William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs is portrayed in this diary passage through a single evening at his Bowery home: an austere interior, a conversation with Mick Jagger, and Andy Warhol’s unsparing assessment of Burroughs as a writer. Rather than offer a biography, the account makes him a figure observed at close range and filtered through Warhol’s divided response to his work and reputation.

The Bowery Apartment

On March 1, 1980, Victor Bockris told Warhol that the dinner with Mick Jagger at Burroughs’s home was on. Warhol stayed at the office rather than go home, and the driver passed 222 Bowery too quickly. At the apartment, Warhol recognized a place he had not visited since 1962 or 1963: it had once been a gymnasium locker room.

Warhol describes the rooms as windowless, white, and neat. Pipes gave the interior a sculptural appearance, while Burroughs slept on the floor in a separate room. The details make the apartment more than a backdrop: its stripped-down, carefully ordered interior is the most concrete portrait the diary offers of Burroughs’s daily surroundings.

Writing and the Past

Warhol’s judgment of Burroughs is pointed but qualified. He credits him with one good book, Naked Lunch, while saying that he does not think Burroughs is a good writer and that he now seems to live in the past. The contrast preserves the importance of Burroughs’s earlier achievement even as Warhol dismisses his present literary standing.

That assessment is explicitly Warhol’s opinion, not an independent evaluation of Burroughs’s writing. Its force comes from the abrupt movement between admiration for a particular book and impatience with the writer as Warhol encounters him in the present.

The Dinner Conversation

During the gathering, Burroughs asked Mick Jagger about drug culture and revolution. The diary records the subjects of their conversation but offers no extended account of Burroughs’s views or of the exchange’s outcome. After Mick Jagger and Jerry left, Warhol remained for a little while; Victor Bockris then walked him downstairs, and they waited about half an hour for a cab. Warhol was home at eleven.

The episode leaves Burroughs in the role of host and questioner, while its brief, selective details keep the scene anchored in Warhol’s observations: the old gymnasium space, the conversation’s broad cultural themes, and the writer whom Warhol regarded as living in the past.