Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997)

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Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997)

During the 1950s, William S. Burroughs blazed many trails to and from the elucidation of human suffering, and his obsession with the means to this end became an enduring facet of popular culture. He exuded the heavy aura of a misogynistic, homosexual, drug-addicted gun nut, both in life and in print. Yet he inspired a generation of aimless youths to lift their heads out of the sands of academe, to question authority, to travel, and, most importantly, to intellectualize their personal experiences.

Born William Seward Burroughs February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, he was the son of a wealthy family (his grandfather invented the Burroughs adding machine) and lived a quiet mid-Western childhood. He graduated from Harvard, but became fascinated with the criminal underworld of the 1930s and sought to emulate the gangster lifestyle, dealing in stolen goods and eventually morphine, to which he became addicted. He moved to Chicago for a time to support his habit, then to New York City where, in 1943, he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University. He encouraged these younger hipster prodigies to write, and they were impressed by his dark wit and genteel poise wizened through years of hard living, though they rarely joined him in his escapades.

In 1947 Burroughs entered into a common law marriage to Joan Vollmer, a Benzedrine addict whom he had also met at Columbia. They moved to New Orleans where drugs were more easily obtainable, and later to Texas where they grew oranges and marijuana, raised two children (one was Bill's), and lived in drug-addled poverty. On the advice of a friend, Burroughs began work on a "memory exercise" which would become his first book—Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict —published in 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee.

Then, on September 6, 1951, while in Mexico City on the run from the law, Bill shot and killed Joan, allegedly during their "William Tell routine." After a night of heavy drinking, Bill suggested she place a glass on her head, and he would shoot at it from across the room. "Why I did it, I do not know," he later claimed. "Some-thing took over." His son went to live with his parents, but Burroughs was never prosecuted. Instead, he embarked upon a quest to exorcize what he called "The Ugly Spirit" which had compelled his lifestyle choices and now convinced him he "had no choice but to write my way out."

Burroughs fled to South America in search of the mystical drug yage, and wrote The Yage Letters (1963) to Allen Ginsberg. Soon Bill was back in New York City, still addicted and on the run, and eventually ended up in The International Zone of Tangier, Morocco. He, however, hallucinated "Interzone," an allegorical city in which "Bill Lee" was the victim, observer, and primary instigator of heinous crimes against all humanity. He began "reporting" from this Interzone—a psychotic battleground of political, paranoid intrigue whose denizens purveyed deceit and humiliation, controlling addicts of sex, drugs, and power in a crumbling society spiritually malnourished and bloated on excess.

When Kerouac and Ginsberg came to Tangier in 1957, they found Burroughs coming in and out of the throes of withdrawal. He had been sending them "reports," reams of hand-written notes which they helped to compile into Burroughs' jarring magnum opus Naked Lunch (1959), a work he "scarcely remembers writing." This novel's blistering satire of post-World War II, pre-television consumer culture, and its stark presentation of tormented lost souls, were the talk of the burgeoning beatnik scene in the States, as were its obscene caricatures and "routines" that bled from a stream of junk-sick consciousness.

Burroughs was soon regarded as the Godfather of the Beat Generation, a demographic that came of age during World War II while Bill was out looking for dope, and which aimed to plumb the depths of existence in post-modern America. Mainstream appeal would prove elusive to these writers, though, until Naked Lunch became the focus of a censorship trial in 1965. The proceedings drew attention—and testimony—from such literati as Norman Mailer, John Ciardi, and Allen Ginsberg, whose reputation had grown as well. After the furor died down, Naked Lunch remained largely an underground hit. Burroughs also stayed out of sight, though he published The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964) using an editing technique with which he had been experimenting in Tangier and called "cut-ups": the random physical manipulation of preconceived words and phrases into coherent juxtapositions.

In the 1970s, Burroughs holed up in his New York City "bunker" as his writing became the subtext for his gnarled old junky image. Though he had been an inspiration to authors, he found himself rubbing elbows with post-literate celebrity artistes yearning for the Ugly Spirit. Later, Burroughs enjoyed a spate of speaking tours and cameos in films. He also published books revisiting the themes of his early routines, and in 1983 was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He later recorded and performed with John Giorno Poetry Systems, Laurie Anderson, Material, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, among others. In the 1990s his face and silhouette, as well as his unmistakable thin, rattling voice quoting himself out of context, were used to promote everything from running shoes to personal computers. He spent most of his last years in seclusion in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died August 2, 1997.

Burroughs' influence on popular culture is evident in every medium, though he is more often referred to than read. From subversive comedic diatribes on oppressive government to the gritty realism of crime drama, from the drug chic youth culture enjoys (and has enjoyed since the early 1960s) to paranoia over past, present, and future drug wars, Burroughs made hip, literate cynicism both popular and culpable.

—Tony Brewer