And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks

by William S. Burroughs

  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 b
lah ... 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!’

  “That’s Bill [Kerouac added], he noticed that. Because he notices them kind of things.”

  In yet another version, the fire was in the St. Louis zoo. But surely this is related to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944, known as “the day the clowns cried.” There were nearly seven thousand people in the big tent when it was suddenly engulfed in flames; three minutes later the tent poles collapsed and the rest of the burning tent caved in. Six minutes after it all started there was nothing left but smoldering ashes. At least 165 men, women, and children died, and some five hundred more were injured, many trampled in the panic. It turned out that the tent’s canvas had been waterproofed with a mixture of gasoline and paraffin —the opposite of a flame retardant.

  The Hartford fire occurred within days of Burroughs’s first visit to the 118th Street apartment to meet Kerouac, in late June or early July 1944. In Hartford, however, the horses, lions, elephants, and tigers were quickly led out of danger, and there were no hippos in Hartford to boil. A pygmy hippo reportedly died in the Cole Brothers Circus fire of 1940 in Rochester, Indiana, along with seventeen other exotic animals such as llamas and zebras; and in Cleveland, Ohio, a fire in the menagerie tent of the Ringling Brothers circus on August 4, 1942, had killed upwards of a hundred animals, two dozen of them shot down by police with high-powered rifles as the creatures fled in panic and horror, their fur ablaze. These horrific, absurd, grimly comic scenes were just the sort of thing that Burroughs found excruciatingly funny. Perhaps the boiling hippos was a running gag with him and it had been triggered again by news of the Hartford fire.

  Others, such as Allen Ginsberg, remembered that the boiling-hippos line might have come from some early “cut-up” speech and radio-news experiments that their friend Jerry Newman used to make on his sound-recording devices. Newman was a Columbia student and jazz aficionado who, before magnetic tape recorders were available, got his hands on some portable disc-recording gear and took it to jam sessions and to the 52nd Street clubs; his rare 1940–41 recordings of Art Tatum are considered musical treasures.

  In Vanity of Duluoz, his late-life novel as memoir, Kerouac described his collaboration with Burroughs in the winter of 1944–45.

  Why, old Will in that time, he just awaited the next monstrous production from the pen of his young friend, me, and when I brought them in he pursed his lips in an attitude of amused inquiry and read. Having read what I offered up, he nodded his head and returned the production to the hands of the maker. Me, I sat there, perched on a stool somewhat near this man’s feet, either in my room or in his apartment on Riverside Drive, in a conscious attitude of adoring expectation, and, finding my work returned to me with no more comment than a nod of the head, said, almost blushingly, “You’ve read it, what you think?”

  The man Hubbard nodded his head, like a Buddha, having come to ghastly life from out of Nirvana what else was he s’posed to do? He joined his fingertips resignedly. Peering over the arch of his hands he answered, “Good, good.”

  “But what do you specifically think of it?”

  “Why ...” pursing his lips and looking away toward a sympathetic and equally amused wall, “why, I don’t specifically think of it. I just rather like it, is all.”

  The Hippos typescript was ready by early spring. In a letter of March 14, 1945, to his sister Caroline, Kerouac wrote, “[T]he book Burroughs and I wrote [...] is now in the hands of the publishing firm Simon & Schuster and they’re reading it. What will happen I don’t know. For the kind of book it is—a portrait of the ‘lost’ segment of our generation, hardboiled, honest, and sensationally real—it is good, but we don’t know if those kinds of books are much in demand now, although after the war there will no doubt be a veritable rash of ‘lost generation’ books and ours in that field can’t be beat.”

  Burroughs had raised the same question about which literary styles would be fashionable and commercial; as we know, Simon & Schuster took a pass on the “sensationally real” Hippos manuscript, and it was rejected by a few other publishers. But Kerouac continued to rework the material: in summer 1945, on his own, he made a complete revision of the Hippos story, calling the result variously “The Phillip Tourian Story,” or “Ryko/Tourian Story,” or “I Wish I Were You.” He also based the characters “Michael” and “Paul” on himself and Lucien Carr in Orpheus Emerged, another piece written around this time and published in 2005; this unfinished novella also features characters based on Ginsberg and Burroughs.

  After two years in Elmira, Lucien Carr was released. He returned to New York to rebuild his life from the ground up, and he was in no mood to indulge his dear friend Jack in any romanticized versions of the tragedy that had ended his youth. He discouraged any further efforts to rewrite or resubmit the Hippos text or any similar treatments. Lucien’s friends knew he wanted to put all that behind him, but it was too good a story to leave alone— and they were writers, or they soon would be.

  In his letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg from Elmira, Carr had maintained his jaunty, what-me-worry? tone, but it was obvious to him and everyone else that he would not be returning to Columbia University. Soon after his release he went to work for United Press International, starting as a copyboy. He married Francesca von Hartz, started a family (three sons, Simon, the novelist Caleb, and Ethan), and in 1956 was promoted to night news editor at UPI.

  That same year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books published Allen Ginsberg’s breakthrough poem “Howl,” with its dedication to Lucien. But Carr had “enjoyed” more than enough public notoriety; he asked his old friend Allen to refrain from mentioning his name in future editions. The 1940s were now a closed chapter of Carr’s life, or so he understandably hoped.

  Burroughs didn’t care one way or the other. By 1946 he was in deep trouble with drugs, his feet at the top of the down escalator that deposited him, five years later, within an inner ring of hell in Mexico City, when he recklessly but unintentionally killed his wife of those years, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, with a shot through the forehead in a drunken party stunt on September 6, 1951. He had been writing for two years at that point, but his subject was not Jack Kerouac or Lucien Carr; his subject was junk and junkies—in New York and Lexington, Kentucky, in east Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana, and ultimately in Mexico City—in other words, himself and his junco partners.

  Jack Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City (1950), was a small-town-to-big-city bildungs-roman like Balzac’s Lost Illusions but told as a family saga, with aspects of Jack and his relatives recombined into the Martin family. The book does feature a much-changed version of the Carr–Kammerer story, with “Kenneth Wood” and “Waldo Meister” drawn from Carr and Kammerer, but with the facts changed enough so that Lucien Carr was not widely recognizable.

  Yet The Town and the City had not tapped all of Kerouac’s fascination with the story. In a letter to Carl Solomon from San Francisco on April 7, 1952—after Solomon had been made an editor at Ace Books by his uncle, Ace’s owner A. A. Wyn—Jack spoke of the Hippos book, which he was willing for Ace to publish.

  “There’s no leeriness on my part concerning paper-cover books,” Kerouac wrote. “[F]act of the matter is, Burroughs and I wrote a sensational 200-page novel about Lucien murder in 1945 that ‘shocked’ all publishers in town and also agents ... Allen remembers it ... if you want it, go to my mother’s house with Allen and find it in my maze of boxes and suitcases, it’s in a manila envelope, entitled (I think) I WISH I WERE YOU, and is ‘by Seward Lewis’ (they being our respective middle names). Bill himself would approve of this move, we spent a year on it, Lucien was mad, wanted us to bury it under a floorboard (so don’t tell Lucien now).”

  Jack may have been embellishing the shock factor somewhat, but he was right about no one accepting Hippos for p
ublication—including Ace Books in 1952. (And he still remembered those floorboards fifteen years later during The Paris Review interview.)

  By 1959 the three cornerstone works of the Beats were published, and each of the three writers rapidly gained notoriety, readers, and sales. The Beat generation had tentatively received its name in John Clellon Holmes’s 1952 novel Go (which also casts Carr and Kammerer in walk-on roles), but Life magazine’s story in November 1959, “The Only Rebellion Around,” was probably the dam burst of mainstream Beat awareness in America.

  In 1959, as Gerald Nicosia points out in his essential biography Memory Babe, Kerouac was still making noises about reviving the Hippos story; he was stuck, halfway through his unfinished novel Desolation Angels. Indeed, he talked about it in front of Lucien and his wife Cessa: “terrifying her, and profoundly disturbing [Lucien] ... Jack seemed to admire the killing as a heroic deed. Although at their behest he temporarily agreed not to do the book, he would keep bringing up the idea every few months, pushing Cessa to the brink of hysteria.”

  In 1967 Jack finally made good on his threat: he was writing Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education 1935–46, a book about his life before he went on the road with Neal Cassady, written as if told to his long-suffering third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac. He hauled his old typescripts from 1945 out of the filing cabinet to reread for inspiration and reminders, and when Vanity was published in 1968 fully a fifth of the book was the story of “Claude de Maubris” (Lucien) and “Franz Mueller” (Kammerer). He also introduced the sublime “Wilson Holmes ‘Will’ Hubbard” (Burroughs) in language similar to what we find in Hippos; Kerouac’s narrative process in Vanity also follows the Hippos scene structure fairly closely.

  Kerouac’s book was published just in time, because by 1968 the first Beat biographies were under way. Jane Kramer’s Allen Ginsberg in America from that year was based on her recent series about Allen in The New Yorker, but she made no mention of Lucien Carr or David Kammerer; perhaps Allen simply refrained from talking about that story with her.