heavenly soul
By Wendy Cavenett
In his book, The Life And Legacy of William S. Burroughs: The ‘Priest’, They Called Him, Graham Caveney reassesses the calamitous career of the green-eyed junkie-gentleman whose collaborations with everyone from Ginsberg to Cobain exhumed the dark heart of the 20th century. Wendy Cavenett reports.
Across the collective imagination of Western consciousness, William S. Burroughs cuts an unforgettable figure. Dressed in his trademark grey suit and pork-pie hat, the eternally old, junk-addled writer always looked more like a desperate criminal than a literary icon.
A publicly confessed homosexual with a taste for pornography, drugs, guns and medical horror, Burroughs languished on the cultural fringe for decades, dismissed by the mainstream as nothing more than a paranoid low-life who wrote indecipherable, drug-fucked psychobabble.
But by the time of his death from a heart attack in 1997, at the age of 83, he had been edified as a transgressive genius—the supreme avant-gardist whose collaborations impacted on all facets of contemporary music, film, art and literature.
Just three days before Burroughs’ death, academic and ex-New Musical Express journalist, Graham Caveney handed the completed manuscript for The Life And Legacy of William S. Burroughs: The ‘Priest’, They Called Him to his publishers.
The book tells of a life spent on the run.
In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot dead his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in a drunken game of William Tell. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion,” he said in retrospect, “that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death. It has motivated and formulated my work.”
Believing himself to be a wanted man, the Harvard graduate fled to South America, and spent the rest of his life wandering the globe from New Mexico, to Mexico, Tangiers, London, New York and Paris.
In was during his stay in Paris at the notorious Beat Hotel in the ‘50s, that Burroughs began a collaboration with artist Brion Gysin which prompted his first experiments with the ‘cut-up’ technique. By randomly juxtaposing ‘cut-up’ imagery, audio tape and text, the pair plucked narrative from apparent confusion.
Burroughs used the cut-up blueprint to create his groundbreaking 1959 novel, The Naked Lunch. Written from notes taken high on the exotic drug yage, The Naked Lunch used the random placing of chapters and stream-of-conscious prose to take readers on a nightmarish trip through the grotesque worlds of fantastic insanity and perverse sexual obsession. The book’s themes—invasion, disease, entrapment, desire as entrapment, consumerism, addiction and consumerism as addiction—became recurring motifs. “His entire body of work was one big book,” says Caveney. The Naked Lunch inspired critical incomprehension, but it did make Burroughs into an anti-hero for young American writers and poets also living in Paris at the time—including Harold Norse, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, whose epic poem, Howl, owes much, both thematically and structurally, to Burroughs.
By the ‘70s however, the influence of The Naked Lunch and its cut-up techniques had percolated down into mass popular culture inspiring David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album, the lyrics of The Clash and such films as Donald Cammell’s Performance and Nic Roe’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Burroughs collaborated with much younger artists, writers and musicians such as Sonic Youth, Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain. “Every genre, even rock’n’roll, has its own conventions,” says Caveney, “and Burroughs wanted to know who’d set the rules for those conventions and why. The modernist battle-cry was ‘make it new’, and that’s what Burroughs always did, sometimes with disastrous results.” Caveney admits that “a lot of his work from the ‘60s is unreadable,” but maintains that “he made America wake up to its ‘Other’, to its own outlaws.”
In a country built on optimistic individualism, Burroughs offered “a very dark, apocalyptic, Edgar Allan Poe-like vision of America,” says Caveney. “Anyone can do anything at any time, but that has a price, and that price is lawlessness, immorality, a lack of piety and a lack of respect.”
Burroughs’ vision “shook the culture to its roots.”
Ironically, in his old age Burroughs found himself in demand with those very institutions he had sought to undermine throughout his whole artistic life—the behemoths of corporate America. His elegant, vaguely menacing, skeletal presence and dissenting stance marked him as the perfect spruiksman for products targeted at the so-called ‘Generation X’ market. But despite lending his face and name to sell everything from casual sportswear to trainers, Caveney insists that Burroughs was never co-opted.
“Burroughs is like Midas and Narcissus rolled into one,” he explains. “He turned everything he touched into an extension of himself. Whether he was flogging Nike trainers or GAP clothing, the ads became Burroughs’ texts.”
Cunningly designed to resemble one of Burroughs’ and Gysin’s collaborative cut-up scrapbooks, The Life And Legacy of William S. Burroughs: The ‘Priest’, They Called Him, makes a compelling read. Blending academic analysis and pop cultural gossip, Caveney illuminates the man who waded waist-deep through the psychic refuse of our culture to discover the infinite potential of humanity.
“You have to be in Hell to see Heaven”, Burroughs once wrote.
Wherever he ended up, it’s certain that the seeds of sickness and subversion which he planted in our heads will continue to bear strange fruit for generations to come.
“Burroughs was America to the power of 10,” says Caveney. “That’s the fascinating thing about him. If he’s such a weird figure and so American, what does that say about America? He left us with that conundrum. ‘What do I say about you, the culture that created me?’
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This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 1998. Since its publication, Caveney has released another book, Screaming With Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg, (1999).
> > >
By Wendy Cavenett
In his book, The Life And Legacy of William S. Burroughs: The ‘Priest’, They Called Him, Graham Caveney reassesses the calamitous career of the green-eyed junkie-gentleman whose collaborations with everyone from Ginsberg to Cobain exhumed the dark heart of the 20th century. Wendy Cavenett reports.
Across the collective imagination of Western consciousness, William S. Burroughs cuts an unforgettable figure. Dressed in his trademark grey suit and pork-pie hat, the eternally old, junk-addled writer always looked more like a desperate criminal than a literary icon.
A publicly confessed homosexual with a taste for pornography, drugs, guns and medical horror, Burroughs languished on the cultural fringe for decades, dismissed by the mainstream as nothing more than a paranoid low-life who wrote indecipherable, drug-fucked psychobabble.
But by the time of his death from a heart attack in 1997, at the age of 83, he had been edified as a transgressive genius—the supreme avant-gardist whose collaborations impacted on all facets of contemporary music, film, art and literature.
Just three days before Burroughs’ death, academic and ex-New Musical Express journalist, Graham Caveney handed the completed manuscript for The Life And Legacy of William S. Burroughs: The ‘Priest’, They Called Him to his publishers.
The book tells of a life spent on the run.
In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot dead his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in a drunken game of William Tell. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion,” he said in retrospect, “that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death. It has motivated and formulated my work.”
Believing himself to be a wanted man, the Harvard graduate fled to South America, and spent the rest of his life wandering the globe from New Mexico, to Mexico, Tangiers, London, New York and Paris.
In was during his stay in Paris at the notorious Beat Hotel in the ‘50s, that Burroughs began a collaboration with artist Brion Gysin which prompted his first experiments with the ‘cut-up’ technique. By randomly juxtaposing ‘cut-up’ imagery, audio tape and text, the pair plucked narrative from apparent confusion.
Burroughs used the cut-up blueprint to create his groundbreaking 1959 novel, The Naked Lunch. Written from notes taken high on the exotic drug yage, The Naked Lunch used the random placing of chapters and stream-of-conscious prose to take readers on a nightmarish trip through the grotesque worlds of fantastic insanity and perverse sexual obsession. The book’s themes—invasion, disease, entrapment, desire as entrapment, consumerism, addiction and consumerism as addiction—became recurring motifs. “His entire body of work was one big book,” says Caveney. The Naked Lunch inspired critical incomprehension, but it did make Burroughs into an anti-hero for young American writers and poets also living in Paris at the time—including Harold Norse, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, whose epic poem, Howl, owes much, both thematically and structurally, to Burroughs.
By the ‘70s however, the influence of The Naked Lunch and its cut-up techniques had percolated down into mass popular culture inspiring David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album, the lyrics of The Clash and such films as Donald Cammell’s Performance and Nic Roe’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Burroughs collaborated with much younger artists, writers and musicians such as Sonic Youth, Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain. “Every genre, even rock’n’roll, has its own conventions,” says Caveney, “and Burroughs wanted to know who’d set the rules for those conventions and why. The modernist battle-cry was ‘make it new’, and that’s what Burroughs always did, sometimes with disastrous results.” Caveney admits that “a lot of his work from the ‘60s is unreadable,” but maintains that “he made America wake up to its ‘Other’, to its own outlaws.”
In a country built on optimistic individualism, Burroughs offered “a very dark, apocalyptic, Edgar Allan Poe-like vision of America,” says Caveney. “Anyone can do anything at any time, but that has a price, and that price is lawlessness, immorality, a lack of piety and a lack of respect.”
Burroughs’ vision “shook the culture to its roots.”
Ironically, in his old age Burroughs found himself in demand with those very institutions he had sought to undermine throughout his whole artistic life—the behemoths of corporate America. His elegant, vaguely menacing, skeletal presence and dissenting stance marked him as the perfect spruiksman for products targeted at the so-called ‘Generation X’ market. But despite lending his face and name to sell everything from casual sportswear to trainers, Caveney insists that Burroughs was never co-opted.
“Burroughs is like Midas and Narcissus rolled into one,” he explains. “He turned everything he touched into an extension of himself. Whether he was flogging Nike trainers or GAP clothing, the ads became Burroughs’ texts.”
Cunningly designed to resemble one of Burroughs’ and Gysin’s collaborative cut-up scrapbooks, The Life And Legacy of William S. Burroughs: The ‘Priest’, They Called Him, makes a compelling read. Blending academic analysis and pop cultural gossip, Caveney illuminates the man who waded waist-deep through the psychic refuse of our culture to discover the infinite potential of humanity.
“You have to be in Hell to see Heaven”, Burroughs once wrote.
Wherever he ended up, it’s certain that the seeds of sickness and subversion which he planted in our heads will continue to bear strange fruit for generations to come.
“Burroughs was America to the power of 10,” says Caveney. “That’s the fascinating thing about him. If he’s such a weird figure and so American, what does that say about America? He left us with that conundrum. ‘What do I say about you, the culture that created me?’
> > >
This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 1998. Since its publication, Caveney has released another book, Screaming With Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg, (1999).
> > >
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