by Barry Miles
Mote had a duck club, and from the age of eight, when Burroughs first began using guns, he would take his two sons along on the shoot: “I used to go out duck shooting with the old man and the president of the First National City Bank and the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You have to get up real early, six o’clock, to catch the ducks. All in hiding in this marshy ground and we would put out decoys, and then as the ducks came in, all these fat old businessmen would stand up and blast away at them. We had retriever dogs to collect the ducks. I used to really enjoy it!”4 Mote’s other great interests were fishing and tinkering about in his workshop. Bill was welcome on the former but banned from the latter; he was too young to touch his father’s tools, something that always rankled. Mort, however, being three years older, was encouraged to learn. Mote had a fully equipped workshop with a long workbench and power tools. He made a pirate chest for the boys that appears in Cities of the Red Night: “I open a rusty padlock into my father’s workshop. We strip and straddle a pirate chest, facing each other.”5
Bill’s mother was clearly a profound influence on his life. It was a relationship out of Proust, who wrote, “I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother’s heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone.”6 William was his mother’s favorite; she adored him and he could do no wrong. James Grauerholz reports that Margaret “Miggie” Vieths, who married Mort in 1934, never really liked or got along with her mother-in-law. “Laura was forever talking about how wonderful Billy was, how bright and clever and interesting.”7 When Laura was interviewed by psychiatrists at Payne Whitney in New York in 1940, they noted that she was “intelligent, but emotional; inclined to be unable to see shortcomings in patient, and to stress what she regards as his successes.” When Bill was an adult, she told him, “I worship the ground you walk on.” Mote was prepared to go along with his wife’s adoration of her younger son, to the extent that he continually bailed him out of trouble and paid him an allowance until he was fifty years old. This does not appear to have caused tension, certainly nothing that Burroughs ever saw. “My parents apparently got along just perfectly. There was never a quarrel. I never saw any signs of friction. Never. Not only were there no fights but there was never a raised voice. Nothing like that. It’s amazing when you come to think of it. They saw each other all the time. All the time.”8
Billy was a sensitive child and prone to visions. Much of the connection with his mother came from Burroughs’s belief in magic and the world of the occult. He had intermittent fevers and saw “animals in the wall” of his bedroom. “I’ve always been a believer in spirits, the supernatural, like my mother. It was a weird family.” When he was four years old he and Mort were playing in Forest Park. Mort had his BB gun and had gone on ahead when Billy saw a delicate little green reindeer, about the size of a cat, standing in a grove of trees, “clear and precise in the late afternoon sunlight as if seen through a telescope.”9 Billy called to Mort to come and look, but Mort refused. Mort said that Billy talked too much; Billy talked all the time, and Mort probably ignored most of what he said. “He wouldn’t believe me. I can see it quite clearly now, the reindeer. Oh yes. It was very delicate, very thin legs, in a sort of green shade. So I was subject to those sort of things. To visions, hallucinations, whatever you want to call them.”10
One morning, aged four, he woke up early in his and Mort’s bedroom, where he had built a little house of building blocks on the floor. “I see little gray men playing in my block house. They move very fast, like a 1920 speed-up film… whisk… they are gone. Just the empty block house in gray dawn light. I am motionless in this sequence, a silent witness.”11 From an early age Burroughs was in contact with the magical medium. “So many people have had at least one of such experiences as a child.” Laura was extremely interested in psychic phenomena, and Burroughs often spoke of her as having clairvoyant powers. Billy had a dream, accompanied by a smell of coal gas, that he was standing in front of his mother, leaning over her like a dinosaur and eating her back.12 “Now Mother comes screaming into the room: ‘I had a terrible dream that you were eating my back.’ I have a long neck that reaches up and over her head. My face in the dream is wooden with horror.”13 This dream recurred throughout his life and was described in a number of his books. He and Laura seemed to be psychically connected. His childhood memories were almost all of his mother. “I remembered a long time ago when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves.”14
Burroughs was also exposed to the superstitious talk and ideas of the servants. Bill’s only memory of the old Irish cook was that she taught him how to call toads. She must have been from the Dingle peninsula where the natterjack toad is found, the only species of toad native to Ireland. Bill had a toad that lived under a rock by the pool in the backyard. The call was a subtle cooing sound, not much like the toad’s mating call, but it worked. Billy would call and his toad would come hopping out. Years later, in the seventies, Burroughs was visiting Ian Sommerville in Bath, in the west of England, and Ian informed him that there were toads in the garden. Bill’s powers had not deserted him and soon one came hopping out. The cook also taught him the rhyme for bringing on the blinding worm curse: “Needle in thread, needle in bread. Eye in needle, needle in eye, and bury the bread deep in a sty.” You took some rotten bread and threaded a needle with catgut and sewed it through the bread in a certain way and then buried it under a fencepost in a pigsty. And that would bring the blinding worm that gets in the eye and blinds the person. It is an old Irish curse. The counterspell was, “Cut the bread and cut the thread and send the needle back on red.” Little Billy listened, fascinated, to these old Irish tales.
But it was Billy’s Welsh nanny, Mary Evans, Mort’s nanny before Billy was born, who remained uppermost in his memory because of a traumatic incident that occurred when Burroughs was four years old. Little Billy was very close to his nanny, so much so that when she had her Thursday off he would throw hysterical tantrums, screaming, “All I want is Nursy!” In the haut-bourgeois atmosphere of upper-class St. Louis, the children probably saw far more of their nurse than they did of their parents and so related to Nursy like a mother. Burroughs later assumed that his need for her must indicate that she fellated him to calm him and send him to sleep, but he also told one of his analysts that Nursy was “severe” and said that when she caught him masturbating she threatened to cut off his penis; hardly compatible with fellation. It was Nursy who took Billy and Mort the three blocks to Forest Park each day. At first he was taken in a perambulator, leather-padded with metal-spoked wheels, then, when he was capable of walking the distance and back, they went on “shanks pony,” as Nursy called it15—on foot—unless the weather was inclement, often the case in the depths of the St. Louis winter. Like the Irish cook, Mary Evans imparted her native folklore to the boys, old Welsh rhymes: “Slip and stumble, trip and fall. Down the stairs and hit the wall.” It stayed in his memory, and his protagonist Kim used it in The Place of Dead Roads to make sex magic against Judge Farris.16 Billy thought Nursy had unusual powers. The fireplace had a surround rail, covered with padded satin that you could sit on. Billy sat there with Nursy, who had just laid the fire. “We should light the fire,” Billy said. She told him, “The fire will light,” and sure enough, the coals began to burn. She had laid the fire on top of hot coals that she knew would ignite the kindling. It seemed like magic.
When he was old enough Bill shared a room with his brother. The three-year age difference was insurmountable for the first few years, but Burroughs claimed they got on very well. Bill looked to his older brother for guidance. One of his earliest memories was at age three telling his brother that people saw through their mouths. Mort told him, “Close your eyes.” Bill realized that Mort was right. There were the usual fights, a memorable occasion being when Bil
l was four and asked Mort to play tenpin bowling and Mort refused. Bill threw a bowling pin at him, hitting him on the head. Mote spanked him, the only time Burroughs remembered his father doing so. There may have been more traumatic sibling incidents. In 1959, when Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin were conducting psychic experiments in the Beat Hotel using a crystal ball and other devices, Gysin asked him, “What about your brother and your relationship with him?” Burroughs burst into tears. He later thought it must have related to “some awful thing with regards [to] my brother. This obviously means that there was something there, something that I probably did, that’s all.”17
Nursy was nevertheless responsible for a major trauma that occurred when Burroughs was four years old, something so extreme and shocking that despite ten years of psychoanalysis he was never able to properly retrieve it. Different analysts proposed various explanations, and Burroughs himself eventually identified some elements of the event. One Thursday in the late summer or autumn of 1918, possibly because of little Bill’s hysterical tantrums, Mary Evans took him along with her on her day off. Mary Evans had a girlfriend whose boyfriend was a veterinarian who worked from his home on the outskirts of St. Louis. They went there for a picnic. It seems that Burroughs had been there before, because he also had a dim memory of seeing the vet deliver a foal, though he felt that this might be a “screen” memory. The general consensus among his analysts was that Mary had encouraged Billy to fellate the vet and that, scared, Billy had bitten the man’s penis, causing him to smack Billy on the head. Bill also theorized that he had witnessed Mary and her girlfriend having sex, giving rise to an infantile idea that women had penises, but why would Mary have risked allowing Billy to watch, unless this was part of the same scenario involving the vet? Whatever happened, it disturbed Billy greatly and he told his brother. Bill later remembered Mort saying, “Should we tell on Nursy?” But they didn’t. Afterward Billy had dreams in which Mary Evans threatened him if he should ever tell what happened. He told another psychiatrist that he wished Nursy and her girlfriend dead, and felt deeply guilty for feeling this.
Both Alan Ansen and James Grauerholz have identified a passage in “WORD,” written in 1957–58 in Tangier at a time when Burroughs was off drugs and alcohol and conducting in-depth self-analysis, as being about this traumatic event:
We are prepared to divulge all and to state that on a Thursday in the month of September 1917, we did, in the garage of the latter, at his solicitations and connivance, endeavor to suck the cock of one George Brune Brubeck, the Bear’s Ass, which act disgust me like I try to bite it off and he slap me and curse and blaspheme. […] The blame for this atrociously incomplete act rest solidly on the basement of Brubeck, my own innocence of any but the most pure reflex move of self-defense and—respect to eliminate this strange serpent thrust so into my face […] so I […] had recourse to nature’s little white soldiers—our brave defenders by land—and bite his ugly old cock.18
Grauerholz wrote, “Searching the Gould’s Directory for 1919 we find listings for eight or nine veterinary surgeons, and no ‘Browbeck… but there is an Edward H. Brune, at 1623 Hodiamont, with his surgical practice at the same address—which would indeed have been exactly at the city limits in 1918. ‘Brune’… B-R-U-N-E… ‘the Bear’s Ass’… bruin… this name, although unearthed from a work of fiction, seems well established in Burroughs’ mind. With all due respect to the late Dr. Brune’s descendants, we cannot convict him on this slender evidence, but it certainly points in an interesting direction.” Mary Evans returned to Britain abruptly in 1919, after a receiving a letter from England, which suggests a death in the family. When his mother told him, little Billy took it very calmly. Clearly the hysterical attachment had been broken. After she left, Billy wrote to her, dictating his letters to his mother. Mary Evans later ran a pub in Wales, and Mort and his future wife, Miggie, visited her there in 1934 when Mort was studying architecture in Paris. She was very hospitable toward them. There is very little cock-sucking in Burroughs’s sex writing.
2. The Autobiography of a Wolf
In 1919, at age five, Billy was sent to the Community School, founded in 1914 by a group of young mothers living in Clayton who were influenced by John Dewey’s The School and Social Progress (1899) and wanted a progressive school for their children. Laura was involved in fund-raising for the school. Billy and Mort were usually driven there, a five- or ten-minute drive, but would often come back on the Clayton trolley along with Jane Mathews, the girl next door, and other local children. “All the haut bourgeois went to the Community School.”19
Bill was slow to begin reading, then suddenly it came quite easy. Before that, Mote read aloud to him: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Moby-Dick, Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. He was taught to write short stories and produced several westerns and “spooky things” that he read to the class. At an early age, Burroughs began to take refuge in fiction and to see himself as a fictional character. At the Community School he read a pirate book and wanted to become the coldest and nastiest of the pirates. He assigned a lesser role to his friend Eugene Angert, who wanted to be cold too. “Blundit was my name. I picked some old rat gambler up off the floor by his hair and ran a cutlass through his neck. The crew was chilled by the cold brutality of the act and they rushed me.”20
The school practiced Pearlman Writing, a technique in which the child was not permitted to move the hand or wrist but used the entire arm from the elbow. It was supposed to produce a beautiful slanting hand, but none of the children mastered it. Billy was useless at addition and division, and never learned to spell properly. His eccentric spellings often remained in his books because editors thought he intended them that way. The children expressed themselves in modeling clay, by beating out copper ashtrays in a mold, making stone axes, and acting out the everyday life of Neanderthal man by draping blankets over the tables to make caves. Billy sat in his cave in his baggy green plus-fours, his long socks pulled high,
my stone axe there and a pot made by a quiet, gloomy girl who solaced herself with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale. “Read this and you will know!” she would say, fiercely thrusting a book of poems on one.
So me and Sara Teasdale under the table go into our “Mr. and Mrs. Average Cave Man” act.
“Did you kill a bison today my mate?”
“Yes, we were lucky in the hunt. There will be no hunger in the cave tonight. My companion is bringing in the kill.”
And Vincent Price21 who was in school at the time lugs in an old stuffed badger.
Bill wrote his first book at the Community School when he was eight years old. It was about ten pages long and was called The Autobiography of a Wolf, clearly inspired by Ernest Thompson Seton’s The Biography of a Grizzly, in which an old grizzly, saddened by the death of his mate, slinks off to a canyon containing poisonous fumes to die. Billy didn’t know the difference between biography and autobiography. “People said, ‘Oh you mean a biography!’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean an autobiography,’ because I felt myself to be the wolf. I was Jerry the red-haired wolf. Grizzlies don’t eat wolves, particularly such a scrawny wolf as that. Really funny. Hunters killed his mate. […] Me and the wolf were one, Jerry the red-haired wolf and all the wolf boys, the wild boys, and so on. It goes back to that, The Autobiography of a Wolf.”22 The bear was called the Grey Ghost. “The Grey Ghost met his death at the hands of a grizzly bear after seven pages, no doubt in revenge for plagiarism.”23 Then there was a tale called Carl Cranbury in Egypt, which was abandoned. “Carl Cranbury frozen back there on yellow lined paper, his hand an inch from his blue steel automatic.”24 Bill also wrote ghost stories, westerns, and gangster stories. He already knew that he wanted to be a writer.
Billy got to know the neighbors through their children. Next door at 4662 lived an old Jewish doctor whose wife held mystical salons and had entertained such celebrities as the poet Witter Bynner and Gregory Zilboorg, the psychoanalyst and psychiatric historian. Next to them, at 4660, lived
the Mathews family. Old Rive Skinker Matthews was a prosperous hardware dealer, with white hair, a high starched collar, and black tie. He was chauffeured home in a whitewalled Packard limousine. He was an old St. Louis resident, and Skinker Boulevard, which once marked the city’s western limits, was named after his grandfather. Bill used to play with his son, Rives. Burroughs remembered, “The older sister Jane told chilling ghost stories on the front porch at twilight fireflies over the lawn. […] Ghosts are gentle creatures need gas light slate roofs a blue mist.”25 One of the stories ended with the postscript, “I have leprosy and I cannot live.”26
On the other side was Dr. Blair, and then came the Francis family. They were rather grand because their grandfather, David Francis, had been the state governor from 1889 until 1893. Mr. and Mrs. Tom Francis had two daughters, Sis and Jane. Sis was Billy’s age and they sometimes played together. “Sis was a terrific person, sort of a Tallulah Bankhead, kind of a forthright hard-drinking girl. She said about me when I hadn’t seen her for years, ‘Who would have thought that ratty little kid could grow into something quite attractive.’ ” Bill stayed in touch and went to her wedding in St. Louis when she married Lancing Ray, the heir to the Globe-Democrat. Bill’s mother said of Mrs. Francis, “She’s the coldest woman I’ve ever seen.” Burroughs clearly used Mrs. Francis as one of his models for a particular type of American woman that signified everything he hated most about his upbringing. “I remember going over there once and he’s drunk and grabbing the children and patting them on the head and she’s just sitting there like a block of ice with the most obvious complete contempt for him.”27 Oddly enough, one of Bill’s classmates at his next school felt the same way about Laura Burroughs. Ann Russe Prewitt said, “I never felt that Mrs Burroughs had any warmth. Mr. Burroughs, on the other hand, spent considerable time with Bill. […] Someone told me that Mr. Burroughs would have Bill pick out five new words each day and then put them into several sentences until they were solidly in his vocabulary.”28