WHILE DELVING into the Berg Collection archive at the New York Public Library, I recently unearthed a postcard sent in 1962 by a professor at the Pennsylvania college I attended. The card was addressed to William S. Burroughs, an old Harvard buddy of his then living temporarily in Paris. Burroughs, it will be remembered, was one of the most colorful figures in the American literary counterculture of mid-20th-century New York. As the author of such Beat-era œuvres scandaleuses as Naked Lunch, Queer, and The Wild Boys, Burroughs rambled across a heroin-soaked trajectory that led him from Mexico to Tangier, from Harvard Square to the Latin Quarter, and finally to Kansas in search of beatitude, both literary and chemical.
Literary scholars have only recently revealed Boyle’s cameo role in the American literary counterculture of the 1950s and ’60s, through his friendship with Burroughs as well as his long, intriguing love affair with novelist Richard Stern. As Ted Morgan writes in his 2012 biography, The Life and Time of William S. Burroughs: “Another character was James Le Baron Boyle, a silver-tongued Irishman who claimed to be related to royalty but was actually the son of a Boston laundress. The lifelong friend of Richard Stern, Boyle drank a lot and was the life of the party; he became a teacher at a boys’ school in Pennsylvania.” Barry Miles’ 2014 biography, Call Me Burroughs, is even more revealing:
By now Bill was beginning to make friends at Harvard. He met James Le Baron Boyle, who was also studying English and who later went to the Sorbonne and got his PhD with a thesis on Proust. He was a member of the Advocate team. He had a big red Irish face, full lips with crooked teeth, and smoked a pipe. He had developed a number of idiosyncratic mannerisms, all designed to amuse and entertain. He claimed to descend from royalty, but his mother was a cleaning woman. He was gay and Burroughs went to bed with him once, but not until after Harvard. Boyle’s mother wouldn’t let Bill in the house because she thought he was sinister.
Continuing, Miles describes Boyle’s romantic liaison with Richard Stern, one of the “wild boys” in Burroughs’s entourage:
About a year after getting to know Boyle, Burroughs met Richard Stern, of the Stern investment bank family, who was at Harvard Business School. … Another time, Bill invited Stern over for a drink and James Boyle was already there visiting. Bill introduced them and they hit it off right away and became lovers. James had no money but Richard had plenty. They lived together at Harvard and on and off for the rest of their lives, spending summers together and making foreign trips. Boyle turned up in Tangier in the fifties when Burroughs was there and spent two weeks.
It is likely that Dr. Boyle was about to embark on one of these summer sojourns when he wrote the postcard to Burroughs in June 1962. A stalwart in the English Department for many years, Boyle was renowned at King’s College for his campy eccentricity, wit, and thoroughly idiosyncratic behavior. At a time when King’s was still fairly straitlaced, Boyle stuck out like a sore thumb: a wry master of improvisation and innuendo. One of his students still remembers, even half a century later, the admixture of “booze and lavender” that “Dr. Boo” exuded as he sailed into the classroom, exclaiming entrance lines like: “It smells as if someone’s been flogging ants in here!” Resident of a modest walk-up flat in a rowhouse next to the King’s parking lot, Boyle would often complain of the slovenly habits of his pet parrot, which he named Onan “because it spills its seed.” Boyle, who stood head-and-shoulders above most of the faculty in stature as well as scholarship, flaunted his academic credentials by sporting ostentatious regalia on formal occasions: ermine-lined toges and epitoges with colorful, gaudy flourishes—topped by a velvet, brioche-like mortier perched on his skull, far more conspicuous than the run-of-the-mill caps and gowns worn by his more austere colleagues. His mien and movements were quite dazzling, especially in the soot-laden atmosphere that blanketed the Wyoming Valley in the later days of the coal industry. I never took a class taught by Boyle, but it was impossible to escape his dominant presence on campus. My most vivid picture of him was one that appeared in the college’s student newspaper, The Crown, in 1966 or so, after his return from Africa, where he had been an exchange teacher of sorts. The photo shows him sitting regally in an ornate chair draped with a leopard skin, as if he had just been spending a quiet evening reading Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief. But the Burroughs posse was not the only social circle that Boyle frequented. Clippings from the society pages of Palm Beach newspapers in the 1950s indicate he also broke bread with the idle “liquorati.” In 1956, the eccentric bon vivant was a guest at a posh dinner party at the Everglades Club’s Orange Gardens, along with Gregg Sherwood, an oft-wedded showgirl in the 1940s and ’50s who eventually married Horace Elgin Dodge Jr., scion of the automobile family and described by one wag as “the only Dodge who ran on bourbon.” Boyle’s date for the evening was Trevor Howell. A man by that name would later be jailed for shoving Frank Zappa off a London stage. “Dr. Boo” sloughed off his mortal Boyle while on a Bahamas cruise in January 1973. The 62-year-old was pronounced dead at Princess Margaret Hospital in Nassau, an appropriate royal setting for the most imperious pretender ever to cruise the halls of the College of Christ the King—a man who, far ahead of his time, intimated to his students that there was a queerer world beyond their ken.
