BY RICHARD KADREY AND SUZANNE STEFANAC
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william Burroughs' raw-boned figure haunted us long before his death. For nearly half a century, he infected our literature, seeding it with his obsessions, suspicions and passions. In his brutal honesty, we began to learn something new about truth and humor and maybe even love.

Of the many authors who have acknowledged his influence, few have been as unflinching or provocative as J.G. Ballard. From the chromey auto-eroticism of "Crash" to the surrendered innocence of "Empire of the Sun," Ballard has refined a style that cuts through the moralism and sentimentality that blunt so much contemporary writing.

After Burroughs' death, Ballard spoke to us by phone from his home in Shepperton, England.

William Burroughs was someone who was suspicious of language and words, but his whole life was defined by them. Do you see a contradiction here? Perhaps the essential writer's contradiction?

I think Burroughs was very much aware of the way in which language could be manipulated to mean absolutely the opposite of what it seems to mean. But that's something he shared with George Orwell. He was always trying to go through the screen of language to find some sort of truth that lay on the other side. I think his whole cut-up approach was an attempt to cut through the apparent manifest content of language to what he hoped might be some sort of more truthful world. A world of meaning that lay beyond. In books like "The Ticket that Exploded" and "The Soft Machine," you see this attempt to go through language to something beyond. If there is a paradox, I think it lies somewhere here.

How did you first encounter Burroughs' work?

I think it was in something like 1960. A friend of mine had come back from Paris where "Naked Lunch" had been published by the Olympia Press, which was a press that specialized in sort of low-grade porn, but also published what were then banned European and American classics. Henry Miller, for example, was first published in the Olympia Press. And Nabokov's "Lolita" was first published by the Olympia Press.

Anyway, it was a rather low time for me. I had just started out as a writer. I hadn't written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called "Hampstead novels" seemed to dominate everything.

Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us. And I, of course, devoured the book and every Burroughs novel. I think there were about three or four then in print from Olympia Press. I knew that this man was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared since the Second World War, and that's an opinion I haven't changed since. It was an encouraging moment. I mean, although my writing has never been along the lines that Burroughs set out, his example was a huge encouragement to me.

I first met him in the early '60s in London. I visited him in his flat in Picadilly Circus. I'm not sure that he got up to a great deal of writing there. He didn't seem that happy.

This was in a street called Duke Street, literally about 100 yards from Picadilly Circus. And, of course, this was of interest to him because that's where all the boys used to congregate, in the lavatory of the big Picadilly Circus Underground station. They had completely taken it over. It was quite a shock for a heterosexual like myself to accidentally stray into this lavatory and to find oneself in what seemed to be a kind of oriental male brothel. He obviously found that absolutely fascinating.

I think these big cities aren't all that different, really. Burroughs roamed around the world throughout his youth and middle age without ever really stopping anywhere for very long. I think the closest he probably felt to home was Tangiers. He certainly did his most important writing there. I mean, he wrote "Naked Lunch" there, and I think he found a very sympathetic community of homosexuals and drug users and, of course, an unlimited availability of boys and young men.

This was Interzone [a parallel universe in "Naked Lunch"] of course. Interzone was based on Tangiers, so I think he was happy there. Happier than he seems to have been in New York. Or, for that matter, during his days as a would-be farmer. I think he must be one of the strangest men ever to set out to raise a cash crop. I remember reading his collected letters a few years ago and he's describing how many carrots and lettuce he's planted and you can tell that this isn't going to work out.

N E X T+P A G E | "The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth ever invented."