William Burroughs' Curse on Truman Capote

Reality Studio has an interesting piece on Burroughs and his thoughts on Capote and his writing.

From the story...

Burroughs’ texts of the early 1950s offer his own mordant mockery of Capote’s success. A letter to Ginsberg from April 1952 finds Burroughs shifting into an effeminate register to mock the gossipy tone of litterateurs: “My dear I simply must read the short story about your affair with a Mongolian hair-lipped idiot in Dakar. It sounds too too Truman Capoty. A hunch back blowing you at the same time?” Most witheringly, Burroughs invokes Capote in the pay-off to the Billy Bradshinkel routine of The Yage Letters (written 1953, published 1963), a tale of an adolescent love affair whose narrative tone treads an uncertain balance between abject sentimentality and self-conscious satire. The latter wins the day as the teenage Billy rejects the advances of Burroughs’ narrator and later dies in a car crash, leading Burroughs to conclude “And I got a silo full of queer corn where that came from,” ending in the bathetic and dismissive address to the reader, “Ah what the hell! Give it to Truman Capote” (a sentiment-puncturing punchline performed to terrific effect in Ed Buhr’s 2008 film of the routine, The Japanese Sandman). Burroughs’ notes on the original Yage manuscript imply that the Bradshinkel vignette was specifically intended as a parody of contemporary American fiction, as a “lapse into typical young U.S. novelist style” (suggesting Burroughs may also have had in mind Vidal’s 1948 novel of gay adolescent infatuation, The City and the Pillar). 

Burroughs’ arrival in Tangiers in 1954 offered new reasons to resent Capote, given that Burroughs promptly felt slighted by the city’s expatriate literary community centered around Paul Bowles (who Burroughs would only befriend some years later). In August 1954 Burroughs writes to Kerouac complaining that “[Bowles] invites the dreariest queens in Tangiers to tea, but has never invited me [...] Since Tennessee Williams and Capote etc. are friends of Bowles I, of course, don’t meet them when they come here.” Despite Burroughs’ bruised tone, it is worth noting that at this point Bowles, Williams, and Capote were all successful writers while Burroughs had only one pulp novel to his (pseudonymous) name. Furthermore, Burroughs may have been misinformed as to the likelihood of encountering Capote in Tangiers, given that Capote’s sojourn in the city had occurred much earlier, in the summer of 1949. Yet the following month, Burroughs again bemoans his social exclusion to Kerouac, revealing the extent to which his sense of being ostracised in Tangiers had reopened old wounds.