William S. Burroughs
From Philosopedia
Burroughs, William S(eward) (5 February 1914 - 2 August 1997)
Burroughs, known internationally as a scatological writer and one with a dim view of humanity, was the grandson of the man behind the Burroughs adding machine, a well-known commercial product. He attended private schools, earned a degree in English at Harvard, and like his wealthy grandfather was against any form of collectivism. His mother was daughter of a Methodist minister, and she called Naked Lunch “that wretched book.” He originally had intended to call the work Naked Lust, but Allen Ginsberg misread his handwriting and the wrong title stuck.
Burroughs has been termed “arguably the most influential American prose writer” of the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, this because his style influenced Thomas Pynchon and other writers. Avant-garde painters, musicians, and filmmakers were influenced by his utilization of what previously had been impermissible ideas.
Like others in the group called the beat generation, Burroughs, using down-and-out “street” language and experience, wrote with an emphasis on an escape from the conventional, the puritanical, the “square.” Instead, his interest was in the visionary, in the celebration of a human drive powered by drugs, sex, wheels, drink, conversation. “If you’re dealing with a religious son-of-a-bitch,” Burroughs once advised, “get it in writing. He’s got the Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
In Junkie (1953), he wrote in stomach-wrenching fashion of his drug addiction. Naked Lunch (1959) experimented with collage technique, a novel using “cut-up” collation and surrealistic descriptions of his fifteen-year addiction to drugs:
- I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness. . . . I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch. The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac. I did not understand what the title meant until my recent recovery. The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch - a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. The Sickness is drug addiction and I was an addict for fifteen years.
David Cronenberg’s film in 1991, reported The Economist (9 August 1997), “disgusts even Trainspotting-hardened audiences with typewriters that metamorphose into talking bumholes and cockroaches that emerge from every sort of human emission and excretion.” Nova Express (1964) and The Wild Boys (1971) describe his obsession with the underworld and homosexual fantasy. My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995), finished when he was eighty, describes his life:
- Survival is the name of the game. It’s all a film run backward.
That included a 1951 scene of pathos in Mexico, in which in real life he had said to Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife, “It’s time for our William Tell act.” She had giggled, put a shot glass on her head, and watched him fire his Star .380 automatic at her. He missed the shot glass, entering her brain through her forehead and blowing her head off. The Mexican authorities arrested him on the spot and sentenced him to thirteen days for “criminal imprudence.” The shock is not only in his receiving such a sentence but also in his never revealing for sure if he knew what he was doing and in reading such of his statements as “anything in the past as far as I’m concerned is of no importance.”
If killing his common-law wife bothered him for the rest of his life, he could at least point to having done the good deed of marrying Ilse Klapper, a German Jew running from the Nazis, and allowing her to emigrate to the United States.
His son Billy, however, never accepted a father who lived with young boyfriends in Tangier, guys who tried to seduce him also. He died at the age of thirty-three from cirrhosis of the liver, having become a heavy user of drugs and alcohol.
Burroughs had undergone triple bypass surgery in 1991 and had quit smoking after the operation. He had, however, suffered from a leaky heart valve and eventually died of a heart attack.
The last entry in his journal, written the day before he died:
- “Love? What is it? Most natural pain-killer. What there is. LOVE.”
He was survived by his companion and manager, James Grauerholz, who was with him at the Lawrence, Kansas, hospital in which he had died.
Burroughs is said to have had no interest in organized religion, particularly after having rejected Scientology. He preferred offering Zen-like observations such as “It always makes me nervous to see a cat on a ledge. . . . Suppose a bird flew by?” However, in an interview reported by David Ulin in Village Voice (12 August 1997), Burroughs in the year before his death said he was frightened at the prospect of dying because “we don’t know it. We can’t.” At the same time, he took a philosophical view of mortality. “I believe in God,” he told Ulin, “and always have. I don’t know how anyone could read my books and think otherwise. In the magical universe, nothing happens unless some power or something wills it to happen. It’s as simple as that. It comes down to the Big Bang Theory. Somebody triggered the Big Bang.”
(See entry for Beat Generation.)
