J G Ballard
That William Burroughs lived to such an immense age is a tribute to the rejuvenating powers of a mis-spent life. More than half a century of heavy drug use failed to dim either his remarkably sharp mind or his dryly cackling humour. When I last saw him in London a few years ago he was stooped and easily tired, but little diffe-rent from the already legendary figure I first met in the early 1960s at his service flat in Duke Street, St James.
Esquire had asked me to write a profile of him, but Burroughs, though courteous, was very suspicious. The baleful power of media empires already obsessed him. While his young boyfriend, “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, carved a roast chicken, Burroughs described the most effective way to stab a man to death. All the while he kept an eye on the doors and windows. “The CIA are watching me,” he confided. “They park their laundry vans in the street outside.”
I don’t think he was having me on. His imagination was filled with bizarre lore culled from Believe It or Not features, police pulps and – in the case, I assume, of the laundry vans – Hollywood spy movies of the cold war years. When Burroughs talked about Time magazine’s conspiracy to take over the world he meant it literally.
I turned down the Esquire assignment, realising that nothing I wrote could remotely do justice to Burroughs’s magnificently paranoid imagination. He changed little over the next decades, and hardly needed to – his weird genius was the perfect mirror of his times, and made him the most important and original writer since the World War II. Now we are left with the career novelists.
William Seward Burroughs died of a heart attack on Saturday, August 2 at the age of 83