BOOKS
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the " feeling" Robert Spike ca ll ed "God." Trust, though not necessarily
in God or Feel in g, is what
Ph otographs of My Father
is ultimately
abo ut. It is trust th a t young Spike all along has striven to preserve in
his narra tive, trust not onl y in hi s own shaken self, but trust in hi s
father's sin cerity, th e truth tha t, whatever the cause of his death , Robert
Spike was noneth eless wh at he professed to be. Yet innocence has a low
tolerance and the book's burden of stress lean s heavil y on Paul Spike's.
The sentence on which th e narra tive ends: " Father, I do not understand
your death, " purports in its contex t to be a sta tement of the Absurd, but
in ano ther sense it merely returns its writer, sti ll hurtfull y perpl exed , to
th e scen e of the crime. And the mys tery there is not Robert Spike's
bisexuality, but th e convergence of forces tha t drove him to this
particular end . The federa l government had its fil e on Spike's erotic life
just as it had a fil e o n Martin Luther King 's, both of whom it
presumably regarded as perverse hypocrites. Wha t is lacking in
Photo–
grap hs of My Father
is precisely thi s wider focus, an enl argement tha t
would revea l not just the tra il of Ro bert Spike's career but the who le
violent rneasure of his wor ld.
In
Kentucky Ham,
which is thi ckl y sli ced and half-baked, Willi am
Burro ugh s, jr. has non e of the probl ems that afflict Peter Reich and
Paul Spike. Burroughs tell s the tal e o f his first important bust. He does
a stint a t Lexing ton (he is escorted there by his celebra ted father ) and
then is paroled to the Alaskan wilderness where he lea rns the redeem–
ing discipline of hard labor. Like hi s fath er, whose qui ck, bracing style
he badl y imita tes, Burroughs has useful knowl edge to impart and o ld
scores with the Cop and the Judge to settl e. But the tough brilliance of
Na ked Lunch ,
tha t vivid sense of experi ence aged in bitter solutions, is
an achi evement
Ken tuck y Ham
can onl y burl esque. "Want to lick the
drug prob lem?" young Burroughs as ks. "Make it lega l. " The useful
know ledge imparted in
Ken tuck y Ham
rarely surmounts this dead
level and th e wi secrack, whi ch the elder Burro ughs elevated to the
sta ture of epigram , is here abruptl y restored to the status of mere
rejoinder. Indeed
Ken tucky Ham
sh amelessly rifl es the store in
Naked
Lunch
and disfigures the goods. "The final and only decisive step in
drug release," Burroughs solemnl y reports, " is a mass ive change in
conscio usness th a t affects the whol e identity and all its sensory capaci–
ties."
If
o ne removes from the tex t the anecdote of Burroughs' s sojourn
in
Tangier with his fa th er (whi ch appea red earlier in
Esquire) ,
not
much in th e way of either amusement or instruct ion remains. Near the
end o f th e book Burroughs begins to run out of narrative and his
hith erto covert padding becomes so expli cit that it can no longer be
