The last Beat

Part 2

by Gary Susman

During his long life, Burroughs seemed to have seen and done it all, even before he started writing. Born to wealth in St. Louis (his grandfather invented the Burroughs adding machine), educated at Harvard, Burroughs worked all kinds of jobs (bartender, exterminator, private eye) and traveled throughout Europe, North and South America, and North Africa. He was living in Tangier when Kerouac and Ginsberg were setting the Beat pattern with On the Road and Howl, challenging authority and conformity in matters sexual, chemical, and even grammatical.

Burroughs became a novelist almost offhandedly, when Ginsberg assembled Junky from letters Burroughs sent him in the early '50s detailing his experiences as a heroin addict. Junky and Queer, a contemporaneous manuscript about his ill-starred gay relationships, weren't published until years later. It was with Naked Lunch (1959), compiled with the aid of Ginsberg and Kerouac from the hallucinatory diaries of his heroin years, that Burroughs came into his own as a writer, going far beyond his fellow Beats in his linguistic experimentation and his beyond-raw depiction of drug use, gay sex, and gory violence. The book made him famous (or notorious) for the rest of his life. There was something in it to offend everyone; and, given how un-PC its misogyny and apparent self-hating homophobia seem today, there still is.

Bursting onto the scene in his late 40s, Burroughs always seemed like an old man, even when he was young. He was about a decade older than Kerouac and Ginsberg, and he was already 30 when he met them a half-century ago. Scarcely a photo was taken of him between then and now that didn't show him in coat, tie, and hat. At 50, on his first spoken-word recording, he revealed a voice already bone-dry, flat and ancient as the Midwestern prairie where his life began and ended. He spent his last years as a college professor in Lawrence, Kansas, where he seemed content to stay home, tending his cats and shooting his guns. For all his libertinism, well-traveled worldliness, and radically innovative art, he remained a conservative (in a libertarian vein) and a stern moralist.

Burroughs's work, like that of the other Beat revolutionaries, placed him squarely within the American literary tradition. Where the questing Kerouac harked back to the restless Thoreau and the picaresque early Twain, and where the exuberantly breathless Ginsberg echoed the pansexuality of Whitman, Burroughs evoked Emerson's self-reliance (he'd have agreed with Emerson's statement that "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind"), Melville's paranoid reading of the world as a system of coded symbols, and the later Twain's grimly satirical pessimism about humanity's future.

As a satirist, Burroughs combined Swiftian scatology with Twain's ear for the lively energy of the American vernacular. His own speaking voice was a blend of Midwestern oracle and carnival barker, Walter Cronkite crossed with Jack Nicholson. His characters talked like comedians and hucksters, spilling out dialogue in hilarious, improvised "routines" (as the author called them). Everyone was a con man. Whether the setting was the New York streets, Mexico City, Tangier, or an imaginary Orwellian police state, all of Burroughs's dystopias were analogues of American society as a hierarchy of exploitation, pyramids of need in which everyone was both junkie and pusher. The model for all human interaction was heroin addiction: to Burroughs, even the president was an addict, hooked on the need to control others.

Part 3