Books: King of the YADS

NAKED LUNCH (255 pp.)—William Burroughs—Grove ($6).

The Young American Disaffiliates (they used to be called beats, but nothing stays simple) have not done well. In matters of finance this is their intention, since the supermarket society is what they have disaffiliated from. But in literature it is merely their embarrassment. Here the best to be said for the YADs is that among them are Allen Ginsberg (Howl). Gregory Corso (Fried Shoes) and Jack Kerouac (On the Road). And the best to be said for these three is that each might have done something worth reading if he had not been lured by the sirens of faucet composition and second-growth Dada.

That is possible, the honorary beat will reply, but have you dug William Burroughs? (The honorary beat is gainfully employed, usually in some branch of the communications industry, but makes up for this solecism by thinking that Norman Mailer improves with age and by having, once, smoked a small quantity of marijuana.) The Burroughs gambit was, until recently, almost unanswerable, because it was almost impossible to track this author down, physically or in print. He was the greyest of grey eminences, a wraith who flickered into occasional visibility in Mexico, Paris or Tangier. The few shreds of information about him have been those of the YAD catechism: he was the legendary "Bull Lee" of On the Road; he spent 15 years on junk; he wrote an unprintable book called Naked Lunch, which no one had read but which everyone said hit the veins like a jolt of heroin.

The Odds Prevail. Now all this is changed; Naked Lunch will now be available at the friendly neighborhood bookstore, right there beside Youngblood Haivke and The New English Bible. The terrible Mary McCarthy has spoken of Burroughs with respect, and the Saturday Review's John Ciardi has praised his "profoundly meaningful" search for "values." British Writer Kenneth Allsop called him "Rimbaud in a raincoat." The grey eminence himself has even appeared at that squarest of social gatherings, a writers' conference.

The reputation of an underground author is a fragile thing. For example, it had been assumed for years that Henry Miller was unprintable but highly readable. Then Grove Press, merely by publishing his two Tropics, proved that Miller is unreadable but highly printable. A reading of Naked Lunch, the grotesque diary of Burroughs' years as an addict, suggests that no such drastic deflation will occur with him. For what it is worth. Burroughs will remain grand dragon of the YADs, by acclamation and by forfeit (he denies, of course, having anything in common with his beatnik vassals, but this is merely good form; no one ever admits to being a member of a literary movement started by someone else). Although Burroughs fancies himself a satirist and occasionally resembles one when the diary's heroin fog clears a little, the value of his book is mostly confessional, not literary.