LITERARY OUTLAW: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Ted Morgan
(Jonathan Cape)
“The whole human position is no longer tenable,” announces a character early in William S. Burroughs’ Cities Of The Red Night. The story that Burroughs’ biographer Ted Morgan — whose previous subjects include Winston S. Churchill, W. Somerset Maugham and Franklin D. Roosevelt — tells in Literary Outlaw is that of someone who has spent an entire literary life attempting to reconcile a belief that human existence is unendurable with the knowledge that it is also inescapable, and whose literary life itself derives from the event which confirmed him in that belief.
On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, William Seward Burroughs – alienated scion of the Midwestern upper-middle class, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, demimondain mentor to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, junkie, gun fetishist – was attempting to demonstrate the virtuosity of his marksmanship by doing a ‘William Tell act’, which involved shooting a glass balanced on the head of Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife and the mother of his five-year-old son, Willam Burroughs Jr. Burroughs père, being both drunk and stoned at the time, allowed his aim to slip, drilling Joan Burroughs through the forehead and killing her instantly. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion,” Burroughs wrote almost three and a half decades later in the introduction to Queer (an autobiographical novel written in the early ’50s but not published until 1985; and one of the most affecting tales of unrequited love in the English language), “that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death [which] maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
No-one seriously believed that Joan Burroughs’ death was anything other than an horrific accident; no-one except William Burroughs himself, literally possessed by the fear that, on some deep and uncontrollable level of his psyche, he had wanted Joan to die. The work which he produced over the next forty years of ‘writing his way out’ was driven by the need to reach the demon in his unconscious: Burroughs relied heavily on images from dreams, from the cold grey horrors of heroin withdrawal which he explored, trawling the depths while Ginsberg and Kerouac – with all their Go! and Kicks! and Holy! – were content simply to celebrate the highs. The Brion Gysin cut-up/fold-in method of generating random text, the seeking-out of esoteric psychedelic drugs and the pursuit of new techniques of meditation and self-hypnosis were all methods Burroughs used as, like his character “Clem Snide, Private Asshole”, he investigated himself.
Again and again in his work, sexuality is linked with death, (exemplified by the recurring image of the dying orgasm of the hanged man), and life with the absence of control. The analogy of heroin addiction – and the mutual parasitism of the dealer and the addict – is his main metaphor for most human, social, commercial and political relationships. He killed the woman in his life, and indeed in his work: much of Burroughs’ writing is set in societies where women simplly do not exist. He is that astonishingly rare creature: the utterly misogynist homosexual who genuinely despises women (though this did not prevent from living reasonably happily with Joan and fathering a son), and this misogyny, Morgan suggests, “was probably an attempt to smother his own contemptible femininity. Born in his hatred of the secret, covered-up part of himself which was maudlin and sentimental and womanly, misogyny was his form of self-loathing.” This analysis is, as far as it goes, supported by the evidence; but Morgan doesn’t take it quite far enough: the very humanity which Burroughs worked so hard to suppress is directly equated in his work with the loathed female principle; the woman he tried to kill (as opposed to the one he killed by accident) is himself. “I love life,” Burroughs told Morgan, “I just don’t like mine.”
And who would? Burroughs was born in St Louis in 1914; theoretically he was the heir to the Burroughs adding-machine fortune, but his family owned only a small proportion of the company’s shares and his father had unloaded the lot just before the Great Depression. Thin, shy and bookish, he was an instant misfit — “that boy looks like a sheep-killing dog,” opined a neighbour — and when his parents sent him to an outward-bound character-building school, the headmaster turned out to be a macho homosexual who would provide Burroughs with a crucial early rôle model. He fitted into St Louis society as poorly as one would expect from someone who read Baudelaire at 14, and he emerged from Harvard equipped to do little more than spend the small monthly stipend which his parents provided as a bribe to stay away from them.
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