The Birds Why the passenger pigeon became extinct. By Jonathan Rosen

The Birds

Why the passenger pigeon became extinct.

By Jonathan Rosen

 

 

In his new book about the passenger pigeon, the naturalist Joel Greenberg sets out to answer a puzzling question: How could the bird go from a population of billions to zero in less than fifty years? Painting by Walton Ford.

Imagine that tomorrow morning you woke up and discovered that the familiar rock pigeon—scientifically known as Columba livia, popularly known as the rat with wings—had disappeared. It was gone not simply from your window ledge but from Piazza San Marco, Trafalgar Square, the Gateway of India arch, and every park, sidewalk, telephone wire, and rooftop in between. Would you grieve for the loss of a familiar creature, or rip out the spikes on your air-conditioner and celebrate? Perhaps your reaction would depend on the cause of the extinction. If the birds had been carried off in a mass avian rapture, or a pigeon-specific flu, you might let them pass without guilt, but if they had been hunted to death by humans you might feel honor-bound to genetically engineer them back to life.

This thought experiment occurred to me while reading “A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction” (Bloomsbury), Joel Greenberg’s study of a bird that really did vanish after near-ubiquity, and that really is the subject of Frankenpigeon dreams of resurrection. Even before the age of bioengineering, Ectopistes migratorius could seem as much science-fiction fable as fact, which is why it is good to have Greenberg’s book, the first major work in sixty years about the most famous extinct species since the dodo.

The passenger pigeon—sometimes called “the blue pigeon,” for its color, though the blue was blended with gray, red, copper, and brown—should not be confused with its distant cousin, the message-bearing carrier pigeon, which is really just a domesticated rock pigeon in military dress. Unlike the rock pigeon—domesticated six thousand years ago, now feral, and brought to these shores by Europeans in the early seventeenth century—the passenger pigeon was native to North America, where it roved over a billion acres of the continent searching for bumper crops of tree nuts. It was here, like the American bison, when Europeans arrived, and it was here when the peoples we consider indigenous migrated across their land bridge thousands of years before that. It evolved on the unspoiled continent and was allied with the big trees that once covered much of the Northeast and the Midwest.

The passenger pigeon was also the most numerous bird species in North America, and possibly the world, dominating the eastern half of the continent in numbers that stagger the imagination. In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock—if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at sixty miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun—that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass. Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around just how many passenger pigeons that would mean, consider that there are only about two hundred and sixty million rock pigeons in the world today. You would have to imagine more than eight times the total world population of rock pigeons, all flying at the same time in a connected mass.

No wonder witnesses frequently described the birds in quasi-Biblical, if not apocalyptic, language. A flight over Columbus, Ohio, in 1855 elicited the following eye-witness account:

As the watchers stared, the hum increased to a mighty throbbing. Now everyone was out of the houses and stores, looking apprehensively at the growing cloud, which was blotting out the rays of the sun. Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed.

On the ground, the birds were equally prodigious. A joint at the corners of the lower bill enabled their mouths to more than double in size. Their crops could hold “up to a quarter of a pint of foodstuffs,” and they could vomit at will if they saw a food that they liked better. Thoreau, a keen watcher of the birds, marvelled that they could swallow acorns whole. A Detroit newspaper in the late nineteenth century described the squabs as having “the digestive capacity of half a dozen 14-year-old boys.”

In their wake, passenger pigeons left behind denuded fields and ravaged woods; descriptions conjure up those First World War photographs of amputated trees in no man’s land. “They would roost in one place until they broke all the limbs off the trees,” one old-timer recalled, “then they would move to Joining timber & treat it likewise, then fire would break out in the old Roost and Destroy the remainder of the timber.” Their droppings, which coated branches and lay a foot thick on the ground, like snow, proved toxic to the understory and fatal to the trees.

One hunter recalled a nighttime visit to a swamp in Ohio in 1845, when he was sixteen; he mistook for haystacks what were in fact alder and willow trees, bowed to the ground under gigantic pyramids of birds many bodies deep. As late as 1871, a single nesting ground in Sparta, Wisconsin, covered eight hundred and fifty square miles, hosting more than a hundred million birds.

But the profusion was misleading. Twenty-nine years later, a boy in Ohio shot a passenger pigeon out of a tree with a twelve-gauge shotgun, killing what was quickly identified as the last wild member of the species (though Greenberg has discovered evidence of a specimen taken in 1902). A small captive population remained at the Cincinnati Zoo, including a pair patriotically named George and Martha, but there would be no new feathered nation. By 1910, Martha was the sole survivor, an extraordinary fate for a bird whose ancestors had, in Audubon’s words, sounded—from a distance!—like “a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel.”

Martha spent four years as a melancholy zoo attraction. Visitors tossed sand to get her to move. Officials offered a thousand-dollar reward for a mate, but on September 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon in the world died.

That we know the date is part of the jarring incongruity of the story. Imagine knowing that the last Tyrannosaurus rex keeled over on a Tuesday in June. Newspapers described how Martha was frozen in a three-hundred-pound block of ice and sent by train from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C. There she was skinned, stuffed, and put on display at the Smithsonian for a nation guiltily waking up to its role in the destruction of the bird and its habitat.

Equal parts natural history, elegy, and environmental outcry, “A Feathered River Across the Sky” has been published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Martha’s death. Greenberg, a bird blogger and the author of “A Natural History of the Chicago Region,” among other books, has also helped create Project Passenger Pigeon, a loose affiliation of educational institutions, museums, and nature societies hoping to use Martha’s anniversary as a “teaching moment” about the tangled relationship between people and the natural world.

A painstaking researcher, Greenberg writes with a naturalist’s curiosity about the birds, the more than forty-two genera of plants they ate, the crops they favored, and their love of “mast”—the collective name for beechnuts, acorns, and other hard forest fruits that fall in staggered cycles of reproductive boom and bust. Passenger pigeons had an uncanny knack for discovering mast, possibly because they dispatched scouts, though it is hard to know for sure, since the bird was little studied while it lived, beyond how to catch, kill, and cook it. Answering even basic questions about the passenger pigeon requires a sort of forensic ornithology, which gives “Feathered River Across the Sky” an unexpected poignancy at the very points where it is most nature-nerdy. A characteristic sentence begins, “Yet another of the great questions that can never be answered regarding the life history of this species is how many times a year they bred.” But the central question that Greenberg sets out to answer is how a bird could go from a population of billions to zero in less than fifty years.

The short answer is that it tasted good. Also, it was easy to kill and so abundant that it often seemed, in the days before refrigeration, like the quail that fell on the Israelites in Exodus. In 1781, after a crop failure, a flock of pigeons saved a large swath of New Hampshire from starvation. Despite the occasional apocalyptic shiver, most Americans looked up and decided that it was cloudy with a chance of meatballs.

The birds were such tempting targets that, in the early eighteenth century, cities had to ban hunting in town, because, in the words of one ordinance, from 1727, “everyone takes the liberty of shooting thoughtlessly from his windows, the threshold of his door, the middle of the streets.” You did not even need a gun: you could poke them from their nests with poles or beat them out of the air with clubs—the weapon of choice Mark Twain recalled from his boyhood, in Hannibal, Missouri. Squabs were fattened on “pigeon milk”—the sloughed-off lining of the birds’ crop that parents regurgitated for their young—and got so plump, Greenberg reports, that they would fall to earth with a “splat.”

The birds even killed themselves. Greenberg conjures a vision of pigeons crammed into their huge roosts, and then asks the reader to “imagine the destruction that would ensue when tree limbs, or at times entire trees, snapped and plummeted to the ground, crushing hundreds if not thousands of birds. When flocks descended to drink, at times the birds that landed first would drown under the weight of newcomers.” No wonder Martha lived so long in her lonely cage.

Seneca Indians called the bird simply Big Bread, and told a story about an ancient white pigeon visiting a warrior with the news that passenger pigeons had been selected as a tribute to mankind. Greenberg gestures toward the notion that Native Americans harbored a proto-conservation ethic toward the birds, but that distinction breaks down as his narrative of destruction progresses, which is perhaps just as well, because our propensity for using things up is certainly species-wide. It was paleo-Indians who helped hunt megafauna like the mammoth to extinction, the Maori in New Zealand who ate the flightless moa to death, and prehistoric Pacific Islanders who extirpated more than a thousand species of birds.

For both Native Americans and European settlers, the appearance of passenger pigeons or the discovery of one of their giant roosting grounds became a festive occasion where every member of the family had a role: shooting the birds, knocking squabs out of nests, chasing the unfledged runaways, and collecting the dead for pickling, salting, baking, or boiling.

Many of the hunting stories have a tall-tale aspect perfectly in tune with the fantastic aura that surrounds the birds. Boys stuck long hickory poles into the ground, pulled on ropes tied to the tips of the poles, and knocked birds down simply by making the poles quiver. Nets were stretched between trees. A roosting ground in Tennessee was set on fire and “scorched corpses were then collected the next day for personal use or sale” from two-foot-high piles of the dead.

More elaborate methods were used, of course—like luring the birds into nets with a live pigeon, which is the origin of the term “stool pigeon.” A demand for stool pigeons opened up a trade in live birds, and so did the later development of “trap shooting,” in which live birds were mechanically launched into the air for sportsmen. So many birds died in transport to the shoots that huge numbers were needed. (The “clay pigeon” was devised by passenger-pigeon hunters to replicate the experience after the actual birds grew scarce.)

As long as America was rural and untraversed by railroads, the killing did not seem to do much more than dent the vast pigeon population. After the Civil War, however, things began to change rapidly. You could find out by telegraph where pigeons were nesting, get there quickly by train, and sell what you killed to a city hundreds of miles away. Soon market hunters began operating on an enormous scale, cramming tens of thousands of birds into boxcars—especially after Gustavus Swift introduced the refrigerator car, in 1878. This meant that rural migrants to growing cities could still get wild game, and the well-heeled could eat Ballotine of Squab à la Madison, served by a new class of restaurant, like Delmonico’s, in New York, where fine dining was becoming a feature of urban life. All this coincided with an explosion in logging, which began destroying the habitat of pigeons just as hunters were destroying the pigeons themselves.

Greenberg hauntingly documents the way people kept “seeing” the birds after the great flocks vanished, or devising outlandish theories to explain where they might have gone. The journal Science speculated that they were in the desert of Arizona; another journal, the Auk, suggested that they were east of Puget Sound, and a lumberman claimed to have seen millions in Chile. Henry Ford was convinced that they had all drowned in the Pacific en route to Asia. The flocks were like phantom limbs that the country kept on feeling. Or perhaps the birds’ disappearance, and the human role in it, was simply too much to bear.

In keeping with these fantasies, it isn’t at all surprising that there is a plan afoot to resurrect the bird, or at least to bring back a genetically approximate simulacrum. To this end, Revive & Restore, an offshoot of Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation, has enlisted the assistance of the Harvard geneticist George Church, who helped initiate the Human Genome Project, to work on what is frequently referred to as “de-extinction.”

De-extinction became big news after a conference last March—sponsored by Revive & Restore, TED, and National Geographic—broadcast plans to take passenger-pigeon genes recovered from the toe pads of museum specimens, combine them with genes from the band-tailed pigeon (the genetic next of kin), and use them to modify another bird, possibly a chicken, so that it would lay a passenger-pigeon egg that could be raised by a band-tailed pigeon but taught to flock by a homing pigeon. If all this sounds like pure fantasy, bear in mind that in Dubai, in 2011, a “chimeric duck” was successfully engineered: it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck but was in fact a chicken, at least reproductively.

“Feathered River” touches on de-extinction in a few neutral paragraphs in the appendix, without getting into the question of why anyone would want to bring back a bird whose habitat was destroyed, and that descended on buckwheat fields like a plague of locusts even when it was there. But the destructiveness of the bird hardly disqualifies it from serving as an environmental teaching tool. If anything, the passenger pigeon is a bracing corrective to notions of a natural world detached from its fecund terrors. The bird’s propensity for eating everything and taking over earth and sky makes it seem, frankly, a little like us. As Greenberg notes, “a widely held view is that this species could not sustain itself without a giant population,” so that decline itself became a cause of further decline. In other words, passenger pigeons lived by collaboration on a giant scale, and may have died by it. Yet what Greenberg sees is not the clash of two irreconcilable species with gargantuan needs but a story of victimizers and victims.

We did hunt the passenger pigeon to death, even if we didn’t quite understand at the time what we were doing. We also might have saved it, at least in token form, if only our technological genius and our conservation consciousness—two things that set us apart from other animals—had come together sooner. But Greenberg’s emphasis on bloodguilt can give his book a religious impatience, however secularized. He has a habit of blurring time and place so that the whole country seems hell-bent on blasting, stomping, and literally biting the pigeons to death, as if it were this zeal, and not a complex web of industrial and environmental factors, that led to their extinction. “What a shame that passenger pigeons became extinct,” he writes, mocking a woman whose 1808 memoir recalls the “gayety” of a pigeon hunt—at a time when there were perhaps five billion of the birds in the world. “Future generations would be denied the near euphoria that apparently accompanied raising a gun toward a flock of pigeons and firing.”

Human beings live in their historical and cultural contexts as much as passenger pigeons lived in fields, trees, and sky; it is important to remember, for example, that rural people hunted for food in the days before factory farming and supermarkets. The chicken industry in this country alone kills more than seven billion birds a year—far more than the total number of passenger pigeons at their peak. Nobody in the nineteenth century had figured out how to make the slaughter of the birds sustainable, but it is worth wondering what we would think of the passenger pigeon, and ourselves, if they had.

It would also have been useful if Greenberg had explored the fact that when the last of the great flocks were being killed off, in the eighteen-seventies, America was suffering from the aftershocks of the Panic of 1873 and the economic depression that followed. (In her book “Flight Maps,” the historian Jennifer Price does this well.) Financial hardship doesn’t have to justify the elimination of a species to help explain why poor country people saw a flock of birds not as a conservation opportunity but as an economic one. This is especially important in light of Greenberg’s environmental purposes, since today, too, regions of economic hardship often overlap with areas where many species are at risk of extinction, surely an argument for making economic development a cornerstone of environmental activism. There is only so much fair-trade chocolate one developing country can produce.

Greenberg’s book is rich in natural history, but when it comes to human history he is more of an environmentalist looking back in anger. He introduces trap shooting by writing, “The great fun that naturally flowed from killing passenger pigeons was evidently not enough for some. They wanted competition and ways to turn the slaughter into a game.” The scattershot sarcasm manages to dismiss hunters, financial necessity, and human nature along with Greenberg’s immediate target.

Understanding the relationship between guns and conservation is as important as understanding the relationship between passenger pigeons and beechnuts. The environmental movement that emerged as the passenger pigeon was disappearing—and that was inspired by the bird’s plight to save the bison—was largely a movement of hunters. The Boone and Crockett Club, founded for rich sportsmen in 1887, by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, morphed into a powerful lobbying group that boasted among its members John F. Lacey, the Republican congressman from Iowa, who spoke movingly about the passenger pigeon on the floor of the House of Representatives as he argued for what became the first federal bird-protection law, the Lacey Act, of 1900. These men were conservationists not in spite of their trophy hunting but because of it—they wanted vast protected forests because they wanted a vast supply of creatures to kill. The “near euphoria” of shooting things, in their case, was a key to saving them. But the patricians of the Boone and Crockett Club shared Greenberg’s contempt for market hunters, men who made a living from the things they killed.

One of the club’s members, Madison Grant, went further, moving the club toward a more strictly preservationist attitude, and the radical idea that unspoiled nature itself is the trophy. Arguably the most important environmentalist of his age, Grant created vital hunting laws, built the New York Zoological Society, and helped save the bison. That he was also a biological racist of such extreme convictions that Hitler sent him a fan letter is, however, also part of the story. So is the fact that William Hornaday, who helped Grant reintroduce bison into Oklahoma, displayed a Congolese Pygmy in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

The environmental movement has more skeletons than Ectopistes migratorius in its closet, and why shouldn’t it? We are only human, and as complex as the creatures we mourn. Now, however, would be a good time to lay out all the bones and see them as part of the teaching moment that Martha’s anniversary provides.

In his appendix, Greenberg includes a lone paragraph called, simply, “Eugenics,” in which he expresses bafflement that among the papers of his hero, A. W. Schorger—whose 1955 book on the passenger pigeon became the source for all later studies—he found a pamphlet warning that “talented humans” were going the way of “yesteryear’s passenger pigeon.”

“It takes a far more imaginative mind than mine,” Greenberg observes, “to connect the extinction of the passenger pigeon with eugenics.” But in fact he makes the connection himself when he writes about R. W. Shufeldt, the scientist who dissected Martha for the Smithsonian. Greenberg notes that he was “disappointed to learn” that Shufeldt, along with important scientific work on birds, “authored a vile screed on domestic race relations. So while he had no regard for many of his fellow citizens, he was moved by the object on his dissecting table.” Such was the passion men like Shufeldt displayed for nature that Greenberg, despite his disgust, can’t resist closing his account of Martha with the scientist’s sentimental decision not to dissect the bird’s heart, and with his salute to “the last ‘Blue Pigeon’ that the world will ever see alive.”

Two years after Martha’s death, Madison Grant published “The Passing of the Great Race,” a warning about the threat to pure “Nordic” peoples from immigrants he viewed as invasive species. White men, Grant believed, needed protection as much as the bison and the passenger pigeon. To that end, he helped persuade Congress to keep Jews, Asians, and Eastern Europeans—the rock pigeons of the world—out of the country.

Is it possible to love the bird on the table more than your fellow-citizens? Of course—especially if you gerrymander humanity into discrete populations and value some groups more than others. For Grant, this was a racial matter, but there are lots of ways to divide a population. We no longer live in an age when a powerful President and his hunting buddies can snatch up millions of acres of wilderness and set them aside for the public good; without a broad consensus, there is not much hope of saving anything.

And without a capacity for complexity there is not much hope of knowing even what needs saving. The great biologist E. O. Wilson speaks about a coming wave of extinctions whose scope eludes us, because though there may be anywhere from ten million to a hundred million species in the world, we have identified far fewer than two million. Unlike the passenger pigeon, these creatures may be hidden in oceans, forest canopies, handfuls of earth. It takes effort and imagination to sift through this information, just as it requires an educated humanism to figure out whether a de-extinction project holds real environmental promise or is only an ancient longing for resurrection disguised as bioengineering.

Thoreau, in a mysteriously beautiful passage in his 1862 essay “Walking,” likens the diminishing numbers of passenger pigeons in New England to the dwindling number of thoughts in a man’s head, “for the grove in our minds is laid waste.” Thinking of the birds as missing thoughts is a good way to honor them. Martha and her billions were undone by the complicated, pitiless tangle of our modern industrialized world, but Thoreau’s nineteenth-century protest—“Simplify, simplify”—will not help us in the twenty-first. Indeed, when it comes to our relationship to nature, the wish for simplicity may be the most destructive thing in the world. ♦

PHOTOGRAPH: Butcher Walsh

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/01/06/140106crbo_books_rosen?currentPage=all

The Outlaw - The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs. By Peter Schjeldahl

The Outlaw

The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs.

By Peter Schjeldahl

THE NEW YORKER Books

“Naked Lunch” brought to social notice themes of drug use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti-authoritarian paranoia. Photograph by Richard Avedon.

 “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves.” So starts “Naked Lunch,” the touchstone novel by William S. Burroughs. That hardboiled riff, spoken by a junkie on the run, introduces a mélange of “episodes, misfortunes, and adventures,” which, the author said, have “no real plot, no beginning, no end.” It is worth recalling on the occasion of “Call Me Burroughs” (Twelve), a biography by Barry Miles, an English author of books on popular culture, including several on the Beats. “I can feel the heat” sounded a new, jolting note in American letters, like Allen Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” or, for that matter, like T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month.” (Ginsberg was a close friend; Eliot hailed from Burroughs’s home town of St. Louis and his poetry influenced Burroughs’s style.) In Burroughs’s case, that note was the voice of an outlaw revelling in wickedness. It bragged of occult power: “I can feel,” rather than “I feel.” He always wrote in tones of spooky authority—a comic effect, given that most of his characters are, in addition to being gaudily depraved, more or less conspicuously insane.

“Naked Lunch” is less a novel than a grab bag of friskily obscene comedy routines—least forgettably, an operating-room Grand Guignol conducted by an insouciant quack, Dr. Benway. “Well, it’s all in a day’s work,” Benway says, with a sigh, after a patient fails to survive heart massage with a toilet plunger. Some early reviewers spluttered in horror. Charles Poore, in the Times, calmed down just enough to be forthright in his closing line: “I advise avoiding the book.” “Naked Lunch” was five years in the writing and editing, mostly in Tangier, and aided by friends, including Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. It first appeared in 1959, in Paris, as “The Naked Lunch” (with the definite article), in an Olympia Press paperback edition, in company with “Lolita,” “The Ginger Man,” and “Sexus.” Its plain green-and-black cover, like the covers of those books, bore the alluring caveat “Not to be sold in U.S.A. or U.K.” (A first edition can be yours, from one online bookseller, for twenty thousand dollars.) The same year, Big Table, a Chicago literary magazine, printed an excerpt, and was barred from the mails by the U.S. Postal Service. Fears of suppression delayed a stateside publication of the book until 1962, when Grove Press brought out an expanded and revised edition. It sold so well that Grove didn’t issue a paperback until 1966.

As late as 1965, however, a Boston court confirmed a local ban, despite testimony from Norman Mailer arguing the book’s literary merit. (Another supporter was Mary McCarthy, who, in the New York Review of Books, praised Burroughs’s “crankish courage” and compared “Naked Lunch” to “a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer.”) A year later, the Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed the ban, on the ground of “redeeming social value,” a wobbly legal standard in censorship cases then and after. Thus anointed, Burroughs’s ragged masterpiece brought to social notice themes of drug use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti-authoritarian paranoia. Those temerities and his disarmingly starchy public mien—he was ever the gent, dressed in suits, with patrician manners and a sepulchral, Missouri-bred and foreign-seasoned voice—assured him a celebrity status that is apt to flare anew whenever another cohort of properly disaffected young readers discovers him. The centenary of Burroughs’s birth, on February 5th, promises much organized attention; an excellent documentary by Howard Brookner, “Burroughs: The Movie” (1983), is about to be re-released.

Contrary to Kerouac’s mythmaking portrayal of him—as Old Bull Lee, in “On the Road”—Burroughs was not a wealthy heir, although his parents paid him an allowance until he was fifty. His namesake grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, perfected the adding machine and left his four children blocks of stock in what later became the Burroughs Corporation. His son Mortimer—the father of William and another, older son—sold his remaining share, shortly before the 1929 crash, for two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars. Mortimer’s wife, born Laura Lee, never ceased to dote on William; Mortimer deferred to her. 

Burroughs started writing at the age of eight, imitating adventure and crime stories. He attended a John Dewey-influenced progressive elementary school in St. Louis and played on the banks of the nearby, sewage-polluted River des Peres. Miles quotes him recalling, in a nice example of his gloatingly dire adjectival style, “During the summer months the smell of shit and coal gas permeated the city, bubbling up from the river’s murky depths to cover the oily iridescent surface with miasmal mists.” When Burroughs was fourteen, some chemicals he was tinkering with exploded, severely injuring his hand; treatment for the pain alerted him to the charms of morphine. He then spent two unhappy years at the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School for boys, in New Mexico, memories of which informed his late novel “The Wild Boys” and other fantasies of all-male societies. 

Burroughs was a brilliant student, graduating from Harvard with honors, in English, in 1936. He sojourned often in Europe; in Vienna, he briefly studied medicine and frequented the gay demimonde. He had become aware at puberty of an attraction to boys, and had been so embarrassed by a diary he kept of a futile passion for a fellow-student that he destroyed it and stopped writing anything not school-required for several years. Later, in psychoanalysis, he traced his sexual anxiety to a repressed memory: when he was four years old, his nanny forced him to perform oral sex on her boyfriend. The tumultuous experience of having his first serious boyfriend—in New York, in 1940—triggered what he laconically called a “Van Gogh kick”: he cut off the end joint of his left pinkie. 

After a short hitch in the Army, in 1942, Burroughs received a psychiatric discharge. He then worked briefly as a private detective, in Chicago, where, however, he enjoyed his longest period of regular employment—nine months—as a pest exterminator. His delectable memoir of the job, “Exterminator!,” the title story of a collection published in 1973, employs a tone, typical of him, that begs to be called bleak nostalgia: “From a great distance I see a cool remote naborhood blue windy day in April sun cold on your exterminator there climbing the grey wooden outside stairs.”

The creation story of the Beats is by now literary boilerplate. Burroughs moved to New York in 1943, along with David Kammerer, a childhood friend who had travelled with him in Europe, and Lucien Carr, an angelically handsome Columbia University student whom Kammerer was stalking. Ginsberg, a fellow-student, was enthralled by Carr, and later dedicated “Howl” to him. Kerouac, who had dropped out of Columbia and served in the Navy, returned to the neighborhood in 1944. With Carr as the catalyst, and Burroughs, whom Kerouac goaded to resume writing, a charismatic presence, the Beat fellowship was complete. 

Carr ended Kammerer’s pursuit of him late on the night of August 13, 1944, by stabbing him and dumping his body in the Hudson River. (The new movie “Kill Your Darlings” tells the tale in only somewhat embellished fashion.) Burroughs then replaced Carr as the group’s mentor. According to Miles, Kerouac and Ginsberg didn’t yet know that Burroughs was gay, and played matchmaker by introducing him to Joan Vollmer, an erudite, twice-married free spirit with a baby daughter, Julie, of uncertain paternity. Burroughs and Vollmer became inseparable and, they believed, telepathic soul mates, but he continued to have sexual encounters with men. In 1946, he started on heroin. (An uncle, Horace Burroughs, whom he idealized but never met, was a morphine addict who committed suicide in 1915, when the drug was legally restricted.) Vollmer favored Benzedrine. 

Postwar New York updated Burroughs’s trove of criminal argot. He saw a lot of Herbert Huncke, a junkie and a jack-of-all-scams—whom Ginsberg called “the basic originator of the ethos of Beat and the conceptions of Beat and Square”—and other habitués of Times Square, whose doppelgängers roam the fiction that he had not yet begun to write. In 1946, Vollmer became pregnant. Burroughs, who could be startlingly moralistic, abhorred abortion; and so a son, Billy, joined the family. Envisioning himself as a gentleman farmer, Burroughs had acquired a spread in East Texas, where he cultivated marijuana, though not very well. He drove a harvest to New York with Kerouac’s “On the Road” icon, Neal Cassady—whom he disdained as, in Miles’s words, “a cheap con man”—but it was too green to turn a profit. After a drug bust in New Orleans, Burroughs jumped bail and settled in Mexico City. For three years, he took drugs, drank, picked up boys, hosted friends, and cut a sorry figure as a father. (With Vollmer also drinking heavily, the children’s lot was grim.) A Mexican scholar of the Beats, Jorge García-Robles, details the louche milieu in another new book, “The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico” (Minnesota). He writes that Burroughs found the country “grotesque, sordid, and malodorous, but he liked it.”

During those years, Burroughs also wrote his first book, “Junky.” A pulp paperback published in 1953, under the pen name William Lee, it recounts his adventures through underworlds from New York to Mexico City. It features terse, crackling reportage, with echoes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The narrator’s first meeting with “Herman” (a pseudonym for Huncke) isn’t auspicious: “Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast.” “Junky” attracted no critical notice. Burroughs wrote two other books in the early fifties that weren’t published until after “Naked Lunch.” “Queer”—centering, in Mexico City, on one of his arduous opiate withdrawals and a frustrating romance with a young man—saw print only in 1985. The most emotional work in a generally icy œuvre, it was written around the time, in 1951, of the most notorious event in Burroughs’s life: his fatal shooting of Vollmer, in a drunken game of “William Tell.” 

García-Robles and Miles agree in their accounts of Vollmer’s death. At a friend’s apartment, she balanced a glass on her head, at Burroughs’s behest. He had contracted a lifelong mania for guns from duck-hunting excursions with his father, and was never unarmed if he could help it. He fired a pistol from about nine feet away. The bullet struck Vollmer in the forehead, at the hairline. She was twenty-eight. He was devastated, but readily parroted a story supplied by his lawyer, a flamboyant character named Bernabé Jurado: the gun went off accidentally. Released on bail, Burroughs might have faced trial had not Jurado, in a fit of road rage, shot a socially prominent young man and, when his victim died of septicemia, fled the country. Burroughs did the same, and a Mexican court convicted him in absentia of manslaughter, sentencing him to two years. In the introduction to “Queer,” Burroughs disparages his earlier work and adds, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death,” because it initiated a spiritual “lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” García-Robles avidly endorses this indeed appalling consolation, casting Vollmer as a sainted martyr to literature.

Miles relates that Burroughs had told Carr, after he killed Kammerer, “You shouldn’t blame yourself at all, because he asked for it, he demanded it.” Some of Burroughs’s friends, including Ginsberg, opted for an analogous understanding of Vollmer’s death as an indirect suicide, which she had willed to happen. Burroughs’s craving for exculpation eventually settled on the certainty that an “Ugly Spirit” had deflected his aim. As a child, Burroughs had been infused with superstitions by his mother and by the family’s Irish maid, and all his life he believed fervently in almost anything except conventional religion: telepathy, demons, alien abductions, and all manner of magic, including crystal-ball prophecy and efficacious curses. For several years in the nineteen-sixties, he enthusiastically espoused Scientology, in which he attained the lofty rank of “Clear,” before being excommunicated for questioning the organization’s Draconian discipline. And he furnished any place he lived in for long with an “orgone accumulator”—the metal-lined wooden booth invented by the rogue psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for capturing and imparting cosmic energy. Miles begins “Call Me Burroughs” with a scene of a sweat-lodge ceremony conducted by a Navajo shaman to finally expel the Ugly Spirit, in Kansas, in 1992. The heat and smoke caused Burroughs to ask to truncate the proceedings.

Vollmer’s parents took Julie into their home, in Albany, and she dropped out of her stepfather’s life. Burroughs sent Billy to be raised by Laura and Mortimer, in St. Louis, and joined them, in 1952, after they moved to Palm Beach, Florida. But he didn’t stay long; he set out to work on his third book, “The Yage Letters,” a quest through the jungles of Colombia for a fabled hallucinogen that, he had written in the last sentence of “Junky,” “may be the final fix.” He found and duly lauded the drug, but the journey seems its own reward, making for fine low-down travel writing. He needs a motorboat to take him upriver: 

Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor—they got it bolted to the porch—“buuuuurt spluuuu . . . ut . . . spluuuu . . . ut,” and you can’t sleep hearing the motor start and die all night and then it starts to rain. Tomorrow the river will be higher.

The book wasn’t published until 1963. In the meantime, two volumes of a trilogy, “The Soft Machine” and “The Ticket That Exploded,” came out, soon followed by the third, “Nova Express.” These were written largely in London and Paris, between trips to Tangier, where Burroughs had lived for several years, starting in 1954. They advanced his claim (with some precedents in Dadaism and Surrealism) to literary innovation: the “cut-up” technique of assembling texts from scissored fragments of his own and others’ prose. The trilogy is a sort of fractured science fiction, telling of underground struggles against forces of “Control”—the shape-shifting, all-purpose bête noire of Burroughs’s world view. It is easier to read than, say, “Finnegans Wake,” but hard going between such bursts of dazzle as the “resistance message”:

Calling partisans of all nations—Cut word lines—Shift linguals—Vibrate tourists—Free doorways—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room. 

A second trilogy—“The Cities of the Red Night,” “The Place of Dead Roads,” and “The Western Lands”—published between 1981 and 1987, reverts to fairly normal narration, filled with scenes of sexual and military atrocity in a succession of mythic cities. Its heroes include Hassan-i Sabbah, the historical leader of a sometimes homicidal sect in eleventh- and twelfth-century Persia. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah is supposed to have said (and was so quoted by Nietzsche). The prose is nimble and often ravishing, but marred by the author’s monotonous obsessions and gross tics—notably, a descent into ferocious misogyny, casting women as “the Sex Enemy.”

The biography, after its eventful start, becomes rather like an odyssey by subway in the confines of Burroughs’s self-absorption, with connecting stops in New York, where he lived, in the late nineteen-seventies, on the Bowery, in the locker room of a former Y.M.C.A., and, returning to the Midwest, in the congenial university town of Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last sixteen years, and where he died, of a heart attack, in 1997, at the age of eighty-three. Miles’s always efficient, often elegant prose eases the ride, but a reader’s attention may grow wan for want of sun. Most of the characters run to type: dissolute quasi-aristocratic friends, interchangeable boys, sycophants in steadily increasing numbers. Names parade, from Paul Bowles and Samuel Beckett (who, meeting Burroughs at a party in Paris, denounced the cut-up method as “plumbing”), through Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, to Laurie Anderson and Kurt Cobain. Most prominent is Brion Gysin, a mediocre artist of calligraphic abstractions. Burroughs met him in Tangier, in 1955, and bonded with him in Paris at a dump in the Latin Quarter, known as the Beat Hotel, whose motherly owner adored literary wanderers.

Gysin and Burroughs deemed each other clairvoyant geniuses. They collaborated on cut-ups, extending the technique to audiotape, and foresaw commercial gold for Gysin’s “Dreamachine,” a gizmo that emitted flickering light to mildly hypnotic effect. It flopped. Burroughs took to making art himself, especially after Gysin’s death, in 1986: he created hundreds of pictures, on wood, by shooting at containers of paint. These have been widely exhibited and sold. They are terrible. Burroughs had no visual equivalent of the second-nature formality that buoys even his most chaotic writing.

Ginsberg comes off radiantly well in Miles’s telling, as a loyally forgiving friend. He tolerated Burroughs’s amatory passion for him, which developed in the fifties, as long as it lasted. Much of Burroughs’s best writing originated in letters to the poet, who took a guiding editorial hand in it. It was Ginsberg who hatched the title “Naked Lunch,” by a lucky mistake, having misread the phrase “naked lust” in a Burroughs manuscript. (I think of Ezra Pound’s editorial overhaul of “He Do the Police in Different Voices”—Eliot’s first title for “The Waste Land.”) Ginsberg effectively sacrificed his own literary development, which sagged after “Kaddish” (1961), to publicizing his friends and, of course, himself. Burroughs disparaged his puppylike attendance in Bob Dylan’s entourage. (Burroughs’s aloofness, like his obsession with mind control, reflected memories of a reviled uncle, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a pioneering public-relations expert whose clients included John D. Rockefeller and the Nazi Party.) But Burroughs liked his own growing fame. He gave readings to full houses. Appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1981, and in Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” in 1989, spread the popularity of his gentleman-junkie cool.

The biography’s most painful passages involve Billy, who both idolized and, for excellent reasons, resented Burroughs. What might you be like, had your father killed your mother and then abandoned you? In 1963, when Billy was sixteen, Burroughs, bowing to his parents’ insistence, briefly took charge of the troubled lad in Tangier. The main event of the visit was Billy’s introduction to drugs, condoned by Burroughs. In and out of hospitals and rehabs, Billy wrote three novels, of which the first, “Speed” (1970), detailing the ordeal of amphetamine addiction, showed literary promise. In 1976, father and son reunited at the Naropa Institute, in Boulder, where Ginsberg and other poets had initiated a program in experimental writing, and where Burroughs was teaching, with crotchety flair. Billy, who had received a liver transplant for cirrhosis, engaged in spectacular self-destruction. Miles writes, “Billy wanted Bill to witness the mess he was in; he was paying him back.” Billy died in 1981, at the age of thirty-three. Burroughs seemed to regret only that he had not sufficiently explained the Ugly Spirit to him. He responded to his son’s death by varying his current methadone habit with a return to heroin.

“Virtually all of Burroughs’s writing was done when he was high on something,” Miles writes. The drugs help account for the hollowness of his voices, which jabber, joke, and rant like ghosts in a cave. He had no voice of his own, but a fantastic ear and verbal recall. His prose is a palimpsest of echoes, ranging from Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (lines like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming phrases. His palpable influence on J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a sound. It’s a cold thrill. While always comic, Burroughs is rarely funny, unless you’re as tickled as he was by such recurrent delights as boys in orgasm as they are executed by hanging.

Some critics, including Miles, have tried to gussy up Burroughs’s antinomian morality as Swiftian satire. Burroughs, however, wages literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that anyone is responsible for anything. Though never cruel in his personal conduct, he was, in principle, exasperated with values of constraint. A little of “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” goes a long way for many readers, including me. But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. When you have read Burroughs, at whatever length suffices for you, one flank of your imagination of human possibility will be covered for good and all. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/02/03/140203crbo_books_schjeldahl?currentPage=4