When William Burroughs died earlier this week at the age of 83, the question many people asked was not why he died, but why he lived so long.
Burroughs, born in St Louis in 1914, was a non-conformist who said 'yes' to drugs, and was known for a reckless, dangerous anarchism that was as much a part of his life as of his writing.
Perhaps his most publicised, and certainly his most tragic, stunt, was his fatal attempt to re-enact the legend of William Tell at a party above a bar in Mexico City in 1951. The writer, drunk, pulled out a gun and a glass. Placing the latter on the head of his wife, Joan, he asked fellow partiers to imagine it was an apple, and fired. He missed the glass and killed Joan.
The Mexican police did not press charges. It was rumoured money was paid.
Four decades on, with the collaboration of director Robert Wilson and singer-composer Tom Waits, Burroughs wrote a musical.
It was based partly on Weber's Der Freischutz ('the free shooter') about a man who made a pact with the devil to become the marksman his girlfriend dreamed of. But it was based mainly on his own experience above that Mexican bar.
