It has been fashionable to sneer at the downwardly mobile — they are despised by rightwingers for failing to accept every erg of money and status available to them, and by leftists for mocking the poverty of those who never had the option — but for Burroughs it provided sanctuary; he sought honour amongst thieves because he had failed to find it anywhere else, and the life of a thief, junkie and homosexual gave him a sense of community. Finding himself poised at the intersection of the criminal underworld and the literary underground, he fell in with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in New York (he appears, thinly disguised as ‘Old Bull Lee’ in On The Road, Kerouac’s only wholly worthwhile book), where he also met Joan Vollmer. Continually relocating across the US in search of safe places to chase boys, shoot heroin and play with his guns, he was living in Mexico City in September 1951.
Further peregrinations took him to Morocco, Colombia and Europe, and the scabrous, nightmarishly-comic monologues which he would extemporise for his friends ended up on paper and became The Naked Lunch, excoriated and prosecuted on publication and, three decades later, qualifying him to wear the rosette of the Institute of Arts & Letters.
The horror did not end with the shooting of Joan Burroughs. In 1981, Burroughs’ son and namesake Billy died after a life of relentless self-destruction which both emulated and tormented Burroughs père. Billy wrote two books describing his history of amphetamine abuse (Speed and Kentucky Ham detailed, respectively, his experiences of addiction and detoxification), and once liver failure demanded a transplant operation which nearly killed him on the operating table, Billy then proceeded to drink obsessively until he had trashed the new liver as well. In a furious letter to his father (which remained unposted and which was only found in his papers after his death), he signed himself “your cursed-from-birth son.” However, Morgan shies off from the conclusion that Billy was ‘cursed’ even before his birth: he suffered from a congenital liver defect which may well have had its origins in the ‘speed’ to which Joan herself was addicted throughout her pregnancy. Despite the extensive medical research which enables Morgan to describe the liver transplants in more detail than you’d ever want to read within three hours either way of a main meal, this very distinct possibility is one which has failed to occur to him.
Burroughs himself believes implicitly in curses. “As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic,” writes Morgan, “the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in a magical universe.” As his eightieth birthday approaches, Burroughs finds himself finally both wealthy and respected, which – in his cosmology, at least – would suggest that the curse has been lifted. Literary Outlaw depends for much of its impact on its subject’s notoriety off as well as on the page — the cover of the US edition depicts a cadaverous, sinister Burroughs in trench-coat and fedora, brandishing a pistol, and the blurb throws jail, junk, wife-killing, book-banning and homosexuality into the first paragraph — but it is fearsomely researched, urbanely written and provides a fascinating key to the coded autobiography which Burroughs himself has written over the past four decades. Paradoxically, it ends up as a tale which celebrates the triumph of humanity; as John Updike (a writer who one would not automatically assume to be predisposed in Burroughs’ favour) once pointed out, Old Bull’s work displays “integrity beyond corruption”. Burroughs’ greatest battle was against his own ability to stare horror in the face without flinching, his life’s work to destroy his own humanity because it caused him too much pain. That he learned to accept that pain and transform the battle into art is Burroughs’ triumph; perhaps it was the final victory of ‘the woman inside.’
Literary Review, 1991
Page 1 Page 2
