By Dave Riley
For a guy who lived by the slogan —"nothing is true, everything is permitted" — William S. Burroughs managed a long innings. The icon of hipster cynicism died on August 3 at the age of 83.
With his death passed the last of the quintessential beats — the core trinity of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs. With Ginsberg going only four months back, extant sixties icons are getting rare.
But the beats had seniority on their side. By the time they were discovered by the love generation, the beats were a ready-made package with their own notions of a liberated lifestyle. As notorious seniors (ie: over 30) who proudly confessed that they'd done it all, yesterday's bohemians soon became heroes and beatdom proclaimed a movement.
Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg first met in 1945 in New York at Columbia University where Ginsberg and Kerouac were students. The older Burroughs acted as mentor and introduced the small circle of friends to his fascination with drugs, sex, violence and crime. The radicalisation that swept America in the years soon after World War II seems to have registered within this clique only in the form of individualised notions of liberation. Dedicated scribblers, with the help of on-hand substances (heroin being the favourite), the three sought a "new vision" which could be harnessed in the written word.
Unscathed by McCarthyism and fluently libertarian, the beats generated a lifestyle which was essentially counter cultural — driven by experimentation in drugs and sexual preference, and buoyed up by bebop, the new jazz sound from the clubs.
When New York beat fused with San Francisco hip in the early sixties, the beats' spontaneous methods of creative work, harassed by a series of obscenity trials, ensured that a new literary form had not only arrived but had matured into the most modern art form on offer.
In an interview with Ginsberg in 1961, Burroughs described the beat mission as a step made in silence. "We detach ourselves from word forms — this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expression, for example, colour. We can translate word letters into colour...In other words we must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness that which is to be perceived at hand."
If these words of Burroughs aren't very clear, you should try reading his novels. But what he has to say describes the beat quest very well. Words were given a new potential, a new dynamic role in a spontaneous creative process.
This ready confidence in the power of words to metamorphose — into colours or sounds — guaranteed that the beats would become a ready source of inspiration within various currents in rock music. Sixties psychedelia bands such as The Grateful Dead, new wave performer Patti Smith, even punk radicals like The Clash and gunge icons Nirvana — all claim some allegiance to the beats.
While Ginsberg threw himself into campaigning against the Vietnam War, Kerouac teamed up with right-wing identity William F. Buckley to support it, only to later die in 1969 an alcoholic reconciled with the Catholicism of his youth. Burroughs, on the other hand, has only come into political prominence in the eighties and nineties. This is why his death has been greeted with more lament than Ginsberg's passing last April.
Burroughs' day has come and it is a pity he is not around to enjoy it. Devoid of the hope, ideals and political activism that fired Ginsberg's poetry and dampened some of his nihilism, Burroughs' fiction lives on the dark side — sadistic, sarcastic, bleak and surreal. To survive, cautions Burroughs, live only for yourself. Untouched by sixties greening, Burroughs' world is that of an alienated outsider — without a class to call his own or a cause to subscribe to.
No wonder such a cynic — although dead — now enjoys a revival.