WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS | ALLEN GINSBERG

Faithful to the Star on Each Other's Foreheads
Timothy S. Murphy
UCLA Department of English

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) were the mind and the heart, respectively, of the Beat Generation. Long after Jack Kerouac's sad descent into alcoholism and reaction, Burroughs and Ginsberg "stayed still faithful to the star on each other's forehead, still sacramental life-companions," as Ginsberg later wrote. ¹ Ginsberg described the birth of their half-century-long relationship circumspectly: "We'd been spiritual-literary friends since Kerouac and I had decided to visit him in 1945 to pay our respects and inquire after his soul." "[W]e lived together for a few months 1953 in idyllic pre-Viet-war Lower East Side between Avenues B & C on East 7th Street, visited by Kerouac, Corso and other friends, had assembled the text of Yage Letters & Queer &'d had a love affair." ² Though the love affair couldn't last, their "spiritual-literary friendship" would never end, and much of that friendship is chronicled in the holdings of the Kurtzman Collection at UCLA.

Ginsberg had been a fledgling poet when he met Burroughs, a novice largely unaware of the vast new literary universe written into existence by the international modernists. Burroughs introduced the younger man to potentialities so recently brought to light and, at the time, so controversial that they were as yet untaught even at Columbia, where Ginsberg studied. Both Burroughs and Ginsberg would themselves become objects of similar controversy when first Howl and later Naked Lunch were banned for obscenity. Indeed, Naked Lunch was drafted in large measure in Burroughs' letters to Ginsberg between 1954 and 1957, while Ginsberg's breakthrough with Howl was enthusiastically followed by Burroughs at the same time. They served as privileged auditors for each other, as Burroughs wrote: "I have written and rewritten this for you...I have to have receiver for routine. If there is no one there to receive it, routine turns back on me and tears me apart, grows more and more insane. . ." ³ Burroughs constantly encouraged Ginsberg to move forward with his own aesthetic, as he did in his praise of Howl: "This poem is undoubtedly the best thing you have done; also, it seems to me, the end of one line of development. I am wondering where you will go from here." ⁴ Ginsberg acknowledged Burroughs' influence on his own attitude in the poem "America" when he numbered among his doubts about American life the fact that "Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister." ⁵ Later, Ginsberg presented his poem "On Burroughs' Work" (1954) as a poetic defense of Burroughs during the latter's obscenity trial in Boston. After that victory, the two of them were acknowledged as leading voices of an era of profound social and artistic change.

Their intense commitment to "sacramental companionship" was not misplaced, as history has abundantly proven. Burroughs and Ginsberg are two of the most pervasive influences on contemporary culture, not just within literature but within almost every area of artistic endeavor, and not just in the United States but around the globe. There is hardly an art form to which they have not contributed. Their following among poets and novelists is legion, ranging from their old friends Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka to the newer "extreme" novelists who follow their most outspoken disciple, the late Kathy Acker. A whole institution, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, has been dedicated to their selfless literary philosophy.

Their influence upon musicians has also been profound and far-reaching. Bob Dylan has acknowledged how Ginsberg's expansive style helped him find his own voice (a favor Dylan later repaid by convincing Ginsberg to sing his own songs), and Philip Glass sought him out to collaborate on an opera. Burroughs, meanwhile, led Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman to North Africa and to the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and inspired punk priestess Patti Smith. In his last years, Burroughs' collaborations constituted a veritable who's who of pop music, from Laurie Anderson to Kurt Cobain to Tom Waits. Among visual artists Ginsberg is respected as a talented photographer and Burroughs as a painter and collagist. And of course there are films: scores of documentaries, David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch, Gus van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. The ubiquity of Burroughs and Ginsberg's influence even led to their unexpected appearances as advertising spokesmen for the Gap and Nike. Outside the U.S., they are equally influential. Their books were passed around clandestinely behind the Iron Curtain, where Ginsberg was elected King of May during the Prague Spring of 1965, while Burroughs was named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.

While they were alive, Burroughs and Ginsberg's extraordinary relevance to contemporary culture depended upon their constant interaction with all aspects of the world around them, just as their legacy now depends upon the accessibility of their works to the interested artists, scholars, students, and general readers who will extend their innovations into the future. The importance of Alan Kurtzman's generous donation of so many of these rare works to UCLA, which would not have been possible without his equally important dedication as a discerning reader and collector, lies in ensuring that Burroughs and Ginsberg, our "sacramental life-companions," remain constantly accessible to us in all their outrageous, lyrical, protean inventiveness. They may be gone, but they are still "here to go."

Notes

1. Allen Ginsberg, "Recollections of Burroughs Letters" in Burroughs, William S. Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957 (New York: Full Court Press, 1981), p.6.
2. Ibid., pp.6, 5
3. Ibid, pp.26-27.
4. Ibid, p.134.
5. Allen Ginsberg, "America" in Howl, and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956).

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