In texts written throughout the 1950s, Kerouac and Burroughs denounce Capote, their derision occupying a space between jealousy and contempt. Yet years before his putdown of Kerouac’s breakthrough novel, American’s foremost literary protégée was already a target of ire for the nascent Beats. Meanwhile, Capote’s best-known association with the Beats came via his famous dismissal of On the Road on the talk show Open End in 1959: “ isn’t writing at all - it’s typing”. It also merited Kerouac a chapter in Vidal’s 1995 memoir Palimpsest, documenting the same occasion described in The Subterraneans alongside the detail omitted from Kerouac’s account (that the two ended the night together in bed). Gore Vidal passed through the Beats’ orbit in New York in 1953, affording Vidal an appearance in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (as “Arial Lavalina”). Norman Mailer was keen to establish himself as one of Burroughs’ earliest champions, supplying a much-quoted tribute (“Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius”) alongside other more dubious commendations (“Burroughs may be gay, but he’s a man”).
Nonetheless, crossovers remained inevitable between Burroughs and his more mainstream contemporaries. Never one of life’s natural schmoozers, the “literary outlaw” made his home in the pages of the underground press rather than on the set of The Dick Cavett Show. The high-profile lifestyles enjoyed by these authors would have been anathema to Burroughs. This was a time when post-war novelists were afforded considerable public attention, with the media’s investment in figures such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote rewarded in the column inches generated by the spectacular fallings-out which occurred between these literary titans, accomplished grudge-bearers all. Largely absent from his home country in the immediate aftermath of Naked Lunch, William Burroughs evaded the mass publicity that America lavished on other writers during the 1960s. Andy Warhol, Polaroid photographs of Truman Capote and William Burroughs
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