William S. Burroughs by Phil Baker (Reaktion Books – Critical Lives Series)

As a fan and student of Burroughs’ work of many years, I’m always eager for new material. However, the man seems to still attract more discussion than his actual writing. On one level, it’s easy to see why: the public have an insatiable thirst for biographies and memoirs (or at least, that’s what publishers would clearly have us believe), and in Burroughs’ case, he led one hell of a life. Moreover, his life story may be strange and incredible, but at least there is a story to be found in it, and one that can be presented in a linear fashion: the same cannot be said of his books, at least where the majority of readers are concerned. Indeed, a number of authors – notably Irvine Welsh – have commented that they like the idea of Burroughs’ writing, but simply can’t get on with it. On another level, though, the emphasis on Burroughs’ biographical details relegates his literary output to a secondary position, which is a mistake, not least of all because his life experiences influenced his writing, and vice versa.

Relatively recent additions to the Beat biographical canon have included Rob Johnson’s account of Burroughs’ farming exploits in the mid to late 1940s, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, James Campbell’s This is the Beat Generation and Barry Miles’ book on the so-called Beat Hotel. But with two substantial biographies already in print – Ted Morgan’s behemoth Literary Outlaw, published while Burroughs was still alive, and Miles’ rather more commercial El Hombre Invisible – plus a cursory picture-book bio in the form of Graham Caveney’s The ‘Priest,’ They Called Him, I had serious reservations about the need for another one, whatever its author’s claims for the inclusion of ‘new’ material.

The first couple of chapters didn’t really seem to offer any great revelations: reading again about Burroughs’ early years doesn’t go so far as to conjure a strange sense of deja vu, but is almost comforting in its familiarity. Baker’s style is at least good for the most part, balancing a decent quality of writing with a broader accessibility. This doesn’t, however, seem to entirely justify the book’s existence.

It’s only as the book progresses that Baker’s real achievement begins to reveal itself. Burroughs was a prolific writer of letters (as the 450-page ‘1945-1959′ volume published in 1993 evidences), and during the writing of Naked Lunch he famously wrote to Ginsberg that perhaps the real book was the letters to him. Baker has made extensive use of Burroughs’ letters, and from these, extrapolates Burroughs’ perspective on events within the context of his biography. It sounds such an obvious approach, but it does add a new dimension to the Burroughs story and provides a fascinating insight by working from this angle. What’s more – and this is, to my mind, more significant than the critical opinions Baker offers when recounting events – while the individual works other than Naked Lunch still only receive limited coverage, there is a greater sense of the way in which the writing and the living were intertwined. The other biographies not only separate the two (and thus compartmentalise the writing as secondary), but also seem to focus so much on the non-literary biographical events that one could come to believe that Burroughs simply conjured books out of thin air: travelling from place to place, spending days staring at his shoe and having dinner with different people each night, how could he possibly have time to write?

Obviously, there simply isn’t the space in this comparatively short book (a mere 200 pages) to detail the long passages of time where little happened, or when Burroughs was simply writing, and similarly, the focus on the writing and publication of Naked Lunch is spectacularly disproportionate in relation to all of his other books. This is only to be expected, although it does, to an extent, reinforce the popular misconception of Burroughs as a one-book author. Given the sales of his final trilogy, this is clearly untrue, but if there’s one thing we can learn from Burroughs – both the writer and theorist, and the self-mythologising versions, which often became interchangeable within his works of fiction – it’s that history is malleable, unfixed and subject to manipulation and distortion after the fact. As such, by returning to the source, in the form of Burroughs’ letters as a means of balancing the mythology with the reality – and there’s no denying that Burroughs not only did a lot to perpetuate his own myth, but also that he was, in many respects a strange man, but also, in many others, not nearly as strange as is widely believed – Baker does a worthy job of presenting the man’s long and unusual life in a digestible and accessible fashion. And for that, credit is most certainly due.