The dark side of William Burroughs, wife killer behind Daniel Craig’s Queer

In the late months of 1949, aspiring American writer William S Burroughs evaded gun and drug charges in the United States by bringing his family to Mexico where he planned to study while waiting out the statute of limitations on his crimes. Burroughs’ letters describe the early days after their arrival – settling in the fashionable Roma district of Mexico City, kicking his dope habit and immersing himself in the raucous expat community – with a kind of euphoria.

Two years later, Burroughs was once again deep in the grip of heroin and prone to violent, pistol-waving outbursts. His marriage was in shambles. His wife, Joan Vollmer, was lost in depression, illness and alcoholism, driven to deterioration by her own demons and the rigours of her unhappy, abusive relationship with husband “Bill”.

One stormy evening on September 6, 1951, the couple joined their usual coterie of literary drunks in an apartment above the rowdy bar they frequented. At first it was a typical get-together – lots of alcohol and drivel – but the situation changed abruptly when Burroughs produced a gun, announced “It’s time for our William Tell act”, and told Vollmer to place a glass on her head as a target. He then shot her in the temple.

Burroughs murdered his wife before going on to become one of the most influential figures in American literature. Vollmer – once a central personality in the emerging literary and cultural movement known as the Beat Generation – rests in a pauper’s grave on the edge of Mexico City to this day.

Now with the release of the movie Queer – an adaptation of Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel about a gay man immersed in the seedier side of Mexico City – there is renewed interest in the author, particularly his time in Latin America. Although it wasn’t published until 1985, Burroughs began early drafts of Queer shortly before shooting Vollmer, and many of its scenes were drawn directly from their tumultuous marriage and the toxic circumstances surrounding it.

With the book’s protagonist played by one of Hollywood’s leading actors, Daniel Craig, the film has brought a new wave of celebration to Burroughs’ work, accurately posing him as a pioneer in queer representation. But as groundbreaking as his writing may have been, a wall lined with mostly unmarked graves in Mexico City stands as a haunting reminder of a darker side to Burroughs’ legacy.

The Burroughs’ apartment at Jose Alvarado 37 in Mexico City where Bill once hosted fellow Beat writers [Nick Hilden/Al Jazeera]

The death of Joan Vollmer

When Burroughs and Vollmer arrived in the Roma district of Mexico City in 1949, the colonia was much as it is today: an upscale neighbourhood popular among visitors and expats with a noticeably prominent American presence, its quiet residential streets checkered with houses either whitewashed or brightly coloured, tree-lined avenues like Alvaro Obregon and Amsterdam bustling with restaurants and bars.

Back then the Americans were largely drawn to the now-defunct Mexico City College, where Burroughs enrolled under the pretext of studying Spanish, Mayan and Mesoamerican codices.

In fact, he was not studying much at all. Instead, he drank constantly, relapsed into the heroin habit he had been grappling with for a decade, and chased young sexual conquests with limited success through the queer bars along Campeche. Visits from fellow Beat Generation luminaires Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac did little to inspire his scholarship, as the trio had a propensity for hanging around the park at Plaza Luis Cabrera where they whiled away the days getting high on heroin or peyote. This resulted in Burroughs’ withdrawal from school.

The Beats writers hung out and took drugs at the Plaza Luis Cabrera in Mexico City [Nick Hilden/Al Jazeera]

Burroughs carried a pistol through it all (“I always carry a gun,” he wrote to Jack Kerouac in 1949, two years before killing Vollmer), and his letters described how he would often draw it amidst drunken bar fights only to have it taken away by the bartender or police. Sometimes it was returned, sometimes it wasn’t.

Vollmer, meanwhile, was not doing well.

She and Burroughs had struck up their relationship four years earlier in New York City, where Vollmer played a foundational role in the early Beat movement: Her apartment was the meeting place for its most illustrious participants, who sought to push artistic and cultural boundaries through the exploration of form, improvisation, drugs, and sexual liberation. Vollmer was known for her sharp intellect and rhetorical skill, and helped to hone the Beats’ conceptual framework via long nights of Benzedrine-fueled conversation and art critique. But while Joan and Bill were drawn to one another on a cerebral level, their union was troubled from the start by two factors: Burroughs was gay and they were both raging drug fiends.

As a result, their years together were painfully fraught. According to friend Hal Chase (who introduced Kerouac to Neal Cassady, the prototype for the protagonist in On the Road), “the struggle between Joan and Bill seemed to be life and death.” Jealous of Burroughs’ queer pursuits, Vollmer would mock him sharply while he escaped into heroin addiction. However, she was addicted to speed to the point where she “got way off the beam” and landed in a psychiatric ward. William was no stranger to hospital stays, including various rehab programmes, and once, in a fit of Van Goghian madness, cut off the tip of his little finger after his heart was broken by an 18-year-old hustler.

By the time Burroughs and Vollmer arrived in Mexico – on the lam from Burroughs’ drug and gun possession charges in New Orleans with children in tow – the couple had kicked drugs in favour of a relentless drinking habit. By all accounts (and the most investigative version comes via an essay by Burroughs’ longtime friend James Grauerholz titled “The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs”), their life in Mexico City was not a happy one. They wasted much of their time in the notorious boozing hub of Bounty Bar (today a laid-back family restaurant called Krika’s). The apartment above was where Burroughs would soon shoot Vollmer.

Monterrey 122, the apartment above the Bounty Bar where William Burroughs shot and killed Joan Vollmer [Nick Hilden/Al Jazeera]

Then Burroughs took up heroin again, leading to violent disputes where Vollmer would throw out the drugs, drawing violence from Bill. He later inserted a depiction of such a scene in his novel, Junkie. A few months into their time in Mexico and roughly a year before her death, Vollmer filed for divorce, though it was never finalised.

By the last days of her life, she seemed to be falling apart.

“She had an incurable blood disease,” wrote Hal Chase in a letter describing his encounter with Vollmer a few days before the shooting. “She had open running sores, and knew she was dying. She was thin-haired … had lost some of her hair. ‘I’m not going to make it,’ she said.”

On the day of the shooting, Burroughs had just returned from South America where he had been travelling with his lover, Lewis Marker. A string of hurricanes had lashed the region, and much of Roma was flooded with up to a metre (3ft) of water. A group of expats was gathered at the third-floor apartment of John Healy at Monterrey 122, above the Bounty Bar where Healy worked. One witness reported that Vollmer was very drunk on ginebre and limonada – gin and lemon soda – but that they did not see William drinking and he did not seem drunk. Then he extracted from his travel bag a Czech-made “Star” .380 pistol.

“Put that glass on your head, Joanie,” Burroughs suggested, according to poet Eddie Woods, who was present in the room. “Let me show the boys what a great shot old Bill is.”

“So she did,” said Woods, “And she said with a giggle – and she turned her head, she is balancing the glass on her head, and she said – ‘I can’t watch this, you know I can’t stand the sight of blood.’”

Burroughs took aim at the glass and fired. A hole appeared in Vollmer’s temple and she slumped over, and the glass went spinning across the carpet undamaged.

At first Burroughs thought she was joking, but then Marker said Vollmer was hit. Burroughs cried out and leaped to her side, trying to revive her. According to Marker, the others sat in silence, “staring and not believing”.

In the ensuing media circus, it was initially reported that Burroughs had fessed up to the William Tell act gone wrong at the time of his arrest. But then at the behest of his lawyer, Burroughs changed his story and said the gun had gone off in a drunken accident while he was showing it to a friend. The lawyer bribed everybody relevant, and Burroughs was released after 13 days.

Burroughs being questioned by police [reprint from Magazine de Policia (no longer in publication)]

The couple’s children – son William Jr (who would die of alcohol-induced cirrhosis at 33, outliving his mother by just five years) and Vollmer’s daughter from a previous marriage – were sent to live with relatives in the US while Burroughs stayed in Mexico to fight his case. But a year later, his lawyer shot and killed the son of a government official, prompting both lawyer and client to flee the country once and for all, escaping to the US before the former broke for Europe and the latter began searching South America for yage – better known today as ayahuasca. Burroughs was then convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.

Authorities buried Vollmer in a cemetery called Panteon Americano on the edge of town. In 1990, a posted notice called for her family to pay the long overdue fees associated with her internment, to no avail. So in 1993, Vollmer’s remains were exhumed and placed among the unmarked funerary nichos (display boxes) for the indigent. Burroughs ended up shelling out for a simple inscription: name, place and date of birth, place and date of death.

Vollmer’s is the only name on a wall of blank graves.

The final resting place of Joan Vollmer who was killed by her husband William Burroughs [Nick Hilden/Al Jazeera]

The appalling conclusion

At the time of the shooting, Burroughs was a nobody without a novel to his name. His claim to fame was not as a writer, but as a wife murderer.

Today, he is remembered as William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, the avant garde masterpiece deemed one of the top 100 English novels by Time. Since its publication in 1959, the book’s fierce experimentation and willingness to deal with the most lurid subject matter has inspired dozens of writers and artists. The famously unfilmable novel was adapted for the screen by acclaimed director David Cronenberg in 1991, and now Queer has received the same treatment.

But despite his literary brilliance, Burroughs was also a fragile “megalomaniac” (his word, used in a letter to Ginsberg) who carried a gun to make himself feel like a big shot and jacketed himself with junk to cover up his manic insecurities. His writing played no small part in popularising heroin within the counterculture, and he had a disturbing taste for sex with underage partners.

William S Burroughs pictured at the 10th International Paris Book Fair on March 23, 1990 [Michel Lipchitz/AP]

While there has been much debate as to whether one can delineate between his work and his deeds – the age-old matter of separating art from artist – Vollmer’s shooting and the writing were, for Burroughs at least, two sides of a coin.

“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death,” he famously wrote in the introduction to Queer. “The death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”

It wasn’t always Burroughs’ intention to fuse the death to his work. While recognisable elements of Vollmer’s and Burroughs’ life together appeared throughout drafts of Junky and Queer, he neglected to cover the shooting, and explained in a 1955 letter to Ginsberg: “I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it. I think I am afraid.” But in the same letter, Burroughs attached a chapter of then-in-progress Naked Lunch that was obviously based on the incident – William Tell act and all – immortalising the scene in his most noted novel.

Whether or not Burroughs killed Vollmer purposefully has been debated ever since, even by those who best knew them. There were those, like Hal Chase, who distanced themselves from Burroughs after the shooting, then later suggested intent. Others, like Ginsberg (who was not present for but was still haunted by Vollmer’s death for the rest of his life and wrote about it in the poem “A Dream Record”) claimed that in fact she agreed to the William Tell act out of her own “death wish” – such was the extent of her diminishing health and mental wellbeing.

“Why indeed?” It was a question Burroughs considered himself via his correspondence with Ginsberg, seeming to find no answers. “I am afraid to go too deep into this matter.”

Witness Eddie Woods was more certain on the issue, explaining in an interview years later, “He was out of it, in shock that this happened. Again, to me, that’s evidence it was absolutely an accident. He was shocked that he had hit her, and he was trying to wake her up. This guy was out of it.”

The killing was featured in several Mexican newspapers and scandal sheets [reprint from Magazine de Policia (no longer in publication)]

American tradition

Like many Americans, Burroughs’ gun fixation was prompted by a combined sense of obligation and paranoia. “I have not only the right but the duty to carry a gun and to protect my person against any attack that might deprive my family of support,” he wrote to Ginsberg in January 1951, 10 months before shooting his wife.

This irony is persistent, as today the vast majority of American gun owners arm themselves for purported personal protection, even though gun ownership vastly increases the risk of violent death for one’s self or partner. When women in America are murdered – which has been happening with increasing frequency since 2014 – the killer is almost always a domestic partner or someone they know, and the weapon is almost always a gun. In Mexico, thousands of femicides occur each year, impunity rates for violence against women are frighteningly high, and such crimes are on the rise in North America and around the world.

Burroughs maintained his gun habit until his death in 1997 at the age of 83, with many legends of his propensity for pulling heat shared right up to the end. He even worked firearms into his creative process with the “shotgun art” he blasted in his later years.

Joan Vollmer in an undated photo taken by Allen Ginsberg [Courtesy of the Ginsberg Estate]

The junk virus

If, like so many Americans today, William Burroughs possessed a toxic affinity for firearms, he – again like too many of his contemporary compatriots – also endured a painful struggle with addiction and was aware of its damage. He may have been one of the godfathers of dope, to some degree responsible for injecting heroin into popular culture, but he was not its advocate. Quite the opposite.

“Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus,” he wrote to Ginsberg in 1959. “Get off that junk wagon, boys.” At the time, he claimed he was done with opioids, but he was not. Never would be.

Opioid addiction has today reached endemic proportions in the US. In Burroughs’ day and on through the 1990s, heroin and its junk derivatives were primarily an underground scene with limited reach and effect. But since OxyContin mainstreamed opioids around the turn of the millennium, overdose deaths have skyrocketed to more than 80,000 per year.

“Junk is a bad deal, a nowhere route that never leads to anything but junk,” he wrote to Ginsberg in 1959. “If treated as a public health problem, [it] could be slowly eliminated with no penalizing of [people].” But that would never happen because “they don’t want anyone to kick.”

Burroughs was an outspoken critic of the American propensity for criminalisation and incarceration, with a particular vitriol for the targeting of what people were only just beginning to realise was a disease.

“Those bastards Stateside don’t want people to cure themselves,” he wrote. “They aim to incarcerate all undesirables, that is anyone who does not function as an interchangeable part in their anti-human Social Economic set up. Repressive bureaucracy is a vast conspiracy against Life.”

Inside Krika’s, which was once the Bounty Bar frequented by Burroughs. Vollmer was shot in the third-floor apartment above [Nick Hilden/Al Jazeera]

Art v the artist

Seventy-five years ago, William Burroughs sat at the crossroads of what are today among the US’s premier crises: opioids, guns and violence against women. As a consequence, Joan Vollmer was killed, and from her death – by Burrough’s own account – arose the perspective he drew from to create the fever dream chaos of his greatest work.

It’s a hard bargain to reconcile. Here is yet another male artist celebrated regardless of the wreckage of raked-over muses left in his wake. In the past, such issues tended to go overlooked, but that is no longer the case.

So can the art be separated from the artist? And is Burroughs’ work, widely appreciated for its hallucinatory prose and revolutionary form, tainted by its association with femicide and the rise of the junk virus?

It is easy to read Naked Lunch and enjoy losing oneself in its madness. But when one visits Panteon Americano and sees Joan Vollmer’s lone name amid dozens of unmarked stones – silent, no visitors, her husband too cheap or too cold to throw in a line of poetry (“How I miss Joan!” he wrote in one of his letters, but you see none of that feeling in her tomb inscription) – it becomes difficult to embrace the fiction over the reality.

There are no easy answers. Perhaps – to paraphrase Alan Ginsberg – it’s up to each of us to choose which darlings we kill and which we keep.

American writer William Burroughs smoking a cigarette and holding a walking stick about March 23, 1990 [Archive photo/AP]