Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The public environment of William Burroughs’ childhood was shaped by traditions of class and quality, with roots in the British origins of the first American settlers. It was calculated to produce worthy heirs to great fortunes, new captains of industry for the nation. But Billy Burroughs and his brother Mort were at the lower end of the social scale, based on their family’s middling fortune, and Billy in particular was keenly aware of never quite fitting in. The private environment of Burroughs’ childhood may have contributed to this. His father was reserved in demeanor, and closer to his elder son, Mort; father and younger son were never able to connect on an emotional level, a fate that would play out again in the relationship between Burroughs and his own son years later. Burroughs’ mother was distant and vague, but she doted on Billy, and may have contributed an element of narcissism to his personality.

  But young Billy was also raised by the household help, for his parents had sufficient means to retain a small group of servants. Otto Belue, the African-American gardener, was only about a dozen years older than Billy, and he often played with the boy as he worked in the garden. And there were servants to help with the children, two of whom left lifelong impressions upon Burroughs. The cook taught him old Irish curses and witchcraft, which much intrigued him; and the Welsh nanny, Mary Evans, took him along on a picnic with her veterinarian boyfriend, who apparently sexually abused the four-yearold boy. This incident of childhood molestation left Burroughs with what he felt was a repressed psychic wound—which he was not able to recall to consciousness until forty years later, in the late 1950s, during what would be the last of a long series of psychiatric and psychoanalytic relationships for Burroughs, beginning when he was twenty-six.

  Young Burroughs, a thin, bookish boy, who already at age eight entertained dreams of a glamorous life as a writer, immersed himself in the pulp fiction of the day—an exposure to popular-entertainment forms of writing that would be apparent in his later writing. His earliest known composition that survives is a short essay published in his school magazine, the John Burroughs Review, in February 1929 when Burroughs was just fifteen. “Personal Magnetism” shows a deftness and balance that prefigures Burroughs’ adult talent, and reveals his fascination with magic, sensational powers, and control. There is no way to know how much his school editor changed the text, but it reads like Burroughs.

  A serious accident happened in 1927, when Burroughs was thirteen years old: he caused an explosion while playing with his chemistry set, and badly burned his right hand. He was taken to a doctor’s office just a few blocks from his home and given “nearly an adult dose” of morphine, by injection. Burroughs later recalled that this made a deep impression on him: “As a boy, I was much plagued by nightmares. I remember a nurse telling me that opium gives you sweet dreams, and I resolved that I would smoke opium when I grew up.” Also in 1927 a book was published which Burroughs read, with profound consequences: Jack Black’s You Can’t Win. This autobiography of a turn-of-the-century opium-smoking safecracker and itinerant stickup man in the American West captured the imagination of the teenaged boy. Jack Black moved in a world where “the Johnson Family” (of fair, compassionate strangers of the road, with the natural democracy of the equally suffering) offered an attractive alternative to what Burroughs saw as the enforced, institutionalized hypocrisy of middle-class America—as exemplified by his uncle, Ivy Lee, whom he visited in New York, with his parents, at Christmas 1925.

  Mote and Laura took the family on a vacation cruise to France in 1929—the first of many extracontinental journeys in Burroughs’ life. Young Billy had persistent sinus troubles, so in 1930 his parents sent him to the Los Alamos Ranch School for boys in northern New Mexico. The school was founded and run by A. J. Connell, a sort of Lord Baden-Powell for the American Southwest: he stressed an idealized Boy Scout-like existence, emphasizing physical hardening and manly bonding, for both of which Burroughs was rather ill-suited. The roster of fellow L.A.R.S. alumni included many future American industrialists, as well as the author Gore Vidal—who, late in Burroughs’ life, reminisced with him about the sexual importunities of Connell. Later, during WWII, the Ranch School was commandeered as the ultrasecret home for the Manhattan Project. Burroughs always hated Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists who developed the atomic bomb, and the president from Missouri who ordered its use on Japan. Among L.A.R.S. alumni, however, this was probably a minority view.

  The New Mexico experience was trying for Burroughs, in several ways; for one thing, it was a separation from his mother that proved unexpectedly stressful for him. He was soon in trouble for going down to Santa Fe with a classmate and passing out on chloral hydrate, or “knockout drops”—no doubt inspired by reading tales in boys’-adventure magazines about shanghaied sailors. Also at Los Alamos, he was first indulging his dream of being a writer, and he kept a torrid diary of his romantic feelings toward one of the other boys. As Burroughs later wrote, when he finally retrieved this diary—among his possessions shipped home after the episode with the “Mickey”—he quickly destroyed the dangerous pages.

  Burroughs finished his high school credits at the Taylor School in St. Louis after his ignominious retreat from the Ranch School, and in 1932, at eighteen, he left home for Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of his friends there, Richard Stern, was from a wealthy Kansas City family, and he was instrumental in exposing Burroughs to the gay subculture of New York City in the early 1930s. They would drive down to Harlem and Greenwich Village, where they found lesbian dives, piano bars, and a homosexual underground—exposing Burroughs to some social stereotypes that he found repulsive, but also giving him his first inkling of a way of life that was an alternative to the straight world. Burroughs went home to St. Louis in the summer of 1935, and by one account he lost his heterosexual virginity at age twenty-one with an African-American prostitute in an East St. Louis brothel, which he then frequented for a time.

  As Burroughs’ older brother grew up, Mort proved to be a sensible, stoic member of his family and of society—in marked contrast to his brother William. He studied architecture at Princeton and Harvard, then spent the rest of his life in St. Louis. During WWII, Mort had steady employment as a draftsman for the Emerson Electric engineering company, where he worked until retirement. He married a St. Louis woman and raised twin daughters there, and attended to his parents for as long as they lived, even after they retired to Palm Beach, Florida, in 1952. Throughout his life, William Burroughs owed much of his freedom to his brother’s dutiful help to the family—which began in earnest just as the younger Burroughs was moving as far away from all of them as possible.

  Burroughs had already embraced, at least in his mind, a wide social underground of the imagination; since boyhood, he was fascinated with gangsters and hoboes, an underworld with roots in nineteenth-century America. He affected various eccentricities, such as keeping a pet ferret in his rooms in Adams House at Harvard, in emulation of Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar” character. And he kept pistols, with one of which he almost killed Stern one day, firing it at him without realizing the gun was loaded—an ominous foreshadowing. Burroughs’ love of guns began in the 1920s, when the pacification of the Western frontier was still a living memory in eastern Missouri; but he had a special fascination for all weapons and techniques of self-defense and mastery over others, even as a young boy.

  Burroughs completed his baccalaureate in American Literature at Harvard in 1936, and—after a “grand tour” through Eastern Europe, which brought him fact-to-face with the open homosexuality of the Weimar era in Hungary and Austria—he stayed on in Vienna, took classes in medicine there, and briefly attended a school for fledgling diplomats. He followed the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the impending Anschluss of Austria; he picked up boys in Vienna’s ancient steam baths, the Romanische Baden, and moved in a rarefied world of exiles, runaways, queers, and spies. In 1937, he agreed to marry a woman he knew from his trips to Dubrovnik: Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a thirty-seven-year-ol
d German Jew, the doyenne of a circle of gay intellectuals Burroughs had met there. The marriage was Ilse’s idea, to escape the Nazi invasion. Burroughs did not share the anti-Semitism prevalent in the society from which he sprang; he did not seek his parents’ permission, nor would they have given it. He married Use in Athens, and gave her the status she needed to flee to New York. Burroughs met up with her there, and although they remained friendly for years, they separated at once, and he formally divorced her nine years later.

  Burroughs took psychology courses at Columbia University in New York City, but returned to Cambridge in the summer of 1938 to study anthropology. He was twenty-four years old, and his roommates were Alan Calvert and his best friend from St. Louis, Kells Elvins. Kells was an intelligent, handsome man who was irresistible to women; he married three of them in his short life. Undoubtedly, Burroughs’ attraction to Elvins was partly sexual, but there is no evidence the relationship was ever physically consummated. Elvins was studying criminal psychology, and Burroughs also wanted to understand the criminal mind. During their time as graduate students, they wrote the farcical vignette “Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” drunkenly acting out the scenes on a screened porch, with lightning in the night sky.

  Kells Elvins is an important figure in Burroughs’ life; his innate mordant humor helped to shape Burroughs’ writing. With the savage, take-no-prisoners satire of college men, informed by a shared appreciation of the psychopathic mind, they tapped a vein of cruel funniness that goes back through Nashe, Sterne, Swift, Voltaire, and Petronius to Aristophanes. The figure of “pure glittering shamelessness,” exemplified by the boat captain’s rushing into the first lifeboat in women’s clothing, would be a touchstone of all Burroughs’ work. This volume also includes an essay from a mid-1970s Crawdaddy column, in which Burroughs offers a more explicit retrospective introduction to “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”—it is invaluable for understanding the autobiographical Burroughs Ur-hero, “Audrey”/“Kim.” This character also represents a visceral rejection—on grounds of hypocrisy, if not melodrama—of the “hero principle” as it was inculcated in young men of his social class. Burroughs gained mastery over the Wasp hero he was expected to be, and could never become, by seizing upon and elaborating a post-Nietzschean “antihero” concept.

  The manuscript used for this version of “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” was evidently typed on a Spanish typewriter, and therefore was typed—either from memory or (less likely) a copy of the original manuscript—after Burroughs moved to Mexico in 1949. But as the 1938 pages are lost, this is the fullest extant version of this seminal work, whose characters, ideas, and scenes would recur throughout all of Burroughs’ writing, sometimes verbatim. (The reader will also find at least two further echoes of this story, in Nova Express and The Wild Boys.) It marks the birth of “Doctor Benway,” one of Burroughs’ archetypes—two years after his medical-school experiences in Vienna. In the heyday of Burroughs’ later performing career, 1974–87, “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” was a staple of his public readings, never failing to get a rise from the audience.

  Kells Elvins went to Huntsville, Texas, to work as a psychologist at the state prison, and in late 1938 Burroughs visited him for a few weeks, then returned to New York City for the winter. Except for his friendship with Ilse Klapper, who had worked as secretary for a fellow émigré, the Broadway playwright Ernst Toller, Burroughs’ activities during 1938–39 remain unclear. After Toller’s suicide in May 1937, Klapper worked for the actor Kurt Kasznar and the writer John Latouche, and Burroughs may have unknowingly met Brion Gysin, who worked on the costumes for Latouche’s Broadway hit Cabin in the Sky.

  Burroughs had read Science and Sanity, a book by a Polish count named Alfred Korzybski, while at Harvard. In August 1939, Korzybski gave a weeklong seminar on his newly minted Theory of General Semantics, and Burroughs traveled to Chicago to attend the lectures. Burroughs retained from Korzybski’s talks the conviction that words were false signposts that had a life of their own, and the insight that what Korzybski called “either/or thinking” could only lead to intellectual stalemate and self-deceit. In their postulation of the universal answer—“both/and”—Korzybski and Burroughs alike tread close to the path of the Hindu philosopher Nagarjuna and his Seven-Fold Negation, so that the groundwork of Buddhist principles is not far from Burroughs’ own revelations about language and reality in his early adulthood.

  In the fall of 1939, Burroughs enrolled again at Columbia, to study anthropology. Staying at the University Club, he ran into a Harvard friend named Bill Gilmore, who knew the homosexual scene in Greenwich Village. In April 1940 Gilmore introduced Burroughs to a young man named Jack Anderson, with whom Burroughs was infatuated from their first meeting. He moved into a room in the boardinghouse at 55 Jane Street in the Village where Anderson lived. In February Burroughs had contacted his first analyst, Dr. Herbert Wiggers, to begin a course of treatment, which now centered on his obsession with Anderson.

  Jack was bisexual, and when he persisted in bringing men (and women!) back to his room for sex, Burroughs was so distraught that he cut off the end of his left little finger, with a new pair of poultry shears, alone in a room at the Aristo Hotel. Carrying the severed digit in a handkerchief, Burroughs triumphantly presented himself to Dr. Wiggers—who immediately committed him to Bellevue. Accompanied in a taxicab by his father, his “wife” Ilse, and his friend Gilmore, Burroughs was transferred to the Payne Whitney clinic. Burroughs’ account of this traumatic incident, a sketch called “The Finger,” dates from the early 1950s and is included in the 1988 Interzone collection. His case file, recently discovered by the psychohistorian Peter Swales, contains examples of Burroughs’ early attempts at “automatic writing,” and shows his interest in the anthropology of the Kwakiutl and Crow Indians. Burroughs was reportedly a quiet, cooperative patient, and after four weeks he was sent home to St. Louis.

  Mote and Laura owned a small landscaping business, and Burroughs became their deliveryman, a job he found intolerably boring. His parents sent him to a new analyst, whom he did not like. He kept in touch with Jack Anderson, who visited him in St. Louis, and the two of them promptly got into a drunken car wreck in Mote’s automobile. Again, we have Burroughs’ own account of the incident: “Driving Lesson,” in Interzone. The image of two boys in a car speeding out of control toward a catastrophic wreck recurs in his later work—The Wild Boys and Port of Saints, in particular—as an erotic scenario, and as a breakthrough to a parallel dimension. One of Burroughs’ lifelong regrets was his inability to show gratitude or love at this time to his father, who rescued him from the legal and financial consequences of the accident.

  In late 1940, Burroughs got a pilot’s license at a flying school in Lockport, Illinois. He lived in nearby Chicago for several months after that, seeing a new analyst, and applying to the Navy, the Glider Corps, and the American Field Service,—war was in the air, and that promised adventure. But Burroughs was flatfooted and nearsighted. He was turned down by all the armed services, as well as by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of today’s Central Intelligence Agency. His interviewer was a fellow Harvard man who noted that Burroughs “had no clubs.” After his failed OSS interview in Washington, Burroughs went up to New York again. He lived there for a year, working for an advertising agency—a job he got through family connections. As an adman, Burroughs was indifferent; he laughed at marketing slogans that his company did not consider funny at all. For sheer ludicrousness, his favorite campaign was for a high-colonic enema called “The Cascade”—for which he penned the motto: “Well done! thou true and faithful servant!”

  Burroughs found another psychiatrist, who referred him after a few months to yet another analyst; meanwhile, he was reunited with Anderson, and they lived together on West Twelfth Street in the Village, but no longer as lovers. Burroughs’ attraction to Anderson had waned, and Anderson’s dependence on him had become a financial burden; it also gave a backdrop to his ongoing psychoanalytic sessi
ons and his efforts to deal with his homosexuality. Even if he had wanted to return to an academic career, his college record was spotty, and he was no longer interested in his studies. Although none of Burroughs’ 1940s correspondence with his family survives, his parents probably insisted on his continuing in analysis as a condition of the allowance they were paying him: two hundred dollars a month, at a time when a dollar-fifty bought a steak dinner with all the trimmings.

  Talk of the war in Europe was everywhere; in December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. joined World War II. The spring of 1942 found Burroughs back in St. Louis, recuperating from a bout with mononucleosis. In May, he was unexpectedly called up in the draft and conscripted as an infantryman. Burroughs’ long-fantasized military career, when it finally began, was over rather quickly. Feeling he belonged in the officer corps, hedid not take well to his basic training at Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, and he asked his mother for help to escape from the army. Laura made an appointment with Dr. David Riock, who referred him to Chestnut Lodge in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. After a visit to that facility in June, Burroughs decided not to enroll in a psychotherapeutic program, which they told him could last a year.

  In September, Burroughs was honorably discharged and returned home to St. Louis, but not for long—he soon moved back to Chicago. He was following up on some “underworld connections” he had made during his short stint as an inductee at Jefferson Barracks, and he had become involved in the relationship between two of his friends from St. Louis: David Kammerer and Lucien Carr. Like Kells Elvins, David Kammerer is one of the overlooked sources of Burroughs’ personal philosophy. Kammerer was a brilliant conversationalist, his monologues ranging from the classics to the “Sunday funnies.” At thirty-one, he was the same age as Mort, through whom he met Burroughs. Kammerer had been Lucien Carr’s youth-group leader when Lucien was in junior high, and he introduced the teenager to Burroughs. Kammerer was romantically fascinated with Carr, who seems to have enjoyed the attention. When Carr went away to Andover, and then Bowdoin, Kammerer followed; in fall 1942, Kammerer followed Carr to the University of Chicago, where they were joined by Burroughs and his shadowy “army friends.” Lucien Carr was then seventeen.