Glacial guru
Duncan Fallowell
William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need Eric Mottram (Marion Boyars £5.95)
William Burroughs is America's most important living writer. Saul Bellow receives the Nobel Prize, John Updike gets the library subscriptions, Norman Mailer the Marilyn Monroe Memorial Butch Award, but Burroughs gets the naked bedrock attention. His violent, satirical blueprints for the future have quite a few people worried: and a novelist has not done that for a long time.
He is paranoid—but Burroughs's definition of a paranoiac is 'a man in possession of all the facts.' Difficult to swallow very often—but Burroughs is not in business for the man who opens a book as one who reads Moby Dick to find out about whaling' (his books do contain much specific information on the global control machine at work ; his symbol for this is often 6junk'). He is cheerless and unreadable for whole stretches at a time—but then his novels are not especially to be read straight off, but rather to be worn in like a pair ofjeans; a combination of explosive iconoclasm and strenuous mental physics; the screaming queen collides with the prophet of doom in bursts of outrageous comedy, gruesome mixes and probes. He is one of the very few writers creating a contemporary mythology under our very noses.
So it is astonishing that Eric Mottram's study is the first to treat Burroughs in the big way—Burroughs's first acknowledgement from the Senior Common Room. The story begins in St Louis, 1914, the home of the adding machine family. Burroughs has him
Previous page
