William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd or Bosch: the boyhood in suburban St Louis; Harvard and early trips to Europe; the war, Greenwich Village and the Beats; Latin America and exile in 1950s Tangier, Existential Paris, Swinging London; the return to the USA and emergence as a literary celebrity adored by Warhol. The wheels are oiled with drugs, guns and sex, suicides and murders, comedy, neuroses and madness, intellectual experiment, numerous cranky collaborators and far-out disciples. But the muse touched the mess — and hey presto, a great writer was born.
The history of modernist literature is the history of ‘outsiderdom’ and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) is the last key novel in that particular trajectory. With its montage ‘open text’ techniques, it is also the herald of post-modernism and of his own future work. The fact that his drug-addled brain could not by that time produce coherent narrative does not undermine Burroughs’s achievement, because the vitality of the oeuvre is inarguable: texts a-swarm with new creatures, images, ideas, bizarre hilarities and prosodic ingenuities. Miles’s biography is especially useful in demonstrating how the novels sprang from their author’s life.
Much of the story is already familiar because the Beat Movement is a sort of later American equivalent to England’s Bloomsbury Group — a social and artistic avant garde celebrated as soap opera in countless films and books, with Burroughs as the Lytton Strachey figure, a presiding authority of outrage and cool.
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