Books of The Times

When a Real-Life Killing Sent Two Future Beats in Search of Their Voices

Credit...Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust

The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.

The novel itself, a sort of murder mystery written in 1945 when the authors were unpublished and unknown, is a flimsy piece of work  repetitious, flat-footed and quite devoid of any of the distinctive gifts each writer would go on to develop on his own.

The two authors take turns telling their story in alternating chapters. Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (“There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark”); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of “On the Road,” none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.

Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs’s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of “Naked Lunch.” In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.

The plot of “Hippos” stems from a much discussed real-life killing involving two men who were friends of both Burroughs and Kerouac. As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs’s literary executor, explains in an afterword: “The enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1936, when Lucien was 11 and Dave was 25. Eight years, five states, four prep schools and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish.”

In the predawn hours of Aug. 14, 1944, in Riverside Park in Manhattan, Carr stabbed Kammerer with his Boy Scout knife, then rolled his body into the Hudson River. Burroughs and Kerouac were among the first people Carr confessed to; he later turned himself in and was charged with second degree murder.

As described by Mr. Grauerholz, Carr’s lawyers painted a picture of an older homosexual harassing a younger man, who had to “defend his honor” with violence. The Carr-Kammerer story fascinated the writers’ circle, and several contemporaries, including Allen Ginsberg, would try their hand at telling the story.

In “Hippos” Burroughs and Kerouac lay out a fictionalized account of the days and weeks leading up to the killing. Carr is called Phillip Tourian here, and Kammerer is Ramsay Allen. While Allen drones on and on to Dennison about Tourian, Tourian tells Ryko that he wants to escape from the suffocating Allen and suggests that he and Ryko ship out with the merchant marine. They make several efforts to get on a boat to France but are repeatedly thwarted for a variety of reasons, like not having the right stamp on their union cards or getting into an argument with another sailor.

Meanwhile, all the characters spend a lot of time hanging out in bars and restaurants and friends’ apartments, complaining about their lack of money and putting on artistic airs, as if they were a bunch of French existentialists. Tourian does stupid party tricks like taking a bite out of a cocktail glass, chewing it up and washing it down with some water. Allen tries to spy on the object of his affection while he is sleeping. Ryko fights and makes up with his girlfriend, Janie, who wants to get married. And Dennison shoots himself up with morphine.

None of these one-dimensional slackers are remotely interesting as individuals, but together they give the reader a sense of the seedy, artsy world Kerouac and Burroughs inhabited in New York during the war years. And so these, really, are the only reasons to read this undistinguished book: for the period picture it provides of the city  think of Billy Wilder’s “Lost Weekend” crossed with Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”  and for the semi-autobiographical glimpses it offers of the two writers before they found their voices and became bohemian brand names.