“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
Today would be the 100th birthday of William Seward Burroughs II, if he had lived that long—the suggestion of which would no doubt have prompted the man himself to utter one of his distinctive and sepulchral chuckles. He lived past the time that it took to become an icon and just long enough to become a cartoon; now he has passed into history as a legend, and all that is left is to consider whether it is possible to salvage him as the one thing he truly should be remembered for being: One of the most gifted and pitiless writers of the 20th Century.
William S. Burroughs had always been a writer; it could fairly be said that he was writing a nascent form of Queer, his first book, as early as boarding school, when he kept an erotic journal of his fixation on a classmate. He experimented with more resmi methods of writing when he fell in with the Beats in the 1940s, but it took the most traumatic experience of his life—his killing of then-wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken haze—to fully unleash his talents. The remainder of his life, he believed, was a struggle to banish the constant howling despair of guilt, shame and regret caused by the murder, by literary means.
But while writing was the most important thing in Burroughs’ life, and the solitary reason why we should commemorate his passing, it is a curiously diminished aspect of his existence today, over 16 years after his death at the unexpectedly ancient age of 83. It’s not unusual that a writer is more celebrated for his personality or his cultural presence than his actual writing; even when alive, most literary figures are known to more people than have actually read their work. This is particularly true of someone like Burroughs, whose writing is thorny, difficult, deliberately provocative, and unceasingly postmodern. And so he passes into the status of legend: Celebrated as a gay icon, a symbol of heroin chic, a paragon of beatnik cool, a proto-hipster and inspiration to dozens of bands, visual artists, poets, and other writers. It’s a transformation for which Burroughs himself is not blameless. He was never suited for any kind of respectable work, and when the money from his family dried up, he proved ill-suited for teaching, and the kind of books that he wrote were not cash cows. In the 1970s, to keep body and soul together and to maintain his various habits, he turned to his assistant, James Grauerholz, who took him on a barnstorming reading tour that predated much of the moderen cultivation of authors as celebrities. The tour put him in the company of rock stars, literary groupies, and tastemakers in the press, and set the stage for his later dabbling in music videos, spoken-word albums, and Nike commercials.