William S. Burroughs is famous for his paranoid novels such as Naked Lunch and being a seminal face on the Mt. Rushmore of the Beat Generation.
Yet, Burroughs is infamous for murdering his 28-year-old wife, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, brilliant in her own right and a muse to the Beats.
The details of Vollmer鈥檚 death 65 years ago this month are jumbled 鈥� complicated by her common-law husband鈥檚 contradictory accounts. The prevailing version, however, puts a pistol in Burroughs鈥� hand and a bullet in Vollmer鈥檚 head after he trained the gun on a highball glass resting on her head and aimed too low in a drunken episode of William Tell.
Debate over whether Vollmer鈥檚 death was indeed murder or tragic boozy theater rages still nearly a decade after Burroughs鈥� death. Dr. William C. Nesbitt, an English professor and chair of the humanities department at 海角社区 explores that puzzle within the context of drama and performance in his essay, 鈥淲illiam S. Burroughs and the Shooting of Joan Vollmer Burroughs as Performance,鈥� collected in the volume, Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the ‘Howl’ Generation (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama (July 2016).
鈥淏urroughs was always conscious of the performance,鈥� Nesbitt writes. 鈥溾�� he asks: 鈥楥an any actor fill the living role?鈥� After all, being oneself is a tough act (to follow). 鈥� Despite the publicity and media attention given to Burroughs, his life demonstrates that the hardest performance is the one required by our own lives, the personal performance. And so, he plays his part.鈥�
Nesbitt had appeared on a conference panel where he delivered a different paper on Burroughs. Intrigued with the subject, another panelist recommended Nesbitt to the book鈥檚 editor, who asked Nesbitt to contribute to the volume.
Though certainly not as celebrated as Burroughs and other luminaries in the Beat galaxy, Vollmer was a force in her own right.
As Brenda Knight writes in The Women of the Beat Generation:
鈥淛oan Vollmer Adams Burroughs was seminal in the creation of the Beat revolution; indeed the fires that stoked the Beat engine were started with Joan as patron and muse. 鈥� Brilliant and well versed in philosophy and literature, Joan was the whetstone against which the main Beat writers 鈥� Allen, Jack, and Bill 鈥� sharpened their intellect.鈥�
In the introduction to his novel Queer, published 32 years after he finished it in 1953, Burroughs called the shooting 鈥� for which he was convicted in absentia of homicide 鈥� the launchpad for his writing career:
鈥淚 am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan鈥檚 death …. [S]o the death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.鈥�
Yet, Burroughs was not always so forthcoming, introspective and reflective, Nesbitt observed.
鈥淪hortly before his death, Burroughs wrote in his journal, 鈥楳other, Dad, Mort, Billy 鈥� I failed them all 鈥� …. However, it is striking that Burroughs acknowledges failing his mother, father, brother and son, but not Joan. He places more emotional emphasis on and directs more feelings of regret to a cat he gave away than to the wife he shot and killed. 鈥� By not acknowledging Joan, he does not bring her into being on the page. He strikes her from the record and coverts her from death to non-existence and erases her.鈥�
Two years after the centennial of Burroughs鈥� birth, renewed interested in is work abounds, including the album, 鈥淟et Me Hang You,鈥� which collected overlooked tapes of featuring the author reading the raunchiest parts of Naked Lunch over works by musicians such as King Khan, Bill Frisell, and Wayne Horvitz.
As Nesbitt notes, 鈥減eople are still investing, exploring, and interpreting his work.聽 His personal life bled into (almost literally) and affected his work to a greater degree than that of many other writers.鈥�
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