A book of blood about the crime which inspired the Beats

And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks is an early novel written collaboratively by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs over the winter of 1944-1945. Narrated in alternating chapters by the young merchant seaman Mike Ryko (Kerouac) and barman turned private investigator Will Dennison (Burroughs), the book is a semi-fictionalised account of a murder and the events leading up to it - the murder of one of their friends by another - written in terse, unaffected prose.

On a muggy summer night in the predawn hours of Monday August 14, 1944, Lucien Carr, 19, stabbed his constant - to the point of stalking - companion, 33 year old former teacher David Kammerer. Thinking Kammerer was dead - he wasn't - Carr weighed the body down and threw it in the Hudson River, where Kammerer drowned.

Both Kerouac and Burroughs were retained as material witnesses to the crime, as the following day Carr had confessed to them both about the killing. Burroughs urged Carr to get a good lawyer and turn himself in; Kerouac helped Carr dispose of evidence, including the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses.

After a court case in which the killing was represented as an 'honour slaying' - an act of self defence to prevent Kammerer committing rape - Carr was found guilty of manslaughter. He served two years in the Elmira Reformatory for the crime.

As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs’ literary executor explains in an afterword in Hippos:

'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. As 'Will Dennison writes in Hippos, 'When they get together, something happens.'"

Although Carr's lawyers presented an easily digested version of the crime to the court, in which the slender young Columbia University student was depicted as defending himself from the unwanted advances of an older, sexually aggressive gay man, the truth of the matter is much more complicated. Writes Grauerholz:

'David is reduced to a pathetic caricature: the obsessive, older male homosexual who increasingly oppresses his innocent, heterosexual victim, finally leaving the younger man no alternative but to "defend his honour" with violence. This was, in fact, the theory of Carr's legal defence, intended to be palatable to a judge, as well as the public - especially in 1944.

There is much more to be said, however, about Lucien Carr's early life and youthful bisexuality ... Lucien did, for example, share a number of sexual encounters with [Allen] Ginsberg in 1944. So did Kammerer: that became clear when Ginsberg's early journals were published in 2006 ... 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.'

It's clear from Grauerholz's afterword, and from the events depicted in Hippos, that Kammerer and Carr's relationship was dangerously complex. It's unfortunate, then, that Kerouac and Burroughs lacked the literary skills to fully explore this amour fou at the time Hippos was written.

As written, the characters of 'Phillip Tourian' (Carr) and 'Ramsey Allen' (Kammerer) may get to speak for themselves, but their voices lack clarity, and their characters are far from detailed. Readers hoping for psychological insights into their passive-aggressive relationship will be sorely disappointed. Rather than a complex rendering of their fatal attraction, Hippos presents a thinly fictionalised account of the facts surrounding the murder without ever getting to the dark heart of the matter. Consequently, readers will know how things happened after finishing the book, but are left to wonder why.

Nonetheless, Hippos is still a fascinating book for Beat Generation devotees: presenting as it does a detailed snapshot of New York City life in the midst of the Second World War, and simultaneously providing an insight into the early development of two significant American writers.

Writing as 'Dennison', Burroughs aims for hard-boiled prose but has yet to acheive the narrative clarity and precision which he would later display in his first published novel, Junkie (1953). His eye for detail and fascination for the demi-monde, however, are already on display.

'The place where I worked is called the Continental Cafe. It is open all the way across the front in summer; with doors that fold back. There are tables where you can sit and look at the sidewalk if you want to. There are several waitresses/hostesses who will let you buy drinks for them. Inside is the usual chromium, red leather, and incandescent lights.

As I walked down the bar I noticed a fag, a couple of whores with two Broadway Sams, and the usual sprinkle of servicemen. Three plainclothes dicks were drinking scotch at the far end of the bar.

... I went up to the other end of the bar and waited on two sailors. The jukebox was playing 'You Always Hurt the One You Love', and one sailor said, "Hey Jack, how come that machine never plays what I want?" "I don't know," I said. "People are always complaining about it."'

Overall the book lacks depth, and its tone is repetitive and listless. There are, however, moments in which one can glimpse the writers' emerging voices, such as in a long, lyrical account by 'Mike Ryko' of a days-long drinking binge during one of his trips in the Merchant Marine:

'It was all a blur to me. I remember later on we were standing in a courtyard somewhere in midtown Boston and the seaman with me was calling up to a second-story window where a whore was supposed to live. The window opened and this big Negro stuck his head out and poured a bucket of hot water down on us.

Well finally, the sun came up, and I was lying on a city department toolbox on Atlantic Avenue, right on the waterfront, and there were all these little fishing smacks docked right beside me with the red sun touching their masts. I watched that for awhile, then I sort of dragged myself to North Station to get my gear, and then had to go across town in a taxi to South Station and buy a ticket from New York. I’ll never forget that glorious return to our fair shores.

It's passages like these than indicate the emergence of Kerouac's own, original voice: a voice which merges the opulent, impressionistic prose of Thomas Wolfe with William Saroyan's autobiographical observations of everyday American life, although the final catalysing influence - the frank, colloquial, first person narrative of Kerouac's muse, Neal Cassady - was still some years away.

And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks is not the suppressed masterpiece some Beat fans and scholars may have been hoping for; its simplistic structure and two-dimensional characters see to that. But as an early collaboration between two writers who collectively, along with poet Allen Ginsberg, cast a long shadow over popular culture and the canon of 20th century literature, it's a fascinating insight into the Beats' creative development; and a valuable documentation of New York City's bohemian subculture before a self-publicising mythology took hold.


And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, $35.00 (Hardcover, 214 pp, Allen Lane, ISBN:9781846141645).