Stavros
02-05-2014, 10:09 AM
There was a time when The Naked Lunch was required reading for people of my generation, along with the rest of the Beat generation, and an odd phoney called Carlos Castaneda, whose books never interested me. Although I think The Naked Lunch is a masterpiece of its kind, I have been sceptical of Burroughs for many reasons, the relentless addiction to drugs that ought to have wiped him out before he was 30, view on women and politics that are an embarrassment....I wonder if anyone still reads him?
This is an article from today's Telegraph for those who are interested.
William S Burroughs: a Life by Barry Miles, review
Exactly one hundred years after he was born, William Burroughs has become more myth than man
William Burroughs: occult guru; drug-soaked crank; literary genius; dystopian visionary; violent psychopath. No writer of the post-war period has been so thoroughly mythologised. He was Old Bull Lee, El Hombre Invisible and Morphine Minnie. He cut off his own finger, he shot his wife and he took every drug he could find. Skin stretched over his skull, hair side-parted, stiff-postured in his three-piece suit, his unsettling intensity hums in every photographic portrait.
The myth was born at the beginning. In 1953, when he published Junky, his first book, he did so under the pseudonym William Lee. His friend and agent Allen Ginsberg wrote “an appreciation” of the book in which he promised that Burroughs’ true identity would “astonish many readers”.
Ginsberg laid it on thick. “Little is known,” he wrote, about Burroughs’ student years at Harvard aside from his “startling penchant for wildness”, and that he kept a “weasel on a chain”. It was, of course, nonsense. There was no weasel – it was a ferret.
Ginsberg also claimed that Burroughs cut off his finger to prove he did not feel pain; in fact he cut off the top joint of his left little finger with poultry shears in an attempt to win back the attention of a rent boy with whom he was obsessed. That’s the thing about Burroughs, the truth behind the myth is rarely prosaic.
Burroughs was born 100 years ago on February 5 and to commemorate there is a hefty new biography, the first comprehensive effort since 1988. In William S Burroughs: a Life, Barry Miles draws on the previous research of James Grauerholz, his unparalleled knowledge of the archives and his own friendship with Burroughs dating back to the mid-Sixties. Sifting through the conflicting accounts of a group of writers and artists deranged out of their senses, he is not short of material.
Burroughs came from an affluent St Louis family and attended Los Alamos, the most expensive boarding school in America. His family was not especially conventional, however. One uncle was a morphine addict who committed suicide; another was a PR man who, on his death, was being investigated for working with Goebbels.
At Harvard, Burroughs got interested in the occult and at the weekends he would head to New York to explore the gay scene and take drugs in Harlem nightclubs. After graduating he went to Vienna, studied medicine, participated in orgies and got married. Ilse Klapper, who was Jewish, asked him to marry her so she could get a visa for America and escape from the Nazis. In doing so, he may well have saved her life.
Back in New York, his psychoanalyst had him committed over the finger incident. Once he had got himself back together, he tried to get involved in the war but failed to convince the authorities he would make either a pilot or a spy. When he volunteered as a private he immediately got cold feet. He moved to Chicago, lured by tales of the criminal underworld. He worked as a store detective and a pest exterminator. On the side, he drew up plans for improbable heists.
When he returned to New York in 1943, he fell in with the Beats. Burroughs, a decade older than most of them, was their link to the underworld, introducing them to hustlers and dealers. He had developed a morphine habit and when he could not make ends meet, would go out and “work the hole” with one of his fellow addicts, lifting wallets off drunks in the subway. All this became the raw material for Junky.
In the summer of 1944, David Kammerer, Burroughs’ close school friend, was stabbed to death by Lucien Carr, the leader of the Beat group. Kammerer was sexually obsessed with Carr and had been stalking him for years. After trying to sink the body in the Hudson, a bloodstained Carr went straight to Burroughs, who told him to turn himself in. Burroughs followed the trial closely and collaborated with Jack Kerouac on a fictionalised account of the murder, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. It was his first piece of serious writing, but would not be published until 2008.
After stints in Texas (where he tried to farm first cotton then pot) and New Orleans, and after being arrested in both, Burroughs lit out for Mexico City. In New York he had entered into a relationship with Joan Vollmer, who was intellectually sharp but addicted to Benzedrine. She had been twice married and had a young daughter. She accompanied him south and became his common-law wife. Their son, William, was born in Texas in 1947.
Mexico City was a permissive utopia for Burroughs but when he wasn’t using he was on the booze. He had also developed an obsession with guns. During one drunken spree, Burroughs attempted to show off his marksmanship by shooting a glass off his wife’s head. The bullet entered through Vollmer’s temple, wounding her fatally.
A well-connected lawyer and some well-coached witnesses helped Burroughs get away with a two-year suspended sentence. The children went to live with their grandparents. Some of Burroughs’s friends, including Kerouac and Ginsberg, thought Vollmer had wanted to be killed; Burroughs blamed the possession of an evil spirit; Miles, more measuredly, puts it down to “a drunk with a gun”.
Burroughs wrote Queer while waiting for the trial (it was not published until 1985) but fled the country when his lawyer got into legal trouble himself. He tried to deal with his grief at Vollmer’s death by writing and later, says Miles, came “to the appalling conclusion” that he “would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death”.
He spent the next few months in the Amazon jungle, searching for shamans who could prepare yagé, reputedly the most powerful hallucinogen in the world. Once he found the good stuff, he was nearly killed by an overdose.
Burroughs started writing again in Tangiers, typing furiously and throwing the sheets behind him and on to the floor. Neighbours heard him convulsed in paroxysms of laughter. This was Naked Lunch. Not that Tangiers was all work. Burroughs described the city as a “promised land flowing with junk and boys”. His drug habit was at its worst: he was shooting up every two hours.
In Morocco he met Francis Bacon, Paul Bowles and, most importantly, Brion Gysin, an artist who had been kicked out of the Surrealist Group by André Breton. Burroughs became close to Gysin in Paris, staying at the Beat Hotel. They did psychic experiments and used machines with flickering light to induce hallucinations. It was Gysin who had the initial idea of the cut-up method, whereby existing texts were cut and the sections rearranged to form new words and sentences. Burroughs ran with it, using it in his writing, photography and sound experiments.
Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 (the same press had published Lolita four years earlier). The success of the book brought Burroughs cultural kudos. In London in the Sixties he befriended Anthony Burgess and Samuel Beckett, and conducted some audio experiments with Paul McCartney, who put him on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s. According to Miles, though, his time in London was “poisoned by his obsession with Scientology”.
Burroughs was susceptible to this sort of stuff. Many of his personal theories were preposterous, not least the idea that humans are agents of an insect trust from another galaxy. Some of these sci-fi fantasies were spiced with some pretty nasty misogyny.
He spoke about shaking off the constraints of bourgeois existence, but had an allowance from his parents until he was 50. That money subsidised not only his heroin supply but also his use of teenage prostitutes. Miles relays one story in which Burroughs and David Woolman exploited two boys in Tangiers. Burroughs does not think that the boys will perform but Woolman is confident. “They are hungry,” he says.
He included this scene in Naked Lunch and Miles claims Burroughs was making “a Swiftian gesture” to reveal his readers’ prurience and “undermine their middle-class values”. Yes, but when Swift wrote that the Irish should eat their babies to ease their hunger it was satire. He never actually ate one.
Miles’s intimacy with his subject, and his vast trove of sources, brings lavish detail but it can come at the cost of indulgence. The book is at its best when he keeps a sceptical distance.
For Miles, Burroughs’ life was shaped by a struggle with “the ugly spirit”, which Burroughs thought may have possessed him during an incident of childhood abuse and which he blamed for the death of Vollmer. The book opens with an elderly Burroughs trying to exorcise this spirit in a Navajo sweat lodge, something he had previously sought to achieve through drugs, occult practices and analysis.
This is a way of framing Burroughs' life as a heroic struggle. The less enamoured reader might find more value in seeing his life and work as a catalyst for an emergent counter-culture. Sure, he may have been controlled by alien insects, but he influenced a generation.
He befriended Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Susan Sontag. He tried to make a film with Dennis Hopper and collaborated with Nick Cave and Tom Waits. David Bowie used the cut-up method for some of his lyrics and it is hard to imagine David Lynch without Burroughs’ influence, or the fiction of JG Ballard and Will Self for that matter. Kurt Cobain sought him out not long before shooting himself.
This was Burroughs as icon and celebrity. He did reading tours and had conventions dedicated to his work. Like any avant-garde radical, he developed a degree of respectability in his dotage. He lived until he was 83, spending his last years in Kansas, back on the junk and experimenting with painting. He died of a heart attack in 1997. Even in his longevity Burroughs was unconventional: hard-living heroin addicts are not supposed to comfortably exceed their three-score and ten.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10617789/William-S-Burroughs-a-Life-by-Barry-Miles-review.html
This is an article from today's Telegraph for those who are interested.
William S Burroughs: a Life by Barry Miles, review
Exactly one hundred years after he was born, William Burroughs has become more myth than man
William Burroughs: occult guru; drug-soaked crank; literary genius; dystopian visionary; violent psychopath. No writer of the post-war period has been so thoroughly mythologised. He was Old Bull Lee, El Hombre Invisible and Morphine Minnie. He cut off his own finger, he shot his wife and he took every drug he could find. Skin stretched over his skull, hair side-parted, stiff-postured in his three-piece suit, his unsettling intensity hums in every photographic portrait.
The myth was born at the beginning. In 1953, when he published Junky, his first book, he did so under the pseudonym William Lee. His friend and agent Allen Ginsberg wrote “an appreciation” of the book in which he promised that Burroughs’ true identity would “astonish many readers”.
Ginsberg laid it on thick. “Little is known,” he wrote, about Burroughs’ student years at Harvard aside from his “startling penchant for wildness”, and that he kept a “weasel on a chain”. It was, of course, nonsense. There was no weasel – it was a ferret.
Ginsberg also claimed that Burroughs cut off his finger to prove he did not feel pain; in fact he cut off the top joint of his left little finger with poultry shears in an attempt to win back the attention of a rent boy with whom he was obsessed. That’s the thing about Burroughs, the truth behind the myth is rarely prosaic.
Burroughs was born 100 years ago on February 5 and to commemorate there is a hefty new biography, the first comprehensive effort since 1988. In William S Burroughs: a Life, Barry Miles draws on the previous research of James Grauerholz, his unparalleled knowledge of the archives and his own friendship with Burroughs dating back to the mid-Sixties. Sifting through the conflicting accounts of a group of writers and artists deranged out of their senses, he is not short of material.
Burroughs came from an affluent St Louis family and attended Los Alamos, the most expensive boarding school in America. His family was not especially conventional, however. One uncle was a morphine addict who committed suicide; another was a PR man who, on his death, was being investigated for working with Goebbels.
At Harvard, Burroughs got interested in the occult and at the weekends he would head to New York to explore the gay scene and take drugs in Harlem nightclubs. After graduating he went to Vienna, studied medicine, participated in orgies and got married. Ilse Klapper, who was Jewish, asked him to marry her so she could get a visa for America and escape from the Nazis. In doing so, he may well have saved her life.
Back in New York, his psychoanalyst had him committed over the finger incident. Once he had got himself back together, he tried to get involved in the war but failed to convince the authorities he would make either a pilot or a spy. When he volunteered as a private he immediately got cold feet. He moved to Chicago, lured by tales of the criminal underworld. He worked as a store detective and a pest exterminator. On the side, he drew up plans for improbable heists.
When he returned to New York in 1943, he fell in with the Beats. Burroughs, a decade older than most of them, was their link to the underworld, introducing them to hustlers and dealers. He had developed a morphine habit and when he could not make ends meet, would go out and “work the hole” with one of his fellow addicts, lifting wallets off drunks in the subway. All this became the raw material for Junky.
In the summer of 1944, David Kammerer, Burroughs’ close school friend, was stabbed to death by Lucien Carr, the leader of the Beat group. Kammerer was sexually obsessed with Carr and had been stalking him for years. After trying to sink the body in the Hudson, a bloodstained Carr went straight to Burroughs, who told him to turn himself in. Burroughs followed the trial closely and collaborated with Jack Kerouac on a fictionalised account of the murder, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. It was his first piece of serious writing, but would not be published until 2008.
After stints in Texas (where he tried to farm first cotton then pot) and New Orleans, and after being arrested in both, Burroughs lit out for Mexico City. In New York he had entered into a relationship with Joan Vollmer, who was intellectually sharp but addicted to Benzedrine. She had been twice married and had a young daughter. She accompanied him south and became his common-law wife. Their son, William, was born in Texas in 1947.
Mexico City was a permissive utopia for Burroughs but when he wasn’t using he was on the booze. He had also developed an obsession with guns. During one drunken spree, Burroughs attempted to show off his marksmanship by shooting a glass off his wife’s head. The bullet entered through Vollmer’s temple, wounding her fatally.
A well-connected lawyer and some well-coached witnesses helped Burroughs get away with a two-year suspended sentence. The children went to live with their grandparents. Some of Burroughs’s friends, including Kerouac and Ginsberg, thought Vollmer had wanted to be killed; Burroughs blamed the possession of an evil spirit; Miles, more measuredly, puts it down to “a drunk with a gun”.
Burroughs wrote Queer while waiting for the trial (it was not published until 1985) but fled the country when his lawyer got into legal trouble himself. He tried to deal with his grief at Vollmer’s death by writing and later, says Miles, came “to the appalling conclusion” that he “would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death”.
He spent the next few months in the Amazon jungle, searching for shamans who could prepare yagé, reputedly the most powerful hallucinogen in the world. Once he found the good stuff, he was nearly killed by an overdose.
Burroughs started writing again in Tangiers, typing furiously and throwing the sheets behind him and on to the floor. Neighbours heard him convulsed in paroxysms of laughter. This was Naked Lunch. Not that Tangiers was all work. Burroughs described the city as a “promised land flowing with junk and boys”. His drug habit was at its worst: he was shooting up every two hours.
In Morocco he met Francis Bacon, Paul Bowles and, most importantly, Brion Gysin, an artist who had been kicked out of the Surrealist Group by André Breton. Burroughs became close to Gysin in Paris, staying at the Beat Hotel. They did psychic experiments and used machines with flickering light to induce hallucinations. It was Gysin who had the initial idea of the cut-up method, whereby existing texts were cut and the sections rearranged to form new words and sentences. Burroughs ran with it, using it in his writing, photography and sound experiments.
Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 (the same press had published Lolita four years earlier). The success of the book brought Burroughs cultural kudos. In London in the Sixties he befriended Anthony Burgess and Samuel Beckett, and conducted some audio experiments with Paul McCartney, who put him on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s. According to Miles, though, his time in London was “poisoned by his obsession with Scientology”.
Burroughs was susceptible to this sort of stuff. Many of his personal theories were preposterous, not least the idea that humans are agents of an insect trust from another galaxy. Some of these sci-fi fantasies were spiced with some pretty nasty misogyny.
He spoke about shaking off the constraints of bourgeois existence, but had an allowance from his parents until he was 50. That money subsidised not only his heroin supply but also his use of teenage prostitutes. Miles relays one story in which Burroughs and David Woolman exploited two boys in Tangiers. Burroughs does not think that the boys will perform but Woolman is confident. “They are hungry,” he says.
He included this scene in Naked Lunch and Miles claims Burroughs was making “a Swiftian gesture” to reveal his readers’ prurience and “undermine their middle-class values”. Yes, but when Swift wrote that the Irish should eat their babies to ease their hunger it was satire. He never actually ate one.
Miles’s intimacy with his subject, and his vast trove of sources, brings lavish detail but it can come at the cost of indulgence. The book is at its best when he keeps a sceptical distance.
For Miles, Burroughs’ life was shaped by a struggle with “the ugly spirit”, which Burroughs thought may have possessed him during an incident of childhood abuse and which he blamed for the death of Vollmer. The book opens with an elderly Burroughs trying to exorcise this spirit in a Navajo sweat lodge, something he had previously sought to achieve through drugs, occult practices and analysis.
This is a way of framing Burroughs' life as a heroic struggle. The less enamoured reader might find more value in seeing his life and work as a catalyst for an emergent counter-culture. Sure, he may have been controlled by alien insects, but he influenced a generation.
He befriended Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Susan Sontag. He tried to make a film with Dennis Hopper and collaborated with Nick Cave and Tom Waits. David Bowie used the cut-up method for some of his lyrics and it is hard to imagine David Lynch without Burroughs’ influence, or the fiction of JG Ballard and Will Self for that matter. Kurt Cobain sought him out not long before shooting himself.
This was Burroughs as icon and celebrity. He did reading tours and had conventions dedicated to his work. Like any avant-garde radical, he developed a degree of respectability in his dotage. He lived until he was 83, spending his last years in Kansas, back on the junk and experimenting with painting. He died of a heart attack in 1997. Even in his longevity Burroughs was unconventional: hard-living heroin addicts are not supposed to comfortably exceed their three-score and ten.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10617789/William-S-Burroughs-a-Life-by-Barry-Miles-review.html