LITTLE ROCK — Naked Lunch turned 50 last year.
Actually, it was first published in 1959 in Paris and - because of U.S. obscenity laws - an American edition didn’t arrive until 1962. Still, a slip cased 50th anniversary edition - complete with outtakes and interview transcripts (the literary equivalent of bonus tracks) - was published last year. And despite the 200 e-mails I receive per hour, I somehow didn’t learn this until last week, when Yony Lester’s reverent documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within was released on DVD.
The film is interesting enough, although it focuses more on Burroughs’ influence on pop culture - it’s filled with celebrity talking heads who celebrate Burroughs’ (carefully cultivated) public persona - than the substance of his work. Which is mildly disappointing, but completely understandable, since it is likely that Burroughs was better known as a Nike pitch man than as a writer anyway. Some would see his life as a species of performance art, of which his writing was but a constituent part.
Burroughs was born in 1914 in St. Louis. He grew up in what he would later describe as “a malignant, matriarchal society.” He was the grandson and namesake of the inventor of the adding machine. He had an English governess until he was 5 years old.
“My earliest memories were colored by a nightmare fear,” Burroughs once told writer-photographer Victor Bockris. “I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the dark,and afraid to go to sleep because of dreams of a supernatural horror seemed always on the point of taking shape. I was afraid that someday the dream would still be there when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said, ‘I will smoke opium when I grow up.’”
So he did. He became famous for his addictions. He wrote about heroin addiction, junk, about something he called “the algebra” of need.
In 1945, he shared a New York apartment with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, acting as something of a literary mentor to the younger men, introducing them to French existentialists and Bowery lowlife. In 1946, he married a woman he didn’t love - a German-Jewish refugee - so that she could gain U.S. citizenship.
During a visit to Mexico City in 1951, during an afternoon of heavy drinking, surrounded by friends, he pulled out a handgun and told his second wife, Joan Vollmer, that it was “time for [the] William Tell act.” She dutifully balanced a glass of water on her head; Burroughs took aim and shot her through the forehead.
After a cursory investigation, a few months in jail and a few bribes, Burroughs was convicted of a minor charge.
Burroughs told some interviewers this event made him a writer. In an old out of-print biography, he says he “would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death . ... 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 Spirit and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
After accidentally killing Joan, Burroughs spent years traveling Latin America, Europe and Tangiers, living off the proceeds of his trust fund.During these years he was engaged in writing the novel that would make him famous, Naked Lunch.
Naked Lunch is a book with no apparent structure and no traditional plot.
It was pieced together by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg from typescripts sent from Burroughs’ apartment in Tangiers. As such it’s a collaboration among the three major beats. It’s also a collaboration between Burroughs’ intellect and drug-crazed mind; guilt, need and paranoia collided with feverish hallucinations and a genuine gift for language.
Burroughs’ work was brutal, ugly and sublime. At times it is wildly funny, but it is suffused with a terrible, haunting mournfulness.
Naked Lunch is one of the saddest books ever written. It is not the product of a well person or a healthy mind. It’s the work of a man broken apart by drugs and shame. Its critics called it disgusting, and they were right. Naked Lunch is repulsive, thick with loathing and bitter misanthropy. It is a book designed to make decent people squirm.
And during the censorship trial that followed its U.S. publication, Norman Mailer called Burroughs “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”
It is likely the most influential American novel of the past 50 years. Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground would not have been possible had not Burroughs established an aesthetic of junk. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow owes much to Naked Lunch; it might even be argued that the jump-cut, rapid-fire editing of music videos is in some part devolved from Burroughs’ experiments with form, juxtaposition and accident.
None of his later novels had the juice of Naked Lunch, although he continued his experiments with “cut-up” techniques, where he’d insert fragments of other texts, such as newspaper stories or magazine advertisements into his work. The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964) make extensive use of these techniques, and now seem more like footnotes than real novels.
By the time he died in 1997, Burroughs had lost most of the dangerous edge; he’d become a playful elder statesman of the avant-garde. Rock bands would roll up to his house in Lawrence, Kan., and instead of meeting them with upraised cane or brandished handgun, the old man would often as not invite them in, serve them wine and listen to their stories. He could be kindly and generous.
A lot of people will tell you that they looked up Burroughs during a cross-country drive; some of them are telling you the truth.
The best way to experience - not read, experience - Naked Lunch is through a cheesy book-on-tape issued by Warner Bros. about 15 years ago. Burroughs reads the novel, in his wheezing, unmusical Dust Bowl tenor. Words are slurred, papers rustle and the background jazz combo - led by guitarist Bill Frisell - beeps and honks like the Star Wars bar band.
Burroughs sounds amused as he reads his cranky old masterpiece; he sounds like a carny, in love with his con. And maybe he was, in the end. But Naked Lunch is not a con. Naked Lunch is a book that will be with us always, a journal of the horrors of addiction and the loneliness of man in need.
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Style, Pages 21 on 02/22/2011