Reconstruction 7.1 (2007)


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William S. Burroughs, Jr. Cursed From Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr. Edited and compiled by David Ohle. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2006.

 

<1> William S. Burroughs Jr. was the son of the author of Naked Lunch and Joan Vollmer, whom his father accidentally (at least consciously speaking) shot in a "William Tell act" in Mexico City. He was also, in his own words, "the author of two novels [Speed and Kentucky Ham] published in seven languages, and numerous articles in national magazines." The title of this latest incarnation from Soft Skull Press casts Burroughs Jr. in the tradition of the poètes maudites and, interestingly, in relation to a short story by Ernest Hemingway about a woman who "accidentally" shoots her husband during a safari.

<2> But, outside of literary allusions, Burroughs Jr. could indeed be described as having lived a short, unhappy life. Losing his mother at the age of four and dropped off with the elder Burroughs' parents' in Palm Beach to grow up, Burroughs Jr. found himself adrift, accidentally shooting his friend in the neck (family traditions die hard), experiencing the mayhem of Tangier with his father for a summer, and forging paregoric prescriptions. This latter episode landed him at the same narcotics facility in Lexington, KY where his father had done time. He got married at age 20 to a middle-class Jewish woman whose family first encountered him as he "passed out trying to get up the stairs and out of sight, after breaking the banister like balsa wood." And then the serious drinking began, which landed him, after numerous abject journeys, with a liver transplant. The chapter covering Burroughs Jr.'s transplant and aftermath, which is the most fragmented, is also the most interesting from linguistic, social, and psychoanalytic standpoints. It takes the Beat psyche into the postmodern and all too fleshy, lived experience of the cyborg. But even it has its dry moments, no thanks to the endless "depositions" editor David Ohle compiles from such notables as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman. In most of this commentary, we find great writers speaking in the banal language of co-dependency, support systems, and the like, oftentimes with repetitions (in less interesting language) of things already covered in Burroughs Jr.'s writing. In fact, this book not only feels "edited in reverse," but Ohle admits as much in his "Editor's Note":

When I saw the actual manuscript [Prakriti Junction]. . . it consisted of sixty typed pages that glossed hurriedly and sketchily over the last fifteen years of his life, an assortment of what he (loosely) called poems, as well as a collection of random notes, thoughts, and sayings written during long hospital stays and outpatient convalescences. . . . Some portions of both Speed and Kentucky Ham were included in order to paint a fuller picture of Billy's childhood and adolescence, a period he sketched over only briefly in Prakriti Junction. Whenever I found a snippet or note anywhere in Billy's boxes that illuminated, enhanced, or added information to passages of the Prakriti manuscript, I inserted it where it seemed to belong. In all cases I imagined an approving Billy back from the dead, saying, "Fix it, man. I smelled the Reaper's breath when I was writing that."

<3> So, rather than the typical volume of autobiographical material (say correspondence) which scholars have edited to reduce banality and repetition, Ohle has, in the manner of a hagiographer, "illuminated" a slender manuscript, oftentimes to its detriment as a work of art. Cursed from Birth, much like Burroughs Jr. himself, is not sure what it wants to be. An introduction to the son of one of technoculture's most prescient critics? A work of art? A page turner? A semi-comprehensive simulation of an archive for scholars who can't make it to Columbus, Ohio?

<4> Perhaps, more than anything, Ohle's greatest fault is imagining an approving Billy, a benevolent spirit. As Michael Taussig has noted, spirits are seldom experienced as benevolent, and to imagine them otherwise is to attempt to cover a wound that can never be sealed. Rather, to encounter death and the dead, which is what Burroughs Jr. does in his own fragmented, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying writing, is to curse and be cursed. Like the poètes maudites before him, Burroughs Jr. spent his seasons in hell and dutifully recorded what he found there. For those records, this book is worth encountering, and I think an astute reader will come away realizing the value of these seasons comes from refusing to deny the powers of abjection.

 

Alan Clinton

 

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