THE AUTHOR
One of the most influential authors of modern times was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, MO. The grandson of the inventor of the mechanical adding machine and Burroughs Corp. founder, William Seward Burroughs was one of the drivers of the Beat movement in the Fifties. Its proponents included Neal Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, and others. However, Burroughs is best known for his realistic novels about drug culture and addiction, including Junky (1951) and Naked Lunch (1959).
The author studied English literature at Harvard, a calving ground for many of the writers who took their place in the Beat Movement's hall of fame. He performed graduate work in ethnology and archaeology and worked various jobs during World War II, including serving stints as a plain-clothes detective, an exterminator, an advertising copywriter, a factory worker, a bar attendant, and a waiter.
While drifting from one job to another, Burroughs met Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg in New York City around Christmas 1943, shortly after Ginsberg began his studies at Columbia. Burroughs impressed them with his scholarship, sardonic sense of humor, and the reserved poise that often comes with a wealthy birthright.
Older than the others in the group, Burroughs took on the role of father figure and mentor, encouraging Kerouac and Ginsberg in their attempts to write fiction and poetry. He felt a particular affinity toward them because they were kindred spirits, dreamers, and fantasizers. He said, "There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks."
Early in his literary career, Burroughs collaborated on a humorous sketch with a Harvard classmate, Kells Elvins, and on a short Dashiell Hammett-style novel with Kerouac. When his publishers rejected both works, Burroughs began to doubt his literary talents. His continuing search for an identity led him to seek out the criminal elements in society.
Hoping to fit in with a "community of outlaws," he began buying stolen goods, including morphine, and in 1944, he became addicted to the drug. In 1947, he moved in with Joan Vollmer, another member of the group around the Columbia campus, and she gave birth to their son, William S. Burroughs, Jr. Joan, too, was an addict, with benzedrine her drug of choice. The couple moved from New Orleans to Texas and Mexico City to obtain their drugs of choice.
In spring 1950, Elvins visited Burroughs in Mexico and talked him into writing a factual book about his drug experience as a "memory exercise." Burroughs set a daily schedule and kept to it with the help of daily injections of morphine. He finished the project in December and titled his book Junkie (later republished as Junky). He sent the manuscript to Lucien Carr in New York, finally seeing the book published as a pulp paperback in 1953. Under the pseudonym "William Lee," the book ran with the sensationalist subtitle, "Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict."
On September 6, 1951, at a party in Mexico City, Burroughs accidentally killed his wife while attempting to shoot a martini glass off her head with a pistol. He was stoned, and the bullet penetrated her forehead, killing her instantly. He was taken into custody and charged with criminal imprudence. His parents took over the care of William Junior at their home in Florida.
Released on bail, Burroughs jumped ship for South America in search of a drug called yage. His letters to Ginsberg describing his experiences in the cities, jungles, and mountains of Ecuador and Peru were collected in a volume later published by City Lights as The Yage Letters (1963). Burroughs thought the pieces would appeal to the same readers who had made Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) so successful.
After Burroughs left South America, he settled in Tangier, where he found he could live cheaply and obtain the drugs he needed for his survival. His wife's death created in him a sense of literary urgency. He felt that he had been possessed by an invader, "the Ugly Spirit," who controlled him at the time of the accident and maneuvered him into a lifelong struggle, "in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."
In 1957, Kerouac visited Burroughs in Tangier and began to type the hundreds of handwritten pages of Burroughs' new book, which Kerouac titled Naked Lunch. Afterwards, Burroughs said he was "shitting out my educated Middlewestern background once and for all. It's a matter of catharsis, where I say the most horrible things I can think of. Realize that--the most horrible dirty smelly awful niggardliest posture possible...."
Burroughs continued to work on the book until its publication in 1959, thinking of it as a picaresque novel narrated by his alter ego, "William Lee." His biographer, Ted Morgan, understood that Burroughs shared the "New Vision" of the writer as an outlaw, creating a "literature of risk." The compression and urgency of Naked Lunch in "the fragmentation of the text is like the discontinuity of the addict's life between fixes. ...For Burroughs sees addiction as a general condition not limited to drugs. Politics, religion, the family, love, are all forms of addiction. In the post-Bomb society, all the mainstays of the social order have lost their meaning, and bankrupt nation-states are run by 'control addicts.'"
After leaving Tangier in 1957, Burroughs traveled to London to enroll in apomorphine treatment--still banned in the United States--for his drug addiction. The treatment worked only temporarily, and he soon slipped back into his familiar ways.
Burroughs found the English literary scene to be terminally depressing. "England has the most sordid literary scene ..." he said. "They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs."
Burroughs published several more novels, including Queer, which he wrote in 1951 but wasn't published until 1985. The book shared the same protagonist as Junky, but the homosexual subject matter--although handled honestly--was considered in poor taste and kept the book from being published at the time.
Burroughs kept a daily journal with three separate columns in it. In one, he wrote what he was doing. In the second, he wrote what he was thinking. And in the third, he wrote what he was reading. He carried with him notebooks, news clippings, and photographs, as well as scissors, paste, and a tape recorder--all of which he considered part of his writing tools.
"In my writing," he said, "I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas ... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed."
In his later life, Burroughs moved to a small two-bedroom cottage in Lawrence, KS, where he lived with his cats. He took up painting and collage, producing abstract works of art characterized as expressive surrealism.
Devoted to truth in all the arts, Burroughs once said, "So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."
William S. Burroughs died in Lawrence on August 2, 1997, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the day before.
THE ETHICIST
In 1976, while Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr. and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs had not seen his son for more than a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was labeled a bona fide "second generation beat writer," his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had failed. A compulsive alcoholic, Billy went through binges where he withdrew from friends and family for long periods.
Following his dinner episode, Billy was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis so advanced that the only treatment was a rare liver transplant. He underwent the procedure and survived the thirty percent odds of success. His father remained by his side for two years, seeing Billy through additional surgeries and medical complications. Allen Ginsberg was also there to support both father and son through the long recovery period.
Billy lost contact with his father after publishing an article in Esquire magazine, claiming Burroughs had poisoned his son's life. He claimed that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications for the next three years. After he stopped taking his transplant-rejection drugs, he was found in critical condition near the side of a Florida highway and died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard the news from Allen Ginsberg.
Meanwhile, his father, who had won a respite from his addiction through the use of an anti-opioid drug, soon fell off the wagon for the last time. The cheap heroin outside his door on the Lower East Side proved irresistible. It "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the writer. From then until his death, he remained addicted to the drug. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981, where he lived out his remaining years. Never content to rest on his laurels, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press in 1984 after signing on with literary agent Andrew Wylie. The deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer. He used some of the advance money to buy a small bungalow for $29,000.
By that time, Burroughs had become a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. In the 1980s, he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten." He also worked with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits, producing a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken-word album in 1987. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical backup from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, along with alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play that opened to critical acclaim in Hamburg, Germany, in 1990. It later played across Europe and the United States. In 1991, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
A multi-dimensional talent, Burroughs developed a painting technique in 1982 in which he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces and shooting at the cans with a shotgun. He exhibited these splattered panels and canvasses first in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By then, Burroughs had also developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage, and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He also created file-folder paintings, featuring these mediums plus "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they also function as art in themselves. Until his last years, he created visual art, featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums. These included the Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and others.
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe." No passing interest, magic was part of Burroughs' everyday life. He sought mystical visions through practices like scrying, taking measures to protect himself from possession, and attempting to lay curses on those who had injured him. The author spoke openly about his magical practices and became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for Last Night on Earth by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri. Throughout his life, the author believed in maintaining close relationships with his friends and remained a stanch supporter of the Second Amendment right to free speech.
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