In a previous essay published in Naked Lunch @ 50, I wrote about William S. Burroughs as a Southerner who had grown up with stories of lynchings in Missouri and the connection between those stories and his obsession with hanged men in Naked Lunch and other works. One aspect of this research I never considered was to survey his works for the earliest occurrences and possible origins of his hanging-death-sex trope. As far as I can tell — and my thanks to the admin at realiystudio.org for pointing it out — the first use of this trope is in a passage from Junky, about two thirds of the way through:

I lay on the narrow wood bench, twisting from one side to the other. My body was raw, twitching, tumescent, the junk-frozen flesh in agonizing thaw. I turned over on my stomach and one leg slipped off the bench. I pitched forward and the rounded edge of the bench, polished smooth by the friction of cloth, slid along my crotch. There was a sudden rush of blood to my genitals at the slippery contact. Sparks exploded behind my eyes; my legs twitched – the orgasm of a hanged man when the neck snaps.

Burroughs could have come to this rather specialized knowledge from any number of sources (discussed below), but recently I came across this relevant passage in “Word,” Burroughs’ run-up to Naked Lunch, that points to a specific incident Burroughs was aware of many years before the writing of Junky:

There was this citizen have a circus act, hang himself with a special elastic rope. A dangerous act they tell me, you gotta check the rope for elasticity before every performance. In St. Louis he didn’t check the rope and his neck snapped, he was carried off by leering cops with a paralyzed hard-on

As a scholar on the cusp of the Notes and Queries generation (“X in Y’s work Z”) who has always been fascinated by how much reality underlies Burroughs’ writings, I consulted my premium membership at newspapers.com and found that this passage is indeed based on a real-life 1943 circus accident at a “Wild West” show in St. Louis. Here are some excerpts from the coverage of the accident provided by the St. Louis Star and Times on Oct. 23, 1943:

5,627 See Act No. 13 End in Death for Man ‘Who Hangs Himself—‘

A veteran performer, who said his family had been in circus work for more than 500 years was listed as No. 13 last night on Fireman’s Wild West Rodeo and Thrill Circus. It was his death number.

Booked as “the man who hangs himself and lives to tell it,” Aloysius Peters, 45, was killed at the Arena, the victim of the leap which he had performed hundreds of times.
Peters climbed to the 75-foot trapeze bar for his act and, adjusting a noose around his neck, plummeted into space before 5,627 horrified spectators.

Split Second Too Late

Always before he had grabbed the rope a second or so before he hit the end of the rope, thus taking the jerk with his arms. Last night he apparently reached for the rope to break the fall a split second too late and was hanged.

The “rope” he used was not resilient enough, his wife said, and put his timing off. Made of strands of rubber covered with canvas, the rope was a new one which he purchased two weeks ago and the war-time rubber, bought in Cleveland, was not the same quality he previously had purchased from London.

When he jumped last night the rope tightened under the impact of his weight, then jerked him 20 feet into the air to dangle like a sack until attendants brought his body down.
[the front page of the St. Louis Star-Times featured grisly photos illustrating the aftermath of his jump and of attendants disentangling the body]
…..

Billed as “The Great Peters” the showman received $650 to $1000 a week from his act …
…..

For the first time his wife, the former Catherine Cowdery, failed to watch his performance. An expectant mother, she had assisted with the act until two weeks ago. “I always helped him with the act,” she told a Star and Times reporter, “simply because I didn’t trust anybody else. I remember he worked with the rope all day yesterday on the kitchen floor, testing it again and again. He didn’t say anything about it not being up to standard or I would have insisted he use the old rope and make the usual jump.”
…..
Tears coursing down her makeup, Genevieve Canistrellis declared the entire company considered Peters “a great performer.” Billy Pape said he had a premonition as he went on for this act that something might happen to Peters. Gayly dressed clowns, too, were crying backstage.

The story was also covered in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and picked up around the country, including by the New York Times, where Burroughs might have read it or elsewhere. I don’t know if he saw the Star Times reporting (probably not) but the story, which is far more dramatic than other local coverage, has elements that would have caught Burroughs’ eye at the time of the writing of “Word.” In the early and mid-fifties, he was haunted by the death of his wife. Queer vibrates with sub-surface echoes of her death and premonitions on that front, including the candy skull scene and the song of the knife sharpener, as well as the shooting of the dangling rat Lee witnesses. Less than a year before Joan’s death, Burroughs’ friend Eugene “Tiger” Terry was also killed in an accident that could have been prevented, mauled to death by an African lion kept as a pet in a south Texas border town (see “Tiger in the Valley” in my biography of Burroughs, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs; Terry died in Oct 1950 and Burroughs wrote a story about him in 1954). The Star Times story reveals similar tragic circumstances and premonitions: Peters’ wife was uncharacteristically not present at this performance (she was in the final stages of pregnancy), and a friend of Peters says he had misgivings about the performance that night. It was later revealed that Peters had changed the brand of elastic rubber he used in the “rope,” and that the war-time rubber used in it (it was 1943) was probably inferior.

The one element in Burroughs’ re-telling of the hanging which appeared in no accounts of the accident I have found is of course the “hard-on” witnessed by the firemen who handle Peters’ corpse. It is the detail that Burroughs would repeat and poeticize in countless hanging scenes throughout his career, to the point where even Anthony Burgess, an admirer of Burroughs, complained about its continued occurrence in Burroughs’ later work. I’m not enough of a psychologist to begin to speculate on Burroughs’ sexual fixation with hanging, but it does seem to have something to do with the involuntary nature of the erection.

Burroughs was by no means the only author to make note of this involuntary reaction in hanged men, throughout history: Joyce scholars have long pointed out the phenomena in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake; medieval, heretical depictions of the crucifixion were censored in this regard. One of the most pervasive images and accounts of the hanged man with an erection involves English highwayman Jack Sheppard, executed in 1724 and celebrated in numerous literary works and drawings. Sheppard was the inspiration for a series of “Wild Boys” books in the 1860’s, such as The New Jack Sheppard, Wild Boys of London, and Wild Boys of Paris. Burroughs’ The Wild Boys (1971) was in turn inspired by these penny dreadfuls.

I assume I’m not alone among Burroughs fans and scholars in that I find pleasure in how his works lead me to rather specialized fields of knowledge, such as how poultry shears are the only implement you should use when severing a finger, or as in the case of “The Great Peters,” that Oscar Wilde was an admirer of an erect, mummified penis found in the very specialized collection of a friend–a penis severed from a hanged man in the eighteenth century.

Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, published by Texas A&M University Press, May 2006. Available now from Amazon.

“‘SHOOT THE BITCH AND WRITE A BOOK! THAT’S WHAT I DID,’ William Burroughs suddenly shouted, standing up fast.” The bitch was Joan Vollmer (the common-law wife whom Burroughs shot in Mexico in 1951), the book was presumably Naked Lunch, and this improbable outburst occurred before astonished visitor George Laughead Jr. in March 1997, just a few months before Burroughs died. “Did he just say what I think?” Laughead reports whispering in his account of the meeting. In reply James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ longtime friend and amanuensis, commented: “It’s so out of character.”

Burroughs’ character — the man has become such a myth that our notions of him have acquired a solidity that betrays the hombre invisible moniker. He was a junky, queer, vanguardist. The story of his life, from the silver spoon of his St. Louis youth to the heroin needle of his Tangiers exile, has become a modern legend. We think we know Burroughs, to the point where we even have the gall to speculate on what the man might have thought about events he never lived to see. We feel, like Grauerholz, that we can judge what might have been in or out of character for Burroughs.

But can we? In his amazing new book, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, Rob Johnson describes Burroughs seated quietly at dinner with some friends. Suddenly, according to witness Ted Marak, Burroughs seemed to break through his habitual reserve. He leapt upon the table, which he had built himself from railroad ties, and exclaimed to his astonished dinner guests, “Now, by God, this is functional!” This too seems out of character — and yet “Shoot the bitch and write a book!” is the same sort of unprecipitated outburst. For that matter, after the noir-ish prose of Junky and Queer, you could consider Naked Lunch a shocking outburst too. There’s practically a moral here, as though we should be wary of our own solidified notions of Burroughs and his character. You never know when the guy might erupt into unpredictability.

The Lost Years often introduces uncertainty into the myth of Burroughs but therefore expands our notion of the man. If you ever worried that in later years Burroughs surrounded himself with sycophants or with people somewhat too impressed with his achievements, then The Lost Years restores balance to the picture. Professor Johnson interviewed a number of people who knew Burroughs during the period 1946-1949, when he lived in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. These were people who “knew him when” — they knew him before his literary achievements; they knew him as a drinker, not a junky; they (mostly) knew him as a married man with two kids, not as a homosexual.

On the whole, the folks who knew Burroughs in South Texas don’t seem to have been especially impressed. “Repeatedly,” Johnson writes, “I was told, yes, he was an interesting person in some ways, but there were a lot of intriguing people.” Some viewed Burroughs as a member of what Johnson calls “South Texas Beats,” a group of eccentric and often self-destructive characters. Some viewed him as a bit of a chump, a “gentleman farmer” who came to Texas and got suckered into buying arid land. Some viewed him as a dullard remarkable not for wild stories but for a lack of basic social skills. When Pat Paris was asked to accompany Burroughs on a trip to Mexico, she replied: “Why would I want to go out with an idiot like that?”

If Burroughs did not impress the people around him, though, they certainly impressed him. Johnson does an excellent job showing how South Texas provided Burroughs with a store of characters — generic types like the oilman and the sherrif as well as specific ones like Tiger Terry, a young man killed by a lion in a nightclub across the border in Mexico. Johnson also takes great pains to show how South Texas shaped the basic outlook that informs Burroughs’ books. His individualism was literally put to the test on his farm, where he believed a man ought to be able to support himself and live free from intrusion. His “factualism” was argued out in letters with Allen Ginsberg, who was flirting with Communism and psychoanalysis back in New York. His conservatism — which, Johnson points out, did not mean in the late 1940s what it means today — was tested by the “wetback deal,” by the ethical ambiguities of being a farmer dependent on illegal labor imported from Mexico. And his entrepreneurialism — yes, Burroughs was the spawn of his inventor grandfather — came up short in the get-rich schemes fabricated by himself and his friends.

However, the most important event to shape Burroughs, as he admitted in the introduction to Queer, was the shooting death of his wife Joan. A feisty, intelligent, and openly sexual woman, Joan very much remains in the shadows of history, and The Lost Years doesn’t — can’t? — do much to fill in the picture. Her cleavage seems to have left as much of an impression as anything else — Ted Marak recalled that “Joan always wore one style of dress, buttoned all the way down the front, and they were always too small, and she never wore undergarments. She had ‘gapsies’ in her dress that I had trouble not looking at. And that poor girl, she’d eat two, maybe three Benzedrine inhalers a day. Never heard her speak a word.” Alarmingly, Marak also recalls that Burroughs — an excellent marksman — had the habit of doing a William Tell routine with her, shooting fruit from their orchard off the top of her head.

Such stunts were truly edgy if not “insane,” as Burroughs himself said. When his South Texas friends and acquaintances heard that, shortly after leaving for Mexico, Burroughs shot and killed Joan, few were surprised. To the contrary, it had seemed almost inevitable to them that some such awful end was in store. Remarkably, Johnson also discovered in his interviews that Ted Marak — never before interviewed on the subject of Burroughs — was an “ear witness” to the fatal event. At the moment of the shooting Marak had been in an adjoining room. He heard the shot and Burroughs shouting, “Quit hamming it up, Joan. Get up!” Fearful of the police for his own reasons, Marak slipped away, never to tell his account — nor even to read a Burroughs book — until located by Professor Johnson.

The Lost Years brims with such details. It veers from embarrassing moments — Burroughs being taunted on Mexico streets by children calling him Willy El Puto — to close textual analysis, from social history to plain old storytelling. (It is difficult, for example, not to get caught up in the tale of Tiger Terry.) And Professor Johnson’s own story, his genuine enthusiasm to discover that Burroughs lived in his neck of the woods, also plays a role in the book: “I’m probably the first person who has read Naked Lunch, walked around on Burroughs’s fifty acres of ‘the finest land in the Valley,’ and known that it was farmed by El Hombre Invisible.” Thanks to Johnson’s efforts, however, the epithet hardly seems appropriate anymore. The Texan Burroughs has at last become visible. The Lost Years is so revealing and, let’s not forget, fun to read, that it may even recast the Burroughs myth anew. William S. Burroughs: junky, queer, vanguardist — and gentleman farmer.

Rob Johnson is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas Pan-American — which, it turns out, is just down the road a bit from Pharr, Texas, where William S. Burroughs lived in the late 1940s. (Google map) Taking note of the proximity while researching the Beats, Professor Johnson began a quest to flush out this almost completely unknown period of Burroughs’ life. Amazingly, he managed to locate and interview people who “knew Burroughs when” — knew him when he was known not as an avant-garde author but as an eccentric farmer. (When Burroughs shot his wife Joan, the New York Daily News described him as a wealthy cotton planter from Texas.) Backing up these interviews with basic documentary research, Professor Johnson has managed to compile a very unique portrait of Burroughs — a portrait of the artist as a pre-artistic man.

In lectures and in an article that appeared in the journal Southwestern American Literature, Professor Johnson has hinted at the portrait which he now fully gives in his book The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. The book is being published by Texas A&M University Press and is slated for release in autumn, 2006. In advance of the publication, Professor Johnson very kindly agreed to field some questions from RealityStudio. He also provided the exclusive picture (below) of “Tiger Terry,” a young friend whose death — he was mauled by a pet lion in a Reynosa, Mexico nightclub — formed the subject of a “lost” story by Burroughs.

RealityStudio: You found a number of people who knew and remembered Burroughs. Without spoiling the stories that will be published in your book, what was their general perception of the man? Did they consider him a farmer? A drug-growing homosexual freak?

Johnson: In general, they found him anti-social, but prone to occasional, enthusiastic outbursts — very much the Old Bull Lee in On the Road who shakes excitedly describing a shelf he has built that will last a thousand years. At least a couple of them believed he was mentally impaired — “retarded,” one man told me. If he had not been friends with Kells Elvins, who was well-known down here, Burroughs would have had few or no South Texas acquaintances. He would have been the “invisible man” he was most other places.

RealityStudio: One of the members of Burroughs’ Texas household was Joan’s daughter Julie. After Joan’s death, she was sent to live with her grandparents and has pretty much disappeared (at least so far as fans of Burroughs are concerned). Does your book present any info on her?

Johnson: Yes, but not much. One of Burroughs’s acquaintances, who is actually my neighbor in McAllen, Pat Paris, described Julie: Her description matches the photo of Julie taken in East Texas in 1947, which shows a rather unkempt, waif-like child.

RealityStudio: At what point did the people who knew Burroughs realize he had become an author and celebrity? Have they read his books? What do they think of them?

Johnson: Most people I interviewed had never read his books, nor were they even aware he had become a writer after he left the Valley in 1949. A couple of them later learned about his books when they saw his picture in Life magazine, following the publication of Naked Lunch. They were shocked. Pat Paris told me she was watching a documentary on the twentieth century with her son, and Burroughs’s image flashed on the screen. She said aloud, “There’s Billy,” and her son said, “Billy who?” “Billy Burroughs.” “Why do you call him Billy?” “Because that’s what we called him down here.” Her son was amazed, being a big fan of Burroughs, and started combing his books for South Texas references. There are at least two references to Pat and her husband in Interzone.

RealityStudio: The image of Burroughs as a would-be farmer probably strikes many of today’s fans as incongruous. Do you think Burroughs really wanted to make a go at farming? Or were there other factors that drew him to Texas — say, the proximity of Mexico (and therefore boys)? Was there anything about South Texas that was particularly congenial to Burroughs and/or the Beats?

Johnson: Burroughs did come down here twice after drug busts, and yes, he did want to be close to the border for that reason. And he was serious as a farmer. Farming was a very masculine occupation and offered self-sufficiency and freedom from outside control. Or at least that’s what Burroughs thought (it didn’t work out that way). The Valley, which is still a very isolated place operating under its own laws, tended to attract black sheep types like Burroughs. It also attracted midwestern Anglos who enjoyed lording it over the Texas Mexican and Mexican population. Segregation in the Valley insured that even third-class white people were treated better than most of the local population. Of course not all Anglos were like that, and Burroughs certainly wasn’t a racist, but there was a side of him that was very colonial, at least during this period.

I don’t think the boys were a big attraction down here, although they were available across the border in Mexico — even though it wasn’t that common for gringos to do that sort of sexual colonizing. Burroughs was outed in Reynosa, however, and was thereafter known as Willy El Puto — Willy the Queer. Reynosa, across the border from McAllen/Pharr, was definitely a draw, an anything-goes place in the 1940s, and Burroughs loved such environments.

RealityStudio: Burroughs didn’t live that long in Texas but the period seems to have furnished him with a lot of experience and characters for his later writing. Is there any evidence that Burroughs attempted to write anything at all while actually in Texas? Or was he just preoccupied with his marijuana crop?

Johnson: He wrote great letters, although he didn’t really start writing Junky until he moved to Mexico City. Ted Marak, one of Billy’s friends down here, remembers seeing him hunched over his Underwood, probably writing letters to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. As far as MJ, Burroughs didn’t grow it here; he grew it on his East Texas farm in New Waverly. His friend, Kells Elvins, however, grew what was reportedly very high grade marijuana.

RealityStudio: One typically thinks of Texas and the South as conservative. (For example, it’s astonishing to imagine Burroughs living in a “dry” county!) Did the radical Beats tap into some pocket of liberality there? Or did they just stand out like a sore thumb?

Johnson: Actually, there were so many real characters down here that Burroughs and Kells were just two among many. My book is about Burroughs, but it’s also about these other characters — a group I dubbed the “South Texas Beats.”

On Liberals and Conservatives: Burroughs (and Kerouac) were hardly liberals. Burroughs hated FDR’s New Deal, Big Government, Revenooers, and especially Communists. He admired self-made millionaires like the wildcatters (oilmen) he met and heard stories about in Texas. At the time, his views were much more in line with Conservatives than Liberals, but we forget, today, that Conservative originally meant someone who believed that people should be left alone to do whatever they want to do without interference, especially from the government. Communism, of course, is the opposite of all that. One of the contributions of my book is to place Burroughs in line with mid-century conservative philosophy. His views on farming illustrate this perfectly. I also discuss the influence on Burroughs of the ultra-conservative, 1940s era columnist Westbrook Pegler. Don’t get me wrong: Burroughs was not Rush Limbaugh, but he would definitely agree with anyone who was anti-government. Conservatives today are hardly pure conservatives — they are often more like Fascists. Burroughs was of the Conservative/Libertarian order. But, at least in the 1940s, calling him “liberal” would have been the greatest personal insult.

RealityStudio: Your previous books were about classic American railroad stories and the supernatural tales of Mexico. It seems like strangely pertinent background material for preparing a book on Burroughs, who admired the one (outlaws, carny men, etc.) and knew the other from his travels in Latin America. Did you find that your first two books informed your book on Burroughs in any way?

Johnson: Of all of those railroad writers, Jack London was the biggest connection, particularly The Road. He too wrote classic American books in the sense that they deal with outlaw cultures such as hobos and catalogue purely American argot and slang (as WSB does in Junky). Fantasmas, another book I edited, is by Mexican-American writers, many of them from the Valley, and what I learned about the literary culture down here helped place Burroughs’s writings about the Valley in context. He was right about some (many) things, wrong about others.

RealityStudio: How did you personally come to be interested in Burroughs? And are you a “native son” of Texas?

Johnson: I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised in Houston. However, I knew very little about South Texas until I took a job down here at the University. I did not seriously study the Beats — in fact, had read only On the Road, “Howl,” etc. — until around 2000, when I was offered a job writing encyclopedia articles on the Beats. To do that, I read practically all Beat literature over a 2-year period. When I came to study Burroughs, I was really surprised to see Pharr, Texas return addresses on his mid-1940s letters. Pharr was down the road from where I lived, in McAllen. That’s what got me going, first as a kind of hobby, and later very seriously, doing this research.

RealityStudio: Your book sounds like it must have been a lot of fun to research. Do you think it will add to or even change the perception of Burroughs today? Does it explode the Burroughs myth or, to the contrary, show that it’s no myth at all?

Johnson: Doing this research was one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life, particularly because of the people I met — lots of Beat scholars, such as Kurt Hemmer, Gordon Ball, Edward Simmen (in Mexico), but most importantly for my research, James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s literary executor, a truly wonderful and brilliant man and important scholar in his own right. I also had the great pleasure of meeting the South Texans who knew Burroughs or Kells Elvins, and people in Reynosa who remembered Willy El Puto. It seemed no accident that these people were part of Burroughs’s world back in the 1940s — they were highly intelligent, fascinating characters, and also great storytellers.

I don’t know if my book explodes the Burroughs myth, but it does let you see Burroughs through the eyes of people who knew him before he was a writer, people who (mostly) had no idea what became of him after he left the Valley in 1949. It’s very difficult to find people today who have that perspective on Burroughs. The main reason people down here met him was because of Kells Elvins’ social connections. That wasn’t true in New Orleans, for example, where I doubt you can find anyone alive who has Billy Burroughs stories. Elvins, Burroughs’s childhood friend and probably his closest friend until Kells’s death in 1961, is a key character in my book. He is “K.E.” in Naked Lunch, and “Rollins” and “Evans” in other works.

My portrayal of Burroughs as a conservative and a would-be capitalist is probably a new perspective for some Burroughs fans. In that respect and others, I think readers will see a Burroughs who is familiar but also different, someone whose ideas in the 1940s were not necessarily ones he stuck with in later life. Burroughs did often change his mind — he was not monomaniacal on issues such as societal “control,” although critics tend to see him that way.

Readers of Queer will see (in the Reynosa stories found in my book) how much Burroughs’s life in South Texas was a dry run for his deeper explorations into Mexico. I also discuss a previously unknown short story by Burroughs called “Tiger in the Valley,” which deals with a friend of Burroughs’s nicknamed Tiger Terry, who was killed by a pet lion in a Reynosa restaurant. And my book contains a new account of the death of Joan Vollmer, provided by one of Burroughs’s South Texas friends who was partying in an adjoining room in the Mexico City apartment where Joan was shot. What he told me substantially changes our understanding of the events leading up to Joan’s accidental death.

I think what readers will like the most about the book, though, are the outlandish stories his friends tell about Burroughs and the other South Texas Beats — their get-rich-quick schemes, their 4-day parties, their sometimes comic attempts at being farmers.