Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Call the next witness
Our mystery columnist puts three legal thrillers on trial.
By Jacqueline Carey
[02/25/00]

Reviews
"A Trip to the Stars" by Nicholas Christopher
A kidnapped little boy, his lost aunt and a fantasy about people finding themselves in the days of flower power.
By Polly Morrice
[02/25/00]

Pros and amateurs
One way or another, men still expect to pay for sex -- and women pay for it, too, by keeping their financial goals low.
By Ann Marlowe
[02/24/00]

Forced crossing
An involuntary traveler across the gender line -- and the first man who went under the knife to become a woman.
By Pam Rosenthal
[02/24/00]

Ivory Tower
Priceline U.
Make me an offer: At eCollegebid.org, students name their price for tuition. You may get a cut-rate deal -- at a no-name school.
By Brian Braiker
[02/23/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Old age mellowed Burroughs, but only to a point. His governing obsessions are still on display, but now they've shriveled into crankiness -- in both senses of the word. (Unfortunately, his world-class humor, in the form of those hilariously sick cosmic jokes uttered in a deadpan tough-guy rhetoric he picked up from Dashiell Hammett, has faded.) He rages predictably against William Bennett, Newt Gingrich and President Clinton as peddlers of anti-drug messages, an animus that seems as tired and cornball as the messages themselves. He denounces the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, but his obvious belief that Hiroshima was part of a larger pattern of evil deeds and lies perpetrated by "them," whoever they are, undercuts his outrage. "We have been abandoned here on this planet, ruled by lying bastards of modest brain power ... Lying worthless bastards," he screeches. These bombastic outbursts will strike all but the most sentimental apologists of "the literature of rebellion" as at best politically naive, at worst flat-out paranoid.

Indeed, Burroughs' political ravings exemplify a strain of Looney Tunes leftism that can still be found squirming under various mossy post-hippie rocks. This paranoia isn't surprising -- Burroughs and his Beat brethren helped invent the "Whoa, dude, the Man is watching us through our TV sets" strain of analysis. (His fascination with alien-abduction theorist Whitley Streiber fits right in.)

And some of his rages are still less attractive. Just three weeks before he died, brooding over a report in the Weekly World News (if this publication was Burroughs' lifeline to reality, many questions are answered) that Oklahoma City mass murderer Timothy McVeigh broke down like a coward in his jail cell, Burroughs rants, "If they have faked it ... then they have perped a viler attack than his, to take from him any dignity and acceptance and eye-to-eye contact."

Even taking Burroughs' point that the worst villains still deserve to be treated uprightly, it's obscene to assert that not doing so would be worse than killing 168 people. And his next sentence does not make matters better: "Now what Tim did was stupid, of course: sensibly he should have sought out the individuals responsible for Waco, and whacked them." Burroughs, always an original, reveals himself to be not just the ur-Beat but the ur-Black Helicopter conspiracy theorist, the original crossover lefty-righty: a counterculture icon who is also a government-hating, gun-worshiping frontiersman on a first-name basis with Tim McVeigh.

"Last Words" isn't just a catalog of rants. Part working notes, part sui generis fragments and part personal confession, it wanders from remorse-filled meditations on the people he let down to unsettling declarations ("I have no real feeling against murder") to weird set pieces (a country boy's demonic fiddling causing two FBI agents to crash their car and die) to denunciations of the soullessness of the contemporary world (the replacement of the romantic four-master ship logo on Old Spice after-shave by a "little boat with outsize sails" -- a "meaningless smear"). Readers who think of Burroughs as existing apart from the literary tradition will find it fascinating that he spends much time mulling over, and quoting from memory, writers as disparate as Joseph Conrad (a particular favorite), Paul Verlaine, Mario Puzo, T.S. Eliot, Andrew Marvell and Petronius.

But though there are a few chuckles, and though an occasional outburst of energetic bile faintly recalls his high invective, nothing here comes close in quality even to such inferior later works as "Cities of the Red Night," let alone "Naked Lunch." Burroughs is painfully aware of this deficiency, as the following characteristically fragmented passage, which follows a short attempt at a sketch, makes sadly clear:

What I am writing here is lifeless and flat as old mud-spattered snow. They have sucked my talent away. Why should I longer stay? "It stinks and I am ready to depart." George Sanders, I think. "I leave you to this sweet cesspool." Suicide note of George Sanders, actor, Barcelona. Overdose of sleeping pills.

Next page | "Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what there is"