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Articles and Reviews: BOOKS
The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William
S Burroughs
By Graham Caveney
The problem for any biographer of William Burroughs,
as for any devotee of his writing, is that, as Caveney puts it
his introduction: ‘He is a signifier of the terminally hip, a
name dropped so frequently that it resurfaces with a (lack of)
identity all of its own...Fans of Burroughs become so before they
have read him (often without bothering to do so) - the very idea
of him is as exciting as his work.’ The life has made a greater
contribution to the myth than has the work, thus obscuring it,
to the extent that Burroughs may well have wished that he’d stayed
home in St Louis, with slippers by the fireside, instead of trailing
around the world indulging in high times, often seeming to be
engaged on a personal mission to disprove the then current laws
of medical science. There again, Philip Larkin, who contrived
to lead as boring - if not as conventional - a life as possible,
was still the subject of a warts and all biography by Andrew Motion,
and J D Salinger’s extreme reclusivity did not protect him from
Ian Hamilton’s effort at rooting out his secrets. (What price
a Pynchon biography, sometime soon?) Damned if you do, damned
if you don’t, would appear to be the message, when it comes to
the publicity game.
The irony of this extravagantly designed and lavishly
illustrated book is that it can only further exacerbate this quandary.
Caveney admits that what is on offer is ‘a chronology of the Burroughs
phenomenon’, rather than an attempt to uncover his ‘authentic
personality’, but for any long-time Burroughs admirer there is
nothing new here, either biographically or critically.
The bare facts of the life are already common currency:
born in 1914 into a bourgeois mid-western family; a dull childhood;
an indifferent English degree from Harvard, an experience which
left him with a lifelong disdain and distrust of the dead hand
of academia; friendship with Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg - the Beats
- and his affair with the latter; the shooting dead during a drunken
William Tell act of his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico
City in 1951, an event that has provoked much speculation in the
accidental/intentional department, and which Burroughs has pinpointed
as the defining moment of his life, the resultant trauma shocking
him into taking himself seriously as a writer, and informing much
of his writing (Burroughs, incidentally, provides great solace
for all of life’s late-starters, becoming a first-time novelist
aged 42, and a first-time home buyer aged 70); protracted periods
of residence in Tangier, Paris, London and New York; and old age
in Lawrence, Kansas.
To be fair, Caveney does go further than merely
presenting the usual ‘junkie, queer, rebel’ image, to highlighting
how the novels represent a thorough-going interrogation of the
fear and attraction of imprisoning systems of control, from drugs,
desire and religion to language itself. He hints at, if never
explores, how Burroughs, unlike his contemporaries, was ‘less
interested in side-stepping systems of control than in exploding
them from within...The Beats produced alternative ideologies;
Burroughs looked at how we are produced by them’. Caveney is also
good at enumerating Burroughs’ various filmic and musical collaborations,
and discusses the shotgun paintings. But again, this is all common
knowledge for any fan, and the newcomer would be better off reading
some of the novels than swallowing this glossy pabulum. From the
early succes de scandale of Naked Lunch to the maturity
of The Western Lands, it is amazing how Burroughs continued
to reinvent himself and improve as a writer, the latter text being
a virtual blueprint for immortality.
In many ways, this artefact exemplifies the idiocy
of the ‘90s: a coffee table book about Burroughs, featuring the
writer as lifestyle accessory. The hagiographic tone is all the
odder, in a tome from a major London publisher, since so much
of Burroughs’ work is at variance with the domestic realism currently
enjoying a hegemony there. Or maybe not so odd at all, given the
market-driven, consumerist ethos of publishing these days. One
wonders what would become of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs
if they were looking for a start today, and John Calder is to
be commended for having given a platform to these highly idiosyncratic
talents. Of course, we are no slouches ourselves when it comes
to posthumously exploiting the reputations of our more subversive
writers, usually to boost the tourism industry, most especially
the ones who found it impossible to live here when they were alive.
Marketing will be the death of us all.
‘Now we are left with the career novelists’ lamented
J G Ballard, in his obituary of Burroughs last August. But Burroughs
is probably not losing too much sleep over this hoopla, wherever
he is, for like other cultural icons of our time - Beckett and
Warhol - the more ubiquitous his image, the more enigmatic he
becomes. With his amalgamation of mandarin intellect with hipster
cool, he remains one of the most important writers of the century.
First published in The Sunday Tribune
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