“Artists, to my mind, are the real architects of change.”
—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first shot morphine in 1944. As he wrote in Junky, “Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous.”
While an addiction to needle drugs like morphine carries a greater stigma than, say, alcoholism, the Harvard-educated Burroughs knew that it was all just a different shade of the same color. “The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction,” he wrote.
In 1944, Burroughs moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, Joan Vollmer, and her daughter. Vollmer was married to a GI serving overseas in World War II. When her husband returned home to find his wife addicted to amphetamines and sleeping with a drug-dealing morphine addict, he quickly divorced her. Astonishingly, Vollmer kept custody of her daughter.
Burroughs and Vollmer became common-law husband and wife, and had a child of their own. Burroughs, however, ran into legal problems as a result of his drug dealings, and he crisscrossed the United States with his new family in search of sanctuary. After stops in St. Louis, Texas, and New Orleans, they finally settled in Mexico, where Burroughs hoped to stay for at least five years to escape Louisiana’s statute of limitations.
In the world of awful career moves, becoming a junkie is only a close second to committing homicide, but that’s just what Burroughs did. In September 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer while entertaining some friends at their home in Mexico.
Tired of her husband’s constant bragging about his marksmanship, Vollmer balanced a highball glass of gin on her head and dared Burroughs to take a shot. They were both drunk.
“I can’t watch this—you know I can’t stand the sight of blood,” Vollmer said, giggling as she closed her eyes.
Burroughs took aim at his wife with his .38 caliber pistol and fired. The bullet missed the glass and hit Vollmer squarely in the head. She died instantly.
Burroughs received a two-year suspended sentence but fled Mexico anyway. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death,” Burroughs wrote in the preface to his 1984 novel, Queer. “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.”
Remarkably, Burroughs didn’t stop playing with guns. He collected and fired them his entire life, going so far as to sleep with a loaded gun under his pillow. He later added a sword cane to his weapons cache. “He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear,” according to Hunter S. Thompson, who shot with Burroughs on occasion.
Meanwhile, Allen Ginsberg was working at a Manhattan advertising agency. His therapist asked him what he really wanted to do.
Quit his job and become a poet, he answered.
“Well, why don’t you?” the therapist asked.
So Ginsberg moved to San Jose, California, in 1954, where his old New York pals Kerouac and Cassady were living at the time. Ginsberg and Cassady had been lovers in New York, and they renewed their relationship. There was just one problem: Cassady was married, and his wife was none too pleased when she returned home one day to find her husband’s cock in Ginsberg’s mouth. She drove Ginsberg to San Francisco, where she dropped him on the street corner with $20.
The move was fortuitous: one of San Francisco’s best-known poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had opened City Lights, the country’s first all-paperback bookstore. Ferlinghetti was also publishing local poets, and a scene was beginning to take shape. In August 1955, Ginsberg sat down at his typewriter in his small San Francisco apartment and typed the opening lines of his most famous poem, “Howl.”
Allen Ginsberg read from “Howl” for the first time in October 1955 at an art gallery in San Francisco. “A barrier had been broken,” poet Michael McClure remarked. “A human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and support bases.”
City Lights published Howl and Other Poems, and the poem’s graphic depictions of both heterosexual and homosexual sex acts made it a lightning rod for prosecutors looking to clamp down on the pervasive sexuality emerging in youth culture. According to the New York Post, “Howl” was nothing more than a “glorification of madness, drugs, and homosexuality” that reveled in its own “contempt and hatred for anything and everything generally deemed healthy, normal, or decent.”
Customs officials seized 520 copies of Howl and Other Poems on March 25, 1957, that were being imported into the United States, on the basis that lines such as “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” were obscene. Prosecutors in San Francisco brought obscenity charges against Ferlinghetti, the publisher, arguing that the book contained “filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.”
The judge, however, ruled in favor of Ferlinghetti, deciding that the poem was of redeeming social importance. In a poetic phrase of his own, the judge asked, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”
Later that year, Ginsberg and his new boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, left San Francisco for Morocco and, ultimately, Paris. Ginsberg made a pilgrimage to Baudelaire’s grave, where he placed a copy of Howl. Ginsberg was well aware of Paris’s reputation as the city that had given birth to the Realists and the Decadents, and was looking for inspiration.
Ginsberg and Orlovsky moved into a cheap hotel. Gregory Corso soon joined them, nicknaming their lodgings “the Beat Hotel.” Burroughs later visited, finishing his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch, during his stay at the Beat Hotel. The one-star hotel provided only the bare necessities—hot water was only available three days a week, and bed sheets were changed once a month.
If Ginsberg and his fellow Beat writers had sought on some level to re-create the Lost Generation’s journey, their Parisian reign was short-lived. Paris was a very different city in the postwar world than it had been in the 1920s. While it was still one of the world’s most literary cities, its influence was eclipsed by the sheer might of the United States. The Beats stayed through 1963, when Ginsberg and company packed their bags and returned home.
Burroughs published Naked Lunch in 1959. He summarized the response to it as: “‘Disgusting,’ they said. ‘Pornographic.’ ‘Un-American trash.’ ‘Unpublishable.’ Well, it came out in 1959, and it found an audience. Town meetings, book burnings—that book made quite a little impression.”
Ginsberg and Norman Mailer were among those who testified on behalf of Burroughs in front of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. Although Burroughs was found guilty of obscenity, the ruling was later overturned on appeal.
“Sure, he romanticized drug use as joyous, and terrible, and wonderful. Did anybody read Naked Lunch and try heroin? Probably. So what? That doesn’t mean that that book shouldn’t be read. I’m for anybody that writes about their obsession,” film director and author John Waters said.
Burroughs, for his part, didn’t slow down. He spent his $3,000 advance for Naked Lunch on heroin, and once even sold his beloved typewriter to buy smack, forcing him to write by hand. He quit narcotics several times over his long career and took methadone—a treatment for heroin addiction—from 1980 until his death.
Burroughs inspired generations of writers and musicians. In 1993, Burroughs and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain collaborated on a nine-minute, thirty-three-second spoken-word recording titled “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him.” “When I was a kid, when I was reading some of his books, I may have got the wrong impression. I might have thought at the time that it might be kind of cool to do drugs,” Cobain said.
While they recorded their parts for the album separately, they later met in Burroughs’s adopted hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. They talked about everything except their mutual obsessions: handguns and heroin. “There’s something wrong with that boy,” Burroughs told his assistant following their meeting. “He frowns for no good reason.”
Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994. “The thing I remember about him is the deathly gray complexion of his cheeks,” Burroughs said. “As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.”
Burroughs died on August 2, 1997, at the age of eighty-three.