Junkie (novel)

Burroughs began writing largely at the request and insistence of Allen Ginsberg, who was impressed by Burroughs's letter-writing skill. Burroughs took up the task with little enthusiasm. However, partly because he saw that becoming a publishable writer was possible (his friend Jack Kerouac had published his first novel The Town and the City in 1950), he began to compile his experiences as addict, 'lush roller' who stole from inebriated homeless persons, and small-time Greenwich Village heroin pusher. Although it was long considered Burroughs' first novel, he had in fact several years earlier completed a manuscript called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks with Kerouac, but this work would remain unpublished in its entirety until 2008.

Burroughs began writing Junkie while he was still regularly using heroin. By February 1951, he had quit heroin, but continued to smoke opium, which he believed carried minimal risk of addiction.[1] Although Burroughs refers to his heroin addiction in the past tense, he remained dependent on opioids like methadone for the rest of his life.[2]

In his preface to the 1977 edition, Ginsberg claims that he and Burroughs gradually developed Junkie through their correspondence, a practice they continued for Queer and Naked Lunch.[3] However, Oliver Harris disputes Ginsberg's account, arguing that Burroughs' first manuscript was largely complete when he began sharing passages with Ginsberg, that Kerouac read much of the manuscript first, and that the book "shows no signs of an interpersonal epistolary aesthetic."[4]

Regardless, Ginsberg was impressed by the chapters he read in Burroughs' letters and reached out to his acquaintance Carl Solomon, whose uncle A. A. Wyn owned Ace Books. Ginsberg sent copies of Burroughs' Junkie and Jack Kerouac's On The Road, hoping to get both published. Solomon and Wyn rejected On The Road, but agreed to publish Junkie.[5]

Ace Books renamed the book from Junk to Junkie, possibly because Junk implied the book itself was poor quality, and added the subtitle Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.[6] Ace took advantage of Burroughs' provocative subject by creating a "lurid" book cover,[7] but also censored the book's language, removed certain passages, and added editors' notes and disclaimers.[8] To avoid the perception that his company endorsed drug use, Wyn chose to bundle Junkie with a reprint of Narcotics Agent, a 1941 book by Maurice Helbrant chronicling his work in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.[5]

Before publication, Ace Books asked Burroughs to add 40 more pages, prompting him to incorporate material originally intended for his follow-up novel Queer. Queer was written in the third-person, and although Burroughs edited these sections to match Junkie's first-person narration, this approach led to stylistic and thematic incongruences in the final text.[9] Burroughs assembled the combined version by cutting up the original manuscripts and pasting them back together, a technique he would push much farther in his later books such as The Soft Machine.[10]

In the original manuscript, Burroughs referred to himself as "William Dennison." This name had previously been used for Burroughs' analogs in two romans à clef: Jack Kerouac's first published novel The Town and the City, and Kerouac and Burroughs' unpublished collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.[11] Before publication, Burroughs switched to using the name "William Lee," with Lee being his mother's maiden name.[6]

You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default.

— William S. Burroughs, Junkie

In a short prologue, William Burroughs describes his childhood as safe and comfortable, but marred by nightmares and hallucinations. Bored with suburban life and inspired by the book You Can't Win, he began committing petty crimes. Burroughs states that he hated university, failed to get a job, and was rejected from the army, but never needed money until he started using drugs. He describes addiction as simply the path of least resistance, not a conscious choice.

In 1940s New York, William Lee[note 1] is offered a job selling stolen morphine. He tries a syrette for the first time and decides to keep some, then sells the rest to a buyer named Roy, who warns him about the dangers of addiction. Over the next month, Lee uses up what he saved and becomes dependent. He and Roy visit a series of doctors and convince them to prescribe morphine, but find it increasingly difficult to support their worsening addictions. Lee is arrested for using a fake name on a prescription; his wife bails him out and he receives a suspended sentence.

Lee begins experiencing withdrawal symptoms, including hallucinations, and looks for an alternative to morphine. Roy connects him to a heroin supplier. To support this new habit, they begin pickpocketing drunk subway riders, but stop after an attempted theft turns violent. Instead, Lee partners with a dealer named Bill Gains to buy, cut, and resell heroin, keeping some for himself each time. Lee forms a new social circle of addicts and customers, but the police begin cracking down, causing his customers to turn on each other and Lee to become increasingly paranoid. Gains decides the drug trade is too risky and checks himself into the Lexington Medical Center to treat his addiction. Lee attempts to wean himself off heroin, but fails and follows Gains to Lexington. There, he listens to other patients’ stories of drug use and undergoes a methadone treatment, which he considers a success.

After four months of recovery, Lee travels to New Orleans. He visits a gay bar and is invited to have sex, only to be robbed instead. That evening, he relapses, and soon resumes selling heroin. The police pull him over and find evidence of drugs, leading to another arrest. In jail, Lee suffers severe withdrawal symptoms, losing 10 pounds in two days. His lawyer arranges for him to visit a sanitorium, where he’s given Demerol and Thephorin as part of an experimental cure. Allowed to move freely until his trial, Lee decides to leave New Orleans.

Lee moves to Texas and tries to support himself by growing cotton. When this fails, he relocates to Mexico City and relapses again, leaving his wife distraught. He discovers that heroin is more expensive in Mexico than in the US, since dealers have to bribe the police. He seeks out a new set of doctors to prescribe morphine, then learns he can get a permit to purchase it himself. Lee spends the next year in Mexico, repeatedly trying and failing to quit opioids. He begins drinking heavily to manage his addiction, which worsens his paranoia and eventually gives him uremia. His doctor warns that he's drinking himself to death, and his wife leaves town with their kids. Lee becomes sober, but feels alienated from his surroundings, and eventually tries morphine again.

In the United States, anti-narcotics enforcement intensifies. Bill Gains flees to Mexico to join Lee, telling him that Roy was arrested and died in prison. Lee decides not to return for his trial. He helps Gains buy a large supply of heroin, but it’s heavily adulterated, and Gains nearly dies when he injects it.

Lee mentions that he and his wife have separated. He reads about yage, a drug that enables telepathy, and decides to leave Mexico City to seek it out, hoping it will fill the void that "junk" did not.

50th anniversary edition, with Burroughs' intended title spelling

Junkie is presented as a novel, but it is arguably an autobiographical memoir. Lee has been interpreted as both a direct representation of Burroughs[12][2] and a fictionalized caricature of him.[13]

Burroughs' writing style is dry and direct. His narrative voice is often compared to that of Dashiell Hammett,[14] and Jack Kerouac favorably compared it to the work of Ernest Hemingway.[5] Despite its first-person narration, the novel puts very little focus on Lee's psychology or motivations.[15] Lee regularly breaks the law and commits acts of cruelty, but his actions are described in straightforward prose without excuses, apologetics, or moral judgments. While the novel does not condemn or justify Lee's actions, it does criticize overzealous law enforcement[16] and doctors who attempt to exert control over their patients.[17] The novel's "hardboiled" narrative is broken up with journalistic asides that document various drugs, addiction treatments, laws, police procedures, and hipster slang.[18] In particular, Burroughs cites and criticizes specific provisions in New York's public health laws and the federal Harrison Narcotics Tax Act.[19]

The novel uses grotesque and dehumanizing language to describe opioid addicts, such as comparing them to wooden puppets or deep-sea creatures. Lee's narration claims that opioids physically reshape their users on a cellular level, and that addiction so fundamentally changes a person's appearance, behavior, and motivations that severe addicts are no longer recognizably human. Burroughs later expands on this motif in his follow-up novel Naked Lunch, which portrays heroin addicts metamorphosing into surreal monsters.[12] At several points in the novel, Lee experiences surreal hallucinations, such as giant insects swarming over New York and people transforming into crustaceans and plants. These scenes have also been seen as precursors to Naked Lunch.[20]

Burroughs emphasizes the negative aspects of addiction and the pain of withdrawal, with relatively little focus on the pleasurable effects of drugs. Even when Lee's first experience with morphine is described as relaxing, this is immediately contrasted with images of fear and death.[21]

The novel is structured around cycles of addiction and withdrawal, which become progressively more severe and prompt Lee to travel further South. The book concludes by starting another cycle, as Lee heads South from Mexico City to find a new addictive substance: yage.[22]

Junkie was commercially successful, selling 113,000 copies in its first year. However, it was not professionally reviewed or analyzed when initially published.[5]

Ace Books primarily catered to New York City subway riders, and competed in the same market as comic book, true crime, and detective fiction publishers. Most libraries at the time did not buy Ace books, considering them trivial and without literary merit, and Ace paperbacks were never reviewed by literary critics. Nonetheless, this edition is a highly desired collectible and even below-average-condition copies have been known to cost hundreds of dollars. The United States Library of Congress purchased a copy in 1992 for its Rare Book/Special Collections Reading Room.

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that while he did not care for Burroughs's subsequent experimental fiction, he admired the more straightforward Junky both on its own merits and further as "an accurate description of what I believe to be the literary vocation"; i.e., the all-consuming nature of writing as similar to addiction.[23]

Will Self argues that the novel fails to insightfully analyze addiction, in part because Burroughs was deluded about his own relationship with drugs, but nonetheless offers an enduring portrait of moral and spiritual alienation.[2]

Jennie Skerl considers the novel a more successful portrait of hipster subculture than Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro. She notes that Burroughs displays a deeper familiarity with the subculture's slang, and correctly identifies that drug use is central to the hipster worldview.[24] Mailer himself described Junkie as a well-written potboiler.[25]

Burroughs himself later criticized the book, stating "I don’t feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time."[26]

At least three recordings have been issued featuring readings from this book. Some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Burroughs recorded an extensive passage from the book which was issued on a record album. Later, in the 1990s, two audiobook editions were released, one read by actor David Carradine, and another read by Burroughs himself.

In the 1970s, Burroughs successfully sued Ace Books for breach of contract, arguing that he had never received sufficient royalties. The court reverted Junkie's publishing rights, and James Grauerholz worked on a new edition that Burroughs personally approved. This edition, published by Penguin Books in 1977, restored material that had previously been censored by Ace Books and changed the title to Junky, with no subtitle.[27]

In 2003, to mark the work's 50th anniversary, Penguin reissued the book as Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk." It included a new introduction by Oliver Harris, the British literary scholar, who integrated new material never before published; Harris had found edits of deleted material in the literary archives of Allen Ginsberg.. This edition includes a previously cut chapter as an appendix, in which Lee builds an "orgone accumulator" inspired by the writings of Wilhelm Reich. Burroughs omitted this chapter in part to avoid being perceived as a "lunatic", and Harris agrees that the chapter makes him sound like "a crackpot eccentric", in contrast to his prescient insights in the rest of the book.[28]

• Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. An Ace Original. William Lee. New York, NY: Ace Books, 1953. (No assigned ISBN. LC Control Number: 92183851)
• Junky: Originally Published as Junkie Under the Pen Name of William Lee. William S. Burroughs with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. 1st complete and unexpurgated edition. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1977. ISBN 0-14-004351-9
• Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk'. William S. Burroughs; edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0-14-200316-6

• Harris, Oliver (2003). William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-2484-9.
• Harris, Oliver (2012). Introduction. Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk". By Burroughs, William S. Harris, Oliver (ed.). New York: Grove Atlantic. ISBN 978-0-8021-2042-7.
• Miles, Barry (2013). Call Me Burroughs: A Life. New York: Hachette. ISBN 978-1-4555-1194-5.
• Murphy, Timothy S. (1997). Wising up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520209510. Retrieved 17 July 2023.
• Skerl, Jennie (1985). William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7438-6.