“Letters” by William S. Burroughs, body and cam – Liberation

2023-06-09 15:37:00

This correspondence of the oldest representative of the Beat Generation appears in paperback sixteen years after its first edition in French.

“Burroughs’ Gift for the Extreme” : Oliver Harris uses these words in his introduction to Lettres (covering the period from 1945, in fact especially 1949, to the end of 1959) of the oldest representative of the Beat Generation, this correspondence appearing in paperback sixteen years after the first publication in French. The author of Feast no was born in 1914 and died in 1997, while Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 and died in 1997 and Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 and died in 1969. The extreme comes in several tones. Rarely have so many members of a literary current been in prison (for non-political reasons), William Seward Burroughs himself, after he killed his wife while playing William Tell badly and for reasons more related to dope (“Only a mistake can explain that you are not yet in prison”, his lawyer told him again in Paris in 1959), but also Neal Cassady (1) and slews of men linked to the movement as the notes of the edition specify. Throughout these letters (mainly to Allen Ginsberg who has more reservations about a physical relationship between them than he would like), Burroughs goes from one extreme to the other. “I don’t touch cam anymore and I don’t miss it at all” appears from the second letter of the collection and will be repeated in other words many times, just like its opposite (“For sure, dope is an abominable thing”). Mexico City and Tangier, where most of this correspondence comes from, are also dragged through the mud before appearing, especially Tangier, as the least artificial paradise there is. A happiness of Mexico, besides the boys? “Here, a cop has the same status as a tram driver.” In addition, the police are «corruptibles».

The author of On the road is a good example of Burroughs’ shifting opinions. 1949 “By the way, I was very favorably impressed by Jack Kerouac. He seems much more sensible, more sure of himself than I remember. Mexico, 1952 : “I haven’t heard from Jack. He left by borrowing my last 20 dollars which he promised to reimburse me as soon as I returned to the United States. It’s been almost 2 months. To be frank, I’ve never had such an unconsiderate and selfish guest under my roof.” 1958, Burroughs receives a letter from Kerouac’s mother which he summarizes as follows: “You can’t be spoken to as a human being, you and your dirty books, your dirty mind and your dirty drugs. Never again mention Jack’s name in your filthy writings.” Neal Cassady is then in prison and Kerouac, who has borrowed so much from him, wouldn’t do anything to get him out of it. Burroughs to Ginsberg: “What he really wants is to be a Nazi while keeping his Jewish friends. In simpler terms, it doesn’tdo not like his mother, he has one blue funk.» Oliver Harris in his introduction: “As these letters reveal, while Burroughs was a precocious misanthrope, his notorious misogyny and anti-Semitism were late acquisitions.” He also criticizes Kerouac for his paranoia, while today’s worst conspirators seem like small players in the face of Burroughs’ paranoia, which is a foundation of his writing.

“I tend to float away like a balloon…”

These letters are another. Little by little, Burroughs realizes that what he writes to Ginsberg can take its place as it is in what will be they Festin nothis great book of the first years of his life as a writer (which he credits in his introduction Kerouac with having “suggested” the title) and whose first edition in English was in France, at Olympia Press by Maurice Girodias, the brother of the French translator of the novel, Eric Kahane. What Burroughs calls “numbers” (“very brief narrations with a slapstick tone”according to the definition of Oliver Harris) thus slips from the correspondence to the novel supposed to say the “terminus of the bed” and which in fact only tells of a stage in the life of Burroughs, an existence different from that of the other members of the Beat Generation also because his family is rich and he will be careful not to seek a job to earn money. ‘money. From Tangier in 1955, together with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, this self-portrait sketch: “I’m actually independent, so damn disconnected, I tend to float away like a balloon…”

(1) Séguier publishes a critical edition of the Joan Anderson Story Letterby Neal Cassady, birth certificate of the Beat Generation.

William S. Burroughs, Lettres

Translated from English (United States) by Gérard-Georges Lemaire and Céline Leroy. Bourgois, “Title”, 646 pp., €15.