And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (17 page)

“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 publication—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.

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.