And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks Review (William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac)

In Manhattan 1944, a Columbia student called Lucien Carr stabbed 32 year old David Kammerer and drowned the body. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were friends of Carr’s and both were arrested after the murder as Carr had confessed to them and neither had gone to the police (Kerouac even helped dispose of the murder weapon!).

The story went that Carr was sick of Kammerer’s unwanted advances and things tipped over one night when they were alone. Carr served just two years for manslaughter and went on to become a successful editor at United Press International until his death in 2005.

This murder, that gave “birth to the Beat Generation” (for bringing together the three main writers of this movement - Allen Ginsberg and the two authors of this book), is explored by then-unknown writers Burroughs and Kerouac in their collaborative novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written in 1945, it wasn’t until 2008 that it was published, partly as a favour to Lucien Carr not to publish it while he was still alive.

I was never a huge fan of the Beats (On the Road and Naked Lunch are both overrated trash) but I have enjoyed some of Burroughs and Kerouac’s work, like Junky and The Dharma Bums - and to that I can add Hippos, which wasn’t bad!

The two write alternating chapters (Burroughs’ proxy is Will Dennison and Kerouac’s is Mike Ryko) with Carr portrayed as Phillip Tourian and David Kammerer as Ramsay Allen. Not a lot happens in the book. We get an idea of the bohemian atmosphere Burroughs and Kerouac lived in at the time, and a flavour of what New York life was like in 1944. The chapter on Ryko and Tourian trying to get passage to France as merchant seamen was fun and interesting.

There’s a glimpse of the kind of writers both would become in later books, with Dennison injecting morphine in one chapter and Ryko often freewheeling around town, drinking and travelling. Burroughs signed the manuscript “William Lee”, his alter-ego in many of his books, while Kerouac was still calling himself “John”.

It’s not amazingly written but it’s also very accessible - this was written years before Burroughs got into his awful cut-up style of writing. The age gap is noticeable in the quality of the prose - Burroughs was 30 at the time, and had probably been writing for longer, while Kerouac was 22, and Burroughs’ chapters are more compelling and well put-together while Kerouac’s are just ok for the most part.

Burroughs claimed that the unusual title was a line said during a radio broadcast following a circus fire. He’s likely referencing the disastrous Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut, in the summer of 1944 where 167 people died and hundreds more were injured (sometimes called “The Day the Clowns Cried”) although there were no hippos involved, so it’s probably Burroughs misremembering/embellishing.

For being inspired by a murder, it’s not a very dramatic read. The murder happens off-page and is dealt with in the last 20 pages of the novel. The lead-up isn’t particularly deep or insightful - just Tourian saying that he wants to escape Al over and over. In James Gauerholz’s afterword, he mentions that Burroughs was also aware of the novel’s shortcomings, that it was just too middle-of-the-road to be published (and only got published because of who the writers ended up becoming).

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks isn’t the most memorable novel but it’s not a bad read and parts of it were intermittently interesting for me to enjoy it well enough. My feelings about the book match Burroughs’ summation of Kerouac’s contributions: “I don’t specifically think of it. I just rather like it, is all.”