City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [87]
Chapter 13
In 1978 I met William Burroughs, who’d lived abroad (in Morocco, mostly) so long that he seemed more a myth from the past than a living writer. His pulseless, saurian persona as a smack addict—and in his work his Sade-like mechanical repetition of erotic hangings for everyone, of shiny faces for lesbians made out of penis transplants, of his predatory insectlike characters coolly sipping spinal fluid through straws—all enhanced his status as someone already dead, too cold and totemic to be alive.
I was invited to a dinner at the apartment of Ted Morgan on the East Side. Later, in 1982, I would write a positive review of his biography of Somerset Maugham, in which he gave a horrifying portrait of the aging writer as having lost his mind to Alzheimer’s though he was pumped full of youth-enhancing monkey glands. Virile and hyperactive but incapable of thinking, the once witty and ironic author would greet guests at the gates of his Riviera compound by presenting them with a welcoming handful of his own shit. Ted Morgan had known Burroughs in Tangier and eventually wrote his biography in 1988. Morgan was a tall, loping, edgy man, famous for his travels through Africa, who had once been French and known as comte Charles de Gramont. His father, people said, had married once for position, once for money, and once for love. Ted was the son of the love marriage with a beautiful Italian woman. Sanche had disliked his name and title so much that he’d changed his nationality, thoroughly expunged his French accent, and redubbed himself Ted Morgan (an anagram of “de Gramont”).
That first evening over dinner Burroughs spoke little except to say that he was able to manipulate his mood as a writer through obvious techniques. “For instance,” he said, “if I want to write about sex, I don’t jerk off for several days, then I’m sure to be horny and ready to describe it in lots of detail and a state of excitation.” We were all fascinated by every word the sphinx pronounced. Burroughs had a way of muttering that, as the evening wore on and joints were brought out, became completely incomprehensible. He produced none of the usual little social smiles or encouraging nods. He seemed remote and indifferent though cordial in a ghostly way. He had on the worn suit and thin, uninteresting tie that comprised his uniform—the look of an unsuccessful Kansas undertaker.
Burroughs had a new minder, James Grauerholz, a tall, sexy, slightly spooky youngster from Kansas. The story was that Grauerholz had written fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs at the same time in 1972. When shortly afterwards Grauerholz met Ginsberg, Ginsberg told him that Burroughs needed a secretary.
James immediately became Burroughs’s manager. He decided to present Burroughs eventually (in 1978) at the Mudd Club, a punk redoubt, where his mixture of literary violence, drugginess, and avant-garde credibility joined up with his look of a “clean old man” to make him famous to a whole new generation.
Grauerholz (with the help of agent Andrew Wylie) renegotiated Burroughs’s contracts and set up something called William Burroughs Enterprises, which brought his backlist into paperback reprint and engineered some media coups. Suddenly this half-dead but brilliant man was fully alive again in the public imagination. Grauerholz also edited all of Burroughs’s last books. Whereas Balanchine as an old man had lived through