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Ted Morgan's book "Literary Outlaw" is ostensibly
a biography of William Burroughs, but Burroughs being
the elder of the Beat circle, it actually seems
like a good history of the entire scene.

He's got a little on Joan Vollmer, largely
from Edie Parker interviews (or so I gather):

   Edie reflected; she [Joan Vollmer] spoke,
   walked, dressed and read slowly, as if savoring
   every moment.  She read everything, every
   newspaper and magazine.  In _The New Yorker_,
   she liked the cartoons of William Steig,
   particularly the one of the dejected fellow
   saying, "My mother loved me but she died."

   Edie thought Joan was the most intelligent girl
   she had ever met.  She had an independent mind,
   always questioning what anyone said, including
   her teachers at Barnard.  In one of her marginal
   notes in her copy of Marx's _Capital and Other         Or perhaps
   Writings_, there are echoes of Burroughs'              echoes of
   thinking: "Maybe Marxism is dynamic and                Vollmer in
   optimistic, and Freudianism is not.  Is one more       Burroughs?
   serviceable than the other? Why does it always
   have to be either/or?"



   Joan's idea of a good time was to go to Child's
   at 110th Street and Broadway and sip _kummel_
   and have deep conversations about Plato and Kant
   while listening to classical music.  Or she
   would spend the entire morning in the bathtub,
   with bubble-bath up to her chin, reading
   Proust.  If you wanted to talk to her you had to
   do it in the bathroom.

   ... She also helped him with his term papers,
   writing one for his course on Dryden and the
   eighteenth century in the manner of a Dryden
   poem, which the professor Joseph Wood Krutch,
   liked well enough to give him an "A."  His
   papers were in fact so brilliant that Kingsland
   worried that his teachers would get suspicious.

                           p 93-94




   Burroughs saw Joan as a woman of unusual insight.
   She was the smartest member of the group, he thought,
   certainly as smart as Allen, in many ways smarter,
   because there were limits to Allen's thinking, but
   none to Joan's.  She started Burroughs thinking in
   new directions, got him interested in the Mayans,
   suggested that Mayan priests must have had some sort
   of telepathic control.  She had an odd and original
   way of looking at things, and a great insight into
   character.  For instance she said about Jack that he
   had a natural inborn fear of authority and that if
   the cops ever questioned him his mouth would fall
   open and out would come the name they wanted.

                         p 123



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