Welcome to the first episode of “Great Moments in Self-Destruction,” where we celebrate the adventurous train wrecks of literary history. Today’s special: William S. Burroughs in Tangier, because nothing screams “genius at work” like fleeing to a lawless city to indulge in every possible vice while pretending to write a novel.
Ah, Tangier in the 1950s—the Disneyland for degenerates. It was the perfect storm of exotic locale meets minimal oversight, where Burroughs could really nurture his morphine addiction and still call it “research.” This is where he pieced together Naked Lunch, a novel that reads like someone ate a dictionary and threw it up on a typewriter. The man wrote on anything he could find—napkins, hotel bills, possibly even the back of his own hand during a blackout.
The result? A disjointed masterpiece that makes you feel like you’re navigating a labyrinth blindfolded. Naked Lunch‘s creation is legendary: it’s a collection of paranoid scraps that somehow coalesced into a narrative, if by narrative we mean a loosely connected series of hallucinogenic freakouts. Imagine the literary equivalent of throwing a typewriter down a flight of stairs and then trying to sell the results as a novel.
And let’s not forget the Interzone, Burroughs’s fictional stand-in for Tangier, which he populated with every sketchy character he met in the city’s underbelly. Because when life gives you a melting pot of international misfits, the obvious thing to do is turn them into material for your next drug-fueled fever dream.
For those morbidly curious about how a human car crash can turn into literary gold, check out Barry Miles’s Call Me Burroughs and Bill Morgan’s The Beats Abroad. Both books dive deep into how Tangier turned from a personal dumpster fire into a beacon of Beat generation brilliance—or at least something you can sell to impressionable college students as brilliance.
So, here’s to William S. Burroughs, who taught us that you don’t need to make good life choices to make good art—just really, really questionable ones.