8:22 a.m. - 2023-04-08
Bill and Joan
William S Burroughs was a child of privilege. I bring this up because I've been thinking about South Texas. About grapefruit trees irrigated in loamy soil; fields of snap-peas and lettuce...crops that Burroughs (or more precisely, the immigrants in his employ) would have harvested when he tried his hand at farming in The Rio Grande Valley.
This was after he'd been busted for forging morphine 'scrips in NYC, and remanded to the custody of his parents back in St. Louis. An indignity that had wounded his pride. So in a bid for filial independence, he'd embarked on a speculative ag-venture down by the border. He was still an addict of course, and impatient...hence his other farming venture in Texas; growing pot in the dank dirt of the Piney Woods, a full day's drive northeast of The Valley.
He was still an addict though, and incompetent...so this too failed.
He was roughly midway between the two farms one afternoon when, high and horny, he'd pulled over to fuck his wife on the side of the road. Something the Bee County sheriff didn't appreciate. Especially from a mouthy proto-beatnik (I have no doubt my TX grandparents did the same thing, just-as-drunk, in the same era...). Burroughs was locked-up on charges of public indecency and DWI. He'd be bailed out by his parents, of course.
It's tempting to view this incident as the beginning of a string of events that would culminate in his 23-year period of exile. But to assign any of these dominoes a position in that ever-collapsing chain would be to ignore Burroughs' tendency (nay, compulsion) to upend the game-table of his life. To leave the tiles scattered on the floor, and their order as of little consequence as the chapter sequence in Naked Lunch.
He would kill her three years after their roadside tryst, his wife. The incident is now American lit-lore, and most often described as a “party trick gone awry”. While presumably accurate, this strikes me as an understatement. And an injustice. Not because I would have seen Burroughs hang for the crime; but because the identity of the victim is lost in the retelling, subsumed by the myth of the man who pulled the trigger.
(Although, come to think of it, “Artist Kills Own Muse” is a headline rife with mythological implication...)
If there's a tier list of literary “muses”, Anaïs Nin would have to be at the top, right? With Fitzgerald's Zelda a close, complicated, second? Burroughs' muse had moved to Texas from NYC, not just as his lover, but as his partner on the ill-fated weed farm. She bore him a son there and, along with her daughter from a previous marriage, followed him to New Orleans...where he got arrested yet-again. This found them back in The Rio Grande Valley awaiting trial and then, in the face of his impending prison sentence, she and the kids followed him on the lam to Mexico City. She encouraged his writing all the while and he penned three novels before shooting her dead. They all chronicle the chaotic hassles of chasing a fix while running from the law, and provide some insight into their life together. But it's the last of these three that gives me pause to wonder what was going through the bright, Benzedrine-addled, mind beneath that fateful highball glass.
Queer wouldn't be published until 34 years after the shooting, and its contents deliver on the title's promise--Burroughs had started fucking boys again. This kind of thing can strain a marriage, I'd imagine. So did she think his aim was truer than his fidelity that night? Or did she hope he loved her enough to squeeze the trigger on an empty chamber--a click to elicit a gasp, and then everyone laughs as another jazz record plays? Or was she daring him to kill her, half-hoping he would? This “death wish” hypothesis was promulgated by many in Burroughs' circle, including Alan Ginsberg. Add to that Burroughs' intro to Queer, penned at the time of its eventual publication, wherein he eulogizes his wife in the context of his own oeuvre, “admitting” that without her death he never would have been “driven” to write Naked Lunch etc. Thus the muse became a martyr... All of this is grotesque, of course; but perhaps inevitable.
Scanning Wikipedia for info on Burroughs, I noticed they'd classified his writing as “Postmodern”. I maintain otherwise. Yes, the Beats were deconstructionists; but that's a plastic distinction...an architectural metric. When Picasso evolved from analytic to synthetic cubism, did he become any less Modern? For me it's the spirit of the work that defines it, and the Beat writers were ego-driven, reactionary, exoticists*. So from my perspective, the line between Burroughs and Hemingway is finer than either would care to admit. And the fact that an outlaw writer who framed his drug addiction in terms of a revolt against the hypocrisy of “square” society, a writer whose lifelong obsession with firearms exemplified an all-too-American fixation on the gun as an extension of the will...the fact that he shot his wife and canonized her as a casualty of his own, necessary, struggle doesn't surprise me.
And I get the appeal of the muse...even as I acknowledge what a sexist anachronism the concept is. But I mean, the idea of someone erudite and attractive who encouraged my work, tolerated my addictions, held our love above the law and liked to pull over and fuck on the side of the road? I don't use the term “dream girl” often, but... Her name was Joan, by the way, Joan Vollmer. Not as memorable as Anaïs or Zelda I guess, and I wish I knew more about her.
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The Burroughs mention in the first paragraph was supposed to segue into my reflections on S. Texas, little diary, but it kind of turned into a book report, huh? I'll pick up the thread on another entry...
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*The genius of Kerouac (everyone's favorite Beat?) was that he took the exotic narrative impetus of trad Modernists like Conrad and London and Kipling and applied it socially, domestically, in his quest for the “authentic”. An idea whose influence is too vast to map, and a definitive part of my worldview.
