It’s become a tradition of mine during our club reading weeks to not only pull books from the mountainous TBR, but also try to read a variety of different kinds of work. So far this week I’ve focused on classic crime and highlighted some previous reads from 1976. Today is the turn of an author I read a lot of in my youth but who’s only featured a little on the Ramblings – William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs is best known as one of the triumvirate of American Beat authors, along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A scion of the wealthy Burroughs adding machine family, he was a writer, visual artist and drug addict who’s now regarded as a major postmodern author. His works are often complex, and he helped popularise the cut-up technique which went on to be widely used, most notably by David Bowie. Burroughs was a controversial figure for many reasons: his sexuality, his drugs use, his killing of his wife in a shooting accident, and the extreme imagery in his writing. Yet as I commented on my review of his Penguin Modern, he can be “readable, entertaining, often funny and sometimes moving”. I haven’t read any of his heavier titles for decades, but I thought I would check to see if there were any of his writings available from 1976, and indeed there were.

The seventies for Burroughs were a strange time; hunkered down in his New York dwelling, ‘The Bunker’, he produced a number of experimental pieces, and I found two of these from 1976 hidden away in a collection I have called “The Burroughs File”. The works are “The Retreat Diaries” and “Cobble Stone Gardens” and so I figured the #1976Club would be a good time to reacquaint myself with Burroughs in provocative mode…

If I’m truly honest, these are not Burroughs at his easiest. “Retreat…” draws on a dream diary kept by the author when on a Buddhist retreat. By neccessity it’s a fragmentary work, filled with the strangeness and incoherence of half-remembered images that haunt the mind when asleep. Often beautiful sentences and phrases jump out, but there’s no single coherent narrative (although it *is* clear that Burroughs doesn’t agree that a Buddhist can make a good novelist, as he obviously intends to follow his muse whenever it appears, regardless of the strictures of the retreat!) In constrat, “Cobble Stone Gardens” (which is dedicated to the memory of the author’s parents) is much closer to Burrough’s more challenging works. Often scatalogical, full of startling and sexual imagery, it’s not for the faint hearted; yet, as with his other writings, there’ll be a sudden sentence or phrase which will jump out at you and stick in the mind. Part of the book seems to be fragmentary memories of his childhood, and I believe the original edition came with some very odd photographic illustrations…

Burroughs in 1983 – Chuck Patch [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D

Both of these pieces originally appeared in small publications, and were gathered with a number of others in “The Burroughs File”, along with some reproductions of scrapbook entries plus commentary by James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ companion and amanuensis. The whole collection is worthy of exploration, giving a fascinating insight into the mind of a true maverick, a one-off writer who can be challenging and rewarding to read. His influence is wider than you might expect (as my review of “Mentored by A Madman” by Andrew Lees makes clear); and if you like a little challenge in your reading I can recommend him (although this is not necessarily the best place to begin). I’m really glad that 1976 has taken me in the direction of reading some Burroughs – a reminder of my reading roots and also of the need to not always take the easy reading option!