Lost and Found

Abstract

American ????G Williamson continuedfrom previous page uncensored bray of a Penthouse letter? Are we so narcissistic that we believe post-WWII American letters to be better, more interesting, more enduring, more relevant than our literature of a hundred years before, than Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, authors who had to find ways to be angry without saying "fuck you," to be sexy without describing clapping genitals, authors who wrote with linguistic limits imposed by a "repressive " culture? Do we think David Mamet a better playwright than Euripides or Brecht? The best way to squash dissent is to institutionalize it, to condone it, to package and market it. Ginsberg himself writes about this in his essay, "Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs." Bemoaning the commercialization of the scene in San Francisco, he writes, "Those ofthe general populace whose individual perception is sufficiently weak to be formed by stereotypes of mass communication disapprove and deny the insight. The police and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manufacturers from Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene." And we get the movie Easy Rider (1969). We get Shaft, 1971 (sex machine—that's John Shaft to you, whitey). We get the three record set of Woodstock, complete with antiwar chants in case you can't make up your own. Instead of Coltrane and Billie Holiday and Bessie Mae Smith, we get Snoop Doggy Dogg. The question, finally, is not whether we should censor our artists and our speech or not. The question is this: given that it's better to have freedom of expression than repression of expression, what do we say? And how the fuck do we say it? Eric Miles Williamson is an associate editor of American Book Review. His latest book, Oakland, Jack London, and Me, will bepublished this summer by Texas Review Press. Lost and Found Davis Schneiderman The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas Rob Johnson Texas A&M University Press http://www.tamu.edu/upress 208 pages; cloth, $40.00; paper, $19.95 The trouble with titling a book The Lost Years ofWilliam S. Burroughs is the implication that other years, in other scholarly tomes, have been already mapped, traced, located, examined — in another word: found. Much recent criticism of the work of William S. Burroughs would certainly disagree, focusing instead (in the case of the most prolific Burroughs scholar, Oliver Harris, as well as my own recent essays) on a complicated manuscript history that does as much to puncture the overripened Burroughsian mythos as it does to deflate the heretofore chronologies ofhis production. Even so, the game is never so simple. For every scholar intent on tracing the origin of a cut-up phrase and its labyrinthine permutations through Burroughs's texts, there are ten, maybe one hundred, persons who are equally (if not more) enthused by the rehash of Burroughs as junkie, Burroughs as wife killer, Burroughs as. . . well...Burroughs. So, despite the implied conclusion of its title, Rob Johnson's study of Burroughs's noncontiguous years in the South Texas "Valley" (1946-1949) contributes to the myth-busting trend ofthe criticism while still attending, precisely, to the nuances of Burroughsian "fascination" (Harris's term) in a way that actually adds substance rather than sizzle to the long-repeated narratives ofEl Hombre Invisible. No doubt, this is due to the paucity ofprevious information used in Johnson's study. Much is already detailed and endlessly documented about Burroughs's stays in New York, Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, but little has been said in the official critical corpus about these Texas years. Johnson tells us how Barry Miles, author of the smaller of the two Burroughs biographies, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (1993), finds the Valley located in East Texas (in his Ginsberg biography); Ted Morgan, author of the earlier biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times ofWilliam S. Burroughs (1988), does the same. It is all the harder to find, Johnson relates, because the Valley—"120 miles ofthe Texas border from Brownsville on the coast all the way up the river to Rio Grande City"—is no valley at all, "only a landscape described today in the...