'Junky' Restored

By ALLEN GINSBERG

Bill Burroughs and I had known each other since Xmas 1944, and at the beginning of the
50's were in deep correspondence. By then Kerouac and I considered ourselves poet/
writers in Destiny, and Bill was too diffident to make such extravagant theater of self. In
any case he responded to my letters with chapters of "Junky," I think begun as curious
sketching but soon conceived on his part-to my thrilled surprise-as continuing
workmanlike fragments of a book, narrative on a subject. So the bulk of the Ms. arrived
sequentially in the mail, some to Paterson, New Jersey.

This took place over quarter century ago, and I don't remember structure of our
correspondence-which continued for years, continent to continent & coast to coast, and
was the method whereby we assembled books not only of "Junky" but also "Yage
Letters," "Queer," (as yet unpublished), and much of "Naked Lunch."

Once the manuscript was complete, I began taking it around to various classmates in
college or mental hospital who had succeeded in establishing themselves in Publishing-an
ambition which was mine also, frustrated; and thus incompetent in worldly matters, I
conceived of myself as a secret literary agent. Jason Epstein read the Ms. of Burroughs's
"Junky" (of course he knew Burroughs by legend from Columbia days) and concluded
that had it been written by Winston Churchill, it would be interesting, but since
Burroughs's prose was "undistinguished" (a point I argued with as much as I could in his
Random House office, but felt faint surrounded by so much Reality... mustard gas of
sinister intelligent editors... my own paranoia or inexperience with the Great Dumbness
of Business Buildings of New York) the book was not of interest to publish. That season I
was also carrying around Kerouac's Proustian chapters from "Visions of Cody" that later
developed into the vision of "On the Road." And I carried "On the Road" from one
publishing office to another. Louis Simpson, himself recovering from nervous breakdown
at Bobbs-Merrill, found no artistic merit in the manuscripts either.

By grand chance, my Companion from N.Y. State Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon,
was given a job by his uncle, Mr. A. A. Wyn of Ace Books. Solomon had the literary taste
& humor for these documents-though on the rebound from his own Dadaist, Lettriste &
Paranoiac-Critical literary extravagances, he, like Simpson, distrusted the criminal or
vagabond romanticism of Burroughs & Kerouac. (I was myself at the time a nice Jewish
boy with one foot in middle-class writing careful revised rhymed metaphysical verse-not
quite.) Certainly these books indicated we were in the middle of an identity crisis
prefiguring nervous breakdown for the whole United States. On the other hand Ace
Books's paperback line was mostly commercial schlupp with an occasional French
Romance or hard-boiled novel nervously slipped into the list by Carl, while Uncle
winked his eye.

Editor Solomon felt that we (us guys, Bill, Jack, myself) didn't care, as he did, about the
real Paranoia of such publishing-it was not part of our situation as it was of his-Carl's
context of family and psychiatrists, publishing house responsibilities, nervousness at
being thought mentally ill by his uncle-so that it took bravery on his part to put out "this
type of thing," a book on Junk, and give Kerouac $250 advance for a prose novel. "The
damn thing almost gave me a nervous breakdown-buildup of fear and terror, to work with
that material."

The fear and terror Solomon refers to was so real that it had been internalized in the
schlupp publishing industry, and so, before the book could be printed, all sorts of
disclaimers had to be interleaved with the text-lest the publisher be implicated criminally
with the author, lest the public be misled by arbitrary opinions of the author which were
at variance with "recognized medical authority."

Because the subject-in medias res- was considered so outre,, Burroughs was asked to
contribute a preface explaining that he was from distinguished family background-
anonymously William Lee-and giving some hint how some supposedly normal citizen
could arrive at being a dope fiend, to soften the blow for readers, censors, reviewers,
police, critical eyes in walls & publishers rows, god knows who. Carl wrote a worried
introduction pretending to be the voice of sanity introducing the book on the part of the
publisher. Perhaps he was. A certain literary description of Texas agricultural society was
excised as not being germane to the funky harsh nonliterary subject matter. And I repeat,
crucial medico-political statements of fact or opinion by Wm. Lee were on the spot (in
parentheses) disclaimed (by Ed.).

As agent I negotiated a contract approving all these obscurations, and delivering

Burroughs an advance of $800 on an edition of 100,000 copies printed back to back with
another book on drugs, by an ex-Narcotics agent. Certainly a shabby package; on the
other hand, given our naivete, a kind of brave miracle that the text actually was printed
and read over the next decade by a million cognoscenti-who did appreciate the intelligent
fact, the clear perception, precise bare language, direct syntax & mind pictures-as well as
the enormous sociologic grasp, culture revolutionary attitude toward bureaucracy and
law, and the stoic cold-humor'd eye on crime.

This article has been adapted from Allen Ginsberg's introduction to a new edition of
William Burroughs's "Junky," which Penguin Books will publish Mar. 31. This edition
restores material in the Burroughs manuscript that was deleted or altered by the original
publisher, Ace Books, in 1953.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/specials/ginsberg-junky.html