macthemost: Cursed from Birth: Burroughs Jr.

Cursed from Birth:
The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr.
by David Ohle
Paper 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" 256 pgs. ISBN: 1-933368-38-1 List: $13.95 11/1/2006
Soft Skull Press.

The photo on the cover of this book of William Burroughs with his son, Billy, and with Florida in the background, does not illumine the depth of suffering that has already befallen them, a tragedy of such notorious proportion to this American literary family that it still calls for illumination in this new century.

The Burroughs saga continues in part because, because like Orwell, William Burroughs, thoughout many of his published works, possessed a singular foresight: in his case, the rise of the Control State in this so-called Age of Terrorism.

Were there sacrifices made to achieve this vision? His son claims, in this slim volume, published posthumously well after the son's death, that he was one of the humans sent to the altar by his father for prize of literary success. A key point in this contention is what happened to Billy's mother and Burroughs' common law wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs:while the family was residing in Mexico City, including Joan's daughter from an earlier marriage, and the two parents were partying with friends, Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in the head and killed her, in a drunken game of William Tell that substituted an empty bar glass for the apple.

As Cursed tries to painfully remind us over and over again, the singular epochal tragedy of the shooting death of the author's mother cast a lifelong shadow over his brief strobe of life and creative output.

The last section of Billy's life is centered in Denver, Colo. the city of the hospital where he received one of the first liver transplants in this country, and Boulder, Colorado, where his father taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Naropa Institute. There is slight mention of time Billy spent in Santa Cruz. F.A. Nettelbeck remembers drinking with him at the Garibaldi. Williams Craddock is a note, recounts the riotous time he and Billy had while partying around a huge Beat poetry reading at the Civic Auditorium.

Billy lived in Santa Cruz with a woman he met at Naropa named Georgette Larouy, after he and his wife Linda Perry split up. Santa Cruz was not a happy time: constant drinking, going to detox, living on the bum, was too much for Georgette to handle. He got the boot.

Anne Waldman, one of the directors of the poetry school at Naropa, said Billy had a demon in him.

We have have several cogent biographies of Burroughs (the longtime Burroughs confidant, executor of his estate, James Grauerholz's, is in the process of completing one). But little about his son. This book of memoirs is a gift, a gentle operation by the distinguished novelist and teacher David Ohle on the written remains left by the son of the father of Junky, Naked Lunch. What he saved, may not be actually brought back from the dead, but is in suspended animation; and presents a portrait of the young man and writer and his circles of hell on earth, with fleeeting moment of heaven, perhaps.

It is wiser not to judge it: it is worthy for the best mental state to describe this retelling of events with kind reference to the past, in a happy fiction, as both father and son might agree for now on one core tenet: as Burroughs Sr. might put it, all writing is autobiographical and all is fiction.

Unlike some youth of famous parents, William S. Burroughs, Jr. did not rebel against the traditional trappings of celebrity and success. He used them and looked forward to a wealthy life as a famous writer. He came to see that his conflict with achieving that came from the hurt that he experienced, real enough for him and for others around him, but perhaps not for his father, whose achievements in triumphing over one's self-induced adversity did not pass to his son. He did not forgive his father; and in so in not doing he did not free himself from the illusion that the spinning wheel of the world cast in mortal threads.

This is what we have to learn from this the "failure" of a book, and there is beauty in it.

He was the only child of his father, the offspring of a tempestuous union of two parents who were intellectual compatible but fully untoward, each in their own self-indulgence. Burroughs Sr., whose full name is William Seward Burroughs II--the first was his grandfather, renowned for inventing the Burroughs adding machine, which grew into a large corporation, though not kept in family hands. His parents ran a tony antiques store called Cobblestone Gardens, first in St. Louis and then in Palm Beach. Perhaps now the Burroughs name is now known more for a literary style incorporating rapid fire stream of altered consciousness with auto- and same sex-erotic historic and 'psycho-political science fiction' elements that melt painlessly in heavily opiated drug overtones.

Reportedly conceived in a hotel room in New York City in 1947, Billy Burroughs came into this life in the midst a great deal of turmoil and social disruption in his parents lives, accentuated by their use of drugs and alcohol.

His father was starting to get uncomfortable, catching heat from the authorities in New York City, so William Sr. gathered Joan and her daughter from an earlier marriage, after she had been released from Bellevue Hospital in New York City due to a "5150" type detention, and moved to Texas, where he bought some farmland near Houston, in a place called New Waverly. This is where Billy was born, in a hospital in Conroe, just about fifteen miles from the homestead. Father William also had called on a notorious junkie cohort from Manhattan, Herbert Huncke, to join them, to work as a "farmhand," but whose skills at scoring heroin and Benzedrine for the three of them in Houston would be a key part of his role. As absurd as this was, one can imagine that this was not to be their abode for long. A move over the state border to New Orleans nearly eventuated in Burroughs landing in Louisiana's notorious Angola State Prison for marijuana possession charge. Finally, first the father, and then the rest of the family, sought exile in Mexico.

So here we have Billy's father, a drug addict and felon on the lam, Billy's mother, a Benzedrine addict, drinking over a quart of alcohol daily. The camaraderie that Joan Vollmer and Burroughs Sr. shared earlier in New York City, and at times they enjoyed on the farm, was just bout gone, disintegrated in a series of arguments over Burroughs' manhood, or lack of it; and over his fetish for guns. He had a long time fascination with weapons, and nearly killed a close friend with a gun as a younger man. As did Billy year later on.

It was undoubtedly a foreshadowing for the main act: the death of the mother, the crime and arrest of the father.

After having posted bond, Burroughs fled Mexico, ventured through Central and South America, then to Europe and North Africa, to Tangier.

Billy's kindly grandparents Mortimer and Laura Burroughs raised him in comfortable surroundings, first in the St. Louis area, then to Palm Beach Florida, until age fourteen, when his father called him to Tangier. Tangier was a free zone where drugs and sex were fluid, and Burroughs Sr. wrote Naked Lunch there.

Billy did not have the exact same drives and disciplines as his father. It appears that this period of adolescence resulted in a crucial, defining split from his father in seeking his own identity, albeit in a negative way.

In an unsent letter by Billy, discovered after his son's death, Billy signed off as "your cursed-from-birth son," and wrote afterwards, "P.S. From one who has intently studied your work all his life let it be known that in this one's opinion, everything since Naked Lunch is tripe of the worst con-artist type--as far as art goes that's your only kind--Con."

David Ohle does a meticulous job of stitching together the writings from Billy Jr's third and unfinished so-called novel "Prakriti Junction," According to an earlier interview with him, published in Hobart

So Burroughs hired me for a fee to “edit” Billy’s last novel, "Prakriti Junction." But when I got to Ohio State, where the filed boxes were

stored, there was no novel to speak of, so I conceived the idea of doing a memoir, a compilation of his writings, his letters and testimonials about him. . . . I guess Billy thought some background was necessary to provide context for readers who were not familiar with his entire life. I thought the same thing when I was compiling Cursed From Birth, and so used background material from Speed at the beginning to provide context. I think Billy began Prakriti Junction before his liver transplant, which changed everything and made it impossible for him to continue in any organized, coherent way. He continued writing, but not regularly, and always obsessively about his physical degradation, suicidal thoughts, and hopelessness. I suppose his post-transplant writings were a form of catharsis. Perhaps writing about suicide prevented him from doing it (directly). . . These papers had been lovingly gathered by Ginsberg, and placed in collection at Ohio State University Library (site for the William Burroughs Papers).

Soft Skull Press published Cursed from Birth, a small, dynamic publisher in Brooklyn, after Grove-Atlantic got cold feet over some of the personal portrayals in the pages, and the fact that not all of the living had signed off. According to editor Ohle, "The Soft Skull version is essentially the same as the uncorrected proofs Grove printed, except the inclusion of the Journal of Psychiatry's Case Report [on Billy], which Grove didn't want to include because of the expense of getting the publication rights." Seeing as how this book was put together from a core set of pages, "Prakriti Junction," and the notes and letters, all this material would have benefitted from an index.

Editor David Ohle, a native of New Orleans, and a graduate of Louisiana State University, teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he lives -- also the locale where Burroughs Sr. resided during the last years of his life -- he was also Burroughs' personal assistant during much of the time that Burroughs lived in Lawrence. Ohle has written two cult science fiction novels whose "indeterminate" fiction has been likened to Burroughs'--Motorman (first published by Knopf in 1972; paperback edition available from 3rd Bed Books), and The Age of Sinatra (Soft Skull, 2004). The forthcoming Pisstown Chaos is due to come out by Soft Skull in the Spring of 07. After Motorman came out he lived in Austin, and taught experimental fiction at the Universtiy of Texas. He has had shorter pieces of fiction published in Harper's, Esquire ("Some Moldenke," Jan., '72), the Paris Review, and other magazines, reviews and journals. "Mother and Son," a short work that appears to from the Pisstown collection,

is at http://www.failbetter.com/05/Mother%20and%20Son.htm

Resources:

Speed
by William Burroughs, Jr. (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1984)

Kentucky Ham

by William Burroughs, Jr. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973)

Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs

by Ted Morgan (New York: Henry Holt, 1988)

When I was Cool: My Life at The Jack Kerouac School

by Sam Kashner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004)

NPR interview with Kashner

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4651089

Take of Care of Freedom and Truth will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty
by Richard Rorty, Edited and with an Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006)