Don't Hide the Madness

 

Steven Taylor (editor) Don't Hide the Madness (2018)
...or William S. Burroughs in conversation with Allen Ginsberg as the subheading promises, which began life as an article for the Observer vaguely intended to promote Cronenberg's attempt to film Naked Lunch. The idea was that the editor would hang around with Burroughs and Ginsberg for a couple of days, recording their conversation on tape in the hope of a written piece being mined from this wealth of source material. Handily, Taylor already knew Ginsberg well, and Burroughs as a friend of Ginsberg, and there were a few others hanging around and chipping in - James Grauerholz, various friends and neighbours and so on. Don't Hide the Madness is three-hundred pages of transcript whittled down from eleven cassette tapes of the gang yacking away without any obvious attempts to steer the conversation.

Taylor claims to have edited out the really inane stuff, so we don't get to hear Ginsberg spotting an apparently discarded shoelace in the corner of the room, then pick it up to discover that it's actually string, then spend the next twenty pages talking about how it really, really, really looked like a shoelace. We do, on the other hand, get to sit in on them talking about guns, which is mystifying, being mostly a series of numbers presumably describing what type of gun someone is waving around.

Yet, as with real life, attention wanders and certain points keep swinging back around, restoring our focus; which keeps the emphasis fairly light, conveys a touching sense of moment which might have been otherwise lost, and even communicates the more intensive subjects by allowing for nuance, and which might not have been quite so engaging had it been pared down to just Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, and the stuff directly relating to Burroughs as author.

I don't remember particularly liking the Cronenberg movie on the one occasion of my seeing it - although I don't think his work is really my thing - but Burroughs' take on it, which is generally positive, is fascinating; not least because it all seems to tie into wider discussion of the ugly spirit, to which Burroughs attributes blame for his having shot his wife all those years ago. This comes up because at the time of recording, and of the release of Naked Lunch, Burroughs was looking into exorcism, and had been subject to some sort of spiritual cleansing by a local shaman. It's the kind of discussion which might inspire the rolling of eyes and general grumbling about new age bollocks under other, more formal circumstances, but here it's revealed as simply the easiest way to discuss and deal with something which otherwise resists analysis in more coldly analytical terms. The pay off, should we need it, is that Don't Hide the Madness actually explains pretty much everything you ever needed to know about Burroughs and his writing, but delivers the information as low-key conversational dialogue which communicates a hell of a lot more than the traditional lists of names, dates and places. As a particularly weird consequence, it very much separates the author from his work in revealing Burroughs as a genuinely nice guy, someone who would be fun to hang around with, or at least I thought so.

He loved his cats, so he's fine by me.