Worthless Drivel

On August 14, 1944, in a park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death with a Boy Scout knife. There were no witnesses, and the killing has been variously interpreted to have been accidental and the result of intoxication; in self-defense; or perhaps intentional and even premeditated—Kammerer had been making unwanted sexual advances to the younger Carr for some time, and Carr had felt so harassed that he’d repeatedly tried to elude Kammerer, to the extent of joining the merchant marines.

This summer-night murder might have faded into obscurity if it weren’t for Kammerer’s and Carr’s friends, who included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, the central figures of the 1950s Beat literary movement. At the time of Kammerer’s death, it would be over 10 years before any of them would write the works that would make them famous, but each in his own way attempted to make sense of this act of violence which naturally had a dramatic impact on their lives.

Burroughs and Kerouac teamed up to write a novel about the murder, authoring alternate chapters. They finished it in 1945, but at this time they were unknown on the literary scene, and were thus unable to find a publisher. Entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a reference to a radio broadcast about a circus fire, the manuscript remained hidden under Kerouac’s floorboards for years. Even after he and Burroughs became famous and could easily have had the book published, Lucien Carr, who had completely rebuilt his life after two years in prison, did not want his name associated with the long-past scandal. It was not until after his death in 2005 that Kerouac’s and Burroughs’ estates considered publishing this “lost Beat novel.”

In the end, the editing was done, the afterword was written, and Grove Press published Hippos this past fall. Alternating between the perspectives of characters Will Dennison and Mike Ryko (Burroughs and Kerouac, respectively), the novel introduces us to Carr’s and Kammerer’s fictional alter-egos, explaining the circumstances of Kammerer’s death, while describing wartime New York and the people, places, and lifestyles associated with it. On the one hand, it’s a hard-boiled crime novel, peopled with tough-talking, hard-drinking characters. But on the other hand, Hippos is a snapshot of New York as it was, with its bars and its boarding houses and its movie theaters, a great city full of the optimism that America would prevail in World War II and that prosperity would ensue. The novel’s delayed publication only enhances this sense of vintage and “period piece.”

On a third hand altogether, though, Hippos is 214 pages of potential: a first novel by a pair of men who would become two of the 20th century’s most celebrated novelists, about a social circle who made their livings as day laborers and merchant marines, but who would before long spark the next two decades of generation-gapping rebellion. Hippos is Kerouac before he turned to liquor and Burroughs before he turned to heroin; although Allen Ginsberg does not appear as a character in this book, it is still Ginsberg before his own literary success spurred him to become his friends’ agent, helping to get On the Road and Naked Lunch published.

Hippos is a capable first novel, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the generation-defining work that was to come in Kerouac’s and Burroughs’ careers. If this had been the only thing to come from its authors, it would be unremarkable indeed—but it is defined entirely by what came after it, and the suspense generated by the fact that it is the first written and yet most recently published in an extensive bibliography. It now exists more as a piece of history than it does a piece of literature, supplementing the last few years’ publication of biographies, letters, journals, and other materials that serve to illuminate the lives of these counterculture figureheads. It is impossible to treat Hippos as one would any other novel, or as one would have treated it had it been published in 1945, because anyone likely to pick it up would do so knowing the names “Jack Kerouac” and “William Burroughs,” and might even know the story of Lucien Carr and David Kammerer as well.

However, that is not to diminish the significance of the book’s publication as a vital primary source for literary historians seeking to understand who the Beats were before they became the Beats. Nor is it a bad or boring read, making it accessible to anyone less interested in history and more interested in a sensational story of interpersonal dynamics in hip and happening New York. Above all, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a must for anyone who has read On the Road, Naked Lunch, or any of Kerouac’s or Burroughs’ other novels. The context that it provides is far richer—and certainly more entertaining—than any introduction or afterword.