“William S. Burroughs lived the kind of life few contemporary American novelists seek to e
“William S. Burroughs lived the kind of life few contemporary American novelists seek to emulate. A roll call of his sins: He was a queer and a junkie before being either was hip; he was a deadbeat father and an absent son; he was a misogynist, a gun lover, and a drunk; he was a guru of junk science and crank religion; he haunted the most sinister dregs of Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, London, and New York; he was an avant-garde writer with little affection for plot and none at all for epiphany; he wore his Americanness like a colostomy bag, shameful but essential. When he died at age 83 in 1997, his last words were: "Be back in no time.” At least he wasn’t a liar. This year is the centenary of Burroughs’s birth and the occasion for Barry Miles’s new biography, Call Me Burroughs: A Life. Miles specializes in Beat literature and is arguably the definitive biographer of Ginsberg and Kerouac, as well as a devout Burroughsian whose 1993 book, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, remains a mainstay of academic bibliographies. Call Me Burroughs eclipses everything else he’s done in terms of breadth, erudition, and sheer narrative combustion. If you’re one for literary gamesmanship, note that it also trumps Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw (1998) as the authoritative record of Burroughs’s life. Let me suggest that a fair barometer of biographical writing is how well it resists hyperbole. Miles is successful in this regard, which is impressive given that Burroughs’s life yields so much that is extreme. There’s the foggy childhood incident in which his beloved nurse either aborted her baby in front of him or forced him to suck her boyfriend’s penis (years of psychoanalysis never fully recovered the details). Or there’s the murder of Burroughs’s friend David Kammerer, about which Burroughs “showed no emotion.” Or there’s the afternoon that Burroughs, desperately in love with a teenage hustler but also desperately possessive, sawed off his own finger joint with poultry shears in an act of lurid chivalry. Or there’s his smorgasbord of addictions—to heroin, alcohol, marijuana, Eukodol, morphine. Above all, there’s the horrific event he spent endless doped years and infinite harrowing pages trying to exorcize: the shooting incident in which he killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City, 1951. Joan Vollmer is something like the Tokyo Rose of Beat literature; her presence is subliminal but toxic. She appears as June in Kerouac's The Vanity of Duluoz and is the subject of at least one wrenching elegy by Ginsberg, in which he imagines her “face restored to a fine beauty / tequila and salt had made strange / before the bullet in her brow.” For Burroughs, she is something else entirely: the dark poltergeist that disfigured his psyche. Although the death was ruled accidental, Burroughs never forgave himself for killing her during a botched party trick—a reenactment of William Tell shooting an apple off of a head, except in this case the apple was a drinking glass, and Burroughs was a bad (and drunk) marksman. Miles narrates Joan’s death via the eyewitness testimony of Eddie Woods, a young American expat: “The first impression I had was the noise.… The next impression I had was that glass … rolling around in concentric circles on the floor.” In Miles’s telling, the moment is as riveting and tragic as it ever was, which is commendable given how thoroughly it’s been autopsied by Beat aficionados. In his introduction to the autobiographical novel Queer, Burroughs confessed: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.… The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit.” The “Ugly Spirit” is the sobriquet that artist Brion Gysin gave—or rather, auto-suggested—to Burroughs during a psychic tête-à-tête in 1959. A connoisseur of fringe phenomena (including telepathy and alien abduction), Burroughs seized upon the notion of parasitic control as both a rationale for Joan’s death and the motif of his artistic life. His most arresting novels—Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded—all riff on varieties of human subordination, to drugs, sex, money, language, biology, politics, religion, history, or some other de facto authority. Miles gives the “Ugly Spirit” interpretation pride of place, declaring from the outset: “This is the story of William Burroughs’ battle with the Ugly Spirit.” More here HOMO MAGAZINE -- source link
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