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“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...” When Allen Ginsberg composed that opening line to the Beat epic “Howl,” he was no doubt writing in part about his friend William S. Burroughs. By the accounts of those who knew him, Burroughs was indeed among the best minds of their generation, but was tragically destroyed by the madness that is narcotic addiction. His hallucinations may have helped him develop his ideas, but his addiction also stunted their expression.
Burroughs seems to have been a tortured character, constantly questing for fulfillment in a variety of pursuits. He was born into a socially prominent and economically comfortable family, the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine and a descendant of General Robert E. Lee. But he felt alienated from his suburban environment, which he blamed only partly on the fact that he was homosexual, and retreated to reading in solitude.
He took his affinity for reading to Harvard, where he studied English literature. After graduating, he married Ilse Klapper so that she could become a US citizen and escape Nazi Germany. He went on to study medicine in Vienna and anthropology at Harvard’s graduate school. He served in the US Army for some months during World War II but was discharged for having severed the first joint of his own finger to impress a friend. He also worked as an insect exterminator, advertising copywriter, bartender, and private investigator. In 1944, he was introduced to morphine by a petty criminal named Herbert Huncke. He would remain addicted to narcotics for thirteen years.
In 1946, Burroughs divorced Ilse to marry Joan Vollmer. Through her, he met Columbia University students Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The Burroughs’ apartment became a salon for the early Beat movement, and William was inspired to write fiction. But his drug addiction was attracting attention from the police, so he and Joan fled to Texas, to Louisiana, and then to Mexico. Burroughs studied architecture, Aztec history, and Mayan codices at Mexico City College. The couple found it easy to support their addictions, but they argued frequently. He was neglecting her in favor of homosexual liaisons, and she had a legendary death wish.
Joan got her wish in 1951. The event would remain shrouded in mystery and rumor until William shared his story thirty-three years later. At a party and under the influence, they had thought it would be a good idea for William to shoot a drinking glass off of Joan’s head with his handgun, after the manner of William Tell. It was not a good idea. Mexican authorities ruled the death an accident and never prosecuted.
Burroughs then journeyed to South America in search of a psychoactive plant called Yage, and then returned to New York for a time. Between 1953 and ‘58, he lived in Tangier, Morocco, and there, between heroin binges, he recorded more than 1000 pages of notes. The collection is full of satire, quirky trivia, scientific descriptions of the effects of drugs, and graphic scenes exploring the limits of humiliation and degradation. Ginsberg and other friends helped him select material from those notes to be redacted into Naked Lunch, regarded as his masterwork, as well as three other novels. Kerouac typed the manuscript, the pages of which were re-stacked at random in the publisher’s office. Burroughs intended this “cut-up” method to be a literary equivalent of collage.
The resulting package is a subversion of literary tradition in a novel’s clothing, a collection of sketches and ravings without a unifying plot. There are recurring characters, and certain themes do emerge. On every page the author rails against the control of people against their will. Drug addiction becomes a metaphor for other kinds of control, whether government bureaucracy or individual exploitation.
Not all of Burroughs’s work is as avant-garde as the cut-up experiments. His earlier novels, like Queer and Junky, are more coherent and accessible. In Queer, Burroughs uses his alter-ego William Lee to tell the story of his wanderings in search of drugs and love after Joan’s death. Junky, a parody of ‘50s pulp novels, is similarly autobiographical and presents a thoroughly unattractive picture of the heroin underworld.
William S. Burroughs’s stark honesty about that underworld and his dark, satirical humor, as well as his literary cohorts, made him a godfather of twentieth-century counterculture. The wild imaginings of works like Naked Lunch are often disturbing, and the nonlinear style is difficult to read, but the picture they provide of the author’s mind is irreplaceable.
Will Burrows
William S Burroughs Titles |