Junky

  On his graduation in the early thirties, considering he had said all he had to say literarily in the aforementioned charade, he studied anthropology, again at Harvard, specializing in Aztec and Mayan archaeology.

  Returning to his home city he found no career to his liking and took to drinking, riding around the river sections with his contemporaries on summer drunks, and studying yoga. Presumably he had no formal instruction in the latter discipline, since on being challenged to prove its efficacy, he announced that he was impervious to pain and demonstrated this by cutting off a finger. This exploit led to his incarceration in a private sanitarium nearby, from which he was soon released, as he seemed composed and cognizant of his surroundings.

  His next move, in true American style, was the Grand Tour of Europe. He spent a year in Paris in the early thirties, went on through Germany and Austria (as did his English contemporaries in the Isherwood-Auden group), and ended up in Cairo, looking at the pyramids with the practiced eye of an ex-archaeology student. He spent some time in the cities of the north coast of Africa, earlier and later popularized by Gide and Paul Bowles, and returned then to America.

  His favorite reading at this time was a dozen or so books, which comprised his whole permanent library, and which he carried around with him in his travels. They included Pareto and Spengler, Cocteau’s Opium, a copy of Baudelaire, a paperbacked volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (later) W. B. Yeats’ A Vision.

  Returning to America he brought with him a bride, whom he had met during one year’s abortive career as a medical student in Middle Europe. Bride and groom separated immediately on landing in New York, the purpose of the marriage having been to obtain citizenship for the Jewish lady, supposed also to have been a baroness.

  Then followed a tour of U.S. cities, hotel room to hotel room; from New York, through the South and Midwest, with long stops during the early forties in Chicago and New York. This was of course made possible by a small private income from his family.

  It was in Chicago that the author first began to explore the underworld within himself and outside of himself, while working as a professional pest exterminator in that city’s slum areas. However, certain other less criminal but nonetheless subterranean vices, treated in the later sections of the book, had already been discovered in his youth in America and travels in North Africa and Europe.

  For the latter, and its related emotional causes, the author had long ago sought out psychoanalytic aid. This proved, apparently, to be of no avail. As for the former, association with criminal elements of the population of the cities he visited, and the use of various drugs he encountered: the author’s story picks up at that point.

  One other important moment of background may be mentioned: the author’s wife, who appears briefly in the New Orleans section of the book. The common-law marriage, which began in the late forties, ended with her untimely death as the result of a drinking accident in a South American country several years ago. There remains one child born of the union, who lives with his father, now presumably in Venezuela.

  This fact has been related last as it will indicate to the reader an important concern of this book: its title is Junk, and its subject is drugs and the drug world; it is not in any sense a complete autobiography, though many personal details relating to the main subject have been included. It is the autobiography of one aspect of the author’s career, and obviously cannot be taken as an account of the whole man, as these last pages of the introduction demonstrate.

  In that respect, the author has done what he set out to do: to give a fairly representative and accurate picture of the junk world and all it involves; a true picture, given for the first time in America, of that vast underground life which has recently been so publicized. It is a notable accomplishment; there is no sentimentality here, no attempt at self-exculpation but the most candid, no romanticization of the circumstances, the dreariness, the horror, the mechanical beatness and evil of the junk life as lived. It is a true account of its pleasures, such as they are; a relentless and perspicacious account of the characters that inhabit the junk world, with their likeness and unlikeness to the known average of the culture; a systematic history of the events of a habit, the cravings, the jailings, the night errands, the day boredoms.

  We are fortunate that we have a historian, however firmly he has taken his position on the other side of the dark wall of normal gratification, who is able to give us these facts in a manner of writing which shows signs of literary maturity; a style which is direct, personal, very characteristic, very literal, highly selective, intense and economical in its imagery. It would be too great a presumption to compare such a localized world of horror as that of junk, with the universal Inferno of Dante; and yet that comparison, for certain spareness of manner and realistic use of simile, is what may happily arise in the mind of the trained reader.

  It remains to be said that the publisher presents this book to the public for its originality of style and content in dealing with a highly controversial subject. Very little real information is obtainable on this subject, and most of it is romanticized and hyped up or distorted for mass commercial purposes. This book has the advantage of being both real and readable. It is an important document; an archive of the underground; a true history of the true horrors of a vice. It makes clear what even the most foolish may understand.

  APPENDIX 5

  CARL SOLOMON’S PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  IN JUNKIE (1953)

  “Junk,” writes the author of these brutally frank revelations, “is not just a habit. It is a way of life.” A way of life in which “kick” is king, and where drug-dominated starvelings float in a half-lighted world of debased values, overpowering hungers and sudden-flaring violence.

  Not since De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium Eater has the finger of light shone so glaringly on the wasteland of the drug addict. Yet, where De Quincey wrote in the vein of dream-phantasy, Junkie is pitilessly factual and hard-boiled. From the very first lines, Junkie strips down the addict without shame or self-pity in all his nakedness.

  But this is more than the story of a drug addict. The anonymous underworld fills its pages—the moochers, fags, four-flushers, stool pigeons, thieves. We follow them as they slink furtively to their “meets” in dim-lit cafeterias and sleazy bars. We watch their hidden gestures, we see them as they “cop the stuff.” We see the veins shrink at the needle’s thrust, the “bang” as the stuff takes—and the indescribable horrors of junk sickness. We witness the sordidness of every crevice of their lives. For all are a “beat, nowhere bunch of guys,” seemingly without past and no future. There has never been a criminal confession better calculated to discourage imitation by thrill-hungry teen-agers. This is the unadulterated, unglamorous, unthrilling life of the drug addict.

  William Lee (the name of the author and of all persons appearing in this book are disguised) is an unrepentant, unredeemed drug addict. His own words tell us that he is a fugitive from the law; that he has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, paranoid; that he is totally without moral values. But his pen has been dipped in an acid of strange lustre, and some of his word pictures are vignettes of compelling artistry.

  We realized that here was a document which could forearm the public more effectively than anything yet printed about the drug menace. The picture it paints of a sordid netherworld was all the more horrifying for being so authentic in language and point of view.

  For the protection of the reader, we have inserted occasional parenthetical notes to indicate where the author clearly departs from accepted medical fact or makes other unsubstantiated statements in an effort to justify his actions.

  APPENDIX 6

  FOREWORD TO JUNKIE (1964)

  BY CARL SOLOMON

  Junkie by William Seward Burroughs was originally entitled Junk and was written under the pseudonym of William Lee. First presented for publication in the early ’50s, it ar
oused some interest among hard-cover publishers but was brought out as one of the earliest paperbacks of the newly emerging Ace Books.

  Since that time, Burroughs has become famous here and abroad as an avant-garde novelist and short story writer, writing under his own name. His novel The Naked Lunch has been published by Grove Press. In Search of Yage, about his adventures on the Amazon River among the headhunters in search of the “mind-expanding” drug yage, has been brought out by City Lights. The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded have been published in Paris by Olympia Press with much attendant scandal. And a new novel Nova Express, will soon be brought out by Grove.

  In Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Burroughs is referred to as the American Jean Genet. His second novel, Queer, remains unpublished in this country and abroad.

  Behind the “beat” renaissance in mid-Twentieth Century America, which shocked the sensibilities of some and gave new expression to others, William Burroughs remains a seldom seen but by now legendary figure. In 1964, unlike 1950, he has innumerable imitators and would-be imitators. His early creed of junk as a way of life has seeped into the youth of today to the point of becoming a major national problem.

  In Junkie he is factual. This is his earlier mode. In his more recent work, he ventures into the surrealistic and imaginative. The New York Post, in writing of his subject matter, fantasies (homo-erotic), and experiments in technique, finds him verging sometimes on the infantile and the schizoid.

  In life, he is a peculiar kind of adventurer, seeking out what is unusual or unexplored in our sensibilities or in our way of living. Pursuing what is increasingly hard to find, the unknown, Burroughs has not yet become redundant and his curiosity is not yet exhausted. In this respect he is unlike many other so-called avant-gardists and poets who once experimented but then reclined on their couches and ruefully admitted that there was nothing new under the sun.

  As for his junk habit, he has gone off and gone back and taken a variety of cures with different amounts of success. One cure, in England, under a Dr. Dent, resulted in an article written by Burroughs in a scientific quarterly.

  Burroughs is a Harvard graduate, has pursued a variety of occupations, is the father of two children, and is the scion of a wealthy family.

  One of the more lurid incidents in his past was the accidental shooting of his wife in a “William Tell” experiment . . . demonstrating his marksmanship by attempting to shoot a champagne glass off her head and killing her in the process. For this, in Mexico City, in about 1950, he was acquitted.

  In one form or another, under one guise or another, his character and personality seem to have had reflections in fictional characters in the writings of his protégé, Jack Kerouac. This is particularly evident in the character of Dennison in Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, and also in that of Bull Balloon in Dr. Sax.

  His politics are a bit hazy. We can seldom make out whether he is fighting against real conspiracies or imaginary ones. In In Search of Yage, he appears at times to be a liberal or even a radical, and the reputation he acquired in recent years in Paris seems to situate him more or less on the left. Most of the time, Burroughs appears to be too self-preoccupied to show much sustained interest in any political camp.

  APPENDIX 7

  INTRODUCTION TO JUNKY (1977)

  BY ALLEN GINSBERG

  Bill Burroughs and I had known each other since Xmas 1944, and at the beginning of the ’50s were in deep correspondence. I had always respected him as elder & wiser than myself, and in first years’ acquaintance was amazed that he treated me with respect at all. As time wore on & our fortunes altered—me to solitary bughouse for awhile, he to his own tragedies and travels—I became more bold in presuming on his shyness, as I intuited it, and encouraged him to write more prose. By then Kerouac and I considered ourselves poet/writers in Destiny, and Bill was too diffident to make such extravagant theater of self. In any case he responded to my letters with chapters of Junky, I think begun as curious sketching but soon conceived on his part—to my thrilled surprise—as continuing workmanlike fragments of a book, narrative on a subject. So the bulk of the Ms. arrived sequentially in the mail, some to Paterson, New Jersey. I thought I was encouraging him. It occurs to me that he may have been encouraging me to keep in active contact with the world, as I was rusticating at my parents’ house after 8 months in mental hospital as result of hippie contretemps with law.

  This took place over quarter century ago, and I don’t remember structure of our correspondence—which continued for years, continent to continent & coast to coast, and was the method whereby we assembled books not only of Junky but also Yage Letters, Queer (as yet unpublished), and much of Naked Lunch. Shamefully, Burroughs has destroyed much of his personal epistles of the mid-’50s which I entrusted to his archival care—letters of a more pronouncedly affectionate nature than he usually displays to public—so, alas, that charming aspect of the otherwise Invisible Inspector Lee has been forever obscured behind the Belles Lettristic Curtain.

  Once the manuscript was complete, I began taking it around to various classmates in college or mental hospital who had succeeded in establishing themselves in Publishing—an ambition which was mine also, frustrated; and thus incompetent in worldly matters, I conceived of myself as a secret literary Agent. Jason Epstein read the Ms. of Burroughs’ Junky (of course he knew Burroughs by legend from Columbia days) and concluded that had it been written by Winston Churchill, it would be interesting; but since Burroughs’ prose was “undistinguished” (a point I argued with as much as I could in his Doubleday office, but felt faint surrounded by so much Reality . . . mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors . . . my own paranoia or inexperience with the Great Dumbness of Business Buildings of New York) the book was not of interest to publish. That season I was also carrying around Kerouac’s Proustian chapters from Visions of Cody that later developed into the vision of On the Road. And I carried On the Road from one publishing office to another. Louis Simpson, himself recovering from nervous breakdown at Bobbs-Merrill, found no artistic merit in the manuscripts either.

  By grand chance, my Companion from N.Y. State Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, was given a job by his uncle, Mr. A. A. Wyn of Ace Books. Solomon had the literary taste & humor for these documents—though on the rebound from his own Dadaist, Lettriste & Paranoiac-Critical literary extravagances, he, like Simpson, distrusted the criminal or vagabond romanticism of Burroughs & Kerouac. (I was myself at the time a nice Jewish boy with one foot in middle-class writing careful revised rhymed metaphysical verse—not quite.) Certainly these books indicated we were in the middle of an identity crisis prefiguring nervous breakdown for the whole United States. On the other hand Ace Books’ paperback line was mostly commercial schlupp with an occasional French Romance or hardboiled novel nervously slipped into the list by Carl, while Uncle winked his eye.

  Editor Solomon felt that we (us guys, Bill, Jack, Myself) didn’t care, as he did, about the real Paranoia of such publishing—it was not part of our situation as it was of his—Carl’s context of family and psychiatrists, publishing house responsibilities, nervousness at being thought mentally ill by his uncle—so that it took bravery on his part to put out “this type of thing,” a book on Junk, and give Kerouac $250 advance for a prose novel. “The damn thing almost gave me a nervous breakdown—buildup of fear and terror, to work with that material.”

  There was at the time—not unknown to the present with its leftover vibrations of police state paranoia cultivated by Narcotics Bureaus—a very heavy implicit thought-form, or assumption: that if you talked aloud about “tea” (much less Junk) on the bus or subway, you might be arrested—even if you were only discussing a change in the law. It was just about illegal to talk about dope. A decade later you still couldn’t get away with national public TV discussion of the laws without the Narcotics Bureau & FCC intruding with canned film clips weeks later denouncing t
he debate. That’s history. But the fear and terror that Solomon refers to was so real that it had been internalized in the schlupp publishing industry, and so, before the book could be printed, all sorts of disclaimers had to be interleaved with the text—lest the publisher be implicated criminally with the author, lest the public be misled by arbitrary opinions of the author which were at variance with “recognized medical authority”—at the time a forcible captive of the Narcotics Bureau (20,000 doctors arraigned for trying to treat junkies, thousands fined & jailed 1935–1953, in what N.Y. County Medical Association called “a war on doctors”).

  The simple and basic fact is that, in cahoots with organized crime, the Narcotics Bureau were involved in under-the-table peddling of dope, and so had built up myths reinforcing “criminalization” of addicts rather than medical treatment. The motive was pure and simple: greed for money, salaries, blackmail & illegal profits, at the expense of a class of citizens who were classified by press & police as “Fiends.” The historic working relationship between Police and Syndicate bureaucracies had by early 1970s been documented by various official reports and books (notably N.Y.’s 1972 Knapp Commission Report and The Politics of Opium in Indochina by Al McCoy).

  Because the subject—in medias res—was considered so outré, Burroughs was asked to contribute a preface explaining that he was from distinguished family background—anonymously William Lee—and giving some hint how some supposedly normal citizen could arrive at being a dope fiend, to soften the blow for readers, censors, reviewers, police, critical eyes in walls & publishers’ rows, god knows who. Carl wrote a worried introduction pretending to be the voice of sanity introducing the book on the part of the publisher. Perhaps he was. A certain literary description of Texas agricultural society was excised as not being germane to the funky harsh non-literary subject matter. And I repeat, crucial medico-political statements of fact or opinion by Wm. Lee were on the spot (in parentheses) disclaimed (by Ed.).