Saturday 12 November 2011

Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs

In December 1959, an American man in his mid-forties in Paris wrote to his best friend, a younger man in New York City, to explain why a planned Christmas-time visit to the US to see his elderly parents in Florida, and his friend in New York, might not be possible, after all:
Temporary hitch.. My Old Lady [the man’s 73-year-old mother] read the Life article and has thrown off her shop keeper weeds and revealed her hideous rank in Matriarch, Inc.: “I Queen Bee Laura of Worth Avenue.. Stay out of my territory, punk..” She has, in fact, forbidden me to set foot in Palm Beach on pain of Orpheus.. And won’t send me money to come home.
Almost forty-six years old, William Burroughs still had to write home for money.
Laura Lee Burroughs ran a high-toned ‘gift shop’ in Palm Beach after she and her husband moved from St. Louis in spring 1952, with their five-year-old grandson, William S., Jr. – whom they were raising because his mother was accidentally shot and killed by their son, William, in Mexico six months before. That scandal made the newspapers all over the USA, and the Burroughses’ social standing in St. Louis County suburban ‘high society’ had become too awkward for them to remain.
The ‘Life article’ mentioned is Paul O’Neil’s ‘Sad but Noisy Rebels,’ in the 30 November 1959 issue. Better known today by its slug title (‘The Only Rebellion Around; But the Shabby Beats Bungle the Job in Arguing, Sulking and Bad Poetry’), the lengthy, photo-illustrated article mocked and dismissed Ginsberg, Kerouac, McClure, and others – including Burroughs:
For sheer horror no member of the Beat Generation has achieved effects to compare with William S. Burroughs, who is regarded by many seekers after coolness as the ‘the greatest writer in the world.’ [ . . . ] a pale, cadaverous and bespectacled being who has devoted most of his adult life to a lonely pursuit of drugs and debauchery [and] has rubbed shoulders with the dregs of a half-dozen races.
All of this (which was not even the half of it, if the full truth could not have been published in writing then), came as a complete and total shock to Laura Burroughs. Billy (William) was always her favourite, her precocious paragon of scientific learning; he later remembered her saying once, ‘I worship the ground you walk on.’
Of course, Life’s sudden blush of Beat scandal in 1959 was – as Laura would live long enough to know, until her death in 1970 – only the beginning of her son’s garish, worldwide notoriety.

William S. Burroughs [Paris] to Laura Lee Burroughs [Palm Beach, FL]
ca. December 1959
Dear Mother,
I counted to ten before answering your letter and I hope you have done the same since nothing could be more unworthy than a quarrel between us at this point.. Yes I have read the article in Life and after all.. a bit silly perhaps.. but it is a mass medium.. and sensational factors must be played up at the expense often of fact.. In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me.. four pots a day and heavy sugar.. Did nurse make tea all the time? Its an English practice that seems to come natural to me.. I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as The Wickedest Man Alive a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley – who by In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me.. four pots a day and heavy sugarthe way could have had his pick of Palm Beach invitations in a much more straight laced era despite publicity a great deal more extreme.. And remember the others who have held the title before.. Byron Baudelaire Poe people are very glad to claim kinship now..But really anyone in the public eye that is anyone who enjoys any measure of success in his field is open to sensational publicity.. If I visit a waterfront bar in Tangier – half a block from my house – I am ‘rubbing shoulders with the riff raff of the world’.. You can do that in any neighborhood bar USA and not least in Palm Beach.. A rundown on some of the good burghers of Palm Beach would quite eclipse the Beatniks.. Personally I would prefer to avoid publicity but it is the only way to sell books.. A writer who keeps his name out of the papers doesn't publish and doesn't make money if he does manage to publish..
As regard my return to the family hearth perhaps we had best both shelve any decision for the present.. Please keep me informed as to Dad's condition and give him my heart felt wish for his recovery..
Love
Bill Burroughs
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@'Granta' 
(Thanx SJX!)

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