OH: The starting point for me with your new book, as for many others probably, is the extraordinary discovery you previously posted online concerning Burroughs’ third, Mexican wife. But what most impressed me about your book was what you revealed about the process, about the detective work involved in such research, and what you revealed about its impact on yourself. You describe the moment when you received the scan of the marriage document from Mexico: “I stared at the screen for a few minutes with my mouth open in disbelief, trying to organize my thoughts.” Can you say why you chose to narrate your research in this way, often as if reporting live from the front line?
TA: There were several reasons for that. To begin with, I had originally intended to write nothing more than a short book about Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, to whom William Burroughs was married from 1937 to 1946. Normally, when one sets out to write a biography, the subject is a public figure. It might be an artist, a politician, an athlete, a film star, or a serial killer. But in most cases, it’s someone whose life can be reconstructed with relative ease because enough documentation exists.
Passport photograph and signature of Ilse Burroughs, 1976
With Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, that simply wasn’t the case. Although she did occasionally emerge as an author in the 1920s and 30s, publishing her first poems when Burroughs himself was only six years old, and although she moved within circles that included major figures of the Weimar Republic’s left-wing intelligentsia, among them Ernst Bloch, Klaus Mann, Ernst Toller, Richard Huelsenbeck and many Dada artists, Ilse Burroughs ultimately chose a life of seclusion. After fleeing the Nazis and enduring further tragedies associated with the war, she left behind almost nothing apart from a small number of letters. She had worked for Toller in New York, witnessed his suicide, and only months later her sister took her own life to avoid deportation to a concentration camp. Traumatic experiences like these inevitably shaped the rest of her life.Despite extensive research, I kept running into chronological gaps that spanned several years at a time. Under those conditions, a conventional biography wasn’t really possible. It seemed more appropriate, and frankly more honest, to present the research process itself: the routes I followed, the steps I took to obtain certain pieces of information, and the trails that led nowhere. Giving readers a report of my investigation in this style, I believe, makes it better comprehensible why certain parts in the biographies of my subjects are missing.
The second reason was that many of those apparent dead ends, along with a number of highly peculiar coincidences, led to genuinely surprising discoveries. I found it far more compelling to describe the sequence of steps by which, for example, I discovered William Burroughs’ appearing as a character in a 1937 novel by the German writer Herbert Schlüter, almost certainly the earliest appearance of Burroughs in literary history, rather than merely stating the fact of Schlüter’s fictionalization.
Herbert Schlüter and William S. Burroughs in Dubrovnik, 1937; Herbert Schlüter Papers, “Monacensia” City Library of Munich
Burroughs met Schlüter through Ilse Herzfeld in Dubrovnik, where both were living in exile. Schlüter was a friend of Ilse’s sister, the philosopher Franziska Herzfeld, Burroughs’ sister-in-law, and closely associated with Klaus Mann. Short before he married Herzfeld, Burroughs invited Schlüter on a four-week journey through the southern Balkans, which he financed entirely. They were not simply travelling companions. Viewed in retrospect, the episode almost reads like an early precursor to the later journey with Lewis Marker through Central and South America fictionalized in Queer, something to which the title of my book also alludes.
Herbert Schlüter with his sister Charlotte at Hotel Wregg, Dubrovnik, November 1936; Herbert Schlüter Papers, “Monacensia” City Library of Munich
Another example illustrates the same dynamic. While searching for an official divorce certificate for Ilse Herzfeld and Burroughs, I followed Ted Morgan’s claim in Literary Outlaw, where he states that Burroughs used a short stay in Mexico with his friend Kells Elvins in the summer of 1946 to get a “Mexican divorce” from Ilse Klapper Burroughs. I never found that assertion convincing, and eventually I located the actual divorce certificate in St. Louis. Still, I wanted to understand how Morgan came to make such an assertion. In the course of searching Mexican archives, I unexpectedly came upon the marriage certificate of Burroughs and María Lucrecia Barquera, a woman I had never previously encountered despite years of engagement with Burroughs’ work, repeated readings of his texts, and familiarity with the biographies, letters, and interviews. This is why, after receiving the scan, I stared at the screen in disbelief. And it’s still hard to believe that Burroughs seemed to have told no one about this, not even James Grauerholz, who admitted that he had never heard of this marriage.
Last but not least, for me the most compelling aspect of my work as a literary historian is the investigative side of it: working in archives, tracking down witnesses who can still provide insight and previously unknown information, and uncovering new connections through documents that haven’t been seen before. That kind of work often requires unorthodox methods and doesn’t always resemble what people typically imagine as “scholarly research.” It’s not by chance that I quote the musicologist Phil Ford in the introduction, who said: “Research, in fact, often is nonlinear and quite irrational. […] Any researcher worth his or her salt will tell you that serendipity is a huge asset to a researcher. With scholarly research, it is better to be lucky than to be smart.”
With this book, I wanted to share that sense of investigation as an adventure and to make clear what’s so absorbing about it. Ideally, it might encourage interested readers to undertake similar projects themselves. Students, perhaps, might even read it as something like a practical guide to literary-historical or biographical field research.
OH: That’s such a great way to look at your work, as kind of guide-book, a How-To… And a How-Not-To—because, early on in your book, you add a postscript apology, where you explain why you’ve had to pick holes in the standard accounts given by biographers and scholars. I think this is not just necessary but very helpful, because I see your book as part of a relatively recent trend—similar to my own One Shot: A Beat Generation Mystery (2024) and David Wills’ A Remarkable Collection of Angels: A History of the 6 Gallery Reading (2025)—of looking under the bonnet, unpacking what has almost always been invisible; namely the material evidence on which the official version of events is based. So, you’re doing two things simultaneously: establishing new, better evidence and showing the process of research itself. What I really admired about your book was how you show the interaction of the two so that your meticulous research isn’t presented as objective truth, end of story. You can expose where previous accounts got it wrong, but that doesn’t always enable you to get it right. At one point, for example, you write: “That being said, it’s also possible to imagine a completely different story…” Were you always conscious of this outcome or did you start by assuming you could nail facts down once and for all?
TA: As I mentioned, I originally only wanted to write a book about Ilse Herzfeld — someone who, in the major Burroughs biographies, is granted barely half a page, and in other texts about the writer maybe a sentence or two, if she’s mentioned at all. My goal wasn’t to expose biographical errors, but simply to discover as much new material as possible. What gradually became a problem, though, was my initial assumption that one could rely on the accuracy of claims made in biographies and academic works. The sparse information about Ilse Herzfeld Klapper in the Burroughs biographies naturally became the starting point for my own research. You describe it very precisely in One Shot: “In the case of books published by reputable presses authored by respected experts in the field, it’s natural to defer to their knowledge and expect their facts to be right.” In reality, however, if you want to quote anything responsibly, you end up having to fact-check virtually every single assertion made by Burroughs biographers and Beat historians. Otherwise, you risk simply reproducing their mistakes. And sometimes the errors are so obvious that it’s genuinely puzzling to see them repeated elsewhere.
Ilse Herzfeld with her first husband Heinrich Klapper in Dubrovnik, April 1930; Friedrich Walter Papers, German Exil Archive 1933—1945, Frankfurt
One example illustrates this rather well. In Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan claims that Ilse Herzfeld Klapper left Germany with her then-husband and emigrated to Dubrovnik when the Nazis banned the music of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in 1934. That statement immediately raises doubts. Mendelssohn’s music was never officially banned; rather, Nazi-controlled concert institutions began excluding works by Jewish composers as early as 1933. And beyond that, one naturally wonders why an alleged ban of Mendelssohn in 1934 would suddenly prompt emigration, when by 1933 books were already being burned, Jewish and Marxist intellectuals imprisoned, and citizenships revoked. What makes this particularly revealing is how quickly the narrative begins to unravel once one looks at documents. While examining Ernst Toller’s papers—because Herzfeld later worked as Toller’s secretary in New York—I came across a letter signed by her in Dubrovnik dated August 1933. So she was already there. Later, I discovered a letter from Ilse’s sister to film critic Siegfried Kracauer in which she recounts how Ilse’s husband Heinrich Klapper fled Berlin three days before Hitler’s seizure of power in order to join his wife in Dubrovnik. That pushes the timeline back even further.
Franziska also published satirical essays, which opened yet another path. When I tracked those texts down, I found a 1929 article in which she casually mentions that her sister was living in Dalmatia. At that point, the whole 1934-emigration story had effectively collapsed. And finally, years later, official records in a German state archive confirmed what the scattered evidence had already suggested: Ilse Herzfeld had been living in Dubrovnik since 1925.
Which leads to the obvious question: how did Ted Morgan arrive at the claim that Ilse emigrated in 1934 because of a supposed Mendelssohn ban? Did he invent it? Or did Burroughs tell him—whose “unusually retentive memory” Morgan explicitly praises? What’s striking is that the same claim then surfaces in other Burroughs biographies, often without even citing Morgan as the source. For a researcher, that situation is enormously frustrating. Because thanks to these “respected experts in the field,” one can spend an immense amount of time pursuing traces of Ilse Herzfeld in Berlin between 1925 and 1934, only to discover—after considerable effort—that she wasn’t there at all.
Morgan, incidentally, never tells us that during an interview Burroughs said to him directly: “If you ask me more questions, I tell you more lies.” Nor was Burroughs’ memory anywhere near as phenomenal as Morgan suggests. He even managed, for example, to engrave the wrong birthplace on the gravestone of his wife Joan Vollmer: Loudonville, which is where she moved to when she was four years old, and not Ossining, where she was actually born. The absence of an exact birth date—not even a month—especially when compared with her date of death, where at least the month is given, strongly suggests that he had also forgotten her birthday. In another interview, he claimed that she had been older than Kerouac, although Kerouac was in fact exactly one year younger. Perhaps precision simply wasn’t a priority for him in interviews. But a gravestone for his wife is another matter entirely.
Of course, one cannot reasonably expect Burroughs himself to present everything accurately. That would hardly align with his character—with the author who described his texts as being 100% autobiographical and 100% fictional at the same time, who dismantled linear narrative through Cut-Ups. But his biographers might have been expected to exercise greater caution, rather than presenting his statements uncritically as fact. Because Ted Morgan did precisely that, and because many who followed him drew heavily on his book—sometimes with citation, sometimes without—most accounts of Burroughs’ life today are about as reliable as the weather forecast.
But to return to your question: Given the dispersal of documents, the fact that the events I describe lie seventy, eighty, ninety, in some cases more than a hundred years in the past, and given my experience with other biographical projects—Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37, a 700-page biography of the Austrian playwright Wolfgang Bauer, and my biography in progress on ruth weiss—I’m fully aware that I cannot definitively “fix” the facts either. Chance discoveries make this especially clear. Had a staff member at the Berlin State Archives not, entirely unprompted, searched an internal database for me whose existence I didn’t even know about, and discovered that a 400-page Nazi file on Ilse Herzfeld was held in the state archive of another German federal region, I would never have learned that she had relocated from Berlin to Dubrovnik as early as 1925.
By structuring the book around the investigation itself, however, I can at least make transparent why I consider one version more plausible than another, particularly by documenting my sources as precisely as possible. That, I believe, is something one owes one’s readers. Authors and researchers carry a certain responsibility—especially in what is now widely described as an age of disinformation, where lies and manipulation shape elections, and where internet search engines, social media platforms, and blogs increasingly circulate what is essentially AI-generated garbage presented as truth. And this is why, for my work, honesty and precision are foundational principles. I find it fundamentally wrong to conceal gaps in knowledge by constructing myths. One sees this tendency quite clearly in recent portrayals of Joan Vollmer, whom some attempt to elevate into a kind of saint. Her actual fate—that of a suburban young woman from a conservative background seeking escape into a bohemian urban life, only to succumb to drug addiction and a destructive relationship with a drug-addicted husband—is tragic enough. There is little need to reinvent her as an unrealized literary figure whose career Burroughs supposedly obstructed, based solely on a rather unremarkable 200-word essay published at sixteen in a High School magazine. Nor as a painter, simply because she once attempted an oil painting after the birth of her daughter, only to abandon it upon realizing it did not suit her.
Regrettably, Beat historiography has not, on the whole, improved since Ted Morgan. As you yourself put it in One Shot: “Any fool with a smartphone nowadays thinks they can do research in four clicks, and scholars are not immune to the temptations of internet surfers to take shortcuts.”
OH: Yes, we’re all fools with smartphones these days—I include myself in that! In my own work I’ve explicitly used—perhaps overused—the phrase “the devil is in the detail” in order to drive my research further. One more thing I admire about your book is that you share with the reader your experience of being drawn down the rabbit holes of research, so that one source leads you to another and another, and you’re left both exhilarated and exhausted by it. Among your many discoveries, my favourite was the connection between Burroughs’ first wife, Ilse, and Anita Berber. Can you say a little about that, and about your own favourite discovery?
TA: After I discovered that Ilse Herzfeld’s first husband, Dr. Heinrich Klapper, had been something of a celebrity physician within the Berlin artistic milieu of the Weimar Republic, my research into him began to yield a series of rather unexpected findings. Klapper repeatedly appears in literary texts and memoirs by writers and artists, often only briefly but always intriguingly. Already during the First World War, he issued medical certificates for several Dadaists, enabling them to avoid military conscription. “Super-Dada” Richard Huelsenbeck (a.k.a. Charles R. Hulbeck), one of his closest friends, was able to leave Germany for Zurich in 1916, where he went on to found the Dada movement together with Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings at the Cabaret Voltaire, because Klapper had declared him mentally unfit. Huelsenbeck’s poetic lines such as “A horse makes itself comfortable in a bird’s nest…” apparently sufficed as evidence.
What is striking is that, despite numerous such references, no one has seriously attempted to reconstruct Klapper’s biography, not even in the German-speaking world. Klapper was trained as a psychiatrist, but his primary specialization was gynecology. He was a vehement advocate of women’s rights and a radical proponent of free love. It is therefore hardly surprising that he also surfaces in accounts of Anita Berber, arguably the most famous dancer in early twentieth-century Germany, whose career was marked by relentless scandal. Berber’s biographer names a certain Joachim Klapper as her witness at marriage. Suspecting that this biographer might prove even less reliable than Ted Morgan, I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that Heinrich Klapper had been meant. Returning once more to the Berlin State Archive, I located the marriage certificate of Anita Berber and the American dancer Henri Châtin-Hofmann. And indeed, not only was Heinrich Klapper listed as a witness in 1924, but also Ilse Herzfeld, who is not mentioned at all in Berber’s biography.
Anita Berber in 1923, digitized facsimile from the book “Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase“ by Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste, published by Gloriette Verlag (Vienna) in 1923.
This discovery naturally raised hopes that Berber might provide further traces of Ilse Herzfeld. Additional reading soon led me to Leo Lania’s biographical novel Dance Into the Dark (1929), where one encounters not only a “Dr. K.” but also, quite transparently, his companion “Elsie,” who eventually enters into a lesbian relationship with Berber. Although the novel adheres closely to many known facts of Berber’s life, much like Junky or On the Road draw on lived experience, it remains a novel. One must resist the temptation to treat its episodes as documentary truth. Yet certain elements strongly suggest plausibility. Ilse Herzfeld’s marriage to Heinrich Klapper may also have functioned, at least in part, as mutual cover, allowing her homosexual and his promiscuous inclinations greater freedom. There is even reason to suspect that Burroughs himself became part of a broader “marriage plot.” After securing U.S. citizenship through her marriage, Ilse Burroughs appears to have considered remarrying her former husband in order to facilitate his emigration to the United States. These plans, however, were ultimately undone by the war and Klapper’s premature death from typhoid fever in 1944, while fighting as a partisan against the Nazis in Yugoslavia.
Ilse Herzfeld in New York 1939, digitized facsimile from a Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper clip
Beyond the discoveries of María Lucrecia Barquera and Burroughs’ appearance as a fictional character in Schlüter’s 1937 novel, other curious intersections emerged. One of Klapper’s close friends was the painter George Grosz, who emigrated to New York in 1933. That Edie Parker and Lucien Carr later met, of all places, in one of Grosz’ drawing classes in 1943 is, at the very least, a remarkable coincidence—even though Burroughs’ biographers routinely claim Grosz taught at Columbia, which is demonstrably incorrect. In any case, these circumstances indirectly contributed to Joan Vollmer’s eventual encounter with Burroughs.
Or consider another chain of associations. Ilse Herzfeld, via Heinrich Klapper, was acquainted with Tristan Tzara, one of the most significant precursors of Cut-Up. And in 1941, while working as secretary for John Latouche, she met Latouche’s friend Brion Gysin, long before Gysin and Burroughs became close collaborators in the 1950s. I mean, what are the odds?
OH: The odds are—well, let’s say, they’re suitably Burroughsian odds… Now, if I have a criticism of your book, or more precisely a frustration with it, it would be that while you bring alive quite brilliantly the backstories to the background of Burroughs’ personal life from the 1930s to the 1950s, you don’t bring to light many connections to his writing. Did you imagine you might, as you did in your book Amongst Nazis—which documented Burroughs’ time in Vienna and drew some really significant connections to, most obviously, the origins of his Germanic doctors—or was that never the horizon of your research?
TA: Ilse Herzfeld, and even Joan Vollmer, occupy only a marginal space in the Burroughs biographies, and it was a deliberate decision to reverse that perspective. Vollmer is, in a sense, present between 1945 and 1951, yet the biographers tend to focus instead on the beginnings of Burroughs’ life as a drug addict and his early attempts at writing Junky. Ilse Herzfeld, as I’ve already mentioned, is scarcely granted more than a footnote, which strikes me as wholly disproportionate. It is, of course, true that Burroughs and Herzfeld entered into a marriage of convenience, mainly to enable her to emigrate to the United States. But what remains almost entirely absent from the biographies is the fact that they maintained a genuine friendship. Herzfeld even accompanied Burroughs to the hospital after he amputated the outer joint of his little finger in 1940, an act prompted by romantic despair, because Jack Anderson, the object of his desire at the time, did not reciprocate his love. They continued to meet regularly in New York as long as Burroughs lived there. As late as 1956, Burroughs asked Ginsberg in a letter from Tangier whether he knew Ilse’s current address. This strongly suggests not only that Burroughs remained in contact with her and only lost touch after leaving Mexico in 1953 and after Ilse moved to a different apartment, but also that Ginsberg himself was acquainted with her, something that, to my knowledge, has never been properly acknowledged.
Returning to the main point, my intention was to write a book about the women in Burroughs’ life. I therefore made the conscious choice that Burroughs himself would appear primarily as the marginal figure or supporting character, mirroring the biographies on him. Only in the case of María Lucrecia Barquera did this approach necessarily shift, since so little material concerning her could be located. This compelled me to search Burroughs’ own writings for traces of her, where I did indeed uncover a few small but telling indications.
Joan Vollmer, photographed by Allen Ginsberg, most likely winter 1945/46 (according to Oliver Harris), courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
With regard to Joan Vollmer in Burroughs’ writings, substantial scholarly work had already been undertaken. For instance, in her book Beat Feminisms, Polina Mackay has demonstrated how Vollmer’s life and fate are reflected not only in Burroughs’ writing, but also in the works of Ginsberg and Kerouac. And I don’t need to remind you of your own book The Secret of Fascination in which you discuss the influence Joan Vollmer and her death had on Junkie and Queer. Any attempt on my part to engage in something similar would have risked simple repetition, which seemed unnecessary.
Finally, while Burroughs’ work does contain certain references to the Weimar Republic, these remain comparatively diffuse and—apart from a clear reference to Klapper in The Western Lands—the connections are suggestive rather than demonstrable. It could be possible that these Weimar Republic references are connected to Ilse Herzfeld, but unlike Dr. Benway, whose origins are readily traceable to Burroughs’ medical studies in Vienna, it was way too speculative to claim that, for instance, any character in the Burroughs universe is based on Herzfeld or friends of hers that Burroughs met while being in Europe in 1936 and 1937.
OH: Thanks, Thomas—having been privileged to get a sneak preview, I know a lot of people are going to really enjoy your new book…
Published 30 May 2026, by Benjamin J. Heal