Original publication: March 1985.
Just Plain Bill
Meet William Burroughs, counterculture guru turned country squire. Sure, he’s a famous writer who just signed a deal for seven books, but he’s also a regular guy who lives in Kansas and likes to go fishin’.
By John Howell
Lawrence, Kansas isn’t a dateline you’d expect for an interview with William Burroughs. After all, this is one of the creators of the original “Beat” scene who made his reputation in such urban centers as London, Paris, Tangier and New York. Lawrence, on the other hand, is noted for its pastoral, college-town atmosphere and an uneventful Midwestern past punctuated by two violent disasters, one real, the other imaginary. During the Civil War, the town was leveled and several hundred inhabitants were massacred during William Quantrill’s famous guerrilla raid. And recently, Lawrence was the fictional site of nuclear disaster in the television movie The Day After. But the grim irony of rural/apocalyptic Lawrence came full circle when, on the plane out to Kansas, I read that, as a boy, Burroughs spent time in a summer camp in Los Alamos, New Mexico—later, of course, to become the center of early atomic bomb testing. So bucolic Lawrence has a karmic past which doesn’t seem totally out of synch with one of Beatdom’s most notorious figures.
Actually, Burroughs’ reasons for residing in Lawrence are quite practical: at 71, he enjoys the slower pace of country life as a relief from his ever increasing activity as a writer, speechmaker, performer, and world-traveling celebrity. Burroughs does return occasionally to New York City, where he maintains his famous “bunker,” a former YMCA gymnasium converted to a windowless residential apartment.
Before moving to Lawrence, Burroughs had made a triumphant “comeback” in New York in 1974. With …
Read More
Author: High Times Vault / High Times
