by Christophe Becker

“Ich war Prinz in diesem Land. Alle anderen mussten vor mich auf den Boden blicken, und niemand durfte mir in die Augen sehen, aber nun bin ich in Ketten, wie mein Volk. Jetzt muss ich auf den Boden schauen.”

[“I was a prince in this country. Everyone else had to look at the ground in front of me and no one was allowed to look me in the eyes, but now I am in chains, like my people. Now I have to look at the floor.”]

Werner Herzog, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972

Christophe Becker: Last time we talked you mentioned your travels across Central and South America: Peru, Colombia, Mexico. Now you’ve just come back from Mexico-City where you did a reading of William Burroughs’ Queer for the 110th anniversary of his birth in St. Louis, Missouri.

Klaus Maeck: Well, I decided to flee the cold and the snow in Hamburg and spend the 3 months of winter in Mexico City. But I knew I needed to do something there instead of simply being a tourist and hanging around. I wanted to organize some screenings. My idea was to present a series of Burroughs films in the area where he lived in the early 1950s, in Colonia Roma. Besides my own films Decoder and Commissioner of Sewers, both starring Burroughs, I was keen to show Beat by Gary Walkow [2000], a film about the visit of Allen Ginsberg and others who left for CDMX (Mexico City), starring Kiefer Sutherland [as William S. Burroughs] and Courtney Love [as Joan Vollmer]. It’s a little-known film, I only knew it from some bad Japanese pirate internet stream. Ginsberg and his friends didn’t run into Burroughs since he’d gone to South America with a young lover at the time, they met with his wife Joan and went together on a trip. Other films I wanted to present were Drugstore Cowboy [Gus Van Sant, 1989], Naked Lunch [David Cronenberg, 1991], William S. Burroughs: A Man Within [Yoni Leyser, 2010], and Burroughs: The Movie, the documentary by Howard Brookner [1983].

Burroughs’ birthday on the 5th of February was a welcome date since the press always needs some distinctive reason to publicize. Besides the films I wanted to do something in the legendary Bounty Bar where Burroughs used to drink with his friends and where he met that young American with whom he travelled to South America searching for Yage — the psychoactive drug also known as ayahuasca. Well, it’s also the house where he accidentally shot his wife in an apartment right above the bar.

I was in CDMX the year before, just for a few days. I went to that building which is now a modest restaurant named Krika’s. [Monterrey 207 Esq Chihuahua Roma Nte, Cuauhtemoc, Mexico City.] I spoke to the owner and asked if he minded me organizing an event there. On the marquee was stenciled: “El lugar de la Leyenda,” “the place of the legend.” He also had some pictures of Burroughs inside. But before I resolved to do anything there I wrote James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ secretary, asking if he believed it was stupid to actually choose this location — because of that tragic incident. The answer was a straight “yes.” Oops. Plus, James informed me that the restaurant is not exactly where the Bounty Bar was. It was really next door, and is now a print shop. Almost no one knew about this. Okay, I get it… However, during the Cut-Ups@2023 event in Paris [12-15 Sept. 2023] I’d told some other Burroughsians about my idea and they’d all said “Go for it! Do it anyway!”

So, when I went back to Mexico, I checked with the owner if he was up for it, not showing films there but doing a reading of Queer, the novel that unfolded from the Bounty Bar — and of course he liked it, as it meant promoting the place. However, I did make plain to the small audience that the restaurant was not the original location.

C. B.: There are two German words: fernweh [marrying the words fern, or distance, and wehe, an ache or sickness, the word can be roughly translated as “distance sickening” or “far woe” — a pain to see far-flung places beyond our doorstep. Think of it as the opposite of heimweh (homesickness). It’s an ache many of us have felt but hitherto we didn’t have a word to describe it.” in David Farley, “The travel ‘ache’ you can’t translate,” BBC.com, 24 March 2020.], not to be confused with wanderlust if memory serves. Which one was it, do you figure?

K. M.: What can I say — both? For a long time I dreamt of spending the winters in that country since I love it so much. The spectacular countryside and coastlines, the spectacular history and traditions, the relaxed way of life… and finally, since I stopped making films, I could afford to leave the cold gray wet Tiefebene of Norddeutschland at least for one winter.

C. B.: Are you seriously telling me you’re done with films?

K. M.: Well, yes… for the films I would like to produce you not only need a large professional team but also hard cash. Suppose you have all that and decide to spend your next 3-5 years on that new film, going through all the funding hassle and development, adjusting your ideas to please investors and audiences before you actually start shooting — obviously the most exciting part as well as editing. But, even if you have an enthusiastic distributor who puts cash into advertising, the potential audiences are shrinking alarmingly. Only few people still go to cinemas these days, it’s quite frustrating, but cinema is dying. There are new formats, especially streaming platforms, but they are solely looking for commercial productions, same goes for television. Outside this framework filmmaking seems more like an expensive hobby and yes, I am tired of that.

C. B. : Among the many countries Burroughs decided to settle in, Mexico probably was the only one he didn’t truly select. It was a last resort solution after he killed Joan Vollmer on September 6, 1951.

K. M.: Well, Burroughs and his wife actually went to Mexico City because he had legal problems in the US. He was on and off drugs, as was his wife Joan, and both were quite heavily drunk and stoned as they had the fatal idea to play a William Tell game in the friend’s apartment where they were partying. So it obviously was an ambivalent decision to do something there… but I made up my mind as the Bounty Bar downstairs was the place where he fell in love with the young American Lewis Marker, named Allerton in the novel. Burroughs wrote about this love affair and their trip to Latin America when he was still living in Mexico in the early 50’s, although it was only published in 1985, with some lively descriptions of the wild nightlife. Much of it was composed while he was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide. Another driving force to settle for that place was Burroughs’ confession that Mexico City and the shooting of his wife actually caused him to seriously start writing, as he stated later in a foreword to Queer. Plus, the novel was just being adapted by film director Luca Guadagnino for a feature film with Daniel Craig which should be released later this year. To be honest I don’t expect too much of that… and sadly enough the first film adaption planned by Steve Buscemi some years ago did not work out.

Well, I did find a nice arthouse cinema in Colonia Roma, the Cine Tonalá, but in the end I could only show my own films and the documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within since I knew and asked the director Yoni Leyser for permission. The cinema was not ready to ask for screening rights for the other films as they were all distributed by major film companies.

The screenings went quite well, especially Decoder, much to my surprise… A band called Virgen Siamesa had designed a crossover between the Decoder logo and the Psychic TV logo — the latter we adapted ourselves for Decoder, since our street pirates and their leader were a spoof of the Temple ov Psychick Youth. I was utterly surprised to find young people who were familiar with the film as it wasn’t available in the country and was never shown in Latin America until my own trip to Mexico.

C. B. : Luca Guadagnino directed a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria that I found surprisingly interesting. He voluntarily erased the profound misogyny and / or homophobia present throughout Argento’s movies to put together a more “feminist” version (for lack of a better word). The fact that he and (script-writer) David Kajganich are homosexual might have had an effect on the script. I was thinking about it because both Bertrand Mandico and David Cronenberg had problems adapting Burroughs’ problematic view of women.

K. M.: I am not familiar with Guadagnino’s films and I am curious to see his adaptation of Queer.

C. B. : I was surprised by the choice you made of reading Queer. Unlike most of Burroughs’ texts you typically refer to (from Naked Lunch to The Electronic Revolution), the novel can be seen as fairly formal. Do you consider Burroughs’ work as a whole, or, like a certain number of critics, do you divide it into two distinct parts? An orthodox Burroughs, preceding an experimental Burroughs?

K. M.: I never thought that way, no. However, my fascination and admiration for this man only started after I read his essays, interviews and manuals (The Electronic Revolution for instance) — his preoccupation with mystical and occult themes, also with mafia politics and the power of mass media. His tone is always wonderfully irreverent and radical, wrapped in subversive black humor. But his novels also amazed me from the very beginning — the power of language that his stories convey, although his unconventional writing style leaves so much open — or perhaps precisely because of this. The images, smells and feelings squeeze out between the lines and jump out at me, even his fragmentary texts without much plot leave bizarrely powerful impressions.

But to be honest, I was also happy when the plot wasn’t whizzing through time and space, wasn’t quite so fragmented and coded and therefore naturally much easier to read — as in the Red Night Trilogy or in Queer especially, where he tells a very personal story that contains many references to his later work.

But for this anniversary event in Mexico, Queer was chosen simply because the true story behind the novel took place right there. Even though the Bounty Bar has not been around for a long time, I found it exciting to present this story in the place where it originated.

C. B. : How did you choose the passages to read?

K. M.: To begin with I chose an excerpt of that introduction Burroughs wrote for a later edition of Queer — what he loved about Mexico City in the 50’s and where he mentioned the tragic shooting of his wife and what it did to him. In my own foreword to the reading I made clear that we were celebrating his novel and the place where it was born, not the spectacle of the killing. From the novel I chose passages where Burroughs described his visits to the Bounty Bar and his first encounters with Allerton, the developing of their strange love affair until his return to the city — alone.

I found two Mexican actors for the reading, Ignacio Velasco and Fernando Yacamán, and I compiled some video footage from Mexico City in the 50’s plus some authentic photos of Burroughs and Lewis Marker in Mexico which were screened in the background. The reading was not well attended, but we had a great time…

C. B. : You were interviewed by journalist Hernán Muleiro for La Jornada. The journalist talked about la “Guerra de los ruidos” (the war of noises). The very first version of Decoder I saw was subtitled in Spanish, I was wondering if, maybe, the movie had had an unusual impact on the Spanish-speaking world…?

K. M.: You saw a Spanish subtitled version? I thought the Mexicans were the first ones to do Spanish subtitles… well, I don’t think the rather poor dialogue makes a big impression, it is rather the authentic images, the unusual edit and the spirit of the time that appeal to a young generation, no matter the part of the world.

And yes, the “war of noises” still is one of my favorite topics… there are crazy findings if you research how and where music is or can be used as a weapon!

C. B. : In that very same interview you mentioned the danger of Spotify and its algorithms.

K. M.: Well, I found it alarming when I studied their marketing strategies. For their advertisers they claim: “At Spotify, we have a personal relationship with over 191 million people who show us their true colors without filters!” And that’s just the number of premium users worldwide, the total number of users is more than twice as high (as of 2022, old figures by now!). What makes Spotify unique within the larger platform economy is that they have vast amounts of data related to our emotional states, moods and feelings, billions of data points every day. This data forms the basis for Spotify’s massive streaming intelligence: Spotify can track your every habit and mood. When they combine this with the psychographic data about you that they can access from the other major players — Facebook, Instagram — their streaming intelligence will be the greatest of all. One of Spotify’s senior business developers said in an interview: “What we ultimately want to do is to be able to predict people’s behavior through music.” Back in 2018, they filed a patent for “Methods and systems for personalizing user experiences based on personality traits.” Whether such applications are carried out within the strict boundaries of ethical guidelines on data use, collection and storage is highly doubtful, don’t you think?

By the way, Spotify used part of its gigantic profit made with music, namely more than 100 million euros, to invest in an AI start-up in 2021. The company Helsing plans to use artificial intelligence to support the military in the assessment of battlefields. In addition to aerial surveillance by military drones, not only sensors and special cameras are used on the ground, but also automated software that enables customers to make faster decisions. So far, their technology has been sold to the French, British and German military, as well as to the European Union, which, to give an example, naturally uses it to better prevent refugees from entering the country.

C. B. : Many programs have recently been developed, mostly AI, including AI music generators that use already existing material. Is it that different from Burroughs’ will to “loot the Louvre” and “steal anything in sight”?

K. M.: Well, in the end it’s a program stealing. It is different because a program can never be a creative artist whose ideas stem from a very individual and personal experience. It can be programmed to steal and compile it in a certain way, even by chance like a random cut-up, but the personal expression will always be missing, don’t you think?

I recently had a script written by ChatGPT, as a test. I added a book to my prompt that I think might make a good film and asked for a 90-minute script. In no time at all I had a well-structured but totally conventional script. The AI learns from successful films, I suppose, so there’s no room for artistic experiments that ultimately make a film special. The AI can do some of the work for me by suggesting a structure, a dramaturgy or certain scenes, but it can only become something unique with my creative input. Now, of course, this only applies to the weird films I would like to make — not to blockbusters.

Regarding music, I love mashups! They emerged in the 80s, songs in which a musical collage of pieces from different artists is mixed together by sampling. I am waiting for more. But what can I tell you as a long-standing music publisher? Knowing the economic situation of so many talented artists, more precisely creators of art, be it music or literature or painting, I am very much in favor of fair remuneration for their work and have long campaigned for it.

Well, copy right or copy wrong? My second self, the artist, still grins and nods when he hears the Burroughs quote!

C. B. : In 2023, Paul McCartney told BBC Radio 4 that “artificial intelligence has enabled a ‘final’ Beatles song,” adding the technology was used “to ‘extricate’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo.” What to do you make of it, considering McCartney was largely influenced by Burroughs’ cut-up technique and Ian Sommerville’s sound experiments?

K. M.: I think that Paul simply tested the new technology in order to create a new/old song to the legendary library and make some more money.

C. B. : What about your projects?

K. M.: My book is the only project I am working on now. It is out on Moloko+, a small independent publisher that cannot invest in any marketing activities. So, in the last weeks I was busy editing a dozen of short film teasers with me reading excerpts of my texts. Fortunately, my 24-year-old nephew helped me to set up an Instagram account to weekly post a new reel, the same on YouTube and on my homepage maeck.net. I had to use my Facebook account to spread the news, my only activity on that creepy platform. And to my surprise I received quite a bunch of likes and comments, including some personal messages of spirited readers.

I did not want to write a biography, even though there was so much material lying around. I got the old stuff out again, compiled my conversations with William Burroughs, found the very first [Einstürzende] Neubauten interview and took the opportunity to write autobiographical outlines apropos my punk period and the making of Decoder, and while I was at it, I puffed up the notes from my world travels a bit and worked through my pain-induced mood swings. The title of the book I only found by chance, at a flea market in Mexico: Full Throttle into Ruin. It was on the cover of a bootleg DVD of the film Head On which I produced in 2004 with Fatih Akin, a slang translation of the original German title Gegen die Wand.

by Oliver Harris

Literary adaptations for the silver screen have always been a hit and miss affair, with some notable triumphs and many spectacular travesties. William Burroughs’ bête noire was The Snows of Kilimanjaro,which in 1952 ruined Hemingway’s short story about death by giving it a Hollywood happy ending. Whether the Beat field is especially cursed, I don’t know, but up until now you certainly can’t say it has been blessed. Not one of the films made from the holy trinity of texts written by the holy trinity of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs can be called a great success, despite good intentions, promising creative collaborations, and flashes of inspiration. And adaptations matter, despite what Burroughs famously said about David Cronenberg‘s 1991 version of Naked Lunch (via a quotation from James M. Cain, which he misattributed to Raymond Chandler): “My novels? Why, Hollywood hasn’t done anything to them. They’re still right there, on the shelf.” 

Burroughs’ hope for Naked Lunch was that readers “will judge the film as something quite apart from my novel, and that I may perhaps find some new readers thereby.” However, like many people, I can’t help seeing cinematic adaptations as “translations” of the original — and badly translated texts badly misrepresent them: if you have any French, try reading Le Festin nu; it’s awful. But Burroughs put his finger on the key questions: can you separate the two when reading one or watching the other? Does the film risk replacing the novel in the cultural imagination? Does the adaptation recruit more readers or does it mislead, confuse, or put them off altogether? 

And on top of the question of fidelity — does the film do the text justice? — there’s the problem specific to Burroughs of how to avoid confusing the man with the myth. The iconic image of Burroughs was forged early on from sensationalised portraits of a mad, bad and dangerous to know man of mystery in Kerouac’s novels and, with a hostile cutting edge, in the mass media. So, it’s more than that Keifer Sutherland was hopelessly miscast as Burroughs in Gary Walkow’s dreadful Beat (2000) or that Viggo Mortensen was unconvincing as Old Bull Lee in Walter Salles’ disappointing On the Road (2012). Peter Weller’s performance as William Lee/William Burroughs in Naked Lunch is the object lesson in what happens when the iconic image takes over, summed up by the film’s opening shot — which is not of the actor but of the shadow cast by his hat, which doesn’t just fetishise the trademark fedora but stands in symbolically for the long shadow of the mythic author that has mediated the popular reception of Burroughs’ work. 

Cronenberg reduced Burroughs to little more than signature visual props and a vocal mimicry that isn’t so much the dry deadpan drawl of the gentleman junky as just two-dimensionally lifeless. A frenzied, feverish text is not well represented by such a cool central performer. At least John Fleck’s Burroughs in Ed Buhr’s gem of a low-budget short, The Japanese Sandman (2008), adapted faithfully from The Yage Letters, is very funny, as is Ben Foster’s better-known imitation in John Krokidas’s entertaining Kill Your Darlings (2013), based on the real-life drama behind the Kerouac-Burroughs novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The last two instances suggest that the higher the expectation — as in the case of On the Road and Naked Lunch, and indeed Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl (2010) — the greater the let-down. Texts that are cultural landmarks as well as Beat classics create a burden of hopes that set a high bar for adaptation: minor works with more modest expectations may have more chance of making it. 

Skin Game

Such thoughts ran through my head as I anxiously took my seat along with two thousand others in the Royal Festival Hall for October’s London premiere of Luca Guadagnino‘s ravishing and remarkable adaptation of Burroughs’ novella, Queer. Although utterly different in most ways, the film has two important things in common with Kill Your Darlings. Both are based, one indirectly the other directly, on source texts that became legendary while remaining long unpublished: Hippos, written in 1945, not published until 2008; Queer, written in 1952, not published until 1985. And in the case of Queer, the adaptation has itself been long-anticipated, appearing almost 15 years after the much-rumoured project to be directed by Steve Buscemi based on Oren Moverman’s script. And second, both Kill Your Darlings and Queer made very surprising casting choices that involved celebrated actors known for one high-profile part playing against type: Daniel Ratcliffe, aka Harry Potter; Daniel Craig, aka Bond, James Bond. But there the similarities end, and while I had been faintly amused to see one Daniel take on the role of Ginsberg, I was much more anxious about seeing the other Daniel take on Burroughs. That’s because, when it came to Queer, the stakes were far higher — for Burroughs, for Guadagnino, and for me. We all had skin in this game.

Queer will never come close to the literary status or cultural reach of Naked Lunch, but the publication of Burroughs’ slight, incomplete early novella was a complete game changer. In a material sense, it had marked a turning point in his career as the keystone in a six-figure publishing contract that secured the future for the 70-year-old author after decades of precarious finances. And in terms of his development as a writer in the first place, the novel transformed our understanding by providing the missing link between the tight-lipped hardboiled reportage of Junky and the radical, riotous disarray of Naked Lunch. My own critical and scholarly work turned crucially on making the case for Queer, which became the driving force for William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination in 2003 and my revised edition of the novella in 2010. 

Putting Queer on the big screen represented, therefore, a unique opportunity to raise exponentially the profile of a work in which I had invested a great deal for over two decades. Ironically, that history made me the best and the worst possible viewer: desperate for it to measure up, could I watch this Queer without the other one always in mind, condemned to be the Man Who Knew Too Much to see the film on its own terms? Worse still — full disclosure — I had even more skin in the game having worked for Guadagnino as a research consultant, given feedback on a draft of Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay, and chatted with Daniel Craig about his role. Still, my investment was strictly professional, unlike the bond that united director and novelist. 

Annexing Annexia

You didn’t have to be an academic to recognise that Queer was by far Burroughs’ most nakedly personal work, one that revealed an inner torment about his sexuality shockingly at odds with the ice-cold image of the man. Far from being an old minor text, this was, in Ginsberg’s blurb, “a major work. Burroughs’ heart laid bare, the origin of his writing genius, honest, embarrassing, humorously brilliant, naked — the secret of the Invisible Man.” And for Guadagnino, too, Queer is his most personal film, as he has taken every opportunity to insist, the one closest to his heart going back to his reading the novel as a teenager. There’s an emotional chemistry here between two homosexual artists that suggested an utterly different take to the collaboration that produced Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, a film that has its admirers and a few good moments — shooting bug powder as “a Kafka high”; the Mugwump typewriters — but which for me got all the important calls wrong. Not only did it replace the vibrant energy, pace, colour, and savage humour of the original with a lethargic and morose dull brown sludge, and not only did it straighten out both the novel’s narrative disarray and Burroughs’ sexual identity (“homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had,” apparently), but it threw away the novel to create a kunstlerroman. As Timothy Murphy argued, by making everything into a metaphor for Burroughs becoming a writer — or rather, a fantasy of the writer-as-secret-agent — Cronenberg sealed his Naked Lunch off from any external reality or other significance. This was one reason why it had left me cold thirty years ago, and why the early frames of Queer might have had me worried.

Setting the scene in early 1950s Mexico, Queer opens with a slow pan across various objects: a bed, a typewriter, manuscript pages of Burroughs’ novel-in-progress, guns… Centipede jewellery and a sign for “Annexia” confirm that these are all references to Naked Lunch — but Cronenberg’s film rather than Burroughs’ original. Would the Italian director follow the Canadian’s path, and film not the novel but a story about its writing? That would at least be true to the facts, since the force of my reading of Queer was that the relationship between William Lee and Eugene Allerton is based on the writing and reading of the text, whose routines Burroughs had sent as letters to his reluctant lover, Lewis Marker, in spring 1952. And of course, as everyone knew — because this was the sensational story Burroughs told on the novel’s publication in 1985 — his turn to writing was linked to the reckless, tragic shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, that had taken place in Mexico City six months earlier. Egregiously, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch had put the shooting at the centre of his film’s fantasy. Guadagnino, it soon became apparent, would reference the shooting but, like the typewriter, it would be a brief allusion to facts on the ground, not the basis to his film’s fictional world. 

The clue to a very different trajectory lies in Queer‘s soundtrack. Whereas Cronenberg’s film was scored entirely by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman’s original jazz composition, Guadagnino’s Queer goes in the opposite direction. Supplementing Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno sounds, the film features some two dozen non-period songs, starting over the credits with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” More anachronistic hits by New Order (“Leave Me Alone”) and Prince (“Musicology”) and many others new to me established that the film was not interested in creating a self-contained mythology or recreating an historical period drama but in making bridges from the past into the present, playfully addressing the present — and doing so in part by a catalogue of Burroughs’ enduring creative influence on other artists, from David Cronenberg to Kurt Cobain. 

1950s Postcard

A tension between past and present is unavoidable given the ambiguous sexual politics at the heart of Burroughs’ novel, which made any adaptation seven decades on bold and risky. It would certainly be easy to misconstrue Burroughs’ Queer as a narrative of internalised Cold War homophobia and nothing more, missing the way Lee performs the part of the Ugly American as a critique of imperialism, holding up a dark mirror to the culture that demonised homosexuals and heroin addicts. Guadagnino could possibly have gone there, although it would have been impossible to retain the other side to Lee’s demonisation, which plays out through his many outrageously racist routines, anti-Semitic jokes, and self-loathing sex tourism humour. Instead of retaining these abject and abjecting fantasies, the film keeps only tasters and a brief exchange — when Lee refuses to pay a Mexican cabdriver the asking price — to indicate the colonialist entitlement of expatriate Americans. But if it looks as if it shies away from the novel’s difficult politics by redacting the routines that made Queer a dry run for Naked Lunch, that would be to miss the genius of the film, which is the way that Guadagnino translates a verbal performance into a visual one.

Even the few hostile reviewers have granted that the visuals of Queer are ravishingly gorgeous, observing that the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, its Thai DoP, “makes the fantasy sequences feel vital and real and the more realistic elements feel vaguely dreamy,” as one put it, while as another noted, the uncanny effect is like being taken inside an intoxicated Technicolour 1950s postcard Mexico. This unsettling poetic quality in the filming goes together with Stefano Baisi’s design that uses paintings, soundstages, mattes and miniatures to create a dreamlike effect. I’d spotted this aesthetic already in the screenplay, which featured several diorama models (“The diorama seems now something like the sets in Synechdoche, New York,” I had noted in my annotations, presciently as it turned out). The film therefore embodied my reading of Burroughs’ novel, which saw through its apparent realism — and remember: it is unique in his oeuvre for appearing to be the realistic narrative of a relationship — as a sham. Thinly fictionalising Burroughs’ real-life experiences of 1951, his Queer tried to pass itself off as realism, but it breaks down as his narrative falls apart together with his own identity as a coherent character. Accordingly, the film is set in a Mexico of the mind, a real-world geography reshaped by Lee’s agonising inability to engage with place or connect with people except through the all-consuming, shattering fantasies of his desire.

There’s a superficial similarity therefore between Guadagnino’s decision to film the Mexico City of Queer at the Cinecittà studios in Rome and Cronenberg’s filming of Tangier on a Toronto soundstage (although that was forced on him due to the outbreak of the first Gulf War). However, the unreal city of Queer is consistent with the tormenting isolation and instability of its central protagonist, evidenced in a scene early on when, with a TV on the wall tuned to hissing static, Lee sits in a bar and turns first monochrome and then semi-transparent while the sound of other drinkers fades out. The point is clinched shortly after when (in a scene faithful to the novel) Lee takes Allerton to the cinema to see Cocteau’s film Orphée: as a phantom arm reaches out to caress the object of his desire, we watch Orpheus on the screen-within-the-screen being led through to the other side of a mirror into what Cocteau called “the Zone.” And so, while Guadagnino’s film is meticulous historically in certain respects, it wasn’t shot on location and the artifice is played up so as to display, in the director’s own words, the “private reverie of a largely unreliable narrator. What’s universal about the story is its fidelity to raw feelings and the suffering this removal from the real world causes.”

Raw Feelings

I should have known better — how could I know the novel by heart and yet miss it? — but as much as I was ravished by the stylised visuals of Queer so was I floored by Daniel Craig’s interpretation of Burroughs’ persona, William Lee. From our video conference discussions, I knew Craig saw Lee as horny in an immature, adolescent kind of way, but still I wasn’t ready to see up on the big screen a version of Burroughs as a man of physical passion, an intensely sensual, sexy man. Hot and sweaty, muscular and naked, Craig’s Lee is a painfully vulnerable prisoner of love, a victim of his own insatiable desires. 

The fever dream of amour fou that takes over the opening third of Queer depends crucially on Lee’s relationship with Allerton, his reluctant lover. Reviewers seem divided between some who find it “never feels entirely believable” and others who say “their relationship is entirely believable” — an understandable division, given how hot and cold Allerton blows and how inscrutable he remains. I saw his illegibility — is he queer? Is he bicurious? Is he a capricious user? Is he indifferent to desire? Does he know what he is? — as a kind of mirror for Lee, a projection of his own inability to understand himself. But I had also always seen Allerton as essentially unworthy, a nobody — Burroughs’ novel paints him ambivalently — so that Lee’s obsessive pursuit is more obviously a fantasy in excess of the real, suffering the blinding self-delusion of love. But as played by Drew Starkey, Allerton here is not a ringer for Lee except perhaps as a romantically idealised version: whereas Craig gets more and more louche in the heat as his white linen suit gets sweatier and sweatier, Starkey remains neat and clean in his preppy clothes — pleated trousers, pressed shirts — and has the easy good looks of a male model. Like the Baked Alaska in Lee’s joke (taken verbatim from the novel), we see him as hot on the outside but cold on the inside. In contrast to Allerton, and playing off against the artifice of the unreal city, Craig’s raw sexual desire comes across as both totally authentic and masochistically tormenting. How long, as Burroughs would write in his final novel, “How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’?” 

Sympathy for the Devil

Daniel Craig’s brave, bold, and rightly lauded performance is, of course, as far removed as imaginable from the laconic cool icon of Peter Weller’s Lee. However, the more important contrast is not between the casting choices of Cronenberg and Guadagnino but within the performances of Craig himself. Like everyone else, I had seen the casting of Craig as very “interesting” — meaning: I had no idea how it would work. It would have been hard to predict his alternation of restless energetic masculinity (shown in the decisive way he moves or slams down his endless tequila shots) and vulnerable inner torment (shown chiefly in his eyes). His Lee is both cynically funny in his delivery of key lines and pathetic in his eagerness to please, as when giving Allerton an excruciating “old-world” bow (deriving from a line in the novel that gave rise to the title “Naked Lunch” via Jack Kerouac misreading the phrase “naked lust” from the manuscript of Queer). In short, Craig is unrecognisable to anyone who knows him from the role that defined his career, as the cool, suave, entirely superficial secret service agent, 007.

Craig’s star charisma and stellar acting elicit a compassion for Lee that makes an otherwise repellent character sympathetic and in turn humanizes Burroughs. The transformation of Craig from James Bond into William Lee now struck me as very carefully calculated. It wasn’t about giving Burroughs’ alter ego the kind of masculinity with which he identified (as I might have suspected). What it was about I found evidenced in the film’s two brilliant cameo performances, by Jason Schwartzman (hilarious as one of the gay characters in the Ship Ahoy bar) and Lesley Manville (even more hilarious as Dr Kotter, the cackling Annie Oakley botanist in the jungle who leads Lee and Allerton towards taking yagé). In each case the actors are simply unrecognisable. It’s all about transformation, the revelation of hidden depths and inner potentials. And what makes this eerily appropriate is that, in giving expression to a sexual and emotional depth suppressed by the iconic image of Bond, Daniel Craig also gave expression to precisely the inner turmoil of Burroughs that was on show in his early novella but which had been hidden for decades behind his own icy cool iconic image. 

Coincidentally — giving that word the significance it has in Burroughs’ world — Craig’s performance in Queer actually returned him to one of his own earliest parts, his breakthrough role in fact, when, 25 years earlier, starring alongside Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, he had played George Dyer, the disturbed lover taken up by the painter during the 1960s, in Love is the Devil (1998), John Maybury’s brutal, brilliant study of loneliness, creativity, and destructive inner demons. The twist is that, for Craig, the younger lover and older predator roles are now reversed. The connection between Bacon and Burroughs as radical queer artists and friends generates a typically Burroughsian point of intersection, one that confirms Craig’s casting is not a wildcard but his destiny, a match made in heaven. To use one icon to play another icon is one thing. To resurrect the actor’s own past as a way to annul the limitations imposed by his iconic identity, and to use that transformation to visualise a parallel transformation for the writer, exposing the queer man behind the cool junky secret-agent myth — it’s a remarkable thing.

Mysterious and Unsettling

Craig’s towering performance is sure to earn him nominations; but whether Queer as a whole wins awards may depend on how critics understand its hybrid, composite nature as a Guadagnino film. When I first learnt of the project, I anticipated as much: “If the director of Call Me By Your Name is ideally placed to do justice to the romance story of queer desire,” I wrote in a piece for the Allen Ginsberg blog, “the truly dark fantasmatic core of Queer will need the director of Suspiria” (his 2018 remake of an Italian horror movie). Mashing irreconcilable film styles and worlds together has naturally baffled reviewers, and the narrative structure doesn’t help, as Lee’s pursuit of contact through sex with Allerton in Mexico City segues into his pursuit of telepathy from taking yagé in the jungle — scenes which have no source in Burroughs’ novel and that are by turns comic and moving and viscerally psychedelic — until the film ends up in an abstract symbolic territory that channels David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. At one point, Joan makes a brief, very strange dream appearance which I didn’t understand at all, and that tempted me to ask the woman in the next seat in the auditorium for an explanation — since I had found myself sitting beside Ronia Ava, the Finnish actress who plays the part. I was held back by shyness and an acceptance of mystery as integral to the film.

Some reviewers got the point, but even those who think they don’t get it actually do when criticising Queer on the grounds that it “ultimately suffers from an identity crisis, leaving viewers puzzled by its intentions.” If you want a satisfyingly coherent, good-looking and well-made story with credible plot and character, you’re watching the wrong Guadagnino film of 2024: Challengers has been a commercial hit because it doesn’t leave inexplicable loose ends and internal contradictions, or combine beauty with horror and the poignant with the weird, or risk polarising its audience with uncertain shifts in tone and style and strange twists in structure. In 1952 Burroughs had left his novella unfinished because it was unfinishable; but then all his work lacks finish, in the double sense of polish and completeness. Seventy years later, its cinematic version adds an ending but remains open-ended, inconclusive, ongoing. What I love about Queer is therefore also what makes it a difficult film, a film that is queer in form as well as in content and name. “For the one thing that would make Queer untrue to its title,” as I put it myself in the 2010 edition of Burroughs’ novel, “would be to explain away all that makes it so mysterious and unsettling.” And that is why, enchanting and challenging in equal measure, the Queer of Luca Guadagnino does justice to the Queer of William Burroughs.

Introduction

On publication in 1983, The Place of Dead Roads was received as William Burroughs’ long-awaited Western, a project originally announced two decades before.¹ Forming the second instalment of an emerging trilogy, the novel continued the use of genre fiction found in Cities of the Red Night (1981), with much of its action set against the backdrop of the late nineteenth-century frontier. This evocation of a lost world of outlaw societies is partly indebted to Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926), the autobiography of a convict that made a lasting impression on Burroughs when he first read the book as an adolescent.² Yet the primary influence that Burroughs cited for his ‘Western’ was an author as far removed from the genre as can reasonably be imagined. As Burroughs stated in his 1985 introduction to Queer: ‘While I was writing The Place of Dead Roads, I felt in spiritual contact with the late English writer Denton Welch, and modelled the novel’s hero, Kim Carsons, directly on him’.³ The novel’s unusual dedication accordingly reads: ‘To Denton Welch, For Kim Carsons’.⁴ 

In the last two decades of his life, Burroughs repeatedly shared his respect for Welch’s work. Prior to this point, familiar literary influences had recurred throughout Burroughs’ interviews (a roster of names including Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene and Jean Genet). In the 1980s, Welch suddenly took centre-stage: ‘Lots of writers have influenced me, particularly Denton Welch’;⁵ ‘Denton Welch […] has influenced me more than any other writer’;⁶ ‘When asked what writer has most directly influenced my own work I can answer without hesitation: Denton Welch’.⁷ 

As these examples show, Burroughs was unstinting in his praise for Welch’s work and unequivocal in crediting him as his greatest influence. Yet he did so without elaborating in detail on the precise nature of how this influence manifested itself. Instead, in discussing The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs claimed Welch as both lead protagonist and co-author, as detailed in a 1981 interview with Bill Rich for the zine Talk Talk:⁸

Denton Welch is actually Kim Carsons in the new book. I sort of kidnapped him to be my hero. And so much of it is written in the style of Denton Welch. It’s table tapping, my dear. He’s writing beyond the grave and I should certainly dedicate the book to him.⁹ 

Despite his attention-grabbing claims of posthumous authorship, Burroughs’ relationship with Welch has continued to evade discussion. Critics have yet to examine why Burroughs embraced Welch so closely, so late in his literary career, and precisely how he believed that Welch had informed his work. I intend to shed light on Burroughs’ claims for Welch’s significance by showing that the kinship he felt with the author was due not to a shared prose style, but instead to the writers’ mutual depictions of adolescent outsiders and the means by which Welch’s biography set an example that Burroughs could apply to his own literary development. Doing so will help to explain the intimate relationship that Burroughs felt with Welch, in spite of the manifold differences between the two writers’ backgrounds, as can be established by a brief introduction to Welch’s life and work.

Denton Welch

Whilst attracting many notable admirers in his lifetime, Welch’s small body of work, his autobiographical focus, and his exacting devotion to minutia have helped to ensure his reputation remains that of a cult figure (in the words of Jim Nawrocki, ‘a writer’s writer and, in particular, a gay writer’s writer’).¹⁰ Born in Shanghai in 1915, Welch was the youngest of three sons to an English father and American mother. After spending much of his childhood in China, he was educated in England from the age of nine. Welch’s mother, to whom her youngest son was particularly close, died shortly before Welch’s twelfth birthday. After finishing his time at Repton school (from which he briefly fled at the beginning of his final year, as recounted in his first novel, Maiden Voyage), Welch enrolled at Goldsmith School of Art. In 1935, the 20 year-old art student was hit by a car whilst cycling. The severity of his injuries (including a fractured spine) forced Welch to spend the remainder of his life as a partial invalid, devoting himself mainly to writing (rather than painting), and subject to frequent bouts of illness. He died in 1948, having published two novels dealing with his adolescence, Maiden Voyage (1943) and In Youth is Pleasure (1945). Posthumous publications include the story collection, Brave and Cruel (1949); a final novel concerned with the period following Welch’s accident, A Voice Through a Cloud (1950); a further collection of stories and poems, A Last Sheaf (1951); Welch’s Journals (1952); the novella, I Left My Grandfather’s House (1958); and the poetry collection, Dumb Instrument (1976). An expanded edition of the Journals appeared in 1984, followed by an extensive collection of Welch’s published and unpublished shorter prose, Fragments of a Life Story (1987). 

The wildly contrasting cultural spheres inhabited by Burroughs and Welch make Burroughs’ claims for the author’s influence seem particularly incongruous. Welch’s Journals depict a pastoral England of bicycle trips, countryside picnics and visits to antique shops, a parochial world far removed from the bohemian subcultures associated with Burroughs. To emphasise this culture clash, it’s worth considering the comparative responses of two English literary contemporaries to the two writers’ work. Welch’s key champion was Edith Sitwell, whose enthusiastic praise helped to launch his literary career: after reading his essay ‘Sickert at St Peter’s’ in Horizon in 1942, Sitwell proclaimed Welch ‘a born writer!’ (a phrase she repeated three times in her foreword to Maiden Voyage).¹¹ Conversely, her famously negative response to Burroughs appeared in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement, following the paper’s 1963 publication of John Willett’s damning appraisal, ‘UGH..’. Sitwell’s contribution to the resulting correspondence records her pleasure at Willett’s ‘very right-minded review of a novel by a Mr. Burroughs (whoever he may be)’, before archly closing, ‘I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories. I prefer Chanel Number 5’.¹² Similarly divergent attitudes to the two writers are provided by the novelist Barbara Pym (wry chronicler of churchgoing women in postwar England). In the mid-1950s, Pym wrote in her diaries of being ‘besotted’¹³ with ‘darling Denton’, leading her to make pilgrimages to his former homes in London and Kent.¹⁴ By contrast, her diaries record an equally forceful response to Burroughs: in March 1963, Pym summarises her year so far as one of ‘violence, death and blows’, typified by her typewriter being stolen, her publisher’s rejection of her latest novel, the UK publication of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and ‘reading The Naked Lunch‘.¹⁵ 

Despite their many differences, Burroughs came to share the marked devotion shown by these other aficionados of Welch’s writing, characterised by a feeling of kinship towards the author and his work. Another of Welch’s English admirers, Alan Bennett, captures this feeling of identification in his own description of first reading Welch’s Journals: ‘he seemed a sympathetic voice and – a characteristic of books read when young – seemed to be speaking particularly to me’.¹⁶ The closeness that Burroughs felt with Welch is shown in his own habit of familiarly referring to the author as ‘Denton’ (‘I’m sure he won’t mind my calling him by his first name’).¹⁷

Though Burroughs only began citing Welch as an influence in later life, he first read his work in the time of its original publication. In the Talk Talk interview, Burroughs remembered reading him ‘back in 1947 or 48 when he was still alive. Kerouac read him. I thought he was great’.¹⁸ Elsewhere, Burroughs dates this first reading to ‘1946 or thereabouts’,¹⁹ though Allen Ginsberg’s contemporary journal suggests that Welch circulated amongst the Beat writers earlier than Burroughs remembered: in a 1944 entry, Ginsberg includes Maiden Voyage in a list of Burroughs’ reading,²⁰ whilst a later entry has In Youth is Pleasure as part of Ginsberg’s own ‘Reading List’ for May 1946.²¹ This shared reading of Welch demonstrates the Beats’ characteristic tendency to elevate the status of otherwise marginalised figures, shown by Gerald Nicosia’s report that, in the early 1950s, Kerouac inscribed a copy of Maiden Voyage to his friend, Justin Brierly, lamenting ‘that none of the 15th Street book dealers would buy it even though Welch was the literary predecessor of the much touted Capote’ (a comparison that also indicates the Beats’ sensitivity to the latent queer sexuality of Welch’s work).²² 

Burroughs evidently remembered these initial readings of Welch with fondness. Matthew Levi Stevens notes that he praised Welch during his years in England, ‘enthusing about him to friends in London like C.J. Bradbury Robinson in the late 1960s and Jim Pennington of Aloes Press in the early 1970s (the latter at the time that Hamish Hamilton had published new UK editions of Maiden Voyage and the Journals).²³ Yet Burroughs only began making public statements on Welch after becoming fully reacquainted with his output, a rediscovery that he credited to Cabell Hardy, Burroughs’ friend and student at Naropa University: ‘In 1976 I spent the winter in Boulder, Colorado. Cabell Hardy, with whom I shared an apartment, managed to borrow Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure, A Voice Through a Cloud, The Journals, a book of short stories called Brave and Cruel, and a volume called A Last Sheaf‘.²⁴ Over the following years, Burroughs would duly discuss Welch’s work in his Naropa lectures on Creative Reading.²⁵

In the foreword that he wrote for E.P. Dutton’s 1985 edition of In Youth is Pleasure, Burroughs suggests that on first reading Welch in the 1940s he had been insufficiently appreciative: ‘I was not overly impressed at the time. I didn’t yet know I was a writer. It was not until I reread Denton in 1976 that I realized the full extent of his influence’.²⁶ In particular, on revisiting Welch, Burroughs must have been struck by the similarities between Welch’s protagonists and his own Audrey Carsons, the autobiographical adolescent introduced in The Wild Boys (1971) and Port of Saints (1973), and precursor to Kim Carsons in The Place of Dead Roads. Like Welch in his first two novels (and many of his short stories), in The Wild Boys and Port of Saints Burroughs draws on his own past to depict isolated, misfit boys whom others treat with animosity and suspicion. Yet there is a slipperiness in Burroughs’ identification of this connection that obscures the autobiographical nature of his adolescent characters, specifically due to the fact that he credits both Audrey and Kim to ‘Denton Welch’. In a 1983 conversation with Nicholas Zurbrugg, this dogged insistence on his characters’ connection to Welch leads to understandable confusion for his interviewer:

WB: A writer that I said quite a lot about, a writer of whom I am more influenced that by any other is Denton Welch.

NZ: In what respect?

WB: Well, Kim Carsons, the hero of my latest novel, The Place of Dead Roads, is Denton Welch.

NZ: So it’s a sort of homage?

WB: No, not a homage, not a homage. He is Denton Welch. He’s derived from Denton Welch as revealed in the books. He’s the character of Denton Welch. Audrey and Kim Carsons, who are the same person – they literally are Denton Welch. You’ve not read Denton Welch?

NZ: No.

WB: Well, if you really knew his work, you’d see it immediately.

NZ: So you might actually be quoting from his work?

WB: No, it isn’t quoting. It’s just like his voice, it’s his style.27

Despite his denial here, Burroughs does in fact quote Welch in The Place of Dead Roads, incorporating Welch’s descriptive passages into his own work. For example, following a covert rendezvous in London, Burroughs describes Kim walking away ‘with a vague uneasy feeling of universal damage and loss’.²⁸ The phrase is taken from the opening pages of A Voice Through a Cloud, in which Welch recounts the morning of his life-changing accident and how he had interrupted his cycling journey to stop at a café in ‘a small eighteenth-century house […]. Looking at the sides of the windows, I saw that some of the beautiful little brass handles on the shutters were broken or missing. I was given a vague uneasy feeling of universal damage and loss’.²⁹ 

Additionally, there is a scene in which Kim’s horse turns on its rider: ‘Kim swore that he would never again become involved with a horse. He hated their hysteria, their stubborn malice, and their awful yellow teeth’.³⁰ This last description is lifted from Maiden Voyage:

I had not ridden since I was ten years old, when my horrible little black pony had at last been given away. How I had hated it! Once it had broken out of the stable and had galloped through the roses and over the lawns, showing its awful yellow teeth.³¹

Burroughs repeatedly turns to this passage when describing the individuality of Welch’s voice, writing in his foreword to In Youth is Pleasure: ‘After I reread [Welch’s] work, the extent of his influence became apparent to me. Also the fact that I had memorized whole passages and looked forward to them as I read like familiar landmarks’.³² Quoting the ‘awful yellow teeth’ from Maiden Voyage, Burroughs asks his reader, ‘Who but Denton could have written these lines?’.³³ He quotes the same passage in his essay ‘Creative Reading’, noting that ‘Style, the manner of writing, the choice of one word rather than another, may be so distinctive that you read one sentence and you know who wrote it’.³⁴ It is ironic, therefore, that Burroughs should utilise Welch’s ‘unique’ description of ‘awful yellow teeth’ in The Place of Dead Roads, creating a situation in which the reader may read ‘one sentence’ and yet remain unclear precisely ‘who wrote it’. 

A similar appropriation of Welch’s words, this time credited, appears in Burroughs’ poem, ‘Fear and the Monkey‘ (published by the Danish magazine Pearl in 1978, and later collected in The Burroughs File (1984)). Taking its title from Welch’s poem of the same name, Burroughs’ text is accompanied by a note in which he describes the work as ‘a Oui-Ja board poem’ drawn from a number of sources (including Welch’s Dumb Instrument).³⁵ Despite oblique borrowings from Welch’s original verse (the phrase ‘Sweeter than rose leaves in closed jars’³⁶ echoed by Burroughs’ ‘With rose leaves in closed jars’), the result remains typically Burroughsian, serving to demonstrate that, even when he is directly appropriating Welch’s work, Burroughs’ writing does not convincingly replicate Welch’s ‘voice’ and ‘style’.³⁷

Among Burroughs’ other claims in his interview with Zurbrugg, the assertion that ‘Audrey and Kim Carsons […] literally are Denton Welch’ heightens the confusion by eliding distinctions between four separate figures: Audrey Carsons of The Wild Boys and Port of Saints; Kim Carsons of The Place of Dead Roads; Denton Welch, the real-life author; and ‘Denton Welch’, the character in Welch’s books. Welch’s first and last novel are explicitly presented as autobiographical (with the first-person narrators of Maiden Voyage and A Voice Through a Cloud bearing the author’s name), and although In Youth is Pleasure is written in the third-person and concerns ‘Orvil Pym’, the character is recognisably the same as that found in the other two novels (as Burroughs states in the Talk Talk interview, ‘He’s only got one character and it’s always him’).³⁸ In stating that Kim Carsons ‘is Denton Welch’, therefore, Burroughs does not distinguish between Welch the writer and Welch’s literary depictions of his younger self. There is also the irony that, though Burroughs describes Kim as ‘derived’ from Welch, he also notes that Kim is the ‘same person’ as Audrey Carsons, a character whose introduction in The Wild Boys, by his own testimony, precedes his rediscovery of Welch in the 1970s. Indeed, in the Talk Talk interview, Burroughs retroactively credits Welch as having helped to inspire the figure of Audrey, albeit without his conscious awareness: ‘I didn’t realize the extent to which he had influenced me or the extent to which the character Audrey Carsons was derived from Denton Welch until I reread him in 1976’.³⁹ Most notably, in crediting Welch as the inspiration for his characters, Burroughs fails to acknowledge that Audrey and Kim Carsons are primarily autobiographical creations, who owe less to Welch’s work than they do to Burroughs’ own past. 

Separating these points helps to cast Burroughs’ use of Welch in The Place of Dead Roads in a different light. Although Burroughs explained that ‘I sort of kidnapped him to be my hero’, the sequence of events supports a different conclusion; that Burroughs reread Welch in 1976, recognised the similarities between Welch’s self-portraits and his own autobiographical figure of Audrey in The Wild Boys and Port of Saints, and modified this character into Kim in The Place of Dead Roads with a newly conscious awareness of the connection to Welch’s work.

With this in mind, Burroughs’ more fanciful claims for The Place of Dead Roads can be discounted as hyperbole, as when stating in conversation with Ted Morgan, ‘I could pass off whole sections of that as an undiscovered manuscript by Denton Welch and everyone would say it’s true’.⁴⁰ On the contrary, it’s hard to establish convincing comparisons between Burroughs and Welch’s style, beyond the fact that both write episodic books with a disregard for literary convention (as Robert Philips notes, Welch ‘eschewed scenic descriptions, plots, motivations, climaxes, and epiphanies’, all points that could be equally applied to Burroughs).⁴¹ Instead, Burroughs’ suggestion that an extract of The Place of Dead Roads could be mistaken for the lost work of Welch indicates more about his profound sense of identification with Welch’s protagonists than it does about literary style, as a closer consideration of the authors’ characters will show.

‘A slimy, morbid youth’ 

The defining feature of Burroughs and Welch’s adolescent characters is their isolation and pervasive sense of difference. As Aaron Kunin notes, ‘No one else in Welch’s books is like Welch’,⁴² and throughout The Place of Dead Roads Kim’s outsider status is similarly enforced (‘It wasn’t anything he actually did, or might do. He just did not fit‘).⁴³ Kim’s lack of sympathy with his surroundings is in keeping with Burroughs’ earlier depiction of Audrey Carsons, introduced in The Wild Boys as ‘a thin pale boy his face scarred by festering spiritual wounds. […] He spent sleepless nights weeping into his pillow from impotent rage’.⁴⁴ Showing the parallels Burroughs must have recognised on later rereading Welch, Maiden Voyage finds Welch similarly suffering from private unhappiness: ‘I lay face downwards on the bed, feeling utterly miserable, crying into the pillow until it was wet and clammy’.⁴⁵ 

These resonances between Burroughs and Welch are evidently informed by similar experiences of childhood and adolescence. Burroughs’ account of his formative years in the prologue of Junky (1953) sets a template for the adolescent characters who proliferate in his later work, with Len Gutkin commenting on the link that leads from the prologue to Burroughs’ first novel to The Place of Dead Roads (noting that, by the latter, ‘the bullied, Wilde-reading child of Junky will have been transformed into the cowboy Kim Carsons. Kim begins not as a gunslinger but as a radically exaggerated version of the autobiographical Lee in Junky‘s preface’).⁴⁶ Junky‘s description of Burroughs’ younger self demonstrates clear parallels with Welch’s own experiences of youthful otherness, as identified in James Methuen-Campbell’s biography, Denton Welch: Writer and Artist (2002). Where Burroughs recalls, ‘I was timid with the other children and afraid of physical violence’,⁴⁷ Methuen-Campbell notes that Welch was ‘solitary by nature and disinclined to join in with the rough-and-tumble games of other boys’.⁴⁸ Of his adolescent years, Burroughs writes, ‘I never liked competitive team games and avoided these whenever possible’;⁴⁹ describing Welch’s early days at school, Methuen-Campbell reports that ‘team games really did not appeal to him in the least’.⁵⁰ 

These foundational experiences of alienation are at the forefront of Burroughs’ and Welch’s depictions of their younger selves, producing inevitable crossover between the two. Burroughs memorably describes Kim as ‘a slimy, morbid youth of unwholesome proclivities’, and the same phrases appear in Welch’s own self-portraits.⁵¹ In the story ‘A Party’ (first collected in A Last Sheaf), Welch presents himself aged 20, noting that ‘”Morbid” was the word his aunt would have used for him. She always made the adjective sound particularly disgraceful’;⁵² and an incomplete story (published in Fragments of a Life Story as ‘An Afternoon with Jeanne’) has Welch write of his twelve year-old self: ‘It is wickedly easy to make a child feel degenerate. Now that my mother was dead, both at home and at school I was made to feel lazy, unnatural, vain. The word “unwholesome” rather describes the character they tried to pin on to me’.⁵³ For both Burroughs and Welch, the labels ‘morbid’ and ‘unwholesome’ not only emphasise their characters’ sense of isolation, but also act as coded signifiers of sexual difference (reinforced by the decadent terms that Welch describes being cast in by his family: ‘lazy, unnatural, vain’).

Whilst such passages exemplify the kinship that Burroughs evidently felt with Welch, these particular similarities to The Place of Dead Roads are presumably coincidental (‘An Afternoon with Jeanne’ first appeared in print four years after Burroughs’ novel, and though Welch uses the descriptor ‘morbid’ in the earlier published ‘A Party’, Burroughs previously uses the term in relation to Audrey in The Wild Boys).⁵⁴ However, at least one passage in The Place of Dead Roads shows Burroughs directly invoking a specific scene from Welch’s work, resulting in a moment of sexualised transvestism without parallel in Burroughs’ writing. In Maiden Voyage, Welch describes the illicit thrill that he experiences as, staying with family friends, he secretly dresses in clothes from their daughter’s bedroom (‘With rising excitement I opened the wardrobe to look at Vesta’s clothes’). His transformation is completed with a generous application of make-up: 

I was not at all restrained. I used everything I could find. I sunk my eyes in wells of blue eye-shadow and arched thin black eyebrows above them. I covered my cheeks with brick-dust rouge and my lips with scarlet lipstick.

By the time I had finished, the profession to which I belonged was quite unmistakeable.⁵⁵

The scene is incorporated into The Place of Dead Roads with a supernatural twist, as Burroughs describes Kim’s late mother and her interest in the occult (suggesting Burroughs’ own mother‘s preoccupation with ‘psychic phenomena’).⁵⁶ Here, donning make-up and a dress leads to Kim’s sexual consummation with his mother’s spirit companion: 

She’d been into table-tapping and crystal balls and had her spirit guides. One that Kim liked especially was an Indian boy called Little Rivers.

Once when she was out Kim put on one of her dresses and made up his face like a whore and called Little Rivers and next thing the dress was torn off him oh he did it of course but the hands weren’t his and then he was squirming and moaning while Little Rivers fucked him with his legs up and he blacked out in a flash of silver light.⁵⁷

The detail of whorish make-up and the absence of similar moments of cross-dressing elsewhere in Burroughs’ work indicate that the passage is a veiled tribute to Maiden Voyage (though the differences in style between the two scenes, not least Burroughs’ explicit sexuality, emphasises the unlikelihood of The Place of Dead Roads being mistaken for a lost work by Welch).

This scene in Maiden Voyage neatly demonstrates the tendency towards transgressive behaviour that is most thoroughly documented in Welch’s second novel of adolescence, In Youth is Pleasure. The charged and oblique sexuality of this book is captured in Matthew Clarke’s description of Welch’s work showing ‘the emergence in adolescence of a relation to bodily pleasure that remains queerly undefined and unassimilable’.⁵⁸ It is telling, therefore, that In Youth is Pleasure was Burroughs’ Welch book of choice when listing his ten favourite novels in 1980 (for The People’s Almanac’s Book of Lists #2).⁵⁹ Turning to this novel in detail helps to further establish Burroughs’ relationship to Welch’s depictions of adolescence, illuminating how, by ‘kidnapping’ Welch for The Place of Dead Roads, he was able to retroactively enfranchise Welch’s powerless protagonists.

In Youth is Pleasure

In Youth is Pleasure draws on the summer of 1930, which Welch spent, aged fifteen, with his father and two older brothers in a country hotel in Surrey. Writing to his publisher, Herbert Read, Welch explained: ‘What I wanted to show in this small book was the secret, lonely life of an adolescent boy, quite different to his life on the surface with other people’.⁶⁰ Amply fulfilling his ambition, the short, plotless novel follow the experiences of Orvil Pym, scarred by the death of his mother and presented as a singular and solitary adolescent misfit, with both a passion for antique curios and a fascination with masochistic rituals, bodily functions and various other taboos. The novel’s content caused wariness among Welch’s supporters: according to the author, Edward Sackville-West advised him ‘not to publish such a book’,⁶¹ and Read was in partial agreement, cautioning, ‘The picture of the hero you present is one which most people will find perverse and even unpleasant’.⁶² Welch’s partner, Eric Oliver, shared his own view that the book was ‘readable, but unwholesome’,⁶³ and on publication In Youth is Pleasure was duly criticised by the Times Literary Supplement for its author’s ‘school-boy relish for the grotesque’.⁶⁴

This tendency towards the grotesque flourishes in the startling imagery of Orvil’s invasive private fantasies. An example occurs towards the end of the novel, as the summer holidays draw to a close and Orvil forms a nightmarish image of the school he must return to:

suddenly he had a vision of the river flowing beneath the old toll-bridge. It was swollen with the filth of ten thousand cities. Sweat, excrement, blood, pus poured through the stone arches. The filth curled into marbled patterns, streaked into horrible arabesques . . .⁶⁵

Here, Welch’s hyper-vivid imagery bears comparison with a characteristic scene from Naked Lunch (1959): ‘broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil’.⁶⁶ Alongside the passages’ shared preoccupation with excrement, in both examples the use of ‘arabesques’ shows a debt to a Gothic tradition (hinting at Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque).⁶⁷ Another of Orvil’s fantasies similarly foreshadows Burroughs’ savage imagery as, staying with his friend Constance, Orvil is intimidated by the stately figure of her father, Sir Robert: ‘the most grotesque pictures kept forming in his mind. […] He saw him with splits in the seat of his trousers, through which could be seen, not ordinary human flesh, but the terrifying blue flesh of the mandrill baboon’.⁶⁸ The scene readily brings to mind Naked Lunch‘s motif of the ‘purple-assed baboon’, suggesting further reasons that Burroughs concluded he had not realised the extent to which Welch had influenced him before rereading his work in the 1970s.⁶⁹ 

The overwrought imagery of In Youth is Pleasure has led Phillips to conclude that the work is ‘heavy-handed’ and ‘must ultimately be consigned to a place somewhat below that accorded Welch’s first and third novels’.⁷⁰ Yet the novel’s queer credentials have made it a particular source of fascination for many of Welch’s enthusiasts, notably the filmmaker John Waters. The novel features in Waters’ list of ‘Good Sex Reads’ and, in his book Role Models (2010), he adeptly uncovers the novel’s latent ambiguities.⁷¹ Describing In Youth is Pleasure as ‘astonishingly erotic’, Waters asks ‘Have the secret yearnings of childhood sexuality and the wild excitement of the first stirrings of perversity ever been so eloquently described?’.⁷² The writer Bernard Cooper describes a similarly strong response to his first encounter with the novel’s heady and distinctive atmosphere:

A friend gave me Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure. I was completely dumbstruck. I loved the fact that so little happened, yet the whole thing seemed charged with an amazing nascent sexuality. Everything had a sexual undertone. I kept thinking: ‘On the next page, he’s going to have sex’. But it never happened.73

Though In Youth is Pleasure is weighted with sexuality, the only sexual release in the novel takes place beyond the reader’s view. As Orvil explores the grounds of his hotel, he passes ‘the ruined stucco gates of some river garden’, with an open gap for entry: ‘Orvil, who never could resist exploring derelict places, felt impelled to get through this hole into the garden behind. He also fiercely desired some very solitary place; for the frustration and excitement inside him were becoming almost unbearable’.⁷⁴ Orvil’s private expression of this excitement is met with instant condemnation. Emerging from the garden, he finds a man waiting for him, who cries in fury: ‘”I saw you! You devil! You filthy little devil! You’ll go mad. Your eyes will drop out. And serve you right too. God is not mocked! God is not mocked!”‘.⁷⁵ 

This outraged tone of moral authority is frequently invoked in Burroughs’ work. In The Place of Dead Roads, Kim’s enemies demand ‘”What the fuck are you doing in front of decent people?“‘,⁷⁶ whilst Audrey is subjected to similar approbation in The Wild Boys, as he becomes the unwitting inmate of the Green Nun’s mental asylum: given plasticine to play with, Audrey produces ‘a naked Greek statue. That day sister’s ruler slashed down on his thin blue wrist and he was forced to write out i am a filthy little beast ten thousand times in many places’.⁷⁷ 

Though Welch and Burroughs’ protagonists suffer shared humiliations, the contrast between the unhappiness and restriction endured by Orvil Pym and the violent freedom enjoyed by Kim in The Place of Dead Roads allows Burroughs’ novel to be read as a fantasy empowering of Welch. Indeed, there are specific instances in which Kim can be found fulfilling Orvil’s fantasies. For example, when desiring to escape the grounds of his hotel, Orvil hires a canoe and, paddling upstream, submits to an eroticised fantasy of masculine self-sufficiency:

His excitement was rising. He wanted to take off all his clothes, he hated the very feel of them against his skin. He longed for the sun on his back and on his legs.

‘If only,’ he thought, ‘I could live all by myself in a tent by the river! If I could hunt for my food, and get brown and fierce and hard all over!’⁷⁸

Orvil’s unlikely wish to lead the life of an outdoorsman is attained by Kim, who lives a life free of societal constraints (‘Kim camped on the south slope, his tent hidden by trees. He baited his hook with a big purple worm and dropped it into one of the still, narrow streams’).⁷⁹ Meanwhile, a later fantasy of escape sees Orvil taking comfort in imagining a solitary life in ‘a small London room with a gas-ring’, outside of which ‘his family and the school authorities were prowling like wild beasts’.⁸⁰ In this fantasy, Orvil is able to avoid his enemies courtesy of ‘a contrivance rather like those aerial devices which waft money to the pay-desk in some old-fashioned drapery shops’: 

He had only to hang on to this wire and wish, when he would find himself swishing through the air to his destination. The long-clawed, long-toothed relations and school authorities looked up and cursed as they saw him flying gloriously free a hundred feet above their heads.⁸¹ 

Whilst Orvil can only dream of ‘flying gloriously free’, Kim (like the characters of The Wild Boys and Port of Saints) effortlessly achieves the feat of physical flight: ‘The boy is teaching Kim to fly. He soars over the water and lands on a path. Kim stands poised, thinking he can’t, and suddenly he is in the air, sweeping in to land on the path’.⁸²

Kim not only fulfils the wishes of Orvil Pym, but also takes revenge on those who would shun queer outsiders. Kim’s primary incentive in becoming an outlaw is the promise of self-defence as, weighing up his options following the death of his father, he rejects the possibility of going to New York (where he has been advised by an antique dealer that ‘there was a place for “people like you and me”‘):

Running away and living on sufferance in a ghetto? And always somebody to spit in his face and call him what the boys called him at school? […] 

Kim decides to go west and become a shootist. If anyone doesn’t like the way Kim looks and acts and smells, he can fill his grubby peasant paw.⁸³

Kim’s decision to become a gunfighter is directly motivated by the homophobic exclusion he has faced from his peers, allowing him to ensure his safety in a hostile world and to take merciless retribution against the kinds of slurs endured by Welch’s characters. In Maiden Voyage, Welch is taunted as he crosses through a train carriage crowded with schoolboys: 

As I passed a group of three one called out to the others in a mocking voice, ‘There’s a pretty boy for you!’ I almost ran so that I should not hear any more, then I locked myself into the lavatory, and although the door was tried many times I would not come out till the end of the journey.⁸⁴

A similar scene is found in In Youth is Pleasure when, escaping the stranger who condemns him as a ‘filthy little devil’, Orvil races along the river bank past a group of young men, one of whom makes ‘cat-calls and screeching whistles, calling after him in mockery, “Hullo, darling! Coo-er, look at that! What’s bitten you?”‘.⁸⁵ Whilst Welch’s characters can only flee from their tormentors, Kim exacts savage vengeance on those who accuse him of effeminacy. Entering a bar to hear one man announce to another, ‘”Now I don’t like drinkin’ in the same room with a fairy – do you, Clem?”‘, Kim reaches for his gun and fires: ‘Both assholes are dead before they hit the floor. […] As Kim looks down at the two bodies crumpled there, spilling blood and brains on the floor, he feels good – safer. Two enemies will never bother him again’.⁸⁶ In his study Queer Burroughs (2001), Jamie Russell identifies this scene as a defining moment that ‘marks the epitome of Burroughs’ queer project; the sad, shy, gay child is transformed into a self-fulfilled, self-reliant (and thus masculine) individual’.⁸⁷ By viewing ‘Kim Carsons’ and ‘Denton Welch’ as interchangeable characters, Burroughs uses The Place of Dead Roads to afford Welch the posthumous tribute of being similarly transformed. 

This reappropriation of the queer outsider as a vengeful gunslinger is the key legacy of the ‘influence’ that Burroughs cited from Welch. Burroughs’ reimagining of the author as Kim Carsons acts as a protective response to the exclusion and rejection described in Welch’s books as, by ‘kidnapping’ Welch, Burroughs allows him to share in the liberation enjoyed by his own adolescent characters. Though Welch’s influence on The Place of Dead Roads may not show Burroughs writing in a way that is ‘just like his voice, it’s his style’, in creating his shootist Burroughs imagines a fantasy of justice for dispossessed gay outsiders, like the Lee of Junky‘s preface and Welch’s Orvil Pym. If Burroughs felt he had a debt to repay to Welch here, then this sense is reinforced by the example set for him by the events of Welch’s biography, and these provide a last point for understanding the significance that Welch held for Burroughs in the final decades of his life.

‘The Appalling Conclusion’

In his 1985 introduction to Queer, Burroughs wrote for the first and only time on his fatal shooting of Joan Vollmer in Mexico City in 1951. In doing so, Burroughs identifies a parallel between this event and the key moment of rupture in Welch’s life, as he paraphrases A Voice Through a Cloud  to describe ‘the fateful morning of Denton’s accident’ (turning to the passage previously referenced in The Place of Dead Roads): ‘At one point Denton had stopped to have coffee, and looking at the brass hinges on the café’s window shutters, some of them broken, he was hit by a feeling of universal desolation and loss’.⁸⁸ 

Burroughs’ focus is on the sense of impending catastrophe implicit in Welch’s account (not acknowledging that, in writing a decade after the event, Welch may have emphasised this feeling of ‘desolation and loss’ as a deliberate foreshadowing of the accident that followed). Taking Welch’s account literally, Burroughs draws a comparison between Welch’s ‘portentous second sight’⁸⁹ and his own experience in the hours before Vollmer’s death when, approaching a knife sharpener’s cart, ‘a feeling of loss and sadness that had weighed down on me all day so I could hardly breathe intensified to such an extent that I found tears streaming down my face’.⁹⁰ The introduction to Queer famously ends in Burroughs drawing the ‘appalling conclusion’ that, if not for Vollmer’s death, he would never have become a writer.⁹¹

Though he does not make the connection explicit, Burroughs’ belief that Vollmer’s death had been horrifically beyond his control and had forced his commitment to writing seems heavily indebted to his understanding of Welch’s accident. In another text published in 1985, the foreword that Burroughs wrote for In Youth is Pleasure, he speculates that the catastrophe was necessary for Welch becoming a writer: ‘He did not begin writing until after the accident. One wonders if he would have turned to writing from painting without the shattering experience of his tragic accident’.⁹² It is a question on which Welch’s biographers are in accord. For Michael De-la-Noy, the accident led Welch ‘to turn inwards on himself and to live, in his imagination, almost entirely in the past. […] Had it not been for the accident and his subsequent confinement, often for weeks at a time, to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the sick room, it is unlikely that he would ever have written a word’.⁹³ Methuen-Campbell draws a similar conclusion, believing ‘There can be little doubt that initially Denton Welch turned to writing as a distraction from his wretched physical and mental condition’.⁹⁴ 

Burroughs’ claim that Vollmer’s death ‘manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice except to write my way out’ follows the precedent set by Welch’s life, whereby a senseless and destructive accident may be retrospectively identified as supplying the impetus for artistic creation.⁹⁵ In his introduction to Queer, Burroughs draws on Welch’s experience to recast personal tragedy as the creation story of his own emergence as a writer, although this requires overlooking the glaring difference between the two examples: namely that, in referencing Welch (as Morgan notes), Burroughs was ‘identifying with the victim of the accident, as if he had been, as its instigator and survivor, the true victim of Joan’s death’.⁹⁶

Lastly, the means by which Welch’s accident provided an example for Burroughs is further suggested by a journal entry made less than a year before Burroughs’ death. In notes recorded in December 1996, Burroughs describes writing as ‘not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality’, and turns to Welch in support of this: ‘Brion Gysin hated Denton Welch. Didn’t see that it is just the petulant queerness in which he is straitjacketed – “Little Punky” – that makes his works such a great escape act’.⁹⁷ Citing the childhood nickname used by Welch’s family in Maiden Voyage (and which led Burroughs to fancifully describe Welch in 1978 as ‘sort of the original punk’), Burroughs addresses what may seem the paradox of his admiration for the author.⁹⁸ That is, despite Burroughs’ avowed antipathy towards male effeminacy and his fantasies in The Place of Dead Roads of physically assured and violent gay youth, in Welch he fervently championed an author whose protagonists are characterised by their fragile sensitivity and emotional immaturity (all details that could inform Burroughs’ charge of ‘petulant queerness’ and which, presumably, failed to earn Gysin’s approval). This journal entry provides a clue to Burroughs’ acceptance of Welch, as he frames the author’s work as an escape from the ‘straitjacket’ of his apparent limitations, an interpretation that may have been guided by De-la-Noy’s 1984 biography, Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer (a copy of which Burroughs had in his library).⁹⁹ Here, De-la-Noy emphasises ‘the physical courage and iron self-discipline’ that enabled Welch to produce his prodigious literary output in spite of the profound disadvantages of his short life and physical suffering: 

While one may indulge in the luxury of laughing at many of Denton Welch’s personal absurdities, […] one cannot at the same time remain unmoved by the realization that through all the frippery and pettiness there struggled a man with a mission – a burning need to fulfil himself as an artist.¹⁰⁰

By viewing Welch’s ‘petulant queerness’ as a straitjacket that he escaped through his work, Burroughs valorises Welch’s sexual identity as one that is implicitly masculine. Evidently, therefore, Burroughs did not view Welch and Kim Carsons as antithetical, and his foreword to In Youth is Pleasure affirms his faith in Welch’s capacity for transformation. Explaining that he has ‘drafted young Denton to play the hero of my new novel, The Place of Dead Roads‘, Burroughs asks: ‘would Denton have felt at ease in the role of a Western gunfighter? A shootist? I think he could be prevailed upon’.¹⁰¹ 

The elder Burroughs’ repeated citing of Welch as his ‘greatest influence’ shows his admiration for the author’s distinctive prose, whilst obscuring other important features underlying his respect for Welch. In suggesting ‘Kim Carsons’ and ‘Denton Welch’ to be one and the same, Burroughs avoids explicitly acknowledging the direct parallels between the authors’ shared depictions of maligned adolescents, and the extent to which Audrey and Kim Carsons are rooted in Burroughs’ own experiences. He also does not draw direct attention to his personal investment in the promise of transformation that is embodied in Welch’s determined response to his cycling accident, and which underpins his reimagining of Welch as a Wild West shootist. Yet by championing Welch’s work in interviews, essays and lectures, Burroughs returned a debt of gratitude to the author for the strength of his example. For Burroughs, seeking to overcome unhappy memories of an isolated boyhood and the trauma of his killing of Joan, Welch gave promise that such ‘straitjackets’ can be escaped through literary creation.

Bibliography

Anon., ‘Novels of the Week: In Youth is Pleasure‘, Times Literary Supplement, March 31 1945, p. 5.

Bennett, Alan, ‘Foreword’ to James Methuen-Campbell, Denton Welch: Writer and Artist (London: Tauris Parke, 2004), pp. v-viii.

Bockris, Victor, With William Burroughs: Private Conversations with a Modern Genius (London: Fourth Estate. 1997)

Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Grove Press, 2013)

—-, The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984)

—-, The Cat Inside (New York: Penguin, 2002)

—-, Cities of the Red Night (London: Picador, 1982)

—-, ‘Foreword’ to Denton Welch, In Youth is Pleasure (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1994), pp. ix-xi.

—-, Junky: The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’, ed. by Oliver Harris (New York: Penguin, 2003)

—-, Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs, ed. by James Grauerholz (London: Flamingo, 2000)

—-, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (London: Harper Perennial, 2005)

—-, The Place of Dead Roads (London: Flamingo, 1994)

—-, Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition, ed. by Oliver Harris (New York: Penguin, 2010)

—-, The Western Lands (London: Picador, 1988)

—-, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1992)

Canning, Richard, Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)

Clarke, Matthew, ‘Beyond Gay: Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure‘, Textual Practice, 34(12), 2020, pp. 2021-2036.

De-la-Noy, Michael, Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer (London: Penguin, 1986)

Ginsberg, Allen, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952, ed. by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006)

Gutkin, Len, ‘Modernist Genre Decadence: From H. G. Wells to William S. Burroughs’, Affirmations: of the modern, 5(1), 2017, pp. 29-54 <https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/2> 

Hemmer, Kurt, ‘Queer Outlaws Losing: The Betrayal of the Outlaw Underground in The Place of Dead Roads‘, in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, ed. by Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (Indiana University Press: 2019), pp. 262-273.

Hibbard, Allen, ed., Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999)

Kunin, Aaron, Character as Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)

Lotringer, Sylvère, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001)

Methuen-Campbell, James, Denton Welch: Writer and Artist (London: Tauris Parke, 2004)

Miles, Barry, William S. Burroughs: A Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014)

Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012)

Nawrocki, Jim, ‘You’ve Never Heard of Denton Welch?’, The Gay & Lesbian Review, March-April 2017 <https://glreview.org/article/youve-never-heard-of-denton-welch> 

Nicosia, Gerald, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (London: Penguin, 1986)

Phillips, Robert, Denton Welch (New York: Twayne, 1974)

Pym, Barbara, No Fond Return of Love (London: Virago, 2013)

—-, A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym, ed. by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym (London: Macmillan, 1984)

Russell, Jamie, Queer Burroughs (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

Sitwell, Edith, and others, ‘Responses to “UGH…”‘, in William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, ed. by Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 45-51.

Stevens, Matthew Levi, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs (Oxford: Mandrake, 2014)

Stevens, Michael, The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading (Archer City, TX: Suicide Press, 2009) <https://realitystudio.org/publications/road-to-interzone> 

Taylor, Steven, ed., Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg (New York: Three Rooms Press, 2018)

Waters, John, Role Models (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

—-, and Bruce Hainley, Art: A Sex Book (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003)

Welch, Dumb Instrument (London: Enitharmon Press, 1976)

—-, Fragments of a Life Story: The Collected Short Writings of Denton Welch, ed. by Michael De-la-Noy (London: Penguin, 1987)

—-, In Youth is Pleasure (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1994)

—-, Maiden Voyage (London: Faber and Faber, 2011)

—-, A Voice Through a Cloud (London: Enitharmon Press, 2004)

Notes

1 Interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review in 1965, Burroughs confirms Knickerbocker’s understanding that his next book ‘will be about the American West and a gunfighter’: ‘Yes, I’ve thought about this for years and I have hundreds of pages of notes on the whole concept of the gunfighter’; see Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 73.

2 For more on The Place of Dead Roads and You Can’t Win, see Kurt Hemmer, ‘Queer Outlaws Losing: The Betrayal of the Outlaw Underground in The Place of Dead Roads‘, in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, ed. by Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (Indiana University Press: 2019), pp. 262-273.

3 William S. Burroughs, Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition, ed. by Oliver Harris (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 131.

4 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 5.

5 Burroughs, The Cat Inside (New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 67.

6 Allen Hibbard, ed., Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 168.

7 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’ to Denton Welch, In Youth is Pleasure (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1994), pp. ix-xi (p. ix).

8 The full Talk Talk interview can be read online: <http://www.inter-zone.org/billrich.html> 

9 Lotringer, p. 497. Burroughs makes similar remarks in his 1985 introduction to Queer: ‘Whole sections came to me as if dictated, like table tapping’; see Burroughs, Queer, p. 131.

10 Jim Nawrocki, ‘You’ve Never Heard of Denton Welch?’, Gay & Lesbian Review, March-April 2017 <https://glreview.org/article/youve-never-heard-of-denton-welch> 

11 James Methuen-Campbell, Denton Welch: Writer and Artist (London: Tauris Parke, 2004), p. 117. In the 1990s, Burroughs applied the same ‘born writer’ description to Dennis Cooper for use as a blurb on the covers of Cooper’s books; see Michael Stevens, The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading (Archer City, TX: Suicide Press, 2009), p. 190. Available online at RealityStudio: <https://realitystudio.org/publications/road-to-interzone> 

12 Edith Sitwell and others, ‘Responses to “UGH…”‘, in William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, ed. by Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 45-51 (p. 49).

13 Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym, ed. by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 192.

14 Ibid., p. 196. Burroughs and Pym both introduce Welch into the landscape of their novels: in Pym’s No Fond Return of Love (1961), Viola Dace notes A Voice Through a Cloud whilst browsing her friend’s bookshelves; see Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love (London: Virago, 2013), p. 75. In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs’ narrator stops to make purchases at a bookstall: ‘From an old Frenchman smoking a Gitane I buy An Outcast of the Islands by Conrad, Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch and Brac [sic] the Barbarian by John Jakes’; see Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (London: Picador, 1982), p. 206.

15 Pym, A Very Private Eye, p. 215.

16 Alan Bennett, ‘Foreword’ to James Methuen-Campbell, Denton Welch: Writer and Artist (London: Tauris Parke, 2004), pp. v-viii (p. vi).

17 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, p. ix.

18 Lotringer, p. 498.

19 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, p. ix. 

20 Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952, ed. by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), p. 78. 

21 Ibid., p. 132. In 1947, Ginsberg lists Welch as part of an extensive sampling of the Western canon that he believes Neal Cassady ‘will have to read’ before he can write the ‘American picaresque novel’ that Ginsberg thinks he is capable of (Ibid., p. 220). In conversation with Burroughs nearly fifty years later, Ginsberg remembered In Youth is Pleasure as the only Welch book he had read: ‘Yeah, I’ve only read one, In Youth is Pleasure. Remembered that from the forties’; see Steven Taylor, ed., Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg (New York: Three Rooms Press, 2018), p. 158.

22 Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 322.

23 Matthew Levi Stevens, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs (Oxford: Mandrake, 2014), p. 181. Thanks to Jim Pennington for confirming this date.

24 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, p. ix.

25 The Naropa University Audio Archive includes an example of Burroughs discussing Welch in a Creative Reading lecture from August 1979: <http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/341>

26 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, p. ix.

27 Lotringer, pp. 580-581.

28 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, pp. 170-171.

29 Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud (London: Enitharmon Press, 2004), pp. 10-11.

30 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 20. The description is also used when Kim enters a bar and is approached by two men, one of whom ‘smiles, showing his awful yellow teeth’ (Ibid., p. 71). Elsewhere, Kim’s horse ‘lays its ears back and shows its horrible yellow teeth’ (Ibid., p. 75), whilst in The Western Lands (1987) Burroughs describes ponies’ ‘horrid yellow teeth’; see Burroughs, The Western Lands (London: Picador, 1988), p. 12.

31 Welch, Maiden Voyage (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 210.

32 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, p. ix.

33 Ibid.

34 Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Grove Press, 2013), p. 47.

35 Burroughs, The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984), p. 110

36 Welch, Dumb Instrument (London: Enitharmon Press, 1976), p. 36.

37 Burroughs, The Burroughs File, p. 110.

38 Lotringer, p. 497.

39 Ibid., p. 498.

40 Barry Miles, William S. Burroughs: A Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014), p. 556.

41 Robert Phillips, Denton Welch (New York: Twayne, 1974), p. 159.

42 Aaron Kunin, Character as Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 207.

43 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 97.

44 Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 32.

45 Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 85. Elsewhere in the novel, Welch sheds tears after escaping from a party where another boy has held him underwater in the swimming pool: ‘I locked the door and fell on my bed. In a few moments the pillow was quite wet from my hair and my tears’ (Ibid., p. 217).

46 Len Gutkin, ‘Modernist Genre Decadence: From H. G. Wells to William S. Burroughs’, Affirmations: of the modern, 5(1), 2017, pp. 29-54. Available online: <https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/2> 

47 Burroughs, Junky: The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’, ed. by Oliver Harris (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. xxxv.

48 Methuen-Campbell, p. 3.

49 Burroughs, Junky, p. xxxvi.

50 Methuen-Campbell, p. 14. 

51 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 23.

52 Welch, Fragments of a Life Story: The Collected Short Writings of Denton Welch, ed. by Michael De-la-Noy (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 292.

53 Ibid., p. 163.

54 Burroughs describes Audrey’s stories being ‘coldly rejected’ by his school magazine: ‘”Morbid” the editor told him. “We want stories that make you go to bed feeling good”‘; see Burroughs, The Wild Boys, p. 33. The scene recurs in The Place of Dead Roads, as Kim imagines suffering the fate of ‘living in some cold-water flat, peddling his short stories from editor to editor. . . . “Too morbid,” they tell him’; see Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 158. 

55 Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 208.

56 Miles, p. 22.

57 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 79. Earlier in the novel, Kim is described picking blackberries and deliberately smearing ‘the red purple juice around his mouth, “like a whore’s makeup”‘ (Ibid., p. 60).

58 Matthew Clarke, ‘Beyond Gay: Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure‘, Textual Practice, 34(12), 2020, pp. 2021-2036 (p. 2024). 

59 Stevens, p. 171.

60 Methuen-Campbell, p. 147. In another letter to Read, Welch identified the reason why, unlike his other novels, In Youth is Pleasure is written in the third-person: ‘I should like this book, since it is written in the third person, to be regarded as a fiction; chiefly because of my family. It would never do for my eldest brother to identify himself completely with the brother in the book’ (Ibid., p. 233).

61 Ibid., p. 146.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., p. 152.

64 Anon., ‘Novels of the Week: In Youth is Pleasure‘, Times Literary Supplement, March 31 1945, p. 5.

65 Welch, In Youth is Pleasure (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1994), p. 147.

66 Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 42.

67 Poe is invoked in Maiden Voyage, as Welch takes  to his bath with a copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination; see Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 230.

68 Welch, In Youth is Pleasure, p. 114.

69 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 129.

70 Phillips, p. 85.

71 John Waters and Bruce Hainley, Art: A Sex Book (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 200.

72 Waters, Role Models (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 165.

73 Richard Canning, Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 46.

74 Welch, In Youth is Pleasure, p. 37.

75 Ibid., p. 38.

76 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 36.

77 Burroughs, The Wild Boys, p. 28.

78 Welch, In Youth is Pleasure, p. 32. Orvil’s fantasy is strikingly similar to a passage in Queer, where Lee feels ‘a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do’, leading him to imagine a life of isolated self-sufficiency: ‘Lee’s plan involved a river. He lived on the river and ran things to please himself. He grew his own weed and poppies and cocaine, and he had a young native boy for an all-purpose servant’; see Burroughs, Queer, pp. 86-87.

79 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 22.

80 Welch, In Youth is Pleasure, pp. 128-129.

81 Ibid., p. 129.

82 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, p. 62.

83 Ibid., pp. 47-48.

84 Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 12.

85 Welch, In Youth is Pleasure, p. 38.

86 Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, pp. 71-72. Another scene in the novel sees Kim nonchalantly shoot a man who addresses him as ‘”You fucking fairy!”‘ (Ibid., p. 78).

87 Jamie Russell, Queer Burroughs (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 109.

88 Burroughs, Queer, pp. 131-132. 

89 Ibid., p. 132.

90 Ibid., p. 134.

91 Ibid.

92 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, p. x. 

93 Michael De-la-Noy, Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 11.

94 Methuen-Campbell, p. xi.

95 Burroughs, Queer, p. 135.

96 Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012), p. 214.

97 Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs, ed. James Grauerholz (London: Flamingo, 2000), p. 16.

98 Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: Private Conversations with a Modern Genius (London: Fourth Estate. 1997), p. 12.

99 Stevens, pp. 246-247.

100 De-la-Noy, p. 15.

101 Burroughs, ‘Foreword’, pp. ix-x.

Part of the Hendrick’s Lecture Series, organised by The Last Tuesday Society, 19th November 2010

by Rona Cran

Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, situated unassumingly on Mare Street in Hackney, is a beguiling emporium of which William S. Burroughs would no doubt have approved. There are shrunken heads on sale, and sinister bibelots (a Doll of the Dead slumps in her coffin), and Hendrick’s gin is served in teacups. A foetal piglet slumbers on a cluttered shelf, a pair of Labrador testicles float nonchalantly in formaldehyde, and the majestic, taxidermed head of a warthog charges into the luridly painted room where tonight’s lecture takes place. The locale is marvellously apt: like Burroughs, it is “dreamy and innocent”, whilst also being “ravaged and vicious”, and the sense of double exposure explored by Oliver Harris in his dexterous introduction to the recently re-issued edition of Queer is made freakishly palpable by the sight of a two-bodied lamb encased in glass, as well as the bicephalous teddy bears on sale by the till.

Although the audience is, for the most part, diffident and dishevelled, this is not a coterie evening. The lecture is remarkably well-attended, a testament to the enduring magnetism of William Burroughs, and to the erudition and clarity of vision which Harris brings to the study of his work. Tonight’s discussion centres on the largely concealed production history of Burroughs’ first trilogy — Junky, The Yage Letters and Queer — and on the writer’s excruciatingly literal equation of his manuscripts with his own body.

Harris, a distinctive figure in trademark brown fedora, begins by positing Burroughs as Holbein’s anamorphic distortion in The Ambassadors: “without this ugly act of queer vandalism, American literature makes sense,” he argues, portraying him as an unsettling stain on several canons by inserting the figures of Updike/Bellow and Ginsberg/Kerouac into the painting. The ensuing analysis of Burroughs’ problematic relationship with publication pivots elegantly around a letter to Ginsberg dated April 1952, in which he writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” The joke marks the advent of the morally indifferent comic-grotesque routine that would become Burroughs’ trademark, appearing at this moment, Harris explains, due to the proposed merger of the manuscripts of Junk (as it was originally titled) and Queer.

Harris explores the “manuscript cannibalism” through which the trilogy came about using for his analogy the vaudeville trick uncomplicatedly known as “Sawing a Woman in Half.” We see Burroughs sadomasochistically playing both the part of the magician and the woman in the box, as he both courts and rails against contradictory editorial demands. The prevarications of the fledgling writer, coupled with his publisher’s querulousness, result in a vengefully strategic deconstruction of textual unity and writerly identity (the Lee of Junky is unrecognisable from the Lee of Queer). Whilst Burroughs’ later work moves from mosaic to cut-up, famously frustrating many readers, Harris repudiates the view that his early works are simple, realist texts, from which the writer veers wildly with Naked Lunch. Fascinatingly, each text in the trilogy is revealed to be a collage, and the corpus of his early work to be quite literally “a body in pieces.”

A Few Questions and Answers with the Editor of the New Edition of William S. Burroughs’ Queer

Though the first published edition of Queer was assembled from a mix of manuscript sources, it was done with the collaboration and blessing of the author. In crafting this new edition, which is a sort of remix of manuscript sources, how do you justify to yourself creating a text that would no longer have that authoritative input from the author himself? 

I’ve always been conscious of the trust shown in me by the Burroughs Estate in granting me the tremendous privilege of editing his work, and I go to great lengths to be as rigorous as possible. I’m also very cautious, often conservative, aiming to respect the line between “correcting” and “rewriting.”

But in terms of lacking Burroughs’ imprimatur, I would say this: that what has made researching the material history of his works, and then editing those works, so fascinating, is to find myself caught up in the same processes of collaboration and contingency that always shaped his writing. Everywhere you look, you see the hand of others or indeed the hand of chance, making key decisions for Burroughs. Now, although I wouldn’t cast myself as his “collaborator,” editing is a collaborative process, and I know there is a limit in trying to do “what Burroughs would have wanted” — because he himself did not see it that way. What I have tried to do is to make all my editions as transparent as possible when it comes to both the history of the materials I’m working with and my own editing.

This new edition of Queer puts the emphasis on the text written in the 1950s and seems to consciously defuse the attention-getting preface that Burroughs wrote in 1985. Can you clarify your reasons for wanting to deflect attention from the preface back onto the 1950s text?

I’ve written at some length about this in Secret of Fascination, because there’s no doubt that Burroughs’ 1985 introduction decisively shaped how Queer has been read — or perhaps, misread. I’m not especially interested in speculating about motives, but the effect of the introduction has certainly been to obscure the narrative by explaining it away — displacing a story of homosexual desire by the death of his wife, Joan. That’s why I felt the need to move the introduction and include it as an appendix — very much as Miles and Grauerholz did in their “Restored” edition of Naked Lunch with that book’s equally influential and equally suspect “introduction” by Burroughs. If the only value of my new edition of Queer is to make it easier for readers to really encounter the narrative — to experience it for what it is: “queer,” in every sense of the word — then I’d be satisfied. 

With the new Queer and with your previous edition of Junky, the texts actually seemed to become more Burroughsian than they had been when published by Burroughs. Do you worry about how your own image of Burroughs might shape the texts?

That’s an intriguing idea, that these works have become more rather than less Burroughsian, but I don’t see it that way myself. I guess it’s hard after a while, you become so insanely familiar with all the words that you can lose track of the overall feel, almost forget what it was that drew you in in the first place.

As for “my” image of Burroughs — I really don’t think I have one. I mean, I have images, plural, of him, but I find it hard to redact or reconcile them into one. That’s one reason why, if you look at anything I’ve ever written about him, you’ll see how much I avoid making generalizing claims and prefer to keep to the particulars. I wouldn’t need to do that if I felt confident I understood him; but then again, if I felt I understood Burroughs I wouldn’t need to keep working on him…

In what ways did editing Junky, Yage Letters, and Everything Lost influence your approach to this new edition of Queer?

It wasn’t really a question of “influence,” although certainly the earlier editing gave me confidence in my working methods and taught me some lessons. After all, with editing as with most things in life, you learn by doing. However, what really counted was my familiarity with the manuscripts and their incestuously tangled histories. In that sense, Queer really didn’t stand alone, and how I approached it was certainly shaped by what I had already done with the other manuscripts.

I suppose if I were to start over again, it would have made more sense to edit Junky, Queer, and Yage Letters all together, so that no decisions were made on each individual text without considering the others, rather than one at a time — but that’s not how publishing or editing work out.

You took a trip to Mexico a few years ago. Was this helpful while working on this new edition of Queer?

In terms of my research for Queer, going to Mexico was crucial. With a certain self-reflexive irony, I was following in Burroughs’ footsteps by seeing myself as an old-style gumshoe, piecing together clues and trying to figure out who did what and when.

So in September 2006 I began what you might call location scouting, looking to identify the locales in Burroughs’ work. I started with the very first scene in the novel, which is set in the “Amsterdam Avenue Park.” I’d long been fascinated by the description of this park in Queer, especially those “concrete benches molded to resemble wood” that Lee sits on. One morning I literally walked right into the park, which is in the Colonia Roma district, and found myself looking at one of these crazy benches. Later, I came across a faded photograph of Burroughs from that era, dressed in a battered suit and fedora and looking just like an old-time detective, and he is standing in that very spot, with some of those implausible pieces of park furniture in the background. One mystery solved.

Of course, putting yourself in the place of the author doesn’t offer any practical help whatsoever in editing a text — but it creates an emotional connection, a point of intuitive identification, and that can keep you going when the odds seem against you. And more generally, my couple of weeks in Mexico City were just so weirdly Burroughsian — to list the series of coincidences I had there would make you laugh; there’s no way you’d believe the half of them — and again, that is a sort of psychic supplement, a back-brain stimulus, that works away on a deeper level than deciding whether to change a comma into a period.

David Cronenberg had to confront a lot of questions about his own sexual identity when creating his film of Naked Lunch. Did you think that editing Queer would put you into a similar position?

Funnily enough, this was a question I raised right at the start directly with James Graeurholz — who, unlike me, is very knowledgeable about these areas of sexual identity and history. But he said (I paraphrase): being a straight man hasn’t stopped you doing a good job before, why should it now? 

If Ace had accepted Queer for publication as a sequel to Junky, how do you think that might have changed Burroughs’ writing in general? Would it have set him on a different path?

The trouble with the “what if” question is that once you ask one you have to ask others: what if New Directions had not rejected Junk, and so left it to Ace Books? Would it have appeared a much more literary text? And would the text of Junk have been published as Burroughs originally intended, before Ace steered him into cannibalizing Queer to make Junkie longer? In fact, the most intriguing plan back in 1952 was for Ace to publish Junk and Queer together in one book. Can you imagine the effect of that? If everything else in Burroughs’ literary history stayed the same, the impact of that double book as the precursor to Naked Lunch would have been utterly different to Junkie published alone.

As for whether Burroughs’ path might have been different, I don’t know. From one point of view, Burroughs was a driven man during the 1950s, fulfilling his destiny as a writer even if he didn’t always know it. From another, he diced with a dozen different fates and could as easily have faded out into an old bore under a potted palm in the Parade Bar in Tangier along with English colonels in crumpled sepia linen suits and a warm martini.

Around the same time as Burroughs was writing Queer, Allen Ginsberg was writing of obsessive love in “Green Automobile” and Jack Kerouac was writing about it too in The Subterraneans. Was obsession “in the air,” or did the works encourage each other somehow? It’s especially pointed in the case of Kerouac, given that Alene Lee was the subject of Subterraneans and later helped to type up Queer.

The question is perhaps more interesting than my answer, which is that I don’t really see a connection with Kerouac, although the parallels between Burroughs and Ginsberg in terms of obsessive desire are striking. And the other side of the cultural coin is just as interesting, if you consider the “official” version of love at that time, such as the Gene Kelley-Debbie Reynolds relationship in Singin’ in the Rain (released April 1952). What Burroughs says around that time about “the sex that passes the censor” giving away the “basic American rottenness” is very exact in recognizing what his culture repressed, and what, with a vengeance, his own writing would return…

It’s an incredible coincidence that you were in Lawrence, visiting Burroughs for the first time, on the very day that the first publication of the Queer was announced by the New York Times. Have you wondered what he would have thought of you re-editing it all these years later?

Oh, I don’t think he would have been that bothered. That’s not to say he didn’t care about his work — on the contrary, it’s hard to imagine a writer who took his work more seriously — but I think at a certain point he surrendered possession of it and let others finish it off. But as for the coincidence of being out in Lawrence that day, of course I didn’t know that at the time, but in retrospect it seems so right somehow.

By Oliver Harris

This is the written version of a talk given by Professor Harris at Columbia University on 16 September 2010. See also Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer.

In 1943, when Allen Ginsberg was a 17-year-old Columbia freshman and first met William Burroughs, he was impressed by Burroughs’ ability to shoot from the hip and come up with apposite quotations taken from Shakespeare. Allusions to “the Immortal Bard,” as Burroughs called him, crop up throughout his work and come surprisingly thick and fast in his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Here, we might recall, he cites the line from Macbeth (Act II Scene iii) that gives my paper its title: “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece” — referring to the bloody sight of King Duncan’s body. When Burroughs quotes the line in Naked Lunch, typically, he gives it a twist, to become: “Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.” 

In the mid-1960s, the British critic David Lodge claimed that, since Burroughs lacked “precise imaginative control” over his materials, Naked Lunch “seems to offer” this line as “an appropriate epitaph on his work.” It’s a glib put-down, but for now let’s accept that this line gives us the key aesthetic question begged by Burroughs’ work — whether it’s a masterpiece made or fucked by confusion.

To be sure, confusion is the most common state in which the work has left its readers — especially in comparison to Burroughs’ “first Naked Lunch.” That’s to say the trilogy to which, in late 1953, Burroughs originally applied the title “Naked Lunch” — texts published separately as: Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters.

These three early autobiographical works have not usually been read collectively — but we need to take them together if we’re to begin to understand how Burroughs went from these simple, seemingly realist texts written in the early 1950s to Naked Lunch by decade’s end.

But are they so simple? 

In comparison to the chaotic disarray of Naked Lunch, the texts certainly seem relatively straightforward, but their material back-stories turn out to be unexpectedly complex and to contradict the apparent simplicity of what’s visible on the page. Or rather, the back-stories make visible the contradictions within the text — contradictions we otherwise overlook or misinterpret. 

Equally, whereas from the very beginning a genetic mythology attached itself to Naked Lunch, very little was written about the material histories of these three texts, and what little there was turns out to be wrong — and this has significant consequences for interpretation. This is so most spectacularly in regard to The Yage Letters, whose 1953 epistolary section did not reproduce Burroughs’ authentic letters at all — as these wonderful cut-and-paste pages from a manuscript held at Stanford demonstrate. 

This is why it’s seemed important to me to make the material histories visible and put them to use in re-editing the texts — using my editions not only to offer a reliable text, but to bring out into the open the previously concealed processes of production. Each of my editions has therefore highlighted the genetic and editing back-stories — including that involved in my own work — with the paradoxical aim of confusing their apparent simplicity.

So, what are the confusions, and why do they matter?

Burroughs wrote his three manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” during a period of under four years, back to back between early 1950 and late 1953. But they were published out of sequence and spread over four decades: Junkie appearing in 1953, Queer in 1985, and The Yage Letters in 1963. They really couldn’t have been written any closer together or published much further apart.

More than that, this scrambling of chronology and delays in publication had a direct impact on the reception of the three texts — on how they have been interpreted. This is one reason why they’ve hardly ever been read as a trilogy, with the result that Burroughs’ literary history, the chronology of his development from one text to another, has been disguised and confused. But even more fundamentally, this disordering of the trilogy turns out to beg questions about production, since the publication histories of the three titles decisively determined the form and content of each text — and not just separately but collectively. 

As manuscripts, “Junk,” “Queer” and “Yage” display a distinct formal variety: “Junk” written in the first person, “Queer” in the third, and “Yage” appearing as letters. And yet, despite these basic differences in form, far from remaining separate, the three manuscripts became incestuously mixed up in the published texts due to the history of their editing. And this, especially in the case of Queer, is where the confusion really begins — although to get there we have to start from “Junk” (this is the title on the original manuscript held at Columbia).

Having begun it a few months after moving to Mexico City in fall 1949, Burroughs had written most of his first novel by December 1950. Burroughs was still tinkering with “Junk” when, in March 1952, he began “Queer.” That same month, Allen Ginsberg, acting as Burroughs’ agent, secured a contract to publish “Junk” with Ace Books, the pulp paperback house recently established by A. A Wyn. Having stalled while they looked at “Queer,” in early June Ace rejected it, and asked Burroughs to write an autobiographical preface to “Junk” and to make the narrative longer. 

They put him under such pressure that Ginsberg planned to do the expansion on Burroughs’ behalf — as we can see from his letter of June 12, 1952 —

reporting Ace’s request for 6,000 more words, and Ginsberg’s idea to use “Junk parts of Queer” plus Burroughs’ real letters to make a new ending. And we can also see, from this carbon (held at Stanford),

how Burroughs did this expansion by transposing third-person “Queer” material into the first-person for “Junk,” literally striking out “He” and replacing it with “I.” 

As a result of this manuscript cannibalism, an eighth of the Junkie published by Ace Books in spring 1953 had come from “Queer,” while “Queer” had lost almost a fifth of its material in the process. 

Although some have noticed the difference in the final chapters of Junkie, the most straightforward novel in the Burroughs oeuvre turns out to be a hybrid, or composite text — which is ironic, given its packaging as an Ace Doublebook, bound tête-bêche (that’s to say, head-to-toe) with the memoirs of a narcotic agent. That the prime agency driving the cutting up and mixing of manuscripts was not Burroughs but his publisher is a material contingency that grounds what would, in time, become a thoroughgoing critique of authorship. What most interests me, as an editor and a scholar, is to explore the emergence of that critique during the writing of Queer.

When Queer was finally published in 1985, readers would have immediately experienced a series of confusions about the text, if it hadn’t been for Burroughs’ long introduction — which, significantly, had been written at the request of Burroughs’ publishers, Viking, just as, thirty years earlier, Ace Books had asked for a preface to Junkie. Famously, the introduction dramatically tied the writing of Queer to Burroughs’ shooting of his wife, Joan, in September 1951. That disaster, added to what Burroughs says about the difference between writing on and off drugs, effectively pre-empted any questions readers might have about Queer — specifically, questions regarding the identity of its central character and the formal appearance of the narrative. 

For the Lee of Queer is completely unrecognisable as the Lee of Junky; from a cool, tight-lipped and distant reporter he has turned into a near-hysterical character who compulsively tells the most outrageous jokes. Lee seems, quite literally, to have become another person. And likewise formally, there’s been an abrupt shift in person — from Lee as the first-person narrator of Junky to Lee as a character in a third-person narrative — except this shift is then itself undone in the “epilogue,” which is narrated by Lee now in the first person, until, in yet another shift, the finale switches back into the third person. Confused? We certainly oughta be…

The shift in the epilogue from third- to first-person can only be explained by knowing the manuscript history. This shows that Queer‘s epilogue didn’t belong to “Queer” at all, but was written over a year later to conclude Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript and was only added for the 1985 edition. Obviously, clearing that up is essential from the point of view of textual interpretation. 

More revealing still is the question why this material was added. That in turn relates to the 1963 publication of “Yage” in The Yage Letters. For City Lights only published those parts of “Yage” that had already been printed in various little magazines, since the full manuscript — including what became the “Epilogue” to Queer — was not available. And so when Queer was edited for publication in 1985, this unused section of “Yage” was, like Burroughs’ long introduction, added to help make up for all the material that had been cut from Queer to add to Junkie in 1953. 

Or, to put this chain reaction another way: it was because Ace, City Lights, and Viking each required a longer text that Junkie gained parts of Queer, Queer gained parts of “Yage,” and “Yage” was mixed in with later texts to make up The Yage Letters. And that is how the manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” all turned into composite texts, curiously hybrid publications. 

Is this merely happenstance? Is there any more to it than an accumulation of the usual contingencies of publishing? Or is there something else going on to explain why none of the manuscripts of Burroughs’ first three novels were published in toto, and each came to have such confused and compromised textual histories? And if there is more to it, what might be the consequences for editing them?

I’m going to work backwards by considering first the two key structural options for re-editing Queer:

• First, to undo the history of cuts made in 1953 and additions made in 1985.
• Second, to complete the manuscript fragment in other ways.

The first option would have meant adding to Queer the nearly six thousand words cut for Junky and cutting the two-and-a-half thousand words that were added from “Yage.” This option would have had significant implications for the other two editions, of course; but equally, to undo the cuts made in 1953 and the additions made in 1985 would be to deny the agency of history, the passage of time, and the inevitable mutability of texts.

But principles don’t mechanically determine editing practice, and I tried out various experiments. One effort

restored the original opening of Queer, material that had been cut and pasted into Junkie. The effect of restoring it, however, was paradoxical, since it made Queer much less queer. That’s because these first pages — which we’ve already seen just a minute ago — starting from the line “One morning in April Lee woke up a little sick” — set up the rest of the narrative as the fall-out from Lee’s state of drug withdrawal. 

Now, this had clearly been Burroughs’ original intention. However, from an interpretive point of view, to clarify the text in this way would have honoured the author’s intention but have betrayed what the work became: Queer is, as its title promises, a confusing and unsettling text, and it was that identity which I felt bound to respect. 

The second structural option turned out to be just as problematic.

In 1985, James Grauerholz had already considered a range of ways to complete Burroughs’ rough and unfinished manuscript. These included constructing several new chapters and transposing the whole narrative into the first person. However, in the end he rejected all but quite modest interpolations of material, especially needed in the increasingly fragmentary final sections. I myself made some small insertions of newly discovered manuscript material, but concluded that the temptation to complete Queer, and the intractable difficulties of doing so, both pointed to the fact that Burroughs had not left it incomplete in 1952; rather, “Queer” was, in a conventional sense, incompletable. 

Why? Because what’s in play here is more than recognising the agency of history. That invites a social text-editing approach, respecting the authority of all textual collaborators — publishers, agents, and editors, from Ginsberg to Grauerholz — rather than seeing these as corruptions of the author’s presumed intentions. But what’s also at stake is recognising the very particular agency of Burroughs as an author and the model of textual integrity that went with it. And that’s why re-editing his work, especially re-editing Queer, is more than a matter of making a reliable text. 

On the contrary, establishing the material history of Burroughs’ writing is important not so much for producing an accurate base for textual interpretation, but as itself a basis to interpretation. This materiality would become visible on the page in the chaotic montage form of Naked Lunch and more radically still in the texts produced by his cut-up methods. But it emerges in the course of writing his first trilogy, and in what follows I’m going to explore in detail the materiality of Burroughs’ model of textual integrity by focusing on what I see as the turning point in his development as a writer. 

When Burroughs began writing “Queer” in early March 1952 he was very clear about it: “Novel could be part II of Junk,” he wrote Ginsberg on the 20th; “Same straight-forward narrative method as I used in Junk.” The plan was clear enough, but that’s not how it worked out. Queer may have started off “straight,” but it achieved its identity by going awry. 

The turning point comes a couple of weeks later when Burroughs responds to two requests from Ace Books — one to write the autobiographical preface for “Junk,” the other to combine his second novel with his first. This is April 14 1952:

As for publisher’s introduction, I would rather you wrote it as I want to give all my time to the second novel. I will send you a brief autobiographical sketch. Perhaps you can use some of it directly. I give you free hand there, as in making all arrangements. Incidentally I think Queer is excellent title. I personally think it would be a better idea to publish Queer as a sequel to Junk rather than together, but in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee. The financial arrangements are O.K., go ahead and …

Wait a minute! — “as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee”?? Where did that come from? In fact, that is the point: this sick joke comes out of absolutely nowhere — not only in this particular letter, but in the context of all the letters Burroughs had written up until this time. It has a sick humour that is trademark Burroughs, but there’d been nothing like it in his writing before. 

The gag is therefore doubly shocking — both on its own terms and as a sudden change in Burroughs’ style. It registers for the first time the appearance of his routine form, the comic-grotesque fantasies that spring up in Queer and will blossom like fleurs du mal in Naked Lunch.

But what about the torso gag itself? What exactly is Burroughs saying, and why would he identify himself with a sadistic serial killer? Historically speaking, he might be evoking the notorious Cleveland Torso Murderer of the late 1930s, or maybe the equally infamous Black Dahlia case from Los Angeles in 1947. More likely, I think, the tone of moral indifference here — “in this life we have to take things as we find them” — parallels the phrase son cosas de la vida, which will appear in Naked Lunch. There, it is attributed to Sobera de la Flor, who, in March 1952, just as Burroughs was starting to write “Queer,” went on a killing spree that took in the same Mexico City neighbourhood where Burroughs lived. I stress this connection because bloody violence that prompts a shockingly passive moral shrug of the shoulders is a key gesture in Naked Lunch — mainly associated with Dr. Benway — and, quite extraordinarily, it has its origins here, in Burroughs’ response to Ace Books’ plan for combining “Queer” with “Junk.” His gag seems wildly over the top, and confusing too, since it’s hard to see how a merger of two manuscripts could be figured as the brutal dismembering of a body.

What’s going on becomes clearer a week later, when Burroughs was about halfway through the writing of “Queer.” This is the single most important letter he ever wrote, I would say, a defining moment for the material history of his work. Here’s the opening paragraph of his April 22nd 1952 letter: 

Dear Al, I begin to understand the rift between publisher and author. The publisher’s demands are not only highly irritating but contradictory as well. For example, they don’t want to publish books separate or together so far as I can make out, and the question of person is confusion’s masterpiece. I quote: “Necessities preclude publishing book together one part in third person one in 1st”. I wonder precisely what person they expect Queer to be in? I feel as if I was being sawed in half by indecisive fiends who periodically attempted to shove me back together.”

I’ll come back to “confusion’s masterpiece” and Macbeth shortly, because there’s such a lot going on here:

• The “rift” between author and publisher
• The publisher’s contradictory demands 
• The relationship between the “Junk” and “Queer” manuscripts
• The confusion of first and third person narrative
• And finally, feeling sawed in half

On a first approach, this is a letter about practical matters involving the editing of manuscripts for publication, but mainly it is an acutely self-conscious reflection on authorship. Burroughs may have worked on “Junk” for over two years, but only now that he has a contract in the works from Ace Books, does he talk about himself as a soon-to-be-published author. He will end the letter asking Ginsberg to save his letters because “maybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” Right now, however, Burroughs is aware that he has no rep at all, and this is what underlies the “rift” between himself and his publishers.

In accusing Ace of making contradictory and confusing demands, Burroughs recognises the power relations between himself as the writer and Ace as the publisher. They are the ones with the power to make decisions — even the power to torment him by being indecisive. 

Once we stress the word — decision, indecision — we begin to understand what’s going on here. Etymologically, decision comes from the Latin decidere, combining the prefix de with the verb caedere, meaning to “cut.” To decide is to cut off, and the pun motivates the imagery of both the dismembered torso and the body sawn in half. In other words, the images in these mini-routines literalise Burroughs’ sense of the publisher’s power over him. But they do so in a very particular way — by equating his manuscripts with his own body — and this materiality is key to understanding the violence and pain in his first routines, and the polarisation of power relations they embody. 

This polarisation is evident in the contradiction between the images in the letter of April 14th and this of April 22nd, for Burroughs seems to identify with both the cutter — the psycho serial killer who wants to hack off limbs — and with the one being cut, the body sawed in half. To the extent that he is talking about the relationship between his two manuscripts, we have to ask: what does Burroughs himself actually want?

March 26, he writes to Kerouac: “the two stories are really complimentary and should go together.”

April 8, again to Kerouac: “The publishers […] want to publish both together as one novel. I would just as soon they go ahead and publish Junk separate.”

April 14, as we’ve seen, he tells Ginsberg, “I personally think it would be a better idea to publish Queer as a sequel to Junk rather than together.”  

April 26, “Look here, might as well just put these 75 pages on the end of Junk and publish as one novel.”

May 15, Burroughs mails Ginsberg a 59-page manuscript titled “JUNK OR QUEER” 

May 23, “Whatever arrangement is O.K. by me. If they want to put this 60 pages on the end of Junk to make one novel, O.K. Or I will go on with Queer.”

Whatever is actually Burroughs’ key response — he uses the word three times alone in his April 14 letter, writing Ginsberg “tell them whatever you think best […] whatever you decide is O.K. with me […] whatever you tell them I will deliver.”

Let’s just digress a moment to consider a case that couldn’t make for a more instructive contrast — namely Jack Kerouac, who in early May 1952 arrived in Mexico City to stay with Burroughs. On May 18, Kerouac responded to the same publishers who were at this time considering his manuscript of Visions of Cody. He writes to Ginsberg: “If Wyn or Carl [that’s Carl Solomon] insist on cutting it up to make the ‘story’ more intelligible I’ll refuse.”

Without wanting to be overly reductive, Kerouac believed in his work with a single-minded passion, and in refusing to accept cuts, he rejects the publishers’ power to force decisions onto him and to impose narrative intelligibility — their commercially-driven definition of aesthetic coherence. In the case of Burroughs, far from writing as if beyond or outside the context of publishing, he has no illusions whatsoever about his position, about all the compromises and economic determinations involved in getting a book to market. 

At the same time, while his publishers did indeed prevaricate about his two manuscripts, the confusion and the indecision that Burroughs attributes to them are really his own. He’s the one who doesn’t seem to know what he wants. 

When, on April 26, he considers combining his two manuscripts, he protests to Ginsberg, “Why the Hell can’t you shift persons in the middle of a book? So it hasn’t been done, well let’s do it.” This is a reminder of what the problem was all about: the shift in narrative person across manuscripts — clearly “unintelligible” so far as Ace Books was concerned. But Burroughs’ apparent decisiveness is asserted only to be immediately qualified: “Anyway I am going to present it third person. If they want to change it, all right, but I think the change would entail considerable loss.” 

Clearly enough, the plan to combine the first person “Junk” with the third-person “Queer” is not just a formal problem for Burroughs’ publishers. On the contrary, this plan to combine manuscripts is also a plan for a visibly divided self: not just two books in one, but in effect two persons with the same name in one book, split by the difference in narrative point of view. The result would therefore embody Burroughs’ own lack of single-mindedness, his own internal rift, which he has displaced onto Ace Books and literalised in the image of being sawed in half. 

In other words, Burroughs casts Ace Books as the unreasonable obstacle to his desire, as if otherwise he would get what it is he wants — when the truth is, what he wants is in a state of self-contradiction.

Interestingly, we can see this displacement of self-divided desire in Burroughs’ allusion to Macbeth. What makes the allusion especially revealing is that it appears in his turning point letter of April 22 as a revision that he then incorporated into a retyped second draft — the original is on the left, the revised draft on the right.

This is itself a crucial moment, for it was the first letter Burroughs ever redrafted in this way. As we can see from my transcription, the opening paragraph is extensively rewritten. This is the key line he struck through:

Personally I am so confused I don’t know whether to think in 1st or 3rd person at this point.

Personally Burroughs is confused about what person to think in… No wonder the line from Macbeth came to him and he substituted the phrase “the question of person is confusion’s masterpiece” — although we can immediately see how this substitution displaces the confusion away from his own person and onto his publishers. 

This confusion of person appears materially in the act of writing itself — for example, in this fragment from the first week of April, where Burroughs experiments with the first-person but mucks it up — again, I’ve glossed it since it’s not easy to read:

I stayed away from the Ship Ahoy for several days to give Allerton time to forget the bad impression he had undoubtedly made.

But this is not just a matter of confusing “I” with “he” when Burroughs writes — far from it. This is not an innocent slip; it’s loaded, and constitutes what Freud called a parapraxis. As the barely concealed psychoanalytical dimensions to Burroughs’ letter suggest, it’s about the confusion of identity in a much more fundamental sense.

To grasp this point, we have to return to how Burroughs quotes Macbeth in Naked Lunch, for now we can see how what’s going on in that passage grows directly out of Burroughs’ April 1952 writing. 

The line that misquotes Shakespeare appears in a comic-grotesque parody of Oedipal confusion — featuring “great big daddy” and “the old lady,” and a cut-up of Genesis with Freud (to make: “male and female castrated he them”) and which is dense with not only physical “cuts” but also a torso job on the mother’s body. As Burroughs’ rewriting of the Bard via Freud has it, God’s masterpiece — man — is thoroughly fucked up by sexual desire. 

But if desire is for Burroughs the basis to confusion, he sees it from a very specific point, one that is encrypted in the image of being sawed in half and its history as a stage act for magicians.

With its origins in Grand Guignol, English music-hall variety, and American vaudeville shows, the act was originally developed by the English magician Percy Thomas Selbit and then perfected and patented in the US by Horace Goldin. However, when Goldin first staged it in June 1921 for the Society of American Magicians at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway and 34th, he made one crucial mistake: the body he cut up belonged to a fellow dressed as a hotel bellboy. Goldin never made that mistake again, and since then the act has almost always been titled “Sawing a Woman in Half.” Or “Sawing a Lady in Half.”

I especially like the poster on the right, with its doctor and nurse in the background, playing up the danger of the act while turning it into a bogus medical procedure, a surgical operation — shades perhaps of Dr. Benway, played here by a blood-splattered Mr Burroughs.

Indeed, the image returns like this in the Benway section of Naked Lunch, where Rock and Roll Hoodlums “saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw.” It is an acutely gendered act of violence. (I love this image, with its Day of the Dead figures that make a Mexican connection back to Burroughs.)

So: as a torso murderer, Burroughs sadistically identified himself with a male slasher, but in the image of being sawed in half he masochistically identifies with the female victim: in other words, Burroughs puts himself in the box as a woman.

As an act of symbolic castration, being sawed in half represents the unequal power relations between Burroughs and his publishers that seem to feminise the writer. But the image also dramatizes what Burroughs dwells on most in his April 22nd letter, which is affirming his maleness as a homosexual. This need is in turn provoked directly by his publishers, as Burroughs reports the suggestion from Carl Solomon that his second novel be titled not “Queer” but “Fag.” This was Burroughs’ reaction:

“I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a fag. That’s what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us manly, strong, noble types and the leaping, jumping, window dressing cocksucker. Furtherchrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somweheres or publishers will swarm all over her sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass.” 

Like the image of being sawed in half, Burroughs’ own contradictions here — asserting his maleness on the one hand and taking on the very queeny, campy tones he despises on the other — materialise the case made by Jamie Russell in his book Queer Burroughs — which is that the historically rigid, binary “opposition of masculine/feminine, queer/fag, man/woman” produced “the gay subject as a schizoid cut-up.” So it’s not just that Burroughs puts himself in the box: sado-masochistically, he plays both parts at once.

Of course, this wasn’t actually funny at all, and the sick humour of Burroughs’ routines in Queer is both hilarious and excruciating. And it’s the pain that brings us back to Burroughs’ texts. 

Now, Queer is centred around Lee’s homosexual desire for Allerton, a thinly fictionalised version of Burroughs’ relationship with Lewis Marker. Lee’s fantasy of physically merging with Allerton, of slupping him as Burroughs puts it, reads like a dark parody of love in Plato’s Symposium. In fact, Aristophanes’ account of love as “the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole” suggests that behind Burroughs’ stage magician and torso killer stands Zeus, who sawed in two the originally rounded whole human being, and so condemned each to the pursuit of their other halves. 

But Burroughs didn’t need to read Plato to learn about love as lack; he felt it as pain. And one reason why the April 22nd letter was such a turning point for him is that here Burroughs reveals that Marker has deserted him: “I am deeply hurt,” he writes, with crushing understatement. In Queer itself, the emotional experience of feeling deeply hurt echoes this letter by consistently appearing in physical terms of the cut body — for example: “Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out toward the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief.” 

Most directly, the imagery here evokes the scene of Burroughs’ own real-life amputation — in which he cut off the end joint of the little finger of his left hand, during an earlier episode of abject, frustrated desire in 1939. The writing of Queer brought back previous traumas of desire, and it comes as no surprise that in his April 22nd letter Burroughs refers to having just written the short story later published as “The Finger.” Fictionalising this earlier episode, “The Finger” mockingly literalises the masochistic figure of Burroughs’ emotional pain: “It’s tearing me all apart. . . . So I hit on this finger joint gimmick.” 

In other words, Burroughs’ confusion about what he wants for his manuscripts, whether their textual bodies should be joined or separate, parts or wholes, shares exactly the same embodied imagery as the literalisation of desire. And if the textual and the sexual seem to be materially, physically one, the imagery also implicates the aesthetic and the economic. 

The implication of these two dimensions is clear from Burroughs’ comment on “The Finger,” which he offers in response to Ace Books’ request for the autobiographical preface to “Junk.” The story is “incomplete of course. What ya think I am, a hack?” 

Hack, which derives from “hackney” — a horse that was easy to ride and available for hire — has, since the days of Grub Street, denoted a writer whose pen is always for sale, a mere professional drudge who churns out commissioned work on time. And that is precisely how Burroughs casts himself in his powerlessness before Ace Books. In two letters — referring to “Queer” on May 23rd and to “Junk” on July 6th — he speaks openly about writing “on schedule” and “to order.” 

However, to hack is also to cut up, and by insisting that his story about the cutting off of one of his fingers is itself an incomplete textual body, Burroughs models a writing that refuses to give his publishers what they want, either aesthetically or economically.

Offering to give Ace Books his finger is clearly an obscene act of payback for publishers who feminise the writer by “sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass.” As for the preface itself, which Burroughs refers to as a “routine, like you see on the back flap,” he offers instead a queering of the writer’s life story, a parody that connects sexual identity and textual integrity via the power relations between author and publisher. Burroughs responds:

Now as to this biographical thing I can’t write it. It is too general and I have no idea what they want. Do they have in mind the “I have worked (but not in the order named) as towel boy in a Kalamazoo whore house, lavatory attendant, male whore and part-time stool pigeon. Currently living in a remodelled pissoir with…” etc.

As a resumé of Burroughs’ employment history and qualifications as a writer, this boasts that no job is too low for him; not merely a “hack,” he’s a whore. But if he feels screwed by his publishers, Burroughs again pays them back by screwing up the biographical portrait they demand — not only by the moral outrageousness of its content, but also by its form. Offering not a metaphorical whole but metonymic parts, he notes that these parts are themselves dis-orderly, mixed up and out of sequence — in other words, confused. But the confusion here is strategic, a deliberate deconstruction of the writer’s identity and the textual unity required by his publishers.

This moment marks the difference between the writing of “Junk” and the writing of “Queer”: He may have described Queer as a “queer novel using the same straight narrative method as I used in ‘Junk,'” but “Junk” achieved coherence and an appearance of closure. The writing of “Queer,” however, marks the breakdown of that method, its unravelling, under the destabilizing pressure of desire and the return — with a vengeance — of the repressed, in the form of jokes, dreams, slips of the tongue, and so on. 

Straight narrative goes awry in Queer because it cannot contain the extreme performances of Burroughs’ vaudevillian routines. Lee is not simply more talkative in Queer than he was in Junkie, he puts on, or rather is the medium for, over a dozen voices: a Mexican boy, a queer doctor, a Texas oilman, a bank president, a driller, his friend Winston Moor, a Vice Squad cop, an old Jew, a Tibetan Holy man and his acolyte, a German doctor, and an American consul… Lee turns polyphonic because the routine is a variety act, useless for coherent narrative but ideal for a quick-change show of vaudeville hoofers, ventriloquists, stand-up comedians, magicians sawing women in half with a two-man surgical saw… 

In conclusion, the shift from “Junk” to “Queer” marked by the appearance in April 1952 of the routine was a turning point in Burroughs’ writing — but what’s equally clear is that it arises as a moment of crisis and self-contradiction — as much the breakdown of a straight method as the choice of a queer one. This was not the end of the story, but its beginning.

“I have not decided on ending for second novel,” Burroughs had written in his torso letter of 14 April 1952, adding, “Perhaps the ending just hasn’t occurred yet.” Unable to decide, waiting on an outside agency, on some contingent circumstance to provide a cut-off point, Burroughs qualifies his desire for control and opens himself to chance — and in this way anticipates the long genesis of the “second” Naked Lunch published in 1959. 

There is, then, no either/or, requiring us to choose between the calculating intentional author or a writer lacking control over his materials. Far from being merely indecisive or confused, Burroughs in 1952 began to recognise that as a writer he was not a unified agent whose work could attain completeness, and the corpus of his writing is emphatically a body in pieces. 

But — and this is what’s most fascinating — his original routines about the dismembered body bring together his writing, his desire, and the material decisions of his publishing house editors. In effect, Ace Books externalised for Burroughs an unconscious dimension, an inner conflict, just as Burroughs himself internalised the commercial logic which dictates that writing for publication is not a unified act but a collaborative process involving contingencies and multiple, divided agencies.

Or to put this another way, if we pose the seemingly nonsensical question, “What do Burroughs’ manuscripts want?” we have here the answer in the very form of their material history. The proof that non-authorial agencies play the part of the work’s unconscious, the proof that, far from being unwanted foreign corruptions that messed up the manuscripts, on the contrary they in fact fulfilled the desire that Burroughs otherwise could not achieve — is simply this: that what Ginsberg referred to as “the Junk parts of Queer” do belong with Junky, and do not belong with Queer; and that the Epilogue taken from “Yage” does fit Queer, and does not fit The Yage Letters. 

To be clear: this isn’t simply to accept that in 1952 and 1985 the editors happened to make or bring about good decisions. Rather, in each case the cuts and additions that they led Burroughs to make internalised the contradiction that was necessary to complete the work. Thus, in the case of Queer, because Burroughs gutted most of the opening two chapters in which Lee withdraws from junk, he prevented this “straight” material from naturalising all that follows — from domesticating the narrative breakdown as reassuringly explicable. 

Likewise, at the other end of the text and thirty years later, the switch from third-person narrative to first-person in the Epilogue is precisely the formal discontinuity demanded by the history of the manuscript, while the finale — where the dream dimension takes over and Lee turns into the monstrous Skip Tracer and the narrative switches back into the third-person — turns out to be the narrative’s true destiny and the realisation of its desire.

And so to simply undo the cuts forced onto Burroughs’ early work would have been to restore an un-cut agency and a unity of intention that Burroughs did not have. Equally, it would have disguised the very material processes that, in the work that was to follow, Burroughs would himself put into the foreground, make visible on the page, as a critique of authorship and textual integrity.

Bringing the back-stories out into the open is therefore particularly relevant to re-editing Burroughs’ work, especially when what those back-stories reveal is contradiction and confusion. Needless to say, editors can’t avoid making definite decisions, line by line, word by word, accidental by accidental — which is why, at times, it’s felt as if I have been sawing Burroughs in half —

and at other times, vice-versa…

Background: The Crying of Lot 22

Where it had been since 1953 and how it got into the hands of a private collector remain a mystery, but it surfaced in October 1999 as Lot 22 of Sotheby’s “Allen Ginsberg and Friends” sale in New York. The small, black notebook with lined paper that had turned sepia over the past half-century, was bought, for an undisclosed sum, by Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library. At Columbus they have built up an impressive archive of Burroughs papers over the years, going back to 1965 when they acquired Naked Lunch-era material from the manuscript- and book-seller Henry Wenning, who had bought it directly from Burroughs in 1961. There followed two major purchases of materials in the 1980s and then two large donations from the Burroughs Estate in the late 1990s. So the acquisition of the Notebook was both a coup for Ohio and a logical development of their holdings.

I first heard about it from James Grauerholz in November 2002 and was immediately interested because the great bulk of the manuscript research I’ve done has been concentrated on Burroughs’ first decade as a writer — not only for The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959, but also the new edition of Junky: the definitive text of “Junk,” which I’d started in early 2001. But as well as being interested, I was worried. This may sound perverse, but it’s probably a paradox for any scholar who pieces together manuscript discoveries: you end up thinking in terms of a jigsaw, with missing pieces, which, you assume, it would be wonderful to find. But it all depends on the timing. At this point I was just completing William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, and my immediate concern was how this notebook might change the manuscript histories of Junky, Queer and The Yage Letters that I had spent twenty years researching and trying to make sense of. My book was almost ready to go to press. Supposing the Notebook, this totally new piece of primary evidence, undermined everything?

It’s at times like this you recognise that manuscript research is not really like assembling a jigsaw puzzle at all; inevitably, you turn the available evidence into a narrative, one that you hope is at least credible, at best compelling — but it’s still a narrative, an interpretation of the evidence arranged into a certain pattern. As Burroughs himself famously said: “There is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event.” But knowing that a definitive account is impossible doesn’t make you less possessive about the version of events you’ve put together yourself. As it turned out, the Notebook both supported and added to the work I’d already done, but I wasn’t to know that for some time — not until there was a transcript. At this point, it didn’t even have a fixed name.

In November 2002, Grauerholz referred to it as “Mexico City Return,” because the most immediate significance of the Notebook is that it contains most of the first draft of the typescript used for the Epilogue given that title and added to Queer in his 1985 edit. In fact, the contract signed by the Burroughs Estate and OSUP in March 2003 was, a little inaccurately, for a work entitled “Mexico City Return: The Yage Notebook of William S. Burroughs, 1951.” But for a long time we mainly referred to it as “the Peru Notebook.” I didn’t come up with the title “Everything Lost” until much later.

My formal role began in March 2003 with an invitation to be Volume Editor for the Notebook, working with Geoff Smith and John Bennett — people I had met in Ohio and worked with since the mid-1980s — who would be Series Editors, overseeing first the editing of the Notebook and then other projects based on manuscript holdings at Ohio State. In Spring 2003 Everything Lost therefore evolved concurrently with Yage Letters Redux, the follow-up to my just-published edition of Junky. This was, of course, a very closely related text chronologically (the first entry in the Notebook is dated July 16 1953; the last letter in “In Search of Yage” is dated July 10 1953), although in key respects Everything Lost and Yage Redux were quite different editorial projects.

Transcribing the Notebook: Hat on a fisherman pole

The transcript started with a rough draft of about half of it made by James Grauerholz in December 2002. I became directly involved in August 2003, when I began working on the first full transcript. Looking back through my files to see how much longer the transcript became — from first to final drafts — I was a little surprised to find that it hadn’t changed that much (from 5,691 words to 5,886). This, however, is deceptive, since the first draft had many question marks and much very dubious early guesswork.

One of the great interests of Everything Lost as a contribution to Burroughs scholarship is the chance it gives to see inside, to get detailed insight into the processes of both writing and editing. That’s to say, you can see Burroughs the writer at work here — moving back and forth between travel diary reportage, intimate personal reflections, records of dreams, and dramatic routines, so that fact and fiction, waking and dream worlds segue into each another — and you can see something of how the process of editing happens too. The actual work of transcription isn’t so self-evident, however. The first few pages are written in a very steady, clear holograph, legible to most readers. But increasingly, there are passages of hurried writing, with numerous cancellations and erasures. With illegible words, I often went about the task of transcription by playing a kind of academic hangman: you look at illegible words and ask yourself, of each letter, could that be an “a”, a “b”, a “c”, and so on. Since the permutations in this mechanical method are enormous, you have to work intuitively at the same time. Naturally, the less context you have — where, say, a whole sentence is illegible — the harder it is and the more you rely on following hunches. Many times you stare at a word and it’s as if you have it on the tip of your tongue. That feeling can last a long time.

One aspect of the transcription process is therefore very close attention to the graphic element, and for this the pdf files were a very important technical development. In the early 1990s, when I was transcribing holograph manuscripts for Letters, 1945-1959, I needed to hold often poor-quality photocopies up against a light or use a magnifying glass. For a year, I had to do the same with the Notebook, working from a photocopy, until in late 2004 I received the facsimile as a series of pdf files. The advantages were obvious: I could blow the image up until a single word filled the computer screen, and play around with various effects, to lighten or darken the image, and so on. And I then extended that process by cross-referring to other images. For example, if I had an illegible word and it looked like it could be “night,” I’d do a word search in the transcript, and that would identify the page and then the right pdf file where that word occurred; so I would have maybe half a dozen screens open at any one time, comparing images to see what the word might be. And the process didn’t stop there. Over the years, I’ve built up extensive files of manuscripts from the early 1950s, including many letters that were in holograph. I would search the electronic version of Letters, 1945-1959 that I have, to locate letters where a specific word was used, then pull out the manuscript copy from my files, and make a comparative analysis. Sometimes the results were conclusive, but not always, and of course this process was not only very time-intensive but complicated. To borrow the phrase Burroughs used when dealing with his own chaos of manuscripts, I’d be thinking to myself: “What am I, an octopus already?” Finally, I’d usually copy and paste specific words and letter fragments into a document, in order to show — to myself as well as my colleagues — step by step, the process of how I had worked it out. My “maths” I call it.

That was one approach. The other main one was more contextual. That’s to say, I’d be looking for how material might echo or directly repeat its use elsewhere in other Burroughs manuscripts from around the same time, such as “Mexico City Return” (in both the typescript originally intended for “Yage” in 1953 and as published in 1985 in Queer). The intertextuality of Burroughs’ writing is one key feature displayed in the Notebook, both through internal repetition of scenes and phrases, as he reworked them, and through this overlapping of manuscripts — which is the most important revelation. For the Notebook shows how Burroughs’ “Queer” and “Yage” manuscripts overlapped, chiefly through the phantom presence of Allerton (based on Lewis Marker) — and as if the lacerating self-pity of Burroughs’ addiction to him isn’t enough, there’s the extraordinary way that he confuses the real-life lover he has lost with the fictional version of him he has invented. So, while “Mexico City Return” helped contextualise the Notebook and aid with some transcription, the Notebook sheds new light on this piece of writing that migrated from “Yage” to Queer.

Some of the practical difficulties are not readily apparent to a reader comparing the facsimile to the published transcript. For example, the initial transcription that I had to work with included a good deal of guesswork, some of it made by volunteers who were brought in by the Series Editors precisely because they had no Burroughsian expertise, just a fresh pair of eyes. However, when you have a wrongly transcribed word there in front of you, it can make it much harder to arrive at the correct transcription: the wrong word keeps getting in the way. As the transcription evolved, the only disagreements I had with the Series Editors at Ohio State were over our “best guesses,” where basically none of us had much confidence in our readings. I felt the frustration keenly, but there has to come a cut-off point where, even though you believe you could do more, the time and effort is disproportionate, since you can’t guarantee success and you have to work to a deadline set by the publishers. Once the Notebook is out there, I’m sure that fresh eyes are going to discover new, improved readings. Whether they will be significant in any way — and so justify maybe hours of time and attention — is another question. That’s one of the things you never know at the time: whether your labour is going to pay off. That doubt casts a long shadow.

Working on a transcript like this, improving it incrementally each time, is therefore both exciting and frustrating. You can spend hours working on a fragment, looking at it from every angle, comparing it to other manuscripts, and so on, and feel almost euphoric about deciphering it; and then you think, that’s one word. And there were others where the correct reading looks so obvious in retrospect that nobody would ever imagine the time that went into getting it. Equally, some days you get absolutely nowhere. Other days, you work out a complete sentence. There aren’t too many you can share that kind of triumph with. Most reasonable people would find this sort of scholarly rigour indistinguishable from a highly advanced pathological condition.

Some discoveries were quite spectacular. One of the most important to me started out in the transcript as “El Paso / This is yage party. Just as the wind movie and painting and poetry.” I knew that wasn’t right, and eventually cracked it: not a reference to a city in Texas, “El Paso” was actually “St Perse” — and this is in fact the very first reference anywhere in Burroughs to the French poet, as important to Burroughs as Rimbaud. St. Perse was a constant point of reference for him, especially throughout the 1950s and early ’60s; when Ginsberg commented on sections of the work-in-progress that became Naked Lunch, he always compared Burroughs’ “prose poetry” to that of St. Perse. Then, at the start of the cut-up project, Burroughs stated repeatedly that the methods worked best on image rich poetry, like that of St. Perse and Rimbaud. So, finding the first reference in the Notebook was highly significant, while working out the next lines made its significance even clearer: “This is yage poetry. Just as there is weed music and painting and poetry.” In other words, Burroughs was making a very interesting insight into different kinds of drug aesthetics.

Of course, I made scores of corrections and new readings that were less spectacular: an “awkward punch” in the first transcript became a “Delaware punch”; “Hat on a fisherman pole” became “Hot as a plutonium pile” and so on. Right up until the final deadline, I was still working on the most tantalising and intransigent illegible words, hoping to turn a “best guess” into a more confident transcription.

Everything Lost: on the inside

Along with making the transcript, there was the internal organisation of the book to determine. This was an issue I debated from the outset with the Series Editors, who made the decision to have both fair copy and literal transcript. We agreed early on that the priority was to keep the colour facsimile pages together as a unit, so that the book would present the reader with something that looked and felt as similar as possible to the original artefact. The downside to this was that the transcript would have to be separate, and so the reader would need to flip back and forth between manuscript and reading copy, but that seemed unavoidable.

Scholarship always has to keep in mind the readership for what it produces and the purposes to which its results will be put. However, not only can scholars disagree amongst themselves, they also have to deal with publishers who have a different point of view informed by other concerns. That’s why the potential is always there for mutual misunderstandings about roles — which are, in my experience, never clearly defined: if scholars feel entitled to extend the field of their expertise to include aspects of the production design, so too the in-house editors seem to want to be involved in shaping the scholarship.

For example, in December 2005, the editors at the Press came up with the idea of having just a fair reading text, interleaved with the facsimile, relegating erasures and revisions to endnotes. We argued the case for needing not just a fair copy but also a proper “diplomatic” transcript, so that the process of Burroughs’ textual revision was clear to the reader. This was important because the great interest and value of the Notebook is not in its literary quality as a finished text in its own right, and it would have been misleading to present it as a reader-oriented work of prose. People who read the Notebook in that way would find it confusing and, very probably, rather disappointing. The internal organisation of the text is therefore crucial in terms of shaping its proper reception and appropriate use.

This issue returned again, very late on, when in August 2007 the University Press production manager proposed another, entirely different format that the Press’s Senior Editor announced was the way to go. This would have modelled Everything Lost on the variorum edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. With more commercial houses like Penguin and City Lights, the in-house editor had essentially deferred on all scholarly issues and left decisions up to me until or unless they could see a practical problem with it. So for me this latest announcement begged questions about the whole decision-making process, as well as about the merits of this specific proposal.

To take the latter issue first, one of the problems with proposing the Valerie Eliot edition as a model was that it had worked very well for Barry Miles’ variorum edition of “Howl” precisely because the aim of that publication was to bid for the comparable status of Ginsberg’s poem. The facsimile pages and extensive scholarly apparatus gave “Howl” the same kind of attention as The Waste Land had received, and definitely changed how the poem was read and valued. But internal design has to be appropriate to the specific subject. Unlike the landmark poems of Eliot and Ginsberg, Burroughs’ Notebook is a slight text, never intended for publication, and without any public record in the first place. The mismatch seemed self-evident and, happily, the Senior Editor at the Press realised it wasn’t the way to go after all.

The other main ground for arguing against such a format was that it would have meant using black and white instead of colour facsimile. The loss of colour would have been a major problem — not in terms of its information value, perhaps, but in terms of the look and feel of the thing, its presence as a material object with a certain aura. That had always been important to me. In fact, when I received the pdf files, the first thing I did was to print them out to make a mock-up of the actual notebook, binding it in a black cover and faithfully observing the dimensions (eight inches by six). There is a significant subjective element to editing, every bit as essential as the mechanical processes of transcription, analysis, and documentation, and being able to hold the object in my hand was very necessary to me. Of course, this wasn’t the real thing — which I had only held for a few minutes back in Ohio — but it was the next best thing. Likewise, when I was in Mexico City for the Burroughs conference in September 2006, it meant a great deal to be in the very places where Burroughs had sat down and written in that notebook. Half a century had passed, but it still made for a special connection between writing and place, with me as a point of intersection. All scholars have to balance their professional reserve, which goes together with claims to authority and expertise, with this highly personal engagement.

Since the Press’s editor backtracked on the variorum format, the design stayed as originally intended, and then the proofs went out. These arrived just before I left for a ten-day research trip to New York at the end of August this year. I worked on the proofs every night at the Hotel Chelsea, and then put in many more hours when I came back to England, because I know from past experience just how often mistakes appear at the last stage — and almost always ones so large that, like Poe’s Purloined Letter, they are hidden by being in plain sight. All the diligence of years of work can be compromised at this last stage, when the pressure is on and the clock is running down. It suddenly throws into relief the hours, days, weeks spent working on one small detail that nobody will likely ever notice.

Publishing: The Cover Story

As I already noted, there were significant differences between the Notebook as an editorial project and The Yage Letters Redux or, before that, Junky. The interest in those projects wasn’t only in discovering and working on the manuscript — mostly typescript rather than holograph — but in establishing the textual and publication histories. In the case of Junky, the material evidence relating to publishing was limited, since there are no archives holding the business papers of Ace Books. Researching in the City Lights editorial and correspondence files at Berkeley was fascinating for that reason and, although I could only skim the cream off it, telling this story in my Introduction was useful for advancing a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how The Yage Letters came to be published in the form it did. Since all interpretation is necessarily based on material assumptions about the origins of the text, I knew that it was important to establish an accurate factual record of what really happened, who made which decisions, and so on. It’s only when you see, in documented detail, how the publication evolved out of numerous alternatives that you truly realise how the identity of the book depends on elements such as design — not only for our experience of it as readers, but as a statement of authorial expression.

For example, in the case of The Yage Letters, Burroughs had strikingly little involvement in the assembly of the text — which was initiated and largely co-ordinated by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — but he became crucially involved in the cover design. Burroughs had been very impressed by the cover for Paul Bowles’ 100 Camels in the Courtyard, which Ferlinghetti had just published, and that’s how The Yage Letters ended up with the wonderfully evocative image of a shaman on its cover, as a counterpart to the Moroccan images on Bowles’ collection of stories. This degree of involvement goes back to the calligraphic design Burroughs made for the jacket of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch in 1959, which in turn marked a great shift from the Ace publication of Junkie in 1953. Then, as a debutant writer having to deal with a pulp publisher at long distance, he had absolutely no input whatsoever, not even getting to choose the book’s title, let alone its cover design: by default, the Ace cover, with its sensationalist artwork, is therefore as revealing about Burroughs’ status and power as a writer — or lack thereof — as it is about how drugs played in the culture of post-war America.

The awareness of a book’s material history — its long, often strange passage from manuscript to physical publication — has been an increasingly important factor in the work I do as an editor, not just in terms of the story I can tell about the past but in regard to what I want for my own editions in the present. In other words, my historical interest as a critic in the “social production” of Burroughs’ texts coincides with and informs my aims as a scholarly editor. On the whole, I’ve been lucky with the publishers I’ve worked with. For example, City Lights let me design (with help from my eldest daughter, Ella) the cover for Yage Redux. In the end, it wasn’t 100% as I wanted it; I didn’t like the banner they ran across the top for the names of Burroughs and Ginsberg, for example — but that was just a practical compromise. Indeed, this is one of the things you learn most forcefully: that almost everything about a book’s writing and publication is marked by collaborations, contingencies, conflicting decisions, the hand of chance, last minute interventions, good or bad. This is a tough lesson for a perfectionist like myself, but it makes visible the ironic position of scholarly editors these days, since many now embrace a form of “socialised” editing — seeing collaborative involvements as not the corruptions of a solitary author’s intention, but as a valid because necessary part of the book production process. Still, as a scholar, I expect to exercise rigorous control over the most minute textual details and to have a robust editing framework carefully worked out — see, for instance, my essay “Not Burroughs’ Final Fix,” which tells the protracted story of the comma and the colon as used in The Yage Letters Redux — but such details will quite reasonably pass by most readers. Nobody fails to notice the layout of the text on the page or the front cover, however — and yet these, the most visibly important elements of all, are typically seen by publishers as a separate job for their design team.

To some extent, this was my experience with Junky: the definitive text of “Junk,” which ended up with a title and a cover design I didn’t really like. However, I was checking back through the files recently and I realised I’d misremembered certain decisions, like the use of “definitive” in the title. I’ve written about that a couple of times, because the word is so contentious in editing circles, and yet in my files of correspondence I saw that Paul Slovak, my — excellent — editor at Penguin, had actually expressed his own doubts about it. And even with the cover design, I discovered an email I’d sent which effectively admitted it was my mistake: I had chosen the cover as the best out of the half-dozen that Penguin’s designers came up with, when I should really have suggested another approach altogether. Ironically, some readers who liked the grungy, pulpy associations of the rather coarse cover assumed it was my idea. In fact, I would have preferred something entirely different: a classic, high sheen, noir look, redolent of city nightscapes and the post-war underworld. At the last minute I did come up with an image that I still think would make the most brilliant cover — a stunning close-up of a metal and glass syringe, a burning cigarette, and Burroughs’ spectral face over a black background, supposedly taken from the film Chappaqua (although it must be an outtake, as it doesn’t seem to be in the film itself; the image is reproduced in Robert Sobieszek’s book, Ports of Entry). But the window of consultation time had closed by the time I changed my mind, and it would have been unreasonable to expect Penguin’s designers to tear up a cover I had initially approved, and accept my bright new idea.

As a book is readied for production all sorts of design decisions are taken very quickly, and there is a palpable sense that the manuscript is changing hands, passing from the scholarly editors to the editorial team of the publishers. Experience helps — Everything Lost is my fifth book — but it is impossible to predict how such key issues as cover design will be handled. For example, with Letters, 1945-1959, Viking asked for ideas and images, and quickly produced two fabulous cover designs, hard and paper, based loosely on them. Simultaneously, in the UK Picador chose a photograph of Burroughs as an old man, taken about thirty years after the letters — in effect, a different Burroughs (unfortunately, for the French translation, Christian Bourgois have recently followed suit with an even older photograph), but they responded to my queries with a rather tart note explaining they knew their business. Viking’s covers were so good, however, I remained sanguine: some you win, some you don’t.

Ohio State University Press had come up with an initial cover design in late 2006. It used the inside cover of the Notebook to form a mottled green background, and ran a black strip (or “belly wrap”) across the middle with the title in a simple font and Burroughs’ handwritten name below in white lettering. I liked the plainness of the design and it was especially good to see at last the evocative title there at the centre of it, which confirmed my sense of its importance — which needs some explaining here.

For a long while everyone had referred to it as the “Peru Notebook” because that’s where Burroughs had started writing it, in Talara, Peru. But that was only the first entry, and the rest of it is written in Mexico, mainly in Mexico City. So it had to be the “Latin American Notebook.” We didn’t discuss the title for very long; in November 2005 I realised what it had to be. I was working on the long (7,000 word) Introduction and all of a sudden the symbolic force of this particular phrase struck home like a revelation. I realised how extraordinary it was to see, written in his own hand, in this little notebook from fifty years ago, Burroughs weighing up his life as he looked back on his years of travelling and writing in Latin America, and summing it up with those two words in one of the very last entries: Everything Lost. The feeling of despair is all the more striking because this is not the story of those years narrated by Burroughs’ biographers, and made familiar through The Yage Letters. This is one of the major significances of the Notebook, that it forces us to accept a much darker picture of Burroughs at this point; not a writer on the verge of a breakthrough, but a man almost without hope.

So, although my colleagues suggested other titles — “A bus called Proletario” (which is the first line of the notebook), for example — this seemed perfect because it caught the raw emotional centre of the Notebook. The phrase also resonates with the status of the Notebook itself, as the one record that survived to tell this very tale of despair and loss. Naming can be surprisingly important in terms of giving a work its identity, and in this case it definitely seemed to confirm what the Notebook was all about.

In that context, the Press’s initial design was unproblematic; I knew there would be a period of consultation later on, and I was relaxed about it. In the summer of 2007 I suggested some ideas for the design of the back cover, since I had been asked to write the jacket blurb and, while the Press didn’t respond to these suggestions, I wasn’t especially concerned. It was in September 2007, just back in England after my research trip to New York, that the new cover design was posted on the author pages on the Press’s website. I was, to put it diplomatically, surprised by what I saw.

The design as a whole seemed to miss the mark: if it was meant to evoke the actual notebook, then the blue-black front cover was curious, since the notebook is just black, while the Press’s logo looked odd stuck in one corner, unbalancing the composition, and the Burroughs doodle they reproduce seems inexplicably to resemble fragments of barbed wire. But these were minor details; what took me by surprise was the lettering of the title phrase, which was so clearly wrong for the book.

Burroughs’ phrase has a simplicity and gravity about it, an understated quality that was captured quite well by the type font on the initial design. Then again, I knew that my colleagues would, like myself, have argued for reproducing Burroughs’ words as actually written in the notebook, since nothing could have bettered the original and authentic hand of the author; after all, with its wonderful facsimile reproduction, such authenticity was essential to the nature and purpose of the whole publication. Significantly, the final design does feature Burroughs’ own handwriting, in the form of his signature, running vertically down the right margin. Unfortunately, this just draws more attention to the inappropriate lettering of the title phrase, with its odd mix of highly stylized and embellished characters that looks gimmicky and makes the word “Lost” hard to even read. Quite simply, Burroughs’ stark, resonant phrase was no longer recognisable to me as the ideal symbolic statement of the book’s identity.

I had served on this project for a long time — over four years, in total — putting in many hundreds of hours without payment, not even expenses, let alone the promise of royalties. Then again, I have always preferred to work in the interests of professional rigour, not profit, because this, I felt, gave me the kind of leverage that money couldn’t buy. In this case, it meant that my sole interest was in protecting the publication, standing up for what, as the Burroughs expert, I thought was right. Given my scholarly and critical research into the history and symbolic importance of Burroughs’ cover designs, I felt well qualified to understand how a detail as specific as the lettering of the title on the cover represented the book as a whole.

Unfortunately, I lost the battle over the cover design. It is difficult to be both a perfectionist by profession and a stoic, but I have to contextualise this one large regret within my broader experience — as both scholarly researcher and scholarly editor — of the many contingencies and collaborations and outright errors that determine the transmission of a manuscript into a publication. Equally, had not Burroughs himself endured far greater compromises as an author dealing with publishers — most obviously in the transformation of his “Junk” into Ace Books’ Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict? Receiving a copy of Junkie in August 1953 — just as he was writing the last entries in his notebook — Burroughs knew that whatever losses he suffered in the name of literature, they were only small symbols of those he suffered in life. Everything Lost makes that painfully clear.

This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007.

I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured I am to be in present company. However, at the immediate risk of testing your hospitality, I want to read you a review of my latest publication — this new edition of The Yage Letters by William Burroughs — that begs the question as to whether it’s an honour I deserve.

“It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that Oliver Harris, a professor at a respectable British university, can devote his scholarly endeavour to the study of the life and works of William Burroughs, not as a case history of psychopathology, or as an example of how bad writing can sustain a large reputation among weak-minded intellectuals, but as if his literary output were worthy of serious consideration. A third of this volume is devoted to the professor’s minute and scholarly reconstruction of how The Yage Letters came to be published in its present form (we learn, for example, that one part of it was first published by the no doubt aptly named Fuck You Press), which is as if all the resources of biblical scholarship were utilized to explicate the provenance and deeper meaning of The Wind in the Willows. In an age of academic hyper-inflation, there is, it seems, no subject that does not find its scholar.”

(Antony Daniels, “All Bark, No Bite,” The New Criterion, November 2006, p. 77)

If this is funny, what exactly is the joke? Is it the reviewer’s blindness to the unarguable truth that William Burroughs is “worthy of serious consideration”? Or is it the assumption that textual scholarship is self-evidently the highest measure of taking a writer seriously, and so must be reserved for only those truly worthy of a place in the academy?

The question of status is a paradox. On the one hand, at this Symposium, William Burroughs is allowed to rub shoulders with the likes of Shakespeare, Malory, Jonson, and Jane Austen. On the other hand, within the Burroughs community, there is in fact a definite residue of ambivalence about bringing into such a respectable and venerable fold as textual studies a writer valued precisely for his status as an iconoclastic outsider, a black sheep in the literary flock. So, paradoxically, it’s some of his friends, as well as Burroughs’ enemies, who worry about the institutional respectability conferred by scholarly editing.

This paradox brings me to another, which is to do with that other key imprimatur of literary value — a place in the archive. Here, I’m thinking specifically of the acquisition, just over a year ago by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, of what is by far the largest and most important collection of Burroughs’ manuscripts, papers, and assorted material. The Berg’s acquisition would seem to contradict quite flatly the derisory tone of my reviewing nemesis, and of course, given the choice, I’m inclined to defer to the authority of the former. But the custodians of the archive exercise an interesting kind of authority, since it is necessarily driven by professional and economic self-interest. That’s to say, prestige in this context is always a conveniently two-way street.

For the housing of Burroughs’ archive in the Berg confers value on his literary worth, but at the same time the Berg claims an increase in its own value as a consequence. This at least is the opinion of Dr. Paul LeClerc, President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Public Library, who claimed that: “Burroughs’ archive is a fantastic addition to the Berg Collection and solidifies the New York Public Library’s position as the world’s leading center for the study of Beat literature”. And yet, in the very same press release, the Curator of the Berg, Isaac Gewirtz, hails the acquisition of Burroughs as a “fiercely sinister and corrosive” figure. Now, since he presumably doesn’t anticipate that Burroughs’ papers will corrode the other manuscripts he curates, there is an inescapable contradiction here in one of the guardians of the academy’s holy relics championing a toxic heretic — notorious not only for being a homosexual heroin addict who shot his wife playing a drunken game of William Tell, but also for making his books by cutting up his writing with a pair of scissors.

Unsurprisingly, my interest in the Berg’s acquisition of Burroughs’ papers is directly related to my past and, I hope, future, as a Burroughs scholar — and in the second half of this talk I am going to focus on the relationship between Burroughs’ manuscript history and the papers now held in the Berg. But before that I want to do two things: firstly, to sketch the outlines of a forthcoming project which is to explore what I call “the politics of the archive” — and, secondly, to return to the specifics of the Berg Collection by discussing the catalogue of Burroughs literary archive produced by the agent for its sale.

The politics of the archive sounds, and is meant to be, a very broad umbrella term, and it came to me when my thoughts began to shift from producing the next new edition to thinking about the very processes by which such editions become — or indeed do not become — possible in the first place.

So naturally, one of the key issues is ownership — the ways in which manuscript collections pass between various hands, from the author’s to agents to private collectors to those of university or public body curators.

Ownership in turn has clear implications for access — what constraints and limits are placed, whether by private collectors or institutions, under what conditions materials can be viewed, when and by whom. So access also includes the construction of collections, their housing, their cataloguing, and policies for managing the archive, whether local ones peculiar to a specific institution or those laid down by professional bodies.

Then there’s the issue of use — of what materials can be cited or published, and so on.

And finally, there are a whole series of issues related to how the constraints placed on access to and use of archival material impact on scholarship and, thereby, on a writer’s reception. This concerns not only the production of specific scholarly editions, but the interpretation of a writer’s entire literary history, which is necessarily determined by what texts are actually available at any given time. So the stakes are potentially very high for both those who house archives and those who want access to them.

And in this context, there arises what might be called a “diplomatics of the archive” — by which I mean the extreme tact with which we have to work — and speak about our work — in order to keep the archival doors open to us. Being even more necessary in print than in speech, this diplomacy entails, for example, the editing of the present paper for publication…

My sense — and here I am genuinely interested to hear from others — is that any scholar engaged in textual studies must be familiar with these issues, but that there’s been no broad study of the ways in which the archive operates. In the absence of such a study, it’s hard to contextualise one’s own experience, and I for one have no clear idea if the problems I’ve encountered are particular to me, or if the relationship between Burroughs’ archives and textual scholarship is not a special case but a commonplace.

Literary Status and Archival Ownership

Well, before turning to Burroughs’ textual history, I want to highlight two related issues arising from this — the sale catalogue of the Burroughs literary archive — a beautiful production put together and written by Ken Lopez, a noted rare book and manuscript dealer.

The two issues concern the relationship of literary status to archival ownership. As Lopez observes, up until twenty to thirty years ago the Beat writers — loosely including Burroughs — were “viewed with disdain by the literary and academic establishment”: “They were outsiders, and deliberately so, and the literary establishment returned the favor by treating them as such. As so often happens, private collectors became the repository for these works.” (Ken Lopez, William S. Burroughs Literary Archive, 2005, p. 6)

In recent years, all that has changed, however, and the archives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and now William Burroughs are, as Lopez notes, “among the most highly valued (in both dollar figures and sheer prestige)” by the very same academy that once shunned their work (19).

The other half of the story, which Lopez goes on to discuss, is the access — or rather, denial of access — during the time the Burroughs archive remained in private hands. In this case, since the archive was assembled in 1973, sold first to the Swiss-based dealer, Richard Aaron, and then in the early 1980s to an American owner, that means a thirty-three year period up until the sale last March. So that has been the situation for the whole of my professional life.

As Lopez puts it, “because the Burroughs archive has been in private hands all these years and not in a research institution, that access has been extremely limited. Various scholars have vilified Aaron and the others in print, labelling them as ‘uncooperative’. In reality, a private home is not a good place for conducting scholarly research […] and these complaints have been essentially misguided, confusing an awareness of an archive with an innate right of access to it.” (6)

I’ve quoted Lopez at length to show two things going on at once. Most obviously, there’s this claim that us scholars, just because we want to put the materials to use, delude ourselves if we think we have any rights to access — the other side of which is that millionaire collectors have a perfect right to prevent access solely by virtue of their bank accounts. Reading between the lines, you might realize that what’s going on here is actually a coded defence of the then-owner of the Burroughs archive, whose sale Lopez was negotiating. Now, if this cat could talk, what tales he could tell — but, for reasons of professional self-interest, I simply can’t. This is what I mean by the diplomatics of the archive…

The second issue raised by Lopez is, in a material sense, the most intriguing and, quite possibly, unique to William Burroughs as a writer. He says:

“As rich as Burroughs’ novels are […] they pale beside the archive, which is his actual work. As spinoffs or byproducts of that work, the books themselves seem almost desiccated in comparison to the main body of his work — this archive — like tree branches broken off of the main living, growing trunk.” (4)

Lopez could hardly up the ante any further: the archive not only as a vital secondary resource, a mother lode of raw materials that can be picked over to underpin the production of new texts and new understandings, but itself, as a totality, the Real Thing, the true creative product and therefore the true object of study and interpretation.

This is by no means snake oil or just sales talk, since Lopez bases his claim on a statement made by Burroughs that has been often quoted by his critics:

“In a sense,” Burroughs once said, “all my books are one book. It’s just a continuous book” (cited in Lopez, 3).

In claiming that the literary archive is this “one book,” Lopez builds on a central understanding about Burroughs’ working methods — namely, the constant overlap and interrelation of his manuscripts — that in turn accounts for the extraordinarily dense intertextuality of his writing. And equally important is the remarkable way in which, as a product of his working methods, the material history of Burroughs’ texts provides precise analogues for his central thematics.

Since this is the point I’m going to end on, I’ll briefly clarify what I mean. The most visible formal feature of Burroughs’ writing from Naked Lunch onwards is his version of a collage aesthetic, in which all the text’s units — whether narrative episodes or brief verbal fragments — coexist in dynamic and mobile juxtaposition. The result is a kind of haphazard montage that replaces the linear unities of realist, narrative temporality with a kaleidoscopic geography in which past and future, identities and places, dissolve and run together. To Burroughs, his texts were literally experiments in a kind of time travel and exploration of unmapped realities generated through textual recombinations.

If this striking formal feature embodies the central thematic of Burroughs’ writing — disrupting fixed and stable notions of reality — then both are determined by the way in which he embraced random factors to assemble his texts from manuscript fragments. Lopez’s claim for the archive plausibly identifies individual books as partial materializations of this larger ongoing project. As I say, I’ll come back to this idea in my conclusion.

“Definitive” Editions

Now, as a way into a brief account of my exploration of Burroughs’ early literary history, I want to pick up on another, related claim made by Lopez, concerning textual scholarship. Discussing Burroughs’ most famous novel, he writes:

“No one has seen the ‘definitive’ Naked Lunch — despite the recent publication of something called Naked Lunch: The Restored Text — because no one has had access to the complete Burroughs papers that were sealed over 30 years ago.” (3)

Putting these two claims together forms a natural bridge to my own work as a textual scholar, in which I have focused on the three novels that Burroughs wrote before Naked Lunch — a title that, for several years, he actually applied to this early trilogy. In what follows, I want to go into the broad outlines of the textual and publishing history of these three novels in order to think about both the “definitive” edition and its relation to the archive.

I begin with the term “definitive” in order to make a very simple point concerning the first and third of these early novels. The first of my re-edited editions had “definitive” in its subtitle — Junky: the Definitive Text of ‘Junk’ — while the second — The Yage Letters Redux — is trumpeted as such on the publisher’s web site. Since I was unhappy about Viking Penguin’s use of the term first time around, for the second book, I directly requested that it be avoided — especially since my introduction explicitly denied that “the re-edited text is now final and definitive”: “This is because the paradox true of all texts — that they are both fixed and flexible, defined in one form and context only to be redefined in another — is exactly what the historical record reveals so powerfully. Redux is part of that historical process, not its perfect conclusion” (xliv).

Needless to say, if you visit the web site of City Lights Books, you will find the “D” word is still up there today. And that’s because commercial publishers aren’t interested in editing theory; they’re interested in selling books. (Likewise, for their edition of Naked Lunch, Grauerholz and Miles were careful to avoid the term — although you might say that “restored” begs other questions — while the jacket blurb insisted on identifying the text as “the definitive version”.) The active agency of publishers is an important issue so far as William Burroughs is concerned, especially early on in his career — and is a story written in miniature in the very title of his first novel.

In 1950, he titled his manuscript “Junk”; in 1953 it was published as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict; in 1977 the “unexpurgated and complete” edition was published under the title Junky. Although the only title Burroughs ever wanted was the first — “Junk” — I lost the argument with Penguin’s marketing department, and the best I could do was to smuggle this into its subtitle. Unhappily, the “D” word rather undercut the point I wanted to make, which is why for The Yage Letters Redux, a text whose history is even more chequered and contingent, I laboured the point in the Editor’s Introduction.

My larger case is twofold. Firstly, that while Lopez’s claim about Burroughs’ “one book” oeuvre has some truth to it, on the one hand, it risks dehistoricizing his work, and on the other, the opposite is equally true — namely that each of Burroughs’ texts is radically plural, a cut-up of manuscripts, a composite of several distinct material histories, in which contingent factors, including the decisions of publishers, played a decisive role in determining content as well as title. And secondly, I want to argue for the importance of recognising this history because, as I’ve already suggested, it had a direct impact on both the thematics and methods of Burroughs’ writing.

The Textual History of Burroughs’ Early Novels

Now to clarify all this, I want to run through the manuscript and publishing history of this trilogy of short novels — whose re-editing I’m hoping to complete next year, now with the benefit of access to the Berg Collection.

To begin at the beginning, whereas the fact of Naked Lunch‘s complex genetic history is well known — albeit most often in the form of inaccurate myths — the first three novels Burroughs wrote have long been seen as straightforward, conventional autobiographical narratives.

Certainly, the compositional history seems to suggest a simple, linear sequence, as each text fictionalised a period of Burroughs’ recent experience one after another, during a four year period in which he lived in Mexico City:

The apparent tight linearity of this trilogy is, however, destabilized by the publication history, which scrambled the chronological order of its writing across four decades:

But there’s more to it than that, as we’ll see if we go through the manuscripts individually.

When it was published in 1953, Junkie looked, crudely, like this —

— where I’ve used dark blue to represent the narrative set in America, and purple for the narrative set in Mexico.

But the manuscript of “Junk” he finished in 1950 had almost none of this second narrative:

Since Burroughs scholars believed his original manuscript was lost, what happened wasn’t clear. My research established that this manuscript was in fact held at Columbia, while the missing material turned up among the Ginsberg papers at Stanford. Why it was added and where it came from tell us a good deal about the decisive part played by Burroughs’ publishers in determining the integrity of his texts.

For the reason Burroughs added a new final quarter to “Junk” — about 14,000 words, all set in Mexico — was because, in summer 1952, his publishers, Ace Books, told him to make it longer. And most of this material he cannibalized from the opening chapters of the new novel he had started writing, but which Ace did not want to publish, namely, Queer. Since this was written in the 3rd person, whereas “Junk” used the 1st, this required a good deal of rewriting but, since he was working to order and in haste, all sorts of small but significant contradictions crept in.

Although I was quite confident I had all I needed, to complete the editing of Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” properly required access to the only complete manuscript of “Queer” — but in 2003 that remained in private hands, so the new edition was published without it.

Now, if we turn to “Queer”: with its first two chapters removed to make up the last sections of Junkie, when a manuscript surfaced in 1984 — having been presumed lost for 30 years — its publishers, Viking, were faced with an even worse problem than Ace Books, since Burroughs never finished the manuscript and all that was left was a fragment too short to even call a novella. What to do? Well, same problem, same solution. So they raided an unused manuscript to make a new ending, which was duly added on for the publication of Queer in 1985 as an Epilogue. This, combined with a long Introduction Burroughs was required to write, added up to a full quarter of the whole book:

“Queer” (1952)

Queer (1985)

Even though this material is in the 1st person, not the 3rd, the new ending, entitled “Mexico City Return,” seemed to follow on perfectly from the end of “Queer”. Where that had Burroughs’ fictional alter-ego travelling from Mexico to South America, this has him travelling back from South America to Mexico. Since both are set in late summer, the gap in time between them seems a few weeks at most.

However, if we go back to the chronology of composition, there’s a striking parallel between summer 1951 and summer 1953. Sure enough, it turns out that the actual time gap was not two weeks but two years, because this material was written in 1953 to describe not Burroughs’ first trip to South America and back, but his second.

Which brings us to the next issue: where this epilogue came from. It turns out that it came from the third manuscript in Burroughs’ trilogy, “Yage,” which narrated his 1953 trip to South America. In fact, this was the ending of that original manuscript, but seems to have become separated from it when the rest of the manuscript was lost in the mid-’50s.

This in turn meant that, when “Yage” was published in 1963, the 1953 material was now so short it had to be combined with miscellaneous other letters and texts written in the 1960s.

“Yage” Ms. (1953)

The Yage Letters (1963)

Needless to say, as I was working on the new edition of The Yage Letters, I was aware that the Burroughs archive contained a manuscript that might possibly have been this long lost original from 1953. But, since access was not forthcoming — and couldn’t have been anticipated in the near future — the edition went ahead without it.

Now, to end with two final points. Firstly, back in late 1953, with Junkie published but no prospects for either “Queer” or “Yage,” Burroughs sketched in his notebook — due to be published later this year — a completely different arrangement of all the material he had written over the past two years. He thought of making a composite text out of six sections of material (including two short pieces which would have been written from scratch) that overlapped the end of Junky, all of “Queer,” and all of “Yage.”

Mexican Composite Manuscript

The result would have been to make one book based on Burroughs’ two journeys from Mexico to South America and back. If this had been published as the sequel to Junkie, then neither Queer nor The Yage Letters would have ever appeared.

But if this one book had come about, the result would have been a single, entirely coherent, linear narrative. It would therefore have contradicted the evolving thematic focus of these manuscripts and so undone Burroughs’ early steps towards his trademark collage aesthetic in which times, places, and identities escape their fixed location. The thematic direction of Burroughs’ writing at this point is summed up by his visionary, yagé-fuelled account of the “Composite City” that concluded “Yage” as published — a topographic fantasy space where “the unknown past and the emergent future meet” (Yage, 53) — and by the description of Mexico City that concluded Queer as published, in which the city is envisioned as “a terminal of space-time travel” (Queer, 131).

And this is why I think it’s hard to see Burroughs’ books as broken branches fallen from the tree of his archive.

For as actually published, Queer and The Yage Letters are radically composite works, each a mix of manuscripts put together only by a series of contingent histories: the end of Burroughs’ first novel had been lifted from the beginning of his second, while the ending of his second novel was taken from the end of his third, and of course since these cannibalizations took place over four decades and the novels were published out of sequence, the chronology of Burroughs’ potentially straightforward autobiographical narrative was, in effect, cut up.

The material contingencies of publication therefore modelled the very disruption of temporality that would inspire Burroughs to methodically cut up his manuscripts to make composite texts, and to speak of moving out of Time and into Space. He came to recognise this only in retrospect, at the time of assembling Naked Lunch — another haphazard, piecemeal composite production — but it confirmed the direction of his work, and his attitude towards publication, from then onwards.

Therefore, the one thing that the archive, as a work in itself, necessarily lacks, is the determining effect on Burroughs’ writing of the simple but material fact of publication. Hence the importance of representing, rather than repressing, the contingent manuscript histories of Burroughs’ novels through scholarly editions — always assuming that his literary output is indeed worthy of serious consideration…

_____ Uncorrected Galley Proof in wraps including a dust jacket with a different design from the final issue.

London: Picador 1985, first British printing, hardbound in dust jacket, rather scarce for a trade edition.

_____Uncorrected Galley Proof in pale pink wraps.

New York: Penguin 1987, first US softcover printing.

London: Picador 1987, first British softcover printing.