In the early nineties, James Grauerholzrepresentative and assistant William S Burroughs He leveraged the author’s famous fondness for firearms to launch a collection of T-shirts drawn and signed by the author of El Almuerzo Desnudo. A few months later, Gap and Nike decided to hire the author to appear in two advertising campaigns aimed at attracting young consumers. However, for the more experienced and familiar with the author’s life and work—particularly his fondness for drug use and the murder of his wife, writer Joan Vollmer—the decision did not cease to amaze them.
“In a TV commercial for Nike, an old man wears a suit and a hat while philosophizing about technology. My husband says it’s about the writer William Burroughs. Given the open nature of its business, it doesn’t occur to me that Nike decided to use Burroughs as a spokesperson. A reader named Danielle Palermo wrote to the Kansas City Star newspaper in October 1994. The head of the newspaper answered the reader, confirming the husband’s intuition, and took the opportunity to step inside. clothing brand’s verdict: “Absolutely odd that a company associated with exercise and wellness would choose Burroughs.”
While unconventional, the two clothing brands’ strategy to connect with the American author was not new. As early as 1989, William S. Burroughs starred in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, whose small role beyond cinematography was not overlooked by film critic Pauline Kael, who underlined that the author’s cameo made some sort of contribution to the film. “innovative stamp of approval”.
Van Sant’s mention meant that from that moment on, brands and artists saw Burroughs as the most viable leverage to get the coolest public in commercial action. What they didn’t realize was that perhaps by taking advantage of the influence of these companies, it was the writer who did what he always sought in his literature: to undermine the foundations of American society, starting with youth groups like the Boy Scouts. and morality groups end up with the repressive organs of the police and the judiciary.
Evidence of this is William S. Burroughs’ conversation with Mick Jagger in March 1980. The reason for the talk was to write an interview to be published in a memoir for the Rolling Stones’ twentieth anniversary. During the meeting, Burroughs commented on Jagger about the importance of his work as a musician. While his books sold hundreds of thousands of copies at best, pop music instantly reached millions, facilitating the cultural revolution.
Far from being impressed by Burroughs’ theory, the singer responded skeptically, saying that movies and television were more influential than rock and roll, asked what this cultural revolution was, and allowed himself the luxury of telling himself that it was so, before getting the answer. seemed like an outdated idea. Clutching the arms of his chair, Burroughs said with deliberate slowness as if speaking to a retarded child: ‘Do you realize that thirty or forty years ago a taco couldn’t have been published on a printed page? And what cultural revolution you ask? Wow, man, what do you think we’ve been doing all these years?’
This and other anecdotes are collected in Literary Outlaw. The life and time of William S. Burroughs, a biography of over seven hundred pages by author Ted Morgan, which he began writing at Burroughs’s request in 1985 and has just been published by EsPop editions in Spain.
Burroughs and his biographer met in London in 1972 through Brion Gysin, a British writer best known for his long stay in Tangier. “As a friend of a friend, we hit it off. He wanted to know how Brion was doing, and I was fascinated by the helot personality he kept cleverly dressed and being extremely polite. I also learned that he is completely honest in his dealings with other people. He paid his bills, never wrote bounced checks, and was never shy when it came to paying his fair share in restaurants,” recalls Morgan in his foreword, owing to the author’s cautious, expressionless face, his accent. His plain, nasal Midwest and black humor reminded him of a kind of Buster Keaton: “London The customs officer who checked your passport on one of your trips to . she asked. , Mr. Burroughs?’. “Enjoy the food and the nice weather,” she replied.
no hot pad
By the mid-1980s he had specialized in writing biographies of such names as Ted Morgan, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Somerset Maugham, and other great personalities of the Anglo-Saxon world, among whom Burroughs thought he might fit.
He didn’t stray from the road. At that time, the author was forced to go into exile in Paris to publish his works without fear of being prosecuted for obscenity, to move to Tangier to live his homosexuality without problems (and have sex with minors), or to travel to Peru to experiment with ayauasca, already halfway around the world. He was an admiring creator. It didn’t seem to matter that he had fraudulently killed his wife on a flight to Mexico decades ago. Or perhaps it even added to a cultural scene where misogyny is rampant.
Rock bands like Soft Machine or Steely Dan took their names from his books, Frank Zappa wanted to make a musical version of Naked Lunch, Patti Smith declared herself a fan of the author, The Beatles put her face on the cover of Sergeant. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Marching Band appeared on the comedy Saturday Night Live and was even accepted into the Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters. “She became a member in 1983 through the efforts of Allen Ginsberg,” Morgan commented, noting that Burroughs was “proud to belong to such a great council and stand shoulder to shoulder with her favorite authors, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer.”
Eventually, Ted Morgan accepted the commission to narrate the author’s life. His only condition was to work with complete freedom and without censorship. “I knew he would speak honestly on matters that others would try to hide. As a writer exposing hypocrisy and fraud, he was incapable of being this or that. He had read my work and was aware that my books did not shy away from the less flattering parts of my biographies,” recalls Morgan, who nevertheless had to compromise on one aspect: “All he asked me was that I didn’t reveal it. I was taking methadone because he thought it would hurt his reputation’.
Consequently, the Literary Outlaw. The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs is a well-documented, entertaining and uncompromising tale of the life of a member of the beat generation contextualized by historical facts who knew best how to adapt to the social changes of his time. A title that does not underestimate the importance of the biography, avoids falling into legend, and does not escape the darkest chapters of the author’s life. These include the tumultuous life of his son Billy or the murder of the boy’s mother, Joan Vollmer.
Although the American author romanticizes the murder of his wife in the preface to his novel Queer by saying, “I have to admit that I would never have been a writer without Joan’s death,” Morgan collects an embarrassing expression. who reads According to George Laughead, a professor at the University of Kansas, during one of the last times he was with the author before he died, Burroughs began shouting, “Hit that bitch and write a book! That’s what I do!”. As much as his assistant, James Grauerholz, tried to belittle the subject, arguing that the author was an inappropriate comment brought on by the emotional impact of the evening news of alcohol, drugs, and serious illness. Ted Morgan, to whom his friend Allen Ginsberg suffers, was not impressed: “Inappropriate? Not for Burroughs readers. Nor for Joan Vollmer Burroughs.