Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

dossier SIX: A Little Night Music

250 dossier SIX A Little Night Music ian MACFADYEN Files Comprising: Addict-Ridden, Corpsing, A Little Night Music, Nothing Sacred, Djinns, God’s Radio Station, Bounce, Targets, Burial Ground, Out Of The Ether, East St. Louis Toodle-O / Nightmare, Cold, Down On The Farm, It’s About Time, Soundtracks, The Sounds Of Silence, The Beggar’s Opera, Stardust, The Outlaw Breed, So Long At The Fair, Human Radio, Mockery, Silence Over And Out, Envoi: Avedon’s Burroughs Portrait By Jeremy Reed. Addict-Ridden The pusher hums the melodies of 1930s and 1940s film songs likeSmiles, I’m in the Mood for Love, and They Say We’re Too Young to Go Steady. He’s the Pied Piper, a musical soul stealer, hypnotizing young kids with his sweet melodies, while the delicious irony of the lyrics invoked, cynically exploiting romantic yearning as a cover for junk need, must really turn him on. “Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath” (7). Burroughs’ choice of the 1912 song Melancholy Baby references, among others, Judy Garland and her iconic performance in the 1954 movie version of A Star Is Born. Garland sings the song in a Manhattan supper club, in a dream projection of chanteuse stardom, but as Tim Armstrong has noted, “Both in the context of its production, and in its contents,” this is “a H_M Ch29.indd 250 3/30/09 12:38:17 PM dossier SIX 251 profoundly ‘addict-ridden’ film” in which popular culture is continually reproduced and played back, the addict star “‘plugged in’ to the studio apparatus,” and the entertainment spectacle which would eventually destroy her (140). Smiles was also a Garland film number, from the YMCA montage sequence in For Me and My Gal (1942)—“But the smiles that fill my life with sunshine / Are the smiles that you give to me.” The original 1917 song is segued with It’s a Long Way to Tipperary and Pack Up Your Troubles—beneath the honey and the razzamatazz, all three songs are littered with bloody corpses. Corpsing “Can you show me the way to Tipperary, Lady?” is answered, “Over the hills and far away . . . Across the bone meal of lawn [ . . . ] The screaming skull” (109–10). Over the Hills and Far Away is a British army song, dating from the time of Marlborough, sung by tens of thousands of corpses-in-waiting. It’s as if Burroughs is compelled to sabotage these songs and turn them into a different kind of show-stopper , to see the blood beneath the choreographic and militaristic display, the terrible denouement masked by a popular culture of lachrymose, patriotic sentiment, the obscenity of Great War songs given the Hollywood Treatment. “Confidentially, girls, I use Steely Dan’s Yokohama, wouldn’t you? Danny Boy never lets you down” (117). Danny Boy is a song beloved of the Irish diaspora, a long-established Irish American funeral song, an elegy for a very young man killed in battle. Judy Garland would record several heartbreaking versions, and Burroughs’ spin on the theme is, of course, spectacularly insensitive and provocative . The congruence of references in Naked Lunch points decisively to Garland’s anguished routines and her recordings of Meet Me in St. Louis and The Man That Got Away would have had a special, bitter significance for Burroughs. Naked Lunch’s vaudevillian interludes resemble those Garland-Rooney musicals in which our guy and gal burst forth into extempore song and improvise a whole show out of handy props and an invisible full orchestra. “I know! Let’s put on a show!” And Burroughs does just that. A Little Night Music The 1920s Broadway nightclub torch singer Tommy Lyman featured Melancholy Baby in his midnight cabarets and it is his signature song which is subversively parodied by Burroughs, so that it becomes a junk lullaby—“Tell me of the cares that make you feel so blue . . . My love is true and just for you . . . I’d do almost anything . . . Could not fail to H_M Ch29.indd 251 3/30/09 12:38:18 PM 252 ian MACFADYEN lull you into peaceful dreams . . .” Junkies are carrying a torch for the only one they really love, and this inhuman, terminally unrequited love is mockingly couched in the parlance of popular romance and crooner shmaltz. Likewise, “Every day die a little,” says Sailor (170), pushing to a boy, turning him on, and turning him...