The Legend of Burroughs

When I was reading letters, notebooks and journals while researching the development of the Beat writers at Columbia University in the early 1970’s, there was very little secondary material to help me form a context. The most obscured life at the time for me was Burroughs’s. When I interviewed him in 1974 my purpose was to try to establish an exact chronology.

Now there is a collection of at least a hundred monographs on the Beats including almost a dozen biographical attempts to tell Kerouac’s story. Much of what has been published has been disappointing, confounded by myth presented more for the sake of sensation than truth, sloppy research, undeveloped literary skills, or a myopically narrow focus.

With the case of William Burroughs, who was less in the public eye than his companions, Kerouac and Ginsberg, the standard biography has been Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, published by Henry Holt in 1988. Morgan had written much acclaimed accounts of the lives of Winston Churchill and F. D. R. so his choice of Burroughs as a subject certainly indicated a radical change in direction.

His attempt to convey Burroughs’s life was flawed by an overt subjectivity, and the way he sometimes paraphrased Burroughs’s letters and used Burroughs’s fiction as evidence of actual experience instead of literary projection or fantasy.

After Burroughs’s death in 1997, the word was that James Grauerholz, his companion, assistant, and literary executor, was working on a biography. Grauerholz did important research into Burroughs’s St. Louis childhood, his undergraduate years at Harvard during the Depression, and a subsequent period in Chicago when Burroughs worked as an exterminator and for a private detective agency.

Grauerholz’s health suffered a decline and he designated Barry Miles to write the biography, an endeavor for which Miles seems to have been preparing for decades. Miles met Burroughs in 1965 in London, distributed a record album, Call Me Burroughs in 1966, catalogued his archives in 1972 and collaborated on an early bibliography. The last two are necessary steps for any biographer. In 1992, he published El Hombre Invisible, a partial account of Burroughs’s life.

Miles’s new book is published one hundred years after Burroughs’s birth. Even though it is approximately as long as Morgan’s, it is more dense, more claustrophobically crowded with detail, more comprehensive. Burroughs lived for another nine years after Morgan’s book appeared and he was questioned about lacunae. Also, Miles used an invaluable cache of seventy-five recorded interviews made by Morgan now housed at Arizona State University in Tempe.

As a result, Miles has written the best documented account of Burroughs’s life we are liable to get. He offers the clearest picture of Burroughs’s genealogy and haut bourgeois childhood in St. Louis, including the possibility that he may have been fellated by his Welsh Nanny or, in a version of The Turn of the Screw (1989), prematurely introduced to a view of adult sexuality.

I find it curious that he omits a story that Ted Morgan tells of an early overdose from chloral hydrate at the Los Alamos School in New Mexico, then the most expensive boys prep school in America, after an unrequited love affair with a fellow student. As a child, and all his life really, Burroughs had trouble sleeping and chloral hydrate is the basic ingredient in barbiturates and sleep medications. Was Morgan mistaken about the overdose or did Miles just miss it in the scramble to assemble enough details to convince us of his version of Burroughs’s life? In the light of Burroughs’s decade of psychoanalysis with half a dozen psychiatrists, what such an event might reveal seems significant. If it did not occur, if it was only smoke in the Burroughs legend, why not refute it?

Sometimes, Miles seems so overwhelmed by his own accumulation of detail as to minimize its significance. He tells us, for example of a shooting accident in Burroughs’s Harvard dormitory room with Richard Stern, a classmate, which...