Junky (25 page)

APPENDIX 3

LETTER FROM WILLIAM BURROUGHS
TO A. A. WYN [1959]

Wyn Publishing Co.
23 West 47 Street
NYC

Reading over a published copy of JUNKIE, I found that a number of alterations and omissions had been made. I am listing alterations that I feel to be unwarranted, to blur or completely obscure the original meaning. I strongly urge that these alterations be omitted in the event of a reprinting as they detract from my book.

I spent a year working on this manuscript. I checked over every word many times. Good or bad the manuscript I submitted was written exactly the way I intended. I have not found one instance of a change that I consider necessary, though I am in agreement with some of the omissions. This list is not complete, but covers only the more flagrant mutilations:

Preface. Page 8, Line 8
:
“Put me down as an out and out con.” This does not mean anything. The original phrasing was: They “put down an out and out con.” Meaning, they attempted to con (deceive) me. There is no such word as “con” used as a noun applied to a person. A con man is never referred to as “a con.” Because the editor is not familiar with an expression he is not justified in assuming it to be meaningless, and altering it in accordance with
ill-informed caprice.

Page 21, Line 1
:
“His complexion faded . . .” Original was “was fading.” I meant his complexion
had been
brown and now
was
fading to yellow.

Page 85, Line 22
:
“He put me down a routine.” This is never said. The original was “He put down a routine.” I wrote it like that because that is the way it would be said.

Page 93, Line 5
:
“We'll get to see him any time.” Original was “We are subject to see him at any time.” “Subject to” means liable to. It is an expression much used in New Orleans.
We are liable to
is not synonymous with
we will get to
.

Page 120, last line
:
“And five more that would get it filled.” Original was “and five more would get it filled.” I meant five more pesos. Not doctors. Doctors do not fill scripts in Mexico.

This list is incomplete. I am merely enumerating the most pointless changes. As regards omissions, I consider the omission of
page 150 in the original M.S.
in which I describe my first meeting with Old Ike, to be a definite loss. This is not only my opinion, but is shared by everyone I know who read the original M.S. and the published version.

APPENDIX 4

“
JUNKIE
:
AN APPRECIATION
” (1952)
BY ALLEN GINSBERG

The reader, after a cursory glance at this book, will discover that the author is no ordinary junkie. He seems to have taken pains to disguise the fact that he is also a man with a background that might astonish many of his readers.

Born just before the twenties, of a respectable middle-class family in a large Midwestern city—a family the name of which is a household word in America for the inventions and commercial exploits of its nineteenth-century forebears—he received a good education at a private school where he was known as an aloof, and presumably shy aristocrat with phenomenal scholarly aptitudes and a startling penchant for wildness. His first literary venture was a history of Rome, done (in true 19th-century manner) from common Latin sources, at the age of 15. Having set a record for scholarship at this school, he was sent to Harvard, where he studied English literature. Little is known of his experiences there, except that he was supposed to have kept a weasel on a chain in his rooms, and a portrait of his family house on the walls. When questioned about the latter, his invariable remark, with an offhand gesture of the palm, was “Yes isn't it hideous?” There remains of his undergraduate days only one literary specimen, a 20-page playlet set on a sinking ship in the middle of the Atlantic, with several of his acquaintances cast in varying roles of hysteria, terror, malice, and last-minute turpitude.

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 aroused 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.