The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959

William S. Burroughs & Oliver Harris (editor)
The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959 (1993)
Much as I loves me some Billy, I've never found this one particularly enticing - four hundred plus pages of private correspondence which I picked up from somewhere or other mainly out of a sense of duty to the author, because I probably have almost everything else he wrote. Thusly has it sat untouched on my shelves year after year emanating an aura which, even as I approach sixty, I still associate with homework. Nevertheless, having committed myself to reading all those books I never got around to reading and having now read most of them, I finally come to Billy's letters, partially thanks to Ted Morgan's biography providing an incentive.

It turns out that my instincts were coincidentally on the money for the first hundred or so pages, taking us up to the early fifties and Burroughs' time in Mexico City. Our man spent the second half of the forties mooching around the US, attempting to get rich though farming. Much of his correspondence from this time fixates on how much dosh he thinks he's going to make, insisting Ginsberg at least think about growing carrots, whining about unions and liberals, and helping the reader understand just why his long-suffering parents considered him something of a disappointment. It's frankly a bit of a chore getting though this first quarter, and so much so that you're almost looking forward to him accidentally shooting his wife and thus generating something worth writing about.

Ted Morgan's biography reveals, at least in part, a side of Burroughs which wasn't really obvious from the books or the attendant legend, namely that he was initially something of a lost soul, fecklessly wandering along with no real idea of where he was going, screwing up and never quite having to face the consequences of the same thanks to the pocket money which Mom and Pop continued to send every fucking month. The letters clearly demonstrate that Morgan wasn't just making that stuff up.

Anyway, It gets more engaging once he's settled in Mexico, and remains so as he moves all over - South America, Paris, Tangiers, London and so on, very much sharpening his wits in the process and gradually gearing up towards the work for which he is most widely celebrated. There's a very strong sense of progress running throughout these monthly, often weekly reports, and one which affords an insight which isn't framed in quite such direct terms by Literary Outlaw, and it's an insight for which even the first hundred or so yawnsome pages are probably essential. The closer I get to Burroughs, the more important he seems, and the more obvious it is how poorly understood is most of his writing, even by those who seem to think they've got it.

So that all worked out very well.