by Barry Miles
Laura’s sister Kate became a real estate agent and married a St. Louis architect named Wilbur Trueblood. Alice married a businessman named Hoxie who died of cirrhosis of the liver despite never having taken a drink in his life. They lived close to the Burroughs household and Bill saw their three children, Prynne, Robert, and Jim, all the time. Robert became a bond salesman and died young of a brain tumor. Prynne died in a car crash, severing his jugular on a broken windshield when he was eighteen years old and a freshman at Princeton. Alice moved out west when her husband died and became very involved with spirit mediums to try and contact Robert and Prynne. Of the other children, James Wideman Lee Jr. joined his brother Ivy’s firm in New York, and Lewis Hughes accepted help from Ivy to set up a brokerage firm in New York, so they only visited St. Louis for family reunions. Uncle Lewis was a heavy drinker and died of cirrhosis of the liver. Wideman Lee also went into advertising; he was a member of all the fashionable New York clubs and knew everyone. He married a wealthy woman and had an estate on Long Island with horses and hunting dogs, but he was hard hit by the Depression and had to move to a small apartment on Madison Avenue. It was through Uncle Wideman that Burroughs later joined the University Club in New York. All the St. Louis relatives were around all the time, grumbling about the servants, discussing the scandals of the day, and they formed a significant part of the social milieu that Burroughs was later to reject so completely.
The first William Seward Burroughs was the son of Edmund Burroughs and Ellen Julia Whipple. William was born in Rochester, New York, in 1857, the third of four children. By 1860, the Burroughs family had moved to live near William’s paternal grandparents in Lowell, Michigan, and later settled in Auburn, New York, during the 1870s. Edmund was something of an inventor and apparently filed patents for a railroad jack and a paper guillotine. He was such a fervent admirer of William Henry Seward, the great abolitionist and two-term governor of New York, also a resident of Auburn, that he named his son after him. When he was eighteen William joined the Cayuga County National Bank in Auburn as a clerk and worked there for five years, during which time he contemplated the possibility of creating a mechanical adding machine to do his job. While still a resident of Auburn, William married Ida Selover from the nearby village of Moravia. They were married at Groton in Tompkins County, New York, on July 30, 1879.
William’s father, Edmund, was living at St. Louis by 1880, where he was working as a model and pattern maker for castings. He set up a workshop at 114 North 7th Street, and lived close by at 703 Chestnut. The Gould’s Directory for 1881 has a listing for “E. Burroughs & Son, model maker; steam gauge testing apparatus, models in wood and metal, forty years experience.” Edmund’s wife, Ellen, remained in the family home at Auburn with her daughter, Anna, a music teacher, and her youngest son, James, a printer. William and Ida, recently married, either moved to St. Louis with Edmund or followed him there shortly afterward. Simon Johnson proposes that Edmund’s temporary separation from his wife and family in Auburn suggests that he moved to St. Louis to assist his son William in establishing himself there.
Before 1885, Edmund Burroughs returned to live with his family in Auburn, where he died in 1892, aged sixty-six years. By then William had established himself in St. Louis with his young family and was working for the Boyer Machine Company, owned by Joseph Boyer, a Canadian inventor who was of Edmund Burroughs’s generation. At Boyer, William developed an adding machine prototype, and in 1886 he founded the American Arithmometer Company with three other men—Thomas Metcalfe, R. M. Scruggs, and W. C. Metcalfe—to manufacture and sell the machine. It was the company’s only product and cost $475. Unfortunately, William was the only one who could operate the machines to get an accurate answer. They were all recalled until William invented a corrective hydraulic mechanism, a cylinder filled with oil with escape apertures that ensured that no matter how much pressure was exerted on the handle, the piston moved up and down the cylinder at the same rate each time. William was granted a patent for it in 1888. They were in business.
Meanwhile in 1880, William and Ida had their first child, Jennie. She was followed by Horace in 1882, Mortimer (Mote) in 1885, and Helen in 1892. Mote later told his son that his grandfather was a remote, cold man who would not allow his children to bother him when he was working. He worked long hours and had a reputation for eccentricity; he drank alcohol “to keep his energy up” and once became so frustrated with his work that he threw open his window and tossed out all his faulty machines to smash to pieces on the ground. He behaved like the classic absentminded inventor, with Ida having to remind him to change his clothes and to eat. She said she had five children: two boys, two girls, and a husband.
William had suffered all his life from chronic health problems, and in 1896 he and Ida moved to a hotel in the hot-springs spa of Citronelle, Alabama, where they hoped to regain their strength. Ida died first, in May 1896. William bought a twenty-square-foot burial plot in the old Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, which was to become the Burroughs family mausoleum. William remarried in St. Louis less than a month after Ida’s death, to his children’s nurse, Nina Keltner. But he did not long survive Ida, and on September 14, 1898, only two years after her, he died of tuberculosis at Citronelle, leaving young children: Jennie, eighteen; Horace, sixteen; Mortimer, thirteen; and Helen, six. William himself was only forty-one years old. He was buried next to Ida at Bellefontaine. After William’s death, his widow, Nina, was initially appointed guardian of the children and was made executor of his estate. Nina married Clarence White in 1900 and they raised Helen, William’s youngest child, as their own daughter, initially in St. Louis and later in Seattle.
In 1902, his supporter and backer Joseph Boyer became president of the American Arithmometer Company. Two years later Boyer moved the company to Detroit, taking with him all his employees on a special train. In 1904 the company’s name was changed to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Over the next fifty years it grew to become the largest adding machine company in the United States. When their father died, the four children had each received a block of shares in the American Arithmometer Company, with the Mississippi Valley Trust Company appointed as financial advisers.
William Burroughs, the subject of this book, always thought that the Burroughs Company swindled the children out of their shares by buying them back at less than they were worth. We don’t know when this was, but there is no evidence of chicanery. The Mississippi Valley Trust probably felt quite sincerely that it made better financial sense to cash in and diversify their investments, rather than have all their wealth concentrated in one new unproven company. There was no way of knowing then how important the company was to be. As it was, according to Burroughs they sold their shareholdings for an enormous sum: $100,000 each, equal to $2.8 million in purchasing power in 2012.11 Burroughs also said that his mother, Laura, had persuaded Mote to hold back some of his shares, which is unlikely as his parents did not marry until November 1908, ten years after William Sr. died. For whatever reason, however, Mote did hold back some of his shares and benefited considerably in the rise in value of the corporation under its new management. The sale likely went through when the company was restructured and renamed in 1904. That same year, Burroughs’s partner Joseph Boyer erected a mausoleum to mark the burial plot at Bellefontaine of his old friend. In Citronelle a stained glass window was installed in the local church with the words “Sacred to the memory of William S. Burroughs.”
Of the four children, only Mote and Helen made a success of their lives. Helen is said to have suffered with tuberculosis. She married an insurance agent named Arthur Mercer in Detroit in 1913. They had a son, born in the same year as Bill, who later became a schoolteacher. Though the family home remained in Detroit, Helen spent some time living in Colorado Springs during the 1920s, presumably for her health. Bill met her in about 1920, and again briefly when he and his mother saw her on their way to Valley Ranch in New Mexico in 1925. Laura said Helen was “very intelligent.” It seems t
hat she and her husband lived a comfortable life in Detroit, and later in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. Prior to her death in 1972, Helen set up the Helen Burroughs Mercer Trust, which bequeathed $137,274 to the University of Arizona College of Medicine. This was used to recruit outstanding faculty members for the medical college.
Bill’s mother had the opposite opinion of Jennie, whom she described as “just a little bit smarter than a moron.” In 1902 Jennie married Sheldon Edler in Chicago and had four children: Charles in 1902, Kenneth in January 1905, and two daughters born in 1909 and 1910, the second of whom appears to have died in infancy. They moved back to Jennie’s native St. Louis and in the July heat Jennie was preparing little Kenny for his bath in front of the open window when he fell naked through the mosquito screen, three floors to his death. Only two weeks before, Jennie had narrowly averted a similar fall by both children, but apparently learned nothing from the experience. Kenny was the third family member to be interred in the Bellefontaine mausoleum. Shattered by Kenny’s death, Jennie became an alcoholic. She and Sheldon separated and she turned to her brother to help her. Mote would get telephone calls from the desk sergeant at the police station, “Mr. Burroughs, Jennie’s here again,” and he would have to go and get her. Mote never spoke about Jennie, or their uncle Horace, to the children. The last time Jennie made an appearance in St. Louis was when Bill was about eight years old. Bill’s father gave her a one-way ticket to Seattle, where her son Charles was living, and they never heard of her again.
Bill’s favorite uncle was Horace, the drug addict, but he never met him. Horace and Bill’s father used to share a house at 4620 McPherson Avenue in 1904 when they were both still teenagers, but whereas Mote used his inheritance to enroll at MIT, Horace was the black sheep of the family. He used his money to live an extravagant lifestyle, carousing around St. Louis in a coach and four wearing a cape, drinking and leading a dissolute life. He married, divorced, and it was said that he lived for some time in Los Angeles and “made and lost several fortunes there.” Horace sustained a shotgun injury to his arm and wrist while hunting and took morphine for the pain. It was legal then and could be bought over the counter in any pharmacy. He quickly became heavily addicted. On graduation Bill’s father had moved to Detroit to work as a salesman for the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Now Horace also moved to Detroit and Mote was continually having to extricate him from difficult situations. Still in his twenties, Horace had lost all of his teeth and looked like a tramp. Laura Burroughs described him as “just a derelict.” He eventually went to pieces completely. The president of Burroughs, Joseph Boyer, sent him to a sanatorium to cure him of his habit, not for the first time and to no avail.
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 entered law on March 1, 1915, depriving morphine addicts of their drug supply. On March 4, Horace collapsed outside Harper Hospital and was released the next morning. Later that day police discovered him unconscious on the sidewalk on Park Boulevard and kept him overnight. He was released early on March 7. He rented a room at 208½ Michigan Avenue, telling the landlord, “I want to take a long sleep.” He locked the door and braced it with a chair against the knob. He smashed the glass chimney of the oil lamp and cut the veins in the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Later that morning, the landlord was alerted to terrible groans coming from his room. Horace was still living when the police broke down the door, but he died that afternoon, one of the first victims of American antidrug hysteria. Dr. Eugene Smith told the Detroit Free Press, “It must have been a horrible death. Deprivation of morphine will drive a man temporarily insane with pain.”12 Horace was buried in Bellefontaine next to his father. Bill could never get his father to talk about him and could only glean snippets of information from his mother. Uncle Horace the morphine addict became a legendary, forbidden figure and his fate undoubtedly contributed to Burroughs’s long campaign against American antidrug legislation.
Mote met Laura Hammond Lee on one of his frequent visits back to St. Louis to see the family. During their engagement Mote remained in Detroit and Laura in St. Louis. They were married by her father at the Holy Trinity Methodist Church in Atlanta in November 1908. Laura clearly had a lot of girlfriends, because the twenty-two-year-old had ten parties and receptions given in her honor in the three days before her wedding, which were all reported in the society columns of the local press. For their honeymoon they went to the spa town of French Lick, Indiana, to take the waters at the Pluto Spring. Afterward they continued to Detroit, to their new home, where the family firm, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, presented them with a solid silver dinner service as a wedding gift.
Their first child, Mortimer Jr., was born in Detroit in 1911. Mote transferred to the St. Louis branch office of the Burroughs Company so that Laura could be close to her family with her new child. In 1912 he bought a plot of land on Berlin Avenue and built a house to his own design. On February 5, 1914, William Seward Burroughs II was born there. Mote did not stay with Burroughs for much longer. In 1916 he took a job at the Thatcher-Kerwin Glass Company, then in 1928 he used the remainder of his money from the original sale of Burroughs shares to start his own Burroughs Glass Company at 305 Arsenal Road, St. Louis, with Laura as vice president. This he owned and operated for many years. He was successful, employing several hundred people, and one year made $80,000. During the Great War, Mote was enrolled in the artillery, but was still in training at Jefferson Barracks when the war ended. He told his sons that during roll call in 1918, soldiers would simply keel over onto the parade ground as the global Spanish influenza pandemic took its toll.
In 1929 Mote sold for $276,000 (worth $3,642,425 in 2012) the remaining shares in the Burroughs Adding Machine Company that he had retained, just three months before the 1929 stock market crash. He continued to operate the Burroughs Glass Company until 1932, when he decided to retire. He sold the company, retaining a block of shares. Retirement did not suit Mote, so he started up as a landscape gardener, combining business with his love of gardening. But it didn’t work out—he would execute a commission, then the client would say they didn’t like the results and refuse to pay—so he and Laura started a garden and gift shop called Cobble Stone Gardens, located at 10036 Conway Road in Clayton. They sold garden furniture, antiques, barbecue sets, bric-a-brac, porcelain birds, upmarket gift items, and finally phased out the landscape gardening altogether.
It was through the art and antiques side of the business that Bill’s parents encountered the homosexual world. They became friends with a gay couple who ran an antique shop, and by having direct contact and friendship with homosexuals they became far more tolerant than most people of their class and background. Burroughs commented, “When they were in the gift and art business they said my father was the only straight man in the industry. They went to the Gifts and Art show in Chicago, so she knew every fag in the industry. She knew all of these people were queer, she was no fool. My mother knew all these queers who loved her. She was well on the way to being a sort of fag hag!”13 Laura thought of herself as something of an intellectual; she read Aldous Huxley in the 1920s but was shocked by the homosexuality portrayed in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. She explained it all to her mother, Eufaula, who was equally shocked, even though she didn’t actually read the book. “Things that you didn’t know existed!” Grandmother said. It all helped prepare Laura for her youngest son’s deviation from the society norm.
Chapter Two
Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodleoo… at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street.1
1. The Green Reindeer
Burroughs grew up surrounded by family: his grandmother, two aunts, two uncles, and five cousins. After her husband died, Eufaula Lee traveled all over the world, visiting India and Europe, always bringing back souvenirs. Every Sunday they went to lunch with Grandmother and, as Burroughs put it, she would disinter her dead brother, killed fifty years before dragging his shotgun through a fence and blowing his lungs out. �
��So every Sunday at lunch there was the boy lying by the wood fence and blood on the frozen red Georgia clay seeping into the winter stubble.”2 There were frequent family reunions and she would lecture them on leading a spiritual life. “Faula” was a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, so there was no alcohol in her house except that which Uncle Robert and Bill’s cousin Fred would bring in their hip flasks. They would disappear into the bathroom and come back reeking of liquor, but Grandma never noticed. She always said she would rather see a son of hers come home dead than drunk; meanwhile the men would sit there dead drunk saying, “Aw, Grandmaw! Grandmaw!”
The Lees had been slave owners. Faula found a diary written by her own grandmother in which she said she felt responsible for the spiritual welfare of every slave on the property in Georgia. Eufaula lived to be eighty-nine, and died in October 1951, a month after hearing that her grandson had accidentally killed his wife in Mexico City. Another grandson described her as being livid with anger at the news.3
Burroughs described his father as reticent, remote, rather difficult to talk to, although he must have been animated enough to discuss adding machines, as he worked as a salesman for so many years. He was not a ladies’ man and Burroughs thought that Laura was probably the only woman in his life, ever. Bill’s parents were in the Social Register and knew all the doctors and lawyers, bankers and businessmen of the community, but Bill’s father was not gregarious and didn’t like parties. Mote drank very little when he was young and not at all later. They had few people around to the house other than family. One of their few regular guests was the famous newspaperman Oliver Kirby Bovard along with his wife, Suzanne. For thirty years O. K. Bovard was the managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch until he resigned in 1938 after the paper’s owner, Joseph Pulitzer, objected to what he saw as Bovard’s emerging socialist views. The staff were about to walk out in protest, but Bovard persuaded them to stay at work. He was renowned for his pioneering journalism in exposing corruption and graft. In order to remain objective, he did not mix with the St. Louis social set, which is probably why he chose Mote as his best friend.