Crazy John and the Bishop By Terry Eagleton

Crazy John and the Bishop

By Terry Eagleton

(University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, No Price Given)

Ever since he burst on to the scene some thirty years ago with Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, now Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been both prolific and polemical, his mixture of literary scholarship, critical acuity, and social concern having the incendiary force of a hand grenade tossed into the stuffy, fuddy-duddy sherry party milieu of English academia back then, some of whose staid attributes and attitudes remain entrenched even today. Crazy John and the Bishop, following on from 1996’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, and his play Saint Oscar, continues Eagleton’s interest and inquiry into Irish cultural history, often confronting the vexed relationship between the Irish and the English.

Crazy John and the Bishop is made up of ten essays which stretch from the eighteenth century to the present day. Topics range from Augustan satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth century Cork to the philosophy of John Toland and Bishop Berkeley. Eagleton also moves between well-known, even celebrated writers to less familiar, even neglected ones.  

The opening essay aims for a close critical dissection of the little remembered eighteenth-century poet William Dunkin, calling him ‘at least as fine a poet as many of his English counterparts who have found their assured niche in the eighteenth-century canon’. There are also studies of Thomas Moore, W B Yeats and Samuel Beckett, the latter piece brilliantly illuminating some of the darker paradoxes that lie at the heart of Beckett’s work, and dealing with the problems it presents for traditional liberal humanist criticism. The title essay focuses on John Toland and Bishop Berkeley, and examines Irish eighteenth-century history of ideas in general. ‘The Good-Natured Gael’ explores concepts of ‘benevolence’ and ‘sensibility’, and includes a long segment on Oliver Goldsmith, as well as some wonderful insights on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of this reviewer’s favourite novels. ‘Cork and the Carnivalesque’ looks at notions of parody, comedy and plagiarism in relation to Irish writing, with particular reference to Frances Mahony (‘Father Prout’) and William McGinn. The theme of the Irish ‘internal émigré’ is featured in ‘Home and Away’, and discusses the work of a broad span of novelists including Maria Edgeworth, Kate O’Brien and Francis Stuart. The cultural and political stance of the book emerges most clearly in the pieces on the largely forgotten Irish socialist Frederick Ryan, ‘The Ryan Line’, and the concluding examination of the revisionist controversy, ‘Revisionism Revisited’. In this essay, full of ingenious juxtapositions, he argues that the debate between traditionalists and revisionists, or conservatives and liberals, is redundant, since what is being proposed is as good or as bad as what went before, and the impasse can only be solved by a radical alternative. ‘There seems little point in replacing the myth of the Celt with the myth of Europe’ he writes, while acknowledging that, ‘There is not much point in trying to convince a Dublin advertising executive that modernity can be every bit as emotionally devastating and spiritually mutilating as lounging unemployed and sexually guilt-ridden at the country crossroads’.

If there is a criticism to be made of this bravura performance, it is that perhaps Eagleton writes too fast. He is rich in ideas, but these are sometimes thrown out at the expense of style. But then again, he would probably have his own rather jaundiced view of essayists who have a reputation for fine writing, and find themselves dubbed stylists, the noun often preceded by the qualifying adjective ‘mere’.

This book is another fine contribution to ‘Critical Conditions’, the Field Day series of books of essays and monographs, whose general editor is Seamus Deane. It adds to Field Day’s reputation as one of the most worthwhile ventures in modern Irish intellectual life.

First published in The World of Hibernia

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi By Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

By Geoff Dyer

(Canongate, £12.99stg p/b)

Geoff Dyer’s new work is very much a book of two halves. Indeed, he was going to subtitle it ‘a diptych’, until his inner editor prevailed in its judgment of such a move as pretentious. Still, the structure of the new novel may prove disconcerting to some, reading more like two novellas than one novel.

The first ‘Jeff in Venice’ half is familiar Dyer territory: it features a third-person male narrator, Jeff, who is much the same age and height as Geoff, and works as a freelance arts journalist just like Geoff. ‘Junket Jeff’ goes to Venice for the 2003 Biennale, gets wasted on bellinis, grass and cocaine, and clicks with a very attractive, younger Californian gallery worker, Laura, with who he has an intensely carnal, hedonistic fling.

So, for the second ‘Death in Varanasi’ sequence, you are set up to expect some kind of continuation of Jeff and Laura's relationship elsewhere. Instead, you get a first-person narrative from an unnamed narrator, who may or may not be Jeff (it’s never made explicit, though you tend to assume they are one and the same) who accepts a travel writing gig to the holy city of Varanasi at the mouth of the Ganges in India. It’s not even clear whether the second half chronologically follows the first. By the time you realise that ‘love interest’ Laura isn't going to reappear, that she’s been abandoned mid-book, it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed. 

Dyer has explicated his methodology, rather fancifully, thus: ‘Just as everyone is an avatar of someone else in Hindu myth, so the characters are different incarnations of each other.’ Whatever; what is certainly clear is that what we have here is an attempt to write prose fiction that is not narrative-driven, that favours the byways of digression over a well-planned, or well-plotted, journey.

Consequently, although the slacker laureate, as he has been dubbed (it is surely something of a misnomer, since few ‘slackers’ are as prolific as he) has this time produced a work of what is ostensibly billed as fiction, his fourth to date, don’t be fooled: classification is always tricky with Dyer, as he is as adept at critical essay, reportage and travelogue as he is at fiction (if not more so), but happiest when fashioning them all into something entirely his own. This assertion, coupled with the diversity of his interests, is evidenced across a back catalogue which includes titles which range from: Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger; The Missing of the Somme; Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence; What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney; The Ongoing Moment, an idiosyncratic history of photography; and But Beautiful, an astoundingly wonderful synthesis of fact and fiction, with a penetrating critical essay as a coda, described by Keith Jarrett as, ‘The only book about jazz I have recommended to my friends.’ The downside of this magpie-mindedness, if there is one, is that because non-fiction for him is just another location on the fiction continuum, his fiction proper (forgive the crude categorisation) can feel a bit samey and lightweight. Again, Dyer on Dyer: ‘I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.’

In his defense it might be argued, with reference to writers who are connoisseurs of their own consciousness from Montaigne to Barthes: why bother trying to make stuff up, when your own preoccupations and obsessions, and what you make of them, are so riveting? Besides, no one actually believes in the elaborate fictive worlds created by the likes of Henry James anymore. (Jeff in Venice at one point compares himself ironically to ‘…some sad fuck in a Henry James’ novel.’) Novels are so over: read Geoff (Jeff) Dyer.

What we have here, I suppose, is a superior sort of Bloke Fiction, a male equivalent of the better Chick Lit. Thus, if Jeff is a bit like Geoff, he is also a bit like me. Jeff on freelancing: ‘If it were a proper job, I’d pack it in and do something else, but freelancing is the something else that you do after you’ve packed in your job so my options are kind of limited. It’s that or retirement – from which it is at times pretty much indistinguishable.’ Hey, I can identify with that. This being the Biennale, there is also some fun and penetrating contemporary art criticism. Even in Varanasi, the lack of Laura is compensated for by the excellent travel writing, and the new friends made. Hinduism is ‘the Disney of world religions’, and there follows a disquisition on the superiority of polytheism to monotheism. ‘There is no God but God, says the one place. There are millions of them, says the other.’ By the time our charming narrator starts losing it spectacularly, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him, whoever he is.

Lots of guys who scribble would give their right arms to be Martin Amis, or some other supposedly serious great mind grappling with the weighty issues of our time.  Me, I wouldn’t mind being Geoff Dyer. With his deft insight and lightness of touch, he makes the self-important overachievers look rather foolishly earnest. What a great travelling companion – if we weren’t all lonesome travellers.

Whatever Happened to Margo? By Margaret Durrell

Whatever Happened to Margo?

By Margaret Durrell

(Warner Books)

Sister of the more famous and, it has to be said, more talented Gerald and Lawrence, Margaret Durrell’s memoir of her career as a landlady in Bournemouth in 1947, discovered by the author’s granddaughter 30 years after it was written, is a light and airy concoction. Margo is probably best known to readers through Gerald’s autobiography, My Family and Other Animals. Returning home after extensive travels in Greece and Africa, she found herself, divorced and with two young sons to support, in need of financial security. So she took the advice of her domineering maiden aunt Patience, and started a boarding house in the respectable seaside town.

But her snobby aunt’s vision of reputable, middle-class boarders was never to be fulfilled. Her first tenant was Edward Feather, a painter of nudes, and his voluptuous model wife. There followed Mrs Williams, a battered wife, and her precocious, over- weight son, Nelson, and a chauvinist bricklayer, Mr Budden, and his long-suffering wife. Then there were Blanche and Judy, student nurses; Gordon, a nervous bachelor who eventually comes into some money; jazz musicians Roger and Andy, the latter of whom Margo embarks on an affair with; and Jane, a prim ex-nurse, lusting after bohemia in revealing black negligees. Add to this mayhem the irregular visits of brother Gerald, who brings a posse of monkeys and a six-foot python into the human menagerie.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of the time, long before Philip Larkin’s annus mirabilis of 1963, is captured well, with two pence looking down on a penny, and nosy neighbours trying to rule people’s lives. Alas for the culture vultures, there is little mention of, and no appearance by, Lawrence. Margo comes across as a generous spirit, free of the pettiness so prevalent then, and with an appreciation of the comic side of life. But one still wonders if the adventures related here really merited a whole book to themselves. Nevertheless, she has produced a not too taxing confection of anecdote and incident, which should pleasurably pass a few hours.

Commissioned for Image magazine

A Star Called Henry By Roddy Doyle

A Star Called Henry                                                

By Roddy Doyle

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

Well, it’s a long way from Barrytown. Or maybe not as far as you might think, since Henry Smart, the rumbustious hero of Roddy Doyle’s new novel, a man born in 1901 whose life therefore runs concurrently with that of the century, could well be the grandfather of one of those kids in The Commitments. But he is even more disenfranchised than they, and the poverty of his childhood makes the world of Angela’s Ashes look like sheer bloody luxury by comparison. In one particularly memorable scene, the young Henry and his younger brother Victor catch rats by smearing their arms and hands with soup made from boiling baby rats, and then sell them on to betting men. These punters: 

          ... paid me extra to put my hands into the sack. I always did it but

          I wouldn’t let Victor risk his fingers. I loved watching the faces

          of the men around the pit; I read their contempt, pity and admiration.

          I stared at the rich ones, the ones I knew already felt guilty about 

          being there, with the worst of the scum of the slums; I’d stare at 

          them as I sank my hand into the sack and felt the fury in the rats’

          backs and the men would look away. I’d let them see the little boy

          being asked to maim himself for their entertainment.

As you can gather, while the Barrytown trilogy presented a somewhat sentimental view of urban working class life, which in this reviewer’s opinion often seemed little more than an updated version of the ‘rare ol’ times’ codology, here we get the real thing, and any mawkishness is quickly undercut by another kick in the teeth. Not that there aren’t huge swathes of humour running through A Star Called Henry, but the hue is decidedly blacker than before. In effect, what we have here is a judicious blend of light and shade, The Snapper crossed with The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, or The Van with Family, and delivered all in one.

Henry’s father, also Henry, was a doorman at Dolly Oblong’s brothel, and also settled scores for her partner, the mysterious Alfie Gandon. He obligingly bumped off Gandon’s enemies, preferably with a good clout from his wooden leg, and then got rid of the bodies piece by piece in the rivers, streams and canals around Dublin. His mother, Melody, was married at sixteen and had succumbed to consumption and alcoholism by her early twenties. When she became too sick to look after her children, they took to the streets. One day Henry goes back to check on her, but she’s moved on. He never sees her again. Then there’s Granny Nash, an omnivorous reader of female fiction, and repository of family secrets. The depiction of childhood here excels that in Doyle’s best previous novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

But it is in its radical beyond revisionist expose of the shibboleths of the 1916 Rebellion, the War of Independence and the Civil War, that the book stands out.  Henry is present in the GPO on Easter Monday (like all the best people), but as a member of the Irish Citizen Army rather than as a Volunteer.  

          Jesus, I hated the Volunteers. The poets and the farm boys, the 

          fuckin’ shopkeepers. They detested the slummers - the accents

          and the dirt, the Dubliness of them. 

His mentors are Jim Larkin and James Connelly (who teaches him how to read and write). He also manages to lose his virginity in the GPO, with his ex-primary school teacher (he went for two days) and future wife, Cumann Na Ban member Miss O’Shea. This puts a whole new perspective on the Easter, ahem, Rising.

On a serious note, here is a novel that shows how 1916 was, like the French Revolution, ultimately a bourgeois affair, since very little changed for those who had nothing to begin with. Towards the end a former rebel leader presents Henry with his death warrant:

          -Why?

          - Well, he said.  - If you’re not with us you’re against us. That’s the 

          thinking. And there are those who reckon that you’re always going

          to be against us. And they’re probably right. You’ve no stake in the

          country, man. Never had, never will. We needed trouble-makers and

          very soon now we’ll have to be rid of them. And that, Henry, is all you

          are and ever were.         

In this reading of events, and in its acknowledgement of the often forgotten number of Irishmen who joined the British army, A Star Called Henry echoes Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, although perhaps it is with Sean O’Casey’s jaundiced treatments of the time, and his use of the demotic, that Doyle has most in common.

There are a couple of technical quibbles, such as why aren’t we told how old Henry is and where is he when writing the book, and how does he know so much about his parents’ courtship, if he wasn’t there at the time and nobody told him about it? But the best way to cope with these minor irritations is to close one’s eyes and be swept along, since the ride is well worth it.

 This is the work of a man who knows a thing or two about human nature, and also about how the world works, and is using that knowledge as a force for good. With his early books he captured a wide audience, many of whom would not be regular readers. In a sense they have grown up with him, and I sincerely hope he keeps them. The blurb calls this, correctly for once, ‘a vastly more ambitious book than any he has written before’, and at the end of the day it is that very ambition which is what is most  impressive about it. It is, after all, only the first instalment of a projected trilogy, The Last Round Up, and Henry is still only twenty when it concludes, and Liverpool bound. I can’t wait for Volume Two. With its wonderfully well integrated and unshowy use of historical research, and its wealth of detail and marvellous descriptive passages, its anger and exuberance, this is one of the most important novels written by an Irish writer in the past thirty or forty years, a major achievement and an instant classic.

Nice one, Doyler. Or, as they used to say in Barrytown, ‘Deadly’.

First published in Books Ireland

Point Omega By Don DeLillo

Point Omega                                                                                  

By Don DeLillo

(Picador, £14.99stg hardback)

Since 1997’s epic tome Underworld, and in contrast to the solidly built, medium-sized, middle-period novels which consolidated his reputation, The Names, White Noise and Libra, Don DeLillo has worked on considerably smaller canvasses, with novella-length fictions The Body Artist, Cosmopolis and Falling Man. Point Omega continues this minimalist, or should that be miniaturist, trend, prompting comparisons with the late stylistic shifts of master practitioners as diverse as Hemingway and Beckett, if not in terms of the actual realised signature styles themselves, which are as individually traceable as DNA samples, then at least in terms of approach and intent. For DeLillo, like these illustrious exemplars, is one of those rare writers who has remade language in his own image, and so also has given us, almost as a seemingly incidental by-product, a unique worldview.

This is achieved in part by the highly stylised, call-and-response dialogue, more incantatory than ordinary conversation, which cries out to be called hypnotic, or hyper-real: ‘ “You need an answer. Is that what you’re saying?” “I need an answer.” “You have a life back there.” … “A life. That may be too strong a word.” … “You’re not married, am I right?” “Separated. We separated,” I said. “Separated. How familiar that sounds.” ’ But it’s also a question of thematics, and how these themes are subsumed into and altered by the style, the filtration process yielding new meanings. Death; dread; paranoia; mediation; perception and the nature of reality: all the old warhorses don’t look quite the same after being pressed into and passed through the refined language blender, condenser, purifier.

The title comes from the Jesuit priest-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who posited an evolutionary belief that there is a point of perfection which the universe, or consciousness, will eventually achieve, which in DeLillo’s spin thereon may well be coterminous with extinction thereof. ‘ “Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” ’

Teilhard is here being referred to by Richard Elster, an ageing ‘defense intellectual’ who has written a journal article on the etymology and possible meanings of the word ‘rendition’ and who, like Paul Wolfowitz and his ilk, was brought out from under his academic rock by the Bush administration to lend an air of respectability and justification to the pro-war policies of the most appalling regime in American history, and obligingly told his patrons everything they wanted to hear. The ‘blat and stammer of Iraq’, he ruefully recalls assuring them, would be ‘a Haiku war, a war in three lines’.

Elster is conversing with our narrator Jim Finley, a documentary filmmaker who is trying to persuade Elster to take part in a film he wants to make where the older man will talk about his two years at the Pentagon, and anything else that pops into his brilliant mind. But Elster is resisting, prevaricating, suggesting that what Finley wants is ‘ “…a public confession…A deathbed conversion….The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.” ’ They end up in California’s Sonoran Desert, in Elster’s crumbling rural retreat, mainly sitting on the deck, drinking and shooting that otherworldly, but instantly identifiable, DeLillo breeze.

They are joined by Elster’s mid-20s daughter Jessie, packed off from New York by her overbearing mother, in fear of a ‘persistent’ boyfriend. For a time things are companionable, then Jessie disappears. Searches ensue, to no avail. Elster disintegrates in grief. We never find out what became of her.

The desert scenes are framed by a brief prologue and epilogue, Anonymity and Anonymity 2, dated September 3 and 4 2006 respectively, which take place in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art, where Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 1993 video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, is showing. A man stands fascinated by this piece, in which the 109-¬minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to roll by. Visual and verbal clues intimate that the man witnesses Elster and Finley enter the first day, Jessie the second day. The set-piece provides an excuse for ruminations on the nature of film, perception and time. Why 24 frames per second? Why not 2 frames per second?

Criticisms of this book will include that it is inconclusive, and that it contains no sustained analysis of what led Elster, and by implication, his real-life counterparts, to get involved with the Grand Old Party hacks. But maybe DeLillo is at a point in his writing life when he prefers to suggest things, rather than fully explore them. Might I suggest that, behind all the vague metaphysical speculation, Point Omega could be about such a quaintly old-fashioned concept as retribution? A man sells his sociopolitical soul for worldly recognition, and suffers a searing domestic tragedy at home. Of course, there is no direct causal link, or even verifiable connection, between the two events, but how could there be, in this post-theistic universe, where there is no controlling principle? Retribution it may be, but it sure ain’t divine.

The critic D.T. Max, in a New Yorker essay, quotes a 1997 letter written by DeLillo to fellow novelist David Foster Wallace: ‘I realised that precision can be a kind of poetry, and the more precise . . . then the better my chances of creating a deeper and more beautiful language.’ Consider, then, these random psycholinguistic observations from his powerful new fiction: ‘The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.’ ‘He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.’ Pairing back. Winding down. Leaving out. Turning off. Perhaps Don DeLillo has reached a Point Omega of his own.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Cannibals By Dan Collins

Cannibals

By Dan Collins

(Jonathan Cape, £10)

This book is, like the proverbial curate’s egg, good in places. Unfortunately, it is also very bad in other places, and the whole is rather less than the sum of its parts. ‘…Cannibals is a novel consisting of eighty-eight compelling bulletins that reveal the fractured essence of our age’ the blurb tells us, and ‘We enter the characters’ lives through seemingly disconnected fragments…’ That ‘seemingly’ is excessive, since a name repeated very occasionally here and there is hardly sufficient to lend integrity (in the literal sense of the word) or narrative thread (to say nothing of thrust) to a randomly assembled bunch of monologues and scenes. The ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses, the splintered technique of which was made valuable use of more recently in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, certainly disturbs the solidity of the space/time continuum, but the sightings of two separate characters’ contrary journeys provides a linking device for those that see them. With Cannibals, the sequencing is entirely arbitrary. Not that I am suggesting that hoary old humanist notions of agency, causality and consciousness are appropriate to the material in hand, since the aleatoric presentation is probably completely intentional and indeed the whole point of the exercise. But, as Thomas Pynchon has written in the introduction to the collection of his early short stories, Slow Learner, with regard to the influence of surrealism: ‘What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father’s orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, “One of the things that people don’t realise about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.” ’

The titles of each snippet are arranged alphabetically, examples of which include: ‘A Thing About Hotels’; ‘Before We Were Married’; ‘Being Stalked’; ‘Catwalker’; ‘Fucking Bicycles’; ‘His Bergman Phase’; ‘Jellied Eels’; ‘Novelty Knickers’; ‘Pigpoo’; ‘Sex With My Husband’; ‘Tracking Rory’ etc. A couple of the more successful ones are the extramarital and political satire of the section with the same title as the book, and the domestic betrayal and resignation of ‘Snakeproof’.

There are bound to be problems unifying a plotless text with no characters who could remotely be described as three dimensional or central. David Foster Wallace managed it in his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but that was through the zanily delicious irony of the underlying ideas, and the exactness of register in the rendering of each disparate interviewee’s use of language. Each piece worked as a stand alone, but taken together, they provided valuable counterpoint for each other. Then again, Foster didn’t call that book a novel. There’s nothing novel about the bad sex, emotional betrayal, blatant careerism and vacuous consumerism on display here, and the glib, shallowly cynical tone, simultaneously callow and world weary, in which it’s delivered. Then again, maybe it’s this very tone that’s supposed to make the slapped together segments some sort of single entity, but paradoxically it’s the lack of variety in world view that makes it ultimately unsatisfying. Like the recent spate of American movies about how messed up the world is (Very Bad Things, Happiness, Magnolia, Your Friends and Neighbours), it’s the absence of light and shade that drains any tragedy of potential significance (which is, I suppose, a tragedy in itself).

There is a deal of writing from a female point of view, some of which seems quite authentic (to this boy, at least), some of which seems merely misogynistic, or at least comes off as a woman talking with a man’s voice. Still, there are lots of different kinds of women out there. There’s also a good dollop of the Brett Easton Ellis multiple designer labels trick.

This is a debut novel, and there are things here that could be developed and built on, but for the moment this writer isn’t telling the hippest of us (presumably the audience it’s aimed at) anything we don’t already know.

First published in Books Ireland

The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S Burroughs By Graham Caveney

The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S Burroughs

By Graham Caveney

(Bloomsbury, £20)

The problem for any biographer of William Burroughs, as for any devotee of his writing, is that, as Caveney puts it his introduction: ‘He is a signifier of the terminally hip, a name dropped so frequently that it resurfaces with a (lack of) identity all of its own...Fans of Burroughs become so before they have read him (often without bothering to do so) - the very idea of him is as exciting as his work.’ The life has made a greater contribution to the myth than has the work, thus obscuring it, to the extent that Burroughs may well have wished that he’d stayed home in St Louis, with slippers by the fireside, instead of trailing around the world indulging in high times, often seeming to be engaged on a personal mission to disprove the then current laws of medical science. There again, Philip Larkin, who contrived to lead as boring - if not as conventional - a life as possible, was still the subject of a warts and all biography by Andrew Motion, and J D Salinger’s extreme reclusivity did not protect him from Ian Hamilton’s effort at rooting out his secrets. (What price a Pynchon biography, sometime soon?) Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, would appear to be the message, when it comes to the publicity game.

The irony of this extravagantly designed and lavishly illustrated book is that it can only further exacerbate this quandary. Caveney admits that what is on offer is ‘a chronology of the Burroughs phenomenon’, rather than an attempt to uncover his ‘authentic personality’, but for any long-time Burroughs admirer there is nothing new here, either biographically or critically.

The bare facts of the life are already common currency: born in 1914 into a bourgeois mid-western family; a dull childhood; an indifferent English degree from Harvard, an experience which left him with a lifelong disdain and distrust of the dead hand of academia; friendship with Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg - the Beats - and his affair with the latter; the shooting dead during a drunken William Tell act of his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City in 1951, an event that has provoked much speculation in the accidental/intentional department, and which Burroughs has pinpointed as the defining moment of his life, the resultant trauma shocking him into taking himself seriously as a writer, and informing much of his writing (Burroughs, incidentally, provides great solace for all of life’s late-starters, becoming a first-time novelist aged 42, and a first-time home buyer aged 70); protracted periods of residence in Tangier, Paris, London and New York; and old age in Lawrence, Kansas.

To be fair, Caveney does go further than merely presenting the usual ‘junkie, queer, rebel’ image, to highlighting how the novels represent a thorough-going interrogation of the fear and attraction of imprisoning systems of control, from drugs, desire and religion to language itself. He hints at, if never explores, how Burroughs, unlike his contemporaries, was ‘less interested in side-stepping systems of control than in exploding them from within...The Beats produced alternative ideologies; Burroughs looked at how we are produced by them’. Caveney is also good at enumerating Burroughs’ various filmic and musical collaborations, and discusses the shotgun paintings. But again, this is all common knowledge for any fan, and the newcomer would be better off reading some of the novels than swallowing this glossy pabulum. From the early succes de scandale of Naked Lunch to the maturity of The Western Lands, it is amazing how Burroughs continued to reinvent himself and improve as a writer, the latter text being a virtual blueprint for immortality.    

In many ways, this artefact exemplifies the idiocy of the ‘90s: a coffee table book about Burroughs, featuring the writer as lifestyle accessory. The hagiographic tone is all the odder, in a tome from a major London publisher, since so much of Burroughs’ work is at variance with the domestic realism currently enjoying a hegemony there. Or maybe not so odd at all, given the market-driven, consumerist ethos of publishing these days. One wonders what would become of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs if they were looking for a start today, and John Calder is to be commended for having given a platform to these highly idiosyncratic talents. Of course, we are no slouches ourselves when it comes to posthumously exploiting the reputations of our more subversive writers, usually to boost the tourism industry, most especially the ones who found it impossible to live here when they were alive. Marketing will be the death of us all.  

‘Now we are left with the career novelists’ lamented J G Ballard, in his obituary of Burroughs last August. But Burroughs is probably not losing too much sleep over this hoopla, wherever he is, for like other cultural icons of our time - Beckett and Warhol - the more ubiquitous his image, the more enigmatic he becomes. With his amalgamation of mandarin intellect with hipster cool, he remains one of the most important writers of the century.

First published in The Sunday Tribune