James Campbell | The Guardian,
Monday 4 August 1997 »»
William S Burroughs, who has died aged 83, was the hard man of Hip. His aims as a writer were traditional, to entertain and instruct, but the means he chose to express them were unclassifiable, sometimes indescribable, occasionally unspeakable.
Some of Burroughs's books, his first, Junkie, and Cities of the Red Night, are recognisable as novels in the ordinary sense; but his most original work came in the form of what he called ‘routines’: short, surreal sketches which sometimes include real characters, but more often involve the products of Burroughs's weird imagination, such as Spare Ass Annie (who ‘had an auxiliary asshole in the middle of her forehead’) or the Lobotomy Kid.
All his energy went into a battle with the agents of 'control' – call it ‘police’ in every form, including the thought police – and his strategies ranged from drugs to the notorious cut-up technique. Norman Mailer said of Burroughs that he was ‘the only American writer who may conceivably be possessed by genius’, but the compliment which he treasured above all others was an austere remark of Samuel Beckett's: ‘He's a writer.’
Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri, into a family that was well off but, as he repeatedly insisted, ‘not rich’. His grandfather, after whom he was named, invented the adding machine, but the family had lost its connections to the company by the time of the Depression. None the less, Burroughs senior was sufficiently comfortable to allow his wayward son a monthly stipend of $200 from 1938 onwards.
Burroughs read English at Harvard but his real studies began when he reached New York in the early 1940s and met the young men who would later be grouped as the Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Other members of this circle were David Kammerer and Lucien Carr, old friends from St Louis. Kammerer was stabbed to death by Carr in 1944, and Burroughs, as the first person to whom Carr turned, was held as a material witness to the crime – neither his first nor last encounter with the law.
Another close friend of those days was Herbert Huncke, an old-time crook who later became a writer, under Burroughs's influence. From Huncke's circles Burroughs learned the art of rolling drunks and picking pockets in the New York subway.
Burroughs was extremely sober in manner and appearance; his dress typically consisted of a grey three-piece suit, tie, and fedora hat. ‘His whole person seemed at a glance completely anonymous,’ he wrote about himself. ‘Sometimes his face looked blurred…’ When Huncke first met him, he mistook Burroughs for an FBI agent, but was soon turning him on to hard drugs. As reported by Huncke, Burroughs's response to his first shot of morphine was, ‘That’s very interesting… that’s very interesting indeed.’
In the late 1940s, he tried his hand at farming in Texas and Louisiana, growing tomatoes as a useful cover for his marijuana and opium crops. By this time he had met Joan Vollmer who, though he was homosexual and she was not, became ‘Mrs Burroughs’ (they were never formally married). Burroughs had previously wed a German Jewish woman, Ilse Klapper, in Europe, so that she could emigrate to the US and escape the Nazis. They divorced amicably some years later.
The bond with Joan was close, but troubled. From her he received a sympathetic understanding probably never reproduced in a relationship with a man. She was a highly intelligent, attractive woman, brought low by a dependence on Benzedrine and drink. She had a daughter by a previous marriage and a son with Burroughs, William Burroughs III, also a writer, who died in 1981.
Joan’s life ended on a September afternoon in Mexico City in 1951. The couple had joined a drunken party in a flat above a bar. Burroughs was carrying a gun, and at some point said to Joan: ‘It’s time for our William Tell act. Put that glass on your head.’ She did, and Burroughs fired an inch too low, killing her. He was bailed after a week in jail and when his Mexican lawyer skipped the country, having killed someone himself, Burroughs followed.
He was never tried for the shooting but according to his biographer Ted Morgan, entered ‘a nightmare that he would live for the rest of his days’. Ostensibly, Joan’s death was an accident, but Burroughs was harried by the dreadful thought that, subconsciously, he had meant to kill her. In the introduction to the novel Queer, written in the 1950s but not published until 1985, he wrote with candour about his feelings:
‘I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realisation of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing… The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvred me into a life-long struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.’
Burroughs began writing much later than Kerouac and Ginsberg. He was 39 when his autobiographical account of being a drug addict in New York and New Orleans, Junkie, was published in 1953 under the pseudonym ‘William Lee’ (a name he retained when referring to himself in his later work).
Junkie is written in a straightforward prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett. Its first edition counts as one of the great curios of modern literature. Aimed at the popular markets the book came out back to back with another, Narcotic Agent, whose moral tone the publisher hoped would offset the scandalous Junkie. The law took no notice and neither did the reviewers, but it sold more than 100,000 copies. (It was later retitled Junky.)
After two expeditions into the jungles of South America in search of the vegetable drug Yage, which he had heard bestowed telepathic powers on the user (it didn’t), Burroughs moved to Tangier, intending to stay only a few weeks but remaining for several years. Drugs and sex were cheap. Burroughs met Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, with whom he would later form an uncompromising avant-garde partnership in Paris.
Skulking through the back alleys of Tangier, seeking a connection, Burroughs became known to locals as ‘el hombre invisible’. His most famous book, Naked Lunch, was written there, fuelled by heroin and kif; but anyone who believes Burroughs glamorised drugs should be persuaded otherwise by reading the introductory 'Testimony concerning a sickness’: ‘I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction… I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.’
Burroughs told Kerouac that the writing he was doing in Tangier – apocalyptic, absurdly pornographic, comically violent – represented the act of ‘shitting out my past’. Some of the routines are horribly funny, such as ‘Displaced Fuzz’, which features a pair of redundant policemen repossessing people's artificial kidneys.
Naked Lunch is something of a cooperative enterprise: many of the routines emerged from letters to Ginsberg; Kerouac supplied the title; the manuscript was typed by these two and other visiting Beats, while the order of chapters came about by random selection. For Burroughs, the extreme edge of art, as of life, was the only place to be. ‘The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it,’ he told Ginsberg. ‘This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption.’
Sections of the ‘dangerous’ book were published in the Chicago Review in 1958, leading to the suppression of the magazine by the university which sponsored it, and to a prosecution on the grounds of obscenity (the last major case of its type in the US).
Meanwhile, the Olympia Press in Paris had published the entire novel. Olympia's rascally owner, Maurice Girodias, later admitted failing to pay Burroughs his royalties, but the author typically forgave him, pointing out that Girodias had published Naked Lunch at a time when no other firm would touch it.
The book was published in Britain in 1964 by John Calder. Shortly before that, a protracted correspondence took place in the Times Literary Supplement, following a review of the Olympia edition under the headline ‘Ugh…’ Calder and the critic Eric Mottram defended the novel, but they were outnumbered by the disgusted, including Dame Edith Sitwell: ‘I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories. I prefer Chanel Number 5.’
By this time, Burroughs had moved even further out. He had discovered a new method of writing, which, he told Ginsberg imperiously, could not be explained ‘until you have necessary training’. Gysin had stumbled on the cut-up technique while playing around with old newspapers and a pair of scissors in his room at the Hotel Rachou in rue Git-le-coeur in Paris, thereafter known as ‘the Beat Hotel’. Burroughs, also a resident, extended the experiment, and soon the Olympia Press had published two cut-up novels, The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). The trilogy was completed by Nova Express in 1964.
As entertainment, the cut-ups are hard going, but seen in the context of Burroughs’s obsessive desire to free his mind from ‘control’ – in this case, the control of ‘word locks’, or rigid conceptual structures governed by language - the experiments make more sense.
Burroughs was off hard drugs by then (though still using cannabis and hallucinogens). He had been trying to kick the habit since the late 1940s. With the help of Dr John Dent in London, who administered an apomorphine cure, Burroughs finally freed himself from the biggest control agent of the lot.
New experiments included the use of a dream machine, invented by Gysin, and Scientology, which Burroughs discussed in a book-length interview with Daniel Odier, The Job (1970).
In the 1960s, Burroughs moved to London, where he lived in Duke Street, St James, central London. He contributed to publications as uncool as Mayfair and the hippy magazine International Times. He was prolific and generous.
Another drug addict and Beat, Alexander Trocchi, gave me a copy of a short unpublished piece by Burroughs circa 1972 and suggested I call the author and ask for permission to use it in a little magazine I edited in Glasgow. Burroughs agreed readily, without mention of payment. The only word he spoke was ‘Yeah,’ which he drawled in response to everything I said.
He returned to the US in 1974, living first in New York, in ‘the Bunker’, a disused locker room without windows on the Bowery, and then, from 1982 on, in Lawrence, Kansas. The books continued to flow – Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, My Education, Ghost of Chance – mixing science fiction, the western, the travel book, the dream journal and other genres. His publisher, Grove Press, has just completed a manuscript of Burroughs’s previously unpublished writings to be released in 1998.
Burroughs was also a painter, and his efforts in that medium are as idiosyncratic as in any other. He held several exhibitions of paintings on wood riddled with bullet holes (‘shotgun art’, he called it; he was also a member of the National Rifle Association). In 1996 a catalogue of his involvement with the visual arts was published, Ports of Entry: William Burroughs and the Arts.
In Lawrence he was looked after by his long-term secretary James Grauerholz and a team of assistants. There was no other woman in his life after Joan. Her death continued to haunt him, and in 1992, with Ginsberg present, he underwent an exorcism ceremony at the hands of a Sioux medicine man to evict the Ugly Spirit which he believed had entered him at the time of Joan's death. His main affection in later life was reserved for his cats, and he published a small homage to his feline friends, The Cat Inside.
Like many artistic revolutionaries, Burroughs became an icon late in life. Among rock stars, it became fashionable to seek him out. David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Frank Zappa and Patti Smith all sang for their supper at the Burroughs table in the Bunker, and he became an honorary godfather to the New York wave of punk.
Less accessible than that of his Beat colleagues, the work of William Burroughs is likely to prove at least as enduring. He was modern man in extremis, an exemplar of alienation, constantly subverting his targets with satire. His extreme individualism never wavered. His first piece of writing, as a child, was called Autobiography of a Wolf. When grown-ups pointed out that the correct word was ‘biography’, Burroughs replied: ‘No, I meant ‘autobiography’.’ And, he told his own biographer 75 years later, ‘I still do.’
William Seward Burroughs II, writer, born February 5, 1914; died August 2, 1997.
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