Scribe of Sixties London

BUY NOW

William Burroughs, the hipster American author and reclaimed heroin junkie, delighted in raising hackles. In a career that spanned half a century from his debut as a confessional crime writer in the mid-1940s to his death in 1997, his bizarre and sometimes brutal imagination confronted such subjects as germ warfare and totalitarian forms of brainwashing. His most famous novel, Naked Lunch, contained passages of Swift-like scatology which (like an outdoor lavatory) take some getting used to.

Rub Out the Words, the second volume of Burroughs’s letters, is a triumph of judgment and judicious selection. It offers a vivid picture of the writer at work during the 1960s: his pleasures, foibles and, above all, his capacity for terse put-downs and fascination for what remained outside his waspish class and culture — whether it was homosexual blue films in 1970s London or marijuana in Tangier.

Burroughs’s judgments of other writers and celebrities could be caustic. Truman Capote is a “bore” (rarely a good thing in Burroughs); Timothy Leary, the crackpot advocate of LSD and other psychotropic drugs, is a “horse’s ass” and charlatan (“I hope never to set eyes on him again”).

Notably, the letters reflect personal traumas. In Mexico City in 1951, dreadfully, Burroughs had accidentally shot dead his wife Joan Vollmer by attempting to blast a wine glass (William Tell-style) off her head. Clearly drunk at the time, Burroughs spent just two days in jail for the misdemeanour, having bribed the authorities. Though he was homosexual and Vollmer was not, their bond was close, and they had a child called Billy (who was to die in 1981 of drug complications).

The father-son correspondence, as reproduced here, is heart-rending, as Burroughs tries to reach out to his troubled boy (“I hear you dig music”) and extend a loving if ultimately useless hand.

Throughout much of the correspondence, Burroughs is prone to disabling bouts of melancholy. The thrill of travel on the sleazy edge — Morocco, Mexico — was perhaps a way out of depression, or simply a means to escape boredom. As he drifted away from Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation in the late 1950s, he began to experiment with the “cut-up” method of writing as advocated by his painter friend Brion Gysin. Burroughs’s dizzy-making 1960s trilogy of novels — The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express — jettisoned narrative for a collage-like impasto of random impressions. The trilogy was written mostly in London, at a time of counter-cultural ferment.

In 1960s London, Burroughs lived out of a suitcase in a series of shabby hotels in the Earl’s Court area. At night he walked the streets round Fulham, Lancaster Gate and Bayswater with a tape-recorder in hand, picking up random voices and sounds for use in cut-up films.

Anything was game for his transcriptions. (“I wonder if you have taped your parrot?” Burroughs wrote to the novelist Paul Bowles.) In 1967, having sold the film rights to Naked Lunch, he was able to move into a “rather expensive flat” in Duke Street, near the London Library, where he hung out with his Cambridge mathematician lover Ian Sommerville and dined with the likes of Mick Jagger.

By the dawn of the 1970s, however, Burroughs was increasingly dissatisfied with London. Industrial strikes brought repeated power cuts. “England is a gloomy cold unlighted sinking ship that will disappear with a spectral cough,” he wrote to his beleaguered son Billy. The royal wedding of 1973 compounded his dissatisfaction as devotees of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips were seen to camp out rough on the streets. It was time to get out of London (“I am considering Afghanistan of which I have heard good reports”). We leave Burroughs in 1974 as he is about to depart for New York.

A wonderfully compelling record, Rub Out the Words comes as near as anything to the way Burroughs talked with friends and family. It has been impeccably edited by his biographer Bill Morgan.

Save up to 20% off books when you buy from our Bookshop with free P&P