Still on a Ginsberg kick, but I’ve also been revisiting William S. Burroughs’ work. Read Junky again and just finished Queer today. Not sure if it’s the second or third time I’ve read it. In any case, it’s a brutal book. I know I always say good things about Burroughs’ writing, because when it comes down to it, it’s honest and gritty. At the same time, though, I wonder how I can feel affection for a man who accidentally shot his wife and basically had nothing good to say about women. Same can be said about Kerouac. He objectified women to the point where he wrote down the name of each lay he had — he kept a list (I saw it, too, at the Kerouac exhibit) — yet, I feel very intensely for their writings. Is it because I can’t identify with it? No, there are a lot of things that even Burroughs writes that I can identify with. Do I need to take in account their private lives when I read someone’s book? Really? How about when their private life IS their book?
About Queer… I think one can be sympathetic to a point with Burroughs. Burroughs’ writes himself about it “Lee seems determined to score, in the sexual sense of the word. There is something curiously systematic and unsexual about his quest for a suitable sex object (there’s that word again), crossing one prospect after another off a list which seems compiled with ultimate failure in mind. On some very deep level he does not want to succeed, but will go to any length to avoid the realization that he is not really looking for sex contact.
“But Allerton was definitely some sort of contact. And what was the contact that Lee was looking for? Seen from here, a very confused concept that had nothing to do with Allerton as a character. While the addict is indifferent to the impression he creates in others, during withdrawl he may feel the compulsive need for an audience, and this is clearly what Lee seeks in Allerton: an audience, the acknowledgment of his performance, which of course is a mask, to cover a shocking disintegration.”
So, I’m torn. I see what he is doing for attention and failing, and can relate to that in some way. I think at some point we’ve all craved attention from someone and when we fail, it’s shattering sometimes. Burroughs does not leave out the shattering bits of heartbreak. He lets us know he is in despair. And yet, that all goes away when he treats the man or boy as an object. We see that Burroughs is selfish and I don’t think that Burroughs had the right to chalk it up to being a junkie. At one point he wasn’t. At some point he made that choice of a lifestyle. Throughout his life he had sought a cure, but never really found one — on and off of junk so much, it didn’t seem like he really wanted to get straight, as it were, but when he went for counseling it just seemed like he was bored at the time and wanted something different. How he lived to be an old man just baffles me.
So, I’m not bad mouthing Burroughs… I’m just saying, “Really? Really, it’s like that?” He was genius because what he wrote, what you just read, makes you want to read even more. How far can he go? How absurd can he get? What will his imagination come up with and better yet, what was his reality?
I think his best work is his letters, actually. Like I said, it is the reality that really gets me. There’s a collection of his letters available to read. They start out like regular letters anyone of us could write but evolve into schemes and dreams and creative thought processes that eventually ended up being used in some of his novels. Very interesting stuff.
BTW, I don’t know why I’m writing about Burroughs at 2 a.m. but I felt inclined to give you my opinion, or rather, write down my opinion, get it out so that next time I read his books I can agree or disagree from there — see how my thinking has evolved. And stuff.