William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

"Death smells."

I mean, death has a special smell...

over and above the smell of cyanide, cordite, blood,

carrion or burnt flesh.

It's a gray smell.

It stops the heart and cuts off the breath.

Smell of the empty body.

Smell of field hospitals and gangrene.

Now, folks, if you'll just care to step this way.

You are about to witness...

"the complete, all-American deanxietized man."

William Seward Burroughs,

heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company founded by his grandfather,

was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri.

After graduating from Harvard University and traveling Europe,

he moved to New York City, where he met his future wife, Joan Vollmer,

and fell in company with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Experimenting with new forms of literature as well as drugs,

the three friends formed the vanguard of a cultural phenomenon...

that would come to be known as the Beat Generation.

"Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986."

Thanks for the wild turkey and passenger pigeons...

destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge...

and danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin,

leaving the carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream...

to vulgarize and falsify...

"until the bare lies shine through."

In the '50s,

anything opened up a good avenue to thinking because it was...

People talk about the '50s, they see Happy Days and they think it was fun.

It was horrible, the '50s. It was the most terrible time.

It was the first memory I had, and it was of you had to be exactly like everybody else.

The Beat Generation was crushing that.

It was an attempt to bust out of that, man.

All of this was a big rap on the knuckles...

of mainstream, white, staid, pool-in-the-backyard America.

"Kid",

what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes?

Why don't you straighten out and act like a white man?

After all, they're only human cattle.

You know that yourself.

"I hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get off on the wrong track."

So what was the Beat Movement? It was real.

The Beat Movement... Well, of course it was.

It underwent many changes. In the '60s, it became quite political.

Yeah. But as I've always said,

it's more sociological than a literary phenomenon.

It was a sociological movement of worldwide importance.

Unprecedented worldwide importance.

A cultural revolution, you might say. Yeah.

So I would characterize it as a spiritual liberation movement actually...

like women's lib, black lib, spirit lib or spiritual lib...

that began in the '40s.

First took shape as a literary movement...

with a production of a number of notable utterances.

Allen Ginsberg's first publication...

was Howl.

It was published in 1956.

In 1957, Jack Kerouac's On The Road.

And in 1959, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs.

These three books came out.

Beatniks were big. Overnight, it was a huge...

Like a hula hoop. Much to their embarrassment, I think.

Because it started out pretty much in North Beach and stuff, like poets and...

So once it became so big in the media, they were embarrassed by that term.

All of those poets,

they couldn't fit what the stereotype of Beat was.

That was a media hype to sell papers.

And they pimped that, boy. They pimped that bad boy, really.

Burroughs himself never identified with the Beat Generation.

He was the godfather and mentor. He was a bit older.

And since he was also Harvard educated,

he just brought in a whole bunch of ideas...

just from classical education that he had.

And invented a style of book almost.

I mean, it was so original.

And anything that's so original like that, eventually lasts.

Cut... Angle... Word line...

This matter... res... the... ripples... with cortex...

In the vague description... which an area...

evasion... experience... will project... further experience...

when accompanied... of mass... but limited...

I think probably Freud would think him to be...

deeply, deeply troubled.

Profoundly mentally ill.

Everybody was enamored by William because he was famous before anybody else.

And he was also famous for all the wrong things.

He was the first person that was famous for things you were supposed to hide.

He was gay. He was a junkie. He didn't look handsome. He shot his wife.

He wrote poetry about assholes and heroin.

He was not easy to like.

Class was an essential factor in the work and life.

William came from a very traditional, upper-crust, American family.

Though the fortune may have been lost,

the breeding was deep and instilled.

And thus the gentleman we know was bred.

I could totally relate to the dry thing...

salesman thing that he'd created. You know.

And this very underplayed thing...

just very, very removed... very removed.

Also very, very interested in death.

And I think that's what scared Americans...

more than his writing itself.

If he'd had that worldview and he was writing in a more polite way...

and if it didn't have to do with guns and junk.

Usually the most radical work tends to come from the upper classes...

because they're trying so hard to shock, so hard to get away from their roots.

So he's a fascinating character, uniquely American in that regard.

I don't think that work could have existed...

had he not been breaking away from an incredibly patrician, Midwestern background.

There was no rebellion in those days.

Well, certainly not in our strata.

Or very little that I saw. There might have been isolated cases.

But by and large, they were in a good spot.

Their families were in a good spot,

and the sons wanted to just go along exactly the same way.

"Thanks for the K.K.K."

For nigger-killing lawmen feeding their notches.

For decent, churchgoing women...

with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.

Thanks for 'Kill a Queer for Christ' stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition...

and the war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the memories.

All right, let's see your arms.

You always were a headache and you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal...

of the last and greatest...

"of human dreams."

Burroughs achieved a great deal more...

than being arguably the greatest writer in the world...

in the second half of the 20th century,

because he did break down so many barriers.

And he did play into and influence...

so many other fields, like rock and roll, like the movies.

Well, William seemed to have a connection with anything and everything.

You know, you see a movie like Blade Runner,

and then you find the phrase "blade runner" came from him.

The term "heavy metal" is attributed to him. "Soft machine."

You know, there's so many phrases, names of groups that come from William's work.

He's like another kind of Bible.

He's a great pioneer of the gay liberation movement,

or the whole position, standing of gay people around the world really now.

Where'd you learn about sex originally, from friends?

Books. Books? Yes.

The book called The Plastic Age by Percy Marks was sort of a daring book for the '20s.

Mm-hmm. And The Green Hat and Coming of Age in Samoa.

Mm-hmm.

This is the '20s I'm talking about, which is a very different era.

Burroughs once said to me,

"If one man stands up and, you know, rejects..."

the bullshit of society,

"it makes it possible for everyone else to follow on."

And he was that man to some extent.

And here is Reverend Braswell in the Denver Post...

"Homosexuality is an abomination to God..."

and should never be recognized...

as a legal human right any more than robbery or murder.

At the present time in Colorado where this was written,

approximate MOB conditions prevail.

And by MOB, I mean 'My Own Business.'

No sex crimes on the book.

You can fuck a cow right in front of the sheriff,

and all he can say is 'Moo!'

But you can hardly expect to bring down the barn with an act like that.

With the right virus offset,

perhaps we can get this whole show out of the barnyard and into space.

"This is the space age, and we are here to go."

They asked him at a press conference what he thought of the gay rights movement.

And his response was,

"I have never been gay a day in my life,

and I'm sure as hell not part of any movement."

But Burroughs was a deconstructor of labels.

You know, that was just another sort of amalgalmized effort to, uh...

to not be marginalized.

And he was one of the very few...

maybe Jean Genet and maybe Pier Paolo Pasolini...

who had the balls...

way before it was, like, vogue,

and certainly when it was dangerous,

to say "I'm queer."

But he was way beyond that,

because he didn't respect any of the rules of the gay world at all either.

He was hardly a Boys in the Band. He would have hated that.

That culture would have been very foreign to him because there were so many rules.

There were so many rules in the straight world too.

And he violated the rules of even junkies' worlds.

He opened up to me not gay culture.

He opened up gay rebels that couldn't fit in gay culture. Very different.

And I have to say that Burroughs to this day and his work...

have an uneasy, uh,

relationship with "queer culture in America."