Last Words

Last Words
William Burroughs

Grauerholz Grauerholz

The journal of the last months of William Burroughs’ life.20 November 1996: ‘Well, it’s time for my Ovaltine and a long good night.’Burroughs died in 1997, after a lifetime of notoriety. The granddaddy of the Beats, druggy, dangerous and bleak, author of thirteen controversial, shocking novels.In his final years, he was writing only in his journals. The last nine months of his diaries are here in ‘Last Words’, and they form a complex, rarely seen, personal portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with ageing and death. Although well into his eighties, the man we see is nevertheless the same old Burroughs, still riling against the Establishment, still contemptuous of the state of the human race, still shocking, bleak and very funny. The diaries are full of anecdotes and memories, entries on the joys of housekeeping, dealing with doctors, shooting a video with U2, musings on his beloved cats, drug-taking and government cover-ups.These journals contain some of the most brutally personal prose Burroughs has ever written. The deaths of his friends, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, provide a window onto the preparations he was making for his own death – a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss.

Last Words

The Final Journals of William Burroughs

Edited and with an Introduction by James Grauerholz

Contents

Title Page

Introduction: His Education

Last Words

Notes for Last Words Aug. 31, 1999

Acknowledgments

About the Author

From the Reviews of Last Words

Other Books by William Burroughs

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction: His Education

At the end of his life William Burroughs was living in Lawrence, Kansas, in a modest two-bedroom cottage built in 1929 from a Sears & Roebuck house kit on Learnard Avenue, a quiet residential street in an old part of town. His front porch was obscured from the roadway by a profusion of honeysuckle, trumpet vine and redbud, white cedar and hackberry trees, and to the south a wide creek ran through branches and poison ivy to a 1930s-era concrete culvert bridge. The house was painted brick red with white trim, its roof a simple full gable front to back. The square pillars supporting his porch had tilted slightly outward over the years, giving the front aspect a warped perspective. A white trellis on the south side of the porch was covered with red rose blooms every summer.

On the porch by Burroughs’s front door there was almost always a cat sprawled out, sometimes two or three. A slab of soft marble lying by the door (an engraving sample from a funerary monument company) read BUR-ROSE. Behind the storm door the entry door was black, with a sticker on it to alert emergency authorities that there were cats inside to be saved. Through six beveled crystal panes in the upper door a distorted view of the interior showed a front room joining a dining area, with the tiny, brightly lit kitchen behind. A walnut buffet just inside the door was covered with an array of curios and talismans (a scorpion in Lucite, a curving kris, a jointed wooden snake); next to that, a cane stand was filled with a dozen walking sticks, clubs and canes with strange, carved handles. And an always-burning lamp on the small dining table might illuminate William Burroughs, hunched over in his four-wheeled “post-operative” chair, squinting at a paperback or scribbling in a bound journal book.

This is the view that greeted many an expectant visitor, for in the sixteen years after Burroughs moved to Lawrence at age sixty-seven he received countless pilgrims to his Midwestern Alamout—travelers from all over, mostly young people, seeking a brief personal contact with the author of Naked Lunch. His little house was the center of a continual round of social activity, with frequent visits by his many Lawrence friends and lively dinner company assured every evening. The daily shopping, cooking, and cleanup were handled by a rotating cast of regular companions, who often helped Burroughs host dinners for the many old friends who journeyed to Lawrence to spend time with him.

The most frequent visitors over the years were the poets John Giorno and Allen Ginsberg. After the “River City Reunion” in Lawrence in 1987—a weeklong gathering of poets and performers in William’s honor—Allen began to make annual visits, on his way to or from Naropa Institute’s summer writing program in Boulder, Colorado. When he was in Kansas Ginsberg stayed with Burroughs, the ex-lovers of years past now become two little old men sitting at the breakfast table in their bathrobes, arguing good-naturedly about nutrition and politics. Both were members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, among other honors, but in William’s modest “home on the range,” far from the glare of celebrity, they renewed and continued a relationship that had begun during World War II.

In July 1996, at the age of eighty-two, Burroughs was honored with “Ports of Entry,” a visual overview of his career at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curated by Robert Sobieszek. Ginsberg was with him for the opening and other festivities, and when the retrospective moved to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in early November of that year, he came to Kansas to take part in a symposium at the Kansas Union. Ginsberg spoke lovingly of his old friend to a full house, and William climbed to the stage for an embrace that was roundly cheered. Two days later Allen left for New York. Although Allen had been ill with diabetes and heart trouble for some time, there was no obvious reason to expect that this would be their last farewell.

William’s health was still fairly good; it had been five years since his triple bypass operation, and while his energy reserves were clearly ebbing, his spirits were good. He was restless to be writing and keeping busy, and he said he was trying to reach a new synthesis of writing and painting, but without feeling that he had succeeded. Between diminished stamina and the arthritis in his hands, William had become unable to type more than a few lines. He often jotted down his thoughts—and, as always, his dreams—on index cards, but it was impossible to keep track of these or put them in any order. After our colleague Jim McCrary and I tried in vain to find a new typewriter that William could use, the idea arose to furnish him with bound blank books, in place of the index-card system.

It was in mid-November 1996 that Burroughs began to write the journals that are presented in this book. The first entry records the death of his cat, Calico Jane. In 260 days from November 14, 1996, to August 1, 1997, he made 168 entries. These writings include successive drafts of several short routines; remarks on books he was reading or had read long ago, and scenes suggested by them; lists of favorite lines from a lifetime of reading and listening; fits of impotent rage at man’s stupidity; day-to-day commentary; the heartbreak of the deaths of his beloved cats; and the contemplation of his own mortality. As late as these last nine months of his life, Burroughs was still compelled to do imaginary battle with his primordial foes: “Drug Warriors,” school-stupid FBI men, cat-haters, humans destroying the earth’s species in their arrogance: “When whales and seals and elephants weep, I cannot suppress the deadly Sin of Anger.”

The significance of William’s empathy with animals cannot be overstated. “My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance,” he wrote in notes for The Cat Inside, begun in 1982 at “the Stone House” south of Lawrence. As related in that short book, he was befriended soon after his arrival in Lawrence by three or four stray cats. When he moved into town to Learnard Avenue he brought along his favorite: Ruski, a Russian Blue. William had not always been a cat-lover, far from it; although he shuddered to remember it, he had several times been cruel to cats in Texas and Mexico. But now he thought often of the many people in his life who had died, and the cats seemed to represent them for him.

At his house on Learnard Avenue with its deep backyard garden, William took in a longhaired orange female stray whom he named Ginger. She mated with Ruski and produced “the orange litter,” which included Calico Jane. The all-black Fletch was a foundling in downtown Lawrence in 1984, and he quickly became William’s new favorite. Jane bore a litter to Fletch, and William gave the kittens to me and other friends. A male that William called Thomas appeared and disappeared in 1985–86, but another refugee, Mutie, a bulbous orange female tabby, stayed on after mating with Thomas. Her litter was distributed among friends, except for Senshu, the gray tabby female, who spent her life with William and her mother Mutie. After William brought Fletch into the house, the aging Ruski became undomesticable and he was farmed out to friends at a cabin on Lone Star Lake. It was around this time that William realized the folly of his prejudice against neutering his cats, and thereafter the only new addition to the cat family was Spooner, a longhaired gray-and-white male who was very affectionate.

Keeping all these cats in his small home, with cat-doors arranged to allow them to come in and go out at will, created a situation marked by frequent cat-feeding interruptions, continual feline vomiting and squabbling, and a house steeped with the rank smell of cat piss. (William had decided that old Calico was too feeble to make it outside for her evacuations and set up a litter box for her in his living room.) These animals, in their innocent wisdom, became William’s all-day companions, sometimes his trial by distraction, and the objects of his heart’s affection. He fed them compulsively, so that the two who were predisposed to overeating—Fletch and Mutie—eventually became quite rotund. And he showered them with jovial verbal abuse: “Come here you little whore, you little bitch …” But no sooner would he see one of his cats appear than he’d jump up to feed it and pet it. William doted on his cats.

What was William Burroughs’s view of old age? For many years his primary, recurring literary protagonist—“Kim/Audrey”—was a version of himself in puberty and adolescence, but by the time he turned seventy his new work offered a series of middle-aged and elderly protagonists. Beginning in his late fifties with Ah Pook Is Here (1972) and continuing through the trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night (1981), the idea of Death as a mythic antagonist had emerged as a central theme. In his later years Burroughs became preoccupied with the quasi-mystic Shootist gestalt of the Old West, and the elaborate “immortality blueprints” of the ancient Egyptians, with their mummies and their ontology of seven souls—a schema that Burroughs absorbed and adapted to his own literary purposes after reading Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. In a passage from The Place of Dead Roads (1984)—a work-in-progress that was a staple of Burroughs’s many stage performances in the early 1980s—he makes an explicit statement of his ideas about immortality:

Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods. In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way. […] Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for.

In Dead Roads, vacillating between his two personas—the persisting, unbearably radiant and amoral adolescent, Kim, and a new middle-aged figure, Joe the Dead, whose existence through many lifetimes has brought him to a desiccated, morbid condition—Burroughs clings to the viewpoint of Kim, despite the ever-widening gap between Kim’s age and his own:

Don Juan lists three obstacles or stages: Fear … Power … and Old Age.

Kim thought of old men with a shudder: drooling tobacco juice, spending furtive hours in the toilet crooning over their shit …. The only old men that were bearable were evil old men like the Old Man of the Mountain [Hassan i Sabbah] … […]

So Kim splits himself into many parts … He hopes to achieve a breakthrough before he has to face the terrible obstacle of old age …. […]

It is said that Waghdas [the city of enlightenment] is reached by many routes, all of them fraught with hideous perils. Worst of all, Kim thinks, is the risk of being trapped by old age in a soiled idiot body like Somerset Maugham’s. […]

Maugham would cower in a corner whimpering that he was a horrible and evil man.

He was, Kim reflected with the severity of youth, not evil enough to hold himself together …

Kim is killed in a shoot-out at the Boulder Cemetery on the last page of Dead Roads—but not by the other duelist, who is also shot dead, both slain by a mysterious sniper. Near the beginning of The Western Lands (1987), the last book of the Red Night trilogy, the author reveals who has shot them both: Joe the Dead, a shadowy character in Dead Roads whose life was saved by Kim, but only after he was horribly burned and maimed, and who worked for Kim and his gang. Here is Burroughs’s explanation of Joe’s motives and his existential condition:

Joe understood Kim so well that he could afford to dispense with him as a part of himself not useful or relevant at the present time. He understood Kim’s attempt to transcend his physical structure, to which he could never become reconciled, by an icy, inhuman perfection of attitude, painfully maintained and refined to an unbearable pitch. Joe turned to a negation of attitude, a purity of function that could be maintained only by the pressure of deadly purpose. […]

This continual pain is a sanction imposed by Nature, whose laws he flouts by remaining alive. Joe’s only lifeline is the love of certain animals. […]

Cats see him as a friend. They rub against him purring, and he can tame weasels, skunks and raccoons. He knows the lost art of turning an animal into a familiar. The touch must be very brave and very gentle.

In this passage we see an accurate snapshot of the elderly Burroughs himself, living alone with his cats and looking back on his life. The adolescent “Kim” has finally succumbed to the very personas into which he split himself, the representatives of the aging author.

Don Juan says that every man carries his own death with him at all times. The impeccable warrior contacts and confronts his death at all times, and is immortal. […]

As Joe moves about the house making tea, smoking cigarettes, reading trash, he finds that he is, from time to time, holding his breath. At such times a sound exhales from his lips, a sound of almost unbearable pain. […] What is wrong? To begin with, the lack of any position from which anything can be seen as right. He cannot conceive of a way out, since he has no place to leave from. His self is crumbling away to shreds and tatters, bits of old songs, stray quotations, fleeting spurts of purpose and direction sputtering out to nothing and nowhere, like the body at death deserted by one soul after the other.

On the first page of My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995), Burroughs recounts a dream remembered from thirty-five years before, shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch with the Olympia Press in Paris in 1959:

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. “Flight sixty-nine has been—” Static … fades into the distance … “Flight …”

Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: “You haven’t had your education yet.”

The curriculum of this education was soon revealed: he would live on, long enough to see most of his closest human friends, and all but two of his beloved animal companions, cross over to the Land of the Dead.

The suicide of Michael Emerton at age twenty-six in November 1992 was the first devastating loss in these final years. Michael had been my partner for almost eight years; he and William had become very close. Just over a year later, as William and I were finally recovering from this shock, William’s first cat, the Russian Blue who had been the catalyst for the late-life opening of William’s tender emotions, died in early 1994. Ruski’s burial established the location of William’s “cat cemetery,” just south of a small pond that lies outside the window of his bedroom. Soon after Ruski’s death, a new stray appeared, and William named him Spooner. At the height of his menagerie in the mid-1990s, William had six cats: Ginger, Fletch, Calico, Mutie, Senshu, and Spooner. But inevitably his cats began to die: Spooner succumbed to feline leukemia in early 1995, and a year later Senshu was swept away by a flash flood in the little creek.

Calico Jane’s death in mid-November was just two weeks before the “Ports of Entry” show closed with The Nova Convention Revisited, a gala tribute to Burroughs at the University’s Lied Center for the Performing Arts. The performers were old friends of his, veterans of the Nova Convention of 1978 in New York; the house was packed, and William was touched by the community’s outpouring of affection and admiration. Two months later, in early February 1997, his eighty-third birthday was observed by a quiet gathering of friends in his home.