Letters to Allen Ginsberg by William Burroughs
This is one Burroughs book that seems to have gone by with little notice. That's too bad because it's fascinating to watch through the course of this book written from 1953-57, the development of the genre-smashing Naked Lunch. We're present at moments when six hours of straight writing on hash in Copenhagen results in 20 pages that might or might not have gotten into Naked Lunch as published. This book, as a series of letters, is a natural cut-up—just one of several techniques we see Burroughs struggling with in his creation of the forms he instinctually is grasping at in his novel's catharsis; a struggle paralleled in these letters which give a running account and first presentation of just evolved passages (Burroughs made copies). His futuristic, bestial pleasures of description—horrific visions of sex and mind control (very funny)—are first let loose in these letters with an obvious pleasure to be writing. Long postscripts addend new idea scenarios. If you get tired of seeing the disparate membranes of his impassioned "fictive" imaginings drawn together, he cuts away to discussion of the boy situations in the various locales the letters are posted from (mostly Tangiers, an unhappy return to folks in Florida, and continuation of heroin kick in Tangiers, London, and Copenhagen). It takes him a month or two to get used to a place and we watch it happen twice as he's very determined to note his relentless frustrated or satisfied observations. The result is this blend of a progressing narrative spiced up as baroquely as possible with personal geography and the local news, that he often gets a twisted pleasure in detailing grotesquer events of: someone pulled from the bay with a bullet in the head, a wave of native unrest and sporadic rioting. Burroughs knows here that he must devise new writing methods to contain his volcanic material, the forms do not yet exist. He knows only that his forms can't be similar to what's already been done: ". . . As you can see I am running more and more to prose poems and no straight narrative in over a month . . ." is one of the positive entries from Copenhagen, at a point in the genesis of Naked Lunch that, according to Allen Ginsberg's concerned footnotes, is already past the point where he, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac had stayed with Burroughs in Tangiers for 4 months, helping him assemble the collage of material, gathering pages off the floor. The love pronounced and otherwise evident for the addressee in these writings softens the hard, uncompromising excesses of the visions Burroughs would later be so deservedly acclaimed for and is here giving first expression to. (Cover, Jan. 1988) |