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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on...
William Seward Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St Louis, Missouri into an upper class Midwestern background.
"As a boy," he recalled, "I was much plagued by nightmares. I remember a nurse telling me that opium gives you sweet dreams, and I resolved that I would smoke opium when I grew up."
At the age of 14, Burroughs read Jack Black's You Can't Win. This autobiographical account of vagrant life had a deep effect on his view of the world and later influenced The Naked Lunch and his 1953 book Junkie where he drew directly on style and stories.
Burroughs graduated in English literature from Harvard University in 1936. During this period he lost his heterosexual virginity in an East St. Louis brothel but he had also begun to acknowledge homosexual fantasies by recording them in a diary.
Burroughs had a fascination with guns, crime, books and homoeroticism together with an inclination to break every rule he could find. There seemed to be no way that he would ever fit into normal society and his parents accepted this, and after he graduated from Harvard they continued to support him financially as he experimented with various lifestyles.
Burroughs travelled in Europe, where he studied medicine in Venice for a year. In Austria he married a Jewish woman who wanted to escape the Nazis and after returning to the United States he studied anthropology at Harvard.
In the early 1940s Burroughs settled in New York City and worked for an advertising agency. When the war began, he joined the army. He was trained as a glider pilot, but was discharged as unfit for service in 1942. The major reason was his relationship with a hustler named Jack Anderson. Burroughs had amputated one of his little fingers after Anderson left him.
Rejecting his Midwestern background, Burroughs plunged into an alternative life-style that included drugs, odd jobs, and bisexuality. While working in the shipyards of New York, he became addicted to heroin, or what he called Opium Jones.
In the mid 1940s, friends David Kammerer and Lucien Carr introduced him to a crowd of young nonconformists studying at Columbia University, including Allen Ginsberg Jack Kerouac, key figures in the Beat Movement and Joan Vollmer Adams, who would be his future common law wife.
Burroughs was named in Kerouac' s novel On the Road as Old Bull Lee. "He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at café tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade." (from On the Road)
Kerouac described Burroughs as 'Tall, 6 foot 1, strange, inscrutable because ordinary looking (scrutable), like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thinlipped cold bluelipped face.'
Kerouac and Ginsberg had established writing careers but by his mid-thirties William S. Burroughs had still not begun to write anything, until under the influence of Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs began Junkie a heroin-influenced autobiography, allowing Ginsberg to arrange for it's publication as a pulp paperback by Ace Books. Burroughs followed this with an account of his homosexuality, 'Queer,' but this was deemed too extreme, even for the pulps, and would not be published for decades.
With Joan Vollmer, Burroughs moved to Texas, where he grew cotton and marijuana crops, they lived together in a state of drug-addled squalor, running the farm and raising two children, one from Joan's first marriage and the second child was their own, William Burroughs III.
Below: Joan Vollmer Adams
The family moved on to Mexico City to avoid legal problems and it was here, in September 1951 that Burroughs killed Vollmer accidentally. They were partying in a room above a bar when he announced he would perform shooting in the style of William Tell. Vollmer placed a glass on top of her head and Burroughs shot at it with the gun he carried, missing tragically. Vollmer died instantly from the single shot. Burroughs was never tried for the accident.
Of the event, he later said "I'm forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death..."
Their son went to live with Burroughs' parents, and Burroughs wandered the world from South America to Tangier where he lived in a male brothel. Ginsberg and Kerouac visited him here and were astonished by the messy pile of stories Burroughs had been idly writing, they helped to type them up and this work became the modern classic that is Naked Lunch.
The book consists of twenty-one satirical pieces that purport to lay bare the horrors of reality: hence the title. "Let them see what they eat." It featured such characters as Dr Benway, a mad scientist dedicated to Automatic Obedience Processing, and the Lobotomy Kid, who manufactures the Complete All-American male, a blob of jelly. It also tries to find , rom the use of drugs and homosexuality, a philosophical statement; Addiction is seen as a metaphor of the human condition.
Burroughs's take on writing has never been orthodox. "My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus," he once said, "that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host..." (from The Job, 1974)
In the mid-1960s Burroughs moved to London, where he studied Scientology and started to use the E-Meter, a piece of equipment that operated like a lie detector and was developed by the Scientologists. But by the 70s, addicted to heroin once again, Burroughs returned to New York.
The film 'Naked Lunch', directed by David Cronenberg, earned Burroughs much attention in the early 90s. He has been cited as an inspiration by writers and musicians with The Soft Machine and Steely Dan taking their names from his writings.
In 1992 Kurt Cobain released an album with Burroughs, 'The Priest They Called Him' in which Cobian plays electric guitar over Burrough's spoken voice.
The same year he also worked with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy on Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, with the duo providing musical background and accompaniment to Burroughs's spoken readings from several of his books.
Below: Debbie Harry with William S Burroughs
William S Burroughs eventually settled in the small university town, Lawrence, Kansas, to become a writer in residence to the university and devote his spare time to a vegetable garden. His last years were spent with cats and handguns and rifles. He also exhibited 'action paintings' produced by taking potshots at tins of paint. Burroughs died of heart failure on August 2, 1997. He was in a methadone programme to combat his longstanding heroin addiction.
Burroughs was involved in a video shoot for U2's last Night on Earth just a few weeks before his death:
Burroughs has a strong presence in contemporary literature, especially alternative branches like cyberpunk and postmodernism. While he is considered part of the Beat tradition, he is also part of the wave of pop-culture media philosophers that flourished in the 60s, along with Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Andy Warhol and Alvin Toffler, particularly because of his warnings about the "Control Machine", forces of conformity that would destroy the unique qualities of the individual.
“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
William S Burroughs
Tags: william s burroughs naked lunch heroin
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