Junky (3 page)

Early on and near the end of
Junky
, Burroughs makes reference to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. The key statute in the history of addiction legislation, the act was actually drafted as a tax measure to regulate the market, but it was soon interpreted as a law prohibiting the supply of opiates. Born in February 1914, Burroughs' life coincided with the world of narcotic prohibition, although the coincidence had not only a symbolic meaning, but a close family connection. After becoming addicted to morphine in the course of medical treatment, his uncle, Horace Burroughs, committed suicide just days after the Harrison Act came into effect in March 1915; finding his condition suddenly criminalized was too much for Burroughs' already troubled uncle, but he was only among the first of many such victims. Interestingly, however, in
Junky
, Burroughs doesn't single out the Harrison Act as the event that forced addicts into a world of crime because it cut off their legal supplies. He therefore avoided making a case that recent historians of addiction have shown to be something of a popular myth, a simplification that overlooks the emergence of addict subcultures well before the national legislation. Rather, Burroughs observes a range of behavior that details the transformation of narcotic use over a forty-year period with remarkable accuracy and eye for significant detail.

Take the very first reference in the book. In the Prologue, Burroughs describes as a child hearing his maid talk about opium smoking, and records its impact on him: “I will smoke opium when I grow up.” The truth of this anecdote does not depend on whether it actually happened, but on its historical accuracy. According to David Courtwright, the white, as distinct from Chinese, opium smoker emerged in America in the late nineteenth century, and was always associated with the lower-class underworld: prostitutes, gamblers, petty criminals—even unsavory maids caring for the impressionable sons of haute bourgeois families. Indeed, there were widespread fears that opium smoking was spreading to the upper classes, especially the idle rich. The decadent aristocrat enchanted by the opium pipe became a stock character, an image Burroughs would later parody in a self-portrait that continued where the Prologue to
Junky
left off: “As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit.”
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But besides the aristocratic and artistic associations, the opium smoker is a significant first reference because when imports of smoking material were banned, under the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909, the use of heroin accelerated to take its place.

Heroin's rise coincided with a major shift in the profile and milieu of the typical addict, and the substance of these changes is documented in Burroughs' novel through details that might otherwise appear insignificant. To give only a few isolated examples:
Junky
begins in New York in 1945, the urban center of heroin use at the point when supply lines resumed after wartime shortages; Burroughs gives the moniker “Short Count Tony” to his Italian connection on the Lower East Side, and it was when Italian gangsters replaced Jewish dealers that the purity of street heroin declined sharply, which in turn led to a rise in intravenous use to maximize the hit; the key transformation in addiction, the reason it moved into the underworld, was the shift from its medical origins, so that a character like Matty, encountered by Lee in Lexington, defines the older generation (“A doctor had got Matty on stuff. ‘The Jew bastard,' Matty said . . . ‘But I made him wish he'd never seen me
'
”); early on, Burroughs focuses on a particular Broadway block to define the territory as well as type of addict (“The hipster-bebop junkies never showed at 103rd Street. The 103rd Street boys were all oldtimers”), so making an important spatial and temporal distinction that anticipates the one he gives later on in Mexico (“No zoot-suiters. The hipster has gone underground”), which in turn conveys an ethnic dimension (zoot suits, with broad, padded shoulders, were worn by Mexican-Americans, and associated with racial tension and riots in southern California during 1943) and marks the rise of a true heroin counterculture; the end of
Junky
describes the “nationwide hysteria” that spread from the “police-state legislation” passed in Louisiana, referencing the Boggs Act of 1951, which imposed harsh mandatory sentences at a time when the postwar epidemic was actually in decline—a sign, as Burroughs claimed in a letter at this time, that the “real significance of these scandalous laws is political.”

Finally, the long section of
Junky
set in the Public Health Service Narcotic Hospital at Lexington is especially significant, because it gives a firsthand description of the key federal institution, important not only for the treatment of addiction, but for medical research (from the 1950s, this included secret CIA experiments) and the development of policy over four decades. Lexington opened in 1935 when addiction was seen in public health terms as a contagious sickness, and the narcotic farm was designed, as Caroline Acker has shown, to segregate addicts out of the prison system and, maybe, to rehabilitate them using techniques of moral and social adjustment.
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In 1946, Lexington's intake was 600; in 1949, there were nearly 3,000 admissions; in 1950, over 5,500. This massive increase featured two key demographic changes: as Jill Jonnes notes, there were 214 black admissions in 1949; in 1950, the figure was 1,460. The other feature was an equally spectacular rise in the number of young addicts, and in 1951 a special new juvenile ward was opened to cope with the problem; as Bill Gains says, with a gloating smile for emphasis, “Yes, Lexington is full of young kids now.”

Bill Gains, in fact, deserves a special mention. With his cruel, vampiric smile, he is a significant exception that proves a particular rule in
Junky
. “If you have a commodity you naturally want customers,” Lee notes; but “Gains was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit.” Burroughs' observations of peddling drugs emphatically contradict one of the tenets of what, in his original introduction to “Junk,” he called “the officially sponsored myth”:
“
Addicts want to get others on the stuff.”
Ironically, Burroughs implies that, with the odd exception, the economics of the junk trade are
more
rather than less ethical than those of the above-ground business world. To the prevailing cold war rhetoric of imitation and deterrence and the insistence on striking a moral position, Burroughs just said
no.

Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger—who also published a book in 1953,
The Traffic in Narcotics
—maintained the official myths as long as possible. But, as David Courtwright notes, hard epidemiological data, like the Lexington intake figures, actually supports Burroughs' insistence throughout
Junky
that addiction is not a moral failing or a psychopathology demanding punitive treatment but a disease of exposure. Burroughs, who spent two weeks in Lexington during January 1948, was a statistic in the manifest failure of politically motivated and increasingly draconian prohibition laws. Fifty years later, at a time when America has incarcerated half a million drug offenders—an astonishing development beyond even Burroughs' powers of prophecy—his point-blank refusal in
Junky
to dodge the moral, medical, legal, and political hypocrisy that surround the subject of addiction is, regrettably, more relevant now than it ever was.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude on this note, just as it would be a mistake to read Burroughs' descriptions of junk peddling as only a critique of capitalism or a riposte to tales of the “heroin menace.” In the end, and not just for literary reasons, Burroughs' novel is more than—
other than
—a bold piece of clear-eyed reportage. His clinical observations give rise to speculative insights, to flights of scientific fantasy about addiction, and from his original introduction it is clear that these pointed toward a
thesis
. Here he made explicit, for example, the logic behind the many images in the novel that imply
junk itsel
f
is a kind of spectral vampire preying on its users: “You cannot avoid the feeling that junk is in some way alive,” “junk is a parasite,” and so on. Before being able to take the idea further, Burroughs would have to write
Queer
—a slighter text in many obvious ways, and yet, in other respects, more crucial to his development—but this is Burroughs taking the first steps toward his theory of the
virus
, a central concern in his writing from
Naked Lunch
onwards. In other words,
Junky
is in embryonic form an exploratory novel, an
experimental
text, like all those Burroughs would write after it, and the final lines of the introduction he cut could stand as the maxim for his entire oeuvre. “I am using the known facts as a starting point in an attempt to reach facts that are not known.”

•

Burroughs began “Junk” in early 1950, and Ace Books published it as
Junkie
on April 15, 1953, but what happened to his manuscript—both in between and since then—reveals a good deal about his early career that significantly changes the established understanding of how Burroughs began as a writer. Since this is a fascinating and complex episode in a much larger history that I have related elsewhere,
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I will focus here on the most immediate issue; namely, how piecing together this story makes visible for the first time the true editing and publishing history of Burroughs' first novel, up to and including this present edition.

The history of Burroughs' manuscript can be divided in three parts. By the end of 1950, he had completed a one-hundred-and-fifty-page draft, typed up for him by Alice Jeffries, the wife of a friend in the expatriate community of Mexico City. The manuscript he mailed Lucien Carr that December—Ginsberg's role as amateur literary agent came later—was organized into twenty-nine chapters (numbered up to thirty, but, mysteriously, there was no Chapter 8), and ended at the point when Lee first meets Old Ike in his lawyer's office (pages 107–8). Burroughs scholars have long assumed this “original” manuscript was lost; in fact, with a few pages missing, it is the one preserved at Columbia University. Burroughs revised quite a few details during 1951 and 1952, but he never replaced this manuscript as such. Then, starting in March 1951, he wrote and inserted a few short expansions, began what he called the “Mexican section,” and in April decided to make one significant cut: removal of Chapter 28, a long digression that applied the theories of Wilhelm Reich to addiction. The next phase began in early 1952, when Burroughs wrote more short inserts and in March made a second significant cut: removal of Chapter 27, a long detour into the economics of the Rio Grande Valley. “The idea,” he told Ginsberg, “is cut down to straight narrative.”

Part three of the manuscript history is the most significant and revealing, but because so many of the pieces were scattered or thought lost, until now no accurate account was possible. It
dates from the point in April 1952 when Ginsberg informed A.
A. Wyn that Burroughs had begun
Queer
, which, even though it was written in the third person, started as a sequel to “Junk.” Much to Burroughs' annoyance, Wyn stalled negotiations until he had seen the new manuscript, with the idea of adding it onto the end of “Junk”; but when in June he saw what Burroughs had written s
o far, he rejected it (less due to its homosexual content than to its quite different quality of writing). Wyn now demanded forty more pages for “Junk” before he would agree to the contract. Burroughs was furious—Wyn had already required him to write the autobiographical Prologue—and he in turn refused to start work on the new material until the contract was signed, which it was on July 5. By a deadline of August 15, he duly completed both the Prologue and a thirty-eight-page manuscript (“I am not completely satisfied,” he told Ginsberg, “especially not with that fucking preface”).
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Apart from a two-page insert made in 1977, this additional manuscript corresponds to the final quarter of the published novel (pages 108–44). Now, because of the events they describe, the last eight pages of this new manuscript could only have been written from scratch in July 1952, while the first ten might have drawn on the “Mexican section” Burroughs began in spring of 1951. The large middle portion, however, over half of this manuscript, can now be identified as a light reworking of material taken from the first half of
Queer
. Precise comparison of newly discovered manuscripts in turn reveals exactly how, where, and why Burroughs edited one to fit the other; in fact, it shows the way he literally
cut up
his carbon copies and pasted the fragile pieces together. This cannibalization of material—which would become an essential trademark of Burroughs' practice as a writer—lets us see for the first time and very exactly the relationship between these two novels, enabling a new understanding for readers—and critics— baffled by the sudden and striking difference between them.

Once Ace Books had Burroughs' manuscript, the editors set to work. In December 1952, they made the decision to bind it back-to-back with
Narcotic Agent
(“an appalling idea,” Burroughs groaned, although he later admitted the memoirs were “not so bad as I expected”). Then, having reorganized the novel into fifteen chapters, they cut numerous passages, made two dozen separate bowdlerizations (some small: “Fucking punks” became “Nowhere punks”; others more substantial), and inserted seven editor's notes. Finally, in February 1953 Ace held up the publication schedule once they knew that Burroughs, now traveling through Central and South America, was planning to write about his expedition to find the drug
yagé
. Burroughs declined to be screwed twice—“They are up to their old tricks: 2 books, 1 advance”—and two months later the book was on sale in rail stations across America.