Last days of an outlaw prophet

Even his admirers will admit the question most often asked about Williams Burroughs was not how great he was, but rather, exactly how weird. This literary maverick spent his life and career, though the two in his case are seamlessly one, gleefully high-stepping the norm - whatever that is. Intent on self-destruction, or at least so it would appear judging by his enduring love affair with drugs and guns, the skeletal Burroughs nevertheless survived until a heart attack claimed him on August 3rd 1997, aged 83 - the last of the Beats, with the exception of Paul Bowles, who died in November.

Madman or genius, it must be admitted that in person Burroughs certainly had a crazy sense of fun, with emphasis on the "crazy". For all the ongoing main event which was his life, once the St Louis-born, Harvard-educated outsider asserted himself as a writer with the publication of Junkie in 1953, followed by The Naked Lunch as it was originally titled in Paris in 1961, dropping the definitive title for its US publication the following year, he proved a productive, even compulsive innovator. The Soft Machine (Paris 1961, New York 1966) and The Ticket That Exploded (Paris 1962, New York 1967) followed, as would in time Cities of the Red Night (1981) and Queer (1986), a powerful love story, whose publication was delayed for some 30 years. As a writer he was concerned with looking at the individual imagination's relationship to society at large.

These journals are composed of the personal diary he kept during the final nine months of his life and confirm he was still writing, reading and most importantly of all, still thinking, albeit at times extremely randomly -"how the mind burbles - like rotten weeds" - up to the very end. "Life review," he writes on May 29th, "is not orderly account from conception to death. Rather, fragments - ". We know he shot his wife Joan dead by accident in 1951 and that Billy, their only son born in 1947, died in 1981. But what we didn't realise fully until here was the extent of his feisty vulnerability.

The familiar subversive, opinionated Burroughs persona emerges from these pages. There is no self-pity or fear. There are only traces of defiance. "People always like to pigeonhole one. Forty-five years ago I was `obviously on the verge of death from drink'. Sixty years ago some English poet referred to me as `poor old Burroughs, deep in addiction and hurting only himself'." Writing of himself in the third person as "an evil old recluse", he declares, "Poor old Burroughs may look a shade better. He is becoming, however, addicted to writing in these notebooks."

Yet there is a growing awareness of impending death, as he writes "Here I sit with my three old cats, getting closer to eternity all the time", and quotes "Time's Winged chariot hurrying near". The progression is marked by the loss of four of those six beloved cats, and candid factual physical details - "my reflexes is [sic] shot. Can't roll a joint" elsewhere "my fingers don't do always what I tell them anymore" - as well as mention of the abrupt leave-taking of his one-time lover and long-time friend, fellow Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

In the journal entry for April 3rd, 1997 Burroughs records "Allen Ginsberg is dying of liver cancer. `About two to three months', the croakers tell him, and he says: `I think less'. He says: `I thought I would be terrified; instead I am exhilarated'." The next entry, April 5th, reads simply. "Allen Ginsberg died (this morning); peaceful, no pain. He was right. When the doctors said 2-4 [Burroughs writes four and not three as above], he said: `I think less'." A few days later, Burroughs wasn't feeling too good himself. "I feel woozy, like I may be dying - who lives will see. Way I feel now don't know whether to call a doctor or the undertaker. It isn't good. Fortunately, my copains are gathering. This may be it. `Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come'." Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. And in any case, no fear - I could die tonight. I had the real dying feeling an hour or two ago. It will return, and heavier - ".

But he quickly rallies. Four days later he is recording "a sex dream" experienced the previous night. Just as homosexual sex was to remain, if not exactly a preoccupation, clearly a theme, so too does his relationship with drugs. "I never regretted the junk habit. These lying bastards have the gall to ask me to speak about the evils of junk - I told them: shallow pretext for police state," and they was [sic] off-line quick, lest they become contaminated by such evil dissent."

Elsewhere he concedes, "How can anyone endure this furtive, precarious life without junk? Show me the full power that junk has over me, lying hypocrite that I am." He sees conformity as failure. "Imagine the barren banality of a drug-free America. No dope fiends, just good, clean-living, decent Americans, from sea to shinging sea . . . No dissent anywhere. No slums. No areas of vague undercover operations. No nothing . . . How good will it be to have total conformity? What will be left of singularity?"

Somehow he presents rebellion as the only way to preserve individuality, truth and justice. Although his entries seldom acquire a fully hectoring tone as his mood is more musing than polemic, it is obvious that Burroughs always saw himself in a prophetic role, even here in his last days. "We're all dying breeds, way I see it. World is going down into a very nasty police state. But the top people is [sic] caught in a bind - they have to have the criminals, vicious gangs, drug lords, drug war. A degree of chaos to justify an all-out war on dissent. Before Communism died, that would have been the way for artists and intellectuals. Way closed. They subside into nothing. Don't need no street fighters . . . You want to destroy a species? Destroy its habitat, where it lives and breathes." More wry than cynical he writes, on April 2nd, "As we near the millennium, Good and Evil slugging it out on this checkerboard of nights and days."

WHILE the self-styled commentator has his say on the great issues, which includes wondering about "the future of the novel, or any writing", vivid fragments of memory infiltrate the entries while his thoughts often return to his cats. The journal begins with his mourning Calico Jane. She had been killed by a car. "In the empty spaces where the cat was," writes Burroughs, "that hurt physically. Cat is part of me. Mornings since, I break into uncontrollable sobbing and crying when I remember where she used to be - sit - move, etc. No question of histrionics. It just happens." He has his lyric moments. "Where human voices used to be, the empty vocal cords, the songs and symphonies, drums, flutes - all empty, just the chrysalis of sound shredding into dust forever. Only the cats remain solid, demanding parts of myself." Less than a month before his own death he loses his cat Fletch. "My Fletch, my Fletch. The empty places where he used to be . . . This grief can kill."

Just when the reader might be wondering if Burroughs was really as unaffected by Ginsberg's death as it seems, he notes on April 30th, "At this moment, 5;04 p.m., I have an intense, vivid feeling of Allen's presence. Outside in the leaves. I see him clear . . .`Allen come in please - sad, empty here. Allen, what is here?' The ghost's response is not reassuring: `You never loved anybody except your cats'."

As strange as anything he wrote, though not as bizarre and far more human except for Junkie and Queer, this characteristically offbeat testament is surprisingly compelling, even moving. It could draw even wary readers back to the imagined, explicit work of an outlaw prophet who has always seemed important, if never fully convincing.

Eileen Battersby is a critic and an Irish Times journalist