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INTRODUCTION

“WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET”

If you’re looking for books about narcotic addiction, the supply has never been better. There are social histories, public health polemics, and political critiques of the war on drugs; cultural studies and ethical analyses; surveys of narcotic legislation, addict psychology, pharmacology and treatment methods; personal memoirs, trash novels, and classic works of literature. The junkie is a modern icon, and heroin has a history and a mythology as well as a chemistry. And if you’re looking for books by William Burroughs, there are over two dozen to choose from, most if not all of which make reference to narcotics and addiction. Junk and Burroughs go together, he’s the addict-artist of the twentieth century, but he never wrote another book remotely like this, his very first.

Descriptions such as “down-to-earth and honest prose”; “what you see is what you get”; “an honest account of the ‘vicious circle’ of addiction”—readers’ comments from an online bookstore Web site, these are not terms anyone would ever use for Nova Express, The Wild Boys, or The Western Lands. One thing you can say about any book by William Burroughs, however, is that whenever you think you’ve got it pinned down, that’s when it has just slipped between your fingers. This is true of the book you are holding now, even though, of all Burroughs’ works, it is the only one that is more often read outside the rest of the oeuvre than as part of it, devoured by readers who admit they choked on Naked Lunch, whereas this one, it seems, is a straight read from cover to cover.

Both more and less than a record of Burroughs’ early years on heroin, this book is, to borrow a phrase from Luc Sante (author of Low Life, a classic study of crime and drugs), crowned with many hats. Having things to say about marijuana, cocaine, Benzedrine, Nembutal, peyote, yagé, and antihistamines, as well as opium and its derivatives, it’s halfway to being a pharmacopoeia. Reflecting Burroughs’ studies in anthropology (first at Harvard and then Mexico City College), it mimics the ethnographic field report, detailing the territories and habits of various urban American subcultures and documenting their emergence or decline in the immediate postwar era. Its attention to hipster idiom and criminal argot makes it a study of underworld linguistics. Not only does it recount the practices of narcotics police, lawyers, doctors, and psychiatrists in federal hospitals, but it also contains a surprising amount of information on the economics of crop farming, tips on the dynamics of luck, and meditations on loyalty and betrayal, existential loneliness, and the abject horrors of our own flesh. It is a work of journalistic reportage, a species of confessional autobiography, and a novel informed by Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, John O’Hara, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as the dialogue of Hollywood B movies. This is reckoned to be Burroughs’ one straightforward story, a simple, informative account written in a plain, dry style. But read it again and you come across little pearls of prose and strange, spectral images, weird moments of pure menace or utter ambiguity that give the lie to the notion of terse, gritty realism and whose effects are all the more unsettling because they didn’t seem to be there before. Read it a third time and, far from being dull and flat-footed, the writing now appears spry and subtle, capable of sharp comic touches and guilty of devious tricks. Look at it from different angles and the thing changes before your eyes, like a trompe l’oeil picture.

This strange, double-take logic comes in many guises. Here’s just one variety. William Lee says: “You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.” At first, the joke is on the doctors, and this looks like the deadpan irony of such phrases as “a hard-working thief,” and a host of others where normally positive cultural terms are given a deft, subversive twist. But look again and the key words are no longer “bedside manner” and “doctors” but the twice-repeated “you”: suddenly, Lee isn’t talking about doctors, he’s telling you how to score from them. This recurrent tactical trap, insinuating the reader’s complicity in the criminal world and making visible our voyeurism, is a unique feature of Burroughs’ style here. The closest equivalent to it is a line in Hammett’s Red Harvest: “He wasn’t the sort of man whose pocket you would try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers”—which tempts us to wonder just how much confidence do we have in our fingers, whether to pick or not to pick the pocket? In other words: What side of the criminal fence are you really on, just where do you draw the line?

It’s tempting to conclude that Burroughs’ chillingly cool and seductive book is complex and ironic, to say that its apparent simplicity is a sophisticated ruse designed to fool you, but this is too simple and won’t do either. In fact, Burroughs’ first novel is both absolutely distinct from everything he would write after it, and yet impossible to read without encountering at every turn phantom traces of the writing to follow. It’s like reading two books simultaneously, one atypically straight, the other characteristically twisted. This is its paradoxical situation, its destiny, as the original work of one of America’s great original writers.

“. . . FOR REASONS UNKNOWN TO ME”

The story of how this debut novel came to be written in the first place, of how and why Burroughs began his career with it, this is a mystery that is bound to interest us. But our appetite for the hard facts is always balanced by an intuitive sense that the mystery of such beginnings should remain intact. Perhaps this is because writers must, at some level, remain mysteries to themselves in order to write at all, and we respect that truth as much as we want to violate it. In any event, there’s a contradiction here that goes to the heart of Burroughs’ novel, one captured in two of its most characteristic lines. “Here are the facts,” is the first of them, which promises to give us everything we want to know, and this the other, that takes it all back again: “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you.”

To get a measure of this book, and to understand what this new edition seeks to add to our appreciation of it, the simplest place to start is with the significant but unexpected mystery of what I have so far avoided—its title. Titles are not supposed to be mysterious. They’re meant to fix a work, to give it a clear identity, to define in miniature the author’s intention. Not so this one, whose history of slight but crucial changes is a version of the novel’s curious editing fate writ small.

Burroughs began his “book about junk” at the dead center of the twentieth century, only a couple of months after relocating his family to Mexico City in late fall 1949. Escaping the punitive regime of Cold War America after a string of drug busts, Burroughs was beginning what would turn into a quarter of a century as a writer-in-exile. He broke the news to Jack Kerouac in a letter dated March 10, 1950, and interesting news it must have been. Five years earlier they had actually collaborated on a novel together, but whereas Kerouac was now more passionate than ever about his literary vocation—his own first novel, The Town and the City, had just been published—Burroughs had since given up on writing. In later years, he would say Kerouac was the one who kept telling him he was a writer, but there was no mention of this in March 1950. He called his novel simply “Junk,” and at the end of the year this was what he typed on the title page of his first-draft manuscript, followed by his nom de plume (borrowed from his character’s appearance in Kerouac’s novel): “William Dennison.” When the novel appeared in 1953, both title and pseudonym had changed. Junk by William Dennison had become Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict by William Lee.

Burroughs himself chose the new name—a very equivocal choice, in fact: he said he needed a pseudonym to conceal his identity from his family, but perversely he chose “Lee,” his mother’s maiden name, and so revealed the very thing he claimed to want to hide. Both the title and subtitle, however, were chosen behind Burroughs’ back by the publishers, Ace Books, in one of a series of cuts and changes they forced on his novel. Allen Ginsberg, who at that time was acting as Burroughs’ agent, had already fought and lost the case before the deal with Ace was signed, in July 1952. “I really feel that JUNK is an inspired title,” he wrote to A. A. Wyn, the publisher, that April. “It’s funny, it’s straightforward, original, and yet very typical of junkie’s talk, and characteristic of author. I think it would be a real sad mistake to change, and advise against it.”1 Why was his advice and Burroughs’ choice ignored? According to Carl Solomon, who had acquired the book for Ace, it was because they thought it would give the impression the book was junk.

These anecdotes tell us a good deal about Burroughs’ situation as a first-time novelist, and they hint at the larger story of writing and publishing in that particular era, but their interest doesn’t stop there. Almost twenty-five years later the title would change once again, this time to Junky, for the unexpurgated and expanded Penguin edition that has been in print since 1977. Burroughs authorized the changes made for that edition, but there was still one decision taken out of his hands. In August 1976, he wrote his agent Peter Matson: “I would suggest that the title of this new edition be JUNK, rather than JUNKIE. JUNK was the original title which I gave the book, and this was changed by A. A. Wyn for reasons unknown to me.” The next month, Matson reported the verdict of Penguin’s editor: “Dick Seaver likes JUNKY, thinking that, without the ‘Y’ it sounds too much like garbage, if you’ll excuse the expression.”2

Taken together, what do these identical behind-the-scenes anecdotes about a title add up to? From an editor’s point of view, they make visible the sheer contingency of Burroughs’ novel, the part played in it by chance events or the decisions of others, only some of which can ever be known. From a critical point of view, they offer a different kind of warning about “the facts,” since interpretations of literature are typically based on silent assumptions that may well turn out to be false. In their different ways, Ginsberg, A. A. Wyn, and Richard Seaver all knew that a book called Junk means something quite different to one called Junkie or Junky. And more generally, these anecdotes give an absolutely material dimension to the truism that we never read the same novel twice. Every book changes to some extent over time and in new contexts, but Burroughs’ first novel has changed literally again and again in name and in content. You might think that the author’s own wishes should finally be respected now, albeit posthumously, and this new edition be given the title Junk. However, publishing remains as bound by pragmatic concerns today as it was twenty-five or fifty years ago, and the fact is that, in the end, the sales department is right: in bookstores, people will still go on asking for Junky. But in scholarly circles, too, another change would only mean one more confusion because, over time, the familiar title has accrued a body of meanings, a certain weight, a particular status: for better or worse, Junky is canonical now. And so it has been left to the subtitle—The Definitive Text of “Junk”—to indicate that this text represents the last stage in a fifty-year history. The aim of this edition, then, is to clarify and settle that history, and to do so by going back to Burroughs’ original manuscripts, to fully restore the original text, if not his original choice of its title.

“. . . AN AMERICAN BOY”

How autobiographical is Junky? Or to put it another way, what relation does William Burroughs have to William Lee? These questions need answering because Burroughs’ first novel was the most mined source of information about his life for some thirty-five years, until publication of Ted Morgan’s biography in 1988. In particular the Prologue, where Burroughs filled in the narrative’s missing background, used to be taken as a wholly reliable biographical resource: most of the details do turn out to be correct, even the most unlikely ones (case records from the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic prove that Burroughs’ doctors really had “never heard of Van Gogh,” for example), but recent Burroughs criticism has nevertheless shown the artful, rather than artless nature of its presentation of facts. And what of the rest of the narrative? Ginsberg was first to point out the obvious in the “Appreciation” he wrote in 1952 (see Appendix 4): “It is the autobiography of one aspect of the author’s career, and obviously cannot be taken as an account of the whole man.” Now that we have two biographies (the other by Barry Miles), a volume of letters covering the period, and a mass of interviews, journalism, and critical material, it’s possible to see just how partial the account given really is.

Rather than go into the fine details of the narrative’s accuracy or selectivity, it is, I think, more instructive to focus on the holes in it that are so large they are easy to overlook. For example, there are portraits of Herbert Huncke, the Times Square hustler who passed the word “beat” to Kerouac and who appears in Junky as Herman, and of the thief Phil White, a.k.a. “the Sailor,” to whom Burroughs initially planned to dedicate his novel and who appears in it as Roy. But there’s not one word referring to the two key figures he befriended at this time—Ginsberg and Kerouac. These significant absences make for a revealing contrast to Kerouac’s work: although Burroughs read The Town and the City just weeks into the writing of his own first novel, Junky did not follow that path of group myth-making, autobiographical fiction that characterized Beat Generation writing.

There is also very little about his wife, Joan Vollmer Adams. Given his focus, there was never going to be much, but after the shooting accident in September 1951 that killed her, Burroughs was put on the spot when Ace pressured him for more: “About death of Joan. I do not see how that could be worked in,” he wrote Ginsberg in April 1952. “I did not go into domestic life in Junk because it was, in the words of Sam Johnson, ‘Nothing to the purpose.’”3 Later that month he complained that Ace’s demands left him feeling like a man “being sawed in half by indecisive fiends,” but it’s clear from following letters that the indecision was his own, as were the fiends: “If they want it I will write it. Alternatively they could simply cross out all references to her.” In the end, the disappearance of Lee’s wife, like her presence, remains anomalous: occasional references have the unsettling effect of making the reader want either more, or none at all.

Burroughs’ indecision suggests the difficulty he had in maintaining, over time, a consistent relation to his persona and therefore a single style of writing. At first, the chronology of his experience provided a minimal structure—you couldn’t call it a “plot”—but this would come to pose increasing problems. In part, this was because Burroughs had a technical and temperamental difficulty with sustaining realist narrative, a conventional weakness he would later turn into an experimental advantage. Indeed, in the effort to keep it “straight,” he decided to cut some of the most interesting sections, which he recognized as digressions from the main narrative line. But the problem can only have become worse as he ceased writing about events set safely in the past, and began having to deal with experiences from the more immediate present. Living with the trauma of a self-inflicted tragedy, and unable either to write about it or to ignore its effects, Burroughs completed Junky during increasingly difficult times, and in the last quarter of the novel it shows.

If there was a logic to excluding his fellow writers Ginsberg and Kerouac, this doesn’t explain another key decision, namely why Burroughs made his alter ego so un-literary: the passing references Lee makes to popular culture (George Raft, Jimmy Durante, Louis Armstrong—an interesting trio) contrast sharply to those he makes in Queer, the novel he wrote while still finishing Junky (Frank Harris and Jean Cocteau). In letters, Burroughs would sometimes call opium “Cocteau’s kick,” referring to Opium: Diary of a Cure, but such an allusion to the French writer would be completely out of place for the Lee of Junky. In fact, there are European literary references in the Prologue—to “Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, even Gide”—although they’re used to distinguish the young Burroughs/Lee from “an American boy of that time and place.” The Prologue is also the place where Burroughs speaks of being “greatly impressed by an autobiography of a burglar, called You Can’t Win,” and in many ways this is the key reference, the one that tells us most about Junky and the particular relation it fashions between literature and life.

Sixty years after reading it for the first time, Burroughs took the chance to pay back the pseudonymous Jack Black by writing a foreword to the republication of You Can’t Win (New York: Amok Press, 1988). Here Burroughs recalls how he was “fascinated by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool parlors, cat houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles.” There are two things to say about this, one self-evident, the other easily missed. The first is the sheer pleasure Burroughs takes in the lingo of Jack Black’s wild frontier locales, the way he savors the phrases, so clearly redolent for him of a lost world, of a nighttime netherworld glazed with a sheen of nostalgia. Burroughs, who also enjoyed the colorful urban world of Damon Runyon, had a double fascination with the criminal milieu and its vivid argot that is reflected throughout Junky. He would have found this in You Can’t Win (“The underworld is quick to seize upon strange words,” Black observes), and probably a little later in David Maurer’s The Big Con (1940), a classic work on the routines and slang of the confidence man in his Golden Age, up to the early 1920s.4 Maurer’s rich gallery of grifters belonged to the vivid but vanishing life that lay outside the sheltered suburbs of Burroughs’ midwestern childhood, and in Junky he brought something like it alive: Subway Mike, George the Greek, Pantopon Rose, Louie the Bellhop, Eric the Fag, and the Black Bastard—these are blood relatives of the Hashhouse Kid and Slobbering Bob in Maurer’s book or the Sanctimonious Kid, Smiler, and Salt Chunk Mary in Jack Black’s.

Prompted by such sources, in Junky, Burroughs shows his grasp of the different functions served by a specialized argot. We see how it can map the thief’s or addict’s clandestine life and make it seem a whole alternative world: “Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next, ‘stashes’ and ‘scripts,’ ‘spikes’ and ‘droppers.’” For the addict, the slang also doubles the social role of the substance itself. “Heroin was our badge,” said Rodney King, onetime partner of Charlie Parker, the great bebop junkie. “It was the thing that said, ‘we know. You don’t know.’ It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club, and for this membership we gave up everything else in the world.”5 Alert to the decline of old subcultures and the emergence of new ones, late on in Junky, Burroughs reports news of changes in the New York scene since he was last there, to suggest how a shift in key terms can define an existence, and, like passwords, admit entry into it: “I learned the new hipster vocabulary: ‘pot’ for weed, ‘twisted’ for busted, ‘cool,’ an all-purpose word.”

Cab Calloway in A Hepster’s Dictionary said the term hip meant “wise, sophisticated, anyone with boots on”—where the last phrase signifies living on the street, being streetwise—and Burroughs must have been drawn by this sense that an outsider from official culture gets to possess insider knowledge, gets to know the score. His own glossary definition of hip spells out this logic as a sly challenge to the reader: “The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don’t ‘dig’ what it means, no one can ever tell you.” As Burroughs would show at the start of Naked Lunch, a square who “wants to come on hip” makes a perfect mark; to the reader hungry for the vicarious thrill of knowledge without the risk of experience, Junky gives a warning all the better to set the trap, like one of Maurer’s con games.

Early on in You Can’t Win, Black describes his youthful fascination with Jesse James—this would be the early 1880s—and concludes: “Looking back now I can plainly see the influence the James boys and similar characters had in turning my thoughts to adventure and later to crime.” Adventure and crime: the point Burroughs makes in his Prologue to Junky is that, trapped in an haute bourgeois suburb of St. Louis and insulated from city life by his family’s money, the terms appeared synonymous. You Can’t Win surely turned Burroughs’ thoughts to adventure and crime, and later to writing. But there remains one thing that goes unsaid in the Prologue, and is only hinted at in passing in Burroughs’ Foreword to You Can’t Win, via the phrase “opium dens.” Although this is absolutely typical of Junky—in giving autobiographical details that are entirely accurate, while omitting to provide the key—the question arises: why did Burroughs neglect to mention the fact that Jack Black was an addict, when this was surely a part of his book’s allure for the young Burroughs and so directly relevant to Junky?

The most likely explanation is that he wanted to avoid any suggestion of the literariness of both his experiences and his own writing, the idea that either were inspired by reading books. This move helped keep Junky at a clear remove from the great Romantic tradition, of Coleridge and De Quincey, that he knew so well. If Burroughs stripped Lee of his own literary knowledge and ambition, and gave priority to the anonymous confessions of an American thief rather than to Romantic poets or European modernists, it was surely because he wanted his writing to appear with boots on.

“SUBJECT IS HOT NOW”

Looking back from the vantage point of half a century, the tribute that Burroughs himself would pay to You Can’t Win can just as well be said of Junky: “He has recorded a chapter of specifically American life that is now gone forever.” In summer 1952, however, as he worried over negotiations with A. A. Wyn, Burroughs had very contemporary works in mind. In June he wrote Ginsberg: “Is he or is he not going to publish JUNK? Two books already out on the subject—DOWN ALL YOUR STREETS and H IS FOR HEROIN. I think this beginning of deluge. NOW is time to publish or we bring up rear and lose advantage of timeliness. . . . Subject is hot now but it won’t be hot long.”6 Although he was wrong on the last score—the subject would never cool down—his reference points here are revealing.

Down All Your Streets, a long first novel about crime and drugs in New York City, won modest critical acclaim as well as good sales for Leonard Bishop when Dial Press published it in 1952. David Hulburd’s H Is for Heroin (“A Teen-Age Narcotic Tells Her Story”) was a twenty-five-cent paperback from the Popular Library. By this point, Burroughs had accepted that Ace, a relatively new, middle-range player in the pulp paperback industry, was his best bet for Junky. But to begin with he had his sights set on New Directions, the one-man press run by James Laughlin, famous for his extraordinary list of modernist literature and for publishing interesting new talent.

For over a year both Ginsberg and Kerouac had lobbied Laughlin on Burroughs’ behalf by recommending Junky, Kerouac closing a letter in February 1952 with the telling lines (given him by Ginsberg): “It would be a shame if it was eventually swallowed up by cheap paper covered 25 cent Gold Medal or Signet books like ‘I, Mobster.’”7 The Ace Double Book publication of Junkie (bound back-to-back with a reprint of Maurice Helbrant’s memoir, Narcotic Agent, and priced at thirty-five cents) put Burroughs firmly in the drugstore and newsstand pulp market rather than on the serious hardback shelves. It’s not an entirely idle thought to wonder what would have happened to Burroughs’ first novel as an imprint not of Ace Books but of New Directions—both in terms of reception (the Ace edition sold over a hundred thousand copies in its first year, but none to literary reviewers) and also in terms of actual content. As we’ll see in more detail below, in important ways the final form and content of Junkie were shaped directly and indirectly by its publishers.

The market that Burroughs was destined to enter also made for a telling contrast to a much more famous novel on the subject that he must have known: Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the book had made Algren an instant celebrity in 1950, and his depiction of Frankie Machine, the low-life, poker-dealing junkie of the title, had an equal impact: as David Courtwright notes in his history of opiate addiction in America, Algren’s hero marked a crucial generational shift in the cultural stereotype of the addict, now defined for the postwar public in the image of the hustling street criminal.8 The irony, however, is that Algren’s literary ambition and experience of narcotics were aloof from street level. In fact, it was his agent who encouraged him to use junk as a peg for his plot at a time when Algren, corresponding with Simone de Beauvoir and financed by literary fellowships, barely knew any actual junkies.

In March 1950, while Burroughs was beginning work on Junky, Algren was receiving invitations to Hollywood (the movie of his novel, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra, came out in 1955), and was being presented with the National Book Award for Fiction by Eleanor Roosevelt at the Waldorf-Astoria. While the prospect of the latter fate would not have tempted Burroughs, it’s necessary to see how materially the publishing context defined by Ace Books ensured that in 1953 Burroughs’ novel, not printed under his own name or even using his title, bypassed any chance of a literary reputation or critical reception.

In 1952 Burroughs was well aware that the subject of Junky was hot, in several senses of the word. From a publishing point of view, it was the type of story that would sell paperbacks, a new and booming industry. But the paranoid and reactionary national mood—this was the era of McCarthyism—meant that the subject was also dangerous to handle. Amid wider fears about popular culture and its capacity to incite imitation, the paperback industry was itself subject to congressional investigation in 1952, and found guilty. A pulp novel about drug addiction therefore combined two moral panics for the price of one.

Junkie was a product of these times, as Ace Books sought both to exploit the interest—packaging the novel inside an especially lurid and voyeuristic cover—and to defend their backs, by inserting a series of nervous disclaimers. This attempt to censor Burroughs’ novel had unforeseen ironic effects, however. Perversely, the notes inserted into the text imply one of two things: either that whenever there isn’t a disclaimer or a rebuttal (“This statement is hearsay,” or “This is contradicted by recognized medical authority”), the text can only be telling the truth; or that this censorious voice is inadvertently pinpointing the really important facts. Ace also added a Publisher’s Note (see Appendix 5), which proposed the novel’s function as a deterrent; it would, they claimed, “discourage imitation by thrill-hungry teen-agers.” The irony of these measures would not have been lost on Burroughs, and his original introduction to “Junk” (see Appendix 2) spelt out his own position in blunt terms: “Official propaganda opposes any factual statement about junk, so that almost nothing accurate has been written on the subject.” Cutting through the myths mattered because, as he knew from firsthand experience as an addict, America in 1950 was at the peak of a postwar epidemic. Whatever else it is, Junky remains a precise eyewitness report to essential changes on the ground.

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.”9 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.10 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 itself 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,11 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 so 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”).12

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.

The first Ace edition sold 113,170 copies between April and the end of 1953 (96,382 in the United States, 16,578 in Canada, the rest unaccounted for) and earned $1,129.60, but Burroughs never received proper royalty payments and would complain repeatedly that Ace failed to honor its contract. Ginsberg, meanwhile, had another complaint. After a meeting with Wyn in October, he covered all the stalls and bookstores around Times Square, 42nd Street, and Greenwich Village in search of Junkie, and found no copies for sale. Since these were, as he later protested to Wyn, the hottest areas for junk and therefore for a book called Junkie, it raises the interesting question as to where those one hundred thousand readers of Burroughs’ novel came from, who they were, and what they made of it.

Apart from a British reprint by Digit Books in 1957, Junkie wasn’t published separately—let alone under Burroughs’ own name—until the Ace edition of 1964, which they reprinted in 1970 and 1973, while other editions appeared from Olympia Press (1966, reprinted in 1969 and 1972) and Bruce and Watson (1973). It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese, including an Italian edition (titled La scimmia sulla schiena—Monkey on the Back) that featured an article on the apomorphine cure which Burroughs asked to be reprinted in the 1964 Ace edition (“the article would lend dignity and purpose to the publication”),13 but to no avail. In the mid-1970s Burroughs, through his agent Peter Matson and lawyer Eugene Winick, finally took action against Ace Books for breach of contract, presented an overwhelming case, and secured reversion of the rights. This paved the way for the new Penguin edition of 1977, and for the many changes, corrections, and restorations of material carried out by James Grauerholz and authorized by Burroughs.

The differences between Junky and the first edition of Junkie are extensive but can be given briefly: The title was changed (and the subtitle dropped); the dedication was cut (“To A.L.M.”—a cryptic reference to Adelbert Lewis Marker, the real-life original of Allerton, Lee’s object of desire in Queer); Carl Solomon’s Publisher’s Note was replaced with a new introduction by Allen Ginsberg; Ace’s chapters were replaced by a continuous text, divided only by spacing; paragraphing was reorganized; the bowdlerizations were undone and a dozen or so original names restored; the editor’s notes were deleted; the glossary was relocated to after the narrative; a number of errors were corrected; a number of new errors were introduced (some due to mistakes in the 1973 Ace reprint, the one used as the basis for the Penguin edition); and, finally, various unused parts of Burroughs’ original manuscripts were inserted, including the long Rio Grande Valley section. All in all, some 250 deletions, corrections, and additions were made, and in the narrative itself the net result was that when Junkie became Junky it gained 3,850 words, lost just under a hundred, and in other, more subtle ways, it both looked and read like a different novel.

Junky (1977) was completely unexpurgated but not “­complete”—in the sense of restoring a single, authoritative manuscript—since, properly speaking, no such object ever existed. The use of manuscripts is always a matter of delicate decisions (you can draw up principles, but have to apply them flexibly) and of chance factors (unlike a jigsaw puzzle, you can never say there aren’t more small pieces still to discover), as well as of interpretation (finding more evidence doesn’t always resolve ambiguities). Apart from making just over a hundred small corrections or changes, this present edition adds to Junky approximately the same amount of new material (around four thousand words) as Junky added to Junkie, but the way it does so is, and had to be, quite different.

This edition of Junky takes advantage of important new manuscript discoveries, and a better understanding of old ones: the middle half of the July 1952 manuscript, the whole chapter on Wilhelm Reich, Burroughs’ original introduction and draft glossary, the Queer manuscripts—these and other fragments were all unavailable or presumed lost in 1977. On the other hand, the imprimatur of Burroughs himself is no longer available. This is one reason I have gone into the details, to make the process of change between editions as visible as possible, and why, where the authority is uncertain or the impact questionable, I have intervened cautiously. Despite the great interest of almost all of it, around three-quarters of the new material has not been inserted into the text. Over five hundred words from the manuscripts of Junky and Queer have been given in notes, and the bulk of it, starting with the most important material, has been put into a short section of appendices.

Appendix 1, the long-lost Chapter 28 (found in the Ginsberg Collection at Stanford University), is so significant that it is tempting to think it should have been restored to Junky. It is certainly more revealing than the Valley section that immediately preceded it in the manuscript, and that Burroughs also decided to cut. But it is not just a question of disregarding the author’s past unambiguous decision. (“Reich will be deleted bag and baggage,” he told Ginsberg in May 1951; “I do not feel that the part about Reich and the philosophical sections belong there cluttering up the narrative,” he repeated in April 1952.) It is also a question of the effect that restoring this material would have on everything else around it.

Although it suspends the narrative, and the prose here is oddly wooden, lacking the deceptive fluency and rhythm elsewhere, the real reason Burroughs wanted it cut is surely because it cast the rest of the novel in an entirely different light. Suddenly Burroughs breaks into his own voice, as if relieved to escape the constraint of his narrator’s, and the person that emerges is a speculative philosopher, a theorist of addiction. It is impossible to imagine William Lee reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy (as Burroughs did in June 1949) or building an orgone accumulator (as he did that November), but the effect of this section is to draw attention to the presence of similar material scattered throughout the novel that is otherwise quite easily overlooked. It also reveals something else about Burroughs. Reich was once one of Europe’s leading psychoanalytical thinkers, but in postwar America he came to be regarded as a science crank and a medical charlatan. Some of Burroughs’ speculations about addiction have turned out to be extraordinarily prescient, literally prophetic, but others show him up as an amateur on his soapbox, a crackpot eccentric; talking about “orgones,” Burroughs admits here that he might be taken “for a lunatic.” So there were several reasons why Reich was cut, “bag and baggage.”

Burroughs’ original introduction (also from the Ginsberg Collection at Stanford) has much in common with Chapter 28, and it’s no coincidence that he decided to revise it in April 1952, the same time he reconfirmed Reich was to be cut. Burroughs recognized that with constant revisions his novel had changed and, while a few pieces of Chapter 28 survived in the new autobiographical Prologue he was asked to write, none of this original introduction did. Again, it is a highly revealing text, speculating about the endocrine balance of addicts, promoting the value of antihistamine treatments (as a wonder drug, the clear forerunner of apomorphine for Burroughs), and making absolutely explicit his determination to go beyond the misinformation of prevailing myths.

Burroughs’ letter to A. A. Wyn (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University), which was written some time in 1959, but possibly never mailed, is included here for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a warrant for correcting several unauthorized changes made to Burroughs’ novel by Ace Books, changes that are themselves given as representative instances, only “the more flagrant mutilations” of his manuscript. Secondly, it shows Burroughs’ attention to detail, concerning not just accurate idiomatic usage, but the novel as a whole: “I spent a year working on this manuscript. I checked over every word many times.” This could be read as a corrective to those who assume Burroughs tossed off his writing carelessly. But to be more exact, it suggests that, whereas for Naked Lunch—first published in 1959—and his early cut-up texts, he did embrace accidents and overlook what other authors would call mistakes, this did not apply to his first novel.

Appendix 4, Ginsberg’s “Appreciation” from April 1952 (previously published in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995), is no less interesting for being full of factual errors about Burroughs’ life. In fact, the contrast it makes with the Prologue by Burroughs that Ace did publish is intriguing, especially if, as the internal evidence suggests, Burroughs modeled his own autobiographical sketch on Ginsberg’s draft. This is true for many local details: like Ginsberg, Burroughs would mention Gide and Baudelaire among his reading, but not Cocteau’s Opium (for reasons I suggested above) or W. B. Yeats’ A Vision (a work of philosophy too recondite and eccentric); Burroughs would keep the finger-cutting incident, but not the shooting of Joan; and the writing of his first mature attempt at fiction, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (described by Ginsberg as a “20-page playlet”), would also be left out, along with any suggestion of a literary background to Junky. Equally, this piece is interesting for showing Ginsberg’s immediate grasp that Burroughs had written “an important document”; “an archive of the underground.” On the other hand, it also shows how bound Ginsberg was, or felt he had to be, by the language of moral judgment (speaking of “subterranean vices” when he meant homosexuality) that characterized the early 1950s.

One final point is worth noting. This only hints at the efforts Ginsberg made to promote Burroughs’ novel, at a time when few were willing. Planning to have it appear under the names of Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes (both already recognized as Beat Generation figures), Ginsberg even wrote a gossip column piece to coincide with publication, intended for David Dempsey in The New York Times—only to have Kerouac angrily refuse to lend his name to it (either out of fear of guilt-by-association with narcotics, or because of his on-off literary rivalry with Holmes). Ginsberg’s tireless support for Junky cannot be overstated.

The last three appendices are reprinted here to complete the publishing record, since each appeared as an introductory text to the three main previous editions. The first of Carl Solomon’s two pieces, an anonymous Publisher’s Note that preceded the first edition of Junkie, is the more revealing of the two and of clear historical interest. Ginsberg’s introduction to the 1977 Penguin edition accurately describes Solomon’s involvement in the Ace edition, just one part of its very instructive and still valuable narrative of events. The account is not entirely reliable, however. Ginsberg implies, for example, that the Rio Grande Valley section was blue-penciled by Ace, when the evidence shows it was cut by Burroughs. More importantly, his claim that Burroughs wrote Junky, in effect, for Ginsberg, sending him chapters as part of their long-distance correspondence, is contradicted by all the evidence (a correction that has far-reaching implications within the larger history I have related). The alternative account of how Burroughs began the novel, given by both his biographers, is that when his oldest friend, Kells Elvins, moved to Mexico City in January 1950 he simply encouraged Burroughs to write up like a diary his past experiences as an addict, which, although it’s partial and inadequate, is what he probably did.

But it would be wrong to end this introduction to Junky with a quibble about Ginsberg’s accuracy as an historian of its writing. He was the one who was there, and there when it mattered, making sure Burroughs’ novel got published in the first place—and besides, who can ever truly say, “Here are the facts”? This is the peculiar interest of Junky; that it began at a point when Burroughs seemed to believe he could say this, and was finished at a time when he knew that he couldn’t. If Burroughs never demystified the origins of his writing, this may be because incomplete or inaccurate accounts suited someone with things to hide (which he certainly had), but also because he doubted the value and suspected the power of claims to true knowledge. Even so, the novel itself points to the unaccountable, to that which, like the junkie identity, “escapes exact tabulation” and so remains irresistibly elusive, leading us on but always slipping away. “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you”—Burroughs leaves us with a paradoxical key, a perverse secret, a confession perhaps, and most definitely a warning.

Oliver Harris

September 2002

1 Ginsberg to A. A. Wyn, April 12, 1952 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

2 Burroughs to Peter Matson, August 25, 1976, and Matson to Burroughs, September 10, 1976 (Matson Collection, Columbia University).

3 Apart from those referenced in footnotes, all quotations from Burroughs’ letters are from The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945–1959 (Penguin, 1993), edited by Oliver Harris.

4 See David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Classic Story of the Confidence Man and the Confidence Trick (1940: London: Century, 1999).

5 Quoted in Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs (New York: Scribner, 1996).

6 Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 15, 1952 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

7 Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956 (New York: Viking, 1995), edited by Ann Charters, 333.

8 See David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

9 The Adding Machine (London: Calder, 1985), 2.

10 See Caroline Jean Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

11 See William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).

12 Burroughs to Ginsberg, August 20, 1952 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

13 Burroughs to Carl Solomon, October 11, 1964 (New York University).