INTRODUCTION TO JUNKY (1977)
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
Bill Burroughs and I had known each other since Xmas 1944, and at the beginning of the ’50s were in deep correspondence. I had always respected him as elder & wiser than myself, and in first years’ acquaintance was amazed that he treated me with respect at all. As time wore on & our fortunes altered—me to solitary bughouse for awhile, he to his own tragedies and travels—I became more bold in presuming on his shyness, as I intuited it, and encouraged him to write more prose. By then Kerouac and I considered ourselves poet/writers in Destiny, and Bill was too diffident to make such extravagant theater of self. In any case he responded to my letters with chapters of Junky, I think begun as curious sketching but soon conceived on his part—to my thrilled surprise—as continuing workmanlike fragments of a book, narrative on a subject. So the bulk of the Ms. arrived sequentially in the mail, some to Paterson, New Jersey. I thought I was encouraging him. It occurs to me that he may have been encouraging me to keep in active contact with the world, as I was rusticating at my parents’ house after 8 months in mental hospital as result of hippie contretemps with law.
This took place over quarter century ago, and I don’t remember structure of our correspondence—which continued for years, continent to continent & coast to coast, and was the method whereby we assembled books not only of Junky but also Yage Letters, Queer (as yet unpublished), and much of Naked Lunch. Shamefully, Burroughs has destroyed much of his personal epistles of the mid-’50s which I entrusted to his archival care—letters of a more pronouncedly affectionate nature than he usually displays to public—so, alas, that charming aspect of the otherwise Invisible Inspector Lee has been forever obscured behind the Belles Lettristic Curtain.
Once the manuscript was complete, I began taking it around to various classmates in college or mental hospital who had succeeded in establishing themselves in Publishing—an ambition which was mine also, frustrated; and thus incompetent in worldly matters, I conceived of myself as a secret literary Agent. Jason Epstein read the Ms. of Burroughs’ Junky (of course he knew Burroughs by legend from Columbia days) and concluded that had it been written by Winston Churchill, it would be interesting; but since Burroughs’ prose was “undistinguished” (a point I argued with as much as I could in his Doubleday office, but felt faint surrounded by so much Reality . . . mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors . . . my own paranoia or inexperience with the Great Dumbness of Business Buildings of New York) the book was not of interest to publish. That season I was also carrying around Kerouac’s Proustian chapters from Visions of Cody that later developed into the vision of On the Road. And I carried On the Road from one publishing office to another. Louis Simpson, himself recovering from nervous breakdown at Bobbs-Merrill, found no artistic merit in the manuscripts either.
By grand chance, my Companion from N.Y. State Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, was given a job by his uncle, Mr. A. A. Wyn of Ace Books. Solomon had the literary taste & humor for these documents—though on the rebound from his own Dadaist, Lettriste & Paranoiac-Critical literary extravagances, he, like Simpson, distrusted the criminal or vagabond romanticism of Burroughs & Kerouac. (I was myself at the time a nice Jewish boy with one foot in middle-class writing careful revised rhymed metaphysical verse—not quite.) Certainly these books indicated we were in the middle of an identity crisis prefiguring nervous breakdown for the whole United States. On the other hand Ace Books’ paperback line was mostly commercial schlupp with an occasional French Romance or hardboiled novel nervously slipped into the list by Carl, while Uncle winked his eye.
Editor Solomon felt that we (us guys, Bill, Jack, Myself) didn’t care, as he did, about the real Paranoia of such publishing—it was not part of our situation as it was of his—Carl’s context of family and psychiatrists, publishing house responsibilities, nervousness at being thought mentally ill by his uncle—so that it took bravery on his part to put out “this type of thing,” a book on Junk, and give Kerouac $250 advance for a prose novel. “The damn thing almost gave me a nervous breakdown—buildup of fear and terror, to work with that material.”
There was at the time—not unknown to the present with its leftover vibrations of police state paranoia cultivated by Narcotics Bureaus—a very heavy implicit thought-form, or assumption: that if you talked aloud about “tea” (much less Junk) on the bus or subway, you might be arrested—even if you were only discussing a change in the law. It was just about illegal to talk about dope. A decade later you still couldn’t get away with national public TV discussion of the laws without the Narcotics Bureau & FCC intruding with canned film clips weeks later denouncing the debate. That’s history. But the fear and terror that Solomon refers to was so real that it had been internalized in the schlupp publishing industry, and so, before the book could be printed, all sorts of disclaimers had to be interleaved with the text—lest the publisher be implicated criminally with the author, lest the public be misled by arbitrary opinions of the author which were at variance with “recognized medical authority”—at the time a forcible captive of the Narcotics Bureau (20,000 doctors arraigned for trying to treat junkies, thousands fined & jailed 1935–1953, in what N.Y. County Medical Association called “a war on doctors”).
The simple and basic fact is that, in cahoots with organized crime, the Narcotics Bureau were involved in under-the-table peddling of dope, and so had built up myths reinforcing “criminalization” of addicts rather than medical treatment. The motive was pure and simple: greed for money, salaries, blackmail & illegal profits, at the expense of a class of citizens who were classified by press & police as “Fiends.” The historic working relationship between Police and Syndicate bureaucracies had by early 1970s been documented by various official reports and books (notably N.Y.’s 1972 Knapp Commission Report and The Politics of Opium in Indochina by Al McCoy).
Because the subject—in medias res—was considered so outré, Burroughs was asked to contribute a preface explaining that he was from distinguished family background—anonymously William Lee—and giving some hint how some supposedly normal citizen could arrive at being a dope fiend, to soften the blow for readers, censors, reviewers, police, critical eyes in walls & publishers’ rows, god knows who. Carl wrote a worried introduction pretending to be the voice of sanity introducing the book on the part of the publisher. Perhaps he was. A certain literary description of Texas agricultural society was excised as not being germane to the funky harsh non-literary subject matter. And I repeat, crucial medico-political statements of fact or opinion by Wm. Lee were on the spot (in parentheses) disclaimed (by Ed.).
As agent I negotiated a contract approving all these obscurations, and delivering Burroughs an Advance of $800 on an edition of 100,000 copies printed back-to-back—69’d so to speak—with another book on drugs, by an ex-Narcotics Agent. Certainly a shabby package; on the other hand, given our naïveté, a kind of brave miracle that the text actually was printed and read over the next decade by a million cognoscenti—who did appreciate the intelligent fact, the clear perception, precise bare language, direct syntax & mind pictures—as well as the enormous sociologic grasp, culture-revolutionary attitude toward bureaucracy & Law, and the stoic cold-humor’d eye on crime.
Allen Ginsberg
September 19, 1976 NYC