On William S. Burroughs' claim to have caused the Church of Scientology to have moved offices.

(A minor annoyance prompted by reading the otherwise-excellent El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles.)

William S. Burroughs did not cause the London office of the Church of Scientology to move by using tape recorders outside it.

He made the claim in "Playback from Eden to Watergate":

"I have frequently observed that this simple operation making recordings and taking pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, then playing recordings back and taking more pictures-will result in accidents, fires, removals, especially the last. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was recently carried out."

Using tape recorders to move a Church of Scientology is an obviously ludicrous claim in general, but in particular to anyone who knows anything about how the Church of Scientology operates in practice:

• Scientology offices move for their own reasons (expansion or contraction). The 68 Tottenham Court Road office is still there, forty years later.
• The thing that breaks even suspension of disbelief: If the Scientologists had even noticed Burroughs acting towards them, they'd have attempted to deal with him in the manners prescribed by Church policy (approaching him to question him, very visibly photographing him in turn, etc.), as they do any other demonstrator against them; and this would have become part of the mythology of Burroughs and Scientology. Instead, Scientology appears to have largely ignored Burroughs' criticisms since he left, their only visible response being a reply to one review in Rolling Stone (their letter was reprinted in Burroughs' Naked Scientology). (This lack of reaction is itself unusual, suggesting that Burroughs failed to come to Hubbard's personal attention as the latter was just starting the Sea Org.)

Burroughs appears to have believed he achieved this, and does not appear to have been joking. (Because, frankly, his brain was full of squirrels and confetti.) But his claim is repeated uncritically by fans, biographers and even the Daily Telegraph.

People like literary effect, spurious narratives and the wishful promise of easily-accessible power so much that they are inclined to completely jettison the application of critical thinking to such claims. The tendency to hagiography in the presence of a cool story is unfortunate. In El Hombre Invisible, anything in a cut-ups novel that presages a real-world event is taken as literary prescience: the author goes through actual word salad (though extremely well-tossed word salad that deserves its literary reputation) for any fragment that could retrospectively be considered a prediction. Compare the claimed retrospective predictions of a fortune teller: how vague were the original predictions, what other claimlike statements were made? People who wouldn't be fooled for a moment by a fortune teller saying "of course, I predicted that" seem to lose all judgement.

The biography is thus tainted: I wonder at the source of every other historical assertion. Burroughs claimed a photographic memory, down to remembering emotions, and his biographers (Miles and Morgan both) appear to have therefore taken his interpretations of reality at face value. Morgan's bio is unashamedly a transcription of Burroughs' memories and interpretations of events, so is an autobiography at one remove; but Miles' isn't, and more could have been expected of him.