Junky (4 page)

The first Ace edition sold 113,170 copies between April and the end of 1953 (96,382 in the United States, 16,578 in Canada, the rest unaccounted for) and earned $1,129.60, but Burroughs never received proper royalty payments and would complain repeatedly that Ace failed to honor its contract. Ginsberg, meanwhile, had another complaint. After a meeting with Wyn in October, he covered all the stalls and bookstores around Times Square, 42nd Street, and Greenwich Village in search of
Junkie
, and found no copies for sale. Since these were, as he later protested to Wyn, the hottest areas for junk and therefore for a book called
Junkie
, it raises the interesting question as to where those one hundred thousand readers of Burroughs' novel came from, who they were, and what they made of it.

Apart from a British reprint by Digit Books in 1957,
Junkie
wasn't published separately—let alone under Burroughs' own name—until the Ace edition of 1964, which they reprinted in 1970 and 1973, while other editions appeared from Olympia Press (1966, reprinted in 1969 and 1972) and Bruce and Watson (1973). It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese, including an Italian edition (titled
La scimmia sulla schiena—Monkey on the Back
) that featured an article on the apomorphine cure which Burroughs asked to be reprinted in the 1964 Ace edition (“the article would lend dignity and purpose to the publication”),
13
but to no avail. In the mid-1970s Burroughs, through his agent Peter Matson and lawyer Eugene Winick, finally took action against Ace Books for breach of contract, presented an overwhelming case, and secured reversion of the rights. This paved the way for the new Penguin edition of 1977, and for the many changes, corrections, and restorations of material carried out by James Grauerholz and authorized by Burroughs.

The differences between
Junky
and the first edition of
Junkie
are extensive but can be given briefly: The title was changed (and the subtitle dropped); the dedication was cut (“To A.L.M.”—a cryptic reference to Adelbert Lewis Marker, the real-life original of Allerton, Lee's object of desire in
Queer
); Carl Solomon's Publisher's Note was replaced with a new introduction by Allen Ginsberg; Ace's chapters were replaced by a continuous text, divided only by spacing; paragraphing was reorganized; the bowdlerizations were undone and a dozen or so original names restored; the editor's notes were deleted; the glossary was relocated to after the narrative; a number of errors were corrected; a number of new errors were introduced (some due to mistakes in the 1973 Ace reprint, the one used as the basis for the Penguin edition); and, finally, various unused parts of Burroughs' original manuscripts were inserted, including the long Rio Grande Valley section. All in all, some 250 deletions, corrections, and additions were made, and in the narrative itself the net result was that when
Junkie
became
Junky
it gained 3,850 words, lost just under a hundred, and in other, more subtle ways, it both looked and read like a different novel.

Junky
(1977) was completely unexpurgated but not “­complete”—in the sense of restoring a single, authoritative manuscript—since, properly speaking, no such object ever existed. The use of manuscripts is always a matter of delicate decisions (you can draw up principles, but have to apply them flexibly) and of chance factors (unlike a jigsaw puzzle, you can never say there aren't more small pieces still to discover), as well as of interpretation (finding more evidence doesn't always resolve ambiguities). Apart from making just over a hundred small corrections or changes, this present edition adds to
Junky
approximately the same amount of new material (around four thousand words) as
Junky
added to
Junkie
, but the way it does so is, and had to be, quite different.

This edition of
Junky
takes advantage of important new manuscript discoveries, and a better understanding of old ones: the middle half of the July 1952 manuscript, the whole chapter on Wilhelm Reich, Burroughs' original introduction and draft glossary, the
Queer
manuscripts—these and other fragments were all unavailable or presumed lost in 1977. On the other hand, the imprimatur of Burroughs himself is no longer available. This is one reason I have gone into the details, to make the process of change between editions as visible as possible, and why, where the authority is uncertain or the impact questionable, I have intervened cautiously. Despite the great interest of almost all of it, around three-quarters of the new material has not been inserted into the text. Over five hundred words from the manuscripts of
Junky
and
Queer
have been given in notes, and the bulk of it, starting with the most important material, has been put into a short section of appendices.

Appendix 1
, the long-lost Chapter 28 (found in the Ginsberg Collection at Stanford University), is so significant that it is tempting to think it should have been restored to
Junky
. It is certainly more revealing than the Valley section that immediately preceded it in the manuscript, and that Burroughs also decided to cut. But it is not just a question of disregarding the author's past unambiguous decision. (“Reich will be deleted bag and baggage,” he told Ginsberg in May 1951; “I do not feel that the part about Reich and the philosophical sections belong there cluttering up the narrative,” he repeated in April 1952.) It is also a question of the effect that restoring this material would have on everything else around it.

Although it suspends the narrative, and the prose here is oddly wooden, lacking the deceptive fluency and rhythm elsewhere, the real reason Burroughs wanted it cut is surely because it cast the rest of the novel in an entirely different light. Suddenly Burroughs breaks into his
own
voice, as if relieved to escape the constraint of his narrator's, and the person that emerges is a speculative philosopher, a
theorist
of addiction. It is impossible to imagine William Lee reading Reich's
The Cancer Biopathy
(as Burroughs did in June 1949) or building an orgone accumulator (as he did that November), but the effect of this section is to draw attention to the presence of similar material scattered throughout the novel that is otherwise quite easily overlooked. It also reveals something else about Burroughs. Reich was once one of Europe's leading psychoanalytical thinkers, but in postwar America he came to be regarded as a science crank and a medical charlatan. Some of Burroughs' speculations about addiction have turned out to be extraordinarily prescient, literally prophetic, but others show him up as an amateur on his soapbox, a crackpot eccentric; talking about “orgones,” Burroughs admits here that he might be taken “for a lunatic.” So there were several reasons why Reich was cut, “bag and baggage.”

Burroughs' original introduction (also from the Ginsberg Collection at Stanford) has much in common with Chapter 28, and it's no coincidence that he decided to revise it in April 1952, the same time he reconfirmed Reich was to be cut. Burroughs recognized that with constant revisions his novel had changed and, while a few pieces of Chapter 28 survived in the new autobiographical Prologue he was asked to write, none of this original introduction did. Again, it is a highly revealing text, speculating about the endocrine balance of addicts, promoting the value of antihistamine treatments (as a wonder drug, the clear forerunner of apomorphine for Burroughs), and making absolutely explicit his determination to go beyond the misinformation of prevailing myths.

Burroughs' letter to A. A. Wyn (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University), which was written some time in 1959, but possibly never mailed, is included here for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a warrant for correcting several unauthorized changes made to Burroughs' novel by Ace Books, changes that are themselves given as representative instances, only “the more flagrant mutilations” of his manuscript. Secondly, it shows Burroughs' attention to detail, concerning not just accurate idiomatic usage, but the novel as a whole: “I spent a year working on this manuscript. I checked over every word many times.” This could be read as a corrective to those who assume Burroughs tossed off his writing carelessly. But to be more exact, it suggests that, whereas for
Naked Lunch
—first published in 1959—and his early cut-up texts, he
did
embrace accidents and overlook what other authors would call mistakes, this did not apply to his first novel.

Appendix 4
, Ginsberg's “Appreciation” from April 1952 (previously published in
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995
)
, is no less interesting for being full of factual errors about Burroughs' life. In fact, the contrast it makes with the Prologue by Burroughs that Ace did publish is intriguing, especially if, as the internal evidence suggests, Burroughs modeled his own autobiographical sketch on Ginsberg's draft. This is true for many local details: like Ginsberg, Burroughs would mention Gide and Baudelaire among his reading, but not Cocteau's
Opium
(for reasons I suggested above) or W. B. Yeats'
A Vision
(a work of philosophy too recondite and eccentric); Burroughs would keep the finger-cutting incident, but not the shooting of Joan; and the writing of his first mature attempt at fiction, “Twilight's Last Gleaming” (described by Ginsberg as a “20-page playlet”), would also be left out, along with any suggestion of a literary background to
Junky
. Equally, this piece is interesting for showing Ginsberg's immediate grasp that Burroughs had written “an important document”; “an archive of the underground.” On the other hand, it also shows how bound Ginsberg was, or felt he had to be, by the language of moral judgment (speaking of “subterranean vices” when he meant homosexuality) that characterized the early 1950s.

One final point is worth noting. This only hints at the efforts Ginsberg made to promote Burroughs' novel, at a time when few were willing. Planning to have it appear under the names of Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes (both already recognized as Beat Generation figures), Ginsberg even wrote a gossip column piece to coincide with publication, intended for David Dempsey in
The New York Times
—only to have Kerouac angrily refuse to lend his name to it (either out of fear of guilt-by-association with narcotics, or because of his on-off literary rivalry with Holmes). Ginsberg's tireless support for
Junky
cannot be overstated.

The last three appendices are reprinted here to complete the publishing record, since each appeared as an introductory text to the three main previous editions. The first of Carl Solomon's two pieces, an anonymous Publisher's Note that preceded the first edition of
Junkie
, is the more revealing of the two and of clear historical interest. Ginsberg's introduction to the 1977 Penguin edition accurately describes Solomon's involvement in the Ace edition, just one part of its very instructive and still valuable narrative of events. The account is not entirely reliable, however. Ginsberg implies, for example, that the Rio Grande Valley section was blue-penciled by Ace, when the evidence shows it was cut by Burroughs. More importantly, his claim that Burroughs wrote
Junky
, in effect,
for
Ginsberg, sending him chapters as part of their long-distance correspondence, is contradicted by all the evidence (a correction that has far-reaching implications within the larger history I have related). The alternative account of how Burroughs began the novel, given by both his biographers, is that when his oldest friend, Kells Elvins, moved to Mexico City in January 1950 he simply encouraged Burroughs to write up like a diary his past experiences as an addict, which, although it's partial and inadequate, is what he probably did.

But it would be wrong to end this introduction to
Junky
with a quibble about Ginsberg's accuracy as an historian of its writing. He was the one who was there, and there when it mattered, making sure Burroughs' novel got published in the first place—and besides, who can ever truly say, “Here are the facts”? This is the peculiar interest of
Junky;
that it began at a point when Burroughs seemed to believe he could say this, and was finished at a time when he knew that he couldn't. If Burroughs never demystified the origins of his writing, this may be because incomplete or inaccurate accounts suited someone with things to hide (which he certainly had), but also because he doubted the value and suspected the power of claims to true knowledge. Even so, the novel itself points to the unaccountable, to that which, like the junkie identity, “escapes exact tabulation” and so remains irresistibly elusive, leading us on but always slipping away. “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you”—Burroughs leaves us with a paradoxical key, a perverse secret, a confession perhaps, and most definitely a warning.

Oliver Harris

September 2002