Also see Ian MacFadyen’s insightful response to RealityStudio’s overview: Henry Miller and William Burroughs: A Letter.
" ... After finishing with the summer job his father had negotiated for him at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, William S. Burroughs returned to Harvard in September 1935. It was his senior year. An English major, Burroughs had studied with the Shakespeare scholar George Kittredge and would retain throughout his life an ability to quote the bard from memory. However, he had been a diffident student. Biographer Ted Morgan describes Burroughs’ attitude toward this final year of college: “Back at Harvard it was more of the same — sexual blockage, a sense of isolation, classes.” The following June, Burroughs would skip his own commencement ceremony.
Given that Burroughs was an English major and would ultimately become an important member of what he called the “Shakespeare squadron,” it is difficult to imagine that he would have failed to note a major literary scandal that occurred as he was returning to school that year. His classmate James Laughlin — a steel heir who would go on to found New Directions, the modernist publishing house — managed to convince the estimable Harvard Advocate to print a story by a shocking new writer whose books could not yet be published in America. The writer was Henry Miller, who described the scandal in a 1935 letter to Lawrence Durrell:
Laughlin is the chap who tried to reprint my Aller Retour New York (under the title “Glittering Pie”). He had the first ten pages published in the Harvard Advocate, and then the Boston police descended upon the paper, destroyed the existent copies and locked the editorial staff up overnight, threatening them with a severe jail sentence.1
Local papers ran headlines such as “Pornography at Harvard!” and the Advocate’s editors were compelled to resign. “I do not recall,” observed historian Arthur Schlesinger in his memoirs, “that the Harvard authorities protested this miserable assault on the freedom of expression.”2
Was this the moment that Burroughs first became aware of Henry Miller, the writer to whom he would so often be yoked in later years? Or did Burroughs, who supposedly viewed literary matters askance until Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac convinced him of his own genius, consider this scandal a tempest in a teapot, in-fighting at a college newspaper that never interested him anyway?
Ironically, though Burroughs may or may not have known the name of Miller in 1935, Miller certainly knew the name Burroughs. In 1936 Obelisk Press in Paris issued his second book, Black Spring. In the chapter titled “Burlesk,” Miller wrote impressionistically about the crowds outside the “fastest, cleanest show in the world”: “Outside it’s exactly like the Place des Vosges or the Haymarket or Covent Garden, except that these people have faith — in the Burroughs Adding Machine.” For Miller, the company founded by Burroughs’ grandfather had become symbolic of a modern malaise: “faith” in the calculator, finance, technology, materialism — precisely the things that the author of Naked Lunch would come to satirize in his creepy tycoons.
This thematic connection between the two writers was apparent even before Burroughs could be considered a writer. In a 1949 letter in which he railed against conformism, Kerouac clearly viewed Miller and Burroughs as exemplary non-conformists:
Wanting money is wanting the dishonesty of a servant. Money hates us, like a servant; because it is false. Henry Miller was right; Burroughs was right. Roll your own, I say.3 ... "
~ continue reading ~
No comments:
Post a Comment