A lot of William S. Burroughs kind of sounds like Djuna Barnes. The prime example: Barnes created the character Doctor Matthew O’Connor in her 1936 novel Nightwood, and Dr. O’Connor could easily be confused with the 1938 Burroughs character, Dr. Benway (no first name). Each fictional physician is a comically amoral addict abortionist. I think it’s likely Burroughs created Dr. Benway within a year of reading Nightwood. Burroughs owes Barnes a debt of inspiration, and not just in the creation of Benway — many of his other characters could also be walk-ons in Nightwood, fitting in well among Barnes’ cast of liars, pretenders, and cheats. So it’s safe to say Barnes influenced the characters Burroughs created. I will also show her influence on his voice, style, and themes.

Since the 1980s, a Burroughs blurb appears on the back of every Nightwood edition, saying in its entirety, “I read Nightwood back in the 1930s and was very taken with it. I consider it one of the great books of the twentieth century.” That’s all he ever said about it; it says it all. It is commonly acknowledged that he admired her work, but I think Barnes had a larger influence. I think Burroughs took what he learned from Nightwood and then, in 1959, he wrote the actual number-one greatest book of the twentieth century, Naked Lunch. Barnes’ influence is found there, and throughout Burroughs’ work.

When Burroughs read Nightwood for the first time, circa 1937 when he was 23, he would have felt inspired on many levels. Burroughs was not even an unpublished writer at that time, because he wasn’t really writing and he wouldn’t get serious about it for years. But Nightwood stirred him. Barnes’ experimental stylings showed it was possible to create a challenging work of high literary value that was also gay, full of sex, drugs, criminality, boorishness, belligerence, cursing of humanity, visionary ranting and raving, gratuitous profanity, and unholy terrors. Today we say such a work is “Burroughsian,” but in 1937, Djuna Barnes owned the brand.

Before any Burroughs characters existed, there was Nightwood’s Dr. O’Connor. There are significant similarities with Dr. Benway, and important differences. But if Dr. O’Connor did not exist, Burroughs would have found it necessary to invent him. Outrageous gay addict criminal doctor checks all the boxes on my Burroughs character Bingo card. The main difference between the doctors is that Benway is a sadistic psychopath, while O’Connor is a grifting streetwise old queen. But Burroughs’ work is full of wise old queens saying things like, “People are shits, darling,” and that could be right out of Nightwood. Dr. Benway is more cartoonishly evil dialed up to 11, but Dr. O’Connor’s behavior is definitely cartoonish, in a hysterical alcoholic drag queen practicing gynecology without a license sort of way. Dr. O’Connor is one among Nightwood’s menagerie of counterfeit characters: there is also a fake baron, a fake Roman Catholic, a fake priest, and a fake marriage. Barnes uses the fakeness device to explore her theme of identity: everyone in Nightwood seems to have at least two of them. The identity theme shares a similar importance in Burroughs’ work, where one finds it expressed in scenarios of secret agents, mind control and spirit possession. For example, his character Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is a complex of identities.

Contrary considerations include the fact that Burroughs did not generally write finely-drawn novelistic characters, relying more on pulp crime types — Benway’s character development is irrelevant because he is meant to be a symbol. Meanwhile Barnes wrote Dr. O’Connor as properly fleshed out and alive, with a character arc. Burroughs was capable of fleshing out characters when it suited the work, for instance his semi-autobiographical hero in Queer is a devastating character portrait.

Queer is heartbreaking because the characters are fleshed out. Written years after reading Nightwood, Queer is a very early Burroughs manuscript. And Barnes’ imprint may be faintly detected in it. For instance, Burroughs writes himself to be wandering around a city lovesick, like Barnes’ autobiographical Nightwood character (Nora). And Burroughs also writes himself speaking in outrageous routines, so much like Dr. O’Connor’s soliloquies.

The genesis of the “Burroughsian routine” may very well be based on the model of O’Connor’s visionary ranting. The definition of a Burroughsian routine is subjective of course. The 1920 Emmy Hennings novel Branded also contains Beat-like sentiments and proto-Burroughsian comic jags. I suppose it’s possible Djuna Barnes read Emmy Hennings and borrowed the ranty flavor of her stand-up-routine-like monologues, piping it into Nightwood, which Burroughs then borrowed from. Call it a fan theory.

When Did Burroughs Read Nightwood?

Reading Nightwood in the 1930s makes Burroughs among the book’s first wave of readers. He might have read it in either America or Europe; it was published in Europe in 1935, and in America in 1936. Burroughs graduated Harvard in 1936 and went to Europe between 1936-1937 on a post-graduate tour, fooling around with medical school for a minute. If he didn’t read Nightwood before he went to Europe, he probably read it there.

Then he returned to Harvard and connected with friend Kells Elvins; in late 1938, Burroughs and Elvins co-created Dr. Benway. The main question of Barnes’ contribution to Dr. Benway boils down to: did Burroughs read Nightwood before, or after, co-creating Dr. Benway in late 1938? If he had already read it, then we must acknowledge Djuna Barnes’ direct stamp on Benway.

Since the creation of Benway happened almost at the end of the 1930s, Burroughs reading Nightwood “back in the 1930s” is numerically more likely to have happened in 1936, 1937, or the first 11 months of 1938. Nightwood didn’t sell well but it had been hailed in literary and queer circles. Burroughs would have been aware of it. It is easy to imagine him seeking out the book in the dirty bookshops of Paris in 1937. But he could have picked it up in any large city. Allen Ginsberg saw a copy of Nightwood on Burroughs’ bookshelf in 1945. Ginsberg recorded it in the awestruck notes he was making of the contents of the older Burroughs’ library the first time they met. Perhaps it was the same hypothetical copy Burroughs had bought in Paris a few years earlier.

Irony Alert

Djuna Barnes’ influence on Burroughs is ironic because Burroughs went into such a hateful paranoid misogynist phase, if you can call decades a phase. It became evident in the 1960s and beyond — seemingly reserving his worst ire for lesbians — I always thought because they were immune to his charms and he couldn’t control them. And yet here he was in the 1930s-1940s with a prominent lesbian book on his shelf. But hell, Djuna Barnes is sometimes accused of rejecting her own lesbianism, while Burroughs came out of his crazy misogynistic period retaining many female allies. Burroughs and Barnes are studies in contrasts.

One thing we can say is she made it safer and easier for him to write what he wanted. She gave him a model of the transgressive, often hilarious, literary queer pioneer to emulate. She took aim at authority, lies, and hypocrisy, and created a morally compromised addict doctor archetype. Nightwood thrilled the young Burroughs.

More Barnes Influence

I found a Washington Post article describing the real person Dr. O’Connor was based on: “He was a compassionate but impossible confabulator and medical fourflusher hanging around Paris named Dan Mahoney. (Was he a real doctor? Who knows. He did perform an abortion on Djuna Barnes, however.) He was engaging but angry — as angry as Djuna Barnes; a tough, ugly, effeminate homosexual quite capable of decking whatever hapless barfly dared mock his limp wrist. And he was a talker. What is called a great talker. In the novel, he is transformed into the spirit of despairing eloquence […]”

Burroughs was all those things. Although he disparaged effeminate gay men in print, he opens up about his feminine side, specifically his emotionality, in Queer; and he gets weepy about his cats in The Cat Inside. He would have identified with Dr. O’Connor on every level. Burroughs had pursued becoming a doctor but failed, while Dr. O’Connor practices without a license. And Burroughs entered a life of crime like how O’Connor is portrayed: stealing from passed-out people in Nightwood, an act which Burroughs first read about, and then went on to do, as portrayed in Junky when he rolls a drunk. As for O’Connor being based on Djuna Barnes’ literal abortion doctor, Benway brags in Naked Lunch, “I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets” (Naked Lunch, p. 27).

In late 1938, it was six years before Burroughs wrote regularly. But Burroughs and Elvins engaged in their early co-writing experiment, the short story Twilight’s Last Gleamings, Benway’s first appearance. The story prefigured Burroughs’ mature voice, and his innovative film-based storytelling techniques. But he did nothing with it and did not write again for six years. Meanwhile Nightwood was still rumbling around in the back of his head, cooking. Burroughs’ style is not unlike Barnes’, except he stripped out her gothic efflorescences and replaced them with his own excesses of language. He kept the visionary truth-teller-of-filth kind of vibe, which is not original to Barnes, but is exemplified by her. And Burroughs kept the comedic outrageous ranting, and the bit about being an out gay writer, as central elements of his work.

Some of Nightwood can be hard to decipher. Full of difficult sentences, Barnes considered that James Joyce’s Ulysses had raised the bar on writing, and she could compete at that level. I imagine Nightwood engaging Burroughs, challenging him as a reader, as well as a future writer. His so-called cut-up trilogy of the 1970s is renowned, like Ulysses, for being unreadable. I trust Burroughs’ Nightwood blurb was genuine, but for all I know, it may also have been meant to deflect the fact that significant aspects of his iconoclastic work indeed sound like Djuna Barnes.

Who Created Doctor Benway?

Benway’s first appearance in Twilight’s Last Gleamings is a lampoon of authority. As a ship sinks, the authority figures of Captain Kramer and Dr. Benway psychopathically abuse their positions to secure seats on the lifeboats at the expense of the passengers.

A sadistic surgeon, Benway was later cast as an amoral mind-control agent of sinister cosmic forces. Benway is often over-the-top funny. Burroughs played the character himself in Doctor Benway Operates, illustrating a reading from Naked Lunch, starting around the 45-second mark:

Since Benway’s first appearance was co-written by Burroughs and Elvins, who really created the character? In Literary Outlaw, biographer Ted Morgan writes that Benway was Burroughs’ idea, saying “Burroughs introduced” the character (p. 68). Morgan also points out negative experiences with doctors in Burroughs’ life up to then, laying the groundwork for the character as a vehicle for vicious satire of medicine and science. In Morgan’s telling, the character is 100% Burroughs’ invention.

But, in a competing biography, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, biographer Barry Miles asserts Benway “was based on a real doctor Elvins once knew” (p. 31). So we must default to a view that the character originated as a composite, a true collaboration between Burroughs and Elvins. Both had bad experiences with doctors, bad enough to demand a brutal satirizing in the figure of Benway, composed of their resentments and memories. And one of those memories was Burroughs being “quite taken with” his recent reading of Nightwood. Insofar as it makes sense to do so, I ascribe the creation of Dr. Benway as something like 25% attributable to Djuna Barnes at a minimum. At a maximum, it is conceivable that Dr. Benway would not exist at all if Barnes had not first supplied the literary blueprint, and some inspiration, by writing Nightwood.

The Racism Though

Nightwood can be dinged for what I think of as Barnes’ hang-ups in the regrettable 1930s milieu of mis- and disinformation about race, kinda like today. Nightwood characterizes race as bringing immutable characteristics of behavior and character. It’s hard for me to tell if she is actually prejudiced or just horribly misinformed in this era just preceding World War II when there was a lot of horseshit around. She frames things in terms of her own biases, like when she writes the Jewish character Felix is “racially incapable of abandon” (Nightwood p. 41). Some of her characters act in racist ways — one drops an n-bomb, and one says “the Irish are as common as whale-shit at the bottom of the ocean.”

I don’t think these are aspirational characters. Barnes depicts them as an unsavory part of the wretched parade of a racist humanity, the way Burroughs’ title Naked Lunch implies taking a good look at the horror in front of you. Burroughs used the unfiltered hate speech of racist characters as a way for them to condemn themselves, and he employed racist caricatures with a layer of irony to underscore how mean those caricatures are. As indelicate as some of his language may be, for someone who hated everyone, I think it’s fair to say Burroughs hated white racists most of all — as in The Cat Inside, when he refers to a boys’ troop leader as “an evil piece of white shit” (p.15), or in the video for “A Thanksgiving Prayer” where he bitterly describes a country of murderous racist white sheriffs supported by “decent church-goin’ women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”

Likewise, despite her indelicate language and backward assumptions, Barnes is ultimately arguing for understanding and tolerance. Dr. O’Connor is characterized as someone who can’t help his sexual orientation, and so deserves compassion. His sexuality is portrayed as an immutable characteristic and therefore unjudgable, distinct from his morals, which are rotten.

But Nightwood must be counted among those poorly-timed works by modernists who were hung up about the Jews right before the Holocaust.

An Index of Burroughsian Lines in Nightwood

These are passages from Nightwood that the young Burroughs must have found particularly inspiring, and which echoed in his work years later, or which otherwise convey a proto-Beat sentiment.

p. 30: Dr. O’Connor says something intense but gross but also funny that could easily be from a Burroughs routine: “I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say ‘Love’ and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.” O’Connor is always saying stuff like this. So is Burroughs.

p. 31: Burroughs would have delighted to these lines satirizing an upper-class twit while humorously demonstrating the low morals of Dr. O’Connor: “Seeing that Frau Mann dozed, the doctor got up lightly and tip-toed noiselessly to the entrance. He said to the waiter in bad German: ‘The lady will pay,’ opened the door, and went quietly into the night.”

p. 33: A long comic passage illustrating Dr. O’Connor’s degradation ends with a high example of depraved selfishness reminiscent of Burroughs characters: “He was seen coming at a smart pace down the left side of the church to go in to Mass, bathing in the holy water stoup as if he were its single and beholden bird, pushing aside weary French maids and local tradespeople with the impatience of a soul in physical distress.” Compare to “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”: “Dr. Benway, carrying his satchel, pushed through the passengers crowded around Lifeboat No. 1. […] When the captain reached Lifeboat No. 1 there were two seats left. Some of the passengers were blocking each other as they tried to force their way in, others were pushing forward a wife, a mother, a child. The captain shoved them all out of his way […]”

p. 34: The character of Felix thinks of O’Connor as one of “the people of the underworld,” a Beat sentiment.

p. 36-85: Scenes where Dr. O’Connor rants in Beat and Burroughsian terms, invoking images of filth, a metallic odor, and, in particular, rusty medical implements, which can easily be imagined in Benway’s medical bag: “‘I like paupers and bums,’ he added, ‘because they are impersonal with misery, but me — me, I’m taken mostly for a vexatious bastard […] the wax that clots the gall […] May my dilator burst and my speculum rust, may panic seize my index finger before I point out my man.’ […] On a maple dresser […] lay a rusty pair of forceps […] A swill-pail stood at the head of the bed, brimming with abominations. […] there is a metallic odour.” Compare to Dr. Benway’s rusty “medical implement” from Naked Lunch, when Benway says, “Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can?” (Naked Lunch, p. 51)

pp. 37-38: A dreamlike passage in which fungal and plant life become confused with the human body, ending with a vision of carnivorous plants: “On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers […] in a moment of threatened consciousness […] lay the young woman […] The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odor of oil of amber […] making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep […] Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water […] she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room […] thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration.” Compare to the hallucinatory dirty passage in Naked Lunch where the lovers turn into plants (p. 84): “His face swells with blood, green lights burst behind his eyes […] Damp hairs on the back of his balls dry to grass in the warm spring wind. High jungle valley, vines creep in the window. Johnny’s cock swells, great rank buds burst out. A long tuber root creeps from Mary’s cunt, feels for the earth. The bodies disintegrate in green explosions. The hut falls in ruins of broken stone.”

pp. 39-40: Dr. O’Connor is described as an exemplar of the Burroughsian street criminal/authority figure committing petty crime with sleight-of-hand to support his habits, with bonus Burroughsian comparison of a man to an invertebrate: “[Dr. O’Connor’s] eternal fear of meeting with the law (he was not a licensed practitioner) […] Felix now saw the doctor, partially hidden by the screen beside the bed, make the movements common to the ‘dumbfounder,’ or man of magic; the gestures of one who, in preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is nothing to hide; the whole purpose that of making the back and elbows move in a series of ‘honesties,’ while in reality the most flagrant part of the hoax is being prepared. […] the doctor’s hand reached out and covered a loose hundred franc note lying on the table. […] He knew he would continue to like the doctor […] in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a pearl.” Compare to Burroughs from Naked Lunch where Dr. Benway is described shuffling photos as he entraps someone: “[W]ith gambler fingers he shifts the photos in three-card-monte passes”(p. 163). And Burroughs from The Western Lands: “Neferti knows the arts of telepathic blocking and misdirection. You can’t make your mind a blank, for that would be detected at once. You must present a cover mind which the Pharaoh can tune into, and which is completely harmless: ‘For me the Pharaoh is a God.’ You can’t lay it on too thick.”

pp. 44-145: Dr. O’Connor says, “[B]ecause I’m American I believe anything […] There is no truth.” Compare to Burroughs’ formulation from the mouth of his character Hassan I Sabbah, appearing throughout Burroughs’ work: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

pp.78-80: “[….] the doctor, wondering how he had managed to get himself into the carriage which held three women and a child […] The doctor turned up his coat collar. ‘I was saying, madame, that by his own peculiar perversity God has made me a liar.’” Compare to Benway in “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”: “Dr. Benway, carrying his satchel, pushed through the passengers crowded around Lifeboat No. 1. ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted, seating himself among the women. ‘I’m the doctor.’”

p. 82: “The doctor […] said in an almost professional voice […] ‘Love of woman for woman, what insane passion for unmitigated anguish and motherhood brought that into the mind?” Compare to Burroughs interview about Naked Lunch in the book The Job: “[Interviewer:] What is the symbolism of the lesbian agents with penises grafted onto their faces drinking spinal fluid? Burroughs: Oh, just a bit of science fiction, really.”

pp. 85-86: “Groping her way she rapped, fumbling for the knob. […] Hearing his ‘come in’ she opened the door […] On a maple dresser […] lay […] pomades, creams, rouges […] this room was also muscular, a cross between a chambre à coucher and a boxer’s training camp. […] In the narrow iron bed, with its heavy and dirty linen sheets, lay the doctor in a women’s flannel nightgown. The doctor’s head, with its over-large black eyes, its full gun-metal cheeks and chin, was framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendant curls that touched his shoulders, and falling back against the pillow, turned up the shadowy interior of their cylinders. He was heavily rouged and his lashes painted. […] he was extremely put out, having expected someone else […].” Compare to “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” not Dr. Benway but Captain Kramer, a parallel authority figure: “Mrs. Norris found the door to the captain’s cabin ajar. She pushed it open and stepped in, knocking on the open door. […] ‘Oh Captain, is the ship sinking? […] Her wig slipped. The captain stood up. He snatched the wig off her head and put it on. ‘Give me that kimono!’ he ordered. […] The captain took a revolver from his side pocket. He aimed at her bald pate outlined in the window, and fired. […] Captain Kramer, wearing Mrs. Norris’s kimono and wig, his face heavily smeared with cold cream, and carrying a small suitcase, walked down to C Deck, the kimono billowing behind him.”

p. 89: Dr. O’Connor utters a line in the third person which Dr. Benway could have uttered: “[…] the reason the doctor knows everything is because he’s been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous.” Burroughs cultivated his own anonymity in his persona of “El Hombre Invisible.”

p.94: Dr. O’Connor on identity in dreams: “We wake from our [dreams] in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them. Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves.” Compare to Burroughs on identity in dreams in My Education: “I can never get names straight. Why? Because I have no name.”

p. 98: A long, obscure passage, but I think Barnes compares eyelashes to centipede legs. Burroughs was obsessed with centipedes. He valued them as symbols for being as far from the human mold as you can get, and therefore a symbol of alienness among themes of alienation (see note for p. 155 below).

p. 111: “[…] contemplation of the mad strip of the inappropriate that runs through creation.” Could be a Burroughs motto.

pp. 97-125: Dr. O’Connor defends being gay, then Baron Felix defends being a fake in Burroughsian terms, and is answered by O’Connor: “‘I haunt the pissoirs as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the Dee’ […] ‘One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it.’ The doctor wiped his mouth. ‘In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured. […] Corruption is the Age of Time.’” Compare to Burroughs from The Burroughs File (pp. 128-129): “[…] across the urinals of Present Time […] I am the morphine […] I’ve been called harder names and it won’t hurt my feelings […] Time is radioactive.”

p. 155: “Robin was outside the ‘human type’ — a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone.” Burroughs would have seen his own feelings of alienation from the human race represented here. Burroughs from The Western Lands (p. 173): “The human mold is broken and this you gotta hear … out crawls a monster centipede.”

Bibliography

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, New Directions Publishing, 2006

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, 50th Anniversary Edition with restored text, Grove Press, 2009

The Burroughs File by William S. Burroughs, City Lights Books, 1991

The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs, Viking, 1992

Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan, Avon Books, 1990

William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles, Hyperion, 1993

I consulted Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (Grove Press, 1998) for the text of “Twilight’s Last Gleamings.”

In addition to his biographies, I consulted Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs (Semiotext(e), 2001) to help me determine that his blurb for Nightwood is the only time he ever mentioned Djuna Barnes in print or on tape. The only other Burroughs reference to Djuna Barnes I can find is in With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker by Victor Bockris (Seaver Books, 1981), where Bockris writes on page 42, “There are a number of women writers whom Bill considers highly, among them Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Bowles, Dorothy Parker, Eudora Welty, Isabelle Eberhardt and Colette.”

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.