How to navigate William S. Burroughs in the 21st century

The year is 1960. The setting is London’s Empress Hotel — a boarding house with a chilling reputation, located right next to Brompton Cemetery, in the heart of Earl’s Court. Chronicles from that time period — including the descriptions given by those who associated with William S. Burroughs (the establishment’s most illustrious guest) — describe the place as a sort of stifling bunker.

Burroughs was the most controversial and cryptic writer of the Beat Generation, the wildest and the most sinisterly free spirit. He had settled in the hotel with the intention of completing a new novel. The only object that stood out in Burroughs’s room was his portable typewriter: it was always left uncovered on the table, where he spent hours cutting up and rearranging texts to finish his manuscript. This was his famous “cut-up” technique — a narrative collage closer to being in a trance, rather than the act of storytelling.

“Completing” may seem like an ill-chosen word to describe Burroughs’ process at the hotel. It was in his room that he began writing The Nova Trilogy, a series of three novels: The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964). In 2014, restored editions were published, with an excellent introduction by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris. He describes the work as “an impossible [place] that mutates before your very eyes.” Upon reading almost any of the books’ hallucinatory sentences — phrases like “[He] rubbed Moscow up me with a corkscrew motion of his limestones,” or “Zero eaten by crabs” — Harris asks himself: “Is this science fiction or avant-garde poetry? Drug literature or homosexual pornography? Political satire?” He concludes that all of these apply… “and yet, none of the above, because no label sticks.”

Harris also notes that no matter “how often you read the text, it will seem new every time.” Joan Didion famously remarked that imagining that you could put down The Soft Machine to answer the phone and then pick up right where you left off a few minutes later “is sheer bravura.” Each sentence is like another opening in a macabre, orgiastic symphony… one that possesses a certain kind of bottomless depth.

The literature of William S. Burroughs, the most formidable enfant terrible of the Beat writers, remains an artifact without copies. His work is so powerfully strange that it’s frightening, perhaps because the voice speaking to us is that of the author’s own subconscious.

Expanded and permeated by every imaginable possibility, constantly shifting and mutating, Burroughs’s unconscious burns through the pages in a kind of delirious nonsense that, for some inexplicable reason, hits home. Burroughs consumed every drug he could get his hands on and became a sort of patron saint of the junkie, convinced that life could be lived in that other world. Kurt Cobain’s visit to him shortly before his death is emblematic in that regard. And yet, despite all the apparent chaos, the force of Burroughs’s unconscious remains undeniable.

Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914. His grandfather had invented the calculator, and the family was incredibly rich: William Seward Burroughs grew up in the lap of luxury. He studied at Harvard and tried to enlist in the army when the United States entered World War II — he had always been fascinated by weapons and saw the conflict as an opportunity to use them. However, he was ultimately deemed unfit for duty. At the time, he was living with his first wife — Ilse von Klapper — whom he had married at the age of 23, even though he was openly gay.

Readers may remember the novel Queer (1985). Burroughs wrote it between 1951 and 1952, but it wasn’t published until more than 30 years later. In 2024, it was adapted to film by director Luca Guadagnino, who cast Daniel Craig in the role of William Lee (that is, Burroughs himself, with all his existential angst). In fact, it was the film’s success that spurred the rediscovery of the writer’s lost work.

Still, if Burroughs’ oeuvre never occupied a central position in mainstream literary culture in the 20th century, it’s even less likely to find a spot in the 21st century. Why? Well, we live in a time when it’s practically impossible to separate an author from their work. And just a brief foray into the writer’s biography tells us why it overshadows his literary production in many ways.

In his novels, Burroughs speaks openly about his relationships with children in Tangier, on the streets of New York City and in all sorts of dive bars around the world. This aspect tends to be omitted when his life is reviewed. The travels, the years spent in Europe, Mexico and Tangier, and, of course, the drugs are all there; the minors are not.

Burroughs was the last of the Beat writers. He died of a heart attack at the age of 83, in 1997. Throughout his life, he never hid the fact that his literary vocation truly began when his second wife — Joan Vollmer — died. How did she die? He shot her. They were supposedly playing the William Tell shooting game (but instead of an apple, they used a gin and tonic). Burroughs aimed at the glass — above Vollmer’s head — and hit her square in the forehead. The year was 1951. He was 37. She was 28.

It happened in Mexico. He went to jail, but his family bailed him out. He then escaped to Europe, never being punished for that death — it was ruled an accident. That was the crime he committed, but he was also an accomplice in another one — along with Jack Kerouac — when their good friend, Lucien Carr (who had introduced them to each other), killed an older man who had become obsessed with him. Together, they disposed of the body and the knife. Kerouac and Burroughs recount this episode in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel (which could be considered a full-fledged confession) that they co-wrote in 1945. It was only published posthumously, in 2008.

It’s ironic to think that, in 1970, the same Burroughs who had shot his wife and disposed of a man’s body wrote an open letter to Truman Capote, cursing him for having wished for the execution of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock — two ex-convicts who murdered a family — so that his non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood (1966), would have the ending it was meant to have. According to Burroughs, Capote had used his talent for evil by not advocating against the death penalty.

The curse came true: Capote drowned in alcohol and guilt, struck by severe writer’s block — he was immobilized by the heights he had reached. He never managed to complete another literary work. It was the fate Burroughs had wished for him. The end.

But let’s step back in time and return to 1960. Between that year and 1964 — far removed from the success of Naked Lunch — in a London dive bar, at the Empress Hotel, at the Beat Hotel in Paris, as well as in Tangier, William S. Burroughs completed his Nova Trilogy.

Perhaps the question of what to do with Burroughs in the 21st century has a simple answer: rather than trying to set his life aside, we should read it alongside his work. That was, after all, how many readers approached him at the time. The Beat writers were far from universally admired in those years; their canonization came later.

No one could accuse Burroughs’s work of being detached from his life. It is completely torn apart by it. It is not only his fractured consciousness that gives shape to the cut-up technique, to those collaged fragments of language, but also the weight of a cosmic guilt, the burden of almost the entire universe.

Read him. Judge him. Then decide for yourself.

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