Last Words

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.

On a typical day in the last year of William Burroughs’s life he would awaken in the early morning and take his methadone (he became re-addicted to narcotics in New York in 1980, and was on a maintenance program the rest of his life) and then return to bed. If the day were Thursday, I would arrive at 8:00 A.M. to drive him to his clinic in Kansas City, or—after he had finally earned a biweekly pickup schedule—take him out to breakfast, so that his house could be cleaned. At about 9:30 A.M. on all other mornings William would arise and—in his slippers, pajamas, and dressing gown—make his breakfast, sometimes a salted soft-boiled egg with toast, or perhaps fresh-squeezed lemonade, and two cups of very sweet tea. Feeding his many cats at the beginning of each day took up considerable time, only after which would he shave and dress himself, by about noon.

William might have visitors at midday, or he might make an outing to his friend Fred Aldrich’s farm for some target shooting with other gun enthusiasts. Otherwise, he passed the afternoon looking through his gun magazines or reading an endless stream of books, sometimes works of serious fiction but more often in the category of pulp fiction, with an emphasis on medical thrillers, stories about police and gangsters, and—his favorite—science-fiction scenarios of plague ravaging the world. William’s later novels demonstrate his fascination with “last words” and the nature of death, and he accumulated quite a library of books on the subject; for example: They Went That-a-way; Famous Last Words; Weird Ways to Die; Until You Are Dead; The Egyptian Book of the Dead; How Did They Die, Volumes One and Two; Death and Consciousness; Sudden and Awful: American Epitaphs and the Finger of God; Death in Ancient Egypt; How We Die; The Abolition of Death; Life Without Death; What Survives?

William liked to go outside in the afternoon and walk in his garden, sometimes practicing throwing a knife into a board propped up against the little garage. But in his last year, he could usually be found lying down for an afternoon nap of an hour or two. One or more of his friends would arrive at 5:00 or 6:00 P.M. to join him for cocktails and make dinner. William’s daily cocktails—which had started religiously at 6:00 P.M. when I first met him in 1974—now commenced at 3:30 sharp. After the first vodka-and-Coke and a few puffs on a joint, he often wrote in his new journal books until he was joined by his dinner companions.

William’s physical condition was markedly improved after his recovery from the 1991 coronary bypass, but he suffered from a painful hiatal hernia, intermittent arthritis, and cataracts in both eyes. He was barrel-chested but very thin and stooped, yet amazingly energetic and agile for his age. He surprised many a visitor by suddenly—for effect—brandishing a sword concealed in a cane, or a blackjack, or a new knife in his collection. He was always jumping up and rushing into other rooms, sometimes talking as he went, as if his guests were meant to follow. During the cocktails-and-dinner hour he had a marked tendency to monologue, but in his last year he became more patient and attentive to his dinner companions.

In this last year William conserved his strength by “making an early evening of it,” sometimes starting to take off his shirt at 8:30 or 9:00 P.M. to signal his guests that they should move their fellowship elsewhere. During the night he was, by his own account, up out of bed many times to urinate or deal with cat exigencies. He often said he was a light sleeper, and until the middle of the night he was, but he usually slept soundly for several hours in the early morning hours, curled up on his side in a fetal position, his hands tucked between his thighs—and his pistol under the covers, not far from his hand, in case of trouble.

The spring of 1997 turned ominous with the unexpected death in late March of our friend, Lawrence architect John Lee, at fifty-one. In the preceding year William’s old friends Herbert Huncke, Terry Southern, and Timothy Leary had died. Now Allen Ginsberg was in the hospital in New York, and William was in touch with him by telephone. Despite encouraging signs, Allen’s doctors discovered widespread liver cancer and predicted he had only a few months to live. The shock of this news was followed closely by Allen’s sudden death just a week later, on April 5, 1997. William was stunned by Allen’s disappearance; his own mortality had never seemed so close at hand. It was clearly the end of an era. Journalists plagued William for his response to his old friend’s death, and he furnished them a statement that cannot have come close to expressing his inner feelings.

On May 24th, forty-nine days after Allen’s death (the period prescribed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the length of a dead soul’s wanderings in the bardo), our friend Wayne Propst hosted a “Bardo Burn” for Allen at his home, north of Lawrence. More than a hundred friends from the community took part in the symbolic immolation of numerous images of Allen, in a purpose-built “fire cage.” William read aloud from the first part of Allen’s “Howl” to the assembled group, and then joined them in eating and drinking—a proper Lawrence wake. But the equanimity with which William seemed to accept his old friend’s passing was later revealed in these journals to have covered a profound inner sorrow and sense of loss.

That summer was lively and filled with visitors to Lawrence, notably our old friends Steven Lowe and Ira Silverberg. Ira and I spent two weeks selecting the passages from William’s oeuvre that became Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, published by Grove Press in 1998. Ira’s arrival was just two days after Fletch, William’s companion for thirteen years since he first appeared as a lithe young kitten, died of heart failure and obesity on July 9, 1997. This loss seems to have hastened William’s own end, which came just three weeks later.

My high charms work,

And these mine enemies are all knit up

In their distractions: they now are in my power …

These lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest might stand for Burroughs’s entire literary project after Naked Lunch and the Cut-Up trilogy. His works from the mid-1960s onward frankly essay the rewriting of human (and his own) history, righting their manifold wrongs by un-writing them. After a long obsession with weapons and conflict, Burroughs became politicized during the 1960s and openly aspired to change cultural reality with his books. Two decades after he returned to the United States in 1974 and began the most public phase of his artistic career, he had the satisfaction of seeing his life’s work reflected throughout the society and culture of the late twentieth century.

In his last year William often quoted these lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “How dull it is to pause, to make a rest / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use.” His efforts now were inward, as he sifted through memories of his long life and cast about him for a worthy opponent against whom to go on doing battle. In his journals he rails against the bottomless stupidity of humankind—he was still fighting the good fight, still working for human liberation. But William’s greatest struggle was against the “rotten weeds” of his own human failings, and the effort to prepare himself to face his final confrontation: the end that he knew was coming. These journals show his growing awareness that, rather than “rage against the dying of the light,” he must surrender to the inevitable, a battle that could be won only by laying down his arms.

As the winter of 1996–97 turns into spring, William’s fury gradually disappears from these pages. With insight into the reflexes of his unruly “Ugly Spirit,” he writes: “Always the cloth: ‘Toro! Toro!’ and one charges again and again.” In these last months of his life he seems weary of his old hatreds, and eager to say, with Prospero, at last: “But this rough magic / I here abjure.” He sees the emptiness of anger and conflict, the illusory nature of victory and vengeance, and in his last days he realizes: “Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience—any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico. Pure love.”