Perhaps d isorientation is the wrong word, actually, because Burroughs always knew where he was, knew himself to be a citizen-perhaps one of the few conscious citizens, at the time-of a floating, borderless nation-state whose shrines hovered invisibly over pharmacies and late-night diners and whose laws were enacted in rented rooms, in low company, with super-heavy eyelids.

Laid out for us in Barry Miles’s enormous new biography, Call Me Burroughs, is the stringent program of dependency, disorientation, and artistic dereliction by which Burroughs brought himself, in 1959, at the age of 45, to the authorial climax of The Naked Lunch. Amass, excise, compress! Or to put it in Lear’s terms: “Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as fast as possible.” The instructions, roughly speaking, are these: flit around disreputably between Tangier, Copenhagen, Paris, and London, with coat-hanger shoulders and a love-starved face irradiate yourself with drugs consort with boy prostitutes and petty thieves when you write, spew, expelling without stint the untreated matter, comical and terrible, of your low-life dream life (plot, character, structure-the hell with all that) enlist a couple of your loopiest friends to help you organize the resulting mess do this for years, drifting chemical years, an endless process, until a publisher of erotica and the avant-garde tells you he wants a viable manuscript in two weeks, at which point you and your friends go into furious sleepless sweatshop mode. Burroughs, malingering and malefacting through the mid-20th century, you follow a procedure that resembles something from the nonsense kitchen of the poet Edward Lear, one of his recipes for Gosky Patties or Crumbobblious Cutlets. How do you write a masterpiece? It’s inside you, you know it’s inside you: How do you get it out? Well, if you’re William S.

Junky william burroughs