burroughs

William S. Burroughs
(1914-1997)

Burroughs was the great Swiftean satirist of the 20th century. I, like so many others, owe a huge debt to the Gentleman Junkie with the sandpaper throat.

Nothing I nor anyone else could say about Burroughs can really do justice to the man. He had a voice and a style all his own. I've put a few audio files below just as an introduction to Burroughs for those of you who do not know his work and a treat for those of you who do. Read the books if you have not already. They are unspeakably wonderful.

Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch was the book the made Burroughs famous or, perhaps, infamous. It was first published in Paris and was the last book ever formally banned by the American government. For several years in the 1950s, copies of that Paris edition were considered contraband and were confiscated by customs or the postal service if discovered. Both the people trying to smuggle the book in and the people trying to keep it out were treating it like some kind of mind altering substance that might change the reader's mind in ways threatening to the continuation of civilization as Americans knew it back in the 1950s. They were right to do so.

He was the real life model for "Old Bull" in Kerouac's On The Road . There he is described as a "great teacher in the night" and he was that to Kerouac and Ginsberg and so many others who had the great good fortune to know him over the course of his long and incredibly colorful life. Burroughs has yet to receive his due as a writer of genius and a thinker of importance. Burroughs was neither a beat writer nor a beatnik. But, without Burroughs there probably would not have been a beat movement in literature and there might have been no beatniks.

The guys in the band "Steely Dan" were big Burroughs fans as were the musicians who formed the popular 70s psychedelic jazz group “Soft Machine”. One of the odd things about Burroughs is how much of his cultural influence is indirect through people who were influenced by Burroughs who were, in some cases, more influential than Burroughs in terms of their impact on popular culture. Burroughs was always a gray eminence in the cultural background of a lot of influential artists and thinkers. He was not so much a writer's writer as he was a subversive's subversive exercising an insidious influence on popular culture far out of proportion to his own fame by virtue of his status as a shaping influence on a relative handful of devotees who collectively reached a much larger audience than Burroughs himself. A good example would be the Canadian film maker, David Cronenberg. Cronenberg read “Naked Lunch” when he was 15 and decided that there was no way he could compete with Burroughs as a novelist. He would have to express his creativity some other way. The themes that recur in Cronenberg’s films are variations on themes very fully developed already in Burroughs’ work by the time Cronenberg was first reading “Naked Lunch”. In particular, Cronenberg returns in film after film to the idea of a disease that is also the next step forward in human evolution; to the idea of a pathology of this stage in our development which creates the next stage. Picture the first sea creature who ever crawled up on land from the perspective of a happy, well adjusted sea creature that felt no need to do so. What we see from this perspective is a pervert with a death wish sprouting huge tumorous growths from exposure to a deadly mixture of gases no sane gill creature would even attempt to breathe. Only later will these growths be named lungs and seen as part of the standard equipment on a whole new kind of critter that is not a fish out of water way up there over high tide mark but right at home.

By the time Burroughs came to rest in Lawrence, Kansas in his early sixties, he had come to play a role in American culture which performed a sort of low burlesque on the role his cultural hero, Hasan I Sabbah, played in the religion saturated politics of the 11^th century Middle East. The evil old man living in a prefabricated house originally ordered out of a Sears and Roebuck catalog back before even he was born stretched tentacles of influence out in every direction from a college town in the Midwest. It was possible for two decades to walk right up to the door of that house, knock , introduce yourself and ask to speak to Burroughs. For two decades, a trickle of admirers did and, more times than not, those who did where ushered into the old man's august presence to say or see whatever it was they came to say or see and take away whatever Burroughs chose to impart in response. There were never enough to create a traffic jam or a need for security but there was always a trickle, a few who had been so deeply touched and maybe changed by Burroughs at a distance as to feel a need to close that distance by coming to the source. Burroughs maintained to the end a cult following which was significant beyond its numbers for including so many who would either form cults of their own or otherwise achieve influence.

Burroughs was about 10 years older than Kerouac and Ginsburg. Both shared an apartment with Burroughs and Joan Vollmer in New York long before writing anything of any importance. Joan would later become the first female ever to be admitted to Bellevue with a diagnosis of Amphetamine Psychosis and bear the famously queer Burroughs a son, William S. Burroughs Jr., before being shoot and killed by Burroughs in Mexico City on Sept. 6th, 1951. Burroughs,at that time, had already studied Medicine in Vienna and done graduate work in Anthropology. He was miles ahead of the rest of the group intellectually and pushed the others to catch up.

Burroughs knew the American ruling class up close and personal. He was born into it and his maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, practically invented modern style image management. Uncle Ivy had a brilliance all his own that he used quite effectively on behalf of John D. Rockefeller. He used Rockefeller's chronic digestive tract agonies to convince people that all the old predator's plunder could not buy at least one thing most of them could take for granted. "Rockefeller would pay a cool million for a stomach like yours" was the slogan and it actually worked to defuse resentment. Lee also had Rockefeller carrying rolls of dimes around in his coat pocket to pass out to children when he entered or exited any building. Each kid went home with a shiny new dime (part of the legend was that they were delivered straight from the mint to Rockefeller's office) and a neat story to tell about meeting the world's richest man. Lee made sure everyone knew the cute story the kids were telling. Anyway, "Steely Dan" took their name from a passage in Naked Lunch which I quote below:

" "Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room. “Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don't go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa. “When I was a transvestite Liz in Chi used to work as an exterminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen Monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don't castrate him literal he come all over my bedbug spray. “What happen to Steely Dan I?” “He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks.” “And Steely Dan II?” “Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboonsasshole. And don't say ‘Wheeeeeeee!’ this time.” “Why not? It's real boyish.” “Barefoot boy, check thy bullheads with the madame.” He looks at the ceiling, hands behind his head, cock pulsing. “So what shall I do? Can't shit with that dingus up me. I wonder is it possible to laugh and come at the same time? I recall, during the war, at the Jockey Club in Cairo, me and my asshole buddy, Lu, both gentlemen by act of Congress'''''''' "

Before Burroughs published anything, he was already infamous from Texas to Tangier for the outrageous "bits" he would spontaneously go into over dinner or a beer with friends or maybe some guy he was trying to impress. As ice-breakers or come on lines these "bits" were a disaster. They were so weird that they would stop all conversation everywhere within earshot and leave everyone staring at Burroughs wondering what planet he had to be from to believe that a story about, say, a man who taught his asshole to talk {a true Burroughs classic, that one!} constitued polite small talk. The distinctive Burroughs' style of saying something totally bizarre in a perfectly casual tone was there very early on. It put the listener in a double bind. Responding with outrage to something delivered in that casual tone made one sound like the ultimate square; not at all the thing the kind of folks Burroughs hung with wanted. But, your alternative was sitting there nodding your head like a boob while this guy spouted the most absurd and patiently offensive drivel any agent provocateur at war with the ordinary ever took it into his head to concoct.