Bill Gains, in fact, deserves a special mention. With his cruel, vampiric smile, he is a significant exception that proves a particular rule in Junky. “If you have a commodity you naturally want customers,” Lee notes; but “Gains was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit.” Burroughs’ observations of peddling drugs emphatically contradict one of the tenets of what, in his original introduction to “Junk,” he called “the officially sponsored myth”: “Addicts want to get others on the stuff.” Ironically, Burroughs implies that, with the odd exception, the economics of the junk trade are more rather than less ethical than those of the above-ground business world. To the prevailing cold war rhetoric of imitation and deterrence and the insistence on striking a moral position, Burroughs just said no.
Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger—who also published a book in 1953, The Traffic in Narcotics—maintained the official myths as long as possible. But, as David Courtwright notes, hard epidemiological data, like the Lexington intake figures, actually supports Burroughs’ insistence throughout Junky that addiction is not a moral failing or a psychopathology demanding punitive treatment but a disease of exposure. Burroughs, who spent two weeks in Lexington during January 1948, was a statistic in the manifest failure of politically motivated and increasingly draconian prohibition laws. Fifty years later, at a time when America has incarcerated half a million drug offenders—an astonishing development beyond even Burroughs’ powers of prophecy—his point-blank refusal in Junky to dodge the moral, medical, legal, and political hypocrisy that surround the subject of addiction is, regrettably, more relevant now than it ever was.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude on this note, just as it would be a mistake to read Burroughs’ descriptions of junk peddling as only a critique of capitalism or a riposte to tales of the “heroin menace.” In the end, and not just for literary reasons, Burroughs’ novel is more than—other than—a bold piece of clear-eyed reportage. His clinical observations give rise to speculative insights, to flights of scientific fantasy about addiction, and from his original introduction it is clear that these pointed toward a thesis. Here he made explicit, for example, the logic behind the many images in the novel that imply junk itself is a kind of spectral vampire preying on its users: “You cannot avoid the feeling that junk is in some way alive,” “junk is a parasite,” and so on. Before being able to take the idea further, Burroughs would have to write Queer—a slighter text in many obvious ways, and yet, in other respects, more crucial to his development—but this is Burroughs taking the first steps toward his theory of the virus, a central concern in his writing from Naked Lunch onwards. In other words, Junky is in embryonic form an exploratory novel, an experimental text, like all those Burroughs would write after it, and the final lines of the introduction he cut could stand as the maxim for his entire oeuvre. “I am using the known facts as a starting point in an attempt to reach facts that are not known.”
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Burroughs began “Junk” in early 1950, and Ace Books published it as Junkie on April 15, 1953, but what happened to his manuscript—both in between and since then—reveals a good deal about his early career that significantly changes the established understanding of how Burroughs began as a writer. Since this is a fascinating and complex episode in a much larger history that I have related elsewhere,11 I will focus here on the most immediate issue; namely, how piecing together this story makes visible for the first time the true editing and publishing history of Burroughs’ first novel, up to and including this present edition.
The history of Burroughs’ manuscript can be divided in three parts. By the end of 1950, he had completed a one-hundred-and-fifty-page draft, typed up for him by Alice Jeffries, the wife of a friend in the expatriate community of Mexico City. The manuscript he mailed Lucien Carr that December—Ginsberg’s role as amateur literary agent came later—was organized into twenty-nine chapters (numbered up to thirty, but, mysteriously, there was no Chapter 8), and ended at the point when Lee first meets Old Ike in his lawyer’s office (pages 107–8). Burroughs scholars have long assumed this “original” manuscript was lost; in fact, with a few pages missing, it is the one preserved at Columbia University. Burroughs revised quite a few details during 1951 and 1952, but he never replaced this manuscript as such. Then, starting in March 1951, he wrote and inserted a few short expansions, began what he called the “Mexican section,” and in April decided to make one significant cut: removal of Chapter 28, a long digression that applied the theories of Wilhelm Reich to addiction. The next phase began in early 1952, when Burroughs wrote more short inserts and in March made a second significant cut: removal of Chapter 27, a long detour into the economics of the Rio Grande Valley. “The idea,” he told Ginsberg, “is cut down to straight narrative.”
Part three of the manuscript history is the most significant and revealing, but because so many of the pieces were scattered or thought lost, until now no accurate account was possible. It dates from the point in April 1952 when Ginsberg informed A. A. Wyn that Burroughs had begun Queer, which, even though it was written in the third person, started as a sequel to “Junk.” Much to Burroughs’ annoyance, Wyn stalled negotiations until he had seen the new manuscript, with the idea of adding it onto the end of “Junk”; but when in June he saw what Burroughs had written so far, he rejected it (less due to its homosexual content than to its quite different quality of writing). Wyn now demanded forty more pages for “Junk” before he would agree to the contract. Burroughs was furious—Wyn had already required him to write the autobiographical Prologue—and he in turn refused to start work on the new material until the contract was signed, which it was on July 5. By a deadline of August 15, he duly completed both the Prologue and a thirty-eight-page manuscript (“I am not completely satisfied,” he told Ginsberg, “especially not with that fucking preface”).12
Apart from a two-page insert made in 1977, this additional manuscript corresponds to the final quarter of the published novel (pages 108–44). Now, because of the events they describe, the last eight pages of this new manuscript could only have been written from scratch in July 1952, while the first ten might have drawn on the “Mexican section” Burroughs began in spring of 1951. The large middle portion, however, over half of this manuscript, can now be identified as a light reworking of material taken from the first half of Queer. Precise comparison of newly discovered manuscripts in turn reveals exactly how, where, and why Burroughs edited one to fit the other; in fact, it shows the way he literally cut up his carbon copies and pasted the fragile pieces together. This cannibalization of material—which would become an essential trademark of Burroughs’ practice as a writer—lets us see for the first time and very exactly the relationship between these two novels, enabling a new understanding for readers—and critics— baffled by the sudden and striking difference between them.
Once Ace Books had Burroughs’ manuscript, the editors set to work. In December 1952, they made the decision to bind it back-to-back with Narcotic Agent (“an appalling idea,” Burroughs groaned, although he later admitted the memoirs were “not so bad as I expected”). Then, having reorganized the novel into fifteen chapters, they cut numerous passages, made two dozen separate bowdlerizations (some small: “Fucking punks” became “Nowhere punks”; others more substantial), and inserted seven editor’s notes. Finally, in February 1953 Ace held up the publication schedule once they knew that Burroughs, now traveling through Central and South America, was planning to write about his expedition to find the drug yagé. Burroughs declined to be screwed twice—“They are up to their old tricks: 2 books, 1 advance”—and two months later the book was on sale in rail stations across America.
The first Ace edition sold 113,170 copies between April and the end of 1953 (96,382 in the United States, 16,578 in Canada, the rest unaccounted for) and earned $1,129.60, but Burroughs never received proper royalty payments and would complain repeatedl
y that Ace failed to honor its contract. Ginsberg, meanwhile, had another complaint. After a meeting with Wyn in October, he covered all the stalls and bookstores around Times Square, 42nd Street, and Greenwich Village in search of Junkie, and found no copies for sale. Since these were, as he later protested to Wyn, the hottest areas for junk and therefore for a book called Junkie, it raises the interesting question as to where those one hundred thousand readers of Burroughs’ novel came from, who they were, and what they made of it.
Apart from a British reprint by Digit Books in 1957, Junkie wasn’t published separately—let alone under Burroughs’ own name—until the Ace edition of 1964, which they reprinted in 1970 and 1973, while other editions appeared from Olympia Press (1966, reprinted in 1969 and 1972) and Bruce and Watson (1973). It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese, including an Italian edition (titled La scimmia sulla schiena—Monkey on the Back) that featured an article on the apomorphine cure which Burroughs asked to be reprinted in the 1964 Ace edition (“the article would lend dignity and purpose to the publication”),13 but to no avail. In the mid-1970s Burroughs, through his agent Peter Matson and lawyer Eugene Winick, finally took action against Ace Books for breach of contract, presented an overwhelming case, and secured reversion of the rights. This paved the way for the new Penguin edition of 1977, and for the many changes, corrections, and restorations of material carried out by James Grauerholz and authorized by Burroughs.
The differences between Junky and the first edition of Junkie are extensive but can be given briefly: The title was changed (and the subtitle dropped); the dedication was cut (“To A.L.M.”—a cryptic reference to Adelbert Lewis Marker, the real-life original of Allerton, Lee’s object of desire in Queer); Carl Solomon’s Publisher’s Note was replaced with a new introduction by Allen Ginsberg; Ace’s chapters were replaced by a continuous text, divided only by spacing; paragraphing was reorganized; the bowdlerizations were undone and a dozen or so original names restored; the editor’s notes were deleted; the glossary was relocated to after the narrative; a number of errors were corrected; a number of new errors were introduced (some due to mistakes in the 1973 Ace reprint, the one used as the basis for the Penguin edition); and, finally, various unused parts of Burroughs’ original manuscripts were inserted, including the long Rio Grande Valley section. All in all, some 250 deletions, corrections, and additions were made, and in the narrative itself the net result was that when Junkie became Junky it gained 3,850 words, lost just under a hundred, and in other, more subtle ways, it both looked and read like a different novel.
Junky (1977) was completely unexpurgated but not “complete”—in the sense of restoring a single, authoritative manuscript—since, properly speaking, no such object ever existed. The use of manuscripts is always a matter of delicate decisions (you can draw up principles, but have to apply them flexibly) and of chance factors (unlike a jigsaw puzzle, you can never say there aren’t more small pieces still to discover), as well as of interpretation (finding more evidence doesn’t always resolve ambiguities). Apart from making just over a hundred small corrections or changes, this present edition adds to Junky approximately the same amount of new material (around four thousand words) as Junky added to Junkie, but the way it does so is, and had to be, quite different.
This edition of Junky takes advantage of important new manuscript discoveries, and a better understanding of old ones: the middle half of the July 1952 manuscript, the whole chapter on Wilhelm Reich, Burroughs’ original introduction and draft glossary, the Queer manuscripts—these and other fragments were all unavailable or presumed lost in 1977. On the other hand, the imprimatur of Burroughs himself is no longer available. This is one reason I have gone into the details, to make the process of change between editions as visible as possible, and why, where the authority is uncertain or the impact questionable, I have intervened cautiously. Despite the great interest of almost all of it, around three-quarters of the new material has not been inserted into the text. Over five hundred words from the manuscripts of Junky and Queer have been given in notes, and the bulk of it, starting with the most important material, has been put into a short section of appendices.
Appendix 1, the long-lost Chapter 28 (found in the Ginsberg Collection at Stanford University), is so significant that it is tempting to think it should have been restored to Junky. It is certainly more revealing than the Valley section that immediately preceded it in the manuscript, and that Burroughs also decided to cut. But it is not just a question of disregarding the author’s past unambiguous decision. (“Reich will be deleted bag and baggage,” he told Ginsberg in May 1951; “I do not feel that the part about Reich and the philosophical sections belong there cluttering up the narrative,” he repeated in April 1952.) It is also a question of the effect that restoring this material would have on everything else around it.
Although it suspends the narrative, and the prose here is oddly wooden, lacking the deceptive fluency and rhythm elsewhere, the real reason Burroughs wanted it cut is surely because it cast the rest of the novel in an entirely different light. Suddenly Burroughs breaks into his own voice, as if relieved to escape the constraint of his narrator’s, and the person that emerges is a speculative philosopher, a theorist of addiction. It is impossible to imagine William Lee reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy (as Burroughs did in June 1949) or building an orgone accumulator (as he did that November), but the effect of this section is to draw attention to the presence of similar material scattered throughout the novel that is otherwise quite easily overlooked. It also reveals something else about Burroughs. Reich was once one of Europe’s leading psychoanalytical thinkers, but in postwar America he came to be regarded as a science crank and a medical charlatan. Some of Burroughs’ speculations about addiction have turned out to be extraordinarily prescient, literally prophetic, but others show him up as an amateur on his soapbox, a crackpot eccentric; talking about “orgones,” Burroughs admits here that he might be taken “for a lunatic.” So there were several reasons why Reich was cut, “bag and baggage.”
Burroughs’ original introduction (also from the Ginsberg Collection at Stanford) has much in common with Chapter 28, and it’s no coincidence that he decided to revise it in April 1952, the same time he reconfirmed Reich was to be cut. Burroughs recognized that with constant revisions his novel had changed and, while a few pieces of Chapter 28 survived in the new autobiographical Prologue he was asked to write, none of this original introduction did. Again, it is a highly revealing text, speculating about the endocrine balance of addicts, promoting the value of antihistamine treatments (as a wonder drug, the clear forerunner of apomorphine for Burroughs), and making absolutely explicit his determination to go beyond the misinformation of prevailing myths.
Burroughs’ letter to A. A. Wyn (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University), which was written some time in 1959, but possibly never mailed, is included here for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a warrant for correcting several unauthorized changes made to Burroughs’ novel by Ace Books, changes that are themselves given as representative instances, only “the more flagrant mutilations” of his manuscript. Secondly, it shows Burroughs’ attention to detail, concerning not just accurate idiomatic usage, but the novel as a whole: “I spent a year working on this manuscript. I checked over every word many times.” This could be read as a corrective to those who assume Burroughs tossed off his writing carelessly. But to be more exact, it suggests that, whereas for Naked Lunch—first published in 1959—and his early cut-up texts, he did embrace accidents and overlook what other authors would call mistakes, this did not apply to his first novel.
Appendix 4, Ginsberg’s “Appreciation” from April 1952 (previously published in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995), is no less interesting for being full of factual errors about Burroughs’ life. In fact, the contrast it makes with the Prologue by Burroughs that Ace did publish is intriguing, especially if, as the internal evidence suggests, Bu
rroughs modeled his own autobiographical sketch on Ginsberg’s draft. This is true for many local details: like Ginsberg, Burroughs would mention Gide and Baudelaire among his reading, but not Cocteau’s Opium (for reasons I suggested above) or W. B. Yeats’ A Vision (a work of philosophy too recondite and eccentric); Burroughs would keep the finger-cutting incident, but not the shooting of Joan; and the writing of his first mature attempt at fiction, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (described by Ginsberg as a “20-page playlet”), would also be left out, along with any suggestion of a literary background to Junky. Equally, this piece is interesting for showing Ginsberg’s immediate grasp that Burroughs had written “an important document”; “an archive of the underground.” On the other hand, it also shows how bound Ginsberg was, or felt he had to be, by the language of moral judgment (speaking of “subterranean vices” when he meant homosexuality) that characterized the early 1950s.
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