This week’s Whatever is a fascinating work that was originally submitted as fiction (in truth Dale told us that it was a non-fiction piece that he had ‘tweaked’) but when we read it we knew immediately where it belonged. An enthralling story about abortive attempts at a pilgrimage. A super read. We give you:-
Visiting Bill Burroughs
It was a time when creative writing programs in the midwestern United States still contained edgy idealists, at least some of them. I don’t know what the writing programs here are like now.
A good creative writing class is, of course, always a bit of a performance. This is true for both the teacher, and the students. Everyone plays their role on an alternating basis.
As a teacher, some time around 2010, I began to notice a shift in my audience. In another never-ending department meeting, the “head” called the shift “corporate.” She said it was destined to only get worse. The shift involved incessant cell phone usage, but also something else that was wordless and indefinable. I didn’t last long in such a climate. Pretty soon they had my head on a platter.
But back in the ’90s, I’d been a student, not a teacher. I left Chicago for graduate school in Kansas with my now-ex-wife not long after the suicide of Kurt Cobain. His death was announced while I was watching MTV, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and reading in the middle of the night. It meant more than a lot to me, because he was almost exactly my age and I was a huge fan. I’m an even bigger fan now, almost exactly thirty years later.
There were practical reasons for choosing Wichita, Kansas, as my destination. But another huge reason was the fact that William S. Burroughs also lived in Kansas, a couple of hours up the road, in Lawrence, an old abolitionist town and still an artistic and liberal enclave with a university. I believed Norman Mailer when he wrote that William S. Burroughs was, truly, a genius of the English language and the written word, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Jonathan Swift.
The writing program at Wichita State University involved taking half creative writing, and half literature classes. So I spent my time studying Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dr. Johnson and Boswell, as well as delivering pizzas to pay the bills and writing endless short stories, prose poems, and book reviews for the local paper that kept pouring out of me and were both inspiring (to myself) and completely in the realm of juvenilia.
But I felt myself getting better at writing every day. And I knew William S. Burroughs was just up the road, a literary giant, a continual, tantalizing presence and inspiration. My intention ever since moving to Kansas had been to visit him, even if only for a few minutes. But I always put it off and kept dreaming about it, aways planning to go and never taking off.
I’d already been on numerous literary pilgrimages throughout the United States. My focus had been on visiting the place and the spirit of the person, instead of the actual author, because most of them were dead. A list can be found at the end of this tale, for those interested in desert island lists. (I’ve been on even more literary pilgrimages since then, including Canada for Leonard Cohen; Mexico for Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and Jamaica for Bob Marley.)
My three years as a graduate writing/literature student at Wichita State University were almost up. My writing had improved (even if it was still juvenilia), and I’d moved on from delivering pizzas to teaching classes in the department. But I still hadn’t visited William S. Burroughs up the highway a couple of hours in Lawrence.
Then the moment came.
I was sitting in a favorite dive bar in a poor side of town on the other side of the tracks with two of my favorite folks in the world. Cocktails we regularly shared together in those days included cocaine, LSD, opioids (no needles), hash, plus two to four packs of Marlboros a day per person, all in the spirit of John Lennon, Rimbaud, Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, and Burroughs, but tonight we were only drinking: whiskey, beer, tequila (and tobacco smoking). All three of us were taking turns playing the audience at our bar table and “writing in air,” as James Agee called it.
One of my friends suddenly suggested that we get in his car right now and visit Old Bill. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin were playing on the juke box because we kept feeding the coins in for them. We talked about it for about ten minutes, then purchased supplies: pints of Jack Daniel’s and packs of cig’s for the road from the barman behind the bar. That kind of take-out was legal, and not even frowned upon, in the Kansas of those days.
The three of us were in my friend’s Mustang headed to Lawrence. These were two of the closest people to me in my life. One of them I was even closer to, because I was madly in love with her, as well as being a best friend. Our driver had done significant time in prison due to shooting a rival in the leg and other issues. He was also a true genius of the underground, someone who could recite entire long passages from “On the Road,” “Howl,” “Song of Myself” and William Blake at will and from memory and would do so frequently in the bars of Wichita. If he wasn’t getting it right, he was making it up, which was even more impressive.
My favorite William S. Burroughs short story is “The Junky’s Christmas.” In this piece, Burroughs, the great sinner, is transformed into a kind of benevolent grandfatherly figure who narrates a tale about a down-and-out junkie who gives away his last shot to a lost soul on Christmas day before being astounded into heaven, as Melville wrote of stoics when they die in his poem “Clarel.”
We asked around in the college bars of Lawrence. They told us where Burroughs’ house was. We continued drinking in the bars of Lawrence into late, late in the night, celebrating Old Bill in his home town. We didn’t finally head out to Burroughs’ place until after the bars had closed down.
We found his house, but he wasn’t home, or was sleeping, or wouldn’t answer the door; and who could blame him; we knew he was elderly, so we didn’t try long, but we were on hallowed ground, if only for a few moments.
On the way back to Wichita, the car ran out of gas on a stretch of the Flint Hills Highway that didn’t have any towns, exits, or gas stations on it for a length of seventy miles. A state trooper drove my friend thirty miles down the road and back again to pick up gas while my other friend and I waited in the car and watched the sun come up over the great, tall-grass prairie hills. The state trooper never mentioned the drinking. There were still antelope on the hills in those days. We watched a herd of them running by and beyond us into the distance. This sight was beautiful, as only wild animals in the middle of nowhere can be.
William S. Burroughs died on the day I finished graduate school in Kansas. The next day, I moved back to Chicago to enter the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago, which had been co-founded by Paul Carroll, one of the editor/writers who first published Burroughs and was almost prosecuted by the U.S. government for doing so. Allen Ginsberg had passed on four months before. This synchronicity meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to anyone on this planet except me.
Old Bill had told and written many stories in his life, in many different forms, and his life itself was a great American story, not without tragedy, of course. Burroughs, who could be more than a tad prickly, always insisted that the purpose of his famous cut-up technique was not artistic, but spiritual, mystical, and magical. The cut-ups brought him messages he needed to know about life, not facts but mysteries.
He didn’t believe in what we call “death,” or “accidents,” especially after the death of his wife, Joan, who had also been his best friend. Robert Browning said, speaking of the afterlife, “Never say of me that I am dead.” I never met William Burroughs in person, but it turned out that was never the point.
Postscript.
Alabama: Barry Hannah; Alaska: Jack London; California: John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Gary Snyder; Colorado: Hunter S. Thompson; Florida: Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway; Georgia: Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Carson McCullers; Idaho: Ernest Hemingway; Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Saul Bellow, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who I met in Chicago for a few minutes and who I plan to write about soon; Iowa: Flannery O’Connor and Denis Johnson; Louisiana: William Faulkner (New Orleans); Massachusetts: Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville; Michigan: Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and Robert Hayden.
Minnesota: Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Louise Erdrich; Mississippi: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Larry Brown, and Eudora Welty; Missouri: Mark Twain; Montana: James Welch and Thomas McGuane; Nebraska: Willa Cather and Malcom X; New Hampshire: Robert Frost; New Jersey: William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman; New Mexico: D.H. Lawrence; New York: Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer; North Carolina: Thomas Wolfe; Ohio: Sherwood Anderson; Oklahoma: Ralph Ellison and Woody Guthrie; Oregon: Ken Kesey; South Dakota: Black Elk; Tennessee: James Agee, Cormac McCarthy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Virginia: Thomas Jefferson; Washington: Raymond Carver; Wisconsin: Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Lorine Niedecker.
literally stories 
Dale
Your love for the written word and writers shines brightly. I read Burroughs’ “Last Words” book years ago and again last year. He complained in his pseudo-journal that he didn’t have the gift anymore (he was 82 then 83), but he was still as sharp as ever. He had this story about “Old Arch” the fiddler going, but only wrote it here and there. But the deaths of several of his Cats took it out of him, I think.
Thank you for this and for the look into your own heart as well.
Leila
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Dear Leila
Thanks for publishing this piece and for your kind words. It means the world to me! As far as the genre of this story, it’s exactly as you described. A real, or true, story with a few flourishes added here and there so that it’s slightly exaggerated in a few places, but only slightly. Also, I inserted a few details I couldn’t exactly remember. Kind of like “New Journalism” in that way (Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson). But far more true than exaggerated.
WSB is one of those writers who can now, in our era, be studied in a variety of ways and contexts. First by reading his work: “Naked Lunch,” while brilliant in places, is not necessarily his best work, especially not all the way through. Secondly, by reading the numerous interviews he gave throughout his life. Thirdly by reading the truly large amount of secondary material there is about him: biographies, encyclopedia entries, articles from “Rolling Stone,” academic criticism of his work, accounts from famous musicians who knew him and were friends with him, like Patti Smith, etc. Fourth, by studying the large amount of photographs there are of him. And finally, via You Tube, which includes a large amount of material on him, especially several really good documentaries, but also other things, like snippets of interviews and readings, people reviewing his work and giving their reactions and opinions, etc. etc. And via listening to the many spoken word recordings he made, also You Tube. Some of these are absolutely brilliant, often hilarious, sometimes almost tragic. But overall, he was a comic writer.
When you study some or all of this material, you find out that, in the second half of his life, Burroughs was much closer to someone like Walt Whitman than he was to any other American writer. While still wild and crazy, he was also a generous spirit who defended the underdog. The accidental death of his wife in Mexico, which he couldn’t remember and also never forgave himself for, deepened his humanity. And he was an animal lover as you pointed out, especially cats!
The short film of “Junky’s Christmas,” narrated by Burroughs himself, also You Tube, shows how much of a humanitarian he truly became, even though still so thoroughly rough around the edges in a good way. He was a rebel: a subversive voice, who fought against authoritarianism, and for human freedom, even in his substance use and abuse.
Thanks again!
Dale
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Hi Dale
I discovered that brilliant bit of claymation on YouTube a couple years back. I knew the story, and I admired the way (Coppola?) didn’t mangle the story. He did edit the bit about Danny buying works after scoring from the croaker, but it was faithful. May we all experience the Immaculate Fix in our lives!
Leila
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Forgot to add that WSB was fantastic as the junky priest in Drugstore Cowboy.
Leila
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A clever and entertaining look at a mix of fact and fiction and a respectful and rather moving account of hero worship. I enjoyed this and am very happy to see it up on the site as a special. Thank you – dd
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Dear Diane,
Hi! I replied to your comment but forgot to hit “reply” and only hit “leave a comment” instead. Thanks again for publishing this narrative!
Dale
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In his essay, The Gifts of Reading, Robert Macfarlane mentions a friend called Don, a fellow teacher of Eng. Lit., but one so enamoured of his subject he made the seminar rooms of Cambridge seem “prim and flat in comparison.” Macfarlane goes on to say: “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with a higher-voltage passion for books . . . Literature WIRED him. When Don read, he crackled.” It’s that very crackle came to mind on reading this. Terrific.
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THANK YOU for this comment. I’m humbled and honored by it and it will keep me going for a while.
Sincerely,
Dale
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Thanks, Dale. I enjoyed your telling of the abortive Burroughs Pilgrimage. It reminded me of another literary near-miss: the journey of the young leftist Saul Bellow to Mexico to sit at the feet of his hero, Trotsky. He arrived the day after Stalin’s assassin smashed an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull. Apologies if you already know that one, Dale,
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Dear Mick,
Thank you! As a Chicago and environs writer, I’m a big Bellow fan, but was not aware of this story, so it was great to hear it! Deeply appreciated. Thanks very much for reading and commenting.
Dale
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Dear Diane
Thank-you for publishing this piece. It’s deeply appreciated! I believe “hero worship” is exactly the right term. Life is so paradoxical! If you pick the WRONG HERO, it can get you and everyone else into so much trouble! But when people, especially writers and artists, pick the right heroes, I don’t believe there’s any better way to educate yourself. The right kind of hero worship goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and even way, way beyond even that, right into human prehistory. I don’t believe our educational systems stress this crucial aspect of writing and art-making enough these days. It’s one, very deep, reason, why so many young folks seem to be floundering these days. Thanks for pointing this out with the right term, and for your kind words. I might also add that Stephen King agrees with me! Everything he’s written and said about writing stresses the importance of reading good writing, and worshiping the right writers, and/or taking them as models, as he himself did with H.P. Lovecraft and others. Thanks again!
Dale
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Well done, Dale! I read where someone (maybe Nietzsche?) said the best fictional writings incorporate historical characters. This piece is an excellent example of how the genre-bending can be effective.
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Dear David,
Thanks for reading and commenting! Your words about incorporating historical characters in fiction are illuminating and make me think more deeply about it. I guess it’s not such a bad idea after all! This whole story is an oral tale that I used to tell my creative writing students at the University of Illinois Chicago and other places I taught at. The LS editors are the ones who inspired me to try putting this down in writing. Thanks again!
Dale
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Leila
Sometimes when I get down in the dumps around the holidays, I put on that version of the Junky’s Xmas and watch it again, because it’s kind of Dickensian in a good way. Most folks don’t think of WSB as a writer who celebrated the real spirit of Christmas (generosity), but there are few who’ve done a better job of it than Old Bill since Charles himself!
Thanks!
Dale
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Dear Leila
You’re right as usual, Burroughs was great in that movie. So were Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch. Dillon is also great in FACTOTUM, as Bukowski (Chinaski). The latter performance is so quiet and realistic it’s amazing. He even has the bad complexion that Buk struggled with.
The novel itself, DRUGSTORE COWBOY, is a truly great piece of work, one of the best serious comic novels of the second half of 20th century US. The death scene at the end is without compare, but the whole thing is great. James Fogle, the author, spent more time in prison than out of it, and wrote many other works, none of which have ever been published so far, which is incredible. But Drugstore Cowboy is a masterpiece.
And I also know of another Pacific Northwest writer who is, truly, better than Raymond Carver (more Shakespearean), and that’s saying a lot. THANK YOU, LEILA!
Dale
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Dale
It is a great tale. Reminded me of a couple I knew long ago who were experts on every drug, no matter how obscure. Their addiction was a strange, symbiotic work of art. Lost contact when they moved on, but Fogel’s story is in no way exaggerated.
Thanks again!
Leila
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Hi Leila!
Just want to throw a shout out into the void for Harold Bloom, who I know you respect and understand, and who died five years ago yesterday, on October 14, 2019. I started reading him in the 1980s and am still doing so, which I can’t believe means that I’ve been reading him across five decades so far: 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s. Much of what I know about literature comes from him. (Not all, much.) His influence on many was powerful.
He did his best work in the second half of life, when he was in his 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. His only novel, The Flight to Lucifer, was a combined science fiction/fantasy affair. He never wrote a poem, but he wrote better about poetry than any other English critic except Samuel Johnson and a few others. His favorite writer and the one closest to his own mind was William Shakespeare. This shows how huge he was. He was also a huge man physically, like Samuel Johnson, with gargantuan appetites, who played the role of Falstaff on stage a few times.
All writers, no matter how far along, should use his short book HOW TO READ AND WHY for at least a few years. You can learn more about how to write in this book than from whole shelffuls of standard how-to books.
His other best works are Shakespeare: The Invention of The Human, The Western Canon, Genius, Possessed by Memory, and The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.
He started out with huge academic tomes that were often unreadable. In his 50s, he started aiming his work at the intelligent high school student level. He chose to teach Freshman students his whole life because he preferred them to the older graduate students. At Yale University, he considered himself a “Department of One,” at spiritual war with all the other academics crowding the halls. He got a lot of shit for this. His interviews with Charlie Rose on You Tube are brilliant. Anything on the internet by him is brilliant. There are also many vicious, hateful, wrong-headed attacks on himself and his work from elites and other academics, many of them in New York City.
He loved Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker as his two favorite artists other than Good Will. But when asked what his favorite song was, he immediately said “The Weight,” by The Band. He was in his 80s then.
A great writer, maybe better than Hemingway! Probably the Hemingway of his era. Also friends with Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, the Moby-Dick-like American classic, and Anthony Burgess, with whom he used to imbibe vast quantities of alcohol as they discussed Shakespeare and James Joyce. He loved that his name was Bloom!
Dale
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Hi Dale,
An excellent and entertaining tale of your ‘pilgrimage’!!
It’s interesting to see Mick Bloor comment as Mick’s love of history comes shinning through his work as does your love of writers and literature.
You both write superbly well and your enthusiasm for your subjects is completely infectious. You have a brilliant mix of subject, interest, knowledge and story that compliments each other.
You have enhanced this site since you have become involved and I’m sure that everyone who you have commented on has taken a helluva lot from your informative and perceptive observations.
Keep doing what you do, it’s a complete pleasure my fine friend.
Hugh
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Dear Hugh,
Thanks for publishing “Visiting Bill Burroughs” and commenting on it.
I was really taken with your reflection on yourself as a creator of short stories yesterday where you wrote, “I’m not sure if I’m a writer or more an observer who writes???” This is a very interesting question given the wide variety of characters who appear in your stories; and also a model question many good writers can ask of themselves in order to dig a little deeper when thinking about their own work. I have to believe that almost all the best writers start as observers even if it’s mostly of themselves. Your stories also strike me as one of a kind.
Your comments on how to write convincing, quality dialogue also deserve to be studied, thought about and practiced by any good fiction or creative nonfiction writer.
Thanks again!
Dale
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That would be very interesting to know how the author, a creative writing teacher, was forced out of his job at the college. He says it was partly something “wordless and indefinable” I took one University creative writing course back in the nineties, taught by a guy who’d never get a job today, but he was great basically because of his character and limit testing all of us. And following, an entertaining and nostalgic look back to the search for Burroughs. Imagine him teaching writing! It would have to be from a bar or cafe…I was taken with the writer on the road trip, driving through the beat era….to all the locations. Indeed, in the journey, not the destination, we can find true meaning. I mean, that is more than a bit of a cliche but wow it’s also totally fricken true! I like the scene of the sunrise over the antelope plain. Cool final paragraph, and last sentence.
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Dear Harrison
Hi! I accidentally replied to your comments by hitting “comment” instead of “reply.” Just letting you know. Thanks again for your comments!
Sincerely,
Dale
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Hi Harrison
One huge reason I truly believe I got squeezed out of the creative-writing-teacher profession was definitely the cell phone. Because it became increasingly difficult to get students to put away their phones. There was a rule at the time that you couldn’t make them put their phone in a bin at the door, back then, as is now allowed. So they all had their phones during class. And they would all continue to use them during class, surreptitiously or obviously. And the average attention span got reduced down to that of a gnat, or perhaps less. The Administration’s answer to how to get their attention was to show videos. But I didn’t know how to work the video thing. And at the time, I refused to learn because I thought it was capitulating: giving in to the System, that was taking over everywhere. I had always taught creative writing as a dialogue and a discipline where you had to pay attention in class. Talking in class was not necessary, especially if you were shy. But paying attention, at least a large part of the time, was required. The Attention Span of the average student was destroyed. My method, and my job, went with it. Swept away in the winds of change, just like anything else in this temporary world.
The wordless and indefinable aspect remains so to this day, but it had something to do with the attention span and its destruction. A lack of caring about the virtues and struggles of writing seemed to accompany the overall destruction of the attention span. People thought everything was supposed to happen fast. No one understood that writing, when done well and truly, was/is a lifelong pursuit: a way of being, a calling, and a quest, as much as a practice and a method. No one understood and no one wanted to learn this lesson. Appearing on Oprah’s Book Club became the main goal of most of the students. If it didn’t happen fast, they lost interest and drifted off to playing more video games or whatever else they were doing on their phones, which was indifference and distraction made manifest, as if it were the goal of life. If nothing else, good writing requires taking a VERY ACTIVE part in life, even if from the margins. OBSERVATION of others, the self, and the world at large being one of the key activities, as Hugh has pointed out quite brilliantly. And it can’t only be done through the medium of a little screen.
Burroughs actually did teach creative writing in college for a few years, because he was broke, even though famous. He never made much money from writing itself, until much later in life, and even then, not so much. His books were not best-sellers, not even Naked Lunch, although it sold OK eventually and probably sells more now than it ever did when he was alive. I believe you’re exactly correct, most of his classes probably adjourned to the bar very quickly. That was allowed, and even encouraged, back in the day. I had several creative writing classes in college where the professors would tell us to not even go to the classroom: meet me in so-and-so bar instead and class will occur there, in that more exciting environment. Drinking and smoking not only allowed but encouraged. If you tried to get away with that type of classroom atmosphere now, you would be instantly fired, no questions asked. Absolutely. 100%.
Thanks for reading this story, and commenting! It’s deeply appreciated!
Sincerely,
Dale
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I absolutely loved reading this! And, I also admit to some envy over your impressive literary pilgrimages. In fact, I’m a huge fan of the Beat Generation (wrote my BA dissertation on Kerouac) and generally have a preference for American writers, so would love to do many of the pilgrimages you have. And, even though I’ve travelled a fair bit, I’ve never made is west of Portugal and one of my dreams is to get to City Light Books in San Francisco.
As for Burroughs, what a standout writer, even amongst his peers. I once heard a story about someone who’d sent a copy of Naked Lunch to Burroughs with a stamped addressed envelope asking for him to sign and return it. Nothing happened for close to a year, but then one day the copy arrived back in the post, with no autograph, but had been shot at right through the middle. I don’t know if that’s true, but I so want it to be!
Anyway, thank you for a great, thoughtful, inspiring post.
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Hi Paul,
Thanks very much for reading “Visiting Bill Burroughs” and commenting. The story about Burroughs shooting a hole in the middle of his own work is hilarious, laugh-out-loud, and something I’d never heard before. Like you, I hope it’s true, but it says a lot about him even if it isn’t literal fact. It seems to me that he was always one pushing ahead, never the kind to rest on his laurels. May all writers have the same kind of critical distance from their own work at some point.
Thanks again!
Dale
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