"AND THE HIPPOS WERE
BOILED IN THEIR TANKS"
1944
IN THE SUMMER OF 1944, victory in Europe seemed within the grasp of the Allies as thousands of troops successfully landed on defended beaches in Normandy, and after weeks of fighting, began to enlarge the pocket. On the home front, the commune had moved to 421 West 118th Street and was going full blast. There was an interminable discussion about Wolfeans versus non-Wolfeans, with Kerouac arguing the merits of Thomas Wolfe’s confessional discursiveness, and Burroughs putting it down as hogwash.
With Hal Chase, Burroughs and Kerouac acted out scenes from André Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters, the story of a motiveless murder. With Ginsberg, they improvised comic skits. In one of these, Kerouac, wearing a straw hat, played the innocent American, while Ginsberg was the oily Hungarian who had escaped from the Nazis with his family heirlooms, and Burroughs was the unscrupulous contessa who was leading the innocent American into the arms of the oily Hungarian. To make his performance more convincing, Burroughs wore a bonnet and spoke in a squeaky accented voice. The charade in retrospect might be seen as a timely parable on the loss of American innocence through involvement in world affairs. Or, as Kerouac was later to write: “Shure did love America AS America in those days.”
Another topic of conversation was the Carr-Kammerer dilemma. As Burroughs put it, “When they get together, something happens, and they form a combination that gets on everybody’s nerves.” Now that Lucien had a steady girlfriend, Kammerer was frantic. He explained at length to Burroughs that making it with Lucien was not what he was after, he wanted affection, a permanent attachment. Kammerer constantly rehashed the Lucien question—what had Lucien meant when he said this, and when he said that? Was Lucien really in love with Celine? Was Celine good for him? He didn’t look well; she seemed to be sucking the life out of him, like a vampire.
Burroughs was fed up with Kammerer, and was also getting fed up with Lucien and his philosophizing. Lucien went on about the New Vision, which he had lifted from Yeats, and which had to do with a society of artist-citizens. “Rimbaud thought he was God,” Lucien said. “Maybe that’s the primary requisite. In Cabala man stands on the threshold of vegetable life and between him and God remains only a misty shroud. But suppose you actually projected yourself as God, as the sun, then what would you see and know?” As far as Burroughs was concerned, it was all in the “I-don’t-want-to-hear-about-it” department.
Kammerer was so fixated that on one occasion he climbed up the fire escape of Lucien’s dormitory, Warren Hall, in the middle of the night, went in the open window, and sat there for hours, just watching Lucien as he slept. “My Gawd,” said Burroughs when Dave told him, “suppose you’d-a found the wrong room and hovered over a perfect stranger?”
Then he would go to the other extreme, after seeing Lucien neck with Celine on 118th Street, and vow that he would never see him again. One such time, he was with a friend on Morton Street when Lucien arrived and he barred the door and said, “Stay out of here. I told you never to come here again.” Lucien barged in and Kammerer slugged him and Lucien fell on the floor, and said in amazement, “You never hit me before.” Kammerer threw him out and locked the door, and then said to the friend: “You’re welcome to stay. And come any time you want. But don’t ever bring that little bastard here, I don’t want him around.” Then he added with a laugh, “I suppose he wants me to write a term paper for him.”
For a variety of reasons, Lucien felt he needed to get away: away from Dave, away from Celine, away from school. One night at the West End, he said to Jack: “Let’s you and me ship out. Don’t tell a soul about this. Let’s try to get a ship to France. . . . We’ll walk to Paris. I’ll be a deaf-mute and you speak country French and we’ll pretend we’re peasants. When we get to Paris it will probably be on the verge of being liberated. . . . I feel like I’m in a pond that’s drying up and I’m about to suffocate.”
“Paris,” Jack said. “All we have is a strip of the Normandy peninsula.” But he thought, why not, he wouldn’t mind getting out of the city for a while, and he needed the money, because Edie was bugging him about getting married. Jack had shipped out a couple of times already, he loved the sea, and had written something called The Sea Is My Brother. With Lucien along, he wouldn’t be so much of a loner, which had caused problems on his previous voyages.
In a larger sense, both men felt the need to involve themselves in an epic situation, an adventure that would bring them to Europe at a historic time. Force-fed with literature, they saw themselves as akin to the heroes in novels. There were precedents in the books they had read for going away to sea and leaving friends and loved ones behind, which somehow validated their action.
Jack, who already had his papers, explained that Lucien would need a Coast Guard pass, a War Shipping Administration waiver, and membership in the National Maritime Union. When Lucien was set, they went down to the NMU hall on West Seventeenth Street, one day in late July. The long, low hiring hall was crowded with seamen sitting in folding chairs, or playing Ping-Pong, or thumbing through magazines at racks stocked with The Pilot (the union weekly), the Daily Worker, and P.M. A dispatcher called the jobs over the mike, most of them for Liberty ships carrying war matériel to Europe: “Barber Line Liberty on line eight. We need two A.B.’s, two ordinaries, a fireman water-tender, three wipers, and two messmen. This ship is going far, far away on a long cold trip . . . you better bring your long underwear.”
Jack and Lucien put in their cards. The idea was to get on the same ship, but Lucien had no seniority and his card was sent back—so was Jack’s for that matter, for he was in arrears on his dues. So they went down day after day, having great trouble finding a ship, but finally they signed on the S.S. Robert Hayes, Kerouac as an able-bodied and Lucien as an ordinary. “Report tomorrow at eight o’clock,” the dispatcher said, “and bring all your gear.”
When Jack got home and told Edie he was shipping out, she was furious. “You know why Lucien wants to ship out with you, don’t you?” she said. “No, why?” Jack asked, throwing his pants on the chair.
“Because he’s a queer and wants to make you.”
“What?” Jack said.
“Don’t what me. Some night at sea when he jumps on you you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“You’re nuts,” Jack said.
“You’ve been living with me for a whole year, you’ve been promising to marry me, I’ve been giving you money, now you start hanging around with a bunch of queers and don’t come home at night.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jack said.
Then he felt Edie’s knee ramming his balls, and her knuckles punching his head. So he slapped her in the face and she went down, capsizing a bedside table that had talcum powder and an ashtray heaped with cigarette butts on it, and she lay there spitting out ashes, with talcum all over her face and her dress up over her knees, screaming: “You bastard! You’re trying to mar my beauty!” But a few minutes later she was fine, and joined Jack on the bed, and said, “When you get back from this trip we’ll get a new apartment.”
That night, Burroughs gave a party, and Kammerer and Jack and Lucien were there, and Lucien said: “Well, we’re shipping out tomorrow. We’ve been assigned to a ship and report at the pier tomorrow morning.”
“Can I count on that?” Burroughs asked. “I’m getting sick of these abortive departures.”
Burroughs had on an old seersucker jacket with a hole in the elbow no bigger than a dime, and suddenly Lucien stuck a finger in the elbow and ripped the sleeve. Kammerer joined the fun and ripped the back, and soon the jacket was hanging on him in shreds. Burroughs took the shreds and tied them together in a long rope, which he strung around the room like a festoon. Kammerer was in high spirits, not seeming to mind Lucien’s departure.
The next morning, Jack and Lucien arrived at Pier 15 in Brooklyn, and Jack asked the guard, “Is the Robert Hayes here?” “She sure is, son,” he replied. “She’s all yours.” They walked through a cool warehouse that smelled of coffee beans. Hundreds of longshoremen were loading ships on both sides of the wharf. Foremen yelled, winches creaked, a huge crane was lifting a 20mm antiaircraft gun to the flying bridge of a ship. A little truck trailing a string of wagons darted around a corner and almost ran them down.
To the right, they saw the great hull of the Robert Hayes streaked with oil and rust, water pouring from her scuppers. Several men carrying seabags came toward them, whom Jack recognized from the union hall. “I’m supposed to be goin’ on as bosun,” one of them said. “What about you?” “A.B. and ordinary,” Jack said.
“Well, listen,” the bosun said. “I shipped out with the mate on this one before and he is a bastard, let me tell you. The work’s never good enough for him. None of us guys intend to sign on because the mate is a prick and we gotta see he acts right with us.” They went aboard, and Jack led Lucien to an empty forecastle where they picked out two lower bunks. Then he took him up to the bow and had him lean over and look at the anchor and the anchor chain. Pointing out the jumbo block, he said, “This thing weighs over a hundred pounds, and it’s just one of the little gadgets you work with on deck.” He took Lucien topside and showed him the wheelhouse, and belowdecks to the refrigerator storage.
The door was open, and they walked in and helped themselves to roast beef and cold milk from gallon cans. Then they went back to the forecastle, got some towels from the linen locker, and took showers. Jack stretched out on his bunk, turned on the bulkhead light over his pillow, and started to read a book, saying, “See? This is the way you do at sea, just lie down in your bunk and read.” Lucien took a gas mask and a steel helmet from the top of his locker, put on the helmet, and said, “We’re going to see action.”
At this point, a six-foot-four, red-haired man wearing a dirty officer’s cap and some old khakis stepped into the forecastle, yelling, “Did you sign on yet?”
“Are they signing on?” Jack asked innocently.
“Yeah, we’re signing on.”
“Well,” Jack said, “the bosun . . . and the other guys . . . told us to wait until later.”
“Yeah,” said the red-haired giant, who Jack had realized was the bastard chief mate. “Get off the ship.”
“Why?”
“Ask me once more and I’ll throw you off myself.”
“But . . .”
“Never mind buts. Who do you guys think you are anyway? You come on a ship, you sign on. If you don’t want to sign, get off . . . and drop a couple of quarters in the kitty for using the shower.”
Jack and Lucien were too stunned to move.
“Did you hear what I said?” the chief mate shouted. “Get off! I don’t want anybody in my crew that won’t cooperate.”
“All right, don’t get your water hot,” Jack said. Turning to Lucien, he said, “Get your stuff. We’re not staying on this damn ship.” He picked up his bags, started for the gangplank, and hollered, “Fuck you all” down the alleyway.
In front of the gangplank, they saw the bosun who had told them not to sign on. “Listen,” he said, “you guys want to sign on and they won’t let you? Okay. That means you go down to the beef window at the union hall and collect a month’s pay from the company, see? Union rules say a seaman can’t be turned away once he’s assigned to a ship. Do you follow me?”
Jack borrowed a quarter from the bosun so they could get home and said to the disconsolate-looking Lucien, who already saw himself marching on Paris with his steel helmet, “Don’t worry, Monday we’ll go to the beef window and get another ship.”
Allen Ginsberg could not get over that this amazing group of people liked him and accepted him. He wasn’t sure that he was likable. They liked him even though Jack and Lucien made fun of his ambition to be a labor lawyer, saying, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you’ve never set foot in a factory.” It was a topic of some hilarity. Uncertain about himself, about his sexual orientation, about what to do after college, Allen drew comfort from his new friends. Their world was certainly more real than the world of the university. What a group! Jack with his unrestrained pursuit of experience, his appreciation of the beauty and ugliness of life, and his compassionate perception. Burroughs, with all his cynical humor and English lord mannerisms, had a melancholy strain. He saw that things would never be the same again. Partly it was the war, which gave one an apprehension of one’s mortality. Partly it was something in the air, a feeling of transience. We are such stuff as dreams are made of. And Kammerer, who was so brilliant on Meredith and Hardy, and so obtuse on Lucien. Kammerer, who could sit cross-legged on the floor and go on for two hours on some arcane facet of Buddhism, was also a secret cripple, an intruder, lurking about unwanted. And yet one had to understand Kammerer, because Lucien was unstable, withdrawing the little he gave. Lucien was the intriguing bad boy, hard to resist—even Professor (Lionel) Trilling liked him.
Allen had a semihumorous sparring relationship with Lucien. Their talks were jousts, or fencing matches, in which the winner could claim touché. Allen jotted them down in his journal:
CARR: “Really, Ginsberg, you bore me.”
GINSBERG: “Perhaps that shows a limitation on your part.”
CARR: “Now, Ginsberg, don’t take refuge in insult.”
GINSBERG: “You’re hypersensitive to insult.”
CARR: “Ah, first you tell me I’m limited, then you tell me I’m hypersensitive. Really, Ginsberg, you bore me.”
In his journal, Allen wrote this assessment of Lucien:
He said he could not write, he was a perfectionist. He compared himself not with those around him but with a high imagined self. He feared that he was not creative, that he could not achieve his imagined potential. He rationalized his failures, but adopted the postures and attitudes of the intellectual for recognition. Carr and his scarred ego. He had to be a genius or nothing, and since he couldn’t be creative he turned to bohemianism, eccentricity, social versatility, conquests.
After the Brooklyn fiasco, there had been no further attempt on the part of Lucien and Jack to ship out. The problem with Kammerer remained unsolved, and on August 13, 1944, Dave met Allen on a traffic island on Broadway to go over his predicament once again. He described his desperate affection. Should he give Lucien up or not? Allen saw a man with all defenses down, open and disarmed. He was like Verlaine in pursuit of Rimbaud, ungainly and ugly and obsessed. He needed advice, but Allen did not know what to tell him. Finally, Kammerer said he was shipping out, and suggested Allen do the same. “Oh, Ginsberg, heed the call of the artist,” he said. “Reverend sybarite, forsake thy calling.” “Art waits on humanity for the moment,” Ginsberg said. “That’s right,” Kammerer replied. “Burroughs called you the bourgeois Rimbaud last night.”
Later that day, Allen ran into Lucien, who said he had been to his room looking for him, and had found instead the journal entry Allen had written about him. With mock sorrow, Lucien said he had written a note in the margin: “Notice the tears in your most definitive work.”
That night Allen went to the West End. Lucien arrived drunk after having had dinner with his mother, who had moved to New York, at her apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. “I’ll tell you about the fight I had with my mother,” Lucien said. “I had a time with the old girl tonight. She’s good in an argument. A good Phi Beta baby.”
“What was it about?” Allen asked.
“My insanity record [from the mental hospital in Chicago]. She finally got me to burn it.”
“No? Oh, what a misfortune. You’ve lost the only family heir-loom. . . . How did she get you to?”
“She just asked me. So I argued. I told her to put a twenty-dollar bill in it and I’d do it. She said okay, but with my money. I offered to put ten in if she put ten, so she smiled and said no, either all your money or none at all. Then I offered to burn it free, only on the carpet. She said no, so I gave in, and we put a big ashtray on the table, lit the paper, and giggled while it burned. We even turned the lights out. . . . It’s symbolic, I suppose.”
“Yes, of her little Lucien’s normalcy,” Allen said. He asked Lucien where Celine was.
“Oh, up in Pelham,” Lucien said. “She asked me up tonight. I don’t know why I didn’t go. I should have. There’s nothing doing here.”
Just then Kammerer walked in and came up to their booth, his long red face leering. “Well, well, fighting as usual,” he said. Lucien rose and went to the bar with Dave, and Allen could see them knocking back drinks and arguing heatedly. Eventually they left, carrying a bottle.
At dawn the next morning, August 14, 1944, Burroughs was awakened by a knock on his door. He got up, put on his bathrobe, and answered. It was Lucien, wild-eyed and distraught. “I just killed the old man,” he said.
“What?”
Lucien handed Burroughs a blood-stained pack of Lucky Strikes and said, “Have the last cigarette.”
“So this is how Dave Kammerer ends,” Burroughs said, half to himself.
“We were standing on the bank of the river and I stabbed him and threw him in the water.”
“You’d better turn yourself in,” Burroughs said. “You could plead some sort of self-defense.”
“I’ll get the hot seat,” Lucien said.
“Don’t be absurd. Get a good lawyer and do what he tells you to do. Say what he tells you to say. Make a case for self-defense. It’s pretty preposterous but juries have swallowed bigger ones than that.”
Lucien left, and Burroughs thought: So this is the way it ends. It had a sort of inevitability, going back to the early days in St. Louis. When he thought of Dave, he thought of what Toots Shor had said about Jimmy Walker at his coffin: Jimmy, Jimmy, when you walked in, you brightened up the joint. Burroughs tore the pack of Luckies into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet.
Not long after, around six that morning, Edie and Jack were asleep in their bedroom on 118th Street when Lucien barged in, threw Kammerer’s glasses on the table, and said, “I just got rid of the old man.”
“What’d you really do?” Jack asked.
“I stabbed him in the heart with my Boy Scout knife.”
“What for?”
“He jumped me. He said I love you and all that stuff, and couldn’t live without me, and was going to kill me, kill both of us.” They had gone down to the Hudson with a bottle after leaving the West End and gotten into this drunken argument. Kammerer had threatened to do something to Celine.
“I stripped off his white shirt,” Lucien went on, “tore it into strips, tied rocks with the strips and tied the strips to his arms and legs, then took all my clothes off and pushed him in. He wouldn’t sink, that’s why I had to take my clothes off, after, I had to wade in to my chin level and give him a push. Then he floated off somewhere. Upside down. Then my clothes were there on the grass, dry, it’s hot as you know. I put them on, hailed a cab on Riverside Drive, and went to ask Burroughs what to do.”
Jack got dressed and went to Morningside Park with Lucien to help him get rid of the evidence. As early as it was, it was already hot. He pretended to piss to draw attention as Lucien buried the glasses in the park. Then Lucien dropped the Boy Scout knife down a sewer grating, the knife he had owned since joining the Scouts at the age of twelve. Then Jack and Lucien went out drinking, and after that to the movies, to see Four Feathers.
It took Lucien two days to decide to go to the police. On the morning of August 16, he walked into the Manhattan district attorney’s office with a lawyer, and told Jacob Grumet, the head of the Homicide Bureau, about the killing. Grumet was skeptical—there was no body. Was this kid some kind of nut? But Lucien was detained and spent his time reading poetry.
On August 17, the front-page banner in The New York Times said: INVADERS DRIVE EIGHT MILES INLAND ON RIVIERA. Amid the invasion news was a story headlined COLUMBIA STUDENT KILLS FRIEND AND SINKS BODY IN HUDSON RIVER.
“A fantastic story of a homicide,” the story began, “first revealed to the authorities by the voluntary confession of a nineteen-year-old Columbia sophomore, was converted yesterday from a nightmarish fantasy into a horrible reality by the discovery of the bound and stabbed body of the victim in the murky waters of the Hudson River.”
The Coast Guard had found Kammerer’s body floating off 108th Street. Lucien had led police to the spot where he had buried Dave’s glasses. In the Daily News, Lucien was shown pointing at the river, where he had dumped the body.
Lucien told the police that on Monday morning, August 14, between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., while sitting on the grassy bank below Riverside Drive at the foot of 115th Street, Kammerer had made an indecent proposal, and a fight had ensued. Carr was five feet nine and 140 pounds, while Kammerer was six feet and 185 pounds. Carr was getting the worst of it and took out his Boy Scout knife and stabbed Kammerer.
When Chandler Brossard, who had been so fond of Kammerer, picked up the Daily News and saw Lucien on the front page, he thought, “This is the stuff of tragedy.” He could see what had happened: They’d had a drunken fight, and Lucien had snapped and killed Dave. But these cries of total innocence were lousy. All you had to say was that a guy made a pass at you and everything was okay, including murder. There was more to it than that, as Brossard well knew from having watched Lucien in action.
When Allen Ginsberg saw the news, he thought of a song Lucien liked to sing:
My friend was an honest cowpuncher
Honest, straightforward and true.
He still would be riding the ranges
If it weren’t for a girl named Lou.
For Lucien, it hadn’t been a girl named Lou but Dave Kammerer. So this is where the experimentation had led, the thirst for experience, the New Vision, the long conversations, the inquiries on the nature of art, the attraction to the gratuitous act. Lucien had crossed the boundary from literary games to reality. He was like the precocious child who reads all the books, and whose mother says, “But if my little darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?” and who replies, “I shall act them out.” If Lucien could kill, it had not been just talk. To what extent, Allen wondered, was Lucien’s deed the logical outcome of their fondness for the doomed figures of literature? And of their smiling approval of his many extravagances? It was as though they had all done it together, as though they had instructed Lucien. He always said, “I’m going out to invoke Mephisto,” and that night he found him.
At the same time, Allen knew that alcohol was to blame. Drink had made Lucien go berserk. Drink made people do things they didn’t understand, it made unconscious motives surface. Allen wrote in his journal, “The libertine circle is destroyed with the death of Kammerer.” He went back to the bench on the traffic island where they used to sit and thought, “I am quick, he is dead.”
In the meantime, Burroughs and Kerouac had been arrested as material witnesses, for not reporting a homicide. So, Burroughs thought, he was supposed to rush to the nearest phone like a decent citizen, who is supposed to be a stool pigeon according to official ruling? The Kammerer killing was significant in that he and Jack were made to choose between their loyalty to a friend and their duty as citizens, and were punished for choosing their friend, which further alienated them from officialdom and its demands.
Burroughs was held in lieu of $2,500 bail, but his father arrived right on cue and posted the bond. When Burroughs went to the district attorney’s office to give his deposition, Grumet was saying to Detective Sergeant O’Toole, a big Irishman with a shoulder holster, “That Carr is a very good-looking boy, wouldn’t you say so?” “A sickly-lookin’ bum,” the detective replied. “Ha ha ha,” laughed Grumet, “well, a comment from the police department.”
Grumet asked Burroughs about the Carr-Kammerer relationship, and Burroughs said, “I don’t think there was any sexual relationship.”
“Did you know Kammerer was homosexual?”
“Yes, I frequently remonstrated with him but in vain.”
“Did he ever make a pass at you?”
“Certainly not.”
In contrast to Mortimer Burroughs, Leo Kerouac told Jack he had disgraced the family name and refused to bail out his son, who was invited to be a guest in the Bronx jail, known as the Bronx Opera House, where the stool pigeons sang arias. At his arraignment, he was told, “You came close to being an accessory.” “I watched him get rid of the knife, I didn’t help him get rid of the knife,” Jack said. He was taken to the morgue in the basement of Bellevue to identify Kammerer’s bloated blue body, red-bearded, his shirt torn, sandals on his feet. In Grumet’s office, Detective O’Toole asked, “What would you do if a queer made a grab for your cock?” “Why, I’d k-norck him,” Jack said.
O’Toole took Jack back to Grumet, saying, “He’s okay, he’s a swordsman.”
“We’ve got the case here,” Grumet told Jack, “of how the guy followed him around the country from one school to another getting him into trouble and getting him expelled.” The case hinged on whether Carr was a homosexual, Grumet said. Jack said he wasn’t.
The banner headline in the August 25 New York Times said: DEGAULLE REPORTED LEADING SMASH INTO PARIS. Inside was the story that Lucien Carr had been indicted for second-degree murder and was being held without bail. The Daily News reported that the books Lucien was carrying as he entered the Tombs were Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Yeats’s A Vision.
Allen Ginsberg was struck by the divergence between the court system and the actual event. What did the lawyers, the regulations, and the paperwork have to do with reality? Lucien had come to the attention of the state, that was all. You could not attempt to convey an honest explanation of the situation, involving the reasons of the heart and the tragic overtones—that had nothing to do with what society had decided was standard procedure. The entire social apparatus that was brought into play was irrelevant to the main Dostoevskian theme.
Lucien was not taking it too badly. On September 30, he wrote Allen from the Tombs that although he missed their polemics and did not enjoy the inflexible discipline of prison life, one could learn much under duress—an amazingly strong animal, Man. Lucien was in a sanguine state of mind, reading Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and doing crossword puzzles, “at which I am a past master.” If you knew what a wattled honey-eater was, or the Walloon name of a province in southern Belgium, or the name of the Anatolian goddess of fertility, you had it made. The presidential election was two months off, and among his upstanding fellow inmates there was many an admirer of the racket-busting former district attorney Thomas E. Dewey.
From Pelham, Celine Young wrote Kerouac that “had Lucien felt less pride in having Dave dog his footsteps, he might have gotten rid of Kammerer before this in a socially acceptable manner. . . . If he persists in the idea that he has done a messianic service by ridding the world of Dave, he is becoming too presumptuous a judge.” Celine in a sense admired Dave’s devotion to Lucien, risky and uncalculating as it was. Now that Lucien was in jail, Celine was breaking off with him. It was an ideal time. She had tried before and couldn’t. Soon she would be dating Hal Chase, who bore a resemblance to Lucien.
Lucien’s lawyer, Vincent J. Malone, could have asked for a jury trial, and might have gotten him off by pleading self-defense, because of the homosexual angle. But it was risky, because Detective O’Toole was unsympathetic, saying: “They traveled around—he says they didn’t have sex—I don’t believe it. I think this had something to do with jealousy.” Malone also felt that it would be wrong for Lucien to get away with murder—he should do a little time. The second-degree murder charge against Lucien could fetch life. But because District Attorney Grumet was agreeable, Malone plea-bargained. Lucien would plead guilty to the reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter, and be sentenced at a hearing before a judge. It seemed fair, and it would save the taxpayers money.
At the hearing, Lucien’s mother described Kammerer as a “veritable Iago,” who had at every turn dissuaded him from the proper course, “purely for the love of evil.” Lucien, wearing a clean and pressed brown suit, gave the judge his “honorable” look. District Attorney Grumet said: “Your Honor, we’re not pushing for a stiff sentence. Anything that could be done to rehabilitate this young man will be appreciated.”
Lucien was sentenced to an indeterminate term of up to twenty years to be served in the Elmira Reformatory rather than Sing-Sing, in view of his age. There is nothing like a prison sentence to order one’s thoughts, and he came out of Elmira after two years a changed man. It was as if by killing Kammerer he had sought to bring his life to a premature climax, so that the rest of it would be tranquil. Lucien stopped drinking and smoking and put on weight and grew a mustache and beard. When Burroughs saw him after his release, he thought, he has deliberately unbeautified himself. The arrogant jeunesse dorée element had vanished.
Lucien dropped out of the 118th Street group and found a job with a news agency. Allen grudgingly acknowledged that the social application had been right. It had been good for Lucien to go to jail for a short period. He had lost his “the world-owes-me-a-living” side. Now Lucien described himself as a “petit bourgeois,” and did not want to be reminded of the past.
In 1956, he complained about being in the dedication of Allen’s book Howl: “I value a certain anonymity in life and it always jars me when my friends, of all people, find it desirable to include mention of me in their works. I hope you bear that idiosyncrasy in mind in your next book—Moan.” Again in 1962, he complained about the “dig-up-of-the-past, roll-in-your-own-shit” poetry. “Can’t you word bandiers stick to your own ghosts and leave mine alone? . . . I’m being trapped annually into your broken record gyrations.”
Burroughs felt that the whole thing had been mainly Kammerer’s doing. Kammerer’s obsession had brought matters to a head. There was something in Dave that had provoked Lucien to kill him. Dave saw death as the solution to his obsession, Mayerling-style. In death, he would live eternally with Lucien. Burroughs told Lucien, “You shouldn’t blame yourself at all, because he asked for it, he demanded it.” It was too complicated to explain to the police. They saw things in primary colors. Had Carr been homosexual? Had Kammerer made advances? It was like trying to explain that Othello had not murdered Desdemona because she was unfaithful but because she was Venetian.
The Columbia Spectator was close to the truth when it said in an editorial: “We only know that there is a complexity to the background of the case that will defy ordinary police and legal investigations. The search for motive will dig deep into the more hidden areas of the intellectual world.”
One by-product of the Carr-Kammerer drama was that it started Burroughs writing again. As with Kells Elvins in 1938, he needed a collaborator to prod him into activity. Kerouac suggested that they write a novel about the killing. Each of them would write alternate chapters based on the part of the story he knew best. They would write it in a deadpan, Dashiell Hammett style, but it would be more than a detective story—it would be the first American existential novel.
The working title, “I Wish I Were You,” indicating Kammerer’s compulsion to transform himself into Lucien, was changed to the absurdist “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase Burroughs had heard a radio announcer use when in mellifluous tones he reported a fire in a traveling circus. Burroughs liked that kind of off-the-wall remark which in this case was also literally true. Kerouac signed his chapters Mike Ryko and Burroughs used the name Will Dennison for his. The novel is a more or less factual account of the 118th Street circle and the events leading up to the murder, with Kerouac contributing some good descriptions of his attempts with Lucien to find a ship, and Burroughs walking away with the best lines, as in, “People in bars are always claiming to be boxers, hoping thereby to ward off attack, like a blacksnake will vibrate its tail in leaves and try to impersonate a rattlesnake.”
“Hippos” is an intriguing example of the early work of two writers who would become famous, who at the time were subduing their individual voices to attain a uniformity of style. The literary agents Ingersoll and Brennan agreed to handle it, but it was turned down by every publisher it was sent to.
In 1952 Kerouac, who had by that time published his first novel, The Town and the City, was still trying to get “Hippos” published, and wrote Carl Solomon, an editor interested in his work, on April 7: “Burroughs and I wrote a sensational 200-page novel about Lucien’s 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 . . . Bill himself would approve of this move, we spent a year on it, Lucien was mad, wanted us to bury it under a floorboard.”
For Burroughs, “Hippos” was another false start, tending to confirm that he had no future as a writer. He would have to find some other form of activity.