Being a fan of Kerouac, I was surprised when I read about this.

Associated Press
BY BRUCE DeSILVA

“The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” (Grove Press, 214 pages, $24), by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac: More than 60 years ago, when Jack Kerouac was 23 and William S. Burroughs was 30, they were arrested in New York City for helping a friend cover up a murder. Although neither had written anything worth mentioning yet, they fancied themselves writers. So, after they beat the rap, they collaborated on a novel based on the case.

Kerouac, for one, thought the book was darned good. America’s publishers unanimously disagreed. And so the manuscript was tucked away, unloved and forgotten, until, at long last, Grove Press published it this month.
It was not worth the wait.

The real crime, which caused a sensation in 1944 New York, gave Kerouac and Burroughs a lot with which to work, but they failed to do much with it. The story is plodding, the characters uninteresting and the writing listless, with few hints at the innovative styles that would later make these writers icons of the beat generation. Perhaps the book will be of interest to literary scholars, but Grove could have posted it on an obscure internet site and spared the rest of us.

The real killer was Lucien Carr, a youth from a well-to-do family. The victim was David Kammerer, who had become infatuated with Carr years earlier in St. Louis while serving as his Boy Scout leader. Kammerer apparently came to New York to pursue Carr, their dance ending when the youth stabbed the older man in the chest with a scout knife, put stones in his pockets and shoved him into the Hudson River.

Carr promptly confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who did not call the police. In fact, the latter helped dispose of the murder weapon. Carr was later found guilty of second degree murder, but he was given only a two-year sentence after his lawyer argued that he had committed the crime to defend his honor from a homosexual predator. Carr served his time and went on to have a distinguished career as an editor. He died in 2005.

The crime, with its bohemian characters and hints of pedopilia, was a lot more interesting in the newspapers of the day than it is in the novel.

Kerouac and Burroughs changed the names of all the characters, including themselves. Inexplicably, they also changed the murder weapon, turning the delicious detail of the scout knife into a hatchet. As “Mike Ryko” and “Will Dennison,” the authors take turns narrating the story in a hard-boiled style, trying to write like Mickey Spillane and making a mess of it.

The characters are aimless, intellectual wannabes who spend most of the book engaging in vacuous conversations while wandering from one seedy apartment and bar to another in pursuit of sex, drugs and whiskey.

It is impossible to work up much concern for what will happen to any of them.

Filed under: In the News, Writers

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