ST. LOUIS
1914-1931
PERSHING AVENUE, AN ELM-LINED residential thoroughfare of plain-fronted brick houses in St. Louis, owes its name to World War I, having been rechristened from Berlin Avenue not long after the outbreak of hostilities. On Pershing Avenue—named after the American commander in the war—you can tell the seasons by the ways of tidying up: in the summer, the freshly mowed lawns; in the autumn, the bags in driveways filled with dead leaves. The avenue, in the middle of Middle America, is a monument to hard work, conventional behavior, proper values, shared assumptions, and sedentary, rooted, community-minded lives. Its houses, not immoderate or ostentatious, indicate a satisfactory level of affluence.
The three-story house at 4664 Pershing Avenue had a slate roof, a fifty-foot front lawn, and a large backyard with a garden and a fish pond, separated from the neighbors by high wooden fences overgrown with morning glories and rose vines. The windows were leaded, a fire burned in the living room on chilly evenings, the dining room and study were commodious, and cheerful bedrooms occupied the other two floors.
It was in one of those bedrooms, on February 5, 1914, that William Seward Burroughs II was born. His heritage combined two familiar American types: the Yankee inventor and the Southern preacher. The inventor was his paternal grandfathehr, William Seward Burroughs, born in 1857 in Rochester, New York, then known as “the flour city” because of its mills. The “Seward,” after Lincoln’s far-sighted secretary of state, who bought Alaska from the Russians, was an expression of hope that the boy would make something of himself.
William Seward’s father, Edmund Burroughs, was a mechanic and an inventor in his own right—he took out patents on a railroad jack and on sliding knives to cut paper, but never made any money and was in fact often unemployed. As a result, he discouraged his son from following in his footsteps, wanting him to take a steady, white-collar job. When William graduated from high school at the age of eighteen, he found employment as a clerk in the Cayuga County National Bank, in nearby Auburn.
A bank clerk in those days spent his time writing columns of figures in black and red ink in cloth-bound ledgers and tallying them by hand. If the columns didn’t balance he was in trouble. Every morning, he came into the office, removed his detachable cuffs, adjusted his green eyeshade, perched on a high stool next to the other clerks, and put in eight hours or more of unimaginable drudgery, until the numbers blurred his vision, until the battalions of dollars and cents melted and liquefied in his brain pan in a puddle of tedium.
William Seward Burroughs stayed at the bank for seven years. He married when he was twenty-one. During those years of scratchy nib pens, endless rows of figures, and the anxiety of error, the sensible idea occurred to him that there must be a better way. And the better way was a machine that would replace all the burned-out bank clerks across the nation. Born of his own seven years of frustration in the salt mines of clerking, the idea of a machine that could add and tally and spit out the error-free results on a strip of paper became an obsession.
The work had ruined his health. He was in the early stages of tuberculosis, and doctors recommended a warmer climate. His father had moved to St. Louis, and William Seward decided to follow there. His life from then on becomes a parable of entrepreneurial capitalism in the land of limitless opportunity, where anything was possible, where a poor young man, hard-working and inventive, could, in a decade, make a fortune and found a great corporation.
In an inventive age, examples abounded—the typewriter in 1868, the telephone in 1876, the cash register in 1879, the fountain pen in 1884, and the Kodak camera in 1888. It was easy—all you needed was the streak of genius to make something that had never been thought of before, plenty of cash to develop your invention, self-confidence bordering on megalomania, and a nod from the patent office.
Of course there had been calculating machines since the abacus, but no one had come up with a machine that could, with one stroke of the handle, add a column of figures and print the operation on paper at the same time. Burroughs later added a wide carriage so bookkeeping journals could be printed, and the now-familiar cash-register tape became the tally of the day’s transactions.
In 1882, at the age of twenty-five, William Seward Burroughs arrived in St. Louis, a city of foundries, with an ample supply of toolmakers, still largely German in its ethnic stock. It was his good fortune soon after he got there to meet a kindred spirit, a young Canadian named Joseph Boyer, who was like him an inventor, and who like him had migrated to St. Louis in search of opportunity. Boyer, who ran a little machine shop at 244 Dickson Street, making mostly bottle molds for dairies and breweries, had patented a pneumatic hammer, and was working on a device to record the speed of trains.
Burroughs rented bench space from Boyer, along with equipment and an assistant. Having been around inventors, Boyer knew that most of them were big-talking dreamers whose schemes never hatched, and it was with a healthy dose of skepticism that he listened to Burroughs boast that “someday there will be one of my machines in every city bank in the land, and that means over 8,000 machines.”
And yet, Boyer had to admit, Burroughs approached his task with the fervor of a religious fanatic. He would be at his bench making drawings when Boyer left the shop in the evening, and he would be there still when he returned the next morning. When the St. Louis damp stretched his drawing paper, he switched to polished copper plates, striking a center or drawing a line under a magnifying glass.
Burroughs found a couple of backers who put up $700 in exchange for fourteen shares of stock in a nonexistent company. Boyer was impressed and invested some of his own money. There was no doubt Burroughs had a knack. Boyer had seen him once, in a couple of hours, design a collapsible chicken coop that folded up when it was not being used.
Burroughs called his machine the Arithmometer, and in 1886, the American Arithmometer Company was incorporated under a Missouri charter with a capital stock of $100,000 divided into 1,000 shares, among Burroughs and three investors. The company was founded mainly on hope, for he did not yet have a patent and had not yet produced any machines. By this time he had a growing family, Mortimer, born in 1885, and Horace, born a year later, who would be followed by two daughters, Jenny and Helen.
Two years later, however, the great day came: Burroughs was granted the first patent for a key-operated recording and adding machine. The stockholders voted to increase the capital stock to $200,000. By this time, in St. Louis investment circles, the “mad mechanic’s” adding machine had become something of a joke. It was customary to say, instead of “He has money to burn,” “He has money to buy adding machine stock.”
Under pressure from stockholders to come up with the goods, Burroughs produced fifty machines in 1889. There was only one problem—they didn’t work. Depending on how hard you pulled the handle, the machines came up with different sums. Operating the handle correctly required a magic touch. Complaints poured in from the banks where the machines had been sent, and they had to be recalled. Banks lost interest, stockholders were discouraged, the company faced failure.
Burroughs hated failure, which in puritanical Darwinian fashion he equated with evil. If you failed, IT WAS YOUR FAULT, it was because of some moral taint. One day, in an alcoholic pique, he paid a stealthy visit to his workroom, where the fifty recalled machines were stored. He sat there for a long time staring at them—a vision of failure, of hopes delayed, of having his judgment and ability doubted. The chorus of complaints rang in his ears: “I tried to list four figures and your machine came up with a row of zeros.” Suddenly he rose, picked up one of the machines, and threw it out the window . . . and then another and another. The machines were evil and had to be destroyed. Then he called Boyer over and, pointing to the pile of mangled metal on the pavement, said: “There, I have ended the last of my troubles.”
PLUCK HIS ONLY ASSET, an obituary subhead would later read. The little drama of persistence was played out in a matter of days, with Burroughs experiencing the “Eureka!” moment, when lightning strikes. The solution to variations in the handle-pulling force was a “dash-pot,” an oil-filled metal cylinder drilled from solid bar steel, about two inches in diameter and five inches long, with a piston punctured by two small holes to regulate the flow of oil. This gave a uniform motion to the shaft mechanism whatever the force applied to the handle. The “dash-pot,” a device also used to keep heavy doors from slamming, buffered the variations.
The new machines went out in 1891, and they worked. In fact, they were the answer to every bookkeeper’s dream. The banks snapped them up at $425 apiece. At last they had attained the dignity of a marketable commodity. As Burroughs noted in his demonstrations, “Let me say that there is no halfway point in the mechanical world. A machine of this nature is either a complete success or a complete failure.”
The product was launched in the midst of that glowing late-nineteenth-century era of business optimism and the “we-can-do-it” spirit:
“How long will a Burroughs last? Frankly we don’t know. We have never seen one wear out.”
“Satisfied customers are saying, ‘The Burroughs pays for itself many times over.’”
Salesmen imbued with absolute faith that their product was a humanitarian blessing fanned across the nation, stalking the P.B.—the Prospective Buyer. William H. Mason traveled 1,200 miles, including several hundred miles seated next to a stagecoach driver, to sell a single machine to a bank in Sonora, Texas, for a ten-dollar commission. Another salesman summed up, in his own way, the ethics of free-enterprise capitalism:
Each time I find a new P.B.,
I add to my prosperity . . .
So conscience-free, I give true worth.
I sell the best machine on earth.
I’ll show you, as well as I can,
Just why I am a Burroughs Man.
Burroughs kept improving his brainchild, with duplicate copies on the paper strip, and a ribbon reverse that later became standard on typewriters. Rival machines like the Comtograph were developed, but quickly went out of business.
As his fortune improved, his tuberculosis grew worse. For years, he had worked until exhaustion under the handicap of TB, and was a heavy user of alcohol to keep him going. Single-minded and obsessive, it was up to his wife, Helen, to remind him to eat and wear clean clothes—she sometimes said that she had five children, two boys, two girls, and a husband. Not that Burroughs was much of a family man. He had that “don’t-let-the-children-come-near-me-when-I’m-working” look.
In 1896 Burroughs moved to Citronelle, Alabama, with his family. Citronelle was situated in a pine forest, 320 feet above sea level, near the Gulf of Mexico, and was highly recommended for tuberculars. When his wife died, he married his nurse, Mrs. White, who helped him raise the children. They were good children—Jenny and Helen and Horace and Mortimer. Mortimer was a sociable lad if a bit ineffectual. One day he was eating a candy bar in the living room, which he hid under the couch when he saw his father approach. Burroughs, who could not stand anything sticky to the touch, reached under the couch and withdrew his fingers smudged with chocolate, which made him so irate that he spanked his son.
In Citronelle, Burroughs worked about four hours a day on his experiments and spent the rest of the day walking in the woods. His appetite returned and he felt that he was improving. In 1897 he resigned from the company, feeling too far removed to keep up with its operations. He kept tinkering, helping out a neighbor who sold firewood in bundles with a device that did the bundling automatically. In fact, however, he was getting worse, and he died on September 14, 1898, at the age of forty-one. At that same age, his grandson and namesake was just getting started on his writing career, having published his first book at the age of thirty-nine.
Burroughs was buried in St. Louis, and a stained-glass window dedicated to his memory was installed in the Presbyterian church in Citronelle, bearing the inscription: “As the hare panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul for Thee, O God.”
It was not long after his death that Burroughs’ dream of selling 8,000 machines was realized. So many machines were sold that in 1904 Boyer moved the entire company and its 465 employees aboard the Clover Leaf Limited to a new and spacious factory in Detroit. He had never liked the hot St. Louis summers anyway. A year later, Boyer, by now president of the American Arithmometer Company, renamed it the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. That year, 7,800 machines were sold, as many as Burroughs had predicted the entire U.S. market could absorb.
Burroughs was the father of the adding machine, but Joe Boyer was the father of the Burroughs company. He ran it after Burroughs resigned, and remained its president for nineteen years. He lived exactly twice as long as Burroughs, until the age of eighty-two. He saw the company grow from assets of $5 million in 1905 to assets of $430 million in 1920, and profited far more than did the Burroughs family, for Burroughs was as indifferent to money as to food and clothing. When he moved to Citronelle he sold quite a bit of his stock and put the rest in trust for his children with the Mississippi Valley Trust Company in St. Louis. So that when he died his children held in trust 485 shares, compared to the 16,380 shares that Boyer held. Over the years, there were stock splits, which made the Burroughs family holdings worth quite a bit, but it was still only a fraction of what Boyer was worth. The company was founded by Burroughs and bore his name, but the “Burroughs millions” were a fable. Burroughs put his energy into inventing the adding machine, and his partners put their energy into capital formation. Other entrepreneurs of the period, such as the Fords and the Rockefellers, amassed enormous wealth and founded dynasties. But Burroughs was a shooting star, who left his children little more than a bright afterglow.
In contrast and complement to the strain of Yankee ingenuity handed down by one grandfather, William Seward Burroughs II had on his mother’s side the strain of the Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Southern clergyman. His other grandfather, James Wideman Lee, born in 1849 in Rockbridge, Georgia, was a Methodist circuit-riding minister, a God-fearing moralizer who spread the gospel through the Georgia backwoods. Lee is, of course, one of the most common family names in the South, and thousands of the clan claim kinship to Robert E. Lee. But there was nothing very grand about these particular Lees, who traced their origins back to dispossessed eighteenth-century tenant farmers, a jump ahead of being sharecroppers. In 1875, when he was twenty-six, James Wideman Lee married thirteen-year-old Eufala Ledbetter. Two years later, she gave birth to the first of twelve children, of whom only six survived to adulthood, including Laura Lee, the mother of William S. Burroughs II, and Ivy Lee, his uncle.
It was through Eufala’s firstborn, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, that her husband’s ministerial message, “If you want to win the game of life and honor the God who made you, work hard and save,” found its application in the business world. For Ivy used the nimbleness with words inherited from his father to realize his ambition of corporate success. William Seward Burroughs did it with an invention, and Ivy Ledbetter Lee did it with language. One was the Father of the Adding Machine and the other was the Father of Public Relations. Ivy Lee made the robber barons look like nice guys, and lied so often on their behalf that he became known as “Poison Ivy.”
He graduated from Princeton in 1898, and the possibility that modesty was not his outstanding trait can be inferred from the class prophecy in the Nassau Herald: “Under his arm he carried a book entitled Great Men Who Have Met Me. . . . He hummed to himself a little tune of his own composition, entitled, ‘Only Me, Ivy Lee.’”
After a few years spent working for New York City newspapers, he found his true calling, as a press agent for big business. At a time when corporations were seen as greedy and arrogant and indifferent to the public good, Ivy Lee pushed the notion of “The public be informed” rather than “The public be damned!” It was better to tell the truth, even if the truth was damaging, than to have your enemy catch you concealing it. If the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of his clients, had a train wreck, he put out the facts on the accident, even if the railroad was to blame. If the railroad wanted to lobby Congress for a rate increase, it could make a better case if it had clubhouses for workers, college scholarships for their children, and a pension plan. You conveyed an image of candor and public service, while in fact you continued to cover up when you could.
Around 1913, when Ivy Lee’s name was on the rise, it happened that the Rockefeller name was at a low. In Colorado, 9,000 miners had walked off the job at coal mines where the Rockefellers were the principal owners. The workmen lived in company houses and shopped in company stores and voted for company candidates. The United Mine Workers came in to organize them and moved them out of the company houses and into a tent city. On October 17, 1913, deputy sheriffs shot up the tent city with a machine gun, and the state militia was called out. In April 1914 there was another battle, which became known as the Ludlow Massacre, in which two women and eleven children were killed. President Wilson sent in federal troops. The Rockefellers were branded as killers in newspapers across the country.
In May 1914, Ivy Lee was invited to the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who said: “I feel that my father and I are much misunderstood by the press and the people of this country. I should like to know what your advice would be about how to make our position clear.”
Here was the new Machiavelli being consulted by the twentieth-century Prince. Ivy Lee advised that management should give plausible accounts of the strike, to make it acceptable to public opinion. He advised an end to ivory-tower seclusion—personal contact between employer and employee was desirable. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was dispatched to Colorado to visit the mines. He chatted with the workers, heard their grievances, and danced with their wives at a social. It did more good than a dozen speeches, and the strike was settled that December. But it later came out that Ivy Lee’s candid press handouts had been based on cooked data from the coal operators, which he hadn’t bothered to check. It wasn’t so much the truth that Ivy Lee was selling, but a shell game. And where was the pea? Under Ivy Lee’s hat.
His services were appreciated, and in 1915 he resigned from his other accounts to devote himself full-time to the Rockefellers. His next assignment was to transform John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who had always shunned the press, from monster into humanoid. He soon had old John D. skipping through his P.R. hoops—distributing shiny dimes to newsboys, cutting his ninetieth-birthday cake in public, playing golf with a reporter, gnarled and weasel-faced, in knickers. After all these years typecast as the villain, old John D. became a media darling. Instead of “Rockefeller, Man or Demon,” it was “Rockefeller Gives Another Million to Unemployment Fund,” philanthropy being the cornerstone of a better image. Ivy Lee, who called himself “an adjustor of relationships,” refused to take credit for the change. “I just raised the curtain and let the people look in,” he said.
Like the “Burroughs Man,” who added to his prosperity by finding a new P.B., Ivy Lee did all right for himself. He had a town house at 4 East Sixty-sixth Street in New York, a list of clubs as long as your arm, and friends in high places. He was in the Social Register, and his daughter Alice was presented at the Court of St. James’s. A song of the period had the line, “Even Rumania has Ivy Lee–mania, gosh how the money rolls in.” A six-footer with a round, fleshy face, he conveyed a sense of prosperity and well-being, and his half-smile was that of a man who knows more than he lets on.
But after rising to a position of eminence in the American business community, Ivy Lee self-destructed because of blind faith in his own procedures. He really did believe that every problem was an “image” problem that would go away with a little P.R. If he could sell Rockefeller to the American public, why not sell Hitler?
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was paid a $33,000-a-year retainer by I. G. Farben to make the new German government and its leaders popular in the United States. Visiting Germany that year, he met Hitler and Goebbels and returned full of admiration. These were the men who would restore German confidence, he said, and was not a confident and healthy Germany essential for Europe?
Ivy Lee saw international affairs and the rise of fascist ideologies as matters that could be handled like corporate strategy. His advice to Nazi leaders was essentially what he had told Rockefeller. People had to be reassured so they didn’t think you were a monster. Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop should say that Germany did not want to rearm. Vice Chancellor Von Papen should say that Germany did not want the Saar basin. Hitler should say that the storm troopers were organized for the sole purpose of preventing a return to Communism. When William E. Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany, met Ivy Lee on his second trip to Berlin in January 1934, he wrote in his diary that “Ivy Lee has shown himself at once a capitalist and an advocate of fascism.”
Ivy Lee realized too late that the Third Reich was not the clone of Standard Oil. You could have Hitler hand out dimes until the Rhine froze over and the Nazis still wouldn’t be nice guys. Ivy Lee now had his own image problem. He was seen as Hitler’s press agent, and his reputation hit bottom. In the Senate, Robert La Follette called his work “a monument of shame.” In the House, the Un-American Activities Committee asked him in May 1934 to testify, and it came out that he was being paid to present Hitler in a favorable light.
The turmoil affected his health, and a cerebral hemorrhage felled him that October, at the age of fifty-seven. Billy Burroughs, then twenty, saw him in New York shortly before his death. He spoke of his many talks with Hitler. “The last time I saw him,” he said, “Hitler told me, ‘I have nothing against the Jews. This is all exaggerated.’” He had just bought a new car, and there was something wrong with it, and he said: “I didn’t dream it would fall apart like this,” which seemed to Billy an unconscious reference to his own situation. He had demonstrated the power, but also the limitations, of public relations. He had helped Rockefeller and other business leaders to find acceptance. But in so doing he had believed that acceptance depended on image rather than substance. As Robert Benchley put it, “Mr. Lee . . . has devoted his energies to proving, by insidious leaflets and gentle epistles, that the present capitalist system is really a branch of the Quaker Church, carrying on the work begun by St. Francis of Assisi.”
Through his inventor grandfather, and through his preacher grandfather, by way of his uncle Ivy, William Seward Burroughs II was offered two examples of laissez-faire capitalism in its purest form. The inventor made something that could be said to advance progress, in that a machine took over dull clerical work, and got rich in the bargain. The press agent borrowed the style and sermonizing of the preacher to get his message across—what was good for the Rockefellers was good for the country.
These examples had a bearing on Burroughs’ vocation as a writer. He was like a son whose father has embezzled a fortune, and who promises to pay back every cent on the dollar. He had a sense of mission. His uncle had debased the language, turned it to purposes of trickery and deceit. He would, in his own writing, restore integrity to language. To use language honestly, or to expose the ways language was used dishonestly, was a sacred trust, not to be taken lightly, which helps explain why it took Burroughs so long to get started. He knew early on that he was a writer, but did not start work on his first book until he was in his late thirties, as though paralyzed by the magnitude of his task.
At the same time his inventor grandfather had lost what should have been his—the corporation that bore his name. Burroughs the grandson was in the position of a disowned heir. He was like “El Desdichado” in Gerard de Nerval’s sonnet, quoted by another St. Louis writer, T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land: “Le Prince D’Aquitaine à la tour abolie”—the prince whose tower has been destroyed. Desdichado means brought down, overthrown, disinherited. Burroughs the writer had to reclaim the name appropriated by the company, and vindicate the inventor who had lost the family birthright, with the help of his children.
For when their father died, the children, still in their teens, inherited the stock held in trust for them, which the executors, in collusion with company management, persuaded them to sell. “Ahem, I must tell you for your own good, holding on to these shares is basically unsound”—Burroughs imagines the scene, adding, “My father could be talked into anything.” They were bought out for $100,000 apiece, which in today’s dollars would be about a million. A tidy sum, but nothing compared with what they would be worth today if they had hung on. Only Mortimer, Burroughs’ father, held on to a small number of shares, which he sold in 1929, three months before the stock market crashed. Burroughs, then fifteen, remembers his father coming home with a check for $276,000, “the highest balance ever to appear on his bank statement. With a measly quarter million in the bank, we were not accepted by families with ten, twenty, fifty million. No one wanted those ratty Burroughses about.” He estimates that his father’s small share in the company, had he held on to it, would today be worth about $20 million, adding, “Twenty million reasons not to write.” For it is his conviction that wealth stifles the creative impulse. So that his exclusion from the family fortune was a blessing in disguise, allowing him to carry out the goal of making a name for himself as a writer.
It was after James Wideman Lee moved to St. Louis to take over an affluent Methodist parish there, Methodism still being in those days a religion of bankers, that Laura Lee met Mortimer Burroughs. James Wideman Lee was a fine-looking old gentleman with a white mustache who knew everyone in the congregation by name, and wrote a book on how to win the game of life, entitled The Geography of Genius. His wife, Eufala, was active in the Women’s Temperance Union and frequently said she would rather have a son of hers come home dead than drunk. After her husband died from the complications of a broken hip, she took to travel, and once brought home some shawls from India, living on to the age of eighty-nine.
Laura Lee was a beauty, with thick chestnut hair, a perfect oval face, the high Lee forehead, a lovely mouth, lovely skin, and a willowy hourglass figure. Mortimer Burroughs was handsome in a clean-cut preppy way. He had a good mind, went to M.I.T., and was the sensible member of the family. Mortimer invested his money, while Horace used his to make a splash, buying a coach-and-four. After an illness, Horace began using morphine and speedily went through his inheritance, committing suicide in 1915, at the age of twenty-nine, by breaking a window pane in a roominghouse in Detroit and cutting his arm on the jagged fragments. Mortimer’s sister Jenny was a drunk, and he would sometimes get calls from the desk sergeant at the police precinct, asking him to come and get her or they would have to lock her up. Finally, in exasperation, Mortimer gave her a one-way train ticket to Seattle and she was not heard from again. As for his other sister, Helen, she married a man named Mercer and went to live in Colorado Springs.
Laura and Mortimer married in 1910, when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-five, and went to Detroit, where Mortimer worked briefly as a salesman for the Burroughs Company. It was there that their first son, also Mortimer, was born in 1911 (to distinguish them, the father was called Mote and the son was called Mort). Soon after, they returned to St. Louis and moved into the house on Berlin/Pershing Avenue. With the proceeds of his Burroughs shares, Mote started a plate glass company. He and Laura were in the Social Register but not in the St. Louis Country Club, an important distinction in the stratified society of that city. Their friends were the haute bourgeoisie, like the lawyer Eugene Angert, and O. K. Bovart, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Their next-door neighbor, Rives Skinker Matthews, was a prosperous hardware dealer who always wore a black tie and a high starched collar, and went to his office in a Packard limousine. Skinker Boulevard, which traced the city limits when the city had limits, was named after his grandfather.
The marriage was apparently a happy one. Billy Burroughs never once heard his parents’ voices raised in anger or argument, and they remained faithful to each other. His father was a decent man who performed small acts of kindness. When one of Billy’s schoolmates broke the glass of a portrait hanging on the auditorium wall with a basketball, Mortimer Burroughs repaired it free of charge. And yet there was in Mortimer a remoteness that his son could never bridge. What was he really like? Billy never found out. There were all too few father-son conversations that he could remember. Mortimer was an atheist, and once told his son, “I know what happens to you when you die. There was a little dog, and his name was Rover, and when he was dead, he was dead all over.” “Well now, Dad,” Billy asked, “what about reincarnation and all that?” “If you can’t remember, what difference does it make?” replied his father. “Maybe you can remember,” Billy said. “Oh, I suppose you know,” said his father in irritation. “Well, maybe I do, Dad,” Billy said.
Billy and Mort had to go to Sunday school as long as their preacher grandfather was alive, but after his death they were let off. One day Mort was spanked for fighting on Sunday, which seemed to Billy sheer hypocrisy, coming from his father.
His mother wasn’t religious either, but she was psychic. She had a feel about people, like an animal. His father would be about to get involved in some business deal and she would say, “No, no, he’s a crook, I can tell,” and she would be right. Once his brother was out late and his mother dreamed that he came to her with his face covered with blood and said, “Mother, we’ve had an accident.” In fact that night his brother had been in a car accident and his face had been covered with blood, although his injuries were minor.
Billy felt that his mother had been crippled by her Bible Belt upbringing, which imposed, among other things, an abhorrence for bodily functions. She suffered from headaches and backaches, and there was something deeply sad about her, as though she expected doom to arrive at any moment. He also felt that his mother was never really accepted by St. Louis society. The rich St. Louis matrons said, “Let’s get together,” but rarely did.
To others, Laura seemed cold and unaffectionate. “She never kissed me on the cheek in her life,” said her daughter-in-law Miggy, who married Mort. “She found it hard to like people. Also, she was an unconsciously tactless woman. She’d walk into a room and say, ‘This is the ugliest room I’ve ever seen.’” Sometimes her behavior verged on the cruel. “She asked me to meet her once at Stix, Baer & Fuller to buy nightgowns,” Miggy said. “I was hoping she would give me one, but no, that wasn’t it. She wanted me to admit that my family had no money and that I could not afford one.
“With her it was always vanity first,” Miggy continued. “When she was told her boys had to wear glasses, she said, ‘Don’t bother about glasses, just sit them in the front row.’ But she was smart, with a good sense of humor,” Miggy went on. “She was good at everything she did, although she was impractical. She was the sort who could cook a French sauce but couldn’t bake a potato.”
Her specialty was flower arranging, and her reputation spread to the point that the Coca-Cola Company commissioned her to write three books on the subject, along with helpful hints on interesting ways to serve refreshments. She appears on the cover of the first volume, sitting on a couch in a white silk dress, a pearl choker around her throat, surrounded by flowers, a bottle of Coke in her lap.
Billy grew up in a family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing, although he was clearly his mother’s favorite. According to Miggy, “Laura was crazy about Billy and didn’t love Mort. It was always ‘Billy this and Billy that. He’s just the funniest person I know.’” When he was older, his mother told him, “I worship the ground you walk on.”
Billy shared a room with his brother as a boy, but they were too dissimilar for there to be much close communication between them. One of Billy’s earliest memories is that he was holding a ten-pin to throw one day as he said, “Will you play with me, Mort?” and threw it the instant Mort said no, hitting him in the head. Alerted by the cries, his father came in and Billy got spanked.
Mort took after his father; he was sturdy and healthy-looking, whereas Billy was thin and long-boned like his mother, and there was no color in his cheeks. Mort became the good son and Billy became the prodigal son. Mort went to Princeton and then to Harvard to study architecture, but he graduated during the Depression, when there was not much demand for architects. So for a while he worked for his father, who by that time had sold his plate glass business and become a landscape gardener. Then when the war came he went to work for Emerson Electric, which was later absorbed by General Electric, as a draftsman, and stayed there until he retired. All his adult life he lived in St. Louis on a different Pershing Avenue, in University City, and was a loyal and dutiful son. And it was perhaps because the place of good son was occupied that Billy was free to go and work out his destiny, living in all sorts of places in all sorts of ways, absent and out of touch, in and out of trouble. And although he was a frequent embarrassment to his parents, they continued to support him for many years, with amazing patience and devotion, when it would have been so easy to write him off as a bad bet. And Mort, of course, deeply resented his brother’s feckless existence, when he, Mort, had been strapped in the straitjacket of family responsibility that Billy had escaped, had been made to play the role of the loyal and upstanding son because of Billy’s defection.
So the texture of the brotherly relationship was based on the different roads they had taken, and came out in small ways rather than in open hostility. In a dignified WASP St. Louis family, small ways were enough. It was just that Billy and Mort never agreed on any subject. Take the little argument they had about the atom bomb when Billy visited St. Louis in 1965, when both brothers were in their fifties.
Mort said: “We were perfectly justified to drop the bomb.”
Billy said: “Don’t you realize the Japs were completely beaten? Look, you got some people over there in a cabin, you got a posse here, they got pistols, you’ve got rifles. They can’t possibly hit you. Are you going to storm that cabin? No, you wait ’em out. That’s all we had to do was wait ’em out.”
Mort said: “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”
Billy said: “Well, I think the Hiroshima thing was ridiculous.”
Billy Burroughs grew up in post–World War I St. Louis, a city on the west side of the Mississippi, ten miles below its juncture with the Missouri. At that time, the subdivisions beyond the city limits, like Clayton and Webster and Groves, were known as “the county.”
On March 9, 1914, a little more than a month after his birth, thirty-nine persons died when the Missouri Athletic Club burned down. It was the worst fire in the city’s history. But generally, St. Louis was known as a fun-loving place, a place of joiners and clubs like the Public Questions Club, the Great Books Club, the Toastmaster’s Club, the Twentieth Century Club, the Wednesday Club, and the Upper Glenmore Rose Garden Society. There was also the St. Louis Country Club for the upper crust. Rogers Scudder, a childhood friend of Burroughs’, remembers his mother saying with horror, “They finally let a German into the country club.”
For there was a strong German strain in St. Louis. The Anheuser-Busch family had built a brewery there, and from its proceeds a great estate on Gravois Road. Joseph Pulitzer had founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, adopting as his own Goethe’s maxim, “Mut verloren, alles verloren”—“Courage lost, all lost.”
It was a city of odd traditions, such as the Veiled Prophet Ball. Each year, the Veiled Prophet, whose name was never disclosed, but who was supposed to be from the Mysterious East, was escorted by Bengal Lancers to his throne at the ball, a white-tie affair, and crowned the “Queen” who would reign over St. Louis society for the next twelve months.
Billy Burroughs’ St. Louis was a mix of places appealing for one reason or another to a boy’s interests. There was the Winter Garden where you went ice-skating, and Joe Garavelli’s restaurant on De Baliviere, where you went on Thursday, the cook’s day off. There was the 415, where you ordered catfish by the pound, and the Women’s Exchange on the corner of Euclid and McPherson, where they sold the best fudge in town. There was the Fawk Fur Factory, which gave off a peculiar smell, supposedly from the processing of seals—the story was that the Fawks had adopted a French boy, but he showed up with his two brothers and they had to take all three.
The old money lived on Portland Place or Van Devanter, while on Lindell Avenue stood the mansions of the new rich, like the Sayman Soap man, who had started selling his soap in the street from a horse-drawn cart. When the horse died he had it stuffed and stood it in the front hall of his fine new house. In contrast there was Market Street, the skid row of Billy’s adolescence, with its tattoo parlors and pawn shops—brass knuckles next to a beat-up guitar in a dusty window.
T. S. Eliot, recalling his St. Louis childhood, remembered mainly the moods and majesty of the Mississippi, the steamboats blowing in the New Year, the river in flood with its floating cargo of dead Negroes and chicken coops, the river tame and sluggish . . . “I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to those who have not,” he wrote.
Burroughs recalled most vividly another river, the Rivière des Pères, an open sewer thirty feet across that meandered through the city and emptied into the Mississippi. It flowed through some of the better neighborhoods, effluence amid the affluence. With his inseparable companion and first cousin Pryne Hoxie, who lived around the corner from Pershing, on McPherson, Billy would stand on the grassy banks of the River of the Fathers as turds shot out into the polluted water from vents along the sides: “Hey looky . . . someone just did it . . .” “You smell like the Rivière des Pères” was a common St. Louis saying.
With Pryne Hoxie also he would sit on his back porch of a summer evening drinking a cold Whistle, an orange drink, and watching the misty blue sky darken as the smells of coal gas and the open sewer drifted over the city. Or they would jump off the ten-foot stone pillars linked by a chain at nearby Washington University, or go to Forest Park and catch frogs in the pond. He and Hoxie saw each other every day—they even had an identifying cry: Woo-Woo-Woop.
It is a recurring theme of Burroughs’ life that those close to him died violently—this book has more corpses in it than Hamlet—and Pryne Hoxie was the first to go. He died at eighteen while at Princeton, in a car crash. His jugular was severed by a broken windshield. Mrs. Hoxie, whose husband, Bob, had also died at about that time, went to see a spirit medium in East St. Louis who put her in touch with her son and husband—it seems they were having playful wrestling bouts in the hereafter. When informed of his former playmate’s fate, Burroughs was disturbed by the apparent intellectual deterioration that the deceased undergo.
The Burroughs family had a gardener, a maid, a nanny, and a cook, who prepared roasts and squab and quail and wild duck. For dessert they sometimes had block ice cream from Delmonico’s, orange ice on the outside and another flavor on the inside. Christmas was the time for turkey and Virginia ham, and almond cookies from Germany shaped like stars and half-moons, called Kuchen.
In the summer, they went to Harbor Beach, a postcard town on Lake Huron, sloping up from the lake into low hills, a town of neat white frame houses and steep winding streets. The hills were bright green in the summer, surrounded by meadows and fields and streams with stone bridges, and further inland there were woods of oak and pine and birch. It was a seasonal outpost of an idyllic pastoral America. The summer people owned cottages and had the town to themselves. Most of them ate in a communal dining hall and were summoned to meals by a bell. Ringing the bell at the wrong time was a favorite prank of the summer kids, as was raiding the icebox for ginger ale and Whistle.
On the surface, it seems an idyllic childhood, but there was a dark side, with a suggestible child falling under the influence of servants who had their private undertakings, possibly improper, possibly corrupt. The old Irish cook, Burroughs later reflected, was like one of the witches in Macbeth. She taught him how to call the toads. He made a sort of hooting sound, and the toad that lived under a rock in the pond in his backyard would come out. She taught him the curse of the blinding worm, how to bring the blinding worm out of rotten bread. You took some moldy bread and ran a needle through it in a certain way, and you buried it under a fence post in a pigsty, and you said, “Needle in thread, needle in bread, eye in needle, needle in eye, bury the bread deep in a sty.” And the worm would go into the eye of the person you were cursing and blind that person. To ward off the curse, you had to say, “Cut the bread and cut the thread, and send the needle back on red.”
“It’s a secret,” the Irish cook said. “Don’t tell anyone.” Many years later, in the Empress Hotel in London, Burroughs dreamed that a white worm was crawling out of his eye and woke up screaming. The Irish cook awakened in the boy a deep and lingering interest in witchcraft and the occult. One day when he was in Forest Park with his brother in the late afternoon he looked into a grove of trees and saw a little green reindeer, very delicate, with pale thin legs. Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade. The reindeer, he later reflected, was his totem animal, which is revealed to you in a vision, and which you must never kill. Another time, he woke up after having made a house of blocks and saw little men playing in the house, moving very fast.
His nanny, Mary Evans, was Welsh, and the Welsh are known to dabble in magic. She taught him another curse:
Trip and stumble
Slip and fall
Down the stairs
And hit the wall.
She had certain expressions that Burroughs still remembers. Whenever he asked her how they were going to get somewhere, she would say, “By shank’s pony.” Once when he suggested they light the fire, she said, “It will light”—and it lit. It was evident to the boy that she had magic powers.
Billy formed a hysterical attachment to Mary Evans, to the point that when she went out on Thursday, her day off, he would throw a tantrum, screaming, “All I want is nursy.” This indicates that she was using the old nanny trick of sexual stimulation to control the boy. Sometimes she took him along on her day off, when she went to see her boyfriend, who was a veterinarian. He called Billy in to watch once when he put a couple of dogs to sleep.
And then one day when he was four, the trusted and beloved nurse introduced evil into his life. The sense of something gross and improper done to a small helpless child is overpowering but to this day blocked out. A feeling of something very drastic, very unpleasant, but what? To this day he can’t be sure. I hear the dark mutterings of a servant underworld.
He knows that it was one of the times he went with nursy on her day off. It turned on some ride, some expedition with the boyfriend. They were out of doors, perhaps in a wood. He sees the man’s grinning face, and hears nursy saying, “Come on, Billy, it won’t hurt you.” He remembers his brother saying later, “Should we tell on nursy?” He remembers a dream where he is being threatened by nursy—“And your eyes will be put out if you tell . . .” And some months afterward his mother said, “Nursy is going away,” and there was no tantrum, he took it very calmly.
Years later, his psychoanalyst, Dr. Federn, who had been a pupil of Freud, lost his patience: “What IS this that has affected you your whole life?”
“I just don’t remember, doctor, I just don’t know.”
He wants to remember, and runs through various scenarios to find the one that fits. A phrase from one of his books springs to mind: “The White Defenders . . .” Mary Evans told him to do something bad . . . the boyfriend had his pants down . . . Mary pushed him forward and asked him to do it for her . . . at the last moment he rebelled and the boyfriend screamed in pain. Was it that? Perhaps . . . he can’t be sure.
Although he did not tell his mother, he felt a loss of confidence in the family for not responding. They should have known that Mary Evans, despite all her impeccable references, was a bad person. “The feeling I get about your parents,” a friend told him once, “is that they weren’t there.”
On the surface, life went on as usual, and Billy at age six started riding the Chocolate Bus (because it was brown) to the Community School, a progressive school with all sorts of interesting ideas. The children were encouraged to express themselves by playing at caveman and making stone axes. They modeled clay and beat out copper ashtrays, and learned the Pearlman style of writing where you moved your arm but not your hand, which was supposed to produce a beautiful slanting script, while in fact all it did was wear your elbow out.
Miggy, who later married Mort, remembers Billy at the Community School as withdrawn, unable to make friends, living in a dream world. He was known for taking books home, she said. Actually, Billy had been very slow to read. His parents thought there was something wrong. Then all at once he started. His father often read to him—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Moby-Dick, Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, with its never-to-be-forgotten encounter with the octopus.
Already, Billy had formed a feeling of apartness. His father had a workshop in the basement and liked to make things out of wood, like tables and chairs and pirate chests. Mort was down there with him, learning and helping. One day Billy, who was three years younger than Mort, came in and picked up a hammer. “Look at the way he hammers,” his father said, and then: “Don’t touch the tools.” Billy was excluded from the workshop, excluded from the closeness between father and oldest son that came from working together and making things. He grew up convinced that he was no good with tools and never would be.
It was made abundantly clear to Billy that he was not like the others. The father of a schoolmate said: “That boy looks like a sheep-killing dog.” One day he went to the house of Sis Francis, another schoolmate. Her mother was home, sitting on the sofa and reading the Atlantic Monthly. She was a cold woman, who viewed her husband, a nice bumbling guy and a bit of a drunk, with contempt. Burroughs had a revelation about women—they were great wasters of time, content to spend all eternity reading magazines or playing bridge. Women were either evil, like Mary Evans, or useless, like Mrs. Francis.
It got back to him that Mrs. Francis’s sister, Mrs. Senseny, had said, “That boy looks like a walking corpse.” Years later, when she died, his first thought was, “It’s not every corpse that can walk.” Also years later, he finally understood what it was about him that had put people off. It was the writer’s appraising eye, the eye that sees, and that, because it sees, seems ill-intentioned.
He also felt ill at ease because he was unsure of his family’s position in St. Louis society. To bear the name of a famous company that you didn’t own a part of didn’t mean much. It was like a Potemkin village made out of cardboard.
Audrey was a thin pale boy, his face scarred by festering spiritual wounds. . . . Doormen stopped him when he visited his rich friends. Shopkeepers pushed his change back without a thank you. . . . Audrey was painfully aware of being unwholesome.
In 1926, his parents sold the Pershing Avenue house and built a handsome white frame house on a five-acre lot in the suburb of Ladue, at 700 South Price Road. Set back from the road, the house could dimly be seen through screens of branches. By that time Mortimer Burroughs was fed up with landscape gardening, because the millionaires who hired you would find some quibbling reason not to pay. He and Laura decided to open a gift and antique shop near their new home, at 10036 Conway Road. It was called Cobblestone Gardens, and they sold garden furniture and porcelain birds and snowflake paperweights and that sort of thing. Once a year they went to Chicago for the gift show.
There were in those days two private high schools in St. Louis where the right people sent their children: John Burroughs (named after the naturalist), which was co-ed, and Country Day, for boys only. The public schools were for riff-raff. Billy had started going to the Burroughs School in 1925, when they still lived on Pershing Avenue, taking the Clayton trolley every day, but now that they were on Price Road, the school was only a short walk away. His brother went to Country Day and said to Billy, “Call yours the sissy school and I’ll know what you mean.”
Billy attended the John Burroughs School from the seventh through the tenth grade. He was not a joiner or a team player. He didn’t go in for sports and thought the whole idea of school spirit was pointless. He went to class and did his homework without enthusiasm. He hated Latin, and when Mrs. Grossman handed out the assignments, he would ask, “Do we have to do this?” He asked the question once too often, and was sent to see the principal, Wilford M. Aiken, who seemed to Billy “a great big fat fraud, like most school principals.”
The other Latin teacher, Mr. Baker, taught him something he never forgot. This was the lesson of Hannibal’s campaign against Caesar. Hannibal defeated the Roman army but stopped short of Rome. He didn’t follow up, which Billy thought was the worst sin of all. “When you got things goin’ for ya, follow up! There are only two rules of gambling, plunge when you’re winning and quit when you’re losing.” Another Mr. Baker taught sociology and was a Communist. “They’re doing a great experiment over there,” he would say. An embittered, sardonic man, he would say, after having asked a question you couldn’t answer, “Are you one of those strong, silent types?”
Ann Russe, who was in the eighth grade with Billy, remembers him sitting in the back of the class and aiming an Eversharp pencil at the other students as though it was a gun. Several times she felt her scalp prickle and turned to see the pencil aimed at her. Ann was invited in February 1927 to Billy’s thirteenth birthday party. She was spending the night with Sis Francis, and after the party Mrs. Francis was late picking them up, so Mr. Burroughs produced a soccer ball for them to kick around the living room. Ann, showing off, bounced the ball off her head and broke a cut-glass sconce on the wall. Mr. Burroughs vanished, but Mrs. Burroughs appeared, and said in a low, strained voice, “I got it in Italy . . . I don’t know how I can replace it.” Ann Russe was ready to commit suicide. The Burroughs home was so exquisitely furnished. But Mrs. Burroughs, she felt, had no warmth. Mr. Burroughs, it was said, made Billy learn five new words a day and use them in sentences.
The year he turned thirteen was the year of the great tornado. Billy was at school, standing in the entrance to the boys’ locker room, when he saw the sky turn black and green. Lightning struck a cornice of the main building and knocked off some bricks. When he went over there he found all the girls running down the halls, screaming hysterically. The tornado killed 300 people (though no one the Burroughses knew), and was included in a book about famous disasters. There were entire blocks where the fronts of houses had been sheared off, so that you could see the inside, as in dolls’ houses. There were two things St. Louis children always heard their elders talk about: the 1903 World’s Fair (“Meet me in St. Louis, Louie”) and the 1927 tornado.
A year later, Billy had a small disaster of his own, almost losing his left hand. He was in the basement playing with his chemistry set in its wooden case, mixing red phosphorus and potassium chlorate, when it blew up in his hand. Luckily, his father was next door in his tool shed and drove Billy to the hospital in University City. The surgeon, Dr. Masters, gave him an adult dose of morphine and operated for two hours, getting the wood splinters out. This was before penicillin, and the fear of a secondary infection kept Billy in the hospital for six weeks.
The accident did not deter him from his interest in explosives. With black powder and a piece of iron, he made a bomb, which he threw through the window of the principal’s house on the school grounds. The bomb did not explode, but the principal’s wife, Mrs. Aiken, called Billy’s mother to tell her what he had done, and he had to apologize.
The summer of 1929, when he was fifteen, his father having inflated his bank account by selling the last of his Burroughs shares, the family toured France with a car and driver—the château country, two weeks in Cannes, the Pyrenees. Billy was sick of châteaus but found wonderful gun shops that carried trick canes. He had developed a fondness for guns and would sometimes go duck shooting with his father. In any case, that summer in France, he bought a sword cane and a shooting cane. His mother was amused when the chauffeur said “L’essence n’arrive pas,” which meant “We’re out of gas,” but sounded like “The essence does not arrive.”
Billy felt that the other boys at John Burroughs saw him as “not quite right.” “You’re a character,” said one, “but you’re the wrong kind.” Yet it was at school that he formed one of the lasting attachments of his life, with a handsome, brown-eyed, curly-haired boy named Kells Elvins, whose family had a town in the lead-mining region of Missouri named after them. The Elvinses lived down Price Road from the Burroughses. Kells’s father, Politte Elvins, was a former congressman and a lawyer for the St. Joseph Lead Company.
Billy thought Politte was a nasty, crapulous old man. He was a fierce anti-Semite, who would say: “You know what I like about this place—the view over the Jewish cemetery. I like to see it fill up.” Politte had syphilis, which affected his mind. The stories about him were endless, and later in life, Burroughs remembered him as an extravagant comic figure, a sort of demented W. C. Fields. He once ordered scrambled eggs and when they arrived he threw them at the waitress, shouting, “Where are my beans?” When a cyclist rode over his toe, he hooked out his cane and caught the cyclist by the neck, pulled him off his bike, and drubbed him with his cane. He was a terrible driver, and once, going ninety miles an hour, he cut off a woman in a limousine driven by a black chauffeur. The woman caught up alongside him and lowered the window to tell him off, but Politte shouted, “Nigger lover!” and gunned the engine.
Billy was strongly attracted to Kells. He already knew he was homosexual. Indeed, he was certain that he had been born that way, dismissing psychological explanations having to do with his parents or his nurse. Kells was his first love, but it was a love that could not be admitted or expressed, and was never sexual. He was, however, clearly smitten. His schoolmates saw it and said to Billy, “You’re his slave.” Billy would walk Kells home with his arm around Kells’s shoulder. Kells was friendly but unresponsive, although occasionally there were ambiguously physical games, as when Kells would playfully take Billy on his lap and strum him like a banjo, which gave Billy a hard-on.
Kells was everything Billy wasn’t. He was athletic and popular, and had great élan. He was a terrific womanizer, which young Burroughs much admired and still remembers: “Kells sure had a way with women . . . he always had three or four beauties on a string . . . from the time he was just a kid he was getting all the ass he wanted. The technique was simple. Most people want it too much, but as soon as you sit back as though you don’t need it, they’ll line up at your door. As Blake said, the lineaments of gratified desire, that’s what’s most attractive to a woman. If someone’s gettin’ it and gettin’ it steady, he’s gonna get it more and more . . . Kells had the trick.”
As Burroughs tells it, Kells was the classic Don Juan, who needs to seduce one woman after the other while disliking them profoundly. “When he’d had about three drinks,” Burroughs recalls, “he’d say, ‘Show me a good woman in anything.’ He would beat them down and reduce them to tears. They’d cry on my shoulder and I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, but if you want to put up with it that’s your concern.’”
Burroughs and Kells were lifelong friends, their lives intersecting over and over, at Harvard, in Texas, in Mexico, in Tangier, in Copenhagen. But “never in the whole time I knew him did it ever get physical.”
At school, there was a class where the students composed plays by volunteering lines that were copied on the blackboard, as in:
First Woman: I hear there is a tiger roaming about the village.
Second Woman: One doesn’t feel safe with that tiger about.
Third Woman: It’s getting dark. I think we’d better go home.
They also wrote compositions that they read before the class. One of Billy’s friends, Gene Angert, a gauntly handsome and fragile boy, like a young T. S. Eliot, read a story that ended with the line, “The boat went down and the captain tried to swim but the water was too deep, and he cried help, help, I’m drowning.” Burroughs never forgot that line, which in retrospect seemed to sum up Gene’s life, for while at Harvard he was institutionalized as a schizophrenic.
For Billy, writing was an alternative to the disappointing world around him. At the age of eight, inspired by Ernest Thompson Seton’s Biography of a Grizzly Bear, he wrote Autobiography of a Wolf. In Seton’s book, the old bear, saddened by the death of his mate, slinks off to die in the animal cemetery. In Billy’s ten-page opus, the wolf, saddened by the death of his mate, killed by hunters, was attacked by a grizzly and killed. Billy’s mother showed the book to her friends, who asked Billy, “You mean biography, don’t you?” and Billy replied, “No, I was right there with the wolf.” It was an autobiography because Billy identified with the wolf and became the wolf.
When Billy was thirteen, he came across a book that would have an enormous impact on the unfolding of his life and work. Written by someone calling himself Jack Black, You Can’t Win was the memoir of a professional thief and drug addict. Billy immersed himself in the world of “gopher men” who tunneled under banks, safecrackers, con men, and fences. It was a world with its own code of conduct, an exciting alternative to the humdrum St. Louis environment.
Jack Black left school at fourteen and went to work in a cigar store that was a front for poker and dice games, running errands for the old cons and relishing their colorful language: “If it was rainin’ soup I couldn’t buy myself a tin spoon,” or “I’ve got a string of debts longer than a widow’s clothesline.”
Jack became a burglar, which is how he came across Salt Chunk Mary, the fence. Salt Chunk Mary bought or sold anything that was stolen, but “she was righter than a gold guinea.” She always had a pot of beans and a chunk of salt pork on the stove, and the first thing you heard when you stepped into her house was “Did you eat yet?” Her hair was the color of sun-burned brick and her small blue eyes glinted like ice under a March sun. Salt Chunk Mary “Could say ‘no’ quicker than any woman I ever knew, and none of her ‘nos’ ever meant yes. . . . She named her price, and she didn’t name another.”
Salt Chunk Mary was a member of the Johnson family, a band of crooks with their own code of ethics. The Johnson family minded their own business. They were loyal and honest with one another, and helped those in trouble. Even though they were outlaws and thieves, they were square in their dealings, and their word was their bond. Billy saw in the Johnsons a model of moral behavior in marked contrast to the hypocrisy, busy-bodiness, and double-dealing of the right-thinking citizens of the St. Louis establishment. In St. Louis, you were nothing if you didn’t own something. St. Louis hummed with tales of loss and chicanery, how so-and-so had been done out of what he had. People actually said: “I can buy and sell that person.” He saw that there existed a society of outcasts and misfits, who were, in their own way, decent people, living by their own rules. And who were the real thieves anyway? Jack Black the safecracker, or the trustees of the Burroughs estate who had conned his father into selling his shares?
In the turn-of-the-century period of the book, morphine and opium were as cheap as tobacco—fifty cents’ worth would last you all day. “No fiend is ever at a loss for a sound reason for taking a jolt of hop,” wrote Jack Black. “If he is feeling bad he takes a jolt so he will feel good. If he is feeling good, he takes one to make him feel better, and if he is feeling neither very bad nor very good he takes a jolt just to get himself straightened around.” Jack became an addict, hanging out with other addicts: “Their bony arms were gray, like pieces of petrified wood. The skin was pocked with marks, mottled and scarred from the repeated, hourly stabbing of the needle. Their shirtsleeves were encrusted with dried blood from the many punctures.”
For Billy, who already saw himself as an outsider, You Can’t Win was a revelation. He felt somehow that Jack Black and Salt Chunk Mary and Gold Tooth and Foot and a Half George and all the others were his kind of people. He was not alone. The Johnsons became a part of his personal mythology. The world was divided into “us” and “them.” In later life, any stranger who did him an act of kindness in a tight situation was a Johnson, like the cop in the paddy wagon after his arrest in New Orleans who slipped him a joint, or the pharmacist in Mexico City who cheerfully filled his prescription for morphine after half a dozen others had snarlingly turned him down.
You Can’t Win was the blueprint for Burroughs’ first book, Junky. It had the same relation to Junky as Biography of a Grizzly Bear had to Autobiography of a Wolf. Just as eight-year-old Billy became the wolf and wrote about the wolf in the first person, the adult Burroughs became a small-time criminal and drug addict and wrote about that, following the example of Jack Black and his thief’s memoirs. In You Can’t Win, there is a set of values, from Salt Chunk Mary’s sense of honor to Jack Black’s hatred of cops (“I always say a copper is a copper until you cut his head off”), that Burroughs would make his own.
Increasingly, Billy took refuge in fiction. It had occurred to him that he belonged to another species. He was afraid of others, and felt the need to play it cool and conceal himself. He felt at the same time inferior to others and better than others—it was hopelessly confusing. He was a physical coward, terrified of any kind of fighting. He was slight, only realizing much later, when he saw the muscles of his jock schoolmates turn to fat, that a slight build is an advantage in the long run. He wasn’t sickly, though his mother tried to make out that he was.
Finding himself inadequate, he imagined himself as a fictional character. He read a pirate book and saw himself as the coldest and nastiest of the pirates, assigning a lesser role to Gene Angert, who said: “I want to be cold and nasty, too.” Billy’s name was Brundage. He picked a little rat gambler off the floor by the scruff of the neck and ran a cutlass through his throat. The crew was chilled by the cold brutality of the act. They rushed him and he killed six of them before they finally killed him.
My God, the memory of that high school prose! The flavor returns like the flavor of chicken croquettes and canned peas in the school dining-room. Crime stories, inspired by You Can’t Win. A murderer tortured by remorse who succumbs to brain fever. A sinister fortune-teller: “With an inarticulate cry the man leaped to his feet and whipped out an automatic, spitting death at the fortune-teller. Blood splattered her crystal ball, and on the table lay a severed human hand.” Action-packed Westerns: “Tom was quick but Joe was quicker.” Hanging scenes galore: “Hardened old sinner that he was he still experienced a shudder as he looked back at the three bodies twisting in the breeze, etched against the beautiful red sunset.” The hanging scenes were inspired by pulp Westerns and by newspaper articles, since hanging was still the form of capital punishment in Missouri.
Then there was an English period—seven young gentlemen were planning an expedition to the Pole. “Why Reggie, you’re as excited as a child,” said Lord Cheshire. “I am and I glory in it. Let’s forget we are gentlemen.” “You seem to have done that already,” said Lord Cheshire acidly.
Some of these stories Billy read in class, and others he thought of selling to magazines, such as this one for True Confessions about a decent young man, grieving the loss of a favorite dog, who fell into the hands of a sinister hypnotist who plied him with marijuana injections. The distressed young man walked up to a cop and said, “If you don’t lock me up I shall kill you.” The cop sapped him without a word but a wise old street detective took a liking to the boy and set him straight. So the young man opened an antique shop in St. Louis and became prosperous.
Billy entertained the idea of becoming a writer. Writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in yellow pongee suits. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy. They lived in the native quarter of some exotic city, languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
His first published prose, however, was not one of his blood-curdling stories but a sardonic one-page essay written at the age of fourteen and accepted by the school literary magazine, the John Burroughs Review, for its February 1929 issue. Entitled “Personal Magnetism,” it is worth quoting in full as an example of the consistency of Burroughs’ thinking:
“Are you bashful? Shy? Nervous? Embarrassed? If so, send me two dollars and I will show you how to control others at a glance; how to make your face appear twenty years younger; how to use certain Oriental secrets and dozens of other vital topics.”
I am none of these things, but I would like to know how to control others at a glance (especially my Latin teacher). So I clipped the coupon, beginning to feel more magnetic every minute.
In a week, I received an impressive red volume with magnetic rays all over the cover. I opened the book and hopefully began to read. Alas! the book was a mass of scientific drivel cunningly designed to befuddle the reader, and keep him from realizing what a fake it was.
I learned that every time one yawns, a quart of magnetism escapes, that it takes four months to recuperate from a cigarette. And as for a cocktail! Words fail me. Another common exit of magnetism is light literature of any kind, movies, and such unmagnetic foods as cucumbers and eggs. I never realized that a cucumber was so potent. They always impressed me as watery and tasteless.
And how is magnetism acquired? So far as I can make out, one must sit perfectly still for hours reading the dictionary or something equally uninteresting, then, laden with magnetism, one should arise with tensed eye (whatever that is) and with slow, steady steps, bear down on one’s quarry like a steam roller.
Did I find out how to control others at a glance? I certainly did, but never had the nerve to try it. Here is how it is done: I must look my victim squarely in the eye, say in a low, severe voice, “I am talking and you must listen,” then, intensify my gaze and say, “You cannot escape me.” My victim completely subdued, I was to say, “I am stronger than my enemies.” Get thee behind me Satan. Imagine me trying that on Mr. Baker!
I think the book was right in saying that by following its instructions I could make myself the center of interest at every party. Interest is putting it mildly!
In this adolescent effort, Burroughs is concerned, as he is in much of his later work, with debunking control systems. He sends away for the little red book and finds that Personal Magnetism as a method of control is a scam, a humbug, a ripoff. Already, he had adopted the guise of psychic explorer, just as he would later explore psychoanalysis, Scientology, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy, Count Alfred Korzybski’s theory of General Semantics, and other, more arcane systems.
The year of his first appearance in print, 1929, was also his last at the John Burroughs School. His mother was worried about his sinus condition and wanted him to spend his last two years of high school in a dry, healthy climate. She enrolled him in the Ranch School at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He had already spent a summer at the school’s summer camp, where his fellow campers nicknamed him “Bull” because he was an incessant talker and advancer of improbable theories. He wisely did not object, although disliking the nickname intensely, thinking, the more you ask them not to the more they’ll do it.
At the end of the school term, Wilford M. Aiken wrote on Billy’s report card: “Capable boy—needs to develop more group spirit—good student and will become better when he has made a place for himself in groups of boys.”
When Billy’s class at John Burroughs, which graduated in 1931, held its fiftieth reunion, Gene Angert was dead, and Sis Francis had lung cancer, but reported from Pinehurst, North Carolina, “I’m going to beat this goddamned thing.” It was amazing, thought Bill Turner, who had broken the glass pane that Mortimer Burroughs fixed for free, how upon seeing classmates after half a century, they shed the slight web of unfamiliarity after only a moment and came right into focus, unchanged. Ann Russe was the same high-spirited extrovert. Charles De Pew, the head of a reunion committee, gave his report in the same clear and concise manner. Alice Frank, who always looked around at whoever was reciting in class with piercing eyes, was still at it.
Burroughs sent a telegram regretting that he was unable to attend, and when it was read the response was something between a loud murmur and a soft cheer. Billy had not been the most popular kid in the class, but as Ann Russe reminded the others, he was their only claim to fame. But Charlie De Pew gave her a regular Jerry Falwell speech about how disgusting Burroughs was. Florence Steinberg said Burroughs had struck her as being dumb, and again Ann Russe took his defense, saying that Mort had been the handsome one, but Billy had all the brains. Who else among them had made it into the Encyclopaedia Britannica? That might well be, said Bill Turner, a retired big-league baseball manager, but he would wait until he was a little older before reading Naked Lunch.