By Keaton Studebaker
It’s not a coincidence that the year Grove Press brought Naked Lunch to America was the same year Ed Sanders rolled out Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders stepped onto the literary stage with William Burroughs as his model for cultural rebellion. The first issues of Fuck You were built around Sanders’s Soft-Man poems, a series he later admitted were “a kind of semireligious text inspired by William Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine” (Fug You 8). Even though he later brushed them off as juvenilia, Sanders still collected most of them in Peace Eye in 1965. Even Sanders’s iconic rallying cry “total assault on the culture” was inspired by Burroughs (Fug You xiv). Yet while there would have been no Sanders without Burroughs, the two came to represent considerably different visions of the counterculture. Whereas Burroughs blurred boundaries, collapsing utopian and destructive energies into a single counterculture stew, Sanders sought to separate the “authentic” from the “corrupted,” offering readers an interpretative compass for a subculture he felt a need to defend in the court of public opinion. Examining where Sanders and Burroughs align and diverge shows how Sanders’s counterculture is always curated, shaped not only by who he felt deserved the status of authentic rebellion but what he thought could gain mainstream traction. The different strategies of Burroughs and Sanders reveal competing definitions of what counterculture was, could be, and should be.
Burroughs’s influence on Sanders persisted long after Fuck You ended. In a 2020 interview with Raymond Foye for Gagosian Quarterly, Sanders confessed that while drafting The Family—his 1971 book on Charles Manson—he had the galleys of Burroughs’s The Wild Boys right in front of him. He even claims to have scrawled his first notes for The Family directly onto the galleys for Burroughs’s novel. Sanders joked about whether some sharp-eyed scholar might one day make note of this, but the anecdote says more than the joke: Burroughs was never far from his work. You can see aspects of The Wild Boys seeping into The Family. Sanders’s cinematic flair—for instance, his introduction of Roman Polanski with the line “Fade in electronic soundtrack from Rosemary’s Baby” (68)—feels lifted from Burroughs’s arsenal of jump cuts and camera pans in The Wild Boys. Sanders’s campy refrains, especially the goofy-spooky “oo-ee-oo,” feel like an attempt to echo Burroughs’s balance of pulp and menace. And like Burroughs’s slippery “I” in The Wild Boys, Sanders only writes of himself obliquely in The Family, referring to himself as “this writer” while dropping editorial asides that can’t be mistaken for anyone else. Burroughs’s influence on The Family is suggested in some of Sanders’s writing techniques.
Both of these books also focus on transgressive subjects, but Burroughs and Sanders diverge sharply in approach to these subjects. Sanders constructs an interpretative scaffolding around disturbing material while Burroughs dismantles such frameworks, leaving readers without an interpretive safety net. Consider how Sanders emphasizes the horror of Manson followers contemplating death, describing how “people arrived from the desert, attired in leather, tanned and trim of form. And they were all sitting around ‘mocking up snuff,’ postulating the event of their own death so as to experience it mentally. Sound like fun?” (The Family 131). The heavy handed rhetorical question at the end makes it clear how Sanders expects the reader to feel. Compare this to the more ambiguous passage from Burroughs: “One time I smashed one of these gourd rats and the blood spurted out all over me. I threw him on the ground and he twisted around the sharp little black point between his legs was stiff. Xolotl laughed pointing to it then we were pointing to each other and laughing and I lay down pretending I was the gourd rat throwing myself around and Xolotl shoved my legs up and we made fire I was kicking like a grog” (The Wild Boys 112). How does Burroughs position the reader in relation to these events? As a voyeur, critic, or something else? Is this a celebration? A portrayal of something to be condemned? Are these experiences supposed to be pleasurable or painful? Sanders tells readers how to feel about what he writes, but Burroughs leaves readers to confront unsettling ambiguities without interpretative guardrails.
These contrasting portrayals reflect different approaches to what constituted the counterculture. Throughout The Family, Sanders persistently works to separate the authentic, positive elements of the counterculture from its corrupted manifestations. This distinction matters because, while both The Family and The Wild Boys represented (relatively, at least for Burroughs) mainstream works for their respective authors, they addressed different audiences. The Family wasn’t written for an underground or avant garde readership like The Wild Boys. This left Burroughs space to blend all elements of the counterculture into a single, chaotic mixture. Consider that although Burroughs at one point aligns his wild boys with the Yippies—the political group Sanders helped found—he also depicts them performing violent, orgiastic rituals designed to “push… the spirit out the back of the head” of boys (The Wild Boys 139, 156). These rituals echo practices Sanders attributes to Manson. Most tellingly, the wild boys pursue “total chaos,” a goal Sanders explicitly links to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, which he argues was instrumental in corrupting Manson (The Family 74, The Wild Boys 139). Burroughs’s wild boys seem as close to Manson’s apparently murderous occult philosophy as they are Sanders’s picturesque rebrand of the counterculture.
The Process Church libel lawsuit against Sanders and his publisher foregrounds the difference between these two versions of the counterculture. In the British trial, Sanders’s legal team only needed to demonstrate a 51% probability that the Process had influenced Manson—a relatively low burden of proof where minor factual errors wouldn’t undermine the defense as long as the central claim of malign influence remained credible. While Sanders’s team presented enough evidence of overlap between the Process and Manson to satisfy this legal requirement, much of this evidence regarding shared beliefs could equally have been applied to Burroughs’s work such as The Wild Boys. A psychology professor testified for Sanders’s team that the Sex issue of the Process magazine could harm young, impressionable people, and they argued that distributing Process literature was like giving matches to children, making the distributor partially responsible when one child inevitably starts a fire. This same loose logic of malign influence through provocative counterculture materials could theoretically extend to Burroughs’s work (or even Sanders’s work prior to The Family). Since a significant portion of the defense relied on a monkey see monkey do conception of representation, the trial foregrounds Sanders’s curatorial approach to the counterculture. Burroughs made the cut for Sanders.
It’s interesting to imagine a case that could have been made for Manson finding inspiration in, say, Naked Lunch or the Nova Trilogy. Since these four novels all predate the founding of the Process, maybe Burroughs was one of their sleazo-inputs (fade in John Carpenter’s Halloween theme). To be clear, this isn’t an evaluation of the veracity of any of Sanders’s claims, but the probabilistic defense of The Family helps show a meaningful difference in how Sanders and Burroughs presented the counterculture. Burroughs recognized more affinities between strains of the counterculture that Sanders kept separate. Sanders curated a mainstream-friendly version of the counterculture that attempts to preserve his idea of radical promise by cutting off its darker permutations. On the other hand, Burroughs didn’t back away from the chaos. His version of the counterculture shows a drive toward freedom bound up with self-destructive tendencies. This difference matters because not only did it inform how the counterculture was seen then but also how it is remembered today. Reading Sanders and Burroughs alongside each other shows two distinct conceptions of the counterculture: one carefully managed, the other unwilling to be contained.
References
Burroughs, William. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Grove Press, 1994.
Sanders, Ed. Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. Da Capo Press, 2011.