The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959
ed., Oliver Harris
T he one time I saw him, eight years ago at a publication party for a novel he'd written three decades before, William Burroughs looked less like the "connoisseur of horror" he once called himself...
...May yet attempt a story or some account of Joan's death...
...I don't got many veins left...
...Needless to say, I will not write any formal statement on the subject...
...He wrote mostly to stave off misery, but he preferred contracts and royalties to neglect and persecution...
...In 1949, when renting the back house on his Louisiana property, he tells Kerouac of a dismaying discovery that he cannot evict his tenants "without removing the premises from the rental market...
...Now he has one, and these letters by and large confirm it...
...On New Year's Day 1950 he writes Jack Kerouac to praise the lack of Mexican efforts "curtailing self-medication...
...Maybe we can get a book of them later on when I have a rep...
...I have given up junk entirely and don't miss it at all...
...It's more complex, more basic and more horrible, as if the brain drew the bullet toward it...
...That he was prepared to embrace neither didn't keep him from being a kind of ethicist to the Beats...
...Ginsberg himself needed few lectures in behavior...
...So I kissed the vein, calling it 'my sweet little needle sucker,' and talked baby talk to it...
...He knew a passage like this might be read years later by more eyes than Gins-berg's...
...As the next dozen years go by and the family's black sheep moves from growing vegetables in Louisiana to drinking yage in Pucallpa and chasing boys and drugs in Tangiers, a reader almost requires a Burroughs adding machine (source of the family fortune) to count Bill's climbings onto and off the junk wagon...
...Apparently, the problem for McGinniss was that there are no existing Kennedy biographies for that period to draw upon...
...and Burroughs was safely enshrined as its visionary of drugs and violence...
...Jack Kerouac had been the movement's road correspondent...
...The young people clinked their glassware and flashed their teeth, while Allen Ginsberg, full of energy and good will, scampered about, snapping pictures of everyone, including that bewildered-looking old Beat, the guest of honor...
...It goes on like this, year after year, from codeine to Eukodol, Peru to Morocco, in and out of "the straitjacket of junk," crawling between resolute cleanliness and "degenerate spectacle: I just hit a vein (not easy these days...
...His literary exploitation of the incident is less repellent than his effort to explain it to Ginsberg...
...Ultimately there is only fact on all levels, and the more one argues, verbalizes, moralizes the less he will see and feel of fact...
...A good deal of what is in these letters ends up, sometimes word for word, in the novels he eventually published, and amidst all the paranoid phantasmagoria those books would contain, one can still detect a nod and a wink, the sly self-awareness of "That Junky writin' boy Bill," as lie signed himself to Ginsberg in 1952...
...Needles and syringes can be bought anywhere...
...He can mix hipster riffs, camp, and Papa Hemingway's Injun talk in a single letter, but he's at his best when playing it starkly straight...
...Conservatism is hardly a seamless garment, and the question of drug legalization has always strained its libertarian lining...
...New Orleans proves a distraction from his farming ("Putting out feelers in the local junk market"), and Burroughs ends up being one of the few men who can say their rehab was thwarted by dislocations in the farm economy: "I had hoped to go to a sanatorium for a 10 day cure on my carrot money...
...He was a gun nut, thanks to that aggressive sense of personal liberty, and who knows what dope-soaked collisions of the sexual and death-seeking urges...
...I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it...
...urroughs often let his own letters simmer "on the stove" for days on end...
...Somehow, Burroughs slogs through all the kicking and lapsing with more plainspokenness than the average social drinker can summon...
...Why can't people mind their own f---ing business...
...He famously killed his common-law wife, Joan, in a drunken game of William Tell that the two of them enacted with a gun and glass...
...Ginsberg had taken care of the politics and bliss...
...He recognized Neal Cassady as an "inveterate moocher" and offered Ginsberg this moral evaluation of the cross-country trip Kerouac would turn into On the Road: "I can not forgo a few comments on the respective and comparative behaviour of the several individuals comprising this tour, a voyage which for sheer compulsive pointlessness compares favorably with the mass migrations of the Mayans...
...B etween hallucinations he was more than ordinarily respectful of common reality, going so far, in 1948, as to pronounce a philosophy of "factualism": "All arguments, all nonsensical considerations as to what people 'should do,' are irrelevant...
...I tell you we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism...
...Start cutting down tomorrow...
...His flash photos of Peru have a terrible vividness: "Lima, a city of open spaces, shit strewn lots and huge parks, vultures wheeling in a violet sky and young kids spitting blood in the street...
...1) Aristocratic code (2) Religion...
...T he one time I saw him, eight years ago at a publication party for a novel he'd written three decades before, William Burroughs looked less like the "connoisseur of horror" he once called himself than someone's terribly frail grandfather, so stooped and skinny I swore I could see his ribs through the back of his jacket...
...I think I am afraid...
...All liberals, he writes a few months later, are "vindictive, mean and petty," and from Mexico City he advises Kerouac always to keep his "snout in the public trough...
...Even while he wallows in Tangiers, a sort of peripheral vision permits him to see the city for what it is: "Things here are so typically Tangiers—`My dear, anything can happen in Tangiers'—that it is positively sick-making...
...But it is a reputation for talent, not genius, and so the lines above must stand, loathsomely, amidst the grubby levelheadedness surrounding them...
...their composition betrays more shaping than haste...
...Now that hope is blasted...
...Fields act," but there was a bit more to it than that: "There are 2 bases for any ethical, system," Burroughs declared to him in 1950...
...Burroughs was frequently one stepahead of the police, but the totalitarianism his imagination feared, at least in this stage of his life, was of the looming socialist variety...
...The letters in this collection are consistent testimony to his loyalty, patience, and simple niceness to Burroughs, whom he served diligently, and for a time quite hopelessly, as a literary agent...
...Ginsberg, his intellectual foil for some of these libertarian pronouncements, thought Burroughs's "b.s...
...Not exactly to discover unconscious intent...
...By March of '51 he's taken "the Chinese cure and [is] off the junk," but thirteen months later, with the departure of a lover, he's "got another habit...
...He may have flirted with the orgone boxes of Reichian psychiatry, but he pretty much saw analysis for what it wasn't ("In the end people will do what they want to do, or the species will become extinct...
...Whether he's writing about the Texas drug laws ("For some idiotic reason the bureaucrats are more opposed to tea than to stuff") or making fun of Ginsberg's short-lived "normalizationprogram," by which the younger writer hoped to turn heterosexual, Burroughs somehow keeps a perspicacious head above the ocean of dope...
...Genius may have its license, but talent is too' common to be the basis for forgiving anything...
...That he lived to attend the party, much less be around even now, seems a sort of medical mystery...
...The party at Mary Boone's art gallery was a freakish mix of the old downtown and the glossy new eighties version.silly, but in that case he should have reported on Teddy Kennedy's refusal to seek the presidency in 1976, 1984, and 1988 against Republicans—and his decision to seek it in 1980 against a Democratic incumbent...
...about Statism and Cops and welfare state is just a W.C...
...He meant his early writings, such as Junkie, to carry no message beyond mere descriptiveness ("You might say it was a travel book more than anything else...
...These famous last words, written in 1946, are among the volume's first: the 32-year-old Burroughs was spending the summer with his parents after a narcotics arrest...
...Better save my letters," he'd written him three years earlier...
...In them he stages some of the vaudeville vignettes that drive the novels, and he indulges in that fifties specialty, the sick joke: "In this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee...
...Talk is incompatible with factualism...
...His just-published letters record the fifteen years of struggle that preceded the success of Naked Lunch, a time of much solitary wandering and gluttonous drug-taking...
...Those who would wish to see Burroughs strictly barred from any gathering of the faithful will still have to admit, when they read these letters, that he was no single-issue deregulator...
...are his watchwords...
Vol. 26 • October 1993 • No. 10
