The last Beat

William S. Burroughs, 1914-1997

by Gary Susman

WHEN WILLIAM Burroughs died last week, my favorite response was the shortest: "Gee, and he took such good care of himself." Indeed, the fact that he made it all the way to 83 -- despite decades of well-documented indulgence in drugs, unsafe sex, and gunplay -- was as much a rebuke to conventional wisdom as anything he ever wrote.

Burroughs's life, like his art, was dedicated to defying received authority, and he never apologized for the scandals he created in either arena. He made a career out of smashing convention; he confounded his fans as much as his enemies. He refused to be limited or curtailed, and he made that struggle against all forms of control the theme of his work. The last surviving member of the Beat Generation's holy trinity, he outlived Jack Kerouac (by 28 years) and Allen Ginsberg (by just four months) largely out of sheer cussedness. He was admired and emulated by countless other artists in a variety of media, not only for launching an aesthetic revolution eons ago, but also for having lived so long without compromising (much), or becoming a self-parody, or killing himself with his habits. He was the Keith Richards of literature.

Rock musicians, especially, found Burroughs an inspiration. The phrase "heavy metal" came from a Burroughs name for an outer-space drug. His writings were a source of names for bands as diverse as The Soft Machine and Steely Dan (named for a milk-filled strap-on dildo in Naked Lunch). Echoes of Burroughs resonate in Lou Reed's matter-of-fact tales of heroin use, Reed's and David Bowie's use of the cut-up technique in their lyrics, Tom Waits's hipster/huckster persona, Patti Smith's poetic fury, Laurie Anderson's aphoristic wordplay, Kurt Cobain's sonic disruption (and his fatal fondness for smack and guns), and the recent media overload of U2. Many of these artists made recordings and videos with the author.

Burroughs has also influenced such varied filmmakers as David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, and scaremeister John Carpenter (see his paranoid, satirical alien-infiltrators thriller, They Live). Cronenberg, who has built a career on Burroughs-like revulsion over the intersection of technology and the human body, made a brilliant film out of Naked Lunch; it's not a cinematic translation of the novel (that would be impossible) but a surreal biography that traces exterminator Burroughs's mutation into writer/junkie/spy Bill Lee. Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy contains the screen's most authoritative depiction of heroin addiction and the definitive Burroughs cameo, as an aging, unrepentant junkie.

DURING HIS long life, Burroughs seemed to have seen and done it all, even before he started writing. Born to wealth in St. Louis (his grandfather invented the Burroughs adding machine), educated at Harvard, Burroughs worked all kinds of jobs (bartender, exterminator, private eye) and traveled throughout Europe, North and South America, and North Africa. He was living in Tangier when Kerouac and Ginsberg were setting the Beat pattern with On the Road and Howl, challenging authority and conformity in matters sexual, chemical, and even grammatical.

Burroughs became a novelist almost offhandedly, when Ginsberg assembled Junky from letters Burroughs sent him in the early '50s detailing his experiences as a heroin addict. Junky and Queer, a contemporaneous manuscript about his ill-starred gay relationships, weren't published until years later. It was with Naked Lunch (1959), compiled with the aid of Ginsberg and Kerouac from the hallucinatory diaries of his heroin years, that Burroughs came into his own as a writer, going far beyond his fellow Beats in his linguistic experimentation and his beyond-raw depiction of drug use, gay sex, and gory violence. The book made him famous (or notorious) for the rest of his life. There was something in it to offend everyone; and, given how un-PC its misogyny and apparent self-hating homophobia seem today, there still is.

Bursting onto the scene in his late 40s, Burroughs always seemed like an old man, even when he was young. He was about a decade older than Kerouac and Ginsberg, and he was already 30 when he met them a half-century ago. Scarcely a photo was taken of him between then and now that didn't show him in coat, tie, and hat. At 50, on his first spoken-word recording, he revealed a voice already bone-dry, flat and ancient as the Midwestern prairie where his life began and ended. He spent his last years as a college professor in Lawrence, Kansas, where he seemed content to stay home, tending his cats and shooting his guns. For all his libertinism, well-traveled worldliness, and radically innovative art, he remained a conservative (in a libertarian vein) and a stern moralist.

Burroughs's work, like that of the other Beat revolutionaries, placed him squarely within the American literary tradition. Where the questing Kerouac harked back to the restless Thoreau and the picaresque early Twain, and where the exuberantly breathless Ginsberg echoed the pansexuality of Whitman, Burroughs evoked Emerson's self-reliance (he'd have agreed with Emerson's statement that "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind"), Melville's paranoid reading of the world as a system of coded symbols, and the later Twain's grimly satirical pessimism about humanity's future.

As a satirist, Burroughs combined Swiftian scatology with Twain's ear for the lively energy of the American vernacular. His own speaking voice was a blend of Midwestern oracle and carnival barker, Walter Cronkite crossed with Jack Nicholson. His characters talked like comedians and hucksters, spilling out dialogue in hilarious, improvised "routines" (as the author called them). Everyone was a con man. Whether the setting was the New York streets, Mexico City, Tangier, or an imaginary Orwellian police state, all of Burroughs's dystopias were analogues of American society as a hierarchy of exploitation, pyramids of need in which everyone was both junkie and pusher. The model for all human interaction was heroin addiction: to Burroughs, even the president was an addict, hooked on the need to control others.

BURROUGHS KICKED heroin about the time he started mainlining words. He needed to write, as he had once needed drugs, to assuage the pain of living. Writing was a response to the most horrific incident in his life: the accidental shooting death of his wife, Joan, in Mexico City in 1951. During a drunken game of William Tell, Burroughs tried to shoot a glass off the top of Joan's head but aimed too low. Thirty-four years later, he acknowledged, "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death. . . . I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, for Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."

But even writing seemed to Burroughs a form of submission as dangerous as politics, violence, or drugs -- because of the way language enforces its structure upon thought. Modern man is incapable of silence, Burroughs wrote in The Ticket That Exploded: "Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."

If language was an invading virus, Burroughs inoculated himself by writing. He weakened language's control by stripping it of its power to dictate meaning. In Junky and Queer, he used the street slang of the drug underground, words with fugitive meanings. In Naked Lunch, he threw out plot, narrative continuity, and sentence structure altogether to simulate mental chaos. Finally, in The Soft Machine and the novels that followed, he used actual randomness in his experimental cut-ups and fold-ins -- creating new passages by arbitrarily splicing together phrases from Shakespeare, Eliot, Kafka, Graham Greene, newspapers, pulp detective fiction and sci-fi, and his own earlier works. In this way, Burroughs removed meaning from language and placed it instead in the silences between words and phrases and images. The results, sometimes Dadaesque, were evocative of the
very chaos and
entropy that he felt characterized
American society.

Burroughs saw dim prospects for humanity, which he frequently depicted as a race de-evolving into hideous insect-like creatures, finally honest in their expression of total need. Science and technology simply accelerated the process of dehumanization. The slim hope Burroughs offered lay in isolated acts of sabotage against all systems of control. Burroughs cited his own linguistic anarchy as a blueprint for such acts, and "William Lee," the fictional protagonist of Junky who was initially credited as the pseudonymous author, often showed up in Naked Lunch and the later novels as an agent provocateur. If Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch were presented as Bill Lee's diaries, then later novels such as Nova Express were how-to books.

Many artists followed Agent Lee's instructions. Burroughs's influence extended well beyond his fellow Beats; the systemic paranoia and apocalyptic comedy of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo depend on his example. Cyberpunk fiction that posits anarchist hacking of information systems or the melding of humans and computers into "soft machines" owes a debt to Burroughs. Moreover, his victory in the 1966 Naked Lunch obscenity trial in Boston aided all writers. Never again would a novel be "banned in Boston" -- or anywhere else in the United States -- by the courts.

In the final years, Burroughs's frequent media exposure threatened to make him into a mere signifier of the Beat stance he had once embodied. The nadir was his Nike commercial three years ago, though it's hard to say who got the worse end of the deal -- was it the technophobic author, praising technology and shilling for a company built on Third-World sweatshop labor, or the corporation, hiring a geriatric, openly gay, drug-using, wife-shooting academic to sell athletic shoes? Maybe Burroughs was just proving his own maxim: "To speak is to lie -- to live is to collaborate."

Still, it was hard to begrudge Burroughs some comfort and security in his old age, after a lifetime spent staring down the abyss. Last year, Burroughs said he had finally run out of things to write (though he was working on another book when he died). For another writer, that declaration might have been an admission of defeat, but for Burroughs, it suggested that he'd finally kicked the word habit. Coming from a guru who had never offered transcendence, only relief, the declaration sounded almost heroic.