Burroughs was born in 1914 into a prominent family in St Louis, Missouri - his grandfather having founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company. After attending various schools, including Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, he studied art at Harvard University, graduating in 1936. During his time at Harvard, he also worked as a junior reporter, and visited New York City where he experiment with drugs and became involved in the emerging gay subculture. On leaving formal education, Burroughs was provided with a regular income from his parents, leaving him free of any need to work. He travelled to Vienna, tried studying medicine, and engaged in promiscuous behaviour. He married Ilse Kapper, a Jewish friend needing a visa to escape from the Nazis.
Biographers generally agree that Vollmer’s death marked a sea change in Burrough’s life as well as his writing. By 1954, he was living in Tangier in Morocco, drawn there by Paul Bowles’ fiction. During his four years in Tangier, he wrote what eventually became Naked Lunch. Excerpts first appeared in 1958, and the novel itself emerged in Paris in 1959, gaining much attention not only from the 1960s underground culture, but from critics too. A celebrated legal case of obscenity against the book, after publication in the US, failed. Burroughs moved to Paris, and then London, by then something of a beat celebrity, supporting himself and a continuing addiction by writing articles for different magazines.
In 1974, Ginsberg, worried about his friend, secured Burroughs a position teaching creative writing at the City College of New York, and, for a while, he stopped using heroin. He moved into an apartment, dubbed The Bunker, on The Bowery, but soon gave up the teaching. He became friends with the likes of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Susan Sontag; he tried to make a film with Dennis Hopper; and he collaborated with Nick Cave and Tom Waits. As an ageing avant-garde radical, he did reading tours and attended conventions dedicated to his work. Between 1981 and 1987, he published Cities of the Red Night; The Place of Dead Roads; and The Western Lands. He spent the last 16 years of his life in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died on 2 August 1997. Further information on Burrough’s colourful life can be found all over the internet, not least at Wikipedia, The New Yorker, Beat Museum, Encyclopædia Britannica, and The Telegraph (biography review).
According to Burroughs himself, he kept journals as a teenager documenting an erotic attachment to another boy, but later destroyed them out of shame. He certainly kept notebooks during some periods of his life: in 2007 Ohio State University Press brought out Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook - see Goodreads for more information. He also kept a diary of sorts in his final months. This was edited by Burroughs’s long-time assistant James Grauerholz and published as Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs (Grove Press) - see Googlebooks.
In Last Words, Grauerholz provides this background to the journals: ‘It was in mid-November 1996 that Burroughs began to write the journals that are presented in this book. The first entry records the death of his cat, Calico Jane. In 260 days from November 14, 1996, to August 1, 1997, he made 168 entries. These writings include successive drafts of several short routines; remarks on books he was reading or had read long ago, and scenes suggested by them; lists of favorite lines from a lifetime of reading and listening; fits of impotent rage at man’s stupidity, day-to-day commentary, the heartbreak of the deaths of his beloved cats; and the contemplation of his own mortality. As late as these last nine months of his life, Burroughs was still compelled to do imaginary battle with his primordial foes: “Drug Warriors,” school-stupid FBI men, cat-haters, humans destroying the earth’s species in their arrogance: “When whales and seals and elephants weep, I cannot suppress the deadly Sin of Anger.” ’
Grauerholz adds these notes in his acknowledgements: ‘William Burroughs’s closest friends often saw him scribbling in the bound journal books that accumulated until there were eight of them, but he was a bit secretive about their contents. He did turn over one book to Jim McCrary to be typed up, and he made some editing marks on the transcription; this shows that he knew the journals would someday be published. (Selections from that typed journal were published in The New Yorker just after William’s death, as “Last Words.”) In late August 1997 Jim offered to transcribe the handwritten journals, and I was content for him to do that because I was not yet ready to face their contents, in William’s familiar scrawl - “dead fingers talk.” I procrastinated reviewing Jim’s transcription until the spring of 1999, when I finally felt up to the sad task of reading my best friend’s last testament. Rather than silently correct mistakes of spelling or sense, I used brackets to insert short clarifications, or to indicate words and passages that remained illegible after my best efforts to decipher them. In the subsequent editing process (with Ira Silverberg’s help), I cut about 5 percent of the material, primarily for reasons of privacy or because of excessive repetition. Following William’s text in this volume is a set of editor’s notes, arranged chronologically, providing additional background and explanation of his many references that would otherwise be obscure.’
Here are several extracts (from the Flamingo edition of Last Words in the UK).
14 November 1996
‘Thursday This is November 14. 1996
November 10, Calico was killed at 19th and Learnard. I heard about it the 12th from Jose. Tom had seen the cat by side of the road.
In the empty spaces where the cat was, that hurt physically. Cat is part of me. Mornings since, I break into uncontrollable sobbing and crying when I remember [where] she used to be - sit - move, etc. No question of histrionics. It just happens.
So dream remembered:
Oh, it was also a cat. I wasn’t sure it could find its way.’
16 November 1996
‘Coming up narrow tenement stairs. Met two people coming down at landing, said: “Hello.”
At top of stairs was a cubicle room with old sewing machine and other odds and ends, and there was an affectionate cat, whose head seemed removable. This room was open at top, three floors up.
Other people on roof said something about “Absolutely,” referring to the cats.’
1 December 1996
‘In a plane coming in for a landing in Paris. The plane landed in a narrow slot. Outside I could see Paris streets and then the plane angled upwards, looked ready to stall at any moment, and I felt physical fear.
“It’s going to crash!”
But it didn’t crash. Landed OK in Paris.
Paris is in many ways my favorite city. Never really got into Rome. London was always antithetical to me. Leaving NYC which is always New York. Small towns like Tangier.’
11 December 1996
‘Let the little growth on my head rest. It is an inoperable, benign, nonentity. So let it stay like that. If the soft machine works, don’t fix it. If it works, don’t fix it.
The words under the words, bubbling up with a belch of coal gas:
“We are - They are - come on! Hit! Hit!”
He cowered there, nursing the welt inflicted.’
30 December 1996
‘Reading New Yorker, July 31, 1995, account of “firestorms” in Hamburg occasioned by Allied bombing. (They don’t need an Atom bomb.) Then Dresden, to break German morale. The result was history’s second major firestorm. Like I say, top people in USA and England were such shits as you can’t believe.
What is left in these minds? Very little of value to me or anyone I can relate to. “All my relations,” as the Indians say. Like the drug anti’s in Malaysia say: “dealers are not human to him.’ And he - Mohathir Mohamed, Prime Minister - is not human to me. I curse him with my whole heart. There is nothing in him I feel for, or with.
Same goes for the firestorm impresarios.
So as this inglorious chapter in the USA draws to a dreary close with Clinton squeaking like the rat he turned out to be, that [in] Arizona and California together courts [are] quasi-legalizing marijuana for medical or any other purpose. . .
You must mark it to its place. It is an ILLEGAL drug and by illegal, beyond question.’
30 January 1997
‘To Kansas City. Pleasant trip. Good breakfast at Nichols’. Back by the freeway.
David made an especially good dinner, small roast, thick, toothsome, and new potatoes and carrots and peas.
My god, how dull these English diaries can get.
I expect Trant - or is it Glen? - will soon be jolted out of his apathy - and his greenhouse, and his green iguana.
Fold sweet etcetera to bed with Ovaltine.
So what does happen?
“Trant thought the frescos were becoming more and more morbid - each of the Martyrs had died in a different way - one by roasting.” (In a Rube Goldberg machine). “A saint carrying his own skin - lifelike in the extreme - the child was timing him to see how long he took” (to find out there was something to be tooked.)
He did something the others had not done: he laughed.
I once questioned in a dream an evil Italian Mountebank Spirit:
“Like, who are you?”
And he laughed and laughed - and went on laughing, in a marble dark lagoon, chintzy Italian decor - and he was deliciously evil.
As someone said about this evil spirit goes around sucking out the last breath from a dying youth:
“It was tasty.”
The child looking quite radiant. He was in fact a Radiant Boy, suck the breath out of an old queen.
He’s got a name, that Eyetye spirit - the Harlequin?
“You must leave now. Follow me.”
Few things are less inspiring than muddy snow. It’s an uncreative accident. (Bacon speaks of “the creative accident.”)
A road of dirty, muddy snow splattered accidental enough - like a pig wallow.’
29 May 1997
‘Life review is not orderly account from conception to death. Rather, fragments -
(Telephone - my eyeglasses are ready.)
“You can keep quite comfortable on codeine.”
- from here and there:
“He looks like a sheep killing dog.”
- Said about me by Politte Elvins, Kells’s father, who later went nuts with paresis. [He’d] been treating himself: “Doctors are just mechanics.”
“Take Beano for the measles, you pay two dollars down.”
- Old song heard at Los Alamos campfire sing, from Henry Bosworth.
I hate that son of a bitch, if he still lives anywhere. He called me “a goddamn worthless little pup.”
I hanged him in effigy by the big square fireplace in the Big House. I had used a statue of a Boy Scout, with the message around his neck: “Bozzy Bitch, goddamn him.”
(Now he later was fired for fooling with the boys, especially the Marsden family - Bob Marsden was a right bitch in his own right.)
A. J. found out about it:
“Yes,” he said, “I know everybody who got up that night.”
He had his network of snitches.
“What’s the safest place in the U.S., Billy?” he needled me, and Connell says: “Where you are.”
(Suppose you are on death row? I guess Fort Knox is about the safest place, offhand - all that gold. Or maybe a vault in Zurich, tended by gnomes.)
It was out by the sawdust pile, caughted fire and been smoldering for years like a mattress.
Recollect in New Orleans Joan set her bed on fire with a cigarette. I was the one woke up. We pour a wastebasket full of water down one hole, and it starts smoking down the other end. Took four metal wastebaskets to quell the fire, and it took $50 to quench the landlady.
Dropped my drink into a wastebasket at the sight of a Glock double trigger.
If they would -’
20 July 1997
‘They say a writer should have something he does with his hands (besides typing, that is). Pulling cat hairs from the Hudson Bay blanket seems to be my hand thing. That and shooting. I groom her, but the hairs are seemingly inexhaustible. What’s a man to do. Ain’t got no chance, one man alone.
Stumbles on a vile deed: report in the Weekly [World] News. McVeigh has turned into a sniveling coward, sobbing: “I don’t want to die.”
Has he? No responsible newspaper has reported what is certainly a newsworthy event. Only the Weekly News has culled this scoop from its mysterious “sources.” I nominate the Weekly News for the Vilest Act of the Century. If this story is fabricated, the News has perpetrated - has extended the very frontiers of vileness.
I remember the Machos. Died smoking. Mexican banditos stand against a pitted adobe wall, sneering at the firing squad.
So some reporter who wasn’t even there reports:
“The bandits died begging for their lives. Most of them lost control of their bowels and bladders.”
I was there. I will hunt that rat reporter down. I will force him to beg for his life in front of witnesses, promising to spare his life if he begs for it like Fido on his knees, with little yips while the cameras roll.
Lights, action, (pistol shots), camera.
To me the most unforgivable sin is the Lie, because like counterfeit currency, it devalues truth.
He has endured tortures that would have reduced most men to sniveling wrecks, an agent of a service so secret it can never be admitted to exist. Now he is, by computer magic, suddenly “a dirty child-molesting dope fiend,” spit on and pelted with rocks from snarling children.
He’s had all he can take.
“Fill my truck with ammonium nitrate. I’m going to fertilize till the land looks level.”
Few survive the Big Switch.
So then?
Straight-aheadedness.’
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