Mmm-mmmm. There’s nothing quite like a fine, fine St. Albert-bus-crazy to wake you up in the morning and see you through your day. This one was a younger guy who didn’t look so much like a bus-crazy as a guy who’d had a few too many cups of coffee. Everything was fine till we got to Westmount - when, the silence of the 6:45 ride apparently having gotten to him, he decided to put in his two cents.

“I ‘ave too go’a girlfriend, yew know!!”

Heads snapped around all over the bus. Then for the next twenty minutes he proceeded - in a guttural and obviously contrived Cockney accent so rife with clicks, pops, and gulps that he sounded like an African tribesman from ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’ - to tell us about how he loved women and thought they were the greatest things ever and all the things he does with his girlfriend, who sounded like quite a catch.

For a crazy guy.

The most important, if not the only, mark of a great author is whether he reads with erudite affection for literature - not whether he writes with it. And so without further ado, I present Martin Amis’ review of William S. Burroughs’ ‘Queer,’ taken from ‘The War Against Cliché,’ Amis’ award-winning anthology of 2001.

“Shocking the world all over again, William Burroughs has written a thoughtful and sensitive study of unrequited love. Mind you, he wrote it a long time ago - in the early Fifties, between the documentary Junky and the hallucinatory Naked Lunch. The author explains, in an agonized introduction, why the manuscript was for so long an object of untouchable distress. ‘The book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned… the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan’ (by his own hand). So Queer is oddly snared in Burroughs’ personal voodoo; it is like him, and not like him; surprisingly lucid and touching, recognizably antic and feral.

“The unrequited love is of course homosexual. William Lee (an often-used surrogate) is lying low in Mexico City in a halfway house full of American dropouts and bail-beaters, all hectically gratifying their ‘uh, proclivities’. ‘”Maurice is as queer as I am,” Joe belched. “Excuse me. If not queerer… As a matter of fact, he’s so queer I’ve lost interest in him.”‘ Intransigently Lee yearns for what is presented as an impossibility: homosexual love, the real thing. it never works, but Lee ‘had never resigned himself’. By a process of elimination he settles on Eugene Allerton, a man without qualities (he isn’t even queer), an appropriate recipient for unrequitable love.

“One of the obstacles appears to be money, in that homosexual sex is always bought sex, sooner or later. Lee, who is rich, seduces Allerton through money and then loses him through money. After a while he wins him back through money. An ‘arrangement’: rostered sex in return for a free adventure holiday. They go to South America, in search of an ‘altering’ drug which, Lee jokes, will make Lee less queer or Allerton queerer. More impossibilities. The book ends with a horrifying dream in which lee comes to haunt Allerton, to reclaim his loan. ‘”I wonder if you know just what ‘or else‘ means, Gene?”‘

“How do things work, anyway, when a male desires maleness? Is it something to do with wanting to become the other person? ‘I want myself the same way I want others… I can’t use my own body for some reason.’ Disembodiment is a constant theme here, as it is in all Burroughs. Earlier, Lee daydreams that he is in the body of a young boy.

Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman’s body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other’s body. ‘I’m not queer,’ he thought. ‘I’m disembodied.’

“Perhaps, then, we do glimpse the dead wife, the marriage, the other impossibility.

“Allerton is featureless but everything about Lee is inordinate. His need for love has a tearing avidity that is in itself repellent. Lee is impossible, and he knows it. The lovers squabble about separate beds: ‘”Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat bib blob?… Am I giving you the horrors?” “Indeed you are.”‘ Lee releases tension through what he calls ‘the Routine,’ fantastic monologues that are deliberately embarrassing, scabrous, pathological. They point the way, as do many local effects (’pathic dismay,’ ’so nasty,’ ‘another angle is malaria,’ ‘like music down a windy street’) to that great extended Routine, The Naked Lunch: ‘I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body.’

“Retroactively the book humanizes Burroughs’ work. An impossibility to which one never resigns oneself: this is as good a reason for writing as any. Queer also helps account for the particular slant of Burroughs’ humour, the comic valuelessness of his despair. In the jungle:

‘Gene, I hear something squawking over there. I’m going to try and shoot it.’
‘What is it?’
‘How should I know? It’s alive, isn’t it?’ ”

Observer, 1986