Call Me Burroughs, Barry Miles
May. 27th, 2014 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessA few weeks back, supergee discussed Call Me Burroughs, a new biography by Barry Miles of influential Beat Generation writer William Burroughs, using it to raise the fascinating question of whether an artist's work can allow us to overlook his or her life. It sounded like exactly the sort of juicy, gossipy biography that I love, so I got the book from the library as soon as I could. This may or may not have been a good thing. The biography is detailed, gripping, enthralling in more than one section. It also left me feeling faintly to seriously unclean as I read. This was a book I had to put down frequently.
Part of the reason I had to put the book down frequently is that Burroughs was not exactly the nicest kind of guy. But a much larger problem is with Miles, or rather, the way Miles chooses to frame many aspects of Burroughs' life.
To his credit, Miles is completely thorough here – some readers might even argue too thorough – and is careful to include the many, many low moments of Burroughs' life, along with the highlights. Less to his credit, Miles is a self-proclaimed major admirer of Burroughs, which leads to bits like this:
"Burroughs took his responsibilities as a father seriously, and his first priority had been to find a place to 'stash these brats.'" (page 167)
Let's hop over the inherent issues with that sentence for a moment, and note that by the very next page, Burroughs is using drugs again and neglecting his children. By page 171, a visitor is saying this:
"You bathed that little girl, and you could tell she hadn't been washed in ages. That little girl—she bit her arm all the time. She had great, terrible, scars on her arm."
One the same page, we learn:
"The children were allowed to use Joan's Revere Ware pots instead of the toilet, and the same pots were used for cooking in the evening."
Miles notes that the house visitor – who, unlike William Burroughs and his wife Joan, was sober during the entire visit – found other aspects of their behavior "peculiar." Miles' word, not mine nor the visitor's. The peculiar behavior in question? Torturing cats.
(If you are wondering why Burroughs' son died tragically young at age 33, well, there were other reasons, but this is a start.)
Torturing cats while high on drugs in the house you are sharing with your children, while the children are using cooking pots for a toilet and biting their arms hard enough to leave bruises, is not taking your "responsibilities as a father seriously," nor is it simply "peculiar." It's criminal. (The Louisiana state police agreed with my interpretation.)
This is hardly the only, or even the most egregious, example of Miles using, shall we say, interesting language to frame various incidents in Burroughs' life. Far worse, however, is when Miles blames other people for things that Burroughs was directly responsible for. In a typical example, when Burroughs makes a deeply offensive, sexist slur against Peggy Guggenheim while attending a party she was hosting, Miles chooses to describe the aftermath like this:
"Unfortunately this was overheard by her assistant, Bob Brady, who nearly swooned with excitement before running to report it. Burroughs and Guggenheim had gotten along well up until that point, but now Bill was banished forever from the premises."
The implication, of course, is that the "unfortunate" part of this incident was Bob Brady overhearing the words, and Bob Brady's decision to tell Guggenheim. The actual "unfortunate" part was Burroughs making the slur to begin with. Brady had every right to tell the hostess of the cocktail party that Burroughs was using language like this, especially since the party was a formal cocktail party held in honor of the British consul, and was a formal event. Burroughs was also dead drunk at the time. I expect, if we heard Bob Brady's version of this story, he would have said that he overheard Guggenheim's drunk guest insulting other guests and his hostess, correctly informed the hostess, who understandably banished Burroughs from the event.
(As a small note, the British consul cocktail party incident happened just a few years after a very drunk Burroughs shot and killed his wife in what was ruled an accident. After that, I am not inclined to criticize anyone who chose to throw a drunken Burroughs off the premises.)
Just a chapter or two later, Miles enthusiastically assures us that Burroughs was now "clean" and following a healthy lifestyle – off drugs – before revealing, in the very next paragraph, that Burroughs was still doing pot, hashish and alcohol. These were all considerably more mild than what Burroughs had been using – mild enough to let Burroughs finally work to put the fragments of his novel - fragments written while on harder stuff – but given that by this time, Burroughs was also an alcoholic, his regular drinking could not be called "clean." A page later, Miles informs us that Burroughs picked up ringworm during this supposed clean, healthy period, as well as severe chafing in certain areas, which does not sound healthy.
In a later bit, Jacques Stern, a wealthy man high on cocaine, accuses Burroughs of stealing money from him and conning him (Stern) out of money. Even though by this point Miles has provided ample evidence to suggest that Burroughs did con friends, family and general acquaintances, and even though the book detailed several incidents where Burroughs outright stole money to support his drug habit, Miles describes Stern's accusation as "the games that rich people like to play." Maybe, sure, Stern was playing a game. Or – and I'm just throwing this out there – Stern accused Burroughs of being a thief and a con man because Burroughs was a thief and a con man. (Also, Burroughs was back on drugs at this point, and his worst behavior coincided with his heavy drug use.)
And in yet another bit, Miles tells us that the drug-using, smoking, filling the house with still more smoke from kerosene heaters and releasing said smoke through the windows, neglectful of his teenage son man who made threatening gestures to women in Arab dress and bought black market food supplies and asked people to commit murder for him (this is all in the same three paragraphs) faced "the antagonism of the local people" because the local people "expected them [Burroughs and his housemates] to pay staff." Or, again, just throwing this out there, the local people were understandably appalled by the behavior of their American neighbor.
Miles also tries to state, multiple times, that Burroughs was not, in any way, shape or form, a misogynist, because, after all, he was willing to talk to and take pictures of women, a statement considerably undercut by Burroughs' own words describing two books he was working on: "The essay book is quite outspoken and uncompromising on the women question. (What do you think about women? They are a perfect curse.) The wild boy book is even more anti-female by total omission. They wild boys have nothing to do with women or junk."
Ahem.
The problem with this sort of thing, of course, is that this blame shifting and victim blaming obscures a central fact about Burroughs, one that has to be considered when judging his art and his life: in most respects, he was a horrible human being.
So that this isn't totally an anti-Burroughs rant, I should note that Burroughs was not all bad: the text shows him unstintingly helping several friends (often with his parents' money or with money from his robberies.) He saved a Jewish woman, Ilse von Klapper, by marrying her and bringing her to the United States before she could be arrested by the Nazis. He wrote several books, painted, acted in films, and served as an artistic inspiration to many, encouraging several fellow writers and poets. I can say that some of my stuff, while not especially influenced by anyone in the Beat generation, owes a certain debt to the willingness of Beat poets and others – often led by Burroughs – to break traditional narrative structures and experiment with language. He gave wise advice to a friend who had just murdered his stalker. He travelled a lot. He was by many accounts a brilliant conversationalist and highly entertaining. He worked on an opera.
In the more questionable category, he held a job as an exterminator and grew a lot of pot, which was a lot more productive than many of his other activities. Later in life he made hashish candy, which, ditto. And failed to score drugs for Joy Division, which I guess is one of those it depends on how you look at it things.
He was also a major, but major drug addict, something that the text suggests may have come from multiple factors. He was a bisexual (mostly gay) man in the 20th century United States, which forced him from an early age to get into the habit of lying. He may also have been molested in childhood. Getting an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army for mental health issues during World War II, without ever leaving the U.S., could not have helped; Burroughs had travelled in Europe, and was well aware of Nazi attitudes towards gays and lesbians, but was unable to fight back. Though he was also unwilling to serve as a private – an officer, sure, but not a private; his family helped arrange for his honorable discharge, and Burroughs later used the G.I. Bill to pay for anthropology classes in Mexico City. In any case, these and a fascination with the criminal underworld seem to have led him to drugs, and drugs led him to do increasingly shitty things, not that his life had exactly been a shining beacon of kindness and probity before.
I do have sympathy for his drug addiction, a serious, uncontrollable illness. Burroughs made multiple attempts to detox, but he was always an addict.
Against this, Burroughs spent most of his life completely living off his parents, when not outright robbing people. By robbing people I mean both going to strangers and stealing their wallets, and conning people out of money. He forged prescriptions; cheated on his romantic partners; lied to friends about the state of his house in Texas, which in turn forced them to make emergency beds so that they wouldn't get eaten by scorpions; was a hellish landlord – right down to making anti-gay slurs against his possibly gay tenants while running around at night trying to pick up men; and paid his illegal migrant farm labor poorly. He let a close male friend stalk and attempt to seduce a teenage boy, something that eventually led to murder. He was a hellish, neglectful parent; reading this book, you want to go back in time and remove Burroughs from the presence of anyone under the age of 18. He avoided prison time for felony drug charges by fleeing to Mexico, where he promptly used more drugs.
He was a drug dealer. He was a pedophile. A pedophile who paid the boys he used poorly. He dripped blood on first edition books while getting high. He was a hellish boyfriend to Allen Ginsberg. (To be fair, the subplot of this book could easily be called "Terrible People Allen Ginsberg Slept With.") He had the nerve to criticize Jack Kerouac for being a terrible houseguest; I'm sure Kerouac was, but coming from Burroughs this is hypocrisy extreme. He hated Harry Everett Smith because of the way Smith mooched off everyone; again, this was a valid complaint, but coming from a man who built an entire life on mooching off people, it's a bit much.
Also, he shot and killed his common law wife and later said that was the moment that got him to write. He was dead drunk at the time.
To put this in perspective, the person who allegedly committed semi-public bestiality as Greenwich Village parties comes off as a delightful model citizen in comparison. (Apparently, by the time this incident occurred the witnesses were so jaded – partly by Burroughs – they just shrugged.)
To give Miles credit, he does list all of these things – and a lot more. But as I noted, about a quarter of the incidents involved are couched in language that attempts to soften the actual blame, or make Burroughs look like an upstanding guy who just happens to be abusing teenagers, while several other incidents are framed to be the fault of anybody but Burroughs, most disturbingly when Miles accuses the teenage boys from very disadvantaged circumstances that Burroughs was sleeping with as taking advantage of Burroughs' money. You know, they probably did, but let's not remove Burroughs from the blame game here.
The book does improve - and gets more readable - once Burroughs finally achieves success, largely because that success eliminates the need for Miles to blame everyone else for Burroughs' failure. But only a little: when Burroughs, at the age of 75, has sex with an 18 year old guy, Miles leaps right back into old habits and assures us that this was all entirely the idea of the 18 year old.
And maybe it was – by that time, Burroughs was famous and artistically respected and on a lot of drugs, so, maybe. The problem is that also by this time, I couldn't buy Miles' version of events.
To be somewhat fair to Miles, what he is doing here more or less mirrors what happened with Burroughs in real life. Time and time again, Miles details how Burroughs' family and friends excused him, blamed others for his actions, and helped Burroughs avoid the consequences of his actions - sneaking him out to Mexico, for instance, and then to South America; continuing to pay him a monthly allowance for decades; hiring top notch lawyers to keep him out of jail; describing other people - including those poverty-stricken boys - as preying on Burroughs; assuring us all that Burroughs wasn't really misogynist by nature - other people made him that way. As a result, the only real consequence Burroughs ends up dealing with is the multiple issues that came along with his addiction. Have sex openly on the side of the road? Someone will get you out of jail. Deal drugs? Ditto. Kill your wife? Ditto. Prey on a kid for a couple of years? The kid, not you, ends up murdered.
And it goes on. Write a novel after the age of 40 that's virtually incomprehensible? Have several friends – including Allen Ginsberg – go through the novel and edit and edit and edit whipping it into some sort of shape. Enough attention is given to this stage that I found myself wondering just how much of Naked Lunch is from Burroughs, and how much from his various friends? The base bits, sure, are Burroughs, but his friends - themselves skilled, brilliant writers are described as spending hours and even months working on Burroughs' book. (I also couldn't help noticing that Burroughs wrote less, and did other things – like paint – more, once the writing friends stopped hanging out with him or died off.) Realize, even after this, that you have a very non-traditional book that is an incredibly difficult sale? No problem: use your friends to get you in an in with a New York publisher, friends who are worried that you might do self-harm to yourself, and friends who you previously helped out financially with your parents' money.
Sure, some of this came about because Burroughs did have a gift for finding and making creative friends. And he did help these friends out on occasion.
But in the end, Burroughs almost becomes the poster child for some recent discussions about racism, sexism, and stacked decks. Miles wants us to believe that Burroughs' success happened because he was an amazingly talented man with a willingness to take risks and a gift for finding creative, amazing friends. That's not entirely untrue.
But it's also true that a lot of Burroughs' success happened because he was a white man from a very wealthy family, who could and did pull him out of all of the crap except for the drug addiction.
Miles doesn't really want to examine this, but over and over in this book, we see again that those without that background never manage to get away with what Burroughs did. Young Arabic boys get murdered. Poorer white boys get murdered, or find that unlike Burroughs, they do have to do jail time, or they do have to go off to war. Mexicans end up in jail or dead. Black men get lynched.
Burroughs? Survives all this to become a best selling author lauded by celebrities and enjoying a comfortable life.
Look, I also don't want to suggest that Burroughs never went through hell. Obviously he did: his ongoing addiction caused enormous problems, and the severe illnesses and early death of his son was a tragedy. Burroughs also continually found himself disappointed in love, always searching, always having issues with relationships (a lot of this because of the drugs.) But he had a gift for finding people who were willing to excuse his crap, and a gift for using other people's money and favors to make sure people would be willing to help him later.
And by following along with this, and making similar excuses, and blaming others, Miles makes it harder to see and judge the real Burroughs: a complicated, troubled, creative artist. By trying to deflect blame, he makes it harder for us to answer the very good questionsupergee asked that got me into this book in the first place: how do we judge art created by horrible people? Miles' answer to this evades the whole question: Burroughs created great art, so, clearly, excuses must be found for him.
The book also has some odd prejudices against rich people - odd only because the book is so enthusiastic about its subject, a rich person despite the periods where he lived in poverty - but a poverty supported by a monthly check from his parents. (Also, actually poor people usually can't buy large farms to start over with.) There's a couple of anti-Seventh Day Adventist comments which under the circumstances seem misguided. Scientologists will also find very little to love here, although in that case I tend to agree with Miles' dismissal of their belief system.
Tidbits about science fiction writers and the history of science fiction pop up here and there – Burroughs was a fan – and if you are just into gossip about rock bands, you can easily skip to the last quarter of the book which has all of the good stuff about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joy Division, and others. Miles also does a fascinating job of describing the cultural contexts of the various places Burroughs visits or lives in - the South America bits are a pretty good read, and the Tangiers stuff is absorbing. And if you want a biography that does detail all of the various bizarre things Burroughs got up to, this is probably your book.
In the meantime, I'll wait for a less defensive biography.
supergee discussed Call Me Burroughs, a new biography by Barry Miles of influential Beat Generation writer William Burroughs, using it to raise the fascinating question of whether an artist's work can allow us to overlook his or her life. It sounded like exactly the sort of juicy, gossipy biography that I love, so I got the book from the library as soon as I could. This may or may not have been a good thing. The biography is detailed, gripping, enthralling in more than one section. It also left me feeling faintly to seriously unclean as I read. This was a book I had to put down frequently.Part of the reason I had to put the book down frequently is that Burroughs was not exactly the nicest kind of guy. But a much larger problem is with Miles, or rather, the way Miles chooses to frame many aspects of Burroughs' life.
To his credit, Miles is completely thorough here – some readers might even argue too thorough – and is careful to include the many, many low moments of Burroughs' life, along with the highlights. Less to his credit, Miles is a self-proclaimed major admirer of Burroughs, which leads to bits like this:
"Burroughs took his responsibilities as a father seriously, and his first priority had been to find a place to 'stash these brats.'" (page 167)
Let's hop over the inherent issues with that sentence for a moment, and note that by the very next page, Burroughs is using drugs again and neglecting his children. By page 171, a visitor is saying this:
"You bathed that little girl, and you could tell she hadn't been washed in ages. That little girl—she bit her arm all the time. She had great, terrible, scars on her arm."
One the same page, we learn:
"The children were allowed to use Joan's Revere Ware pots instead of the toilet, and the same pots were used for cooking in the evening."
Miles notes that the house visitor – who, unlike William Burroughs and his wife Joan, was sober during the entire visit – found other aspects of their behavior "peculiar." Miles' word, not mine nor the visitor's. The peculiar behavior in question? Torturing cats.
(If you are wondering why Burroughs' son died tragically young at age 33, well, there were other reasons, but this is a start.)
Torturing cats while high on drugs in the house you are sharing with your children, while the children are using cooking pots for a toilet and biting their arms hard enough to leave bruises, is not taking your "responsibilities as a father seriously," nor is it simply "peculiar." It's criminal. (The Louisiana state police agreed with my interpretation.)
This is hardly the only, or even the most egregious, example of Miles using, shall we say, interesting language to frame various incidents in Burroughs' life. Far worse, however, is when Miles blames other people for things that Burroughs was directly responsible for. In a typical example, when Burroughs makes a deeply offensive, sexist slur against Peggy Guggenheim while attending a party she was hosting, Miles chooses to describe the aftermath like this:
"Unfortunately this was overheard by her assistant, Bob Brady, who nearly swooned with excitement before running to report it. Burroughs and Guggenheim had gotten along well up until that point, but now Bill was banished forever from the premises."
The implication, of course, is that the "unfortunate" part of this incident was Bob Brady overhearing the words, and Bob Brady's decision to tell Guggenheim. The actual "unfortunate" part was Burroughs making the slur to begin with. Brady had every right to tell the hostess of the cocktail party that Burroughs was using language like this, especially since the party was a formal cocktail party held in honor of the British consul, and was a formal event. Burroughs was also dead drunk at the time. I expect, if we heard Bob Brady's version of this story, he would have said that he overheard Guggenheim's drunk guest insulting other guests and his hostess, correctly informed the hostess, who understandably banished Burroughs from the event.
(As a small note, the British consul cocktail party incident happened just a few years after a very drunk Burroughs shot and killed his wife in what was ruled an accident. After that, I am not inclined to criticize anyone who chose to throw a drunken Burroughs off the premises.)
Just a chapter or two later, Miles enthusiastically assures us that Burroughs was now "clean" and following a healthy lifestyle – off drugs – before revealing, in the very next paragraph, that Burroughs was still doing pot, hashish and alcohol. These were all considerably more mild than what Burroughs had been using – mild enough to let Burroughs finally work to put the fragments of his novel - fragments written while on harder stuff – but given that by this time, Burroughs was also an alcoholic, his regular drinking could not be called "clean." A page later, Miles informs us that Burroughs picked up ringworm during this supposed clean, healthy period, as well as severe chafing in certain areas, which does not sound healthy.
In a later bit, Jacques Stern, a wealthy man high on cocaine, accuses Burroughs of stealing money from him and conning him (Stern) out of money. Even though by this point Miles has provided ample evidence to suggest that Burroughs did con friends, family and general acquaintances, and even though the book detailed several incidents where Burroughs outright stole money to support his drug habit, Miles describes Stern's accusation as "the games that rich people like to play." Maybe, sure, Stern was playing a game. Or – and I'm just throwing this out there – Stern accused Burroughs of being a thief and a con man because Burroughs was a thief and a con man. (Also, Burroughs was back on drugs at this point, and his worst behavior coincided with his heavy drug use.)
And in yet another bit, Miles tells us that the drug-using, smoking, filling the house with still more smoke from kerosene heaters and releasing said smoke through the windows, neglectful of his teenage son man who made threatening gestures to women in Arab dress and bought black market food supplies and asked people to commit murder for him (this is all in the same three paragraphs) faced "the antagonism of the local people" because the local people "expected them [Burroughs and his housemates] to pay staff." Or, again, just throwing this out there, the local people were understandably appalled by the behavior of their American neighbor.
Miles also tries to state, multiple times, that Burroughs was not, in any way, shape or form, a misogynist, because, after all, he was willing to talk to and take pictures of women, a statement considerably undercut by Burroughs' own words describing two books he was working on: "The essay book is quite outspoken and uncompromising on the women question. (What do you think about women? They are a perfect curse.) The wild boy book is even more anti-female by total omission. They wild boys have nothing to do with women or junk."
Ahem.
The problem with this sort of thing, of course, is that this blame shifting and victim blaming obscures a central fact about Burroughs, one that has to be considered when judging his art and his life: in most respects, he was a horrible human being.
So that this isn't totally an anti-Burroughs rant, I should note that Burroughs was not all bad: the text shows him unstintingly helping several friends (often with his parents' money or with money from his robberies.) He saved a Jewish woman, Ilse von Klapper, by marrying her and bringing her to the United States before she could be arrested by the Nazis. He wrote several books, painted, acted in films, and served as an artistic inspiration to many, encouraging several fellow writers and poets. I can say that some of my stuff, while not especially influenced by anyone in the Beat generation, owes a certain debt to the willingness of Beat poets and others – often led by Burroughs – to break traditional narrative structures and experiment with language. He gave wise advice to a friend who had just murdered his stalker. He travelled a lot. He was by many accounts a brilliant conversationalist and highly entertaining. He worked on an opera.
In the more questionable category, he held a job as an exterminator and grew a lot of pot, which was a lot more productive than many of his other activities. Later in life he made hashish candy, which, ditto. And failed to score drugs for Joy Division, which I guess is one of those it depends on how you look at it things.
He was also a major, but major drug addict, something that the text suggests may have come from multiple factors. He was a bisexual (mostly gay) man in the 20th century United States, which forced him from an early age to get into the habit of lying. He may also have been molested in childhood. Getting an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army for mental health issues during World War II, without ever leaving the U.S., could not have helped; Burroughs had travelled in Europe, and was well aware of Nazi attitudes towards gays and lesbians, but was unable to fight back. Though he was also unwilling to serve as a private – an officer, sure, but not a private; his family helped arrange for his honorable discharge, and Burroughs later used the G.I. Bill to pay for anthropology classes in Mexico City. In any case, these and a fascination with the criminal underworld seem to have led him to drugs, and drugs led him to do increasingly shitty things, not that his life had exactly been a shining beacon of kindness and probity before.
I do have sympathy for his drug addiction, a serious, uncontrollable illness. Burroughs made multiple attempts to detox, but he was always an addict.
Against this, Burroughs spent most of his life completely living off his parents, when not outright robbing people. By robbing people I mean both going to strangers and stealing their wallets, and conning people out of money. He forged prescriptions; cheated on his romantic partners; lied to friends about the state of his house in Texas, which in turn forced them to make emergency beds so that they wouldn't get eaten by scorpions; was a hellish landlord – right down to making anti-gay slurs against his possibly gay tenants while running around at night trying to pick up men; and paid his illegal migrant farm labor poorly. He let a close male friend stalk and attempt to seduce a teenage boy, something that eventually led to murder. He was a hellish, neglectful parent; reading this book, you want to go back in time and remove Burroughs from the presence of anyone under the age of 18. He avoided prison time for felony drug charges by fleeing to Mexico, where he promptly used more drugs.
He was a drug dealer. He was a pedophile. A pedophile who paid the boys he used poorly. He dripped blood on first edition books while getting high. He was a hellish boyfriend to Allen Ginsberg. (To be fair, the subplot of this book could easily be called "Terrible People Allen Ginsberg Slept With.") He had the nerve to criticize Jack Kerouac for being a terrible houseguest; I'm sure Kerouac was, but coming from Burroughs this is hypocrisy extreme. He hated Harry Everett Smith because of the way Smith mooched off everyone; again, this was a valid complaint, but coming from a man who built an entire life on mooching off people, it's a bit much.
Also, he shot and killed his common law wife and later said that was the moment that got him to write. He was dead drunk at the time.
To put this in perspective, the person who allegedly committed semi-public bestiality as Greenwich Village parties comes off as a delightful model citizen in comparison. (Apparently, by the time this incident occurred the witnesses were so jaded – partly by Burroughs – they just shrugged.)
To give Miles credit, he does list all of these things – and a lot more. But as I noted, about a quarter of the incidents involved are couched in language that attempts to soften the actual blame, or make Burroughs look like an upstanding guy who just happens to be abusing teenagers, while several other incidents are framed to be the fault of anybody but Burroughs, most disturbingly when Miles accuses the teenage boys from very disadvantaged circumstances that Burroughs was sleeping with as taking advantage of Burroughs' money. You know, they probably did, but let's not remove Burroughs from the blame game here.
The book does improve - and gets more readable - once Burroughs finally achieves success, largely because that success eliminates the need for Miles to blame everyone else for Burroughs' failure. But only a little: when Burroughs, at the age of 75, has sex with an 18 year old guy, Miles leaps right back into old habits and assures us that this was all entirely the idea of the 18 year old.
And maybe it was – by that time, Burroughs was famous and artistically respected and on a lot of drugs, so, maybe. The problem is that also by this time, I couldn't buy Miles' version of events.
To be somewhat fair to Miles, what he is doing here more or less mirrors what happened with Burroughs in real life. Time and time again, Miles details how Burroughs' family and friends excused him, blamed others for his actions, and helped Burroughs avoid the consequences of his actions - sneaking him out to Mexico, for instance, and then to South America; continuing to pay him a monthly allowance for decades; hiring top notch lawyers to keep him out of jail; describing other people - including those poverty-stricken boys - as preying on Burroughs; assuring us all that Burroughs wasn't really misogynist by nature - other people made him that way. As a result, the only real consequence Burroughs ends up dealing with is the multiple issues that came along with his addiction. Have sex openly on the side of the road? Someone will get you out of jail. Deal drugs? Ditto. Kill your wife? Ditto. Prey on a kid for a couple of years? The kid, not you, ends up murdered.
And it goes on. Write a novel after the age of 40 that's virtually incomprehensible? Have several friends – including Allen Ginsberg – go through the novel and edit and edit and edit whipping it into some sort of shape. Enough attention is given to this stage that I found myself wondering just how much of Naked Lunch is from Burroughs, and how much from his various friends? The base bits, sure, are Burroughs, but his friends - themselves skilled, brilliant writers are described as spending hours and even months working on Burroughs' book. (I also couldn't help noticing that Burroughs wrote less, and did other things – like paint – more, once the writing friends stopped hanging out with him or died off.) Realize, even after this, that you have a very non-traditional book that is an incredibly difficult sale? No problem: use your friends to get you in an in with a New York publisher, friends who are worried that you might do self-harm to yourself, and friends who you previously helped out financially with your parents' money.
Sure, some of this came about because Burroughs did have a gift for finding and making creative friends. And he did help these friends out on occasion.
But in the end, Burroughs almost becomes the poster child for some recent discussions about racism, sexism, and stacked decks. Miles wants us to believe that Burroughs' success happened because he was an amazingly talented man with a willingness to take risks and a gift for finding creative, amazing friends. That's not entirely untrue.
But it's also true that a lot of Burroughs' success happened because he was a white man from a very wealthy family, who could and did pull him out of all of the crap except for the drug addiction.
Miles doesn't really want to examine this, but over and over in this book, we see again that those without that background never manage to get away with what Burroughs did. Young Arabic boys get murdered. Poorer white boys get murdered, or find that unlike Burroughs, they do have to do jail time, or they do have to go off to war. Mexicans end up in jail or dead. Black men get lynched.
Burroughs? Survives all this to become a best selling author lauded by celebrities and enjoying a comfortable life.
Look, I also don't want to suggest that Burroughs never went through hell. Obviously he did: his ongoing addiction caused enormous problems, and the severe illnesses and early death of his son was a tragedy. Burroughs also continually found himself disappointed in love, always searching, always having issues with relationships (a lot of this because of the drugs.) But he had a gift for finding people who were willing to excuse his crap, and a gift for using other people's money and favors to make sure people would be willing to help him later.
And by following along with this, and making similar excuses, and blaming others, Miles makes it harder to see and judge the real Burroughs: a complicated, troubled, creative artist. By trying to deflect blame, he makes it harder for us to answer the very good question
supergee asked that got me into this book in the first place: how do we judge art created by horrible people? Miles' answer to this evades the whole question: Burroughs created great art, so, clearly, excuses must be found for him. The book also has some odd prejudices against rich people - odd only because the book is so enthusiastic about its subject, a rich person despite the periods where he lived in poverty - but a poverty supported by a monthly check from his parents. (Also, actually poor people usually can't buy large farms to start over with.) There's a couple of anti-Seventh Day Adventist comments which under the circumstances seem misguided. Scientologists will also find very little to love here, although in that case I tend to agree with Miles' dismissal of their belief system.
Tidbits about science fiction writers and the history of science fiction pop up here and there – Burroughs was a fan – and if you are just into gossip about rock bands, you can easily skip to the last quarter of the book which has all of the good stuff about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joy Division, and others. Miles also does a fascinating job of describing the cultural contexts of the various places Burroughs visits or lives in - the South America bits are a pretty good read, and the Tangiers stuff is absorbing. And if you want a biography that does detail all of the various bizarre things Burroughs got up to, this is probably your book.
In the meantime, I'll wait for a less defensive biography.