Biography paints dark portrait of influential writer William S. Burroughs

"Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois,” said Gustave Flaubert, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Many writers have heeded the French novelist’s counsel that an unadventurous life can bear artistic fruit.

But, as depicted in a new biography, William S. Burroughs, a prime figure of the beat generation, wasn’t one of them.

Burroughs, who lived from 1914 to 1997 and is considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century, not only ignored Flaubert’s advice but set out to defy it. In the new biography Call Me Burroughs, author Barry Miles spends hundreds of pages documenting how the acclaimed author of Naked Lunch and Junky flouted accepted behavior.

A son of the Midwest, Burroughs behaved in a fashion that rarely jelled with that of his socially elite St. Louis family, which made a fortune from the invention of an adding machine.

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Even among his fellow beats, the particulars of Burroughs’ life are shocking.

While in Mexico in 1951, he proposed that his second wife, Joan Vollmer, set a glass atop her head. Burroughs assumed the role of William Tell and fired a gun, missing the glass and striking and killing her.

Evading significant punishment, Burroughs later perversely implied that some good came of the incident.

“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing,” he wrote in 1985.

Burroughs’ friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, even obliquely blamed the victim: “I always thought that she had kind of challenged him into it.”

To his credit, Burroughs disagreed.

The death of his wife isn’t the only disturbing event in a biography that is almost encyclopedic in its documentation of its subject’s flaws.

Burroughs and Vollmer’s only child, William S. Burroughs Jr., died at age 33 of cirrhosis. “His drinking and drug taking,” Miles writes, “were all pathetic attempts to be cool, to show Bill that he was continuing the bohemian tradition.”

When the elder Burroughs’ parents threatened to cut off his allowance, he was faced with “the awful possibility, at 40 years of age, of having to find a job.”

“The only thing he could think of was dealing heroin with his old friend ‘Ritchie,’?” Miles adds.

He also claims that everything Burroughs wrote after his return from Europe to the United States in 1974 was done under the influence of opiates.

For readers more bewildered than bewitched by Burroughs’ literary style, such revelations offer some

explanation.

In his later days, Burroughs lived in Lawrence, Kan. — a far less exotic locale than Tangier or Paris, where he had spent much of the 1950s and early ’60s.

He enjoyed renewed currency thanks to an acting role in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, as well as appearances in a Nike TV commercial and a U2 promotional video in the mid-’90s.

But troublesome habits remained.

“He always carried a handgun in a holster in his belt,” Miles writes. And vodka “steadied his hand.”

Although Miles clearly appreciates Burroughs’ contributions to contemporary literature, his book succeeds less as a tour of an innovative mind than as a definitive but depressing account of a misspent life.