Review: “William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers” (1 of 2)

I recently watched the documentary William A. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sewers.  I suppose I can call it a documentary, although it contained no commentary; I suppose that is one form of documentary.

It wasn’t particularly unified either.  Instead, it was a collection of short clips, about thirteen as I recall, that ran a total of about fifty-one minutes.  Some of the clips were of Burroughs reading from his writings.  Others were interviews conducted by Jurgen Ploog.  Still others were clips of experimental films featuring Burroughs or his texts.

I find Burroughs more and more interesting, although I expect this phenomenon to flip without warning into boredom.  Although Burroughs interests, he also gently repulses.  I can’t imagine being his friend.  My ultimate reaction is that he was a very odd man.

I first learned of him while reading Jack Kerouac.  Burroughs was the model for the character Old Bull Lee in On The Road.  His persona there was certainly strange.  Kerouac in fact refers to the relationship between Burroughs and his wife “one of the strangest.”  During Kerouac’s visit to Burroughs' house near New Orleans, he observes him and his wife Joan drinking and pretty much taking every drug in the book.  Burroughs gets up in the morning, takes a fix, is lively for awhile, takes another fix, is lively for awhile…..etc.  A few years after the events recounted in On The Road, Burroughs would accidentally kill Joan while trying to shoot a glass off the top of her head a la William Tell.  He later was forced to the “appalling conclusion” that this event drove him to become a writer.  Over the following decades, he became known for novels like Junkie, Queer, and Naked Lunch.  Some of these were written using the “cut-up” method of writing something and then slicing pages in half and rearranging the sequence of half-pages.  

Given the variety and amount of substances that Burroughs took into his system, it is perhaps a miracle that he produced any writing at all.  I haven’t read much of it—I certainly haven’t read Naked Lunch (although I read a few pages from time to time).  Consequently, I can’t judge the coherence of the work.  I know that some people regard Naked Lunch as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.  About all I really know of Burroughs' work is the poem “A Thanksgiving Prayer, November 28, 1986,” which is, if nothing else, memorable.  It is by no means clear that Burroughs is expressing thanks; disgust seems closer to the truth.

And yet, in the mythic Beat trio of Jack Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg/William S. Burroughs, Burroughs seems the ultra-conservative.  Kerouac said that Burroughs harbored a nostalgia for the country as it was around 1910.  He nearly always appeared in a suit and tie.  There is just this little problem of his drug habits and some nasty things he said about his country—he was a cantankerous curmudgeon.  And he outlived both Kerouac and Ginsberg, though older than both.