We returned to the limousine and headed back for Manhattan. Gloria talked of her forthcoming visit to England, her intention to visit the Greenham Women and ‘to seek political asylum’ here if Ronald Reagan, ‘a smiling fascist’, won a second term. The frequency of her smile at first suggests, not falsity, but settled habit; after a time, though, it suggests a real superabundance of warmth — also energy and self-belief. Here is a woman riding the crest of conviction, of achievement. ‘Look!’ she said with a triumphant laugh (this was one of her daily rewards). ‘There are people working signs on the road ahead.’
Observer 1984
William Burroughs: The Bad Bits
Like many novelists whose modernity we indulge, William Burroughs is essentially a writer of ‘good bits’. These good bits don’t work out or add up to anything; they have nothing to do with the no-good bits: and they needn’t be in the particular books they happen to be in. Most of Burroughs is trash, and lazily obsessive trash too — you could chuck it all out and not diminish what status he has as a writer. But the good bits are good. Reading him is like staring for a week at a featureless sky; every few hours a bird will come into view or, if you’re lucky, an aeroplane might climb past, but things remain meaningless and monotone. Then, without warning (and not for long, and for no coherent reason, and almost always in The Naked Lunch), something happens: abruptly the clouds grow warlike, and the air is full of portents.
The good bits are so fortuitous, indeed (mere reflexes of a large and callous talent), and the no-good bits so monolithic, that the critic’s role is properly reduced to one of helpless quotation. Here is a good bit; this is another good bit; take, for example, this good bit. Eric Mottram, however, in his adoring and humourless new study, “William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, swallows Burroughs whole: every section of jaded agitprop, every page of trite assertion and denatured rhetoric, every abstract noun finds an honoured place in the inter-disciplinarian’s filing-system. John Fletcher, general editor of this Critical Appraisals series, says that to qualify for inclusion writers need to be ‘demonstrably “masterly” in the sense of having made a real impact on the contemporary arts’ (I think he must mean ‘modern-masterly’). Mr Mottram, anyway, has unsmilingly accepted the brief. His book is, in effect, about the bad bits.
Here are two of the funnier ínsensitivities ensured by this approach. There is, by common consent, a great deal about drugs in Burroughs’s four main novels (or ‘tetralogy’, as they are here typically dignified). Many of his characters are junkies, they talk about junk a lot, their senses – in common with Burroughs’s prose — are peeled by junk: on junk, says Burroughs, ‘familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life’. From Mr Mottram’s Delphic lectern, though, ‘the junk world is the image of the whole world as a structure of addiction and controls’. Well, this is the radical falsification line of the Beat school, and fair enough in its way. But evaluative criticism of Burroughs (and all criticism of living authors should be evaluative) would be far better off with the unglam-orous premise that Burroughs was just a junkie himself, that he got lost for a long time in the junk world, and that it is in this reality that his imagination — and his style – has been conclusively formed. An index of Mr Mottram’s futile reverence is that he seldom refers to Burroughs as ‘being dependent on’ drugs, or ‘taking’ drugs, or even ‘using’ drugs. What Burroughs does is ‘experiment’ with them. (At one point Mr Mottram pictures Burroughs ‘experimenting’ with alcohol. I hereby confess that, during his longer chapters, I conducted a few experiments with the stuff myself.)
Burroughs’s militant homosexuality, also, is seen as yet another suave literary device. Mr Burroughs doesn’t really like women: one feels safe in this observation, since he has gone on record with the vow that he would kill every woman alive if he could. Although this is not in itself a criticism of his writing, it is certainly a clue to it. But here is Mottram, in a biographical stroll-in: