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TONY TANNER
clues for the surreal works which were to follow. For here we get
some arresting glimpses of the real events and people later to be
metamorphosed by his imagination; here is the actual in which his
vision is grounded. Later, he made the business of drug addiction into
a vast encompassing metaphor; in this book he looks at it, with a
remarkable cool lucidity, simply as the dominant fact of his life.
His childhood was spent "in a comfortable capsule, with a beautiful
garden and cut off from contact with the life of the city." Life in
the suburban vacuum only served to make city life seem more real
and vital, while the dull respectability of his milieu seems to have
engendered a sympathetic predilection for the outlaw, the deviant.
At the same time, in this "empty" environment he sensed hidden
antagonists and suffered bad dreams. It would seem that the disposi–
tion to horrific hallucination was there from the start. In describing
the actual sequence of events leading to addiction, he stressed that
it was mainly a matter of "not having strong motivations
in
any
other direction." In his aimless wandering he drifted into it. This
is
worth noting: in the Burroughs world evil is not something you
seek out or create-it is always there, waiting. And if you get
involved with it, it takes you over.
This idea of dope (or any other vice) as a malevolent power
which can move in on you recurs on an increasing scale throughout
his work until, in
Nova Express,
it is a matter of a cosmic take-over.
From the semi-hoodlum underworld of drug-trafficking which
Junkie
describes, Burroughs goes on to a war of the worlds. But
if
the scale
has changed, the image was there from the start. Thus, for instance,
he describes a "fag bar." "A room full of fags gives me the horrors.
They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into
hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spon–
taneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long
ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out.
Fags are ventriloquists' dummies who have moved in and taken over
the ventriloquist." In a similar way he describes one drug addict as
having two selves: an alert, active conscious mind plus the other self
composed of all the cells in his body inhabited by the need for junk.
Need, as an all-else devouring state of body and mind, Burroughs
also explored in later work. For need creates a sort of shameless sub–
servience allowing an alien substance to drain the life out of you
