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The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico

Jorge García-Robles, a Mexican professor of literature and novelist, visited William Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas in the summer of 1990, and decided to write an account of Burroughs’s experience in Mexico City from 1949–52. His book was published as La bala perdida by Ediciones del Milenio in 1995, and it has now been translated by Daniel Schechter. Burroughs and his common-law companion, Joan Vollmer-Adams, had each become heroin addicts in New York. Paranoid, they moved south to New Waverley, Texas, then to Algiers, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, and finally to Mexico City with the intention of buying land to grow opium. Their journey was a tortured, twisting path of drugs, police raids, and court processes causing difficulties along the way. My problem with García-Robles’s attempt to retell these events is that he views them with a highly impressionistic lens, offering suppositions and recreations based on the mistaken projections of predecessors like Ted Morgan or Barry Miles, presented with staccato over-simplification and sketchy summary grounded less in a genuine historical methodology than the desire to spin a sensational story. The result is a blurred, novelistic view that leads to frequent errors of fact in a romantic style which allows García-Robles, at one point, to refer to Burroughs as His Highness, to Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” as “demonic,” and to Kerouac’s sidekick Neal Cassady as Dionysus. García-Robles employs short phrases that are usually presented with insufficient dimension as when he claims that Kerouac “had never been Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 91, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2015, 271–272