And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (16 page)

Even if all you know about the
Hippos
novel comes from this book’s jacket, you already know too much for you to meet the text as it was written, by two nobodies and about no one you ever heard of. Thanks to a virtual mountain of Beat bibliography, biography, belles lettres, memoirs, and new archival sources, most of the persons on whom Kerouac and Burroughs based their characters in 1945 are widely recognizable today. For better or worse,
Hippos
comes to you now as a “framed” work:
The Columbia murder that gave birth to the Beats! A lost Kerouac book! A lost Burroughs book!

Today, sixty-odd years after it was composed, the setting of
Hippos
—New York City near the end of World War II—makes it a period piece. You’ll want to bring to your reading of this text all the imagery you associate with that period, all the wartime music and automobiles and fashions, the movies and novels and headlines. But depending on which version of the “Lucien Carr–David Kammerer story” you have been served, you will probably want to throw out your pre-conceptions
and let the novel’s characters “Phillip Tourian” and “Ramsay Allen” speak for themselves.

For anyone who just walked in, the basics: the enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936, when Lucien was eleven and Dave was twenty-five. Eight years, five states, four prep schools, and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish; as “Will Dennison” writes in
Hippos
, “When they get together, something happens.” Something had to give, and something finally did.

In the muggy predawn hours of Monday, August 14, 1944, in cruisy Riverside Park on New York’s Upper West Side, Lucien and Dave were alone, drunk and quarreling. They wrestled and struggled in the grass, and then Lucien stabbed Dave with his little Boy Scout knife, twice, in the upper chest. Dave passed out. Lucien assumed he was dead and he rolled Dave’s limp body into the Hudson River—unconscious and bleeding out, arms tied together with shoelaces, pants pockets weighted with rocks—to drown. It took Carr almost twenty-four hours to surrender himself to authorities and still another day for Dave to be hauled up at the foot of West 79th Street.

The killing was front-page news for a week in New York, but it was especially shocking to the three
new friends whom Lucien had introduced to one another in his freshman year at Columbia University: Allen Ginsberg, eighteen, a fellow Columbia frosh from Paterson, New Jersey; Jack Kerouac, twenty-two, a recent Columbia dropout from Lowell; and William S. Burroughs, thirty, a Harvard graduate and Kammerer’s friend since 1920, when they were school chums in St. Louis.

Today, many written explanations of the long, fraught relationship between Kammerer and Carr are available to the interested reader. In almost all of them, however, David is reduced to a pathetic caricature: the obsessive, older male homosexual stalker who increasingly oppresses his innocent, heterosexual victim, finally leaving the younger man no alternative but to “defend his honor” with violence. This was, in fact, the theory of Carr’s legal defense, intended to be palatable to a judge, as well as to the public—especially in 1944.

There is much more to be said, however, about Lucien Carr’s early life and youthful bisexuality than has ever been published in even the fullest, most reliable biographies of the major Beat figures. Lucien did, for example, share a number of sexual encounters with Ginsberg in 1944. So did Kammerer: that became clear when Ginsberg’s early journals were published in 2006 as
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice
. But Lucien
never had any sexual contact with Dave—not even once, according to what Burroughs remembered Kammerer telling him often, and undoubtedly Dave would have told his old friend Bill if anything at all had ever happened.

To almost all who knew the actors, the retrospective sanitizing of Lucien’s sexual history for public consumption seemed forgivable, in the circumstances. After all, even the dead man’s oldest friend did not turn against Carr. William Burroughs was the first person to hear Lucien’s confession, a few hours after the killing; he immediately suggested that Lucien get a good lawyer and turn himself in, relying on the defense-of-honor scenario. Burroughs felt that no purpose would be served by Lucien taking the maximum fall.

When Lucien hurried to tell Jack the news next, Kerouac was more ambivalent. He had found much to like about David Kammerer. Jack’s bisexuality was confused and covert, but undeniable; he could not feel any real contempt for Kammerer on that account. And yet even though he and Carr had been friends for only six months, Kerouac felt a loyalty to Lucien that overrode his misgivings.

They spent the day together, talking and drinking, roving from bar to bar, looking at paintings, watching art movies, and revisiting the places where all this
real-world drama had recently happened. Finally it was late afternoon, and the young men understood they had stalled as long as they could. Reluctantly, Jack and Lucien parted, each knowing that what had just occurred was going to change everything.

After spending most of August 14 with Kerouac, Lucien confessed to his mother, Marion Gratz Carr, in her apartment on 57th Street. She called her lawyer and Lucien told him the story. He took Lucien the next morning to the office of Frank S. Hogan, district attorney, to turn himself in. Carr was charged with second-degree murder and jailed. Kerouac was arrested at the apartment where he lived with his girlfriend, Edie Parker, no. 62, 421 West 118th Street; unable to pay his bail, he was held as a material witness.

When the police knocked on Burroughs’s apartment door at 69 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village on Thursday morning, Bill was across town in the Lexington Hotel, working a divorce case for the William E. Shorten detective agency. He was to listen for “amorous noises” in the adjacent hotel room, where the target couple had made reservations—but they never checked in. As soon as Burroughs got word that he, too, was wanted as a witness, he contacted his parents in
St. Louis. They immediately arranged for him to retain a good attorney, who walked his client in to the DA’s office for questioning and then walked him out, free on bond.

Lucien’s attorneys, Vincent J. Malone and Kenneth Spence, offered the assistant DA Jacob Grumet their client’s guilty plea to a lesser charge, first-degree manslaughter. For the court and the press the lawyers had painted the picture of an old queer harrassing a young boy who was not at all homosexual—as Carr had perhaps seemed in the first news stories and photos from jail, with his fair hair, boyish looks, and a volume of Yeats’s poetry clutched in his hand. The attorneys even suggested that the much-larger Kammerer had physically menaced Lucien, but they did not want to try to convince a jury that a vigorous nineteen-year-old was incapable of defending himself with any measures short of stabbing Dave in the heart ... or running away, for that matter.

Lucien was sentenced to the reformatory in Elmira, New York, on September 15, 1944, to a maximum of ten years’ confinement. Ann Charters’s biography of Kerouac states that Carr’s friends had expected him to receive a suspended sentence, so they were shocked when he was remanded to the corrections system. But as Burroughs told Ted Morgan, “I was there in the
courtroom. ... I walked out with Lucien’s lawyer, who said [to me], ‘I think it would have been very bad for his character, for him to get off scot free’—so his heart wasn’t in the case at all, he didn’t want to get him off. He was kind of moralistic about it.” (That man may, however, have been right.)

Kerouac married Edie Parker while he was still in jail so that her family would bail him out. He went home with her to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to work off his bond debt. That lasted only a few weeks. Jack headed back to New York in early October and entered his period of “Self-Ultimacy,” as it is referred to in the biographies.

After Kammerer died Burroughs went to see Dr. Paul Federn, his psychiatrist at that time, every day for a week; then he went home to live with his parents in St. Louis for several weeks. Burroughs returned quietly to New York at the end of October and sublet an apartment at 360 Riverside Drive. Within a month Burroughs’s underworld connections had introduced him to the effects of injecting morphine, and by December he was sharing this discovery with Allen and Jack.

For Burroughs, as we know, this was the beginning of a lifelong struggle with addiction and an endless series of habits and cures, back on, off again, until in 1980 he got on the methadone maintenance program.

Allen Ginsberg was among the first to try his hand at making literary hay with the Carr–Kammerer story: in late 1944 Allen wrote many notes and chapter drafts in his journals for a work that he considered calling “The Bloodsong.” Ginsberg’s now published journals include those writings, with many vivid scenes between him and Lucien and lively depictions of the Carr– Kammerer–Burroughs circle. Ginsberg’s reconstruction of the ultimate encounter between Lucien and Dave that night is the most detailed, and possibly the most realistic, of all the dramatizations of Kammerer’s final hours.

In November 1944, however, Ginsberg wrote in his journal: “Today the Dean called my novel ‘smutty.’” The assistant dean of Columbia, Nicholas McKnight, had called Allen in for a talking-to after Harrison Ross Steeves, chair of the English department, tipped off McKnight to what his undergraduate was working on. Dean McKnight did not want more notoriety for Columbia from the case and he discouraged Ginsberg from continuing.

By fall 1944 Allen’s friend the student poet John Hollander had already written a “Dostoyevskian” story about the killing for the
Columbia Spectator
, and the juicy details proved irresistible to many other writers
in those years. Some version of the affair turns up in novels and memoirs written in the 1940s, or later, by Chandler Brossard, William Gaddis, Alan Harrington, John Clellon Holmes, Anatole Broyard, Howard Mitcham, and even James Baldwin—who is believed to have used the characters for a story he called “Ignorant Armies,” a very early version of his gay-themed 1956 novel
Giovanni’s Room
.

Other New York writers who were certainly aware of the story include Kammerer’s (and Brossard’s) friend Marguerite Young and a friend of hers, a copyboy at
The New Yorker
named Truman Capote, to whom Young introduced Burroughs around June 1945, when Capote’s first important story, “Miriam,” was published in
Mademoiselle
. Years later Edie Kerouac Parker, another eyewitness, wrote her memoirs; her story was finally published in 2007 as
You’ll Be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac
. Edie’s account is from the perspective of Jack’s girlfriend, who didn’t immediately understand why the police banged on her apartment door and took her man away to jail.

And then there were Burroughs and Kerouac. William spoke at length to his first biographer, Ted Morgan, in the mid-1980s for Morgan’s indispensable
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs
.

“Kerouac and I were talking about a possible book that we might write together, and we decided to do Dave’s death. We wrote alternate chapters and read them to each other. There was a clear separation of material as to who wrote what. We weren’t trying for literal accuracy at all, [just] some approximation. We had fun doing it.

“Of course, [what we wrote] was dictated by the actual course of events—that is, [Jack] knew one thing, and I knew another. We fictionalized. [The killing] was actually done with a knife, it wasn’t done with a hatchet at all. I had to disguise the characters, so I made [Lucien’s character] a Turk.

“Kerouac hadn’t published anything [yet], we were completely unknown to anybody. At any rate, no one was interested in publishing it. We went to some agent [Madeline Brennan, of Ingersoll & Brennan] and she said, ‘Oh yes, you’re
talented
. You’re
writers
!’ and all this kind of stuff. But nothing came of it, no publisher was interested.

“And in hindsight, I don’t see why they should have been. It had no commercial possibilities. It wasn’t sensational enough to make it [...] from that point of view, nor was it well-written or interesting enough to make it [from] a purely literary point of view. It sort of fell in-between. [It was] very much in the Existentialist genre,
the prevailing mode of the period, but that hadn’t hit America yet. It just wasn’t a commercially viable property.”

About the unusual title Burroughs explained: “That was [from] a radio broadcast that came over when we were writing the book. There had been a circus fire, and I remember this phrase came through on the radio: ‘And the hippos were boiled in their tanks!’ So we used that as the title.”

In his 1967
Paris Review
interview, Jack Kerouac remembered the title’s source this way: “It’s called
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
. The hippos. Because Burroughs and I were sitting in a bar one night and we heard a newscaster saying ‘... and so the Egyptians attacked blah blah ... and meanwhile there was a great fire in the zoo in London and the fire raced across the fields and the hippos were boiled in their tanks! Goodnight everyone!’