Junky

182 Pages·1977·0.3 MB·English

by  William S. Burroughs

junky
William S. Burroughs
introduction - by allen ginsberg
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prologue
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junky
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glossary
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INTRODUCTION
Bill Burroughs and I had known each other since
Xmas 1944, and at the beginning of the `50s were in deep.
correspondence. I had always respected him as elder &
wiser than myself, and in first years' acquaintance was
mazed that he treated me with respect at all. As time wore
on & our fortunes altered -- me to solitary bughouse for
awhile, he to his own tragedies and travels -- I became
more bold in presuming on his shyness, as I intuited it, and
encouraged him to write more prose. By then Kerouac and
I considered ourselves poet/writers in Destiny, and Bill was
too diffident to make such extravagant theater of self. In
any case he responded to my letters with chapters of
Junky, I think begun as curious sketching but soon con-
ceived on his part -- to my thrilled surprise -- as continuing
workmanlike fragments of a book, narrative on a subject.
So the bulk of the Ms. arrived sequentially in the mail,
some to Paterson, New Jersey. I thought I was encouraging
him. It occurs to me that he may have been encouraging
me to keep in active contact with the world, as I was
rusticating at my parents' house after 8 months in mental
hospital as result of hippie contretemps with law.
This took place over quarter century ago, and I don't
remember structure of our correspondence -- which con-
tinued for years, continent to continent & coast to coast,
and was the method whereby we assembled books not only
of Junky but also Yage Letters, Queer (as yet unpub-
lished), and much of Naked Lunch. Shamefully, Bur-
roughs has destroyed much of his personal epistles of the
mid-'50s which I entrusted to his archival care -- letters of a
more pronouncedly affectionate nature than he usually dis-
plays to public -- so, alas, that charming aspect of the
otherwise Invisible Inspector Lee has been forever ob-
scured behind the Belles Lettristic Curtain.
Once the manuscript was complete, I began taking it
around to various classmates in college or mental hospital
who had succeeded in establishing themselves in
Publishing --
an ambition which was mine also, frustrated; and thus
incompetent in worldly matters, I conceived of myself as a
secret literary Agent. Jason Epstein read the Ms. of Bur-
roughs' Junky (of course he knew Burroughs by legend
from Columbia days) and concluded that had it been writ-
ten by Winston Churchill, it would be interesting; but since
Burroughs' prose was "undistinguished" (a point I argued
with as much as I could in his Doubleday office, but
felt faint surrounded by so much Reality . . . mustard gas
of sinister intelligent editors . . . my own paranoia or
inexperience with the Great Dumbness of Business Build-
ings of New York) the book was not of interest to publish.
That season I was also carrying around Kerouac's Prous-
tian chapters from Visions of Cody that later developed
into the vision of On the Road. And I carried On the Road
from one publishing office to another. Louis Simpson, him-
self recovering from nervous breakdown at Bobbs-Merrill,
found no artistic merit in the manuscripts either.
By grand chance, my Companion from N.Y. State
Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, was given a job by his
uncle, Mr. A. A. Wyn of Ace Books. Solomon had the
literary taste & humor for these documents -- though on the
rebound from his own Dadaist, Lettriste & Paranoiac-
Critical literary extravagances, he, like Simpson, distrusted
the criminal or vagabond romanticism of Burroughs &
Kerouac. (I was myself at the time a nice Jewish boy with
one foot in middle-class writing careful revised rhymed
metaphysical verse -- not quite.) Certainly these books in-
dicated we were in the middle of an identity crisis prefigur-
ing nervous breakdown for the whole United States. On the
other hand Ace Books' paperback line was mostly com-
mercial schlupp with an occasional French Romance or
hardboiled novel nervously slipped into the list by Carl,
while Uncle winked his eye.
Editor Solomon felt that we (us guys, Bill, Jack, My-
self) didn't care, as he did, about the real Paranoia of such
publishing -- it was not part of our situation as it was of
his -- Carl's context of family and psychiatrists, publishing
house responsibilities, nervousness at being thought men-
tally ill by his uncle -- so that it took bravery on his part to
put out "this type of thing," a book on Junk, and give
Kerouac $250 advance for a prose novel. "The damn thing
almost gave me a nervous breakdown -- buildup of fear and
terror, to work with that material."
There was at the time -- not unknown to the present
with its leftover vibrations of police state paranoia culti-
vated by Narcotics Bureaus -- a very heavy implicit thought-
form, or assumption: that if you talked aloud about "tea"
(much less Junk) on the bus or subway, you might be
arrested -- even if you were only discussing a change in the
law. It was just about illegal to talk about dope. A decade
later you still couldn't get away with national public TV
discussion of the laws without the Narcotics Bureau &
FCC intruding with canned film clips weeks later denounc-
ing the debate. That's history. But the fear and terror that
Solomon refers to was so real that it had been internalized
in the schlupp publishing industry, and so, before the book
could be printed, all sorts of disclaimers had to be inter-
leaved with the text -- lest the publisher be implicated crim-
inally with the author, lest the public be misled by arbi-
trary opinions of the author which were at variance with
"recognized medical authority" -- at the time a forcible
captive of the Narcotics Bureau (20,000 doctors arraigned
for trying to treat junkies, thousands fined & jailed 1935 --
1953, in what N.Y. County Medical Association called "a
war on doctors").
The simple and basic fact is that, in cahoots with
organized crime, the Narcotics Bureaus were involved in
under-the-table peddling of dope, and so had built up
myths reinforcing "criminalization" of addicts rather than
medical treatment. The motive was pure and simple: greed
for money, salaries, blackmail & illegal profits, at the ex-
pense of a class of citizens who were classified by press &
police as "Fiends." The historic working relationship be-
tween Police and Syndicate bureaucracies had by early
1970s been documented by various official reports and
books (notably N.Y.'s 1972 Knapp Commission Report
and The Politics of Opium in Indochina by Al McCoy).
Because the subject -- in medias res -- was considered
so outré, Burroughs was asked to contribute a preface ex-
plaining that he was from distinguished family background
-- anonymously William Lee -- and giving some hint how
some supposedly normal citizen could arrive at being a
dope fiend, to soften the blow for readers, censors, review-
ers, police, critical eyes in walls & publishers' rows, god
knows who. Carl wrote a worried introduction pretending
to be the voice of sanity introducing the book on the part
of the publisher. Perhaps he was. A certain literary descrip-
tion of Texas agricultural society was excised as not being
germane to the funky harsh non-literary subject matter.
And I repeat, crucial medico-political statements of fact or
opinion by Wm. Lee were on the spot (in parentheses)
disclaimed (by Ed.).
As agent I negotiated a contract approving all these
obscurations, and delivering Burroughs an Advance of
$800 on an edition of 100,000 copies printed back-to-back
-- 69'd so to speak -- with another book on drugs, by an ex-
Narcotics Agent. Certainly a shabby package; on the other
hand, given our naïveté, a kind of brave miracle that the
text actually was printed and read over the next decade by
a million cognoscenti -- who did appreciate the intelligent
fact, the clear perception, precise bare language, direct
syntax & mind pictures -- as well as the enormous socio-
logic grasp, culture-revolutionary attitude toward bureau-
cracy & law, and the stoic cold-humor'd eye on crime.
ALLEN GINSBERG
September 19, 1976 NYC
prologue
I was born in 1914 in a solid, three-story, brick house
in a large Midwest city. My parents were comfortable. My
father owned and ran a lumber business. The house had a
lawn in front, a back yard with a garden, a fish pond and a
high wooden fence all around it. I remember the lamp-
lighter lighting the gas streetlights and the huge, black,
shiny Lincoln and drives in the park on Sunday. All the
props of a safe, comfortable way of life that is now gone
forever. I could put down one of those nostalgic routines
about the old German doctor who lived next door and the
rats running around in the back yard and my aunt's elec-
tric car and my pet toad that lived by the fish pond.
Actually my earliest memories are colored by a fear
of nightmares. I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the
dark, and afraid to go to sleep because of dreams where a
supernatural horror seemed always on the point of taking
shape. I was afraid some day the dream would still be there
when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium
and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said:
"I will smoke opium when I grow up."
I was subject to hallucinations as a child. Once I woke
up in the early morning light and saw little men playing in
a block house I had made. I felt no fear, only a feeling of
stillness and wonder. Another recurrent hallucination or
nightmare concerned "animals in the wall," and started
with the delirium of a strange, undiagnosed fever that I
had at the age of four or five.
I went to a progressive school with the future solid
citizens, the lawyers, doctors and businessmen of a large
Midwest town. I was timid with the other children and
afraid of physical violence. One aggressive little Lesbian
would pull my hair whenever she saw me. I would like to
shove her face in right now, but she fell off a horse and
broke her neck years ago.
When I was about seven my parents decided to move
to the suburbs "to get away from people." They bought a
large house with grounds and woods and a fish pond where
there were squirrels instead of rats. They lived there in a
comfortable capsule, with a beautiful garden and cut off
from contact with the life of the city.
I went to a private suburban high school. I was not
conspicuously good or bad at sports, neither brilliant nor
backward in studies. I had a definite blind spot for mathe-
matics or anything mechanical. I never liked competitive
team games and avoided these whenever possible. I be-
came, in fact, a chronic malingerer. I did like fishing, hunt-
ing and hiking. I read more than was usual for an Ameri-
can boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole
France, Baudelaire, even Cide. I formed a romantic at-
tachment for another boy and we spent our Saturdays ex-
ploring old quarries, riding around on bicycles and fishing
in ponds and rivers.
At this time, I was greatly impressed by an auto-
biography of a burglar, called You Can't Win. The author
claimed to have spent a good part of his life in jail. It
sounded good to me compared with the dullness of a Mid-
west suburb where all contact with life was shut out. I saw
my friend as an ally, a partner in crime. We found an
abandoned factory and broke all the windows and stole a
chisel. We were caught, and our fathers had to pay the
damages. After this my friend "packed me in" because the
relationship was endangering his standing with the group. I
saw there was no compromise possible with the group, the
others, and I found myself a good deal alone.
The environment was empty, the antagonist hidden,
and I drifted into solo adventures. My criminal acts were
gestures, unprofitable and for the most part unpunished. I
would break into houses and walk around without taking
anything. As a matter of fact, I had no need for money.
Sometimes I would drive around in the country with a .22
rifle, shooting chickens. I made the roads unsafe with reck-
less driving until an accident, from which I emerged
miraculously and portentously unscratched, scared me into
normal caution.
I went to one of the Big Three universities, where I
majored in English literature for lack of interest in any
other subject. I hated the University and I hated the town
it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The Uni-
versity was a fake English setup taken over by the gradu-
ates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no
one, and strangers were regarded with distaste by the
closed corporation of the desirables.
By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the in-
ternational queer set who cruise around the world, bump-
ing into each other in queer joints from New York to
Cairo. I saw a way of life, a vocabulary, references, a
whole symbol system, as the sociologists say. But these
people were jerks for the most part and, after an initial
period of fascination, I cooled off on the setup.
When I graduated without honors, I had one hundred
fifty dollars per month in trust. That was in the depression
and there were no jobs and I couldn't think of any job I
wanted, in any case. I drifted around Europe for a year or
so. Remnants of the postwar decay lingered in Europe.
U.S. dollars could buy a good percentage of the inhabitants
of Austria, male or female. That was in 1936, and the
Nazis were closing in fast.
I went back to the States. With my trust fund I could
live without working or hustling. I was still cut off from
life as I had been in the Midwest suburb. I fooled around
taking graduate courses in psychology and Jiu-Jitsu les-
sons. I decided to undergo psychoanalysis, and continued
with it for three years. Analysis removed inhibitions and
anxiety so that I could live the way I wanted to live. Much
of my progress in analysis was accomplished in spite of my
analyst who did not like my "orientation," as he called it.
He finally abandoned analytic objectivity and put me down
as an "out-and-out con." I was more pleased with the re-
suits than he was.
After being rejected on physical grounds from five
officer-training programs, I was drafted into the Army and
certified fit for unlimited service. I decided I was not going
to like the Army and copped out on my nut-house record
-- I'd once got on a Van Gogh kick and cut off a finger
joint to impress someone who interested me at the time.
The nut-house doctors had never heard of Van Gogh. They
put me down for schizophrenia, adding paranoid type to
explain the upsetting fact that I knew where I was and who
was President of the U.S. When the Army saw that diag-
nosis they discharged me with the notation, "This man is
never to be recalled or reclassified."
After parting company with the Army, I took a van-
ety of jobs. You could have about any job you wanted at
that time. I worked as a private detective, an exterminator,
a bartender. I worked in factories and offices. I played
around the edges of crime. But my hundred and fifty dol-
lars per month was always there. I did not have to have