Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Burroughs decided to buy a house in town; he chose a little white wood-frame house by a creek, in the southeast quadrant of Lawrence, on Learnard Avenue. It was a Sears, Roebuck “kit house” from the late 1920s. There was nearly an acre of garden land in back, with fruit trees and berry bushes. Burroughs moved to town in November, and he settled in for the winter. Of the cats from the Stone House, he brought with him Ginger and Ruski. By springtime Burroughs had scraped together enough money to purchase the house; for the first time since 1948, he owned real estate.

  Burroughs was already deep into his reading of Norman Mailer’s new book, Ancient Evenings, a thousand-page novel set in ancient Egypt. The early Egyptians” obsession with immortality keenly interested Burroughs; he had studied some Egyptian history and hieroglyphics in his college days, and as he approached seventy, he was intrigued by the mummy concept. Working in his sunny bedroom, Burroughs began to write The Western Lands—the Egyptian name for paradise in the afterlife.

  The novel begins with his exegesis of the Egyptian concept of “the seven souls”; Burroughs takes Mailer’s description of the souls and makes it his own. After death, three of the souls depart from the subject, but some remain to guide him on his perilous journey across the Duad—a river of excrement—and through the purgatorial Land of the Dead to the Western Lands of happy immortality. Burroughs also reveals that the mystery sniper at the shoot-out in Boulder was Joe the Dead, a disloyal lieutenant of Kim’s gang. In The Western Lands, Joe is seen as the alter-ego of William Seward Hall—himself an alter-ego of Burroughs. But after dispatching his long-running “Audrey/Kim” character, Burroughs must find a substitute, so he takes Kim back to ancient Egyptian times, as “Neferti.”

  Burroughs also creates a new character named “Hassan-i-Sabbah,” based on the historical Shi’ite prophet and Master of the Assassins, whose life and philosophy so captivated Burroughs and Gysin in Paris. Above all, Burroughs confronts the persistent question of immortality, a concern that he has adumbrated in Kim’s mesa-top monologues at the beginning of Dead Roads. In Western Lands, Hassan-i-Sabbah comes down from his mountaintop redoubt, “Alamout,” to wander and suffer in the alleys of Thebes. Suffering and disillusionment are central themes in Western Lands; in his own voice, Burroughs looks back sadly and nostalgically to the apex of his life and career, in Paris, 1959.

  In Cities, Burroughs had taken his readers to three of the six cities of the prehistoric Red Night: Tamaghis, “open city of contending partisans”; Ba’dan, “given over to competivie games and commerce”; and Yass-Waddah, “the female stronghold.” In Dead Roads, inspired by his resumption of handgun targetry in Boulder, he had lingered in Old Western versions of Ba’dan and Yass-Waddah, “opposite each other on a river” (based on St. Albans, his family’s summer home near the Missouri River), and introduced Waghdas, the university city, on a lake ten miles long. Naufana and Ghadis, “the cities of illusion where nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted,” are discernible in Western Lands, which takes place mostly in Waghdas, a stand-in for ancient Thebes and for the college town of Lawrence, where Burroughs was entering old age: “The traveler must start in Tamaghis and make his way through the other cities in the order named. This pilgrimage may take many lifetimes.”

  More and more, Burroughs was dreaming of his old friends now wandering in the Land of the Dead. The spring of 1983 brought word of two new arrivals: in February, his brother, Mort, died of a heart attack in St. Louis, at age seventy-two. Burroughs traveled to St. Louis for the funeral, and he was surprised by how much the brief religious service affected him—or was it seeing so many people from his childhood now elderly, like himself? Again Burroughs was off on reading tours, and in San Francisco, he learned that Tennessee Williams had died suddenly in New York; Burroughs felt that, despite his fame and wealth, Williams never really received his literary due as one of America’s greatest playwrights.

  But recognition did come at last to Burroughs: boosted by Ginsberg’s lobbying, he was elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The ceremony in New York that May was a suitably auspicious occasion, as Burroughs took his seat on the stage alongside many other eminent American artists and writers. And when Burroughs went to Paris and Bourges, for readings in the spring of 1984, the French minister of culture made him a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. At formal occasions for the rest of his life, Burroughs always wore the green-and-white lapel pin of his Ordre—just below the gold-and-purple rosette of the American Academy.

  In February 1984, Burroughs was seventy years old; Howard Brookner’s film portrait had been shown a year before on BBC’s Arena program, and Burroughs” first biographer, Sanche de Gramont (Ted Morgan), had begun work on Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. A seventieth-birthday bash was held at the Limelight nightclub in New York, and there were parties to celebrate Overlook Press’s posthumous reissue of Bill Jr.’s book Speed and the publication of The Place of Dead Roads. Critical response to Roads, however, was tepid at best. Burroughs” reading trips continued through 1984, and he was busy in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis, London, and Paris with personal appearances to support Brookner’s documentary film. Set in motion by his fans and supported by his own cooperation, the canonization of William Burroughs as “the Godfather of Beat and Punk” had begun.

  What mattered much more to Burroughs at this time was his new cat, whom he named “Fletch,” using one of the Devil’s nicknames. Fletch was a black male kitten who literally leaped into my arms on downtown Lawrence’s main street in June 1984. Fletch soon became Burroughs” favorite. Ruski, neutered too late in his life, was undomesticable, and he was moved to a friend’s cabin at Lone Star Lake in southern Douglas County. Burroughs made frequent feeding visits to the tranquil little Depression-era resort lake, and eventually he bought a small cabin there, where he often retreated with friends for an evening’s cocktails and cookout, sometimes rowing himself around the lake in his ten-foot johnboat.

  At Naropa in summer 1984, Norman Mailer was the featured visiting writer, and he and Burroughs spent several days and nights together, discussing Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and Burroughs” ideas for his own work-in-progress. When Mailer read from his novel, Burroughs sat in the front row, at rapt attention. Mailer was one of Burroughs” first defenders, at Edinburgh in 1962; Mailer’s quote about Burroughs being “possessed by genius” had been used so often that it was as famous as the books that it adorned. Burroughs respected, but had no natural affinity for, Mailer’s work—until the Egyptian novel.

  Peter Matson had been Burroughs” agent since the mid-1960s, and now their paths diverged: in 1984, Burroughs changed agents, moving to Andrew Wylie, whom he had known for ten years. Wylie represented Allen Ginsberg, who had only good things to say about him. After an auction in November, Burroughs moved to Viking Penguin, where his new editor was Gerald Howard, and then a few years later David Stanford. The first two books due on the seven-book contract were Queer and The Western Lands, on which Burroughs was working steadily. The signature advance in 1984—although modest by publishing standards—was the largest sum he had ever received for his work, and for the first time since the end of his parents” allowance in the 1960s, Burroughs experienced financial security.

  In early 1985, Burroughs made his last trip to Tangier. For about a year he had been talking with the director David Cronenberg about a movie based on Naked Lunch, and producer Jeremy Thomas escorted them to Tangier in February. Except for Paul Bowles, still holding forth regally, the place had become almost unrecognizable. The Parade Bar closed just before their arrival, and the remaining old Tangier hands considered it the end of their era.

  At this time, Michael Emerton—with whom I lived for the next seven years—came into our lives. Michael was a curly-headed, hard-drinking nineteen-year-old from Kansas City. His adoptive mother had died when he was sixteen, and he never recovered from the loss. Burroughs and E
merton took to each other immediately: they had much in common, and Michael loved William and his cats. Burroughs went to Paris in November for a disheartening visit with Gysin, who was now very ill. But he had been taken up by a younger crowd around the Palace nightclub, and was enjoying a renaissance of sorts. For his emphysema, Gysin carried a green oxygen bottle when he went out to drink and dance all night.

  The spring of 1986 found Burroughs on the road again to Paris, Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin. This time in Paris, Burroughs knew he might be saying a last good-bye to his old friend. Just two months later, as Burroughs was packing his bags in Kansas for an urgent return to Paris, Brion Gysin succumbed to lung cancer at home in his apartment at 135 rue St. Martin, alone, in the early hours of July 13. Burroughs took the news very hard. He said he never wanted to return to Tangier, or Paris—that the soul was gone out of them with Brion’s departure. His work on The Western Lands slowed to a crawl, and he found little pleasure in the publication, two months later, of an illustrated, limited edition of The Cat Inside, with eight drawings of cats by Gysin—the project was meant to be their last collaboration in life, and now it was posthumous. Burroughs” depression was profound.

  But he took heart, later that summer, when Allen Ginsberg visited Lawrence and stayed a week in Burroughs” home. In the fall, Burroughs resumed his work on The Western Lands. His grief over Gysin’s death, and his reveries of their years in Paris and Tangier together, found their way into the book, introducing a somber tone of loss and finality. Gysin was Burroughs” greatest collaborator. Together they had distilled a formula for immortality—and now Gysin was dead. Burroughs ended his novel with a provocative passage that strongly suggested he would never write again, quoting T. S. Eliot’s great literary death knell: “Hurry up, please, it’s time.”

  Just before his seventy-third birthday, Burroughs received the painter Phillip Taaffe in Lawrence. Taaffe and Burroughs created a suite of collaborative drawings and several paint-can-and-shot-plywood preparations. This project reminded Burroughs of the joy he felt making his first “shotgun paintings” five years before. He had long been embarrassed by how his career overshadowed Gysin’s, but there was no longer any danger of hurt feelings if Burroughs began to show his paintings now. In the spring of 1987, Burroughs embarked on a prolific period of art-making, which lasted eight years. He was explicitly communing with Gysin’s spirit, and in his painting studio he found a sense of renewal. During these months Burroughs also finished writing The Western Lands.

  The “River City Reunion” was a weeklong event that September in Lawrence, and many old friends came from all over to take part: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, John Giorno, Timothy Leary, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Patti Smith, Keith Haring, and many others. Alternative-minded citizens in Lawrence were treated to a cornucopia of readings, and the undergraduates at the university were enthusiastically involved in their own poetry sessions. For a week, Lawrence was the national headquarters of the counterculture. In December, Burroughs headed to New York for the publication of The Western Lands and for his first serious art exhibition. His shotgun paintings were shown at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, along with drawings by Keith Haring for Fault Lines, a posthumous book project Haring had planned with Brion Gysin. The art world was in a buying mood in those years, and Burroughs was pleased to see his paintings selling.

  Burroughs returned to Lawrence to spend the winter at home. From now on, his travels would be fewer, undertaken mainly in support of his new medium. Burroughs” retreat from writing seemed valedictory, final; as he wrote on the last page of The Western Lands:“The Old Writer had come to the end of words, to the end of what can be done with words.”

  from cities of the red night

  FORE!

  The liberal principles embodied in the French and American revolutions and later in the liberal revolutions of 1848 had already been codified and put into practice by pirate communes a hundred years earlier. Here is a quote from Under the Black Flag by Don C. Seitz:

  Captain Mission was one of the forbears of the French Revolution. He was one hundred years in advance of his time, for his career was based upon an initial desire to better adjust the affairs of mankind, which ended as is quite usual in the more liberal adjustment of his own fortunes. It is related how Captain Mission, having led his ship to victory against an English man-of-war, called a meeting of the crew. Those who wished to follow him he would welcome and treat as brothers; those who did not would be safely set ashore. One and all embraced the New Freedom. Some were for hoisting the Black Flag at once but Mission demurred, saying that they were not pirates but liberty lovers, fighting for equal rights against all nations subject to the tyranny of government, and bespoke a white flag as the more fitting emblem. The ship’s money was put in a chest to be used as common property. Clothes were now distributed to all in need and the republic of the sea was in full operation.

  Mission bespoke them to live in strict harmony among themselves; that a misplaced society would adjudge them still as pirates. Self-preservation, therefore, and not a cruel disposition, compelled them to declare war on all nations who should close their ports to them. “I declare such war and at the same time recommend to you a humane and generous behavior towards your prisoners, which will appear by so much more the effects of a noble soul as we are satisfied we should not meet the same treatment should our ill fortune or want of courage give us up to their mercy. . . .” The Nieustadt of Amsterdam was made prize, giving up two thousand pounds and gold dust and seventeen slaves. The slaves were added to the crew and clothed in the Dutchman’s spare garments; Mission made an address denouncing slavery, holding that men who sold others like beasts proved their religion to be no more than a grimace, as no man had power of liberty over another. . . .

  Mission explored the Madagascar coast and found a bay ten leagues north of Diego Suarez. It was resolved to establish here the shore quarters of the Republic—erect a town, build docks, and have a place they might call their own. The colony was called Libertatia and was placed under Articles drawn up by Captain Mission. The Articles state, among other things: all decisions with regard to the colony to be submitted to vote by the colonists; the abolition of slavery for any reason including debt; the abolition of the death penalty; and freedom to follow any religious beliefs or practices without sanction or molestation.

  Captain Mission’s colony, which numbered about three hundred, was wiped out by a surprise attack from the natives, and Captain Mission was killed shortly afterwards in a sea battle. There were other such colonies in the West Indies and in Central and South America, but they were not able to maintain themselves since they were not sufficiently populous to withstand attack. Had they been able to do so, the history of the world could have been altered. Imagine a number of such fortified positions all through South America and the West Indies, stretching from Africa to Madagascar and Malaya and the East Indies, all offering refuge to fugitives from slavery and oppression: “Come to us and live under the Articles.”

  At once we have allies in all those who are enslaved and oppressed throughout the world, from the cotton plantations of the American South to the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the whole Indian population of the American continent peonized and degraded by the Spanish into subhuman poverty and ignorance, exterminated by the Americans, infected with their vices and diseases, the natives of Africa and Asia—all these are potential allies. Fortified positions supported by and supporting guerrilla hit-and-run bands; supplied with soldiers, weapons, medicines and information by the local populations . . . such a combination would be unbeatable. If the whole American army couldn’t beat the Vietcong at a time when fortified positions were rendered obsolete by artillery and air strikes, certainly the armies of Europe, operating in unfamiliar territory and susceptible to all the disabling diseases of tropical countries, could not have beaten guerrilla tactics plus fortified positions. Consider the difficulties which such an invading army would face: continual harassment from the guerril
las, a totally hostile population always ready with poison, misdirection, snakes and spiders in the general’s bed, armadillos carrying the deadly earth-eating disease rooting under the barracks and adopted as mascots by the regiment, as dysentery and malaria take their toll. The sieges could not but present a series of military disasters. There is no stopping the Articulated. The white man is retroactively relieved of his burden. Whites will be welcomed as workers, settlers, teachers, and technicians, but not as colonists or masters. No man may violate the Articles.

  Imagine such a movement on a worldwide scale. Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words. The disastrous results of uncontrolled industrialization would also be curtailed, since factory workers and slum dwellers from the cities would seek refuge in Articulated areas. Any man would have the right to settle in any area of his choosing. The land would belong to those who used it. No white-man boss, no Pukka Sahib, no Patrons, no colonists. The escalation of mass production and concentration of population in urban areas would be halted, for who would work in their factories and buy their products when he could live from the fields and the sea and the lakes and the rivers, in areas of unbelievable plenty? And living from the land, he would be motivated to preserve its resources.

  I cite this example of retroactive Utopia since it actually could have happened in terms of the techniques and human resources available at the time. Had Captain Mission lived long enough to set an example for others to follow, mankind might have stepped free from the deadly impasse of insoluble problems in which we now find ourselves.

  The chance was there. The chance was missed. The principles of the French and American revolutions became windy lies in the mouths of politicians. The liberal revolutions of 1848 created the so-called republics of Central and South America, with a dreary history of dictatorship, oppression, graft, and bureaucracy, thus closing this vast, underpopulated continent to any possibility of communes along the lines set forth by Captain Mission. In any case South America will soon be crisscrossed by highways and motels. In England, Western Europe, and America, the overpopulation made possible by the Industrial Revolution leaves scant room for communes, which are commonly subject to state and federal law and frequently harassed by the local inhabitants. There is simply no room left for “freedom from the tyranny of government” since city dwellers depend on government for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.