It's the birthday of the novelist William S. Burroughs, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1914). His family was wealthy — his grandfather had gotten rich inventing an adding machine. His mother was the author of a popular book called Flower Arranging: A Fascinating Hobby. He later described his hometown as: "Bare clay of subdivided lots, here and there houses set down on platforms of concrete in the mud, play-houses of children who look happy and healthy but empty horror and panic in clear gray-blue eyes."
He went on to Harvard but he didn't fit in there either. He kept a ferret and a .32-caliber revolver in his dorm room. He started writing, but when a piece of his was rejected by Esquire magazine he was so disappointed that he didn't write again for six years. He tried to enlist in the military, but he was turned down by the Navy, he failed to finish flight school, and when he got into the Army infantry, his mother arranged for him to be given a psychiatric discharge.
So, at 30 years old, he moved to New York City and got involved in a bohemian scene. It was there that he was introduced to two younger men, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was attracted to their ideas about literature and society, and they were impressed by his wisdom about the world. But Burroughs was also drawn to the criminal subculture in the city, and he wound up getting hooked on heroin. He said, "You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default."
Though he already suspected he was gay, Burroughs married a woman named Joan Vollmer, and the two moved to Mexico City, where Burroughs planned to begin his career as a writer. He began writing a memoir of his experience as a drug addict. One night, he was entertaining some friends when he and his wife agreed that he would demonstrate his marksmanship with a gun by shooting a glass off the top of her head. Everyone had been drinking, and no one seemed to think this was a bad idea. But Burroughs missed the glass and his wife was shot dead.
Burroughs later said: "I am faced with the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death. … [It] brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle in which I have had no choice but to write my way out.''
He eventually finished his memoir, Junky, which eventually came out in 1953. It was marketed as a "true confessions" paperback for 35 cents a copy, and it sold more than 100,000 copies. Burroughs traveled around South America and then moved to Tangier, where he sank deeper into alcoholism and addiction. He began writing a novel, and his friends said they would hear him typing away in his room laughing hysterically, and they'd find him surrounded by yellow pieces of paper covering the floor of his office. He claimed that the book had no structure and he called it "the endless novel which will drive everyone mad." But Jack Kerouac showed up and helped him edit a rough draft from all the fragments, and they settled on the title Naked Lunch (1959).
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What is it about St. Louis? Besides William S. Burroughs, it was home to T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, my beloved Marianne Moore....
Further investigation reveals it's the hometown of Kate Chopin, Stanley Elkin, Eugene Field, Jonathan Frantzen, William Gass, William Inge, my beloved Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov (and I guess Diane Arbus, his twin), Jane Smiley, Sara Teasdale, and Maya Angelou.
Wow. From The Awakening to Freedom.
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Writer's Almanac, 2/15/11:
It was on this day in 1764 that the city of St. Louis was founded by the businessman Pierre Laclède and his 14-year-old stepson, Auguste Chouteau. Auguste's abusive father had abandoned him and his mother, Marie Thérèse Chouteau, and she and Pierre Laclède lived together in a common-law marriage. Laclede taught young Auguste about his business, and he brought him on his journey up the Mississippi to establish a trading post at the place where the Mississippi and Missouri came together. They stayed at a French fort about 50 miles south of what is now St. Louis, and looked for land. In November of 1763, Laclède found the place he wanted, a limestone bluff, and he marked trees and then went back to the fort for the winter. The river broke up in February, and young Auguste Chouteau and 30 workers went back to the spot to start clearing land on this day in 1764. There is some debate about whether it was February 14th or 15th, or another day altogether. Chouteau's son Gabriel said that the inaugural day was on the 14th, but Chouteau's own recollection of the event — albeit 40 years after it had taken place — listed the date as the 15th. Chouteau went on to become the most prominent citizen of the quickly growing St. Louis — he started out as a fur trader, and soon moved into banking and real estate.
Tennessee Williams, who grew up in St. Louis, hated the city. He called it "that dreaded city" and "the City of St. Pollution," and when people asked him why he moved to New Orleans, his response was: "St. Louis."
Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she wrote: "The Negro section of St. Louis in the mid-thirties had all the finesse of a gold-rush town. Prohibition, gambling and their related vocations were so obviously practiced that it was hard for me to believe that they were against the law. Bailey and I, as newcomers, were quickly told by our schoolmates who the men on the street corners were as we passed. I was sure that they had taken their names from Wild West Books (Hard-hitting Jimmy, Two Gun, Sweet Man, Poker Pete), and to prove me right, they hung around in front of saloons like unhorsed cowboys.
"We met the numbers runners, gamblers, lottery takers and whiskey salesmen not only in the loud streets but in our orderly living room as well. They were often there when we returned from school, sitting with hats in their hands, as we had done upon our arrival in the big city. [...]
"St. Louis also introduced me to thin-sliced ham (I thought it was a delicacy), jelly beans and peanuts mixed, lettuce on sandwich bread, Victrolas and family loyalty."
In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain wrote about St. Louis: "The city seemed but little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size, since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts, it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think. I heard no complaint."
The British poet T.S. Eliot was actually born in St. Louis, which he left at the age of 16. He wrote later: "I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not [...] the Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world."
Jonathan Franzen was born and grew up in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. He said: "As an adult, when I say the word 'Webster Groves' to people I've just met, I'm often informed that I grew up in a suffocatingly wealthy, insular, conformist town with a punitive social hierarchy. The twenty-odd people who have told me this over the years have collectively spent, by my estimate, about 20 minutes in Webster Groves, but each of them went to college in the seventies and eighties, and a fixture of sociology curricula in that era was a 1966 CBS documentary called 16 in Webster Groves. The film, an early experiment in hour-long prime-time sociology, reported on the attitudes of suburban sixteen-year-olds. I've tried to explain that the Webster Groves depicted in it bears minimal resemblance to the friendly, unpretentious town I knew when I was growing up. But it's useless to contradict TV; people look at me with suspicion, or hostility, or pity, as if I'm deeply in denial."
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