Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
(edited by James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg)

Review is written and copyrighted by Adrien Begrand.

Outstanding. Simply outstanding. This is THE definitive Burroughs book...a great starting point for new readers, and an essential career overview for longtime readers.

It's all there: the Junky-era reportage writing, the Tangiers Word Hoard, the Cut-Up Trilogy, the collaborations with Brion Gysin, the Red Night Trilogy, and countless other routines, memoirs, experiments, and Burroughs' own inimitable philosophy.

Burroughs' early years as a writer are given a token overview, but aren't explored too deeply, and deservedly so. What is there isn't his best writing, but fascinating in an historical context: his teenage-penned "Personal Magnetism" shows his trademark sense of humor starting to peek through his writing; "Twilight's Last Gleamings", his famous collaboration with buddy Kells Elvins, is the first example of Burroughs' brilliant satirical imagination. One of the most highly-anticipated parts of Word Virus was the chapter excerpted from "And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks", an early collaboration with Jack Kerouac, where they both (in alternating chapters) embellished the story of the famous David Kammerer murder. The chapter that is included (just the one, written by Burroughs) is in actuality rather weak, proof why we haven't seen it published yet. But it will be published someday, solely because it's the most notorious author collaboration in the twentieth century.

Junkie, Queer, and Yage Letters are all given a token look-see, the highlights being Burroughs' touching, famous introduction to Queer, where he mourns the loss of his companion Joan (saying it was his mission to write his way out of the darkness created by the shooting incident); and "Roosevelt After The Inauguration", a savagely funny routine from The Yage Letters which describes, in the way only Burroughs can describe, the first few days of a power-mad politician's presidency. The apocalyptic, horrific, hilarious story marks a real turning-point in Burroughs' writing. However, the real turning point is in the section that follows.

The 'Interzone' section is the real stuff, the start of the journey into Burroughs' apocalyptic vision. It starts off with excerpts from the book Interzone, including the section "Word". In it Burroughs finally lets go, attempting for the first time a sream-of-consciousness style, writing anything that pops into his head. He accurately describes his experience as finally letting loose an enema that had been inside him for forty-odd years. He let the shit fly, and the world (and the Word) was all the better for it.

The Naked Lunch excerpts do the book justice, with the best parts included: the famous opening scenes, Dr. Benway, the immortal "Atrophied Preface", and, of course, the talking asshole.

The cut-up novels of the mid-sixties, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express are next, and the trilogy benefits from being in excerpted form. Upon reading the section it's clear that The Soft Machine is the best book of the three, with "The Mayan Caper" ranking among Burroughs' all-time best pieces. The Ticket That Exploded, when read in full, is an alternately fascinating and frustrating book, where Burroughs lets the cut-ups and fold-ins nearly spiral out of control, but the excerpts provided highlight the best parts of the book, and make his 'language as a virus' theory more clear and comprehensible. The Nova Express excerpts also keep things a bit more focused, instead of going into cut-up overkill. Like I've said in the past, a little of the cut-ups goes a long, long way, and Word Virus proves it.

The section 'Inspector Lee: Nova Heat' starts off well, featuring small articles explaining Burroughs' cut-up theory, but rapidly loses momentum in the pieces "Who Is The Third That Walks Beside You" and "Last Post Danger Ahead". The selections from The Third Mind, Burroughs' collaboration with Gysin, are at first interesting, but quickly bog down in far too much cut-up experimentation. It's a stultifying read, and what memorable parts there are hard to find again amid the mess of random phrases. The pieces from The Job are a bit too long, nearly thirty pages devoted to Burroughs' rambling on and on about tape splicing, L. Ron Hubbard's e-meters, and other subjects. The Job was never a book I really totally got into in the past, and I still found it a bit boring.

The last half of the section, however, redeems the meandering of the previous selections. "Remembering Jack Kerouac" is a beautiful tribute to Burroughs' good friend, and there's a pang of regret there, for the two didn't see eye to eye in Jack's later years. "When Did I Stop Wanting To Be President?" is another classic hilarious routine, describing Burroughs' demented fantasy of being named Commissioner of Sewers for the City of St. Louis. "The Limits Of Control", "Immortality", and "The Johnson Family", all from The Adding Machine, are outstanding as well.

Two of Burroughs' best books, The Wild Boys and Exterminator!, are excerpted in the next section. The Wild Boys is given only twenty pages, and is missing "The Green Nun", one of my favorite parts. What is there is great, though. Several stories from Exterminator!, such as "The Discipline of DE", "What Washington? What Orders?", and the classic "The Priest, They Called Him", pay fitting tribute to one of Burroughs' most underrated books.

The Red Night Trilogy is next, and it is obvious that editors James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (and William himself) wanted to stress the importance of the three books: Cities Of The Red Night, The Place Of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. The section is given a whopping one hundred-or-so pages, and deservedly so. Along with Naked Lunch and Soft Machine, the Red Night Trilogy marks the high point of Burroughs' writing. He introduces several memorable characters like Clem Snide, Audrey Carsons, Joe the Dead, Neferti, and Burroughs' own old-age pseudonym William Seward Hall. Starting in 'Cities', a send-up of old children's pirate novels, Burroughs makes the journey towards death, redemption, and eventual immortality, which continues through 'Dead Roads' (in Old-Western form), and culminates in the Egyptian-inspired Western Lands, where William seems to see the writing on the wall, saying he "had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words." He realizes that his pilgrimage will be an ongoing one, and seems to accept the end of his journey as a writer. After reading the Red Night section, I had a better understanding of the entire trilogy than when I first read it, and it's a fitting, monumental climax to the Reader.

The 'Later Work' section features small excerpts from The Cat Inside and My Education: A Book Of Dreams, and beautifully shows Burroughs' tender side, especially in his loving ode to his cats. I remember Patricia Elliott telling us on the beat-l mailing list two years ago that William was very broken up about the death of his favorite cat, and James Grauerholz mentions the same thing. With all of Burroughs' best friends dead, the death of his cat Fletch was the clincher, and he never totally recovered.

I would have liked to have seen excerpts from such books as Port Of Saints, Ah Pook Is Here, Ghost Of Chance, Blade Runner, and Last Words Of Dutch Schultz, but, as it is, the book is overflowing with essential material. It is noted in the book that all the pieces which were included met with Burroughs' approval, shortly before he died, so there is consolation in the fact that this was the book that Burroughs himself wanted to put out.

Throughout Word Virus are biographical chapters written by Grauerholz, and the information he gives is valuable, both in the overview of Burroughs' long life and career and the intimate details of his final years. What are missing from the early biographical chapters are more critiques of Burroughs' early work (Grauerholz does go into the themes of the Red Night Trilogy); new readers could benefit from a more in-depth critical view of the more difficult cut-up pieces. However, that's just nitpicking, the chapters by Grauerholz are excellent.

There is a critical essay by Ann Douglas, which is very good as well as helpful, but perhaps one more opinion by another Burroughs scholar might have helped as well.

Word Virus is an exhilarating, grotesque, engrossing, stupefying, hilarious, sensitive, and (a small part) frustrating book. Frustrating in a good way, for it is the best writers who dare to challenge us and the way we read, interpret signals, absorb media, live our lives, and face our mortality.

William Burroughs lived a life of a dozen people, journeying from college intellectual to hipster to junky to hard-boiled reporter to avant-garde artist to visionary to, finally, wise old sage. Like his compatriots Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan, Burroughs was, during all his incarnations, at heart, a seeker, and his last written words show a moment of clarity at the end of a tempestuous life (which must be seen firsthand in the Best of WSB CD box set liner notes):

"Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE."