William S. Burroughs(1914-1997)
- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat
Generation (the other two being his friends
Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis,
Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the
Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and
attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the
climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to
house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his
undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled
inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed
to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a
patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and
chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political
options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study
medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in
1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish
woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen.
The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the
U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New
York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs
formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in
Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised
Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms
used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the
United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he
drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an
autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he
claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young
Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist
Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and
David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who
had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively
afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by
Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the
attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he
would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend
Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer
inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his
life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and
Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of
becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and
Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of
Kerouac's girlfriend
Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the
flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with
morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he
subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the
vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan
and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs
began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and
abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended
and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing
Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become
part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was
World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in
Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and
drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a
storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being
arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had
turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and
possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs
began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit
and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that
spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs,
with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of
heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of
time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He
particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed
having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play
roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and
Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land,
ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it
fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any
inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated
on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled
in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a
fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the
book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York
publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost
interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll
along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a
notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms,
Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed
of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs,
soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good
lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped
him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs
and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as
an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without
being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off
to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known
to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to
Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually
they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to
come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in
which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and
killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to
mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the
story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after
Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the
guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later
ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head.
Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure
caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory.
Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or
subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use
for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in
love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through
Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which
like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of
perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed
it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into
print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel,
"Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl
Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original
(its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug
Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with
another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico
City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with
his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion
of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing
the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In
1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even
cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually
returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be
prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in
Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while
addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia
Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions
of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred
use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew
the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good
fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses"
and the works of D.H. Lawrence and
Henry Miller before the American
public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove
Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until
1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity
trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl",
which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry
fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court
starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect
literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in
the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be
utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of
Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive
list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to
defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was
declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would
be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the
police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs
v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social
value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began
in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge
for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state
governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by
critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by
punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He
died in 1997 at the age of 83.
Generation (the other two being his friends
Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis,
Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the
Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and
attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the
climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to
house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his
undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled
inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed
to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a
patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and
chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political
options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study
medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in
1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish
woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen.
The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the
U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New
York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs
formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in
Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised
Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms
used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the
United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he
drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an
autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he
claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young
Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist
Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and
David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who
had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively
afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by
Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the
attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he
would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend
Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer
inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his
life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and
Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of
becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and
Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of
Kerouac's girlfriend
Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the
flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with
morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he
subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the
vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan
and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs
began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and
abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended
and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing
Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become
part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was
World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in
Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and
drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a
storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being
arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had
turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and
possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs
began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit
and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that
spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs,
with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of
heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of
time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He
particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed
having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play
roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and
Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land,
ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it
fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any
inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated
on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled
in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a
fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the
book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York
publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost
interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll
along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a
notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms,
Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed
of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs,
soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good
lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped
him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs
and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as
an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without
being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off
to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known
to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to
Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually
they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to
come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in
which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and
killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to
mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the
story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after
Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the
guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later
ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head.
Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure
caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory.
Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or
subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use
for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in
love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through
Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which
like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of
perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed
it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into
print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel,
"Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl
Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original
(its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug
Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with
another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico
City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with
his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion
of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing
the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In
1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even
cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually
returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be
prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in
Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while
addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia
Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions
of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred
use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew
the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good
fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses"
and the works of D.H. Lawrence and
Henry Miller before the American
public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove
Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until
1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity
trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl",
which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry
fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court
starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect
literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in
the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be
utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of
Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive
list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to
defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was
declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would
be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the
police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs
v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social
value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began
in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge
for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state
governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by
critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by
punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He
died in 1997 at the age of 83.