A private conversation with William Burroughs must have resembled a tryst with the Ancient Mariner. Detained by a glittering eye and the grip of skinny hand, you were likely to be treated to an account of psychedelic travels and post-mortem travails. When a student ingeniously asked Burroughs if he believed in an afterlife, he demanded, 'How do you know you're not already dead?' Victor Bockris, the auditory paparazzo who tracked Burroughs with a microphone during the last three decades of his life, had a follow-up question: 'Do you experience your own death?' Burroughs eerily whispered, 'Of course.' The grave confided its secrets to him. After all, he had worked as an exterminator, a professional killer of cockroaches.
Rather more ambitiously, he shot his wife in the forehead during a drunken prank in Mexico. In old age cranky, wheezing and emaciated, recklessly relating his sexual fantasies while he prophetically announced the earth's atomic doom he seemed like a mad Methuselah or perhaps like the ageless, androgynous seer Tiresias in TS Eliot's The Waste Land (the poem from which he derived his method of 'cut-up collage'). He often babbled about longevity pills, which would allow you to survive for centuries. 'A new mythology is possible in the Space Age,' he claims in the first of the sessions transcribed by Bockris. His crazed imaginings were exactly that: myths about a universe jolted out of shape by violent technological change.
His friend Allen Ginsberg praised Burroughs for embodying the 'change in consciousness' which unsettled traditional verities between the 1950s and the 1990s. He sent a telegram to congratulate the Sex Pistols when they chanted 'Bugger the Queen', and in Bockris's book he snakily grins in photo-ops with musical avant-gardists such as Lou Reed and David Bowie. The young consulted him because, having apparently outlived himself, he offered a preview of what the next phase of psychological and physical evolution might bring. Burroughs considered the human organism to be an artefact, and an ill-designed one at that: it needed rewiring, to be followed by a relaunch of the species. First the bicameral brain, tediously set up to rationalise actions, would have to be unkinked. 'Think of it: no conscious egos,' Burroughs tells a friend. 'All that negativity done away with.' He showed the way by impenitently shrugging when arraigned for murdering his wife. 'If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do,' he argued, 'you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.' He got off by blaming the inaccuracy of the gun.
If organs can be transplanted, so Burroughs contended could identities. In 1977 he scoffed at the science of cloning, though by the time he died last August Dolly the woolly replicant had proved him wrong. Not that Burroughs would have taken much pleasure in the notion of extracting cells from mammary tissue for the purpose of genetic engineering: the cloned sheep was named in homage to Dolly Parton, with her cantilevered silicone bosom. He considered women to be an evolutionary error, responsible for the detour taken by a 'dualistic universe', and declared them 'no longer essential for reproduction'. At one of Bockris's dinners, Andy Warhol innocently wonders 'why a boy's never had a baby'; Bockris reports that Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky have been energetically trying to make one (though he doesn't say in which bodily recess the prodigy was meant to be incubated).
Discussing artificial insemination at another party, Bockris suggests that Burroughs should merchandise samples of his semen. The priapic wiseacre volunteers to make a donation, though the phone rings before he can try on a test tube for size. Such friction and fumbling belonged, in any case, to the past. Burroughs predicted that, thanks to techniques of brain stimulation, we would soon be able to patronise an 'electronic Whorehouse'. Did he know that virtual sex is already for sale in Tokyo? Even here, however, those troublesome lower extremities have not withered away. Customers are outfitted with the usual virtual-reality helmet and mitten, but also strapped into a digitalised codpiece, which has been known to short-circuit and produce electrifying orgasms. For Burroughs, the ultimate aim was to outgrow the body: 'We must be weightless to go into space.' The comment makes him sound scarily like the Heaven's Gate cultists in California who, after 'training on a holodeck', dosed themselves with poison and lay down on their beds to await their transmigration to cyberspace.
It's a shame that Bockris, a downtown Manhattan hanger-on 'currently writing the autobiography of John Cale' (with Cale, presumably, as a research assistant), shares the conversational ineptitude of Coleridge's wedding guest, who can only stammer, 'I fear thee, Ancient Mariner'. The inanity of his interviewing riles Burroughs. 'Much of your work has been extremely condemning of the planet as a whole,' Bockris fatuously observes. Later he asks if Burroughs has ever been frightened. 'Are you mad?' screeches bilious Bill, who several times pulls a gun on Bockris and once sprays him with teargas. Deploying his insider's knowledge of the inferno, he declares that a woman Bockris is having wet dreams about must be a succubus intent on deranging him.
Bockris, who cravenly invites the famous for a meal in order to sell transcripts of their table talk, deserves such put-downs. Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger consent to eat his food, though on the way out Warhol tells his host, 'You were really terrible. Nothing happened.' At least the wedding guest, after meeting the spectral mariner, was 'a sadder and a wiser man'. Not so Bockris. Thirty years ago he had dinner with Jasper Johns at the Connaught Hotel in London and asked him: 'What is painting all about?' Johns retaliated by wondering what writing was all about. 'I still don't have the answer to that one,' Bockris now woefully admits. Truman Capote, confronted by a Kerouac novel, once remarked that this was typing, not writing. What Bockris does is taping, not even typing: secretarial skills and manual dexterity are not required.
