Volume 31, Number 8 · May 10, 1984
The Invisible Man
By Luc Sante
The Place of Dead Roads
by William S. Burroughs
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 306 pp., $15.95
Naked Lunch: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
by William S. Burroughs
Grove Press, 256 pp., $17.95
Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953–1957
by William S. Burroughs
Full Court Press, 203 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Burroughs
a film directed by Howard Brookner
William Seward Burroughs has been a daunting gray presence in American culture for more than twenty-five years. He has just turned seventy, which means that he has chronologically attained the age he has seemed to be for some time. His grayness is not that of an expansive, grandfatherly Whitman, but a hue partaking of the essences of illness, raw brain cells, invisibility, and the haze of distance. His gaunt features, carefully inconspicuous attire, and Midwestern flat nasal drawl served to conceal him until the undefinable point when they became trademarks. Street boys in Tangier in the 1950s called him 'El Hombre Invisible'; nowadays his anonymity has come full circle. In night clubs, in pop magazines, on television his image detaches itself from the surrounding regimental flamboyance, and he appears as the sole survivor of a species: the Last Author.
Review, 4423 words
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