The last Beat

William S. Burroughs, 1914-1997

by Gary Susman

When William Burroughs died last week, my favorite response was the shortest: "Gee, and he took such good care of himself." Indeed, the fact that he made it all the way to 83 -- despite decades of well-documented indulgence in drugs, unsafe sex, and gunplay -- was as much a rebuke to conventional wisdom as anything he ever wrote.

Burroughs's life, like his art, was dedicated to defying received authority, and he never apologized for the scandals he created in either arena. He made a career out of smashing convention; he confounded his fans as much as his enemies. He refused to be limited or curtailed, and he made that struggle against all forms of control the theme of his work. The last surviving member of the Beat Generation's holy trinity, he outlived Jack Kerouac (by 28 years) and Allen Ginsberg (by just four months) largely out of sheer cussedness. He was admired and emulated by countless other artists in a variety of media, not only for launching an aesthetic revolution eons ago, but also for having lived so long without compromising (much), or becoming a self-parody, or killing himself with his habits. He was the Keith Richards of literature.

Rock musicians, especially, found Burroughs an inspiration. The phrase "heavy metal" came from a Burroughs name for an outer-space drug. His writings were a source of names for bands as diverse as The Soft Machine and Steely Dan (named for a milk-filled strap-on dildo in Naked Lunch). Echoes of Burroughs resonate in Lou Reed's matter-of-fact tales of heroin use, Reed's and David Bowie's use of the cut-up technique in their lyrics, Tom Waits's hipster/huckster persona, Patti Smith's poetic fury, Laurie Anderson's aphoristic wordplay, Kurt Cobain's sonic disruption (and his fatal fondness for smack and guns), and the recent media overload of U2. Many of these artists made recordings and videos with the author.

Burroughs has also influenced such varied filmmakers as David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, and scaremeister John Carpenter (see his paranoid, satirical alien-infiltrators thriller, They Live). Cronenberg, who has built a career on Burroughs-like revulsion over the intersection of technology and the human body, made a brilliant film out of Naked Lunch; it's not a cinematic translation of the novel (that would be impossible) but a surreal biography that traces exterminator Burroughs's mutation into writer/junkie/spy Bill Lee. Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy contains the screen's most authoritative depiction of heroin addiction and the definitive Burroughs cameo, as an aging, unrepentant junkie.

Part 2