Rub Out the Words: The Letters of
William Burroughs, 1959–1974
Edited by Bill Morgan
Ecco. 444 pages, $35.
LONG BEFORE Dancer from the Dance (1978) and A Boy’s Own Story (1982) ushered in a golden age of gay literature, there was an earlier wave of novels whose gay content was overshadowed by their experimental technique and graphic depictions of drug addiction, hustling, and violence in the American underworld.
First among them was Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs (1914–1997), which begins with a “fruit” cruising a “junkie” in a New York subway and ends in an apocalyptic vision of debauchery and sadism. This novel—like John Rechy’s City of Night and Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, which appeared a few years later—was published by Grove Press, condemned as obscene, and found baffling by mainstream reviewers. It is fair to say the legal battles fought over Naked Lunch made possible the publication of the more domesticated vision of gay life associated with Andrew Holleran and Edmund White and their successors.
The first collection of Burroughs’ correspondence, covering the years from 1945 to 1959, was published in 1993. Rub Out the Words starts in 1959, when Naked Lunch was first published in Paris, and ends in 1974, when, after living abroad for 25 years, Burroughs returned to New York City to take a teaching job at City College. With a lucid, informative introduction by Bill Morgan, this volume charts a trajectory from the excitement Burroughs and his colleagues felt about their early experiments—in writing, tape recording, photography, and filmmaking—to their growing disappointment over his poor book sales and, at the end of these letters, a determination to sell his manuscripts to collectors in preparation for old age. Burroughs was only sixty at that time and lived for another 23 years, becoming a literary celebrity in old age. One assumes another collection of his letters will be forthcoming to cover these final years. The Burroughs who appears in these letters is an odd mixture of businessman and visionary. The Yet there is a lack of feeling, an emptiness in these letters, most evident in those written to his parents and to his son Billy, a talented writer who fought drug addiction and committed suicide. Many of these letters were written to men with whom he had sexual relationships, but they contain no overt expressions of affection. Burroughs was more of a tough guy than a Beat. The works of the Beats are full of emotional vulnerability, something Burroughs never exhibited. Very few of the letters were written to women, in whom Burroughs appears to have had little interest, suggesting he was closed to the feminine in his own personality. “No women, no trouble, no problems,” he wrote to the filmmaker Fred Halsted when they were considering making a film based on The Wild Boys, a later novel about a world without women. Pornography separates sex from feeling, and Burroughs seems to have done the same in his many relationships with the “boys” who came and went in his life. “I was not looking for love but for sex in return for a modest monetary outlay,” he wrote to a woman he had never met. Burroughs changed the terrain of the modern literary landscape. However, his most important contribution may be the opportunities he opened for subsequent writers rather than the appeal of his own brilliant, nightmarish novels. Daniel A. Burr is an assistant dean at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he teaches in the medical humanities program.
letters are formal and polite, even when he writes about such things as trying to make a “hole in reality” with his sound recording experiments. He is good at organizing publicity campaigns for his books and those of his friends. He is sympathetic when a publisher who defrauded him of royalties faces financial ruin. He grows disillusioned with Timothy Leary but contributes to his defense fund when Leary is arrested on drug charges. Burroughs even finds good things to say about L. Ron Hubbard long after concluding that Scientology—which initially interested him as a way of altering consciousness—is a devious form of mind control. His own drug addiction gave him the perspective of an outsider who withholds judgment on the weaknesses of others. Burroughs is most admirable in his loyalty to his literary friends, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, and many others, and his gratitude to the brave agents and publishers who worked to publish a writer who was changing literary standards.
