Fables of Representation: Essays

Journals of Addiction

Journals of Addiction In 1958, the graduate student editors of the Chicago Review, Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal, published excerpts from an unpublished —and seemingly unpublishable—novel The Naked Lunch by an unknown author named William S. Burroughs. The excerpt had been sent to the editors by Burroughs’s friend and agent, Allen Ginsberg, whose poem “Howl” had made a sensation when he read it at San Francisco’s Six Gallery on October 13, 1955, thus giving birth to the “San Francisco Renaissance” and the Beat Generation. Fortunately for Burroughs, Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley attacked the Chicago Review issues for obscenity. The resulting furor, including the refusal of the U.S. Postal Service to mail Carroll’s subsequent magazine, Big Table, led to the immediate publication of The Naked Lunch by Maurice Girodias of Paris-based Olympia Press, the publisher who had made a similar sensation by publishing Nabokov’s Lolita. The rest is history. Burroughs’s reputation as a leading literary “outsider” was established and The Naked Lunch came to be viewed as a classic work of the Beat Generation. With Jean Genet and Georges Bataille, Burroughs became one of the leading authors of “transgressive” Action. His inBuence is also felt on contemporary writers and poets such as Kathy Acker, Jim Carroll, and Dennis Cooper. According to Barry Miles’s biography, William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis on February 5, 1914. Named after his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the 175 From Review of Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (New York: Hyperion 1993) and The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945– 1959, edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris (New York: Viking, 1993), Chicago Tribune Books, September 5, 1993. adding machine, Burroughs was raised in what he later described as “haute bourgeois” circumstances. The family was attended by a butler, a cook, a maid, a gardener, and a yard man. Young William and his brother Mortimer, who would later bail him out of a Mexican jail on a charge of murder, were attended by a Welsh nanny. Burroughs studied English literature at Harvard, but his career there was distinguished mainly by having kept a loaded gun and a ferret in his room. In the summer of 1942, Burroughs moved to Chicago, where he worked for a detective agency and took his now-fabled position as an exterminator. In the summer of 1943, Burroughs moved with childhood friend Lucien Carr to New York City, where Carr planned to study at Columbia University. Within months, Burroughs, then twenty-nine years old, met the younger Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and forged friendships that would eventually inBuence the direction of American letters. Here events considerably darken. In 1944, Carr was charged with the murder of his roommate, David Kammerer, whom he stabbed with a Boy Scout knife as a result of Kammerer’s unwanted homosexual advances. Carr served only two years in prison for the crime, which was labeled an “honor slaying.” Using the incident as their basis, Burroughs and Kerouac began writing a collaborative novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, alternating paragraphs as they proceeded. This book remains unpublished; however, it led to the important invention of what Ginsberg was to label “routines,” a parodic compositional method that was to serve Burroughs in the compiling of The Naked Lunch. With the further passage of time, Burroughs was to acquire his drug dependency, purchase a farm in Texas on which he attempted to grow marijuana for sale in New York City (the scheme failed), and move to Mexico and Tangier, the latter providing the inspiration for Interzone, one of the settings of The Naked Lunch. Burroughs’s transgressiveness is genuine. Openly homosexual at a time when homosexuality was publicly scorned, he was addicted to heroin and a proliferation of other drugs, including yage (Bannisteria caapi), in Burroughs’s words “a hallucinating narcotic that produces profound derangement of the senses.” His travels to South America in search of the drug and his re176 sulting correspondence with Ginsberg regarding the quest have been described in the previously published The Yage Letters. The yage letters, as well as numerous other letters to Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac, are included in Oliver Harris’s brilliantly edited collection of Burroughs’s correspondence. Because of the horriAc adventure that has been Burroughs’s life, as well as his scrupulous honesty in depicting his desires...