[3 articles] 'Boiled': A long-lost Beatnik mystery bubbles up
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-11-10-boiled-beatnik_N.htm 11/10/2008 By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY In 1945, two unknown and unpublished writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs collaborated on a novel based on a real-life New York murder committed by a friend. Initially rejected by publishers, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove, $24) finally is being released today, many decades after Kerouac and Burroughs became founding fathers of the Beat Generation. "It's no long-lost masterpiece," says James Grauerholz, its editor and executor for Burroughs, who died in 1997. "But it should appeal to fans of the works and lives of both writers." By more than a decade, it predates the books that made its authors famous: Kerouac's On the Road in 1957 and Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959. Its back story may be more interesting than the novel itself, which features alternating chapters by Burroughs and Kerouac, who died in 1969. It was inspired by a sensational 1944 murder involving a friend of Kerouac and Burroughs: Lucien Carr, a promising 19-year-old freshman at Columbia University. It was Carr who introduced another Columbia freshman, the future poet Allen Ginsberg, to Kerouac, then 22. Carr also introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to Burroughs, who was 30. He, in turn, introduced them to the effects of injecting morphine. Carr had an older admirer, David Kammerer, a former teacher who fawned over him and made sexual advances. By some accounts, Carr didn't mind, at least for a while. But shortly before dawn on Aug. 14, 1944, Kammerer and Carr got into a drunken fight. As Carr later confessed, he stabbed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife and dumped his body into the Hudson River. He first admitted the crime to Kerouac and Burroughs, who were briefly held by police as material witnesses. After a headline-grabbing trial, Carr served two years in a reformatory. He died in 2005 after 47 years as an editor at United Press International. One of his three sons is novelist Caleb Carr (The Alienist). He remained friends with Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose own novel about the murder was abandoned after a dean at Columbia called it "smutty." Carr valued his privacy. When Ginsberg's breakthrough poem, Howl, was published in 1956, it was dedicated to Carr until he asked to have his name omitted in future editions. The existence of Hippos was known to Beat scholars and biographers. Kerouac rewrote parts of it in his 1967 memoir/novel Vanity of Dulouz. An excerpt appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader in 1999. But Grauerholz notes in his afterword to Hippos that after Burroughs became famous, he promised Carr the novel wouldn't be published until after Carr's death. It's only 184 pages and doesn't get to the murder until page 160. Its characters spend much time scrounging for money, drinks and drugs. It's very much a period piece. It uses the words "queer" and "fag" a lot. The Kerouac-like narrator says, "I like the Negroes, but maybe I'm prejudiced because I know so many of them." The title comes from a scene by Burroughs in which a radio newscaster, describing a circus fire, says, "And the hippos were boiled to death in their tanks." Burroughs adds, "He gave these details with the unctuous relish characteristic of radio announcers." The authors contended it was an actual newscast. But Grauerholz says it's more likely Burroughs' "improvisation" was triggered by a 1944 circus fire in Hartford, Conn., in which 165 people died, but there were no hippos to boil. -------- When a Real-Life Killing Sent Two Future Beats in Search of Their Voices http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/books/11kaku.html By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: November 10, 2008 The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire. The novel itself, a sort of murder mystery written in 1945 when the authors were unpublished and unknown, is a flimsy piece of work repetitious, flat-footed and quite devoid of any of the distinctive gifts each writer would go on to develop on his own. The two authors take turns telling their story in alternating chapters. Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war ("There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark"); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of "On the Road," none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work. Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs's famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of "Naked Lunch." In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress. The plot of "Hippos" stems from a much discussed real-life killing involving two men who were friends of both Burroughs and Kerouac. As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs's literary executor, explains in an afterword: "The enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1936, when Lucien was 11 and Dave was 25. Eight years, five states, four prep schools and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish." In the predawn hours of Aug. 14, 1944, in Riverside Park in Manhattan, Carr stabbed Kammerer with his Boy Scout knife, then rolled his body into the Hudson River. Burroughs and Kerouac were among the first people Carr confessed to; he later turned himself in and was charged with second degree murder. As described by Mr. Grauerholz, Carr's lawyers painted a picture of an older homosexual harassing a younger man, who had to "defend his honor" with violence. The Carr-Kammerer story fascinated the writers' circle, and several contemporaries, including Allen Ginsberg, would try their hand at telling the story. In "Hippos" Burroughs and Kerouac lay out a fictionalized account of the days and weeks leading up to the killing. Carr is called Phillip Tourian here, and Kammerer is Ramsay Allen. While Allen drones on and on to Dennison about Tourian, Tourian tells Ryko that he wants to escape from the suffocating Allen and suggests that he and Ryko ship out with the merchant marine. They make several efforts to get on a boat to France but are repeatedly thwarted for a variety of reasons, like not having the right stamp on their union cards or getting into an argument with another sailor. Meanwhile, all the characters spend a lot of time hanging out in bars and restaurants and friends' apartments, complaining about their lack of money and putting on artistic airs, as if they were a bunch of French existentialists. Tourian does stupid party tricks like taking a bite out of a cocktail glass, chewing it up and washing it down with some water. Allen tries to spy on the object of his affection while he is sleeping. Ryko fights and makes up with his girlfriend, Janie, who wants to get married. And Dennison shoots himself up with morphine. None of these one-dimensional slackers are remotely interesting as individuals, but together they give the reader a sense of the seedy, artsy world Kerouac and Burroughs inhabited in New York during the war years. And so these, really, are the only reasons to read this undistinguished book: for the period picture it provides of the city think of Billy Wilder's "Lost Weekend" crossed with Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" and for the semi-autobiographical glimpses it offers of the two writers before they found their voices and became bohemian brand names. -- AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS By Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs 214 pages. Grove Press. $24. -------- And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9af20146-ac59-11dd-bf71-000077b07658.html Review by Mark Ford November 10 2008 And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks By William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac Penguin Classics £20, 224 pages FT Bookshop price: £16 During his freshman year at Columbia University (1943-1944), Lucien Carr IV, scion of wealthy St Louis parents, introduced Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to each other. Carr had met Burroughs through Dave Kammerer, who had attended the same St Louis school as Burroughs. Kammerer was 14 years older than the dashing Carr and had long nurtured an obsessive, unrequited passion for him. In the early hours of August 14 1944, a drunken squabble between the two in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side ended in Carr stabbing Kammerer twice in the chest with a knife. Kammerer passed out; Carr bound his admirer's arms together with shoelaces, put rocks in his pockets and rolled his body into the Hudson River to drown. It's a story with which every Beat aficionado is familiar. The blood-stained murderer called first on Burroughs, who advised him to get a good lawyer, and then on Kerouac, with whom he spent the rest of the day, revolving Carr's options. That evening he confessed to his mother, and the following morning to the district attorney. On August 16 Kammerer's body was dragged from the Hudson River at West 79th Street. In the wake of Carr's sentence to a maximum of 10 years in a detention centre in Elmira (he served only two), Kerouac (then 22) and Burroughs (30) decided to collaborate on a fictional account of the tragic imbroglio. Burroughs assumed the persona of Will Dennison, a bartender who works on the side for a detective agency, and Kerouac that of Mike Ryko, a merchant marine drifting and drinking while waiting to ship out. The novel was composed in alternating chapters at great speed, typed up by Kerouac, and dispatched to New York publishers in March 1945. None were interested, and Carr, eager on his release to put the past behind him, did all he could to prevent his Beat friends publicising his crime he ended up as a successful journalist and family man. Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, includes a version of the story, as does his last, Vanity of Duluoz. But Hippos its title was supposedly taken from a radio news item about a fire in a zoo had to wait until the death of Carr three years ago to be published. Penguin Classics has made a beautiful book of it but the novel itself is unlikely to achieve classic status. Both fledgling authors labour heavily under the influence of Hemingway; their elliptical, hard-boiled descriptions of the gang's drinking, scrounging, quarrelling and drug-taking don't really amount to much. Only the obsession of Ramsay Allen for the gorgeous Phillip Tourian ("the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to") interrupts the general aimlessness of their lives. The best passages are those by Kerouac who relates Ryko's and Tourian's visits to the National Maritime Union Hall in quest of work. Their plan to jump ship in France and work their way to Paris doesn't come off but they go to lots of French movies, and the book is perhaps best read as an uncertain homage to existentialism. In the mid-1940s New York was on the threshold of becoming the artistic capital of the western world but here its would-be bohemians seem pale shadows of enfants terribles such as Rimbaud and Verlaine, to whom they refer reverently. In this Hippos resembles Saul Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man (1944), with its similar existential concerns: both reveal what this generation of American novelists had to reject to achieve their breakthrough visions of America in classic novels of the 1950s such as The Adventures of Augie March, Naked Lunch and On the Road. -- Mark Ford is professor of English at University College London . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
