Actually I own and have read Burroughs, and Leary, and Hoffman, the other icons he mentions in the article. First I will say Burroughs is a lot easier to ‘take’ recorded than read. His notoriety or fame was never about his writing as a mass appeal thing; there was never a chance of that. He fought battles of censorship to write frank descriptions of heroin addiction and sex between older and younger men, but not a lot of people ever wanted to read that much of it.
His life was a lot of different stories, but the one I like is like this. He was a weird kid from a rich family in a midwestern town. He was sent to Summer Camp at Las Alamos. He fell in love with another boy. Their secret was discovered, and the Camp staff responded with requisite horror. Maybe they made each boy swear he had never done such a thing, and Bill lied, but his lover did not. When it was said and done, the lover had committed suicide. In my story, something shifted into place in young Bill and stuck, then. The whole Post Victorian straight bully world was nothing but Evil, and it would be made to pay, somehow, some day, if it was the last thing he did. To that end, he pioneered the idea of words or ideas as Viral, infectious, weapon-like. He may not have been a ‘great’ writer, but he was a Shaman, accessing places ordinary minds were not going, and reporting what he found there. And he was the Mentor to writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac. And in a very real way, he succeeded. In his lifetime, he saw his own sexual proclivities go from being grounds to be shot on sight to an acceptable alternative among adults who will keep quiet. (Burroughs was never a politically correct gay man.) It helped that he was ahead of his time, so he had the cooperation of demography and history on his side, even if ‘society’ was always arrayed against him. So when they call him the Godfather of Punk Rock, it isn’t because he recorded with Brion Gysin or Kurt Cobain. It’s because the attitude of uncompromising hostility to propriety and authority on grounds that it’s morally indefensible, THAT was something he wrote the book on in his life. It’s a caustic and difficult attitude, the opposite of all getting along. It presupposes that life is conflict and does not offer to roll over. So when this writer laments that what younger people get from Burroughs is mainly an attitude, I would agree, but not as a lamentation. Come down to it, most ‘movements’ are built on attitudes more than ideas. Uncle Bill has achieved Punk Rock Immortality, exactly the twisted underground kind he would have wanted.
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