RealityStudio.org

The revised edition of Literary Outlaw is out. You can pretty much digest the new material (a preface and closing chapter) on Amazon or on Google Books. Here is a brief piece by Ted Morgan about the revised edition:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ted-morga ... 44139.html

(I totally don't understand how proofreading fuckups like "Augusten Burroughs" and "Allen Ginsburg" slipped into this piece.)

Anyone have thoughts on the new edition?

Rather strange that Burroughs volunteered all of that personal information, knowing full well what its intended purpose would be, only to get all upset about seeing it in print. There must have been more to it than that.

Maybe I'm thinking of Miles' El Hombre Invisble but didnt Ted Morgan confess to taking liberties with the biography, that, in parts, it was more like 'fan fiction'?

I've heard that accusation leveled against Morgan, but to me, his biography had a very professional tone and presentation. Miles' book, in contrast, seemed like the gushings of a devoted fan rather than an objective biography.

We see the same problem with criticism and commentary on Burroughs' fiction, so much of it reads more like a fan letter than analysis (or else we get the opposite extreme, where people just vent their spleen and ridicule the work, with no golden mean).

Maybe WSB thought the title was too restrictive. It puts him in the same group as Genet and Celine.

OT here's Ted Morgan talking about his book 'Dien Bien Phu'...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pKGTXF-fno

Burroughs was annoyed because he did not consider himself an outlaw, since one needs a ground to reject within a law, and get away from it to be an outlaw. Burroughs thought he had never had such a ground. He mentions it in "My Education".

Sorry for my poor translation, I could not find my English version of it

You are right Theo. In 'My Education' Burroughs says ... "To be an outlaw you must have a base to reject and get out of. I never had such a base."

Ted Morgan gets the last word though..... in the new edition of 'Literary Outlaw' he calls it the "fanciful ramblings of an octogenarian. Artists have always been cast as outlaws. Oscar Wilde etc....Burroughs was legally an outlaw." Morgan's words....not mine.

"the ramblings of an octogenarian", well, there's definitely more to it than that! I think Burroughs meant that he never purposefully tried to break any law (which would be political act anyway), he was not trying his best to be an outlaw as probably some artists do. It seems to me that even during the "Naked Lunch" trial in Boston, which did break a law, he was not paying much attention to it. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, is the new edition worth buying? Does it contain a lot we don't already know? Just curious!

Morgan's bio of Burroughs is mostly based on the 100-plus hours of interviews he did with Burroughs. It also closely glosses passages from Junky, Queer, and Burroughs' other semi-autobiographical work. He is sometimes loose with facts. Pharr, Texas, for example, is not in east Texas; Herbert Hoover, not J. Edgar Hoover, claimed "Beatniks" were one of the most dangerous groups in America, along with communists and "eggheads." His notes aren't always helpful in finding the source of his facts (the Hoover mix-up is an example). Burroughs was mainly disappointed by the biography because Morgan didn't talk to people who disliked him--WSB wanted a more critical perspective on his life. I was at a James Grauerholz lecture several years ago and someone asked James G. what the difference would be between his bio and Morgan's and he said that his (and Barry Miles' bio, now) would contain more details and more facts on every level about WSB's life. The example he gave, and this will apparently be one of many, is that he had access to an interview the Lexington doctors conducted with Joan about William and his life and addictions. But that's just one example. If you go back through Morgan's book, you can see how there are multiple opportunities on almost every page to draw out the story through more in-depth research. And through interviews with still-living informants. That aspect of the biography was evidently new to Morgan, who was experienced writing biographies about dead, not live subjects. Miles, by contrast, is much better at handling the tricky task of writing about still-living subjects.

That said, I think Morgan's bio was crucial: he was the first to point out the autobiographical nature of all of WSB's writings, no matter how obscure the real-life basis might be. Burroughs himself said, "All writing is autobiography."