Hippos review: good, but not great
| October 29th, 2008
George Kimball has written a nice, lengthy, gut-spilling review of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the only novel-length piece of fiction ever written by both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It’s due to be published on Saturday, more than 60 sixty years since its completion.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks probably won’t be confused with great literature, then, but as a study revealing two giants-to-be in the developmental stages of their craft, it may be a valuable historical document. Burroughs’s droll Midwestern cynicism is a counterpoint to the youthful Kerouac’s sometimes flighty exuberance, and, in a conversation with “Phillip Tourian” (the Carr character), Kerouac even gets a chance to practice telling the story of a wild, misspent night in Boston’s Scollay Square that will turn up, in a somewhat embellished version, in On the Road a dozen years later.
As in much of both men’s subsequent work, many of the dramatis personae are vaguely disguised depictions of actual people; the reader is left to amuse himself by guessing who’s who, although Grauerholz, who edited the book, hazards a few of his own in his introduction. (The best I can tell, only one figure, the legendary Village character Joe Gould, is represented under his own name.)
James Joyce once said, of a much better novel, that he hoped to leave a portrait of his birthplace “so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book,” and that sentiment may actually represent the more enduring legacy of Hippos. With its evocative rendition of now-vanished saloons, bygone diners, and other landmarks of yesteryear, Burroughs and Kerouac may have inadvertently done for 1944 Greenwich Village what Joyce did for 1904 Dublin.
Back Beat [The Boston Phoenix]
