This tasty extract from the [revised, 2nd edition of] 'The Soft Machine' occurs midway through the book. When I was re-reading & researching for DENIZEN, this paragraph (which was not a paragraph unto itself, originally, as it was merely one runon in a greater blobwall / passage) struck me as a total encapsulation of my intent with the project. For months I had been wrestling with an explanation-- if not justification --for why I had returned, like some self-incriminating idiot, to my teenage fixation with the furtive, seedy, wife-killing Beat ikon, William S. Burroughs. And the explanation was this:
I am not a writer.
I like to say that. Set aside whether or not it's true. I'm not a writer. I'm a bad forensic scientist.
DENIZEN began with this choice: I chose the Carr-Kammerer homicide as a junction where all of modern gay life changed forever. The Carr-Kammerer case was used by the legal system of New York City as the foundation for what became known as the "Gay Panic" defense. Burroughs was complicit in the lies told in that courtroom, as was Allen Ginsberg, as was Jack Kerouac. The whole Beat movement began with a pair of flailing, failed writers trying to carve a book out of their best friends' senseless homicide. Ginsberg initially dedicated his most celebrated poem to Lucien Carr. Everyone in the circumstance had opportunity to save their friends from the murderous impasse in the relationship of Lucien Carr & David Kammerer-- and no-one tried any harder to prevent it than anyone tried to avenge it. Everyone in the situation was complicit. Everyone in New York.
Much has, quite rightly, been made of William Burroughs' killing of Joan Vollmer. In my view, most if not all the same parties are culpable: Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac pressured Burroughs to stop "being queer" and become romantically entangled with Joan. Nobody made the correct choices there, either. In every instance, everyone resisted the sensible, honest course of action: Be Yourselves.
No-one assumed any responsibility. They simply constructed the circumstances permitting the experiment's disastrous result. "It just happened," as we like to say.
It can be argued that the reason why Lucien Carr's lawyer was able to successfully sell Self-Defense in court in 1945 is because no-one wanted to hear the facts of the case. Nobody in New York in 1945 wanted to understand why homosexuality was criminalized, or why the participants ultimately came to behave in such a callous, stupid and inexpertly criminal fashion. Nobody wanted to hear why Lucien Carr rehearsed his excuses for murder with both his "best friends", nor would anyone want to hear why Lucien Carr-- a male prostitute with a family history of mental illness --attempted to cajole Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs into helping him dispose of evidence.
No-one in New York in 1945 wanted the responsibility. Everyone just wanted it to go away.
In picking apart why I couldn't portray the events of August 1945 completely factually, I had to use the "facts" of August 1945 to explain how fucked everyone and everything was. So the facts wound up with my fingerprints all over them. A Real Writer might have the discipline & integrity to depict all the facts of the case faithfully, with absolute clarity-- but the facts, as they arrived on my desk, were murky as sin.
Lucien Carr's motives were as murky as his attempted disposal of David Kammerer's still-breathing corpse, and the facts were as bent as the police manning The Tombs. Lucien tried to stab Dave with a cheap knife that could barely break skin, then he tied his friend hand & foot and put bricks in his pockets and threw him in the water. Taking time to empty Dave's pockets of money and cigarettes. The same Lucky Strikes Lucien offered Bill to smoke, when Burroughs answered the door and discovered Lucien in a less-than-fresh hell of his own invention.
In some versions of the story, Burroughs helped Carr dispose of the cigarette pack and knife. He did not. In other versions, Carr presented Burroughs with Dave's bloodied glasses as he said, "I finally had to off the old man." The exact same phrase Lucien would use to greet Kerouac.
Burroughs' own version, in 'And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks', has Lucien killing Kammerer with a hatchet and throwing the body off a roof. Because one gets the sense that Bill had had enough of Facts. Facts couldn't account for Carr's stupid, brutal, delusional act of finality in a set of circumstances which never required stupidity, brutality, or delusion.
In Kerouac's version, Lucien and he spent the day at the movies, juiced as fruits on cheap vino, trying to decide when, not If, to tell the cops. In every version, it was Lucien Carr's own mother-- who'd had a traumatic enough life already --who was left to convince her idiot son to turn himself in to the police. In the public version, Carr was forced to defend his honour from a scary elder queer with the only means he had.
Etcetera.
I couldn't tell any version of that. I had to tell every version of that. In order to tell it, I had to get away from everybody but one solitary witness, William S. Burroughs, a.k.a. Will Dennison of St. Louis, worldweary young traveler, failed medical student, self-mutilator and recent denizen of wartime New York, with his admittedly auto-impaired perspective. So. Those are the facts.
I am not a writer. "I used abstract reports of the experiments to evolve the formulæ of pain & pleasure association that control the planet." Mea culpa, my friends.
