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William (Seward) Burroughs (1914-1997) |
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American writer of experimental novels, who lived long times in Mexico City, Tanger, Paris, and London. William S. Burroughs' homosexual themes in The Naked Lunch (1959) and the frankness with which he dealt with his own experiences as a drug addict sparkled the last major obscenity trial in the U.S., but won him a following among writers, musicians, and film makers. Burroughs produced the bulk of his writing after he moved to London and took an apomorphine cure under the direction of Dr John Dent. "You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal about the sight of it. The spit hangs off their skin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it." (from The Naked Lunch, the restored text edited by James Grauerholz abd Barry Miles, Grove Press, 2001, p. 6) William Seward Burroughs II was born in St. Louis, Mo. into a successful business family. His mother, Laura Lee, was a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee, his grandfather the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. The Burroughs Corporation ultimately merged with the Sperry Corporation to create Unisys. By the time of Burroughs's birth, his father Mortimer had already sold his stock in the company. After six years at the private Community School, Burroughs sent to the John Burroughs School. He also spent some time at the Los Alamos Ranch School for boys. "As a boy," he later recalled, "I was much plagued by nightmares. I remember a nurse telling me that opium gives you sweet dreams, and I resolved that I would smoke opium when I grew up." (quoted in 'The Name Is Burroughs' by James Grauerholz, in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, edited by James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg, introduction by Ann Douglas, 1998, Grove Press, p. 5) At the age of 14, he read Jack Black's You Can't Win. This autobiographical account of hobo life had a profound effect on his world view and later influenced The Naked Lunch. Burroughs graduated in English literature from Harvard University in 1936. During this period he lost his heterosexual virginity in an East St. Louis brothel. However, he had also recorded his homosexual fantasies in a diary at Los Alamos. Burroughs traveled in Europe, where he studied medicine in Venice for a year. While in Austria he married a Jewish woman who wanted to escape the Nazis. After returning to the United States Burroughs studied anthropology at Harvad. In the early 1940s he lived in New York City and worked for an advertising agency. When the war began, Burroughs joined the army. He was trained as a glider pilot, but was discharged as unfit for service in 1942. The major reason was his relationship with a hustler named Jack Anderson. Burroughs had amputated one of his little fingers after Anderson left him. Rejecting his background, Burroughs plunged into an alternative life-style that included drugs, odd jobs, and bisexuality. While working in the shipyards of New York, he became addicted to heroin, or what he called Opium Jones, G(od's) O(wn) (Medicine). Drug addiction was not new in the family. Burroughs's uncle Horace used morphine. He committed suicide in 1915. In the mid-1940s Burroughs befriended with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, with whom he would be linked as key figures in the Beat Movement. He was named in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957) as Old Bull Lee. "He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at café tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just two minutes too long for a drink, and wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it" (On the Road, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 143) With Joan Vollmer, his common law wife, Burroughs moved to Texas, where he grew cotton and marijuana crops. To avoid legal problems, they moved to Mexico City. Joan could no longer get Benzedrine, instead she drank cheap tequila. To her friends she said that her days were numbered. In September 1951 Burroughs killed Vollmer accidentally. They were partying in a room above a bar when he announced the assembled company he would perform shooting in the Wilhelm Tell style. Vollmer placed a water glass on top of her head, and Burroughs shot at it from about six feet away with the gun he carried – missing tragically and Vollmer fell dead. Burroughs was never tried for the accident. Their son William Burroughs III died at the age of 32 from drink and drug abuse. The author have said: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formutalted my writing." (quoted in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012, p. 213) It has been said, that Ginsberg's opus Howl! was written after a dream of Joan. Burroughs lived for a time in Tangier in a male brothel. Ginsberg
and Kerouac visited Tangiers in 1957. In 1959 Burroughs published The Naked Lunch, which was banned in 1962; the ruling was overturned in in 1965 by the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Now the work is accepted as a modern classic. Norman Mailer
said in its 1962 blurb: "Naked Lunch is a work of great beauty, great
difficulty, and manically exquisite insight. I think that William
Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Much of the structure of the book was
planned by Allen Ginsberg, who gathered the scraps of paper that he
found scattered around in Burroughs's room. The narrative consists of
twenty-one satirical pieces that purport to lay bare the horrors of
reality: hence the title. "Let them see what they eat." It featured
such characters as Dr Benway, a mad scientist dedicated to Automatic
Obedience Processing, and the Lobotomy Kid, who manufactures the
Complete All-American male, a blob of jelly. Some critics compared Burroughs' humor to that of Jonathan Swift. First it was published by Olympia Press in Paris. In England it appeared in 1964, as part of Dead Fingers Talk, an amalgam which also included The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. The nightmarish visions of William Lee, a junk addict contains science fiction, biological fantasy, disgusting images, and sick jokes. "May all your troubles be little one as one child molester says to the other." (Naked Lunch, p. 118) It also tries to find from the use of drugs and homosexuality a philosophical statement – addiction is seen as a metaphor of the human condition. The plotless novel was a tough challenge for the Canadian film director David Cronenberg, whose science fiction films often deal with biological mutations. "Given an impossibly difficult text to film, Cronenberg made an excellent decision to avoid the kind of ponderous, literal (mis)reading of a classic American novel that marks, for instance, Joseph Strick's Ulysses. Instead, he used the entire Burroughs opus and the legendary biography as the interpretation for his film that became a brilliant response to the novel, rather than an adaptation per se." (The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise, second edition, 2005) Cronenberg added in the film scenes from Burroughs' life, accidentally shooting of his wife, literary friends who have much similarities with Ginsberg and Kerouac, and an American expatriate couple, referring to Paul and Jane Bowles. In Paris Burroughs' address at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur was known as "the Beat Hotel," but his focus had began to shift to another kind of literarure. He became friends with the painter Brion Gysin, who influenced his fiction, especially his 'cut-up' technique. Burroughs' ideas on writing has never been orthodox. "My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus," he once said, "that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host, though this symbiotic relationship on now breaking down, for reasons I will suggest later." (The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier, John Calder, 1984, p. 12) Burroughs
moved in the mid-1960s to London, where he studied Scientology and
started to use the E-Meter, a piece of equipment that operated like a
lie detector and was developed by the Scientologists. Ali's Smile / Naked Scientology (1972)
collected Burroughs's opinions on the movement. Following an
apomorphine treatment devised by Dr. John Yerby Dent, Burroughs
temporarily freed himself from his heroin addiction. Most of the 1960s,
Burroughs' boyfriend was Ian Sommerville, a mathematician, who
operated Paul McCartney's studio
at 34 Montagu Square. Burroughs used the studio for his experimental
'Hello, Yes, Hello' tapes. "He was very interesting but we never really
struck up a huge conversation," recalled
McCartney. "I actually felt you had to be a bit of a junkie, which
was probably not true. He was fine, there never was a problem, it just
never really developed into a huge conversation where we sat down for
hours together." (Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, Vintage, 1998, p. 241) In the 1970s Burroughs returned to New York, where he got hooked on
heroin again. Eventually he settled in the small university town,
Lawrence, Kansas. When he moved into the town he brought along his
favorite cat, Ruski, a Russian Blue. Soon after his arrival he was
befriended by three or four stray cats. A longhaired orange female was
named Ginger. She mated with Ruski and produced "the orange litter,"
which included Calico Jane.Cat-doors were arranged to allow the animals to come in and go out at will. Burroughs' house on Learnard Avenue was a modest
two-bedroom
cottage built in 1929 from a Sears & Roebuck house kit. Over the
years the most frequent visitors were the poets John Giorno and Allen
Ginsberg. Usually Burroughs woke early in the morning, took his
methadone, and fed his cats which took up considersable time. He liked
to walk in his garden in the afternoon, and practice knife
throwing. After the first vodka-and-Coke and a few puffs on a joint he
had a quiet moment to write in his journal. Burroughs was was a light sleeper. In case of trouble, he had his pistol under the covers. In 1983 Burroughs became a writer in residence to the university and devoted to his spare time to a vegetable garden. His last years Burroughs lived with cats (Calico Jane, Ruski, Fletch, Horatio, Smoky, Ed, Ginger, Wimpy, et al.) and handguns and rifles. He also exhibited "action paintings" produced by taking potshots at tins of paint. William S. Burroughs died of heart failure on August 2, 1997, in Lawrence. In his works Burroughs developed with painter Brion Gysin a cut-up method, that employed cutting and blending several random texts into one hybrid narrative. Thus Burroughs has attempted to avoid conventional language patterns and to restructure readers consciousness. He began writing in the 1930s, but his first book, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, came out in 1953 under the pen name William Lee – he did not want to upset his parents. Part of the sequel, Queer (1985), Burrough wrote already in 1952. The book was not published until decades later due to its homosexual content. The Naked Lunch was completed after
Burroughs's treatment for drug addiction. Other works include The Soft
Machine (1961), Nova Express (1964), and The Wild Boys (1971). Christopher Isherwood proclaimed Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night (1981)
as a masterpiece. Although it mixed a virus plague and CIA with a
missing boy, intergalactic conspiracy, and an eighteen-century pirate
captain, it is considered one of Burroughs' most coherent novels.
However, while writing the book, he underwent several operations in an
effort to close an abdominal cyst and spent much of his time and money
on drugs. In the sequels of The Red Night trilogy, The Place of Dead Roads (1983), a western where cowboys are gay, and The Western Lands (1987), Burroughs also depicted a deadly virus plaguing humankind, "inexorably headed for extinction." The Yage Letters,
published in 1963, was based on Burroughs' travels through the Amazon region of South America in search for the drug yage, the notorious "final fix". The Wild Boys was set in the year 1988. Adolescent guerrilla packs of specialized humanoids are routing the forces of civilized nations and ravaging the earth. When wholesale slaughter erupts, the battle continues underground where the survivors evolve into The Wild Boys, hordes of pitiless homosexual warriors who move in and destroy the cities. Burroughs has warned of the "Control Machine," forces of conformity that would destroy the unique qualities of the individual. In Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded they are agents from other space and a virus from Venus. Material for his novels the author has borrowed from all areas of popular culture. In science fiction his influence can be seen in the works of J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, John T. Sladek, Norman Spinard, and others. Overt pastiches of his works include Barrington J. Bayley's The Four-Color Problem (1971) and Philip José Farmer's The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod(1968).Apart from the bands (Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk), which took their names directly from his works, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, REM, Nirvana, and others have paid homage to Burroughs. The writer is also found from the cover of the famous Beatles album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Burroughs
even appeared in an advert for Nike and in a strange documentary film
from 1994 by Kevin Hull, which depicted the search of Albert Einstein's
brain – finally a Japanese scholar Kenji Sugimoto finds the bulk of it
preserved in two glass jars, owned by a pathologist named Thomas
Harvey. In Drugstore Cowboy Burroughs
acted Matt Dillon's elder brother. His other films include Twister and U2 music video Last Night on Earth. Burroughs recorded with Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, and Michael Stipe.
He has been credited of coining the music term "heavy
metal." (The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, edited by Patricia Romanowski and Holly George-Warren, Rolling Stone Press, 1995, p. 432) The novella Blade Runner: A Movie (1979), had nothing to do with Ridley Scott's film, based on Philip K. Dick's novel. Burroughs' work, set in New York City ("a city which has come to represent all cities") in the year 2014 and exploring welfare and Medicare apocalypse, was written as a treatment for an adaptation of Alan E. Nourse's science fiction book The Bladerunner (1974), published by Ballantine. Noteworthy, Nourse interest in the medical field was natural because he was a trained doctor. Burroughs suggested that his book was "about a second chance for Billy the blade runner, and for all humanity." (quoted in The Ridley Scott Encyclopedia by Laurence Raw, Scarecrow Press, 2009, p. 64) At the end of the credist in the movie, Scott acknowledges the borrowing of the title from Burroughs and Nourse.
Selected works:
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