The Word and William Burroughs
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 9, 2008
When I attended our UU Association's General Assembly in St. Louis summer before last, I had at one ulterior motive. I allow myself at least one ulterior motive per GA. This one was to find and photograph the childhood and adolescent home of William S. Burroughs. The address was 4664 Pershing Avenue. I got a hold of a car, and a street map of St. Louis - a city I'd never visited before - and set out on my quest. As I followed my map to my destination I noticed that I was in one of the toniest, most upscale sections of the city. And when I got to the point where Pershing Avenue intersected the street I was driving along, I encountered a big iron closed gate. Pershing Avenue, I swear, was a gated street. So I parked the car on the street I was already on, and headed on foot up Pershing, which, to its credit I guess, did have an accessible sidewalk.
It was a beautiful Midwestern June day, and I walked past these big old beautiful houses that were well back from the street. Most of the lawns were being dutifully tended to by gardeners and landscapers. I found what had been the Burroughs home, and somewhat audaciously walked up its front walk close enough to get a good picture or two; and then got myself out of a neighborhood where my casual attire alone was probably driving down the property values. I also did notice that the other end of Pershing was open to traffic. But I was just as glad I'd walked as it gave me a good feel for the early home environment of the Beat Generation writer, and combination genius/misfit, William Seward Burroughs.
[A side note: When William's parents purchased their home the street was then called Berlin Avenue. With the coming of World War I, and with Germany being the enemy, the powers that be (or were) in St. Louis apparently decided a street named Berlin just wouldn't do so they re-named it after General Pershing.]
Walking back to my car I could not help but compare the street and home I'd just seen with the working class neighborhood double-decker at 9 Lupine Road in Lowell's Centalville section where Jack Kerouac was born 86 years ago this coming Wednesday. (Just so you know). It was the meeting up of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg in New York City, as World War II was drawing to a close, that is generally heralded as the birth of the Beat Generation. Beat scholars like to argue that point, but I don't have the time, and I doubt you have the interest, for the finer nuances of "beat-ology" today. But it was these three persons, from quite radically different socio-economic and cultural and religious backgrounds, that helped give rise to a genre of literature and poetry that has now come to be recognized as one of the major literary and cultural expressions of post World War II America and beyond.
I got a book out on the whole thing about three years ago where I treat the Beat Movement as primarily a religious and spiritual phenomenon. Since I wrote most of it while on a sabbatical, for which you...ah...were paying, I figured I'd get for a little sermon mileage out of it now and then, which gets us to where we are right now.
I've created a personal tradition for myself in my ministry here, which I guess you'll just have to indulge me in, whereby I use the Sunday closest to Jack Kerouac's birthday of March 12 to speak to the life and legacy of one of the Beat Generation writers. This year I decided to really fly without a net and try to make some sermonic sense out of the guy who was far and away the oddest odd-duck of them all when it comes to the Beats: Mr. William Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri - as well as many other parts of the globe over his 83 years of living. This sermon definitely belongs in the category of "What Was I Thinking When I Thought of This?" But I'll see what I can do.
The best image or metaphor I can offer for both the life and writings of Bill Burroughs is a Jackson Pollock painting, or an impressionistic or surrealistic work of art, with splotches and images thrown all over the place in a way that jars your senses even as you try to make some sense out of it. Just the geography of his life is enough to make your head spin. His pastiche of a life itinerary went something like this: Early years in St. Louis, boarding school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Cambridge, Massachusetts (where he graduated from Harvard with a degree in English Literature), a brief Army hitch in Europe during World War II, then Chicago, back to St. Louis, to New York, to the hamlet of Pharr, Texas where he tried his hand at farming, to New Orleans, to Mexico City, to Tangier - with short side residencies in London and Paris - then back to New York for a spell in the 70s and 80s, before living out his final years in Lawrence, Kansas.
If I were to consider this man's life from, say, the perspective of a parent, I would have to say - with apologies to Willie Nelson - "Mamas don't let you babies grow up to be Burroughs." Mr. Burroughs, I sure, would wholeheartedly concur. He never offered his life as any kind of an example of healthy and wholesome living to anyone. He just wanted to live completely on his own terms - for better and for worse. And he got his share of both.
What gets my attention about him, however - and I can only take his madcap and often deliberately disjointed writings in very measured doses - is what he reports back from his view into an abyss of humanity's seamier side. He offers an unblinking view of a world seen from the dead-end, rock-bottom, up; and a view sometimes seen at times through the horrifying experiences of narcotics addiction which Burroughs battled off and on throughout his life. His first published work, in fact, was the novel Junkey, which is a completely unvarnished and completely de-romanticized view of drug addiction. But his vision was also one that still held out for the possibility of some kind of transcendent and redeeming meaning to it all. More on that later.
His was also the view of a trenchant satirist who could see a bizarre, off-the-wall kind of humor in even the most unhumorous of situations and settings. A quick example from his early days: Shortly after Burroughs and Kerouac first met in New York they decided to collaborate on a detective novel in which they would each write successive chapters. While working on this opus they happened to be listening to a radio broadcast about a terrible fire in a London zoo that killed a number of animals. The last line of the broadcast, which the announcer read off his copy sheet before going on to his next news item was, "And the hippos were boiled in their tanks!" Burroughs immediately decided that that line, which had absolutely nothing to do with what they were writing about, would be the title of their novel: And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks! The book - to the extent that it even got written - was never published; and much later in his life, in the flat dry-wit twangy Midwestern voice that became his trademark, Burroughs would say, "It was not a particularly distinguished piece of work." His diction, in fact, was something of a Midwestern version of the recently departed William F. Buckley.
Back to another take on his life: Burroughs was born to privilege but chose to spend much of his life with society's outcasts and discards. In that one respect, at least, he was like Siddhartha Buddha. The St. Louis Blues says it pretty well. He turned his back on the St. Louis upper crust to hang out with those whose lives were defined by the Blues. William's grandfather, for whom he was named, invented the Burroughs adding machine in the 1890s which gave rise to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, which many decades later morphed into one of the eight largest computer companies in America. The Burroughs family, however, cashed in on only a fraction of the immense wealth the company, in time, garnered. William's father sold his share in the company as the Depression approached so his family could continue to live in the style to which they were accustomed. That worked well enough in the short run, but the Burroughs heirs completely missed out on the enormous wealth the company eventually generated.
Even with his father's short-sighted move, William was able to live his vagabond, out-on-the-fringes life to some degree off of a family trust fund, which gave him a modest but steady income. It was only in his later years that he was able to live off his writings and public appearances, which, in 1981, at the age of 67, included a gig on Saturday Night Live.
If every writer or artist has his or her defining moment, Burroughs had one that was writ large big time. While he lived most of his life as an openly gay man, he was married for a time to Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs; a woman who had been part of the original beat circle in New York in the mid-1940s. The marriage ended in a terribly insane way when he accidentally shot and killed her in September of 1951 while they were living in Mexico City. With a few other friends present, and with their minds in - shall we say - an altered state, Joan placed a glass on top of her head and dared William to shoot it off with a loaded pistol he had nearby. William took the dare, aimed too low, and you can guess the rest. With the services of a good lawyer - paid for by the family trust - who was able to convince a judge - correctly - that Joan was the victim of a deadly and horribly irresponsible accident, Bill did a very minimal jail sentence and was on his way.
Much later in his life Burroughs would write of this experience in this way: "The death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into life-long struggle, in which I have no choice but to write my way out."
While some of his more zany satirical pieces do manage to hook me, I can't say that I enjoy reading Burroughs all that much. When it comes to his signature work Naked Lunch I can only take it in the measured doses to which I referred earlier. I'd much rather just cruise along with Kerouac in On the Road or The Dharma Bums. But I'm drawn nonetheless to someone who used his writing as a means of trying to save himself or exorcise himself from a personal invasion of what he called the Ugly Spirit. Taken in toto his body of work is a literary exorcism.
So I'd like to offer just a couple of the dimensions of Burroughs' writings that have helped to inform my own journey of the spirit. When I've taught Burroughs I've had several hours of class time to cover him and his work. That's not what we have here, so I will, of course, economize.
One of Burroughs' recurring themes has to do with the use of language and the power of the word when it comes to our understanding of what is true and reliable. Burroughs, as a writer, respected and relied upon the power of the word. And as one who, in part, makes his living by the shaping of language, so do I. The verse in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word," if read from a Burroughsian point of view, means that the beginning of language was the true dawn of humanity. But for Burroughs, the word was also a virus, an instrument of mind control and manipulation in the hands of the powerful. He didn't live long enough to see the Patriot Act enacted but he would have, in his own perverse way, loved it. Loved it, that is, as an example of the manipulation of language, whereby questioning any of its provisions allows those who are enacting to call those who question it "enemies of the State."
What Burroughs was trying to do, in some of his more "out there" novels, was to put on paper what a surrealistic artist puts on a canvass: A bunch of scrambled, and sometimes shocking images, that deliberately strain and test the senses of the reader or viewer. It's an attempt to scramble your senses so that you then have to put your senses back together again on your terms. So if you're not up for having your senses scrambled then I'd say stay away from the guy, particularly when it comes to Naked Lunch or a book he titled The Ticket That Exploded. But Burroughs did have a method or purpose in his madness, which was to counter the word virus and to make his readers actually think about all they are being asked to swallow when it's right out there on the end of the fork - which is one interpretation of the title of Naked Lunch.
One more, of the many angles on his work that I'll hold up, has to do with, believe it or not, Burroughs' search for God. Shortly before his death in 1997 Burroughs gave his last major interview to Rolling Stone Magazine in which he said, "I've always believed in God. I don't think anyone could read my books and believe otherwise." Of all the startling things Burroughs ever said or wrote, that was the line that startled me the most. I've not read all of his books, but be damned if I could find belief in God in any of the ones I have read. But then I linked back to something the recently departed Norman Mailer said about the guy. When Naked Lunch was first published it had to go through the ritual of an obscenity trial - much in the way Ginsberg's Howl did - before it could be widely distributed.
In testifying in that trial Mailer said this about Burroughs: "William Burroughs is in my opinion a religious writer. There is a sense in Naked Lunch of the destruction of the soul. It is a vision of how mankind would act totally divorced from eternity..." Setting aside the gender-specific language (noting that the trial took place in the early 1960s) Mailer was on to something. By "eternity," he does not mean time going on forever. Life divorced from any sense of eternity means a life lived apart from some larger, transcendent, wholistic sense of what life is finally about; life, that is to say, apart from any ultimate meaning or purpose.
Dr. Paul Tillich, a person I consider to be one of the premier theologians of the 20th century, held that the word "God" does not refer to a willful and supernatural Supreme Being, but refers instead to that which gives Life its Ultimate Meaning and Purpose above and beyond the many pen-ultimate - or less than ultimate - meanings - for good and for ill - that we build our lives around. Viewed in this way, much of Burroughs work is about the absence of God. Not God in any authoritarian or controlling sense since Burroughs work is also a life-long railing against practically all forms of authority and control. To the extent that he had a political philosophy it was a radical kind of libertarianism with a dash of anarchy thrown in.
But Burroughs is writing about the absence of God, meaning the absence of any Transcendent Meaning to Life Itself. But since he said he actually believed in God, then he must have been holding out for at least the possibility of an affirming and Transcendent meaning even as he took his readers on a journey through a harrowing, frightening, revolting, and at times insanely hilarious world, where, in Mailer's apt words, the reader witnesses the "destruction of the soul."
OK, let's see if for the next few minutes I can get any of this down to where we actually live. I guessing that whatever our trials and tribulations may have been, most of us do not experience life as an ongoing struggle with the Ugly Spirit. I'm further guessing none of us shot a spouse at some earlier point in our life. And while the "destruction of the soul" may be a little over the top in describing our journeys of the spirit, I'll also guess that most of us have had our dark nights of the soul; times when we've found our spirits diminished, and when we had our own encounters with meaninglessness.
We do look for ways to reach beyond the various and sundry banalities that sometimes seem to engulf us. Indeed it is this very human need for some sense of transcendence in our lives, for some sense that we are a part of a reality greater than ourselves - however we may name it - that has given rise to religions and religious communities and spiritual pursuits and ventures of many kinds. I became a Unitarian Universalist for essentially the same personal and professional reason: So I could be a part of a community, and seek to offer leadership to a community, where a variety of paths to the Transcendent are honored and affirmed without being tied to a single doctrine; where differing roads may be taken to the Greater Force, Presence, Power, or Reality in which are lives are ultimately grounded. This is the kind of community we are all co-creators in making happen.
However broken or whole the many lives are that come into our midst, we need to keep offering those paths to the Transcendent. William Burroughs said that the role of the writer or poet or artist was to let people know what they already know about their lives, so that they can see themselves anew. I think that describes one of our callings as a liberal religious community as well.
By most indication Bill Burroughs did find some measure of peace in his later years, after his quite chaotic life. When he returned to America in the late 1970s a man named James Grauerholz - who was a couple of decades William's junior - came into his life. James became his business manager, companion, and partner. Not surprisingly Burroughs had little clue as to how to organize a professional life for himself; but James did. He got him good publishing and recording deals, negotiated his public appearances, and made him something of a celebrity for the punk rock crowd. His profile in the 1980s and into the 90s was as a performer - so to speak - at punk rock clubs where he would come out in a three piece suit, sit behind a table, read from his works, and bring down the house. And in 1982 he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, which represented an embrace by the very literary establishment that had shunned him for most of his life.
James Grauerholz is from Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas. When the New York scene and the road go to be too much for William, he and James bought themselves a modest little house on a modest little street in Lawrence - one state over from his native Missouri. There William Seward Burroughs lived out his days. He died in August of 1997, a few short months after one of his life-long soul mates, Allen Ginsberg, also passed away. Burroughs' last major published work was called The Western Lands and it ends on this poignant, autobiographical note: "The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what could be done with words. What then?...In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the mountain. 'Hurry up please. It's time.'"
Whoever or Whatever Burroughs took God to be, in his case he felt could not gain the blessing of the Holy Spirit without first facing down the Ugly Spirit. But however much of a journey an artist, poet, or writer may take through the dark side, their ultimate objective is to shed greater light on themselves and on those who come in touch with their work. Perhaps their search for their growing light can help us to find ours.
Stephen Edington
March 9, 2008
