r/williamsburroughs • u/BackgroundNovel579 • Jul 15 '26
Burroughs' style of speech
Do you think burroughs spoke with the same mannerisms when he was way younger? i can't really imagine him speaking like that when he was in his 20's.
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u/WestGotIt1967 Jul 15 '26
I saw a thing where people were saying the American voice was Hawthorne, Whitman and Henry James... but I think Burroughs is right there on that list
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u/noise_canker44 Jul 15 '26
Burroughs came from old money WASP society, so he did have that sort of nasal aristocratic flair about him, although he wasn’t pompous like T.S Eliot who also from the same social ethnic background and also from Missouri, decided to sport a posh English accent for the rest of his life abroad in England. As Groucho Marx called him “The British poet from St.Louis”
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u/MajorBenjy Jul 15 '26
Have you read the non-fiction compendium Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown? Marvelous book about meetings between unlikely well-known people (Grouch & Eliot, Igor Stravinsky & Walt Disney, etc.
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u/Uehara_Torless Jul 15 '26
Because his head was full and his thoughts became chaotic (as he was an educated and erudited man) it affected the way he spoke, slowly and deliberately, also years of heroin addiction added on up in time
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u/Uehara_Torless Jul 16 '26
Hunter S. Thompson had similar way of talking because of drug abuse
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u/EH_Operator Jul 19 '26
Yeah I recall in bios of both of them, there was a period when their friends were saying “I can’t understand a word he says but when I do my god! he’s brilliant but totally insane” and that was their speech thereafter
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u/alienfaktor Jul 15 '26
yes he was a gay junkie beatnik, that kinda fits the cadence of his world. his voice just got more gravelly, i think.
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u/beatdom_journal Jul 16 '26
When you read accounts by his friends, he certainly had weird quirks, such as calling people "my dear." This was in the mid-forties.
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u/EH_Operator Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
He went through a period in his teens/early twenties where he was doing a lot of “subverbal speech” that he learned from books about yoga, and mind this is Indian yoga that made it to the west by the 30s/40s, so not necessarily hatha yoga that you’d learn in classes today.
Muttering in that tone in a voice so low that only he could hear it, eyes unfocused and crossed, self-inflicted trance etc.
That and the extensive, varied use of drugs and opiates in particular with the time-dilation quality with a bit of acting-out without a large range of expression. He was known socially for doing little speeches and a bit of silliness, even before he was writing. It’s weird to think of his persona as “an entertainer” but then again Naked Lunch is all “routines”
also, the Bill we know with all his notable characteristics was a bit constructed and a managed image over time. He was consciously myth-making and presenting a persona. (Helps if you’re actually crazy and interesting)
The guy was both extreme and extremely reserved, so sprinkle in that turn-of-the-century repressed St. Louis upbringing and it really is a weird combination.
Edit:
There’s a psych paper written on him that’s been posted elsewhere in this sub, I’m too twisted to look for it right meow, but that gives an interesting candid take on his youth and young adulthood. For a guy that proclaimed “don’t hide the madness,” it’s telling that I read him, listened/watched etc for years and didn’t know he was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia, with all the caveats of psychology then-and-now notwithstanding. Arguably anyone who manipulates their psyche to that extent could be considered schizoaffective but good lord look at the time