American
memoirist,
1947-
1981.
William S. Burroughs, Jr. was the son of the
William S. Burroughs you've heard of. His mother,
Joan Vollmer Burroughs, died accidentally in
1951 in
Mexico City at the hand of his father. She was a
benzedrine addict. Burroughs, Jr. -- "Billy" to his dad -- spent most of his childhood in the care of his grandparents
1 in
St. Louis, MO and
Palm Beach, FL. At the age of fourteen, WSB Jr. lived briefly in
Tangiers,
Morocco with his father
2. For a portrait of the
Burroughs family while
Joan Vollmer Burroughs was still alive, see the
Old Bull Lee episode in
Kerouac's
On the Road.
WSB Jr. wrote three
memoirs, billed as
novels:
Speed,
Kentucky Ham, and -- reputedly --
Pakriti Junction. The first two were published
posthumously in
1984; the last apparently hasn't been published at all.
He died in
Florida from the failure of a
transplanted liver, his first
liver having succumbed to
alcoholism and other abuse.
Speed covers his adolescent adventures as an
amphetamine addict in
New York City, with a slice of
Palm Beach at each end.
Kentucky Ham covers the time in
Tangiers, a sentence served at the
Federal Narcotics Farm in
Lexington, KY, and a trip to
Alaska spent working on a
crab boat. The old
junky inmates at
Lexington pronounce "
heroin" as "
heron", and speak of "
King Heron" more or less
apostrophically. I'm reminded of
Don Gately in
Infinite Jest when he remembers
demerol withdrawal in a
jail cell in similar terms: "
Abiding with the Bird", "
The Cold Bird"
3. It's
ironic but probably inevitable that a source of such acute and utterly senseless
human misery should inspire such
grim and lovely language.
Pakriti Junction is said to have been left in such a fragmentary state that nobody was able to get it together for
publication.
The grim truth is that WSB Jr. isn't considered a significant figure in his own right, he's not his dad, and we're unlikely to see a whole lot of effort going into his work. By my count, he's dismally underrated.
Speed and
Kentucky Ham are not
worth reading because of he
author's father; they are
worth reading because they are very clear, lucid, readable accounts of events best kept
at arm's length. As a writer, WSB Jr. bears little resemblance to his father: There's no
hallucination, no strange creatures, no
explicit sex. If anything, he reminds me of
Jim Carroll, but with a colder and more
cynical eye and no sympathy for himself. That may be WSB Jr.'s great charm, beyond his facility with
the language: He has almost no sympathy for himself at all.
1 These, incidentally, are the
Burroughses of the
adding machine company which went into
computers and was sucked into the series of mergers which ultimately gave the world
Unisys.
2 If you don't know why
William S. Burroughs might have wanted to live in
Tangiers, you're probably too young to be told.
3 Our
cold, cruel, and ancient feathered friend here brings us very near to
The Sons of the Bird in
Robert Heinlein's "
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag", which has nothing to do with
narcotics at all (though you could read it in a number of ways . . .)