Comments on: William S. Burroughs, Esquire, and New Journalism https://realitystudio.org A William S. Burroughs Community Mon, 15 Mar 2021 01:43:39 +0000 hourly 1 By: conlon https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-s-burroughs-esquire-and-new-journalism/comment-page-1/#comment-114530 Fri, 02 Jul 2010 04:20:09 +0000 https://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1722#comment-114530 Thanks for the covers & pics.
I’ve seen that one of Bill & Billy in b&w before, but it’s even better in color.

]]> By: Paul https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-s-burroughs-esquire-and-new-journalism/comment-page-1/#comment-113410 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:20:49 +0000 https://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1722#comment-113410 To corroborate your insightful interpretation of Esquire’s ways at the end of the 1960’s… Genet wasn’t more thrilled than Burroughs by the idea of attending the Democratic Convention in itself. In fact, he accepted Esquire’s invitation under one condition: that he be allowed to write a second article on Vietnam, which Hayes agreed upon. But it seems significant to me that, when the time came to publish this much more innovative piece, “Salut aux cent mille étoiles”, Hayes himself… turned it down for he thought it was definitely too screwy – but then, that is if our French version of the story is true? (of course it’s always difficult, if not impossible, to get accurate accounts of these kinds of things…) Anyhow, we know that Genet, who was not only especially attached to this great text of his but also subject to impetuous moves, replied to the betrayal by tearing it to pieces in Esquire’s press-room (giving them a show it does seem they wanted more than his articles…) He also replied exactly as you did, to journalists who argued they were not so touchy about patriotism since after all they did publish his pretty “anti-americanist” article on the Convention: by pointing out that they hadn’t contacted him because he was an innovative writer, but indeed because of his big name, “par snobisme”. Luckily the French manuscript of his Vietnam piece had remained in safer hands, the Seaver’s, so his truly “new” article could come out, but in Evergreen Review where of course it had almost no impact; in any case not the tenth of the delicious one it would have had on some of Esquire’s readers… if Esquire would have kept its word!
But then again, Genet wasn’t known to keep his… As Burroughs likes to recount in his interviews, when he arrived in America he phoned Hayes and said he wouldn’t submit his first article unless they would pay him more than agreed. “But, you are a thief!”, he shouted out. To which the legendary thief had his say: “Mais bien entendu, Monsieur”. And his “superbe”, his haughtiness did pay. So..!

I wonder if you know Genet’s article “Quatre heures à Chatila” (censored in 1982 but integrally printed in The Declared Enemy)? If not, I think you might like it. A must from your interesting New Journalism angle, both in matters of troubling facts and form: a four hours walk in a city exclusively filled with corpses is not a common experience of course, but among Genet’s pieces I also regard it as the one where he has pushed his poetic – quite Burroughsian – fragmental vision to the uncanniest extent. If Genet loved Lois’ “Chicago’s murder” cover design for Esquire, he too didn’t appreciate that the scene of the crime was staged, that the city and the corpse were faked; and yet, what precisely makes his later article on Chatila massacre so powerful in my opinion has as much to do with the awfulness of what he saw there, than with the failure he experimented when he put it down on paper: as hard as he poetically attempted to, he couldn’t exactly say he enjoyed that the corpses he then finally got to step over were real…

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