FICTION: And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their TanksBy William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Edited and with an introduction by James Grauedholz Penguin, 214pp, £20 - AT THE TIME OF his death, in 2005, the man his colleagues knew as "Lou Carr" was a hard-boiled newspaperman who had spent more than half a century working the news desk at United Press International.
Few would have associated his name with that of Lucien Carr, the man to whom Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems had been dedicated when it was published in 1955, and who appeared, under various aliases, as a central character in several of the novels of Jack Kerouac.
Carr had in fact been so anxious to disavow his past that at his insistence the dedication was removed from subsequent editions of Howl. And when it became apparent that And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a 1945 collaboration between Kerouac and William Burroughs, might at last see the light of day, Lucien Carr extracted a promise from James Grauerholz, Burroughs's literary executor and the book's editor, that Hippos would not be published until its central character was safely below ground.
In 1944, Carr and Ginsberg were classmates at Columbia University, members of an inner circle that would eventually form the core of what would be known as the Beat Generation. Kerouac, a former football player at the Ivy League school, was also a charter member of the group, as were Burroughs, the erudite 30-year-old heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company fortune, and David Kammerer, a boyhood friend of Burroughs who had developed a bizarre fixation on the prepubescent Carr, and had been essentially stalking him for half a dozen years.
Carr appears to have been deeply conflicted by the relationship in that he was both flattered by the older man's attention and repulsed by any notion of a physical relationship. As Burroughs, in his voice as "Will Dennison", the co-narrator of Hippos, ominously notes early on in the book, "when they get together, something happens".
And on August 14th, 1944, something did. In what started out as a bit of horseplay at Riverside Park near 79th Street, Carr stabbed Kammerer twice in the chest with a pocket knife. Believing the older man to be dead, he tied his arms together with shoelaces, weighted down the body, and rolled him down a hill into the Hudson River, where, an autopsy later revealed, he drowned.
An agonizing 24 hours, during which Carr must have felt like Raskolnikov, elapsed before he turned himself in to the constabulary. Since he had in the interim confessed the crime to both Kerouac and Burroughs, both men were subsequently charged as accessories after the fact, even though the latter had actually advised Carr to surrender. Kerouac was briefly jailed and held as a material witness. Burroughs, accompanied by a lawyer retained by his family, was released following a desk appearance.
The salacious details, presented in the trappings of sex and violence, in the staid Ivy League milieu kept the story of the "Columbia murder" on the front pages of the New York tabloids for days and even weeks. When it eventually came to trial, Burroughs's suggestion that he characterise himself as the victim of a sexual predator and throw himself on the mercy of the court was essentially the defence Carr adopted.
Before the autumn semester was out, Allen Ginsberg had attempted to write a fictional version of the Carr-Kammerer tale called Bloodsong for his creative writing class. When word got back to the Columbia administration, Ginsberg was threatened with expulsion lest he further bring the university into disrepute with what a dean described as his "smutty" novel, and dutifully abandoned the project. Shortly thereafter Burroughs and Kerouac commenced work on the book that would become And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. (The title reflected Burroughs's bemused reaction to a radio report of a circus fire.) The two, writing in the first person as "Will Dennison" (Burroughs) and "Mike Ryko" (Kerouac) alternated chapters. Although the intent had been to pattern the narrative after the detective stories in vogue at the time, the voices are more redolent of Burroughs and Kerouac (albeit at an unpolished stage of the aspiring writers' careers) than they are of Mickey Spillane.
Kerouac's share includes jazz-like flights that foreshadow the writer he would eventually become. There is even a passage, about a drunken night in Boston's Scollay Square, that would turn up, in a somewhat embellished version, in On The Road, a dozen years later.
When Hippos made the rounds of New York publishing houses in the mid-to-late 1940s its authors were listed as "William Lee" and "John Kerouac", the same names that would appear on their first published works, Kerouac's conventional "novel novel", The Town and The City (1950) and Burroughs's Junky (1953). Not until On The Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959) did they become Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks found no takers, in any case, and after numerous rejections the manuscript was salted away at Kerouac's mother's home for half a century. Its existence was widely known in some circles - I'd heard stories about it over 40 years ago - and Kerouac was given to describing it as a masterpiece ahead of its time, Burroughs came to believe that the publishers had in this instance exercised sound judgement.
"It wasn't a very good piece of work," Burroughs would reflect many years later. "No publisher was interested, and in hindsight, I dont see why they should have been."
(Despite its emulation of the genre, Hippos isn't even properly a whodunit. The murder, in which the Carr character slays the Kammerer character - using an axe instead of a Boy Scout knife - doesn't even take place until the end. Nor does Hippos attempt to treat what might have been promising fodder for Burroughsian exploration - to wit, what must have gone through Carr's tortured mind in the day that passed between the act and his apprehension.)
KEROUAC DIED IN 1969, GINSBERG and Burroughs in 1997. Later that year, Grauerholz, whom we were supposed to meet for a drink in New York, was running late, he invited me, along with the poet Jim McCrary, to Ginsberg's old loft on East 13th Street.
Thus it was that I walked into an astonishing scene: besides Grauerholz, the company that day included Burroughs's agent, Andrew Wylie; Kerouac's brother-in-law, John Sampas; Jack's agent, Sterling Lord; Ginsberg's secretary, Bob Rosenthal; his protégé and editor, Peter Hale; and Bill Morgan, the Beat archivist to whom Ginsberg had entrusted the dispersal of his effects - in effect, every heir and representative of the Founding Fathers of the Beat Generation.
The subject of the "Beat Summit", supposed McCrary, who couldn't have been far wrong, was "who's got what left and what can we get for it?" In October of 1999, a Sotheby's sale ent itled "Allen Ginsberg and Friends" garnered $674,466. (Among the artifacts auctioned off that day was a copy of Lady Windermere's Fan, signed by Oscar Wilde, which Bono had presented to Ginsberg.) Two years later Christie's auctioned the On The Road scroll, which was purchased by Indianapolis Colts' owner Jim Irsay for $2.4 million. By then it was clear that the And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks would also be in some demand, but Grauerholz made good on his promise and did not undertake steps to publish the book until after Carr's death.
Great literature it is not, but as a historic document Hippos will, like the recently-published original scroll manuscript of On The Road, be a valuable contribution to the bourgeoning field of Beat Generation scholarship, revealing as it does two future legends in their developmental stages.
Lucien Carr, by the way, served less than two years in the New York state reformatory in Elmira. Not long after his release, he and Kerouac took their girlfriends to dinner, followed by a show at a Greenwich Village movie house, where the feature film that night turned out to be Crime and Punishment.
George Kimball, who writes the America at Largecolumn for The Irish Times, is the author of Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing(Mainstream) and American at Large(Red Rock Press). Among his prized possessions is a signed 1983 pistol target personally ventilated by William S Burroughs, whose marksmanship had by then considerably improved