The Other Burroughs, Not Edgar Rice

We associate pieties with sentimental religion, holy medals and such, when in fact they often arrive in the form of sociopathic earnestness. Take Williams Burroughs – not the sort of fellow you would have wanted living next door. Burroughs was a deviant by any standard – a thief, a wife-killer, an Olympic-class drug abuser, a sexual pervert and a man who seldom failed to indulge any hateful impulse that entered the black hole of his egotism. As a writer, Burroughs celebrated his pathologies and never transcended his pulp origins – all good career moves in an age when professors and critics use “transgressive” as an accolade.

In the November issue of The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, performs a brief, deft dissection of Burroughs and his academic groupies. Under the pretext of reviewing The Yage Letters Redux, Daniels diagnoses Burroughs and his co-author, Allen Ginsberg, as “an example of how bad writing can sustain a large reputation among weak-minded intellectuals.” Such a grotesquely undeserved reputation precisely fits the definition of piety.

I’m not speaking from a clinical distance. I’ve read much of Burroughs. As a teenager, I remember a visit with my parents to a discount store in suburban Cleveland where I found a table covered with remaindered hardcovers, many of them from Grove Press – the same publisher that brought Samuel Beckett to American readers. Apparently I had already, in the late-sixties, heard of Burroughs and his notoriety. I bought The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express, and was never able to read them because they were quite literally unreadable. To my adolescent way of thinking, they represented sufficient provocation just sitting on my shelves, so there was no compelling reason to read them. A year or so later I found, on a rack in Avallone’s Pharmacy, an Ace paperback of Junkie, an early Burroughs novel published under the nom de dope “Bill Lee.” I remember only that it was written in sub-Hammett prose. Soon, I acquired a Grove paperback of Naked Lunch, complete with a blurb from Norman Mailer, the Harvard graduate slumming in pulpdom. It, too, proved unreadable in any conventional sense. Today, Burroughs, who reveled in sexual sadism, is read by students who have never read Dante or Milton. Daniels concludes his review like this:

“When [Burroughs] says that `In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom,’ and that `all intellectuals are deviants in U.S.’ the thought does not occur to him even for an instant that part of the problem might be with him.

“A worthy subtitle of this slender book, then, might be `A Moment in the Rise of Mass Egotism.’”