King of the YADS

NAKED LUNCH (255 pp.)--William Burroughs--Grove ($6).

The Young American Disaffiliates (they used to be called beats, but nothing stays simple) have not done well. In matters of finance this is their intention, since the supermarket society is what they have disaffiliated from. But in literature it is merely their embarrassment. Here the best to be said for the YADs is that among them are Allen Ginsberg (Howl). Gregory Corso (Fried Shoes) and Jack Kerouac (On the Road). And the best to be said for these three is that each might have done something worth reading if he had not been lured by the sirens of faucet composition and second-growth Dada.

That is possible, the honorary beat will reply, but have you dug William Burroughs? (The honorary beat is gainfully employed, usually in some branch of the communications industry, but makes up for this solecism by thinking that Norman Mailer improves with age and by having, once, smoked a small quantity of marijuana.) The Burroughs gambit was, until recently, almost unanswerable, because it was almost impossible to track this author down, physically or in print. He was the greyest of grey eminences, a wraith who flickered into occasional visibility in Mexico, Paris or Tangier. The few shreds of information about him have been those of the YAD catechism: he was the legendary "Bull Lee" of On the Road; he spent 15 years on junk; he wrote an unprintable book called Naked Lunch, which no one had read but which everyone said hit the veins like a jolt of heroin.

The Odds Prevail. Now all this is changed; Naked Lunch will now be available at the friendly neighborhood bookstore, right there beside Youngblood Haivke and The New English Bible. The terrible Mary McCarthy has spoken of Burroughs with respect, and the Saturday Review's John Ciardi has praised his "profoundly meaningful" search for "values." British Writer Kenneth Allsop called him "Rimbaud in a raincoat." The grey eminence himself has even appeared at that squarest of social gatherings, a writers' conference.

The reputation of an underground author is a fragile thing. For example, it had been assumed for years that Henry Miller was unprintable but highly readable. Then Grove Press, merely by publishing his two Tropics, proved that Miller is unreadable but highly printable. A reading of Naked Lunch, the grotesque diary of Burroughs' years as an addict, suggests that no such drastic deflation will occur with him. For what it is worth. Burroughs will remain grand dragon of the YADs, by acclamation and by forfeit (he denies, of course, having anything in common with his beatnik vassals, but this is merely good form; no one ever admits to being a member of a literary movement started by someone else). Although Burroughs fancies himself a satirist and occasionally resembles one when the diary's heroin fog clears a little, the value of his book is mostly confessional, not literary.

Shell & Worm. Chairbound souls, however, will put up with a lot from an author who has been there and back, whether "there" is the top of Everest or the depths of the soul. Burroughs has been there, all right; he is not only an ex-junkie, but an ex-con and. by accident, a killer. In Mexico, having acquired a wife, he shot her between the eyes playing William Tell with a revolver. (The Mexican authorities decided it was imprudentia criminate and dropped the whole matter.) He has even been in the Army, but not for long; he reacted to being drafted by cutting off a finger joint, and was discharged with the notation "not to be recalled or reclassified."

Presenting himself as proof that the universe is foul, Burroughs achieves the somewhat irrelevant honesty of hysteria as he writes of a malevolent world of users and pushers, of a mad conspiracy of spider-eyed manipulators who sell each other "adulterated shark repellent, cut antibiotics, condemned parachutes, stale antivenom, inactive serums and vaccines, leaking lifeboats." All pity is mockery ("Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossessing your wife's artificial kidney. They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung"). All degradations are cherished: a coroner named Autopsy Ahmed makes a fortune peddling an Egyptian worm that "gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of the worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome." Most sex is homosexual and all of it is sterile: one partner murders the other in the midst of an embrace, so he can enjoy the death spasms.

Such a book might have been an eloquent attack on the insect society that civilization sometimes threatens to become. But the author is almost never in control for longer than a paragraph or two. Burroughs cannot sustain his nightworld, as Joyce did in sections of Ulysses, and as Novelist Ralph Ellison did in the whole of that remarkable book, Invisible Man.

Fold-In Shakespeare. Supported by a tiny income whose source is the Burroughs adding machine, which his grandfather invented (an irony important to beat hagiographers), the 48-year-old author lives in the "beat hotel," a fleabag shrine in a section of Paris where passers-by move out of the way for rats. There in a worn grey room the worn grey man has written three other novels. The Soft Machine, the immediate sequel to Naked Lunch, repeats the rant of its predecessor with far less coherence; the improvement may be explained by Burroughs' solemn assurance that much of his writing is dictation from Hasan-i-Sabbah. founder of the eleventh century hashish-eating Ismaili cult, the Assassins. The two most recent books, Novia Express and The Ticket That Exploded, come daringly close to utter babble, according to reports. In these volumes Hasan's dictation is augmented with a "fold-in" technique: pages of the first draft (or of a newspaper, Shakespeare, or whatnot) are taken at random, folded in half lengthwise, and stuck together. This juxtaposition of fragments, says Burroughs, produces a continuous interweaving of flashbacks and flashforwards.

It also produced a question from a puzzled plodder at last summer's Edinburgh Writers' Conference. "Are you serious?'' the earnest fellow asked.

"Yes, of course," Burroughs said, and apparently he was.

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