You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
—William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, 1987
William S. Burroughs is the original beatnik and king of the underground. Patti Smith called him the godfather of punk, while for Kurt Cobain he was a grunge muse. Today’s Generation Z might consider him the Daddy-O of normcore, though, and when you look at the “junkie gentleman,” he is undoubtedly a conservative picture to behold. Typically Burroughs wore a three-piece suit, shirt, tie, and fedora hat, and occasionally a trench coat when the weather demanded it. In his Telegraph obituary, he is referred to as a “Giacometti sculpture in a demob suit.” He’s especially known for the fedora, and it has become sewn into the signature of Burroughs’s personal panache. It was a piece of headwear that respectable men in the 1940s put on as a matter of course: nothing out of the ordinary. But Burroughs put one on and decided to work it throughout the decades: biker jackets and denim in the 1950s or loon pants and tie-dye in the 1960s were not for him. He was a maverick sartorially—he refused to follow fashion, and his ideas, writings, and design for life inspired and subverted style on the street and stirred those in the know.
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William S. Burroughs at his desk, 1959.
In director Howard Brookner’s 1983 film, Burroughs: The Movie, wardrobe traditionalist Burroughs admits to a phase of dressing up in drag as an “old lesbian” while playing charades with Allen Ginsberg—his dress sense was informed by Edith Sitwell’s Plantagenet look. This was back when the cult of beatnik was getting baptized in the early 1940s. Burroughs’s daywear, however, was always suit and tie, and although it conflicted with his on-the-edge lifestyle, it was a perfect fit. While he was hanging out in South America in the mid-fifties, local kids used to call Burroughs “el hombre invisible.” The name worked for him. He wanted to assimilate; he didn’t want to attract attention when all the while he was shooting heroin and guns.
Kurt Cobain asked Burroughs to appear in the video for Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.” Cobain wanted him to play Jesus, but Burroughs refused the invitation.
As a young man, Burroughs enjoyed listening to Viennese waltzes and Louis Armstrong.
Before moving to New York, Burroughs worked as an exterminator in Chicago.
Interviewed for a Burroughs exhibition at the Lawrence Arts Center in Kansas in 2013, John Waters said of him: “He branded himself; he always had that look. He kept one look all his life, which is very important to do. He was gay and a junkie and he didn’t look the parts. . . . Everybody read his books, especially when you’re a young kid trying to rebel. . . . As a young gay man I thought, ‘Finally, a gay man who isn’t square.’ That was very influential, to realize that there really was a bohemia. Didn’t matter if you were gay or straight. I just wanted to be in Bohemia, because I lived in Lutherville, Maryland, then. Burroughs was my imaginary friend.”
Burroughs has not just been an imaginary friend to disenfranchised youth. He also gave a voice to the counterculture, when it needed someone to articulate its ideals. With his writing and words, Burroughs defined and gave insight into new-age cultural shifts and recalibrated the mind-sets of a generation. To many today, Burroughs was the man who prophesied, through his slash-and-paste word sequences, the oppressiveness and out-of-control consumerism of the twenty-first century.
Burroughs was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. He wrote from an early age, but it wasn’t until 1951, when he accidentally killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game with a gun, that he believed his writing became a soul-searching release. In Conversations with William S. Burroughs, he is quoted as having said: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” The “word hoard” he had been penning while drifting, taking drugs, and living in Paris and South America was reassembled with the help of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac into his book Naked Lunch, which was published in Paris in 1959 and eventually in the States in 1962. Burroughs credits Kerouac with coming up with the title, which has now, of course, become an ultrareality motto. Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg met in New York City in 1943, and all three men are recognized as being the heartbeat of the beatniks and their work an expression of the unconventional.
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William S. Burroughs in France, 1964.
