Theres a picture of William S. Burroughs, the writer, from his time in Paris. In the photo, there’s a car in the background, over his right shoulder. The car is a Citroen DS, the entirely revolutionary design introduced by the Citroen car company in 1955. Practically every system in it was hydraulically controlled, and it was capable of some things that other cars can’t manage, even today, even over 6 decades later. The weird thing is, Citroen was founded by Andre Citroen, and he had the same birthday as Burroughs, February 5. Was it a coincidence that the Citroen was in the picture? Burroughs himself would say no; he didn’t believe in coincidences. That’s just one of the unusual things about him. It’s like he had some sort of connection to…I don’t know; something or somewhere or someone just…not of the current world. Let me tell you something about him.
He was born into the wealthy Burroughs family of St. Louis, Missouri. Their wealth came from William’s grandfather William S. Burroughs I, who invented a usable mechanical adding machine and founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. He graduated from Harvard, after which he received a monthly stipend from the family for decades. The stipend made him financially independent, although not rich, and he was able to explore some, shall we say, far reaches of human intellectual experience as a result.
He got addicted to heroin in his late twenties, and despite that — or maybe because of it, which is what he claimed — he lived to be 83, lucid and creative throughout his entire life. He was pretty open about his addiction, and wrote about it in his novel Junkie. His most famous novel was Naked Lunch, which is also features a heroin addict, and is a seriously weird book. It’s a set of chapters that Burroughs said could be read in any order you wanted. No matter the order you choose, the story shifts and morphs in time and place, and at one point focuses on a place called Interzone. There are political factions there: the Liquifactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists. They’re bitterly divided, although it’s not clear why. The factions and their clashes feel very contemporary, somehow, in 2024. Maybe it comes from being inexplicable.
Something else inexplicable about Naked Lunch is that the last few sections — which are very difficult to follow — were generated by Burrough’s “cut up” technique. Not that he invented the approach; it probably came from the Dadaists in the 1920s. But Burroughs made the most of it, and introduced it to the wider world. The cut-up method means you take existing printed texts that might be from books, newspapers, magazines, or whatever printed material you have, cut sections out with scissors, and rearrange the sections to create a completely different work. It’s copy-paste raised to the next level — possibly a nonsensical level, but sometimes the process produces something that makes a strange and new sort of sense. Where that new meaning comes from is a mystery. Exactly the sort of mystery that Burroughs seemed to have a connection to.
He killed his wife, you know. It was 1951 and they were in Mexico City. It was a party, and the two of them — both addicts, by the way, Burroughs addicted to heroin, his common-law wife Joan Vollmer hooked on benzedrine — and at the party they were both quite drunk too. Burroughs loved handguns for his whole life, and there are a couple of different stories about what happened. One is that for some reason that nobody knew or remembers, they decided to enact a William Tell scene. William Tell was the probably mythical character from Switzerland who shot an arrow through an apple sitting on his son’s head. The whole story is a little more complicated than that, but for our purposes, Burroughs and his wife decided to play a “William Tell game.” For them that meant Vollmer balanced a glass on her head and Burroughs attempted to shoot it. This is a stupid stunt to attempt even when you’re sober, and Burroughs was anything but (although there were also witnesses who said he hadn’t had all that much to drink). He missed the glass, but hit Vollmer in the head, killing her.
Another story is that the gun accidentally discharged when Burroughs was checking it. Or maybe it went off when he accidentally dropped it. The whole thing ended up in court, and Burroughs was defended by Bernabé Jurado. But then Jurado shot somebody himself, escaped to Brazil, and Burroughs managed to get back to the US to escape his trial. Vollmer was 28 when she died.
Burroughs concluded that he must have subconsciously wanted to kill her, and had been possessed by what he called the Ugly Spirit. It was “monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American.” He was deeply affected by the incident, and came to believe in possession and sorcery. He used the cut-up technique to “disrupt language” partly because he believe that would protect him from further possession.
Both before and after Vollmer’s death, Burroughs was part of the Beat Generation. It wasn’t a whole generation; it was just a literary and artistic movement, and consisted of a relatively small group; most notably Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Brion Gysin, and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg moved to Tangier, where he lived for a few years, and worked on more writing using his cut-up technique. He spent some time at the “beat hotel” in Paris starting in 1959, and spent his time there on what he called occult experiments.
About that time he published the book Naked Lunch, and itattracted so much attention that it was mentioned on the cover of Life magazine That was quite the thing in 1959. And Burroughs continued as he had; one foot in the workaday world of writing and publishing; another in the world of heroin addiction, and somehow weirdly connected to mysterious sources of creativity. Was it through his cut-up technique? His occult experiments? Even he didn’t know. But a few years later he began to dabble in something new: his “playback technique.”
The playback technique, evidently Burrough’s own invention, involved a tape recorder. You would record at your “target location,” then go back and play back the tape you’d recorded, but at very low volume so it could barely be heard. Burroughs would enhance the audio by splicing in “trouble noises” like alarm bells or machine guns. This was supposed to put a curse on the location, or maybe on the people there. He used it against the Moka Coffee Bar in London, apparently because he didn’t like their cheesecake. He felt his campaign succeeded, too, because in 1972 the Moka Bar closed. Burroughs never entertained any possibilities like the chance that nobody else liked their cheesecake either. If nothing else, William S. Burroughs was committed to his methods.
Burroughs returned to the US in 1976 and settled at first in New York. He was a prominent part of he avant garde cultural scene and hung out with people like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. He kept writing, turning out several more books as well as becoming a columnist for a couple of magazines. In 1981 he moved to Kansas and signed a deal with Viking Press to write seven more books. The money from the deal was enough for him to buy a small house. The next year, in its back yard, he came up with a painting process based on his cut-up technique for writing; he would set cans of spray paint in front of blank canvases, then shoot the cans with a shotgun. His artwork has been featured in over 50 galleries, and in museums like the Royal Academy of the Arts, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
He was invited to the White House during President Clinton’s administration, but didn’t at the time realize who was President. He has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame, although I’m not sure how many people have even heard that St. Louis has such a thing. Still, it’s better than nothing, I suppose. He espoused a weird olio of left- and right-wing political views, and about the magic he believed in, he said: “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint.”
Hunter Thompson, who knew Burroughs and collaborated with him, once wrote “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Nobody was weirder than William S. Burroughs — maybe ever — and who can say what the pro-level of weirdness might open you up to? He lived in a magical universe, and thought the rest of us do too. “There are no accidents in the world of magic.” But on the other hand, there was that William Tell game back in 1959.
