(Ed. Note–actually, Co-Editor note. Both images provided by DWB as we enter day two of some of his fine past works. This originally appeared in Literally Stories UK. It is good to keep things alive in this hectic globe of online publishing, a world covered by multiple layers of ether. The only way that this format can develop a history is to quickly acknowledge and keep a light trained on its past. LA)
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 and Mexico for Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)
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, years in the past. 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 grizzled yet 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 at the end of his very, very long poem Clarel, a work that perhaps fifty people, or less, have ever read end to end. And that means fifty people ever in the history of humanity, not just who are alive now. If anyone is alive now who’s read this entire poem, I wish to hear from you.
We asked around in the college bars of Lawrence. They told us where Burroughs’ house was. We continued drinking in the bars 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 and may they remain there forever. We watched a herd of them running by and beyond us into the distance. This sight was true beauty, 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. And I think it was better that way because it wasn’t something I could’ve shared at the time in the right way, even though I tried.
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, probably even more than she was his wife.
Robert Browning said, speaking of the afterlife, “Never say of me that I am dead.” I never met William Burroughs in person, but 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 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.
Saragun Springs 
Hello Dale
Yes the shift is a terrible, vanilla wafer change that appears to be about one thing, corporate politics–protecting the investment. Big companies do not care about race, but they will populate their ads with people of color to show how wonderful and even minded the corporation is. The actors may be Black but I guarantee that the bosses are still as white as Miss America’s underwear.
This makes the so-called stand for justice every bit as racist as “The Birth of a Nation” in which the KKK is presented in a bizarre, heroic light. Mentioning such is not racist even though retorting against the mention of such is designed to blackball objectors.
Old Burroughs certainly lived a wild life and yet he was as calm and quiet a looking person as you can imagine. I identify with him, not as a writer (although that is a fine goal) but as perhaps being the oldest person at a methadone clinic. There’s something cool about that, it shows survival skills.
A Junky’s Christmas is far more about the spirit of the holy holiday than Rudolph will ever be. Many people have only seen the great stop motion production, but the story itself is easily found in books–“Interzone” I believe, is the original source. The idea of a junker giving up his only dose to help another human being gets to the soul of what the holiday really means (and you do not have to “believe” to be like Danny). Yet people are trying to scrub Burroughs away because he shot his wife and because of other dubious behaviors. Well, I’m not too much for shooting people, but I was not THERE, and I do not believe that gives me a right to burn his books.
Anyway, censorship is always disguised as something else and it will be around until the final speed ball pops. And it will always be cooler to dose and tell the truth (not necessarily in that order) than it will ever be to nit pick titles off the shelves. Why bigots do not understand that placing prohibitions on things is usually is the best thing to ever happen to the items is beyond me. How people become little nannies makes me angry and I refuse to gentle any language against them with stupid shit such as “well intentioned.” Like hell–censorship and coddling financial sources is never well intentioned. Those items are evil. So is playing along to save your own skin.
The Midwest is a mad house not matter what people say. The place is “Fargo” and I hope it keeps producing wild voices.
Thank you again for writing this!
Leila
LikeLiked by 1 person
Leila
Thanks for your great thoughts and comments!
One of the very first things that caught my eye about you as writer was the way in which you spoke about William S. Burroughs on Literally, in the Comments section, and in your bi-weekly Saturday reflections and essays, and also in your short stories at least by implication (the Tess stories) if not by actual name there (?).
A person like Burroughs is anathema in academia for a million reasons now, and the fearless and sympathetic take you have on Burroughs served as an enormous, huge breath of fresh air for me.
For me, it was a wild discovery akin to magic finding another writer who felt this way about Burroughs. And who understood him so well. Knowing that his work goes beyond just his writing, although it includes his writing too, but it also was the way he lived his life.
So that this piece was written for you and directly inspired by you, and our mutual fascination with William S. Burroughs, who I sometimes think of as a kind of half-mad, scientific-minded, mystical, utterly sane, drug-addicted Mark Twain wordsmith, a one-of-a-kind American voice who will not go away no matter how much they try to knock him down and keep him out.
So thank you for having a SENSIBILITY (and the common sense) that can appreciate and UNDERSTAND William S. Burroughs and his ilk. This piece was penned for you!
I’ve read many accounts of the shooting of his wife and the psychological aftermath that Burroughs went through, and I do not believe he did it on purpose at all, I believe it was some sort of profound, fateful accident. He almost turned the gun on himself after that happened. It would have been easier to. He was a survivor instead.
Your description of the Midwest and how it creates wild voices and why is perfect!
Thanks for inspiring “Visiting Bill Burroughs,” this piece is a perfect example of why and how you are a Muse for me and will remain so until I end, and lay down the pen for the last time, which I hope is in the very far future!
Dale
LikeLike
Dale
I am honored by the tribute! If Burroughs hadn’t lived it would have been necessary to invent him. I cannot get closer to the meaning than that.
I find the cutups fascinating and I think I can grasp the language they created. They almost make sense in a sense making wat, which speaks of greater dimensions than those our own minds can understand. We get so damned “trained”–and we react poorly when that is shown to us.
I understand his need for junk. His love for it his art “for” it as well. He was still a positive forced even though society repudiared his homosexuality and drug use.
I love certain drugs myself and I would not like being alive much without them.
Your work creates response and conversation. That is truly human and wonderful.
Leila
LikeLike
As with The Old Guitarist: as satisfying a read second time round (or perhaps 8th or 9th time round!) as it was on the first. In fact, on first reading the piece, I sent it to a man called Tom Flemons, owner of Lancaster’s best bookshop, Atticus; Burroughs visited the shop (when it was based in Liverpool) in 1981 & Tom recalls an extremely courteous & surprisingly unassuming man.
Your essays always make for a refreshing read.
Geraint
LikeLiked by 1 person
Geraint
Thanks so very much for sharing my work in that way, and for letting me know about it, too. I can’t tell you what it means to have my work read in England in that way, a land I’ve never visited (I’ve never been out of North America) except in my dreams but a land that peoples my imagination because of its Literature, which I’ve been studying for my entire life, almost since memory began, and my mother started telling me the stories of some of Shakespeare’s plays, beginning with Julius Caesar. It was “the Ides of March” thing that got me hooked.
In preparation for sending this Burroughs piece out there again, I was rereading some sections of the inimitable Thomas de Quincy’s CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.
And I was struck with the fact that your writing voice reminds one of de Quincy in many good ways. Something about the erudition combined with the streetwise nature plus the Shakespearean skeptical distance and your eloquent language chimes with de Quincy, that writer admired by Dickens (inspiring Dickens’ Opium Sal) among so many others.
Thank you!
Dale
LikeLike
De Q. lived just up the road, about 30 miles north of where I’m now sitting. Like STC, he was excessively partial to that celebrated ‘solution’, the Kendal Black Drop – said to possess four times the strength of “common” laudanum. O’er vales & hills they sweated.
Enjoyed all your recent pieces.
Geraint
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dale – some similarities. 1968 floundering while working on my Ph.D. in math at U of O Eugene Oregon. A prof got a deal to go to Kansas State in Manhattan (see “I won’t Take Manhattan” non fiction) and I went with him to do my last year for the Ph.D. The Viet Nam War and rock and roll were the background. I wrote something about aadic solenoids (Topology not electronics) about which I remember next to nothing. Left a luke warm girlfriend behind who my sister said wanted marriage.
No hard drugs, just weed and alcohol.
After a year of teaching math at Morehouse in Atlana I drove back to Eugene and met the woman who would become my wife of 55 years and my editor of ten or so.
2014 my difficulty with knees made me think about writing. Before and after that time I spent a lot of time hiking and park stewardship. My reading was mostly sci fi and horror, but had written some in th 1990s with no idea how to publish and was discouraged from writing. I did some contemporary reading in maybe the 1970s. Only took the required lit class in college.
2014 I started to get published. Took an online lit couse which was a complete waste. Currently have a few hundred things published in all of the usual genres and four continents. Doing OK because there must be a market for people who write like a mathematician. I’ve been aided by Maysam in Tehran who made my Iranian website, and Bill in Illinois who is our mutual gamma reader (we aren’t good enough for alpha or beta). We have about ten co-author credits on which he is the lead writer.
LikeLike
Dale, thanks for a very interesting essay. Just wanted to share a little on the topic of Literary Pilgrimages. A dozen or so years ago, I was on a walking holiday with friends on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides. One of the party was very keen to visit the house (maybe called ‘Barnwell’) where George Orwell had retreated to write ‘1984.’ I went along just because I fancied a walk.
But I was glad I’d gone, but the bleakness of the journey widened my understanding of the book: the house was miles off the public road, along a rough track, over a near-featureless heather moor, cold winds whipping of the Paps of Jura (mountains). It wasn’t ‘splendid isolation,’ it was grim isolation. He was widowed with a young child, without transport except a rackety motorbike, already very ill with TB.
I had a new respect for the man and the book.
bw,
mick
LikeLiked by 1 person