After William Burroughs killed his wife Joan Vollmer, he threw away all her possessions. Their son, Bill Jr., never saw a photograph of her. When Bill Jr. was 32, he begged his father to send him a photo but he didn’t.
Now she is only remembered as a footnote to William Burroughs’ mythology. On the internet, and in all the libraries I scoured, no one has tried to correct the narrative of her erasure.
Last year, I tried. After lack of interest from many other outlets, my pitch to write about her was accepted by a reputable literary magazine. But several scholars questioned the purpose of my project and my editor tried to get me to dramatize Joan’s promiscuity, while cutting out sections on her childhood and her dreams.
One of the scholars who responded to my second request was Nancy M. Grace. I was thrilled. Nancy was one of the first, and remains one of the only, scholars to acknowledge that Beat history existed outside the trio of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg; that women were writing and working alongside them, but had been dismissed as second-class, if acknowledged at all.
Over the phone, Nancy was kind and generous with her time. She agreed that Joan wasn’t just a “muse” and that the common narrative surrounding her death—and the way it is used to bolster William’s outlaw persona—undermines the seriousness of the act and contributes to our culture’s permissiveness toward violence against women.
It’s true that Joan is only famous because of her relation to the Beat men. William Burroughs directed this narrative—through killing Joan, he ensured she wouldn’t live to create a body of work.
William’s literary executor James Grauerholz wrote a 70-page document about Joan’s death in which he deconstructed the events surrounding her murder. He writes about what kind of gun William may have used, how many people were in the room, and how long William spent in jail (only two weeks). He puts William “on trial” and asks the readers to act as “judge and jury.” He turns her death into a spectacle, a murder-mystery. It’s the longest piece of writing on Joan, by far, but it obscures Joan the woman almost completely.
Still, I reached out to Grauerholz for information, figuring if anyone knew more, he would. Plus, he seemed sympathetic to her situation; in his paper he mentioned being responsible for getting William to write an inscription for the unmarked cemetery niche where Joan’s remains were stored. This was after her bones had been dug up from their original grave—due to William and her family not paying the plot fees.
Source: On the Disappearing of Joan Vollmer Burroughs ‹ Literary Hub
I never knew about the woman-hating of Burroughs and his mates Kerouac etc. In those times feminist opinions hardly existed and there certainly was no public knowledge about the real truth of Burroughs’s wife death. It just shows how entirely male-governed the media were and the poverty of women’s understanding and knowledge about these guys real lives and ideas! We have come a long way since that male-centred period!