. James Grauerholz reports that Mortimer Burroughs may also have had a cabin in St. Albans itself, “for William’s memories of these summers vividly recreate the town.”31 It is St. Albans that Burroughs is remembering in The Western Lands: “In the 1920s, everyone had a farm where they would spend the weekends. I remember the Coleman lanterns that made a roaring noise, and the smell of the chemical toilets.”32

  Large sections of The Place of Dead Roads are set in St. Albans,33 and the book features a map of the town, based on Burroughs’s childhood memory of the place.34 In the novel, Tavern Creek becomes “Dead Boy Creek,” and Head’s Store at the corner of St. Albans and Ridgeview Roads, in the same family since 1915, becomes “Uncle Kes’s Saloon and General Store,” the scene of a lovingly described shootout. The small town of Defiance, about four miles north of St. Albans, across the Missouri River, comes in for some rough treatment. Burroughs renames it “Jehovah”: “Their horrid church absolutely spoiled his sunsets, with its gilded spire sticking up like an unwanted erection, and Kim vowed he would see it levelled.”35 Kim laid waste the town by distributing smallpox-laced illustrated Bibles. The town and its church previously came in for opprobrium in Cities of the Red Night: “ ‘When the fog lifts you can see their fucking church sticking up.’ The boy spits.”36 Clearly the church irritated Burroughs enormously when he was a child.37

  St. Albans was probably used mostly as a weekend retreat from St. Louis, but for their annual vacation the Burroughs family had a comfortable summer house in Harbor Beach, Michigan, on the western shore of Lake Huron, due north of Detroit. It was a small town of local residents and summer people. Bill’s parents knew people with houses on the lake. They took a train from St. Louis to Port Huron and continued to Harbor Beach by ferry. Burroughs remembered an incident on the ferry at the age of four or five when he picked up a water glass, bit a piece out of it, and spat it out. His mother later told him how astonished everyone was that he did not cut himself. Later he seemed to attract jokes involving broken glass, as David Kammerer, Lucien Carr, Dennis Evans, and Burroughs himself all had broken glass acts. Bill performed another swallowing act, as he recalled in his journals. “Now when I was four or five years old I had a little gold knife and I used to suck it for the steel taste. Folded of course the puckering steely taste. Ended up swallowing the knife but let that pass as it did three days later.”38

  Bill learned to swim at an early age at Harbor Beach in the breakwater at Bathing Beach Park. It was at Harbor Beach that Mote moored his boat, a large, four-berth cabin cruiser, about fifty feet in length, with sails and an auxiliary motor. They would go out beyond the breakwater and chug along at five or six miles per hour across the lake. Mote loved to fish—it was his favorite occupation—and he passed the skill on to Bill. Harbor Beach is remembered with affection in the “From the lake, From the hill” section of Port of Saints: “The hills are very green in summer, surrounded by meadows and fields and streams with stone bridges, and further inland woods of oak and pine and birch.”39 The entire section could have come straight from a Denton Welch novel.

  Though Harbor Beach was in no way a holiday camp, there was communal eating. A bell rang to tell residents to dress for dinner, and fifteen minutes later they would assemble in the dining hall. A typical Sunday menu consisted of plain mashed potatoes, fricasseed chicken, and rice. One resident got drunk and claimed that his flapjacks were soggy and slid them across the floor like curling stones. He was barred from the dining hall. Ringing the bell at the wrong time was a favorite prank of the summer children.

  Bill used to go out to the end of the pier and catch a string of small rock bass and yellow perch using worms or minnows as bait. “I remember a yellow perch flapping on the pier, the stagnant water inside the breakwater where the carp lived.”40 He would ask the chef to cook them. Sometimes the family would fry the day’s catch in the cottage on a kerosene stove. Burroughs adored fresh fish, and when he eventually retired to Kansas, he bought a fishing lodge and small boat on Lone Star Lake near Lawrence.

  Burroughs’s use of the word “nostalgia” in a memoir suggests that even in 1925, when he was eleven, he already had a premonition that these carefree days were limited. “The pure pleasure of cold Whistle on a hot summer afternoon of my childhood. […] Sitting on the back steps drinking Whistle at twilight on a summer evening, hearing the streetcars clang past on Euclid Avenue, I felt the excitement and nostalgia of the twenties tingling in my groin.”41 In 1925, the year that the Burroughs family moved to the suburbs, a carbonated orange soda called Whistle had been introduced by the Vess soda company of St. Louis. These were poignant moments for Burroughs: sitting on the stoop, watching the lamplighter make his rounds through the veil of smoky brown mist at dusk on the tree-lined private roads of the Central West End. Burroughs was not the only one to feel nostalgia for those days. T. S. Eliot recalled “the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,”42 and “the burnt-out ends of smoky days. / And now a gusty shower wraps / The grimy scraps / Of withered leaves about your feet / And newspapers from vacant lots.”43 However, the impact of the smog on people’s health and on the environment was disastrous, but such was the corruption and political chicanery in St. Louis that nothing was done to alleviate the situation until 1940, long after Burroughs had left home. In 1906 the Public Library had to spend $10,000 to repair smoke damage to its collection, and “sulphuric gases from smoke” were killing the trees in Forest Park, one block away. By the 1920s the botanical gardens considered moving out of town because so many plants were dying. The Burroughs family made the same decision.

  Bill spent part of the summer of 1924, when he was ten, at a dude ranch in New Mexico with his mother. Valley Ranch was owned by Mr. Miller, a matchstick figure in a dark gray suit. Billy was assigned a gentle old strawberry roan named Grant. If he got lost he was told to
just let Grant have his head, and he did and Grant did. The food was terrible, but occasionally Bill caught a fish and added it to the meager fare. He also caught a large centipede that he preserved in alcohol. Bill spent several summers there.

  Bill first went to Los Alamos Ranch School when he was eleven. He and Mort attended summer camp there for three years running, from 1925 to 1927. Bill joined the school itself in 1929 and stayed for three years. The idea that Bill’s chronic sinus infection, no doubt caused by the filthy polluted air of St. Louis, would be improved by a summer in the West came from Dr. Eugene Senseney, who lived down the street at Pershing and Walton, and who was the doctor responsible for a botched job on Bill’s tonsils. “I came near bleeding to death from his bungling hands.”44

  The family summer holiday in 1925 was, as usual, at Harbor Beach. That Christmas they spent in New York City. Bill’s Uncle Ivy had invited all his siblings to bring their families for a family reunion in his eighteen-room mansion at East 66th Street and Fifth Avenue. There were twenty-six family members at the Christmas dinner, including Bill, resentful at being dragged to New York away from his friends and who particularly disliked being ordered around by Uncle Ivy. “He was very domineering. He put us all up in this huge apartment and he would organize sightseeing.” The family were taken to see the sights, including FAO Schwarz’s famous toy shop on West 23rd Street and the Woolworth Building on Broadway, then the tallest building in the world.45 Burroughs told an interviewer, “Ivy Lee hated me on sight. He was part of that whole class of people that I was brought up with in St. Louis. And they all took one look at me and said, NO!”46

  Chapter Three

  A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

  And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

  —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “MY LOST YOUTH”

  1. Kells Elvins

  The air pollution in St. Louis precipitated a flight to the suburbs by anyone who could afford it. On December 23, 1926, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline cracked, “Presumably the sun rose, but whether it did nobody knows.” That year Mortimer Burroughs bought five acres of land at 700 South Price Road and hired Wilbur Trueblood’s architectural firm, Trueblood and Graf, to design and build a house. Wilbur was married to Laura’s sister Kate. Bill’s natal house on what was now called Pershing Avenue was sold, but unfortunately the new house was not yet ready and the family had to spend a month living at the Fairmont Hotel, on nearby Maryland Plaza. Bill had with him his pet guinea pig, which “screamed and hollered, and the cage stunk something awful.”1

  The new house at 700 South Price Road was large, with steep gray sloping roofs, double-window dormers, and three chimneys, shielded from the road by a curve in the driveway and surrounded by trees. The front door opened into the usual hall with a dining room to the left. Behind that was the kitchen and the servant quarters. To the right of the front door was the living room and above that the master bedroom with its own bathroom and a balcony opening onto the garden. The boys lived and slept at the back in a large comfortable room with windows on three sides, two beds, and two closets. On the same floor was a bathroom and a guestroom.

  With five acres of garden, Bill was able to get more pets. At Pershing Avenue he had had an Irish terrier, as well as his guinea pig. Now he added a raccoon and an angora goat, which lived in a special enclosure. It was pregnant and gave birth. Bill loved the kid; he would put his hand up in a fist and the kid would butt at it.

  Most of the children from the Community School continued either to the boys-only Country Day or to the coeducational John Burroughs School, named after the great naturalist, no relation. Mort went to Country Day as the John Burroughs School was only founded in 1923, the year he went to high school. The big high school football games were between John Burroughs and Country Day. Bill went to John Burroughs in the seventh grade, and Laura and Mote clearly liked the way the school was run, because they moved Mort there to join Billy, a move that was no doubt resisted by Mort, as he had always told Bill, “Call yours the Sissy School so I’ll know what you mean.” Like the Community School, it was private and progressive, with friendly teachers and no bullying. It had the added advantage of being less than half a block from where they lived, so they could walk across to it along the leafy suburban lane. Burroughs particularly remembered his Latin teachers: Mr. Baker, a supporter of the Russian experiment in communism who could be very sarcastic, and Mrs. Grossman, whom Burroughs “had some difficulties with.” Bill was sent to see the principal, Mr. Aitken, a few times but was never in serious trouble.

  Burroughs has remarked on how utterly different life was in the twenties from the postwar life most of his readers knew. “If you want to get idea of what it’s like read Fitzgerald. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I think the midwestern towns, places like St. Paul, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, were pretty much similar.”2 It was the time before mass entertainment: when he was twelve or thirteen, Bill was sent for piano lessons with a Mrs. Stowe, where he just about learned to play the “Marseillaise,” “Frère Jacques,” and “The Last Rose of Summer.” He learned to waltz, foxtrot, tango, and to do the Charleston from a fat little man named Mr. Trimp and his plump little wife. Mechanically recorded sound was just being introduced into the home. Both cylinders and discs were available to play on your wind-up phonograph—the needle had to be changed for each playing. The movies were still silent: the first feature film with sound was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927, but it was some time before Hollywood switched to “talkies”; Bill loved the movies and grew up with Rin Tin Tin the wonder dog, which played its first starring role in Where the North Begins in 1923. He loved the weekly serials. Other memorable films included Josef von Sternberg’s silent crime thriller Underworld with George Bancroft (1927), and Richard Barthelmess in Weary River (1929). In 1925 Bill saw Rupert Julian’s silent gothic The Phantom of the Opera: “How I loved the movies. ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ The scene where she comes up behind him while he’s playing the organ and pulls his mask off, ‘Feast your Eyes! Glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!’ ”3 In the 1920s there were still stage shows between the films. Bill disliked these because they went on and on and he just wanted to see the movies:

  I remember now an occasion, I was with my father, a big rawboned performer got up and sang:

  Sailing on

  Sailing on

  I am sailing on…

  That was sixty-odd years ago. Where was he sailing to? I can’t remember the film but I can see him quite clearly from here. Not a young man, early to mid-forties, tall, angular, awkward, thick red wrists his sleeves too short, worn blue serge suit…

  What did my father say after the show? “Big raw boned fellow…”

  The full misery of the human condition hits me when I think about that long ago singer.4

  St. Louis had its first radio station in 1921, and the Burroughs family had a crystal set, stringing the antenna between the trees and the house. Electric street lighting was being introduced. Horse-drawn vehicles and trolley cars filled the streets, but new forms of transport were making an appearance. One of Bill’s aunts drove an electric car; they had a single lever and went at about twenty miles per hour, but they were heavy and the battery had to be recharged at frequent intervals. In the teens, several family members had steam cars, which had the advantage over gasoline cars of being faster; they could reach sixty miles per hour. The downside was they took some time to build up a head of steam, but in the days of servants that was not a problem. Bill rode around in his aunt’s Stanley Steamer. “There was the Stanley Steamer and the White Steamer, but they were immediately knocked out by the gas car because you could just go out and start it when you wanted to whereas your steam car, you had to go out and light it and then wait about half an hour, have breakfast.”5 They stopped making steamers in the early twenties. Male members of the family drove Stutz Bearcats: “Stutz Bearcats outside, it’s the 1920s.”6 When he was old enough to drive, Mort received a M
odel A Duesenberg, one of the grandest, most beautiful, and expensive American cars ever built: “firefly evenings at the Bellerive Country Club […] Forest Park, my brother’s silver ‘Daisy’ glinting in a distant sun.”7 Bill and Mort often visited the Forest Park Highlands, a huge funfair complete with roller coaster, shooting arcades, and the penny-arcade peep shows that appear in many of Burroughs’s later cut-ups. “By the way, B.J. what ever happened to Forest Park Highlands?” “It burned down, boss—hot peep shows in the penny arcade.”8

  It was at the Community School that Bill met Richard Kammerer and his older brother David, but he didn’t really get to know them until they were all at John Burroughs School. Richard was the same age as Burroughs, but Bill found him rather surly. He got on better with David, who was born in 1911 and was three years older. Kammerer came from the same wealthy St. Louis background as Bill: his father was a partner in the consulting engineers Von Schrenk and Kammerer. But the real friendship began later when they admitted to each other that they were gay. David enjoyed a drink, and he was energetic, charming, and the life of any party. For years they were best friends, and later they were neighbors, first in Chicago and then in New York, where David was to meet his end. Kammerer appears to have recognized a sensitivity, a vulnerability, in the younger boy that he could relate to. Although Burroughs said that he knew he was homosexual by the time he was thirteen, his early crushes and experiments were fraught with anxiety and difficulty. “At that time I was felt by the other boys to be not quite right. You’re a character, just the wrong kind.”9 He was a very insecure twelve-year-old, hovering on the brink of adolescence: “I think it was always there, at the same time being afraid of the others and apart from them, I always felt a necessity to play it cool and conceal myself. I don’t know how or at what age that it occurred to me that I was of another species. It would have occurred to me of course no matter where I lived, sooner or later. I felt inferior to other people at the same time I’d feel different from them, I’d feel better than them. It was a confused feeling. I was terribly afraid of any physical conflict.”10