William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac: And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks
Before they were Beat
heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac teamed up to write a crime novel
together, based in part on the fallout of 1944, when their friend Lucien Carr
stabbed an older admirer and tossed his body into the Hudson River. But publishers
roundly rejected the result, whimsically titled And The Hippos Were Boiled
In Their Tanks.
By the time the authors were famous, Carr had been released from prison and sought
to dissociate himself from his wild youth, which is why both authors' estates mothballed
the novel until he died in 2005.
Perhaps they needn't have
bothered; the murder is an afterthought in the lives of the protagonists, New
York newcomer Will Dennison (written by Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (written by
Kerouac), a merchant mariner. Mike and his friend Philip Tourian, "the kind of
boy literary fags write sonnets to," scheme to get jobs aboard a Europe-bound
freighter so they can jump ship and go to Paris, far from the clutches of Mike's
older, unbalanced admirer Ramsay Allen. Poor Will's primary function in the
novel seems to be providing an apartment where his buddies, including Mike and Philip,
can crash in the middle of the night and tell him what everyone else is doing. As in life, both men become accessories
to the crime when Philip confesses to them, but his anguish over whether to
turn himself in is resolved in just a few chapters. Will, Mike, and friends
mosey from bar to apartment and back again for most of the book; its most
suspenseful moments are tied up in a story Ryko tells about a wild weekend on
shore leave in Boston.
Still, here and there these
slack tales show glimpses of who the writers would become, particularly Kerouac.
He later wrote Carr's story into almost all his novels, including his debut The
Town And The City,
and some of Mike's musings on life could easily have come from On The Road's Sal Paradise. Burroughs seems to have been saddled
with the job of keeping the plot moving, at which he's merely adequate, but his
stabs at writing like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett are fun in their
failures. The book's years
fermenting in Kerouac's mom's house didn't turn it into a hard-boiled noir, but
even its inexpert handling of a real-life crime sheds some light on its
creators' early lives.