Busting out like a berserk convention of drunken novelty salesmen here’s Interzone, the latest offering from the bizarre fiction chest of William Burroughs. In the tradition of Burroughs’s most notorious works, this compilation is repulsive, hilarious, astonishing. Like Naked Lunch it’s sure to make the rounds among friends, to be read behind locked doors or on the sly in public with careful, periodic glances over the shoulder. (It’s always fun to read Burroughs on the subway, snickering mysteriously among the crowd.)
William Burroughs’s career draws an odd chart: his development was fast, his best work came in a flash, then, in spite of a conspicuously declining talent, he managed to kick out a steady trail of books for the next 30 years–right up to the present. If Naked Lunch was the moment of explosion, later books like Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads are its scattered embers.
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The first of the “Stories” is “Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” the familiar short sketch Burroughs wrote in collaboration with chum Kells Elvins at Harvard in 1938. This Burroughs standard also appears in Nova Express and has been a standby at his public readings. It’s the comic sketch about a sinking ocean liner whose captain kills a society lady and puts on her dress, forcing his way into a packed lifeboat. The story also introduces Doctor Benway (“ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel”), the mad coke-addicted surgeon who would later appear in Naked Lunch. (The operating room of the Joker’s plastic surgeon in Batman seems lifted right out of Benway.)
The zone was at the time a sort of cafe society for tenacious losers, and Burroughs saw himself as an unfortunate member of the pack. Though his adventures in poverty and squalor always smacked of the anthropological (he was a Harvard grad and a member of the adding-machine Burroughs family, and monthly checks from Mom ensured that he’d never slide all the way down), he considered himself a failure when he lived in Tangier; his esteem for his writing was shaky and cracked. Nonetheless he did write, and with an expatriate’s perspective on America–and a daily dose of hash–he roared forth with a firestorm of material.
But not all here is thick and gloomy; sometimes when Burroughs is in a good mood his twisted sense of humor shines. One of the better offerings in this section is “Displaced Fuzz”–a huge crew of unemployed policemen desperately searching for new ways to hassle the innocent. In another journal entry, Burroughs observes, “Interzone is crawling with pedophiles, citizens hung up on prepuberty kicks. I don’t dig it. I say anyone can’t wait till thirteen is no better than a degenerate.”
While the tone sometimes shifts to a wistful murmur–“Motel loneliness moans across the continent like foghorns over still oily waters of tidal rivers”–most of “Word” twists in a maelstrom of Burroughs “routines”: insane, perverse little sketches celebrating sheer filth and humor. The routines are like vulgar nickelodeon episodes–or like W.C. Fields on acid–almost seeming to end in flickering fades to black. But the disgusting parts are also the most hilarious, both in their audacity and timing. They’re usually just blatant statements, written with a wisecracking delivery, of everyday possibilities ordinarily never mentioned. They’re funny because they’re true, and because they make fun of horrible, painful, repressed experiences and ideas. As the author has often reiterated, you can’t tell anyone anything they don’t already know on some level. Of course Burroughs’s warped mind produces some scenarios most people would never dream of, but that’s why he’s the writer and we’re the readers.
Interzone has a posthumous feel to it, and is probably the first in a long line of such miscellaneous collections. But at 75 Burroughs is alive and active. At the sprightly age of 66 he suddenly took up painting (“I had always taken it for granted that I couldn’t draw or paint)” he said in a recent Time article), and he has been producing artworks ever since. That’s one of his pieces–Space Door–on the cover of Interzone. In fact an exhibit of his works showed last fall at the Klein Gallery, one of the galleries lost to last spring’s disastrous River North fire. Burroughs attended a party in Chicago the night before the opening, and didn’t pass up a joint when it came his way. As a matter of fact the old boy bogarted that doobie.
