Live fast, die old: William S.

Burroughs 1914-1997
Ulin, David
The Village Voice; Aug 12, 1997; 42, 32; ProQuest Research Library
pg. 51

ADDICTED TO WORDS another reality. Bllttoughs once wrote more water who accidentally found air. appeared in music videos, Gus Van
a play based on the deathbed ravings of Once we got past this stage, he was Sant'sDmgsture Cowbuy, even a sneaker

A Dutch Schultz, and, he advised us in

ddict, killer, pederast, Harvard sure, humans would live in outer space, commercial. The culture had finally
man-William S. Burroughs class, "I've gotten words and voices perhaps without a body-if we lived at caught up with him - at least enough to
was the distinguished elder from barking dogs." all. He aCtually had little hope for the appreciate his nihilism, his gallows hu·
statesman of the lowlife. Burroughs believed that human vile human race. mor, his "death-of-the author" method-
To a greater extent than his legend beings were in the larval stage of devel· Becoming a kind of pop icon in the ology, and to celebrate an artist who had
allowed, though, he was also a man of opment - beached fish looking for last decade or so of his life, Bllttoughs always lived dangerously. -c. CAR R
complex, creepy, visionary thought-
both utterly paranoid and utterly
moral. The obscenity case against his
most famous book,NakedLunch, went
all the way to the Supreme Court in
1966 before it was cleared. But Bur-
roughs wrote outrageously because he
was outraged by the social order.
Central to all ofBnttoughs's work
was his perception that everyone is vic-
timized by some form of addiction. As
he wrote in Naked Lunch: "The face of
'evil' is always the face of total need?'
He'd been a junkie for 15 years, then
developed a Word habit, producing
more than 20 books. And words were
the agents of Burroughs'S nemesis:
Control. For him, the very alphabet
was pan of a conspiracy, creating chains
called "sentences" which trap us in lin-
ear thought. He felt it was the writer's
job to discover "what words really are:'
and then "their relationship to the hu-
man nervous system." His own conclu-
sion: the Word is a virus.
Burroughs's theory of Control
was grounded in tragedy. He'd had his
own first encounter with this force
when he shot and killed his wife, Joan,
in 1951. (He'd been aiming for a glass
on top of her head. He missed.) Bur-
roughs'S own "appalling conclusion"
was that this shooting made him a
writer. "I live with the constant threat
of possession, and a constant need to
escape from possession, from Control.
So the death of Joan brought me in
contact with the invader, the Ugly Spir-
it, and maneuvered me into a lifelong
struggle, in which I have had no choice
except to write my way out?' William Burroughs at Columbia University in IyJril 1975
In a writing workshop I took with
him at N aropa Institute in Boulder in LI VE FA ST, DIE 0 LD the shadow of his involvement, and in later years was burdened by
the late '70s, he was a remote presence a constant flow of uninvited visitors, hoping to bask in his idio-
as a teacher, uninterested in the students., William S. Burroughs, the iconoclastic novelist, painter, and all- syncratic glow. Among his admirers were not only writers, but
but filled with ideas about how to defY around countercultural icon, died on Saturday at the age of artists like Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, and rock musi-
the conventions and taboos we were 83, nearly 24 hours after suffering a heart attack in Lawrence, cians Kurt Cobain and Michael Stipe, with whom he recorded.
barelv aware we'd internalized. In other Kansas. Notorious as a heroin addict and sexual outlaw, he had Burroughs's writing was a curious mix of the hard-boiled and
words, tips on how to sabotage ControL lived in quiet semiretirement for the last several years, but con- the avant-garde, marked by what he called routines-extended
"Writing is 50 years behind painting:, he tinued to work on occasional projects, and just a week before his satirical riffs that worked by making the outrageous commonplace.
groused. It was an oft-repeated com- death, put the finishing touches on a volume of selected writings His most famous novel, Naked Lunch, attempted to recreate the
plaint. He outlined his famous "cut-up" to be published next year by Grove Press. disassociated experience of heroin addiction, and other works like
technique, suggesring that writers cut Born in St. Louis in 1914, Burroughs was a member of the Nova Express, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded
and reassemble the te.xt of their choice in American aristocracy: his grandfather perfected the Burroughs used the technique of cut·ups, in which Burroughs cut existing
order to break the "word and image adding machine (although his family sold their interest in the texts and randomly juxtaposed the pieces, to undermine the iIIu-
locks;' introducing unthinkable new company too early to become truly rich), and he was educated at . sions of traditional narrative in favor of the more intuitive logic of
cOlmections and exposing what is liter- Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1936. It wasn't dreams. For all his experimentalism, however, Burroughs believed
ally between the lines. until the early 1940s in New York, though, that he met Jack Ker- that the chief impetus for his writing was utterly personal-the
. The Ticket Tht~t Exploded, The Soft ouac and Allen Ginsberg, with whom he would transform the lit- 1951 death of his common·law wife Joan, whom he accidentally
Machine, andNovaE-cpre§form a trilogy erary world. shot in the head during a drunken game of William Tell.
of experimental novels built around As the nucleus of what later came to be known as the Beat In an interview last year, Burroughs addressed the subject
cut-ups. He apparently used everything Generation, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg helped to define of his own death, noting that he was frightened at the prospect
from Shakespeare to Coleridge to Gra- American bohemia in the second half of the 20th century; even to- because "we don't know it. We can't." At the same time, he took ALSO IN THIS
ham Greene as his own raw material. day, more than 50 years after their first meeting, it's impossible to a philosophical view of mortality. "I believe in God," he said, "and SECTION
(The only real writing advice he ever of- go to a poetry reading or enter an art gallery without uncovering always have. I don't know how anyone could read my books and
fered. was "Steal everything in sigh!?') their influence somewhere in the mix. Although Burroughs dis- think otherwise. In the magical universe, nothing happens un· SPARROW
Cut-ups echo the distinctive syntax of tanced himself from the nascent movement in the early 19505- less some power or something wills it to happen. It's as simple as
delirium .md schiwphrenia, the procla- living in Mexico City, Tangiers, London, Paris, and New York be· that. It comes down to the Big Bang Theory. Somebody triggered NEW YORK BOUND
mations of someone with o~~ . ~9@.~~~emi.~t:l,!awr:ence i.n 1981-:-hewas never able to. esca~ r .~ !~e~~.. B~~~:" ,
. ,,_;':;P.A\lI.p .~ LIN ·':"" BOOKS CLOSES ... ..;.,.,
4"

August 12. 1997 VILLACE VOICE 51

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