William Seward Burroughs II died in Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1997, at eighty-three, of a heart attack. He had outlived almost everyone he had ever taken drugs with. He had outlived the wife he had killed in a 1951 drunken William-Tell routine in Mexico City. He had outlived his son, who had died at thirty-three of cirrhosis inherited from the father’s chosen inheritance. He had outlived the obscenity trials of Naked Lunch, the heroin decades, the cut-up experiments, the New York late period with the rifles and the cats and the methadone, and by the end he was a beloved American uncle, interviewed by every magazine, painted in Andy Warhol’s studio, cameo’d in Nike commercials. The obituaries led with the novels. This is the wrong way to remember him.
Junkie, Burroughs’s first book, published in 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee, is the book the obituaries should have led with. It is the book that matters. It is also the book most readers skip, because Naked Lunch is the famous one, and Naked Lunch is the one on the syllabus, and Naked Lunch is a difficult, hallucinatory, fragmented, deliberately non-linear work that announced a certain kind of postwar American experimental prose and that most people who tell you they have read it have not, in fact, read.
Junkie is plain. Junkie is reported. Junkie is the work of a man who had been a heroin addict in New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City for the better part of a decade, and who was sober enough, for the length of the writing, to give an accurate field report on what heroin addiction was in the late 1940s American urban economy. The prose is flat. The observations are precise. There is no mythology. There is no transcendence. There is no Dean Moriarty driving across Nebraska at ninety miles an hour with the radio on. There is a man in a furnished room in a bad part of the city, doing what it takes to not be sick, and the mechanics of what it takes are the subject.
The other American drug books all romanticize. On the Road, Kerouac’s Benzedrine travelogue, romanticizes. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson’s mescaline-and-ether disaster, romanticizes. Trainspotting, Welsh’s heroin novel, romanticizes by inversion — by making the drug life so abject and so funny that abjection becomes a style. Burroughs did none of this. He wrote a procedural. He wrote a manual. He wrote the book the honest way, the way a veteran writes about a war he has not finished losing, and the book was suppressed and banned and eventually re-released and eventually canonized for the wrong book, because the canon rewards difficulty and punishes plainness, and Junkie was plain.
What he got right, forever: the economics. Junkie is the only major American literary work about drugs that takes the economic structure of addiction seriously. Burroughs tells you how much a cap cost in New Orleans in 1948. He tells you what a bad dose looked like. He tells you how a seller calibrated the cut depending on what neighborhood he was selling in. He tells you how the pusher economy fed the legal economy that fed the police economy that fed the prison economy that fed the pusher economy. He is writing thirty years before the scholarly literature on narcotic economies caught up with him. He was not trying to be ahead. He was trying to be accurate.
What he got wrong, as a man: his whole life. He said so himself. The Mexico City shooting of Joan Vollmer Burroughs in 1951 was the event that he claimed, decades later, had made him a writer — because the guilt had required it. A man should not require a dead wife to write. Burroughs knew this. He never recovered from it. Every book he published after 1951, including Junkie itself, was written by a man doing penance he could not complete.
Naked Lunch is the louder book. Junkie is the clearer one. Read Junkie first. Read it as the document it is — a report by a survivor of a specific American economy, written plainly, because the man who wrote it was still close enough to the thing to know that style would be a lie.
Rest easy, William. You saw it. You reported it. The country that produced the thing you reported has produced far worse drug economies since, and a fentanyl overdose rate you would not have predicted, and an industrial opioid arithmetic that makes your 1948 New Orleans look like a cottage industry. Your book is more useful now than it was then. That is both a victory and a defeat. A writer takes what he is given.
A related vagobond.com piece: Travel Writing — Dangerous Business.
Readers and fans of Junkie will really enjoy Fucking People — my story collection about Americans on the edge of economies Burroughs would have recognized, written plainly, because the people in them deserved to be reported and not romanticized. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
