Coming Soon: The Burroughs-Warhol Connection

In late 2024, Beatdom Books will release The Warhol-Burroughs Connection, a new book by Victor Bockris, author of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. This fascinating collection of interviews, journal excerpts, photographs, and collage explores and celebrates the relationship between two of the 20^th century’s most fascinating and influential artists.

William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol met several times, mostly thanks to the prompting of Victor Bockris, then a friend of both men. He brought them together hoping for great conversation and perhaps even collaboration, but what transpired was often misunderstanding and frustration. Add the likes of Mick Jagger and Lou Reed to the mix and the result was a weird series of disagreements and comical mishaps alongside a frustrating array of near misses.

What is interesting about this depiction of their friendship is how—in spite of their often cold, inhuman demeanour—the two men could be so warm and open around each other. Just look at that cover photo! Burroughs was oddly at ease around Warhol and Warhol was similarly willing to have Burroughs physically lean on him—an unthinkable transgression for almost anyone else.

This book sheds new light on these two men and in doing so brings about a third man—a composite character constructed of Burroughs and Warhol’s combined beings. In a long chapter called “the biography of comparison,” Bockris highlights the many interesting similarities between them. It contains this fascinating insight:

Their public careers in America took off in November 1962. Warhol’s groundbreaking one-man New York show of paintings opened at the Stable Gallery in New York on the 7th. Grove Press published Burroughs’ Naked Lunch on the 26th. Both works polarized their fields. Both men went on to confront their mediums by developing machinelike techniques, which appeared to remove the artist’s emotions from their work. Burroughs’ cut-up technique drove the majority of his peers and critics around the bend. Warhol’s silkscreen technique confused and annoyed his detractors, who chased him until he died. Whereas painters like de Kooning might spend a year on one canvas, Andy Warhol took less than five minutes to produce a painting.

The photos in this book are magnificent and the journal entries eye-opening, but perhaps best of all we have the conversations. These are not the standard interview answers. We do not have Burroughs drawling in his intellectual-but-anti-academic manner about his esoteric interests. Rather, we have them gossiping and joking and discussing penis size and premature ejaculation. Warhol was annoyed that one conversation recorded did not seem very intellectual, but their bantering makes these two titans of postmodern art all the more human. Their struggles to articulate or understand, the sudden departures from one idea to the next make these conversations like any other and bring the combined wisdom of Warhol and Burroughs into the reader’s life.

Finally, we have a long conversation between Bockris and Beatdom regular, Leon Horton. Horton prompts Bockris to talk on a variety of subjects, discussing his fascinating life and his various interactions with the Beat writers.

You can learn more about this book and even pre-order your copy here.

In other Beat news…

In case you missed it, Beatdom #24 was recently released. This issue dealt with the West Coast of the United States and included pieces on Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and Diane di Prima. You can learn all about it here.

That link will take you to our recently redesigned website. Feel free to let us know what you think. The change was spurred by a new logo we adopted earlier this year, created by Waylon Bacon, who has now done about half of our covers.

We hope that the new site is more readable than the old one. We also intend to put a lot more content online in the coming months.

Speaking of change, we have finally created a Twit… sorry, I mean an X account. Yes, that particular social media app is now a tragic nightmare of trolling and disinformation, but maybe Beatdom can brighten it a little with some Beat content. We’re at @beatdomjournal. Feel free to follow us. We’re also on Facebook.