And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks due Nov. 1
| October 1st, 2008
According to news sources, this more than 50-year-old collaborative text between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is triumphantly, finally going to be released next month.
Over at the Irish TImes, they’re talking about Kerouac and the genesis of the story:
The extended circle of friends also included Burroughs, a 30-year-old Harvard graduate who lived in Greenwich Village, and David Kammerer, a homosexual book editor who had developed a fixation on Carr and followed him to New York.
In August of 1944, following an evening of drinking in Riverside Park, Carr stabbed Kammerer in the chest with a pocket knife. Believing him dead, he tied his arms together with shoelaces and rolled him into the Hudson River, where, an autopsy subsequently confirmed, he drowned.
Carr eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter. (Kerouac, to whom he had confessed the crime, was briefly jailed as an accomplice.) The salacious details of “the Columbia murder” remained on the front pages of the New York tabloids for weeks, and proved the fodder for a fictional treatment by two unpublished authors.
Alternating chapters, Kerouac and Burroughs produced And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which made the rounds of publishing houses in 1945 and was summarily rejected at each stop. (The title reflected Burroughs’s amused reaction to a radio report of a circus fire.) “It wasn’t a very good piece of work,” Burroughs would later candidly admit. “No publisher was interested, and in hindsight, I don’t see why they should have been.”
Whereas Barbara Hoffert of The Phoenix gave it only a semi-blurbial, cursory mention:
Speaking of fictionalized lives: who knew that WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS and JACK KEROUAC got together to re-create friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer? The novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove; November 1), is appearing only now.
Myself? I’ve always been partial to the excerpts that were published in Word Virus.
