And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks

by William S. Burroughs

  Next was Ann Charters’s groundbreaking Kerouac: A Biography in 1973, and it reintroduced Carr and Kammerer to a world that had forgotten them— whereas the UPI senior editor Lou Carr was well known and well liked. Charters, however (and Ginsberg used to complain about this in my presence), was obliged to remove from her last draft and replace with paraphrase every word she had quoted from the writings of Jack Kerouac, published or otherwise, because the Kerouac estate had an exclusive-access agreement with Aaron Latham, who was also working on a biography.

  Latham’s book was eventually completed but never published, perhaps because Charters’s book was felt to have saturated the Kerouac-biography market for the time being. Meanwhile, important new biographies of Kerouac did come out in the 1970s, notably Jack’s Book by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, in 1978, and Desolate Angel by Dennis McNally in 1979.

  The Latham project had a delayed effect that proved quite profound. Latham’s agent was the venerable Sterling Lord, who was also Kerouac’s agent since the early 1950s and, after Kerouac’s death in October 1969, the estate’s agent. Latham often wrote for New York magazine, and the late Clay Felker, its editor, agreed to publish Latham’s first chapter. It was titled simply enough “The Columbia Murder that Gave Birth to the Beats,” and it was published in April 1976, with a two-page graphic spread and, on the issue’s cover, a reefer banner to the story inside. Latham’s chapter was based directly on scenes and dialogue quoted liberally or paraphrased from Vanity of Duluoz and the unpublished Hippos typescript, as if both texts could be treated as literal, verbatim accounts. Lucien’s intimacies with Ginsberg also made an unprecedented appearance in print.

  The New York piece upset the applecart of Carr’s life, and Lou was livid. Although he had worked with some of his friends at UPI for as long as thirty years, none of them had been aware of his adolescent homicide. He blamed Allen for talking about their sexual affairs too freely with Latham on tape; he felt that Allen had flouted the understanding of 1944, best summed up in Vanity of Duluoz when Claude mutters to the narrator (Jack), while both are in police custody, “Heterosexuality all the way down the line.” Allen was unsure as to whether he had blabbed anything to Aaron Latham or not. Either way, he was all contrition and begged William to soothe Lucien’s savage breast.

  William felt quite indignant on Lucien’s behalf, and with the help of his longtime copyright lawyer, Eugene H. Winick, he brought suit against Latham, Lord, and New York magazine for copyright infringement of Burrough’s chapters the Hippos work, defamation of character, and invasion of privacy (meaning an unauthorized, endorsement-type use of one’s name or likeness). Burroughs’s suit was settled in the early 1980s for nominal damages and with no hard feelings; control of Hippos was thenceforth to be shared and exercised jointly. So now “the Hippos were locked in their drawer” —and thus matters stood for twenty years.

  Burroughs moved from his New York “Bunker” to Lawrence, Kansas, at the end of 1981 and he lived and worked in Lawrence for sixteen more years, completing his Red Night Trilogy and creating a substantial body of visual art. When William Burroughs’s time to make his journey to the Western Lands finally came, on August 2, 1997, I was with him; I had been privileged to live and work with William for twenty-three years.

  Soon after my twenty-first birthday I had arrived in New York from Kansas to seek my destiny. Burroughs and the Beats had been my literary focus since my early teens; I had already met Ginsberg the year before and now, with Allen’s encouragement, I met William, in mid-February 1974. William soon invited me to be his roommate in his big loft sublet at 452 Broadway. Very late one night that spring William and I were awakened by the street-door buzzer and I heard a cheerfully insolent voice bark over the intercom: “Bill! It’s Lou Carr goddamn it, let me in.” I did, and then we all sat up talking for an hour or two. My friendship with Lucien began that night and grew over my years with William.

  In fall 1999, as executor of the Burroughs estate, I took part in the Allen Ginsberg estate’s auction at Sotheby’s in New York. After the auction I went down to Washington, D.C., to visit Lou for a few days. There I affirmed my long-ago promise to Lucien: that, out of respect for his feelings, I would not allow publication of the Kerouac–Burroughs Hippos book in his lifetime.

  I have also been gifted for many years with the friendship of John Sampas, executor of the Kerouac estate. John has been generous, thoughtful, and entertaining. He has also been consistently respectful of my promises to Lucien about Hippos.

  They are all gone away now: Dave, Jack, Allen, Bill —and Lucien, too, three years ago, in 2005 ... so here are your Hippos, ready at long last to come to the boil.

  A few words about this book: the seasoned Beat reader will easily recognize the pseudonymous characters in Hippos: the real-life authors and narrators, Jack Kerouac (“Mike Ryko”) and William Burroughs (“Will Dennison”); the tragic central figures Lucien Carr (“Phillip Tourian”) and Dave Kammerer (“Ramsay Allen” or “Al”); Kerouac’s girlfriend and first wife, Edie Parker (“Janie”); Carr’s girlfriend Celine Young (“Barbara ‘Babs’ Bennington”); and Carr’s fellow freshman John Kingsland (“James Cathcart”).

  Scholars may also recognize some lesser-known historical persons on the fringes of the story: Lucien’s parents, Russell Carr (“Mr. Tourian”/“Mr. Rogers”) and Marion Carr (“Mrs. Tourian”); his wealthy uncle Godfrey S. Rockefeller (“Phillip’s uncle” also); the future New Yorker writer Chandler Brossard, who lived at 48 Morton Street, where Kammerer lived, around the corner from Burroughs’s apartment on Bedford Street (Brossard may be “Chris Rivers”); the longshoreman Neal Spollen (“Hugh Maddox”); a Barnard-linked lesbian circle, with the butch Ruth Louise McMahon (“Agnes O’Rourke”) and the femme undergrads Donna Leonard (“Della”) and Teresa Willard (“Bunny”?); Kammerer’s friend Patricia Goode Harrison and her then-husband Thomas F. Healy, an Irish writer (“Jane Bole and Tom Sullivan,” possibly); and the young gangster whom only Dennison knows—based on one “Hoagy” Norman, or Norton (“Danny Borman”).

  And of course Joe Gould, the real-life “Professor Sea Gull”—as he was dubbed in a widely read 1942 profile by Joseph Mitchell in The New Yorker— appears here under his own name. Verbose, alcoholic, middle-aged, a patrician dans la boue fallen from a family tree with roots in pre-Revolutionary Boston, Gould was an authentic Village eccentric. Just as portrayed in Hippos, he passed his time at the Minetta Tavern, working (he said) on his vast literary masterpiece, An Oral History of Our Time—and, as Burroughs recalled, doing his “seagull act” for drinks. But “Joe Gould’s Secret,” which Mitchell revealed in his 1964 follow-up, was that the endlessly scribbled manuscript of the Oral History had never existed.

  In 2000 Joe Gould’s Secret was made into a film, directed by Stanley Tucci and starring Ian Holm as Gould. It is a beautifully realized visual re-creation of exactly the place and time—Greenwich Village in the mid-1940s—when this Hippos story takes place, and thus the reader might do well to screen the movie to help in reimagining these settings, so distant now in time.

  In my editing, I have not aspired to the kind of meticulous textual work that the eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has already brought to his definitive versions of Burroughs’s early works Junky (1953) and The Yage Letters (1963). Rather, I have endeavored to present these writings according to the authors’ own intentions, insofar as those can be discerned.

  We do know that Kerouac and Burroughs entrusted this selfsame typescript, entire, to their agent in spring 1945, for submission to publishers such as Simon & Schuster and Random House. This fact alone confirms to me that, if Hippos had been contracted for publication then, they very likely would have acquiesced in some modest editorial suggestions as to organization and orthography—especially since they were writing explicitly for a genre-fiction market, not for the avant-garde reader.

  I have largely avoided making silent changes, though I have made a few. Commas were added only when they seemed quit
e necessary, and some solecisms have even been retained, as being characteristic of the authors’ composition style. Jack Kerouac evidently typed up this entire manuscript just as it is preserved, with no missing pages; he was a good speller and handy with punctuation. My greatest liberty was taken in adding or changing paragraph breaks, to enhance readability or the almost cinematic scenarization—again, as seems appropriate to the work’s literary genre.

  Before I close, below, a note about the text: it was transcribed from archival photocopies of the typescripts by my friend and colleague Tom King, whom I am pleased to thank for his painstaking help. I want to thank also my friends Thomas Peschio, John Curry, and James M. Smith for manifold favors and encouragements; scholars Gerald Nicosia, Oliver Harris, Dave Moore, and Bill Morgan for suggestions and error rescues; my editor Jamison Stoltz for guidance timely proffered; Lucien’s companion Kathleen Silvassy for their hospitality to me, years ago; my old friend Gene Winick for a lifetime of help to William and his legacy, and likewise the Kerouac estate’s agent Sterling Lord for his six decades’ nurturance of Jack’s legacy (and his magnanimity around that bygone lawsuit thirty years ago); my friend and colleague John Sampas, for his even keel and Burroughsian wit; my agents Andrew Wylie and Jeff Posternak, for years of faith in me, through my vicissitudes; my cherished and dear friend Ira Silver-berg for all the above and much more; but most of all my beloved mother, Selda Paulk Grauerholz, who passed away on March 13, 2008, still asking me did I have the Hippos done yet!—her, I thank for everything, always, and wish I could tell her so again.

  Lou Carr became a consummate and dedicated newsman. He was promoted to head of UPI’s news desk in the 1970s, and when United Press relocated to Washington, D.C., in 1983 he moved there from New York. Lucien remained with the agency forty-seven years, until his retirement in 1993 at age sixty-eight. He died, aged seventy-nine, on January 28, 2005.

  At a tribute event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2005, more than 160 of Lucien Carr’s fellow journalists gathered to eulogize him. As the Times of London reported in its obituary: “A history of the [United Press] company, Unipress (2003), said of Carr that he was: ‘the soul of the news service. The tall, slim graduate of the “Beat Generation” rewrote, repaired, recast and revived more big stories on UPI’s main newspaper circuit, the A-wire, than anyone before or after him.’ He inspired much admiration and affection from colleagues.”

  “The murder that gave birth to the Beats” has become an oft-told tale, but it was not the death of Kammerer that rocked the cradle of the Beats; it was the intellectual and sexual life force of teenaged Lucien Carr, whom Kammerer himself had raised from puberty on a rich diet of poetic excess—the divine af-flatus of Baudelaire; the actes gratuits of Gide; and the passionate entwinement of Verlaine and Rimbaud. And then Dave and Lucien fell into madness, enacting those doomed roles in their own lives.

  In Hippos, Jack and Bill portrayed a tragic case of mentorship gone wrong and the natural cruelty of youth. However, the plot difficulty with Hippos was always that Kammerer’s death was not the end of a story but the beginning of one. With Kammerer dead and Carr locked up, three remained: Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg ... and although none of them would see their work published for another decade after David died, they were the ones destined for recognition, literary and otherwise.

  Lucien Carr’s limelight moment as the insouciant young cynosure of the Beats—the lucent, charismatic Claude de Maubris, their sacrificial celebrant, cheering them on to “Plonger au fond du gouffre/Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?”—that halcyon time ended many years ago, one hot summer night in wartime when Lucien took, or accepted, the life of his mentor and soft touch, his stalker and plaything, his creator and destroyer, David Eames Kammerer.

  —James W. Grauerholz

  June 2008