EDITORS' CHOICE

Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S.Burroughs, Jr., edited by David Ohle. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2006.

In "Blue Tulips and Night Train for Jack Kerouac's Grave," Campbell McGrath's elegy to Kerouac, or rather to McGrath's youthful romance with Kerouac's work, he writes of a conflict of image:

. . . To the neo-beatnick faithful you remained a sacrificial paradigm, an icon bleeding be-bop plasma, a boozy, jazz-infused Buddhist martyr; to us a tutelary prodigal, a culture-hero to the bitter end. In truth what? A drunk Canuck guzzling bourbon, laughing aloud at "The Beverly Hillbillies"' slaphappy pantomime of bliss, paranoid and obese, crushed by a mother's alcoholic love?

While McGrath ultimately suggests the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes—grizzled failure and beatific saint—he seems to understand that even a minor compromise of Kerouac's sainthood constitutes a complete decanonization: to humanize the pantheon of "beats" is to tear off masks that cannot be put back on.

Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr., edited and compiled by David Ohle, is a violent wrenching of just these masks. Kerouac only plays a minor role in the text (although Dharma Bums is the medium of a crucial realization for Burroughs: his mother, Joan Burroughs, whom William, Sr. shot dead in a garage in Mexico during a drunken game of William Tell, had black teeth and was driven mad by her Benzadrine addiction), but his compatriots Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Sr. loom large: not, however, as literary luminaries so much as impotent friends and family whose flimsy new age pretensions and indulgent self-medication drive Burroughs, Jr. (Billy throughout the book) to his excruciating death in 1981, a few months shy of his 34th birthday.

Cursed from Birth is an unusual book to review. It has a muddled authorship: while much of the material is Burroughs' own, from his unfinished final autobiography, "Prakriti Junction," and from his two previous semi-autobiographical books, Speed and Kentucky Ham, the text is not presented as Burroughs' artistic vision, and so to criticize or commend him makes little sense. The focus of Cursed from Birth is Billy's writing only insofar as it reflects on the author. Moreover, the draft of "Prakriti Junction" that Billy left behind was some 60 pages long; somehow those 60 pages became a 210 page book. So is Ohle the author figure, and if so, should the book be read as a biography? In an important sense, no: Ohle's role, as he describes it himself, was to "unscramble" Billy's writings; in any case, Ohle did not write any of the book. Much of the text consists of letters and tape transcriptions from Billy's friends and family, structured to augment and inform the bits and pieces Burroughs left behind.

And yet, it remains a powerful and worthwhile read, regardless of who deserves the credit. Much of Beat writing seems either myopic or unaware of itself and its conceits; in the parts of the book that originate in Burroughs' writings, it becomes clear that he avoids these pitfalls. The jagged line between beatnick and addict is manifest throughout the text, but nowhere more so than at the beginning of the evocatively titled chapter "A Liver the Size of Baltimore," in which Burroughs follows poet David Rebman to Boulder, Colorado, where Rebman is to teach at the Naropa Institute. In many ways the epitome of beatnick high-minded-ness, Naropa remains a Buddhist university with which Allen Ginsberg maintained a close relationship until his death. In his 1990 essay "Kerouac's Ethic in the Light of his Buddhism," Ginsberg writes, "the great Tibetan Lama Chogyam Trungpa, examining Kerouac's poetry, said: 'It's a perfect manifestation of mind,' and that's why at Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, we originated the Jack Kerouac school of Disembodied Poetics in 1974." To be "beat," then, was to be in some deep communion with a Buddhist ethic and spirituality, embodied by Naropa's philosophy of "contemplative education," described on their website as "learning infused with the experience of awareness, insight and compassion for oneself and others . . . " (Contemplative Education).

Compare this fancy rhetoric with Burroughs' description of Naropa:
"I remembered when Allen Ginsberg had talked about this spiritual teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, high Tibetan master of This and That. I remembered that he had a school in Boulder called the Naropa Institute . . . " Burroughs seems to have no illusions about the Naropa project; yet his perspective, however jaded, seems justified when, two pages later, he writes: "There were four classes of people in Boulder: regular people, college people, Naropa people, and street people. I was street people. I was supposed to be Naropa people but I didn't make it. I got crabs and I lost my head. I was unsteady, wild, drunk, and angry." There seems to be an implicit contradiction, here: how can one fail to "make" a group devoted to "compassion for oneself and others?"

Indeed, something has gone wrong for Billy Burroughs. He is "street people," but fails to undergo the apotheosis described of street people in On the Road. He writes, "I read Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, and Kerouac always with a contradictory feeling of deja vu and of having just missed the boat. And there was a party on board; I could hear the music." Watching the boat from a distance, Billy gains a valuable perspective that, while perhaps obvious, remains profound: for every "jazz-infused Buddhist martyr" there are countless "drunk Canuck[s] guzzling bourbon" whose godheads never arrive. And so Burroughs Jr. achieves a kind of verisimilitude unavailable to his father and his famous friends: he captures suffering without sentimentality or romanticism, painting a bitter world in harsh colors. But for all its darkness, honesty and realism seem a refreshing alternative to the indulgent delusions of "the neo-beatnick faithful" cast large in the background of Billy's tragic descent and death.

James Owen Weatherall