The name is Burroughs

The name is Bill Burroughs. I am a writer. Let me tell you a few things about my job, what an assignment is like.

You hit Interzone with that grey anonymously ill-intentioned look all writers have.

“You crazy or something walk around alone? Me good guide. What you want Meester?”
“Well uh, I would like to write a bestseller that would be a good book, a book about real people and places…”
The guide stopped me. “That’s enough Mister. I don’t want to read your stinking book. That’s a job for the white reader.”



People ask what would lead me to write a book like Naked Lunch. One is slowly led along to write a book and this looked good, no trouble with the cast at all and that’s half the battle when you can find your characters. The more fare-out sex pieces I was just writing for my own amusement. I would put them away in an old attic trunk and leave them for a distant boy to find… “Why Ma this stuff is terrific – and I thought he was just an old book-of-the-month-club corn ball.”

Yes I was writing my bestseller… I finished it with a flourish, fading streets a distant sky, handed it to the publisher and stood there expectantly.


I like cool remote Sunday gardens set against a slate-blue mist, and for that set you need the Yankee dollar.


As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

I can divide my literary production into sets: where, when and under what circumstances produced. The first set is a street of red brick three-story houses with slate roofs, lawns in front and large back yards. In our back yarn my father and the gardener, Otto Belue, tended a garden with roses, peonies, iris and a fish pond.

My first literary endeavor was called “The Autobiography of a Wolf”, written after reading The Biography of a Grizzly. In the end this poor old bear, his health failing, deserted by his mate, goes to a valley he knows is full of poison gas. “They called me the Grey Ghost… Spent most of my time shaking of the ranchers.” The Grey Ghost met death at the hands of a grizzly bear after seven pages, no doubt in revenge for plagiarism.

In this set I also wrote westerns, gangster stories, and haunted houses. I was quite sure that I wanted to be a writer.


When I was 12 we moved to a five-acre place on Price Road and I attended the John Burroughs School which is just down the road. This period was mostly crime and gangsters stories. I was fascinated by gangsters and like most boys at that time I wanted to be one because I would feel so much safer with my loyal guns around me.

I wrote at that time Edgar Allan Poe things, like old men in forgotten places, very flowery and sentimental too, and would that flavour of high school prose. I wrote bloody westerns too, and would leave enigmatic skeletons lying around in barns for me to muse over…

“Tom was quick but Joe was quicker. He turned the gun on is unfaithful wife and then upon himself, fell dead in a pool of blood and lay there drawing flies. The vultures came later… especially the eyes were alike. A dead blue opaqueness.” I wrote lot’s of hangings: “Hardened old sinner that we was, he still experienced a shudder as he looked back at the three bodies twisting on ropes, etched against the beautiful red sunset.” These stories were read aloud in class. I remember one story written by another boy who latter lost is mind, dementia praecox they called it: “The captain tried to swim but the water was too deep and he went down screaming ‘Help, help, I am drowning’”.