Writing on the Wall (6 page)

These imprints of the Glass collective personality are preserved as though they were Veronica’s veil in a relic case of well-wrought prose. And the eerie thing is, speaking of Veronica’s veil—a popular subject for those paintings in which Christ’s eyes are supposed to follow the spectator with a doubtless reproachful gaze—the reader has the sensation in this latest work of Salinger that the author is sadly watching him or listening to him read. That is, the ordinary relation is reversed, and instead of the reader reading Salinger, Salinger, that Man of Sorrows, is reading the reader.

At the same time, this quasi-religious volume is full of Broadway humor. The Glass family is like a Jewish family in a radio serial. Everyone is a “character.” Mr. Glass with his tangerine is a character; Mrs. Glass in her hairnet and commodious wrapper with her cups of chicken broth is a character. The shower curtain, scarlet nylon with a design of canary-yellow sharps, clefs, and flats, is a character; the teeming medicine cabinet is a character. Every phonograph, every chair is a character. The family relationship, rough, genial, insulting, is a character.

In short, every single object possessed by the Glass communal ego is bent on lovably expressing the Glass personality—eccentric, homey, goodhearted. Not unlike
Abie’s Irish Rose.
And the family is its own best audience. Like Hemingway stooges, they have the disturbing faculty of laughing delightedly or smiling discreetly at each other’s jokes. Again a closed circuit: the Glass family is the Fat Lady, who is Jesus. The mirrored Glass medicine cabinet is Jesus, and Seymour is his prophet.

Yet below this self-loving barbershop harmony a chord of terror is struck from time to time, like a judgment. Seymour’s suicide suggests that Salinger guesses intermittently or fears intermittently that there may be something wrong somewhere. Why did he kill himself? Because he had married a phony, whom he worshiped for her “simplicity, her terrible honesty”? Or because he was so happy and the Fat Lady’s world was so wonderful?

Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?

October, 1962

Burroughs’
Naked Lunch

L
AST SUMMER AT THE
International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, I said I thought the national novel, like the nation-state, was dying and that a new kind of novel, based on statelessness, was beginning to be written. This novel had a high, aerial point of view and a plot of perpetual motion. Two experiences, that of exile and that of jet-propelled mass tourism, provided the subject matter for a new kind of story. There is no novel, yet, that I know of, about mass tourism, but somebody will certainly write it. Of the novel based on statelessness, I gave as examples William Burroughs’
The Naked Lunch,
Vladimir Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
and
Lolita.
Burroughs, I explained, is not literally a political exile, but the drug addicts he describes are continually on the move, and life in the United States, with its present narcotics laws, is untenable for the addict if he does not want to spend it in jail (in the same way, the confirmed homosexual is a chronic refugee, ordered to move on by the Venetian police, the Capri police, the mayor of Provincetown, the mayor of Nantucket). Had I read it at the time, I might have added Günter Grass’s
The Tin Drum
to the list: here the point of view, instead of being high, is very low—that of a dwarf; the hero and narrator is a displaced person, born in the Free City of Danzig, of a Polish mother (who is not really a Pole but a member of a minority within Poland) and an uncertain father, who may be a German grocer or a Polish postal employee. In any case, I said that in thinking over the novels of the last few years, I was struck by the fact that the only ones that had not simply given me pleasure but interested me had been those of Burroughs and Nabokov. The others, even when well done (Compton-Burnett), seemed almost regional.

This statement, to judge by the British press, was a shot heard round the world. I still pick up its reverberations in Paris and read about them in the American press. I am quoted as saying that
The Naked Lunch
is the most important novel of the age, of the epoch, of the century. The only truthful report of what I said about Burroughs was given by Stephen Spender in
Encounter,
October 1962. But nobody seems to have paid attention to Spender any more than anyone paid attention to what I said on the spot. When I chided Malcolm Muggeridge in person with having terribly misquoted me in the
New Statesman,
he appeared to think that there was not much difference between saying that a book was one of two or three that had interested you in the last few years and saying that it was one of the “outstanding novels of the age.” According to me, the age is still Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Faulkner, to mention only the “big names,” but to others evidently the age is shrinking to the length of a publishing season, just as a literary speaker is turned into a publisher’s tout. The result, of course, is a disparagement of Burroughs, because if
The Naked Lunch
is proclaimed as the masterpiece of the century, then it is easily found wanting. Indeed, I wonder whether the inflation of my remarks was not at bottom malicious; it is not usually those who admire Burroughs who come up to me at parties to announce: “I
read
what you said at Edinburgh.” This is true, I think, of all such publicity; it is malicious in effect whatever the intention and permits the reader to dismiss works of art and public figures as “not what they are cracked up to be.” A similar thing happened with
Dr. Zhivago,
a wonderful book, which attracted much hatred and venom because it was not Tolstoy. Very few critics said it was Tolstoyan, but the impression got around that they had. Actually, as I recall, the critics who mentioned Tolstoy in connection with Pasternak were those bent on destroying Pasternak’s book.

As for me, I was left in an uncomfortable situation. I did not want to write to the editors of British newspapers and magazines, denying that I had said whatever incontinent thing they had quoted me as saying. This would have been ungracious to Burroughs, who was the innocent party in the affair and who must have felt more and more like the groom in a shotgun literary wedding, seeing my name yoked with his as it were indissolubly. And the monstrousness of the union, doubtless, was what kept the story hot. In the end, it became clear to me that the only way I could put an end to this embarrassment was by writing at length what I thought about
The Naked Lunch
—something I was reluctant to do because I was busy finishing a book of my own and reluctant, also, because the whole thing had assumed the proportions of a
cause célèbre
and I felt like a witness called to the stand and obliged to tell the truth and nothing but the truth under oath. This is not a normal critical position. Of course the critic normally tries to be truthful, but he does not feel that his review is some sort of pay-off or eternal reckoning, that the eye of God or the world press is staring into his heart as he writes. Now that I have written the present review, I am glad, as always happens, to have made a clean breast of it. This is what I think about Burroughs.

“You can cut into
The Naked Lunch
at any intersection point,” says Burroughs, suiting the action to the word, in “an atrophied preface” he appends as a tailpiece. His book, he means, is like a neighborhood movie with continuous showings that you can drop into whenever you please—you don’t have to wait for the beginning of the feature picture. Or like a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer. He is fond of the word “mosaic,” especially in its scientific sense of a plant-mottling caused by a virus, and his Muse (see etymology of “mosaic”) is interested in organic processes of multiplication and duplication. The literary notion of time as simultaneous, a montage, is not original with Burroughs; what is original is the scientific bent he gives it and a view of the world that combines biochemistry, anthropology, and politics. It is as though
Finnegans Wake
were cut loose from history and adapted for a Cinerama circus titled “One World.”
The Naked Lunch
has no use for history, which is all “ancient history”—sloughed-off skin; from its planetary perspective, there are only geography and customs. Seen in terms of space, history shrivels into a mere wrinkling or furrowing of the surface as in an aerial relief-map or one of those pieced-together aerial photographs known in the trade as (again) mosaics. The oldest memory in
The Naked Lunch
is of jacking-off in boyhood latrines, a memory recaptured through pederasty. This must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction—the others are entertainment.

The action of
The Naked Lunch
takes place in the consciousness of One Man, William Lee, who is taking a drug cure. The principal characters, besides Lee, are his friend, Bill Gains (who seems momentarily to turn into a woman called Jane); various members of the Narcotic Squad, especially one Bradley the Buyer; Dr. Benway, a charlatan medico who is treating Lee; two vaudevillians, Clem and Jody; A. J., a carnival con man, the last of the Big Spenders; a sailor; an Arab called Ahmed; an archetypal Southern druggist, Doc Parker (“a man don’t have no secrets from God and his druggist”); and various boys with whining voices. Among the minor characters are a number of automobiles, each with its specific complaint, like the oil-burning Ford V-8; a film executive; the Party Leader; the Vigilante; John and Mary, the sex acrobats; and a puzzled American housewife who is heard complaining because the Mixmaster keeps trying to climb up under her dress. The scene shifts about, from New York to Chicago to St. Louis to New Orleans to Mexico to Malmö, Tangier, Venice, and the human identities shift about too, for all these modern places and modern individuals, (if that is the right word) have interchangeable parts. Burroughs is fond too of the word “ectoplasm,” and the beings that surround Lee, particularly the inimical ones, seem ectoplasmic phantoms projected on the wide screen of his consciousness from a mass séance. But the haunting is less visual than auditory. These “characters,” in the colloquial sense, are ventriloquial voices produced, as it were, against the will of the ventriloquist, who has become their dummy. Passages of dialogue and description keep recurring in different contexts with slight variations, as though they possessed ubiquity.

The best comparison for the book, with its aerial sex acts performed on a high trapeze, its con men and barkers, its arena-like form, is in fact with a circus. A circus travels but it is always the same, and this is Burroughs’ sardonic image of modern life. The Barnum of the show is the mass-manipulator, who appears in a series of disguises.
Control,
as Burroughs says, underlining it,
can never be a means to anything but more control—like drugs,
and the vicious circle of addiction is re-enacted, worldwide, with sideshows in the political and “social” sphere—the “social” here has vanished, except in quotation marks, like the historical, for everything has become automatized. Everyone is an addict of one kind or another, as people indeed are wont to say of themselves, complacently: “I’m a crossword puzzle addict, a hi-fi addict,” etc. The South is addicted to lynching and nigger-hating, and the Southern folk-custom of burning a Negro recurs throughout the book as a sort of Fourth-of-July carnival with fireworks. Circuses, with their cages of wild animals, are also dangerous, like Burroughs’ human circus; an accident may occur, as when the electronic brain in Dr. Benway’s laboratory goes on the rampage, and the freaks escape to mingle with the controlled citizens of Freeland in a general riot, or in the scene where the hogs are let loose in the gourmet restaurant.

On a level usually thought to be “harmless,” addiction to platitudes and commonplaces is global. To Burroughs’ ear, the Bore, lurking in the hotel lobby, is literally deadly (“‘You look to me like a man of intelligence.’ Always ominous opening words, my boy!”). The same for Doc Parker with his captive customer in the back room of his pharmacy (“...so long as you got a legitimate condition and an RX from a certified bona feedy M.D., I’m honored to serve you”), the professor in the classroom (“Hehe hehe he”), the attorney in court (“Hehe hehe he,” likewise). The complacent sound of snickering laughter is an alarm signal, like the suave bell-tones of the psychiatrist and the emphatic drone of the Party Leader (“You see men and women.
Ordinary
men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks. Leading their ordinary lives. That’s what we need...”).

Cut to ordinary men and women, going about their ordinary everyday tasks. The whine of the put-upon boy hustler: “All kinda awful sex acts.” “Why cancha just get physical like a human?” “So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax.” “You think I am innarested to hear about your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.” “But he comes to a climax and turns into some kinda awful crab.” This aggrieved tone merges with the malingering sighs of the American housewife, opening a box of Lux: “I got the most awful cold, and my intestines is all constipated.” And the clarion of the Salesman: “When the Priority numbers are called up yonder I’ll be there.” These average folks are addicts of the science page of the Sunday supplements; they like to talk about their diseases and about vile practices that paralyze the practitioner from the waist down or about a worm that gets into your kidney and grows to enormous size or about the “horrible” result of marijuana addiction—it makes you turn black and your legs drop off. The superstitious scientific vocabulary is diffused from the laboratory and the mental hospital into the general population. Overheard at a lynching: “Don’t crowd too close, boys. His intestines is subject to explode in the fire.” The same diffusion of culture takes place with modern physics. A lieutenant to his general: “But chief, can’t we get them started and they imitate each other like a chained reaction?”