Burroughs: Art Outlaw or Man of Letters? : Exhibition: With his show at the McGrath Gallery, the septuagenarian literary terror extends his aesthetic anarchy into other media.

One couldn’t help wondering what William Burroughs was thinking when a young woman in a miniskirt grabbed him at the opening of his current exhibition of paintings, and pumped his hand, gushing “I love your philosophy!”

A notorious recluse who’s never suffered fools gladly, Burroughs was surprisingly gracious to the woman--as he was to the dozens of ardent fans who thronged his opening at the Earl McGrath Gallery in Hollywood. Even more surprising is that at the age of 76, Burroughs, whose infamous novel of 1959, “Naked Lunch,” stands as a milestone in American literature, still has enough creative drive that he’s interested in launching a second career as a visual artist.

Combining Surrealist and Dadaist ideas with an approach to the calligraphic mark similar to that of Mark Tobey, Burroughs’ loosely figurative abstractions are very much in the modernist tradition, and are clearly a further articulation of ideas central to his writing (particularly the writing employing the so-called “Cut-up Method”). Both his writing and his art employ the element of chance in an attempt to create an environment where magic will enter. This is particularly true of the “shotgun paintings,” where Burroughs positions cans of spray paint in front of a wooden surface, then blasts them with a shotgun. “The shotgun blast releases the little spirits compacted into the layers of wood,” he says of the technique.

“With art, one must invite the element of chance in, otherwise you just get repetition,” says Burroughs, who has little interest in the didactic or decorative properties of paintings, preferring to interpret them as talismans with mysterious powers. “I sometimes paint with my eyes closed because I see with my hands when I paint.”

More surprising than Burroughs’ new career in art, however, is that after a lifetime of drug taking, he’s not only in excellent health, but repents nothing.

Meeting the legendary author at the gallery prior to his opening, one finds Burroughs is every inch a formidable character. Bone-thin and stooped with age, he is nonetheless a searing presence. One of the most radical minds of this century, Burroughs has the impeccable manners of a well-bred Midwesterner, but his courtly demeanor is no disguise for his steely intelligence. Speaking in a flat W.C. Fields drawl, Burroughs points out that he considers most people “appallingly stupid,” and one senses he finds being interviewed trying at best. His scorching gaze could wilt a new rose at 10 yards. Chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes between sips of tea, he reflected on his work and life.

And what a life it’s been. From the Beats of the ‘50s to the hippies in the ‘60s to the punks in the ‘70s, Burroughs has lurked on the fringes of every anarchistic upheaval of the past 50 years. Usually associated with the ‘50s Beats, Burroughs has crossed paths with many of the great creative minds of this century--Samuel Beckett, Celine, Francis Bacon, Jean Genet. Burroughs knew them all, and they greeted him as an equal. His has been an admirable life in many respects, but it’s been a ruthlessly lived one as well, in that Burroughs’ first allegiance has always been to his own interior explorations, and he’s pursued them with an unswerving single-mindedness.

Born in St. Louis in 1914, one of two sons in an affluent family, Burroughs began forming attachments to other boys as a child, and started experimenting with drugs while a teen-ager. Openly homosexual long before it was tolerated by society and an admitted heroin addict, he spent much of his life traveling from one country to the next, hounded by authorities, in search of a place where he’d be left in peace with his demons and desires. That he was able to develop himself as a writer in the midst of that chaos is remarkable.

Burroughs’ life as an addict was as tawdry as such lives unavoidably are; however, his involvement with drugs had considerably more dimension than that of the average junkie. His interest was not to get stoned, but rather to push his consciousness as far as he could take it. Bitterly cynical about conventional interpretations of reality, yet hungry to believe in something, he embarked on an exhaustive quest in search of--what? “Well, you’re trying to get something straight,” is all he’ll say today.

In 1953 he traveled to a remote part of South America to participate in an Indian ritual involving the ingestion of a hallucinogenic called yage, and while living in the United States he submitted himself to every manner of psychotherapy available. He explored Wilhelm Reich’s theories involving a healing device known as the Orgone Box, practiced Scientology and studied the religions of the Far East. He nearly drank himself to death at one point; a firm believer in magic and psychic phenomena, Burroughs is well versed in the principles of alchemy.

Having spent his life exploring the expansion of consciousness, what method does he advocate today?

“Drugs are one way of getting there, but anything that can be achieved chemically can be achieved in other ways if you have sufficient knowledge of the factors involved,” he says. “The Eastern disciplines, however, don’t work for me, and I also found analysis pretty unproductive. I still have an Orgone Box and I’d use it if I felt the need, but I really can’t advise anyone in this regard because what worked for me won’t necessarily work for others.”

Though Burroughs has been off drugs for more than a decade, he still advocates their legalization and points out that “this so-called war against drugs is a very flimsy pretext to justify an increase in police power and the setting up of a fascist state. Moreover, the criminalization of drugs is one of the chief causes of the gang wars we’re currently seeing.”

Curiously, Burroughs acknowledges no connection between drugs and the tragedy that’s dogged him throughout his life. As Ted Morgan points out in his excellent Burroughs biography, “Literary Outlaw,” practically everyone around him has died. Countless friends expired of drug-related causes. In 1981 he watched his only son drink himself to death at the age of 34, and one could make the case that drugs played a part in the death of Burroughs’ wife, Joan Vollmer.

In 1951 the couple were living in Mexico and in a drunken cocktail party game, Burroughs, who’s always loved and owned guns, attempted to shoot a glass off his wife’s head and accidentally killed her. Needless to say, the shooting of his wife had a profound effect on him, and he in fact credits his writing career to the incident. As he explained in “Literary Outlaw,” “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death. Her death brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

Burroughs’ first book, “Junky,” a chronicle of the daily life of an addict, was published two years after his wife’s death, and “Naked Lunch,” the epic work that made Burroughs’ reputation, came six years later. Condemned as obscene for its violence, lurid sex and explicit language, the book nonetheless won a landmark anti-censorship Supreme Court decision, and it was here Burroughs introduced the themes that have appeared in all his books: conspiracy theories, time travel, societal control, the dualistic universe, the reconciliation of warring aspects of the self--these are but a few of the ideas interwoven in his highly complex prose. Several of his books are made doubly difficult by virtue of the fact that they employ the Cut-up Method, in which various bodies of text are cut up, scrambled together and reassembled.

Asked how literature should ideally function in society, Burroughs comments that “dreaming is a biologic necessity--if people are prevented from dreaming, they die. They’ve done experiments with animals where they woke them up whenever they started to dream--which is signified by rapid eye movements--and very soon, no matter how much dreamless sleep they had, they suffered the symptoms of sleeplessness which are eventually fatal. So, dreaming is a very necessary function, and I think that’s something artists do--they dream for other people.”

As to the current state of the novel, he says, “As a form, it’s rather self-limiting, and I don’t see anything new being done and don’t read much any more. I read doctor books, spy books--I’m reading ‘Russia House’ now. Le Carre is always good.”

Though Burroughs hasn’t published a book in three years (“The Western Lands” was his most recent work), he’s completed a new novel titled “Ghost of Chance” and continues to write every day. Having published more than 20 books, he’s surprisingly prolific, considering that he has no set manner of working. “I don’t work on any schedule,” he says, “because it’s impossible to write if you’re not in the mood.”

As to what he feels to be his best work, he says, “It’s all sort of one book, and there are good passages in all of the books. Other than that, I couldn’t say. Writers are notoriously bad judges of their own work. I’ve destroyed quite a bit of my work--a thousand pages at least--and often read my work and think ‘Oh my god,’ and tear it into tiny pieces and put it in someone else’s garbage can.”

Burroughs writes in the small house in Lawrence, Kan., that he shares with five cats he waits on hand and foot. He paints at home as well, having converted a room of his house into a gallery and another room into a work space. Though Burroughs didn’t become seriously committed to painting until 1982 (the year after he moved from New York to Lawrence), his involvement with visual art began in 1953, when he met the artist Brion Gysin. The inventor of the Cut-up Method, Gysin (who died in 1986) was a huge influence on Burroughs, and the pair collaborated throughout the ‘60s on scrapbooks combining visuals and text. The 20 scrapbooks they completed are all in private hands.

“Meeting Brion was one of the most significant events in my life,” Burroughs says. “He taught me everything I know about painting and brought the Cut-up Method to writing, he introduced me to Moroccan music and the pipes of Pan--he was certainly my most important single influence. Brion had integrity and complexity and was the only man I’ve ever respected.”

Though Burroughs didn’t begin showing his work until 1987, in the past three years he’s had exhibitions in 17 cities around the world, and has done collaborative pieces with Philip Taaffe, Robert Rauschenberg and the late Keith Haring. His work sells for from $3,500 to $25,000, and the McGrath show, on view through Oct. 6, is reportedly selling quite well.

Adding to Burroughs’ current income and visibility were recent appearances in two films (“Drugstore Cowboy” and “Twister”), and his profile should rise even higher when David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of “Naked Lunch” hits the screen in 1992. Whereas Burroughs and the things he represents were once absolutely unacceptable to society, he has clearly been absorbed by the culture and is now regarded as a grand old man of letters--he was even inducted into the stodgy American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. About that, he said, “20 years ago those people were saying I belonged in jail. Now they’re saying I belong in their club. I didn’t listen to them then and I don’t listen to them now.”

In parting, one asks Burroughs how he explains his capacity to live so fearlessly. It seems that from the time he was small child, he unflinchingly hurled himself into every abyss he encountered simply because he was curious to see what was at the bottom.

“I wouldn’t say I took great chances in my life--I didn’t do any mountain climbing,” he dryly points out.

But in fact, he did. There is no greater frontier than human consciousness, no terrain more fraught with mystery and peril, and Burroughs not only journeyed to the heart of darkness, but reported back his findings.