At that time, Burroughs read the autobiography of a burglar, called You Can’t Win by Jack Black. “It sounded good to me compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out.” He and his friend found an abandoned factory, broke all the windows, and stole one chisel. They were caught, and their fathers had to pay for the damages. “After that my friend packed me in because our relationship was endangering his standing with the group. I saw there was no compromise with the group, the others, and I found myself a good deal alone. I drifted into solo adventure. My criminal acts were gestures, unprofitable and for the most part unpunished. I would break into houses and walk around without taking anything.… Sometimes I would drive around in the country with a .22 rifle, shooting chickens. I made the roads unsafe with reckless driving until an accident, from which I emerged miraculously and portentously unscratched, scared me into normal caution.”
Burroughs went on to Harvard, living first at Adams House and then Claverly Hall. “I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. I hated the university and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The university was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables. Nobody asked me to join a club at Harvard. They didn’t like the looks of me. And when I tried to join the OSS under Bill Donovan with a letter from my uncle, I encountered, as the deciding factor, a professor who was head of the house I was living in at Harvard, who particularly didn’t like the looks of me. And later when I tried to join the American Field Service, this snotty young English school tie says, ‘Oh, uh, by the way, Burroughs, what were your clubs at Harvard? No clubs?’ He goes all dim and gray like the room was full of fog. ‘And what was your house?’ I named an unfashionable house. ‘We’ll consider your application.…’
“And the physical exam when I applied for a Naval commission.… The doctor said flatly, ‘His feet are flat, his eyesight bad, and put down that he is a very poor physical specimen.’ He gave me a tough aside: ‘You may get your commission, if you can throw some weight around.’ Needless to say, I had no weight to throw around anywhere. I wanted some. And that is what brought me to dabble in crime.”
“The only possible thing to do is what one wants to do,” Burroughs wrote years later in a letter to Jack Kerouac, who planned to write a book called Secret Mullings About Bill. With William Burroughs could just as well have been called Secret Mullings About Bill Updated, if the title hadn’t been too Kerouackian to steal, because as I got to know him I found myself increasingly mulling over Bill’s thoughts and actions. At sixty-seven he has become the wise old wolf who escapes from a forest fire at the end of his first literary essay: The Autobiography of a Wolf. In the words of one of his young friends, Stewart Meyer, “I saw that William not only holds water, but when he doesn’t he changes. This guy is everything he pretends to be. In fact, he’s not pretending. Isn’t that rare among famous people?” In this sense Burroughs is revealingly similar to Muhammad Ali and Andy Warhol, two other stars I’ve written portraits of. All three are exactly what they appear to be. They are, as Burroughs says of Genet, “right there.” And they are willing to let others benefit from their experiences.
Burroughs and Mailer at dinner for Allen Ginsberg’s Gold Medal Award presentation at The Gramercy Arts Club. Note photo of Burroughs by Peter Hujar above Mailer’s head. Photo by Marcia Resnick
William Burroughs is, as Patti Smith has often pointed out, “the father of heavy metal,” who helped make the present possible by writing maps of territory that had previously been considered out of bounds. “It only takes one man to reject all this crap,” he states flatly, “and it can disappear for everybody.”
“Burroughs is a real man,” I heard Norman Mailer tell writer Legs McNeil.
“But … but,” Legs, an avid exponent of heterosexuality, spluttered.
“Oh no, that’s bullshit,” Norman insisted. “That is a man. I remember when we read the first sections of Naked Lunch we felt so relieved. We knew a great man had spoken.”
“Any writer who does not consider writing his only salvation, I—‘I trust him little in the commerce of the soul,’” says Burroughs.
The most difficult thing in a writer’s career is to keep on writing. The odds are very much against a writer’s being able to write to his satisfaction throughout his life. He has to keep traveling intuitively. He has to get off boats and planes to keep looking for new scenes he will need to write twenty years later. He may have to involve himself in other people’s dreams. He may have to spend weeks in bed with the covers pulled up over his head. Only by continual courage can this writer renew his essential writer’s passport. For, as Burroughs constantly reminds his students, “a writer must write.” Where Kerouac, who did not change, died at the hands of the writer in him, Burroughs found salvation in the vehicles writing gave him to continue traveling to Venus and other locations in.
The period With William Burroughs focuses on (1974–1980) has been extremely active, exciting and productive for Burroughs and constitutes a watermark in his career. He began the eighties by completing Cities of the Red Night, the novel that had occupied him since his return from London in ’74; beginning The Place of Dead Roads, his long awaited western; and looking for a piece of property on which, as he approaches his seventies, he plans to purchase or build a country house, where he will be able to chop wood, take walks, practice shooting his guns in between writing, and become a country gentleman.
Being a writer becomes largely a matter of character. It is the writer’s personality and attitudes that allow him to find a new way to go on, or stop him dead in his tracks. In With William Burroughs, I provide an introduction to the character of Burroughs through the mirror of these conversations with the characters who wander in and out of our pages. It is a portrait-in-the-round of a man whose writings and opinions have had great effect throughout the world of letters for the last twenty years, and whose work continues to be important to all those concerned with language and the question of survival. As he continues to travel it becomes evident that his writer’s passport will never be revoked. I hope this book may also stand as a celebration of William Burroughs.
ON WRITING
DINNER WITH SUSAN SONTAG, STEWART MEYER, AND GERARD MALANGA: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: What is writing?
BURROUGHS: I don’t think there is any definition. Mektoub: It is written. Someone asked Jean Genet when he started to write, and he answered, “At birth.” A writer writes about his whole experience, which starts at birth. The process begins long before the writer puts pencil or typewriter to paper.
SUSAN SONTAG: Do you write every day?
BURROUGHS: I feel terrible if I don’t; it’s a real agony. I’m addicted to writing. Do you?
SONTAG: Yes. I feel restless if I don’t write.
BURROUGHS: The more you write the better you feel, I find.
SONTAG: I’ve trained myself to be able to produce some writing that I tell myself quite sincerely is never going to be published. Sometimes something comes out of those things.
BURROUGHS: People will get ahold of them unless you destroy them. Papa Hemingway got caught short with a whole trunkload of stuff!
SONTAG: Do you write on the typewriter?
BURROUGHS: Entirely. I can hardly do it with the old hand. I remember that Sinclair Lewis was asked what to do about becoming a writer and he always said, “Learn to type.”
STEWART MEYER: I remember waking up at the Bunker and hearing the typewriter going like thunder. James Grauerholz told me every morning Bill just gets up, has coffee and cake, and hits the typewriter …
BURROUGHS: The world is not my home, you understand. I am primarily concerned with the question of survival—with Nova conspiracies, Nova criminals, and Nova police. A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroe
s and villains, as regards intentions towards this planet. I feel that the future of writing is in space, not time—
SONTAG: This book [Cities of the Red Night], which is 720 pages long, did you just write it out? I’m not asking if you revise. Is your method to write it out and then you have a version to revise, or do you write it in pieces?
BURROUGHS: I used a number of methods, and some of them have been disastrously wrong. In this book I tended to go ahead and write a hundred pages of first draft and then I’d get bogged down in revisions. What I do personally is make ten-page hops. I do a version of a chapter, go over it a couple of times, get it approximately the way I want it, and then go on from there, because I find that if I let it pile up I suddenly get a sickening feeling of overwrite. The whole matter of writer’s block often comes from overwrite. You see, they’ve overwritten themselves, whereas they should have stopped, gone back and corrected. No writer who’s worth his salt has not experienced the full weight of writer’s block.
BOCKRIS: How long did it take you to write your book about cancer?
SONTAG: That was easy and fast. Everything is hard for me, but it was easy. I was inspired. When you’re really full of a subject and you’re thinking about it all the time, that’s when the writing comes, also when you’re angry. The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. If you have emotions like that you just sail.
GERARD MALANGA: I used to think it was love until love took a third place.
SONTAG: Love is the third. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood. It’s a very big emotion, but it doesn’t give you much energy. It makes you passive. If you use it for something you want to write, some strange languor creeps over you, which militates against the aggressive energy that you need to write, whereas if you write out of anger, rage, or dread, it goes faster.
BOCKRIS: William, have you ever written anything out of admiration?
BURROUGHS: I don’t know what this term means. It does seem to me an anemic emotion.
SONTAG: Bill, suppose you agreed, which maybe you couldn’t even conceive of doing, to write about Beckett. Somebody offered you a situation at which you said, yes, I’d like to say what I want to say about Beckett, and my feeling about Beckett is mainly positive. I think that’s harder to get down in a way that’s satisfactory than when you’re attacking something.
BURROUGHS: I don’t see what’s being said here at all.
SONTAG: Victor asked me how long it took to write the little book about illness. I wrote it in two weeks because I was so angry I was writing out of rage at the incompetence of doctors and the ignorance and mystifications and stupidities that caused people’s deaths, and that just pulled me along. Whereas I just finished writing an essay on something I really adore, Syberberg’s seven-hour movie about Hitler, and it took months to write.
BURROUGHS: I see what you mean, but it doesn’t correspond to my experience.
SONTAG: I think you write more exclusively out of some kind of objection or admonitory impulse.
BURROUGHS: A great deal of my writing which I most identify with is not written out of any sort of objection at all, it’s more poetic messages, the still sad music of humanity, my dear, simply poetic statements. If I make a little bit of fun of control with Dr. Schaeffer, the Lobotomy Kid, they say, “This dark pacifist who’s paranoid, who’s motivated completely by rejection of technology.” This is a bunch of crap. I just make a little skit that’s all. I am so sick of having this heavy thing laid on me where I just make a little slapstick and someone comes upon me with this “Oh, God, he’s rejecting everything!” shit. I always get this negative image from critics, but the essays in Light Reading for Light Years will make me sound like some sort of great nineteenth-century crank who thought that brown sugar was the answer to everything and was practicing something he called brain breathing. You know, he believed in Reich’s orgone box. I think the real end of any civilization is when the last eccentric dies. The English eccentric was one of the great fecund figures. They’re the lazy men. One man just took to his bed and died from sheer inertia, another would just walk around his estate and he was so lazy that he would have to eat the fruit without plucking it, see, which caused a lot more trouble than if he had actually plucked it. Yes, the English eccentrics were a great breed.
William and Susan after dinner at my apartment. Photo by Gerard Malanga
SONTAG: There are southern eccentrics.
BURROUGHS: Oh, by heavens yes, living on their crumbling estates controlled by their slaves …
DINNER AT BURROUGHS’ APARTMENT: BOULDER 1977
BOCKRIS: Why do you feel that writing is still behind painting?
BURROUGHS: There is no invention that has forced writers to move, corresponding to photography, which forced painters to move. A hundred years ago they were painting cows in the grass—representational painting—and it looks just like cows in the grass. Well, a photograph could do it better. Now one invention that would certainly rule out one kind of writing would be a tape recorder that could record subvocal speech, the so-called stream of consciousness. In writing we are always interpreting what people are thinking. It’s just a guess on my part, an approximation. Suppose I have a machine whereby I could actually record subvocal speech. If I could record what someone thought, there’d be no necessity for me to interpret.
BOCKRIS: How would this machine work?
BURROUGHS: We know that subvocal speech involves actual movement of the vocal cords, so it’s simply a matter of sensitivity. There is a noise connected with subvocal speech, but we can’t pick it up. They probably could do it within the range of modern technology, but it hasn’t been done yet.
BOCKRIS: People absorb and repeat the words of rock songs, which make them very effective. Do you think the printed word can become a more effective tool for communication than it is? People do not go around reciting passages of books in their heads.
BURROUGHS: Yes, they do.
BOCKRIS: Not a lot of people.
BURROUGHS: A lot of them don’t know where what’s in their heads came from. A lot of it came from books.
BOCKRIS: However, words accompanied by music tend to have a bigger effect.
BURROUGHS: This fits right into the bicameral brain theory. If you can get right to the nondominant side of the brain, you’ve got it made. That’s where the songs come from that sing themselves in your head, the right side of the brain. Curiously enough, the most interesting thing about Julian Jaynes’ book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is all Jaynes’ clinical evidence on people who’ve had various areas destroyed. The nondominant side of the brain can sing, but it can’t talk. You can say to it: “Okay, if you can’t say it, sing it.”
BOCKRIS: When did you first meet Brion Gysin?
BURROUGHS: He’d just come back from the Sahara and I went to see an exhibit of his paintings. I met him then. He was a tremendously powerful personality and I was very much impressed with the paintings. I didn’t really get to know him until he came to Paris in 1958. Then I saw his paintings and he was the one who taught me everything I know about painting. He said, “Writing is fifty years behind painting,” and started the cut-up method, which is simply applying the montage method of writing which had been used in painting for fifty years. As you see, painters are now getting off the canvas with all these happenings. I suppose that writing will eventually get off the page following painting. What exactly will happen then I don’t know. They may start writing things in real life. A crime writer will actually go out and shoot people. There’s been a lot of talk about crimes incited by writing, but actually very few authenticated cases of anyone who has committed a crime as a result of reading a work of fiction. Any number of crimes have been committed by people who’ve read about it in the newspapers. Like the man who killed eight nurses in Chicago and then some kid in Arizona got the i
dea that this might be a good thing to do and killed five women. So all the censorship arguments should be applied first to the daily press because they’re the ones that actually cause people to commit crimes. This man who shot Deutsches [a Communist student leader] in Berlin said he’d gotten the idea from the assassination of King, so the daily press, as far as causing crimes goes, is the real offender, and not the works of fiction. People read a work of fiction and they know it’s a work of fiction. They don’t necessarily rush out and do these things.
BOCKRIS: What is Gysin’s interest in writing?
BURROUGHS: He said, “Well, here’s a simple little thing—the cut-ups—painters have been doing it for fifty years, why don’t you writers try it?” He wants to bring writing up to where painting is. The montage method is much closer to the facts of actual human perception than representational writing, which corresponds to cows-in-the-grass painting.
BOCKRIS: How do you feel about using the tape recorder at the moment?
BURROUGHS: I did some experiments with tape recorders, but using a tape recorder for composition has never worked for me. In the first place, talking and writing are quite different. So far as writing goes I do need a typewriter. I have to write it down and see it rather than talk it. I know that some writers get their notes together for a chapter, then get it into a tape recorder. They got a secretary who brings that back to them and then they make some corrections.
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