The lifestyle and literature of William S. Burroughs were both equally unorthodox in practice. The strange life lived by the author of Junky and Naked Lunch was often as surreal and inexplicable as the themes and imagery of those two classic and disturbing novels. Burroughs’ literature and the detailed biographical portraits we have of him can be bound together to form what could be called the Burroughs mythos. Up until recently, one piece of the Burroughs mythos has not been given proper attention; the missing piece is the time he spent as a member of The Church of Scientology and how it influenced his works. David S. Wills fills in this gap in his book Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult.
This book is broken into four sections. The first is a general overview of Burroughs’ life up until the time he started to seriously pursue a career as a writer. Wills covers his childhood in St. Louis, the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy, his introduction to the occult by his mother and nanny, his fascination for quack cures and pseudo-science, and a few other traumatic events along the way. The years of his early adulthood were just as strange. Burroughs began experimenting with drugs, traveled in South America, got involved in criminal activities, tried and failed to operate a grapefruit farm in Texas, and met up with future Beat Generation superstars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And, of course, there is the time Burroughs shot his wife in the head in Mexico City. In short, this section is a standard overview of William S. Burroughs’ life. There is one hitch, though. The author David S. Wills has an annoying approach and takes every chance he possibly can to take swipes at the man for either doing stupid things or having stupid beliefs. It’s not that Burroughs lived an exemplary life or had infallible views; Burroughs fans take these things for granted. Wills fails to understand that these are what makes Burroughs such a mythical character and beating up on him just makes Wills look like a smug and condescending asshole.
The editing in this book is poor. I will mention it but won’t dwell on it too much. The text is permeated with spelling errors, improper word usage, awkward grammatical constructions, and poorly organized paragraphs. Sometimes it gets bad enough that I had to go back and reread a sentence or two to figure out what Wills was actually trying to say. At least William Burroughs was intentionally trying to confuse his readers. Wills just accomplishes this through carelessness.
The author also adds some sporadic details that don’t quite fit the narrative. For example, he mentions Brion Gysin’s creation of the Dream Machine and the sad details of Burroughs’ relationship with his son; while these events are true and also represent significant details of the general biography, they have nothing to do with Burroughs and his relationship to Scientology. They are not well incorporated into the narrative. Most readers already know these things anyways. These parts stand out in uncomfortable ways like pieces of broccoli in a bowl of ice cream.
And couldn’t he have come up with a better title than Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult? That sounds like something you would find in the National Enquirer.
Moving on to the second section, as Burroughs’ life continues, he begins making waves with his second novel Naked Lunch then heads off for more exotic locations where the police won’t be breathing down his neck. He ends up in Tangiers, Morocco and that is where he meets Brion Gysin, the man who introduces Burroughs to both the cut-up method of writing and Dianetics, a new form of therapy devised by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the future cult leader of The Church of Scientology. The two men were not impressed with each other at first but they later struck up a friendship in Paris where Gysin was running the now-legendary Beat Hotel.
Wills really cocks up the narrative by going into a muddled account of when Burroughs first heard of Dianetics. He goes into some detail based on letters exchanged between Burroughs and Ginsberg because he wants to prove that Burroughs never accurately stated the proper date when he learned of the technique. Why should we care what the exact date was? The very fact that it happened is more interesting and relevant to the story. Wills is, once again, making a petty attempt at debunking Burroughs. This section of the book is also annoying because Wills writes about how Burroughs was condescending to Ginsberg in his letters, something that didn’t appear to bother Ginsberg much since the two maintained a close friendship until both of them died. Wills also expresses a lot of contempt for Brion Gysin, who he obviously doesn’t like. There are times when Wills’ cheap shots almost ruin the whole book.
Nonetheless, William Burroughs, with his penchant for occultism and fringe science, took to Dianetics and its use of the E-meter/lie detector to erase language and memories of traumatic experiences from the unconscious mind. The goal is to become “clear”, a state of mind where a human reaches their full potential because all the junk they have accumulated in their thoughts throughout their life is no longer there. One strong point about this book, and one that Wills deserves credit for, is demonstrating how the traumas of childhood, the drug addiction, the manslaughter, the homosexuality, and failed attempts in psychoanalysis made Burroughs a prime candidate for membership in L. Ron Hubbard’s cult, as if it were tailor made for Burroughs to begin with.
At about the same time, Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique. In this method of slicing up written texts and randomly putting them back together again, Burroughs saw a useful counterpart to Dianetics therapy. He saw it as a way of tearing through the clutter of language to recreate the relationship between the individual person, time, and space. Burroughs went on to use cut-ups as a writing technique which he employed in the novels of the Nova trilogy. Wills runs into some more trouble here. He tries to make the case that since Burroughs saw a connection between Dianetics and cut-ups that he somehow lifted the idea of cut-ups from L. Ron Hubbard. But it was Burroughs who conflated these two practices, not Hubbard. There is, as far as I know, no mention of anything resembling cut-ups in Hubbard’s literature.
There is another aspect of cut-ups that Wills overlooks. The technique was less likely to have come from Dianetics and more likely to have originated in modernist, avant garde art, particularly the technique of Analytic Cubism. A direct line can be traced from that seminal movement to Brion Gysin who was briefly a member of the Surrealists before their final demise. Surrealism grew out of Dadism which grew out of Cubism with Pablo Picasso being one of the connecting threads through all three movements. Brion Gysin in Here to Go: Planet R-101 stated that painting is always fifty years ahead of writing. Backtracking from 1960 to the pre-war years, we arrive in the neighborhood of Analytic Cubism, which depicted the fracturing of physical surfaces, and Dada collages and montages which made combinations of unrelated found objects and images. The Dadaist poetry of Tristan Tzara was randomly constructed word-salads meant to be nonsensical. The Dadaists sought to destroy language because language means logical structures and logic is what led to the atrocities of World War I. Therefore disrupting all lines of communication would liberate humanity from future atrocities. That idea brings us full circle back to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Cut-ups are the application of Analytic Cubism and Dada techniques to the physically realized literary text.
“Rub out the word” and “language is a virus” are quotes that Burroughs reiterates throughout his writings. According to Scientology, the reactive mind and engrams act like tape recorders in the mind by constantly replaying language associated with, and accumulated by, traumatic experiences in life. They unconsciously control a person’s outlook and behavior. This idea is a key theme in understanding Burroughs’ literature and it is correct to attribute Scientology as a source of his inspiration. The problem for Wills is that he overplays his hand in this matter. Burroughs had discovered the theory of General Semantics as proposed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski long before he had discovered Dianetics. This concept is also prevalent in the theories underlying hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and the system of magick developed by Aleister Crowley, all of which Burroughs had toyed around with before he knew about Scientology. Wills says as much in the first section of his book. Therefore, his assertion that Burroughs borrowed his ideas about language from the cult is overemphasized. It did play a role in the development of Burroughs’ themes but there is a lot more to it than that. Wills makes it sound like the Nova trilogy is a treatise on Scientology and this is not entirely off the mark but inaccurate nonetheless.
The third section of Scientologist! Is the strongest part of the book. Wills really gets to the heart of the matter here by telling the story of how William S. Burroughs actually joined The Church of Scientology in London, going through the auditing sessions with the e-meter, taking their classes, and eventually reaching the stage of clear. Burroughs eventually lost interest in the cult and published some scathing articles about their shady practices, authoritarian nature, and obsession with making money. They once conducted a high level auditing session with Burroughs in a broom closet. A clear picture of what it would be like to be in this church is given to those of us who would never consider joining.
Burroughs’ motives for joining are also examined. This section culminates with a dispute between Burroughs and a spokesperson for the church that plays out in the pages of the pornographic magazine Mayfair in which Burroughs had been writing a monthly column on the cult for some time.
But despite this well-detailed and well-researched section, David S. Wills still manages to drop the ball on a couple significant points. One example is his assertion that Burroughs was so enthusiastic about Scientology that he failed to recognize its darker aspect of being a mind-control cult. But this contradicts what Wills says about Burroughs approach to Dianetics in the second section; he claims that Burroughs was initially skeptical of L. Ron Hubbard’s motives, seeing him as being a money-grubbing, power hungry conman. This also contradicts Burroughs’ statement that he joined Scientology as an anthropologist, also mentioned by Wills. It might be more accurate to say he joined as an investigative journalist. But anyhow, my contention is that Wills misinterprets Burroughs’ motives because his own underlying intention is to prove that Burroughs was stupid. From my vantage point, I think Burroughs knew from the start what he was getting into. I do agree that he naively joined the church to reap the benefits of their therapy and come to terms with the nightmarish memories he had accumulated. Burroughs was about the age of 40 when he joined and it appears to me that this might have been the onset of his midlife crisis, a detail that Wills never considers. I also think Burroughs joined because he needed a new angle for his writing. It is not uncommon for authors to feel they have run out of ideas and go in search of something new, especially as they approach middle-age. Scientology was new territory, not just for Burroughs, but for everybody else as well since it was so new. I think Burroughs did know they were dangerous and joined for that reason. He was not a man who was averse to risky behavior, whether it be a matter of playing with guns, exploring the jungles of Colombia and Panama, experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, or even buying a citrus farm in Texas hoping to get rich. Even his novels were daring; he possibly even wrote Naked Lunch with the intent of getting it prosecuted for obscenity; it is a work that takes extreme artistic, as well as, legal risks. It is part of the Burroughs mythos that he was attracted to danger while maintaining a calm, cool exterior. Wills never seems to put two and two together to get four; he lists all the separate pieces of the equation but never calculates them in order to come up with the correct answer.
Wills also overemphasizes the role Scientology played in its influence over Burroughs’ writing. As previously mentioned, the place it holds in the narratives of the Nova trilogy is significant but the claim that The Wild Boys is a novel directly influenced by Scientology is a stretch. Wills points out two minor and densely opaque passages in that book that refer to Scientology but the novel overall has little of anything to do woth that subject matter. The story celebrates a group of young men who live in the wilderness of Morocco. They reject society for the sake of living a free life of unrestrained indulgence in drug use and gay sex. They form an international cabal that sabotages the machinations of the puritanical American establishment. This anarchic vision is more like a direct contradiction of the end goals of Scientology rather than an affirmation.
The fourth part of Wills’ book simply narrates the remaining years of Burroughs’ life and how aspects of Scientology continued to linger in his thoughts. A glaring omission in this section is the influence of Burroughs’ theories on the early industrial music scene of the mid-1970s which is indirectly related to Scientology. Not only did Burroughs work with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle but his theories of language, social control, his cut-ups, and his audio tape experiments provided the theoretical framework for industrial music. P-Orridge and Christopherson released a record of cut-ups on their Industrial Records music label long before the two of them went on to form their own cult, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth which bore some similarities to Scientology via their practice of magick, an original influence on L. Ron Hubbard. Genesis P-Orridge was also influenced by The Process Chruch Of the Final Judgment, a cult that spun off from The Church of Scientology. The original idea behind industrial music was to bring hidden cultural taboos to the surface of consciousness for the sake of erasing them and liberating the individual from the mechanisms of control imposed by the establishment in modern culture. As Michel Foucault would say, the structures of cultural power and domination are largely invisible to the people who are manipulated by them. The idea that language is a virus means that language, as a mechanism of control, is hidden in the way Scientologists conceive of engrams and the reactive mind. Alexander Reed’s book Assimilate: A Critical Analysis of Industrial Music gives a comprehensive account of how industrial music grew out of William S. Burroughs. His involvement with Scientology did play a significant role in this.
Scientologist!, despite its obvious flaws and amateurish writing, is a book that had to be written in order to fill a gap in the mythos of William S. Burroughs. David S. Wills does a good job of detailing this story. He does a bad job of interpreting what it is all about. He comes across as some douschebag millenial with a chip on his shoulder who wants to prove that baby boomers suck; if that is his hidden agenda, he has failed. William S. Burroughs may have believed in things that weren’t real but he does prompt his readers to question the realities of the world we live in. In the end, he wasn’t a scientist or a philosopher, he was an artist and a writer of fiction. If believing in bullshit resulted in him writing novels that are truly profound in the effects they have on the reader, then so be it. Burroughs is iconic because of his beliefs, not in spite of them. Behind his fringe ideologies is a stubborn insistence to reject the miserable conditions of the world and create a better way to exist, a way of life that embraces pleasure, freedom, peace, and the ability to be who you are while minding your own business. Besides, I know from experience that while under the influence of drugs, things like orgone energy, Dianetics, and famailar spirits can make a lot of sense. It’s just that when you come down from whatever high you are on, the illusions wear off. How can you get yourself permanently into that ecstatic state of mind? Burroughs never figured it out. Hopefully someday somebody else will.
Wills, David S. Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, United Kingdom: 2013.
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